Tag Archives: Marketing

Monday’s Link Roundup.

Posted on November 12, 2012 | 2 Comments

In this Monday’s Link Roundup there’s so much good stuff to choose from. As a closet designer, I was particularly drawn to The Phaidon Archive of Graphic Design.  This is a must on every designer’s wish list. As someone who volunteers at our local Hospice, I was deeply moved by Hospice Hand Portraiture.  And if your business involves the gathering or tellingof stories, you’ll want to read Telling Your Story: The Secrets To Content Branding.

  • People Of The Bookshelf. “Alpha by subject … or by dinner party seating rules? Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Geraldine Brooks on a shelving obsession.”
  • Are You Overwhelmed by Marketing? “Does it seem like there are just too many things to do to market your business? It’s easy to get overwhelmed by marketing ideas, plans, and tasks, especially when many of them involve learning new skills. And then people are always telling you about something else to do. But you’re only one person. You can only afford to pay for so much help. Is it really even possible to do everything about marketing that others say you should? Here are four steps to find a clear path out of marketing overwhelm.”
  • Hospice Hand Portraiture. “As a hospice nurse and photographer I have the honor to witness and capture the unwavering expression of love that endures between people living with terminal illness… Hand portraiture preserves this important expression of love. Each hand is different; a symbol of identity that embodies character and tells stories. Hands reveal honest emotion. Hands are for holding.”
  • The Phaidon Archive of Graphic Design. “Every once in a while, along comes a book-as-artifact that becomes an instant, inextricable necessity in the life of any graphic design aficionado. This season, it’s The Phaidon Archive of Graphic Design — an impressive, exhaustive, rigorously researched, and beautifully produced compendium of 500 seminal designs…”
  • Mary Karr, The Art of Memoir No. 1.[Paris Review Interview] “The Liars’ Club, Karr’s 1995 memoir of her Gothic childhood in a swampy East Texas oil-refining town, won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction, sold half a million copies, and made its forty-year-old author, who was then an obscure poet, a literary celebrity…For a writer who has shared herself with the public in three memoirs, Mary Karr is an extraordinarily elusive interview subject. Nearly two years passed between our initial contact, in July of 2007, and our first session.” [Thanks to Pat McNees of Writers and Editors for alerting me to this aerticle.]
  • 9 Of The Most Beautiful Words In The English Language. “I’ve riffled the pages of scores of old dictionaries and ransacked my father’s old army trunks, which now contain hundreds of my journals and notebooks. More than once during my restocking I’ve thought of the startling line in J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, where Captain Hook is described: “The man isn’t wholly evil; he has a thesaurus in his cabin.” Recently, I felt even more vindicated about my ardent belief in the beauty of word books when I heard the deadpan comedian Stephen Wright say on late-night television, “I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.”
  • Telling Your Story: The Secrets To Content Branding. “Facts are boring but putting facts into a context with emotion makes them memorable. Stories help you connect with people on a sensory level…The late Steve Sabol, the man behind NFL Films, once said “tell me a fact and I’ll learn, tell me a truth and I’ll believe. But tell me a story and it will live in my heart forever.”

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Monday’s Link Roundup.

Posted on November 5, 2012 | Leave a comment

In this Monday’s Link Roundup I’ve listed several book reviews that I think you’ll find interesting. If you’re concerned about  digitizing your precious family history, you’ll want to read Digital Imaging Essentials.  For an understanding of  what it’s like to be  supportive parents of a gay teenage boy who tried to commit suicide, be sure to read Oddly Normal. And for John Lennon fans, don’t miss The John Lennon Letters.

  • No sunlit room, no last words. “As Luke Allnutt watched his father die, he thought the time for a meaningful conversation and emotional epiphany was at hand. His father had other ideas.”
  • The best way to get unstuck. “Don’t wait for the right answer and the golden path to present themselves.This is precisely why you’re stuck.”
  • 10 Essential Marketing Skills for Freelancers. “As a freelancer (or potential freelancer), you live and die by your ability to sell your services. And uOddly Normal is not Joseph’s story. It’s the story of his parents, who struggled for years over how best to raise a child whom they knew was gay, who wasn’t out to them or the world, and whom they thought was mentally crumbling under the pressure of that secret.nless you’ve got some kind of agent or marketing firm doing your marketing for you, you’ve got to be your own marketer. If you’re like me, that doesn’t come naturally.”
  • Digital Imaging Essentials by Geoff Rasmussen. “Genealogists use digital imaging technology every day. But what they do not know about it can harm their digital treasures. They have needed a comprehensive, easy-to-read guide, full of illustrated step-by-step instructions to learn how to digitize, organize, preserve, share, and backup their digital collections.”
  • The John Lennon Letters, Edited by Hunter Davies. “The triumph of these 200 or so letters is that they are not just about John and Mimi, or John and The Beatles, or John and Yoko. They are all of that but, within the framework editor Hunter Davies gives them, they’re also about a time and place, and Lennon’s role within it. It is hard to distinguish whether the honestly and innocence of some of his correspondence reflects his personality, or his era.”
  • Translating from speech to prose. “Terkel’s books consist of tape-recorded conversations with mostly common people; after a brief introduction from Terkel, each text unspools almost seamlessly, with only an occasional nudge from the questioner. But here’s the thing: most people don’t talk that way.” [Thanks to APH member  Pattie Whitehouse for alerting me to this article.]
  • Book Review: Oddly Normal. “Thirteen-year-old Joseph Schwartz …came out at school one spring day in 2009, rode the bus home, shut himself in his suburban New Jersey bathroom, and downed way too many capsules of Benadryl. He had never been subjected to overt homophobia, was only a few years away from hearing the president of the United States express unequivocal support for gay marriage on national television, and was the son of two very supportive, loving parents. But no matter his direct relationship with what it meant to “be gay,” Joseph carried the weight of his difference… and it almost killed him. Joseph’s dad, New York Times national reporter John Schwartz['s],… new memoir, Oddly Normal: One Family’s Struggle To Help Their Teenage Son Come to Terms With His Sexuality… is not Joseph’s story. It’s the story of his parents, who struggled for years over how best to raise a child whom they knew was gay, who wasn’t out to them or the world, and whom they thought was mentally crumbling under the pressure of that secret.”

