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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Courtesy of that sublime mischief maker Allan Jenkins comes word of a nifty tool that allows you to mouse over a city and see what the news headlines are there. As Jenko says, Excellent for travelers who want a foretaste what their destination city is talking about, or (loosely) tracking the regional differences in coverage [...]
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Update below… A month ago today I bought a copy of Steganos’ ‘Secure Traveler’, looking forward to its promises of data security and seamless integration twixt noisy notebook, desktop, usb stick and pda. To date I STILL haven’t got it working. After the first few attempts at installing it, I contacted the Support Desk at [...]
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The wondrous AFTRS (the Australian Film, Television and Radio School in Canberra — amazing place!) are looking for professional teams with groundbreaking new media ideas to attend their leading R&D production lab. Facilitated by AFTRS, the Laboratory for Advanced Media Production (LAMP) has run hundreds of workshops, seminars and live-in-residentials and developed over 54 projects. [...]
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Melcrum are offering three of their most successful publications to you at a bargain rate for this Christmas. Yes, it makes you think ‘Why?’ Why, if they are so successful, would they drop the large cash cow and give these reports to you for a heck of a lot less than normal? Come on… have [...]
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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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I’ve recently struck up a friendship with Connie Benson. Connie, it turns out, is a dab hand at blogging and is also ACDSee’s Community Manager to boot. So why is this good for business? Because over the last month or so I’ve exchanged quite a few ‘pokes’ with Connie over on Facebook and recently started [...]
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I have a ton of uni work to focus on for the next few weeks, so a lighter-weight blogging service will be in place until my essays are cleared out of the way and the business accounts completed. I’ll still be here, but please don’t be offended if I ignore you — it’s nothing [...]
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One of the principle selling points of the recent two-day seminars I ran on behalf of Melcrum was that the delegates would get to create and take away a first-draft Comms Strategy that incorporates Social Media. I kind of felt uneasy about it, as I have always thought of ‘Strategy’ as an end goal, not [...]
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ONE of the many fascinating topics discussed in my recent workshops with Melcrum was around crisis comms: if you would and if so how you might use Social Media in a crisis. Dave Fleet comes up with a very timely post on the whole crisis comms/social media issue. “Immediacy is one of the great things [...]
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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!
