Archive for September, 2007
I’ve been thinking about credibility this morning, in light of a couple of recent pitches in which the vendors concerned asserted that their products are really, really important and/or useful.
They didn’t seem very credible, though, a judgement I make largely by backing my own credibility.
I’ve been hanging around this IT caper for more than 12 [...]
I went to a press event that took just fifteen minutes the other day.
Three speakers, a product launch, even skydivers … all in 15 minutes from ‘Welcome’ to ‘thanks’.
Sure, it was a simple product. But gee it was a nice change from the usual 30 minutes of chat and endless PowerPoint.
If only it had started [...]
I’ve just had a phone call that is one of the classics, especially for freelancers.
It goes a little something like this:
PR: Hi Simon, are you interested in coming to our event
Me: When is it?
PR: Tomorrow?
Me: (Says) Tomorrow?
(Thinks) Tomorrow? No-one sends out invitations to an event 24 hours only in advance. I bet that they are [...]
Over the weekend I noticed a job ad in the newspaper … and I know the current holder of the job.
There were only two options:
He’d been promoted
He’d left
Either way, I had no choice but to ask the company concerned what was going on.
I started with their PR agency and asked ‘Why is your client hiring [...]
I’ve just had a look through the stats for the blog and it gets a lot more hits when I am dishing out on PR people.
All my big spikes come from angry rants.
There’s a strong trickle of would-be audio book thieves, a few people looking for Australian political debate and some people looking for information [...]
Just read this post ‘How to pitch to a blog‘ over at The Bad Pitch Blog.
There’s a lot to like in it.
There’s also a lot of incredibly basic stuff I’m kind of stunned needs to be said in the context of any pitch to any type of writer.
Discuss?
A lot of my correspondence with PR is generated by pitches which perplex me.
So I write back with some questions about why my readers should care about the topic on offer.
This can sometimes be hard to explain.
Sometimes it generates wonderful cut and paste jobs where boilerplate gets offered as argument. So let me say right [...]
Today, we all pay for the ‘free’ entertainment on TV every time we eat, drive a car, wash our clothes. You name a product, it pays for TV.
That’s because the cost of advertising is built into everything we consume. So a certain proportion of the price I paid for the pasta I will eat for [...]
I sometimes get asked to interview vendors’ visiting vice-presidents, often in the hope that as a freelancer my associations with various publications will mean coverage of these folks works its way into places that would otherwise be disinclined to even receive a pitch about this kind of interview.
Here’s why I will always say no to [...]
I’ve discovered a more recent set of statistics on small businesses in Australia
You’ll find the ABS document here.
Long story short, there are now:
1,156,326 businesses that do not employ anyone
807,581 businesses that do employ someone
Of the businesses that do employ someone
721,569 employ fewer than 20 people, the ABS definition of a small business
227,373 of those small [...]
Twitter / ssharwood- ssharwood: At the #rightnow customer service conference on the gold coast. The "united breaks guitars" video shown as demo of need for social service
- ssharwood: New Order' "ceremony" is awesome. listening to it now reminds me of how I figured out the giutar part as a talentless teenager
- ssharwood: working late in a god coast hotel room before the right now call centre conference. not glamourous
- ssharwood: they said "pwned" on #Mediawatch teehee
- ssharwood: Nick Minchin says lefties want to de-industrlalise the world ? cuckoo ... cuckoo ... #4corners
- TechTarget ANZ
- Eight free IT outsourcing templates
- Five ways to boost business intelligence
- Three ways Lean processes can improve your BPM effort
- The pain of SOHO IT
- Twelve free project management templates
- CIO: Don't attempt BPM system without mapping process flows
- Seven jobs to launch your business process management strategy
- Six mistakes that make SOA implementations fail
- Adopting agile development methodology is a stretch, but the exercise pays off
- Chapter download: Find new value in your IT
- What I’m listening to
- Smart Call Podcast
- Smart Call # 70 - Travel and analytics advance agentsOn this show, we have a look at two unusually advanced ways to improve agent performance. The first comes in our main presentation, which comes from Paul Cahill, General Manager Customer Service at Internet Service Provider iiNet, which operates contact centres in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Paul explains how iiNet works to build a consistent [. […]
- Smart Call #69 - Who’s the boss?In this episode of Smart Call, we ask: Who’s the Boss? And we do so in two ways. First up, we have Dr. Catriona Wallace of callcentres.net sharing the results of her firm’s annual Australasian Benchmarking Report with us. Catriona finds that call centre bosses have some happier challenges at the moment, because fewer workers are leaving [...]
- Smart Call #68 – The geek show!This episode of Smart Call gets geeky as we talk to two IT strategists. But don’t worry that we are going to go all dry and technical on you! Instead, we have a fascinating presentation from Genesys’ G-Force about the future of customer service, from Bill Peer, a Vice President for Enterprise Architecture at the InterContinental [...]
- Smart Call # 70 - Travel and analytics advance agents
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