Search Results (from the archives)

Cliches make for easy, but lazy writing.

“From working in the marketing department of Hitachi Data Systems to joining business podcast network startup Podtech to becoming the first blogger to be hired as an analyst—Owyang’s last five years have been a model of professional advancement through social media,” wrote Marshall Kirkpatrick for ReadWriteWeb . So why did he announce last week that he’s leaving Forrester for a yet undisclosed future endeavor? We’ll reportedly find out this week. Until that time, here’s a cl…

This week, Jody Powell, the former press secretary to President Carter, passed away. James Fallows, a national correspondent for The Atlantic , worked with Powell in the Carter White House. Fallows was then a young speechwriter reporting to Powell. In a blog post, Fallows offered his thoughts on Powell, the communicator. “Reporters generally respected his intelligence, his toughness, his honesty, his hard-bitten sense of humor, and his unparalleled knowledge of the President’s mind, manner, and tem…

CEO Mark Ragan banned most cussing from Ragan.com. Now we’ve stumbled across an essay written by the founder of the company decades ago. We wonder—do you agree with Larry Ragan?

That headline sounds like a ridiculous notion, right? Well, Matthew Yglesias, a fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, thinks there’s something to it. Citing a recent report that found American intelligence in Afghanistan to be lacking, Yglesias, a former Atlantic magazine editor, said, “the military as a whole seems to have a somewhat disturbing level of reliance on communicating via PowerPoint presentations that are often quite poorly made.” He continued: “The f…

The hits just keep on coming for the New York Times. You’d think there was a recession, or the newspaper industry was melting, or both. On Thursday, Times executive Michael Golden sent a memo to employees indicating the company was ending grants and gift-matching through its philanthropic arm, the New York Times Foundation. The Times will continue to fund its existing charities. Until Thursday, the company matched employees’ charitable donations dollar for dollar. Also, Times employees learne…

“The brands that master consistency win,” Mitch Joel, president of digital marketing and communications agency Twist Image, wrote on his blog, Six Pixels of Separation . “Especially when that consistency happens on top of a product or service that people love (and will talk about).” Thing is there are companies — like the airlines — that have strange rules that aren’t very consistent. For cases like these, Joel offered four pieces of advice. Here’s No. 2 on…

Maybe this blogger’s a bit moody, but he makes a good point — don’t ‘carpet bomb’ your press releases to everyone in a database. That’s apparently what one PR firm did to him, and presumably other bloggers and journalists, even after he asked them to stop several times. So, the blogger, Jason Mendolson, called for a boycott of the firm. Yikes.

The great aggregator of news article, Google News, is considering offering Wikipedia as a source, some blogs have reported. That means if you search for news about Apple computers a Wikipedia article might stand alongside a Wall Street Journal article. So when’s the last time you visited Wikipedia to see if your company has an entry and to check if everything that’s said in it is true?

Looks like your tweets may end up in Google searches soon. “While taking questions [last week] about alleged violation of anti-trust laws, Google execs, including CEO Eric Schmidt, reportedly told press that the company is, in the words of Reuters scribe Alexei Oreskovic, ‘looking at … ways of integrating micro-blogging capabilities, such as those popularized by Twitter, into its search product.'” according to the ReadWriteWeb blog.  Related New York Times A night on the town with the gu…

Here’s No. 6 on this list of social media faux pas, from C. Edward Brice, senior vice president of worldwide marketing at Lumension: “Not knowing your audience. Lacking an understanding of what your audience is passionate about or wants to engage in will result in a poor experience both for you and your audience.”

Although communicators don’t like to admit it, they have their own clichés and nonsense phrases.

Twitter’s  @earlybird provides exclusive offers from Twitter’s select advertising partners. Think of it as Groupon meets the Twitter stream. The account attracted more than 21,000 followers after its  first tweet (“I get the worm, now you can too”). As the saying goes, the early bird gets the worm, and that’s the whole premise of this account: It will be “time-sensitive and sometimes supply-sensitive, so [advertising deals] may run out quickly,&#822…

It’s time to put your prose on a strict diet. Here’s how to shed a few words.

Neither George Clooney nor Brad Pitt will be playing disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff in the biopic about his life. That role goes to Kevin Spacey. Right now, they’re casting the rest of the rest of the film. Anyone else dying to find out who will play Grover Norquist? Good money says it’s Elliot Gould.