Email is quick, casual and convenient–and a potential minefield. An email gaffe can be amusing, embarrassing or even career-ending. Use these guidelines for proper email etiquette to make sure your electronic messages don’t come back to haunt you: Remember that readers cannot hear your tone of voice or see your facial expressions and gestures. [...]
Do you know who is receiving your text messages? Early this morning, I received a text from a client wishing me a happy Mother's Day. Yes, that's odd from a number of perspectives, but this is a quirky client and I appreciated the thought. Before I could respond, I heard another text come in. It [...]
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me. You probably learned this rhyme as a child and maybe chanted it to a playmate who was teasing you. It would be nice if it were true, but it's not. Words can hurt. They can also help. However words are used, they're [...]
Full disclosure: I'm a ghostwriter. I write books, articles, blogs and more that are published under my clients' names. Using a ghostwriter is a smart move for busy executives, professionals and subject matter experts who need to publish material but don't have the time and/or writing skills to do it themselves. One caveat: If you [...]
Press releases can be a powerful weapon in your marketing and public relations arsenal. Just be sure you don't shoot yourself in the foot with them. I can’t count the number of press releases I’ve written over the years in my career as a business writer--and it’s almost as hard to count the number [...]
Have you decided to hit the speaking circuit to promote your product or service? Congratulations! Giving talks is a powerful, effective way to enhance your reputation and grow your business. Once you’re booked, these tips will help you be a speaker who is applauded, referred and invited back: 1. Provide appropriate promotional materials in [...]
No, this isn't a rant about English-only or bilingual workplaces -- it's a rant about corporate jargon sparked when I read an article by Laura Vanderkam, "Why you should cool it with the corporate jargon." I understand how internal jargon develops and why using acronyms can save time if everybody understands the code -- but [...]
How many ways can your customers communicate with you? Recently a friend of mine was evaluating two companies who were vying to provide a service to her church. One had a product with a pricing and service package that was clearly superior. But that salesperson would only communicate by phone -- he didn’t use email [...]
The recent situation with the Yahoo! list that had used excerpts from at least one of my books without permission or attribution has sparked a number of discussions about when it is and isn't okay to republish someone else's work without specific authorization. One person told me that he thought as long as he [...]
How many times have you received a voice mail message that rambled on, left out important information, or just didn’t make much sense? And on the other side of that, how many times have you place a call, reached someone’s voice mail, and left a message that you knew made you sound (let’s be gentle [...]
