And news just in: From the “For those of you who can’t get enough of me” Department (ahem), you’ll be pleased to note that I will be running a pre-summit afternoon workshop on social media at Melcrum’s 4th Annual Strategic Communication Management Summit in scrumptious Sydney. I’m running the workshop on Tuesday 31st July, with [...]
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Courtesy of the dapper and debonair Mark Ragan comes an invitation to join in his new sandpit. Mark’s latest web creation is MyRagan, a MySpace for business communicators. Like all good Web2.0 tools, it’s in “public beta” phase — so come in now and grab a place at the table for yourself before all the [...]
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Crayon is experiencing another growth spurt. Crayon, you may remember, is a new media communication company working solely on Second Life projects (although no doubt if other virtual worlds become as large as Second Life they will expand their working base, as I and many other communicators will). They are looking for a senior project [...]
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Okay, call me maudlin, but I have been reading some academic papers on our much-loved topic, Business Communication, and have had my eyes opened to a new and troubling perspective. Ask yourself this: is the job term ‘Communications Professional’ going the way of the dodo? The reason I ask is because of a paper* by [...]
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A fabulous way of learning more about your company and what goes on in it is to take a work colleague to lunch. As Will Rogers once said, “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch” – plan what you are going to ask them about their jobs, the company, the industry. It will [...]
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Robin Crumby, the MD of Melcrum, emailed me and asked for help. Melcrum are conducting a survey at the moment, looking for responses. “I want to ask for your help with a survey we’re running on social media usage at large corporates. We’ve so far sent the survey to over 20,000 subscribers to Melcrum’s e-newsletters [...]
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Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day. You may be tempted to create some lovely-dovey messages for your organisation. I wrote an article once on using clipart within organisations. Just remember what Mamma used to say: “If in doubt, don’t” Powered by Zoundry Tweet
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Steven Lewis over at Social Media in Australia, my colleague in arms and frequenter of the same city as Trevor Cook (the traffic-ridden Sydney), has come up with a good idea that I extend to other colleagues Social Media in Australia:… certainly be bringing up the Ask a Ninja deal and 12 Byzantine Rulers when [...]
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What is ‘Internal Communication’? Note: this is cross-posted from the Forward blog and is a follow-on post from my recent vidcast and podcast on employee communication. You can listen to some fantastic podcast interviews I recorded with great internal communicators, and there are more to follow… Internal communication is a subset of effective business communication, [...]
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G‘day and welcome to a special edition of Better Communication Results. So what’s in today’s show? Employee Communications — why they are so important! This edition is being published as both an audio podcast AND a video podcast — and in two ‘flavours’ of that, no less! Firstly, the audio — you can download or [...]
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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!
