Got an email yesterday from Mark Ragan, CEO of Ragan Communications, alerting me pre-launch to a great initiative of his. You can now pop a widget on your blog or main website that pulls in the latest stories from the various Ragan web properties. As Mark explains, it is a way of getting some of [...]
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My colleague-in-arms Leesa Barnes (author of Podcasting for Profit) has organised the first Telesummit on Social Media for 2008 (that I am aware of). Leesa has kindly given me access to it so that I can ‘live blog’ some of the sessions. Thanks, Lisa! The Telesummit will take place between 20th and 28th Feb, [...]
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My ooVoo Day is where you can meet and chat with bloggers on video, starting in one day, three hours, 42 minutes and 43 seconds as I type this, and going for a week (so why is it a ‘Day’???). My ooVoo Day is a week-long experiment in blogger-to-fan interaction. Notable bloggers (aka ‘bloglebrities’) from [...]
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It turns out I’m not an A-list blog celebrity in Australia. [sniff] But I *AM* a B-lister! And I even rank above Laurel and fellow Adelaidian Shai! [tee hee]. Much popping of corks at BetterComms Towers has ensued. Source: http://australialiving.blogspot.com/2008/02/australia-list-bloglebrity.html Technorati tags: business communication, blog celebrity, australia, lee hopkins, laurel papworth, shai coggins Tweet
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A recent private discussion amongst some members of our illustrious community focused on how to cope with the potential damage to one’s reputation if idjuts start posting negative and inflammatory comments on your blog. There are historically two things you can do if you start receiving the attention of the ill-informed and barking mad: Ignore [...]
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Those fine folk over at For Immediate Release, the handsome Shel Holtz and the equally handsome Neville Hobson recently announced a contest. Not wishing to upset anyone, they announced that the judges of the contest would be themselves and the regular correspondents to FIR — including yours truly! As Shel says, Contests on podcasts aren’t [...]
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As promised in an earlier post, I have set up a blog specifically about my experiences with the Nitro Marketing Blueprint online business system. You can find the blog here: http://www.LeeHopkins.net/nitro You can, of course, subscribe to the blog feed via rss, or else if email is your preferred tool, then feel free to complete [...]
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As part of his pan-global research on behalf of SAP, I was recently interviewed over email by the legendarious (I love creating neologisms*) Shel Israel. True to form, I don’t pull any punches on what I see happening in ‘Business Australia’ regarding social media… Please note: Shel inadvertently put my very old blogspot url up [...]
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The wise Chip Griffin has started a fabulous meme over on his Media Bullseye site. Chip argues persuasively for the ‘throwing out’ of the ‘rules’ we leading-edge social mediarists have sometimes insisted be followed. As Chip says, I’m here to tell you that most of the rules are bunk, and we as an industry to [...]
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So says a curious spam email I just received (twice): Hi,We are looking to potentially immediately buy your website. It must meet the following criteria: * Minimum Google PR: 3 * Be in one of the following categories: – Canadian focus – finance – cars – telecommunications – travel * Provable earnings history of some [...]
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I recently picked up a copy of Bob Bly’s excellent ‘Super Productivity for Writers’ e-book and wanted to share with you some of his gems.
Here’s his seven common time wasters that he says writers (and I say everybody) should avoid:
1. Excessive blogging (more than 10 minutes per day) – unless that’s your job, of course!
2. Random web surfing (continuing to surf after you’ve found the information you need)
3. Attending meetings of writers groups, marketing clubs, etc. You can learn and network, but you lose half a day
4. Social or business lunches with other writers, editors, publishers, clients. A waste of time and you can lose nearly half a day
5. Volunteering for committees and similar activities. Every hour you spend on administrative nonsense is an hour you don’t write
6 .Sending or receiving jokes, photos, videos and other junk content via email (or my pet hate – Facebook requests to add time-sucking applications or join groups of no interest to me). Stop wasting other people’s time and yours
7 .Letting a ringing phone interrupt your writing. Get caller ID and call them back when you have finished (or better yet, set the phone’s ringing tone volume to ‘silent’ and get an answer machine to take the call for you)
Even though Bob is focusing his material on writers, of which he is a superb one, the advice found on page 22 of his book applies to all of us methinks.
As he points out on page 21, with an average lifespan of seventy- five years, we have only 27,375 days from the time we are born until the time we die. And since we’re asleep for a third of that time, we have only 18,250 days we’re actually awake and active.
How you spend this finite amount of time is mostly up to you. To maximise your productivity, income and output as a writer, writing must be a priority.
If you prefer to garden, that’s perfectly fine; but don’t complain that your colleague who spends those hours in front of the pc is getting more work done than you are. It’s your choice.
Wise words, indeed. Get a copy of this brilliant book and be careful out there…
I love Bob’s material – as I write I have 26 of his publications, each a worthy addition to my knowledge library.
Bob Bly is the man McGraw-Hill calls 'America's top copywriter.' Bob has written copy for more than 100 companies including Boardroom, Phillips, IBM, Medical Economics, AlliedSignal, and Lucent Technologies. He is the author of more than 60 books and a columnist for DM News and Early to Rise.
Making Social Media Work for Your Business - just published!
Social Media: The New Communication Landscape - for Ark Group
How to get started with podcasting in your organisation - for Melcrum Publishing
Contributing author to:
How to use social media to solve critical internal communication issues
How to communicate with hard-to-reach employees
- for Melcrum Publishing
How to use social media to engage employees - for Melcrum Publishing
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Tactical Transparency by Shel Holtz and John Havens.
A belter of a book and a 'must read' addition to any communicator's bedside reading table if they are serious about introducing social media into their communication plans. It includes a fabulous chapter on transparency and business (hint: you want to photocopy it and give it to your CEO!)
Qualitative Communication Research Methods by Thomas Lindlof and Bryan Taylor.
Not just a book for academics, it's chock-full of great ideas on how to effectively and efficiently research your employees, customers, the marketplace and other stakeholders
The Twitter Book by Tim O'Reilly and Sarah Milstein.
A fabulous book that gives a clear, clean overview of what Twitter is and WHY you should be engaging with it. THEN it goes into depth with so many tips and ideas that they should have sold the book for twice the price!
Practical SEO Copywriting: a ‘must get’ book. My mate Glenn Murray has written a bottler of a new book on search engines and copywriting.
In a cunning twist of bizarre nomenclature, he’s titled it Practical SEO Copywriting. The cheeky little fox! It’s a DIY guide to writing online copy for both human readers AND for that 400kg gorilla we lovingly call ‘Google’.
The danger, Glenn quite rightly …err …writes is that focusing too much attention on all of the supposed SEO ‘tricks of the trade’ will make your copy all but unreadable by the human brain. You know, all that stuff bandied about by the so-called SEO (search engine optimisation) experts: keyword frequency, exact string versus individual words scattered across the page, page length, alt tags, header tags, and so on.
Not that this stuff isn’t important – it all is, and more besides – but Glenn argues persuasively that by far more important is the ability to write copy that people will actually want to read – and link to!
