Hey, everyone, I just started a new blog called “Small Business Success: 20 Years & Counting.” I realized I have a lot of good information to share based on over 20 years of working with great clients and colleagues, including some who are considered thought leaders in their fields. Check it out at http://www.yourghostwriter.com/blog and [...]

So you’ve done what every successful business needs to do and developed a great strategic plan. Now it’s time to make that plan happen. Where do you start? With great internal communication directly from you, the leader. Everyone in your organization needs to understand your strategic plan and his/her role in making it a reality. [...]

Over the long holiday weekend, I was determined to clean my office so I could start 2010 out with a fresh workspace. I was dusting the bookcase (a beautiful cherry Mission-style piece my brother made for me) and as I started to pull out books to clean them, one of the items I came across [...]

Bad news can hit even the best of companies. Natural disasters, for example, can happen to any organization. Good communication with internal and external audiences during a crisis is crucial to maintaining your company’s most hard-earned asset—its good name.

Steps to Plan for the Unpredictable

• Be prepared. Having a crisis communication plan before it’s needed promotes proactive [...]

For those of us who are posting here, I thought this article, “100 Ways to Find Ideas for Your Blog Posts” by Steve Aitchison would be of interest. Great ideas!

http://lifesnips.com/blogging/345/100-ways-to-find-ideas-for-your-blog-posts/

While at times it can seem more like a curse than a blessing, e-mail is an essential business communications tool. Lacking the body language, facial expressions, and voice tone that typically help us figure each other out when we’re talking face to face, e-mail, while useful, is not without hazards. Meanings can, and often are, [...]

I’m presenting a workshop entitled “Get the Media to Tell Your Business Story” for the Hilltown CDC next Wednesday evening,  October 14. Here’s a write-up on it:

Publicity is one of the most effective marketing tools available to any business owner. Getting your company and its products or services covered in a news story in print [...]

Few business activities are as exciting—or perilous—as launching a new product or service. Over the years, research has consistently revealed alarmingly high failure rates for new products. Compounding the challenge, the number of new products being launched each year has skyrocketed since 2000, making it even harder to get attention for your new pride and [...]

I saw author Daniel Goleman (a Valley resident) on BookTV this weekend talking about his latest book, “Ecological Intelligence.” He talked about a new Web site called goodguide.com that is now available in beta form. It’s a guide to help us find safe, healthy and green products.

According to the site, GoodGuide provides the world’s largest and [...]

Back in 2001, I coauthored a book on innovation with Mark Sebell, head of Creative Realities, an innovation consulting firm in Andover, MA (www.creativerealities.com). With so many companies looking to innovate in the environmental market space, I thought it might be time to dust off some key learnings from that book. Here goes:
Innovation is the [...]

Excellent advice! I phoned a client the other day after we had been e-mailing endlessly about a potential big new project. By the end of the call, I knew all about the project (actually there are THREE potential projects!) and we agreed that I would send him a budget. So I made more progress with [...]

As a consumer, how many times have you received written communication about a product or service that was confusing or even incomprehensible? A friend recently received a newly formatted utility bill with no accompanying explanation. She told me that the bill was so unlike the company’s previous communication that it took her a while even [...]

Ratcheting up your organization to pursue new business as the economy recovers (hopefully!) is invigorating. The good news is that revenues finally may start growing again. The bad news is that bringing new business in the door may require writing proposals, a time-consuming activity that many business people would rather skip.
Increasingly, savvy business [...]

I’ve been writing copy for the Internet  for over a decade, and a significant amount of what I know about what makes for good Web copy I’ve learned from  Jakob Nielsen, a world-renowned Web guru. Nielsen  has been called the “king of Web page usability.” He conducts thousands of Web site user tests, publishes pricey [...]

Tough economic times like we’re experiencing now force many businesses to undergo rapid change in order to survive. To effectively lead this change requires mastering leadership communications. Because most people are resistant to change, your message about change must constantly be reinforced or else people will go back to their default method of operating.
Here [...]

When I tell people I’m self-employed and work out of a home office, quite often the response is: “Oh, that’s great; I envy you! I could never do that myself. You must have so much self-discipline.”
Well, here’s a secret: I do not have tons of self-discipline. In fact, I can be downright lazy on occasion. [...]

Nervous about being interviewed by a reporter? Here are 10 quick tips to help you do your best when talking with the media:
1. Prepare for the interview by having someone ask you all the questions that might arise. You don’t want to sound “rehearsed,” but you do want to be prepared for difficult questions.
2. If [...]

Every day reporters, bloggers, book authors, and TV & radio news producers are looking for informed sources to quote on a topic they’re covering. Help a Reporter Out (HARO) is a service where you can receive three daily e-mail feeds (Monday through Friday) with queries from  media members who are looking for expert sources. The [...]

Hi, Barbara,

Yes, I agree that the company news you mention is definitely newsworthy. Press releases would be the way to go. I’ll be happy to send you some examples. (I’ll do that through your regular e-mail.) For most media these days, you can get e-mail contact info from the publications’ Web sites. Until you’ve established [...]

Want to get your company’s name in the news? Publicity is one of the most cost-effective forms of marketing. It is less expensive than advertising and has more credibility. But to get publicity, you have to understand what journalists are interested in covering.  Here is a quick list of the types of information about your [...]

Last evening, I presented a workshop on “30 Ways to a Better Web Site on Any Budget” at the Hilltowns CDC along with Karen Utgoff of Karen Lauter Utgoff Consulting, a marketing strategy firm in Amherst, and Silvana Gravini of silvana.net, a Web design firm in Northampton. After presenting our material, we looked at the [...]

When people first enter your Web site, they don’t actually read the copy – they scan it looking for keywords and other clues that indicate this is a site worth their time. If they don’t get these clues, they quickly move on to the next link in their search results. Bingo, they’re gone and you’ve [...]