Good news for modern man has seeped out from Psychology Today — a man’s mid-life crisis is all his wife’s fault. Phew! That’s a relief. “Many middle-aged men do go through midlife crises, but it’s not because they are middle-aged. It’s because their wives are. From the evolutionary psychological perspective, a man’s midlife crisis is [...]
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Guardian angel Jon Hoel from the PR Junction podcast has pointed out that a really horrible security breach is doing the rounds of WordPress blogs. Says Jon, Hi Lee,The PR agencies may not have come around yet, but the spammers are certainly giving blogs plenty of attention. Site hack issue as discussed: HTML appears in [...]
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G’day! I’m very proud to announce the birth of my newsletter, better Social Media communication results. And to celebrate, as a special offer for the readers of my blog, I offer it to you at over 50% off each issue! The ‘regular’ price of the newsletter is AUD$24.95, but for my friends and blog subscribers, [...]
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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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currently in bed, feeling yuch, typing this out on my new asus eee pc. normal service will be resumed as soon as possible 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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Courtesy of Carol Kinsey Goman and Philip Yaffe comes a bunch of new articles: 171. The power of optimism by Carol Kinsey Goman 170. Yaffe’s Law vs. Murphy’s Law by Philip Yaffe 169. Laugh your way to persuasive communication by Philip Yaffe 168. Techniques of persuasive communication by Philip Yaffe 167. Counterbalance by Carol Kinsey [...]
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Bizarre happenings here at BetterComms Towers this morning. Not only did I accompany Mrs BetterComms on her morning walk at 6.15am, but even more bizarre than that the browsers I use are behaving badly. Internet Explorer 7 shows my blog looking all nice and tidy. But look at my blog in Firefox or Flock and [...]
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As I mentioned in my interview with Shel Israel, living and working in Adelaide is tough; if there was only Adelaide that I could ply my trade to I would starve to death. Thankfully I have grown my consultancy to the point where I no longer need to rely on Adelaide business to support my [...]
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Flatteringly, I’ve been invited to n number of conferences in 2008, all around the globe. I’m happy to go — but just pay my business class airfare, accommodation and expenses and I’m very happy to present. Otherwise please find another luminary. No disrespect, but I’ve had enough of “this will be wonderful for your profile” [...]
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Measuring the Impact and ROI of Social Media
Making Social Media Work for Your Business
Social Media: The New Communication Landscape - for Ark Group
How to get started with podcasting in your organisation - for Melcrum Publishing
Contributing author to:
Best practices in social media governance
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!
