Image by Tama Leaver via Flickr How many times have you received a batch of emails waiting for you on a Monday morning, and you either skim quickly through them or delete them without even opening them? Don’t worry – you’re not alone. Figures show that Mondays and Fridays are the two least popular days of the week for people opening emails – hardly surprising when you consider both days are either side of the weekend. So why do many…

Image by Chris Campbell via Flickr I had the good (?) fortune to sit down with the CEO of a PR agency in Toronto recently. He had been at a seminar I attended regarding converging technologies and mediums and how they fit into the role of the PR professional. We got chatting and decided to have lunch together. Now, I’m a pretty open guy to how businesses run themselves, but this lunch was an eye-opener. The conversation turned naturally to…

I read a report today that women multi-task better than men. Published by Integrated Media Measurment Inc, the survey looked at how almost twice as many women both use the Internet and watch television at the same time compared to men. While I found the survey a little obvious (everyone knows women multi-task better than men!),  it did make me wonder – how is this information being used? Let’s look at the key group, for instance. The biggest percentages of…

Yesterday on Twitter I made the comment that communication + unity = community. A simple play on words, it seemed to hit the target with a lot of people. This guest post from Cathy Browne, a Canadian PR professional currently based in the US, takes that sentiment further and looks at how we can all help our local communities. It’s Martin Luther King Day here in the US, and President-Elect Obama has urged us all to honor Dr. King’s memory…

Now and again you come across something that’s just so cool you wonder why no-one did it earlier. Tonight I found one, thanks to Kevin Sherman – bubbletweet. Allowing you to record a video snippet and then have it displayed on your Twitter page for any new followers or visitors to see, bubbletweet is simple and fun – always a good combination. It also has a lot of potential for both personal and corporate branding. Imagine being able to tell…

Image by suzukik via Flickr What do you use to track success? It’s one of the first questions I ask new clients when we sit down to discuss a new project or campaign. Most of the answers that come back are either Google Analytics, Yahoo Web Analytics or a similar platform. While these tools are excellent in their own right, they can take you away from the most important analytic source – people. Where else can you get real-world feedback…

Cover of Pyromania In 1983, the biggest-selling album in the US was Michael Jackson’s Thriller, still a pop classic more than 25 years later. The second biggest-selling album was from a relatively little-known (at the time) UK rock band called Def Leppard. The album was Pyromania. Selling more than 10 million copies in the US alone, Pyromania launched Def Leppard into the melodic rock stratosphere, and introduced music fans previously against rock into their brand of catchy hooks and excellent…

This is a guest post from Jason Anthoine of workplace communications firm The Cohesion Group. It’s the result of an email Jason sent me asking whether I’d covered social media usage within organizations and a nice follow-on to an earlier post of mine looking at internal communication systems. I was intrigued by Jason’s email and asked him if he’d be interested in writing about it here. Enjoy. Remember in high school how, as a freshman, you were relegated to the…

Despite its obvious benefits for communication, interaction and connecting, Twitter still finds itself labeled as a fad. (And my apologies to Chris Brogan who asked us not to talk about Twitter in 2009 – my bad!). Maybe it is a fad – maybe the detractors are right. But in the meantime, if you want to see why it’s so popular and why it’s hailed as one of the friendliest social media networks around, look no further than FollowFriday, where people…

Image by william.n via Flickr How well do you keep your personal and business life separate? Are you able to separate the two relatively easy, or do they crossover too much to have significantly different views? Or to put it another way, if you had a personal issue with someone could you still work with them professionally? I ask this as a situation arose today where I had to question whether I was in the wrong, someone else was, or…