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Encore! 8 Ways To Make Your Business Stand Out From the Crowd.

Posted on October 17, 2012 | Leave a comment

In today’s marketplace you’ve got to do more than offer excellent service and product. That’s a given. To separate your small business from all the others offering a similar service you’ve got to be unique and memorable. How do you do that?…Read more.

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Monday’s Link Roundup.

Posted on October 1, 2012 | Leave a comment

My favorite article in today’s Monday’s Link Roundup is Reading Cookbooks as Life Stories. One of my prized possessions is Mom’s 1945  Purity Cookbook.  Thumbing through the grease-stained pages and reading her handwritten notes is like stepping back into Mom’s kitchen. Also, be sure to take a look at Boring Is Productive. I can now feel justly proud of my “boring” morning  routines! ;-)

  • An Illustrated Homage to Grandparents and the Art of Looking Twice. “As a lover of vintage and vintage-inspired children’s books, I was instantly enamored with The Frank Show (public library) by British illustrator and designer David Mackintosh — a charming homage to grandparents and the art of seeing beneath the grumpy exterior.”
  • The simple power of one a day. “There are at least 200 working days a year. If you commit to doing a simple marketing item just once each day, at the end of the year you’ve built a mountain. Here are some things you might try (don’t do them all, just one of these once a day would change things for you):”
  • The Top 10 Social Networks for Creative People. “I begin by looking at WHY networking is critical to your success as a creative professional. Then it’s onto the networks themselves, with quotations from the founders of some networks and success stories from users, explaining the networks’ individual cultures, how to use them, and how they can help your creativity and your career.”
  • Reading Cookbooks as Life Stories. “…cookbooks tell us something much more personal about their readers,..The problem is, we often only come about this information by inference – particularly when we know nothing about the original owner. Still, many cookbooks do offer at least a few tantalizing clues who owned them and how they were used.”
  • Data Lives Forever in Quartz Glass. “Hitachi has discovered a way to store digital information on slivers of quartz glass. This data can seemingly exist forever, enduring extreme temperatures and hostile conditions without degrading… at least until the sun begins to die and expend to consume the earth, that is.”
  • Using WorldCat to Find Genealogy Books. “WorldCat is the world’s largest network of library content and services. It is an online library catalog that lets you look up items in libraries around the world. The items available include books, electronic documents, journals, microform, and audio and video recordings. Best of all, WorldCat is available to everyone free of charge.”
  • Boring Is Productive. “Making too many decisions about mundane details is a waste of a limited resource: your mental energy. In the late 1990s, Roy Baumeister (a professor at Florida State University) and colleagues performed several experiments showing that certain types of conscious mental actions appeared to draw from the same “energy source” — gradually diminishing our ability to make smart decisions throughout the day.”

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Book Review: “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking” by Susan Cain

Posted on September 5, 2012 | Leave a comment

The following review is by Dhyan Atkinson of The Five Essential Skills. Providing business skills training, consulting and business coaching to English-speaking small business owners around the world.  Learn the business skills you need to be successful and get help using them out in the real world to find clients!

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I am an introvert.  I love public speaking. I love teaching my classes.  I love working with my clients and I do these things well… but I am a dyed-in-the-wool introvert all the same.

One of the best explanations I have come across for the difference between an extrovert and an introvert has to do with the things that energize and rejuvenate them.

Extroverts get energized by interacting with people and being in public. They find group energy stimulating and enlivening.  They thrive on teams and competition, and relish expending lots of energy which, in turn, energizes them more. They would rather be with people than be alone.

Introverts are the opposite. Although they may enjoy being with others, they tend to get drained by too much time with too many people.  At a party, they are more likely to be in the corner having a deep quiet conversation than dancing with a lampshade on their head in the center of the room.  Sooner or later, they are ready to leave the party for some quality time alone.  It is the alone time that gives them more juice and feeds their contributions to the world.

When I saw Susan Cain’s book “Quiet:  The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking” advertised on my Kindle I bought it at once and have relished every page!  Susan Cain, herself an introvert (and a Wall Street Lawyer), talks about the dilemma introverts face every day living in a world that admires what she calls “The Extrovert Ideal.”   Think Tony Robbins.  Think Mega-churches.  Think our current political leaders.  Think Harvard Business School.  Think every mega-training program you have ever heard of.

Cain has clearly done her homework.  The book draws on cutting-edge research in psychology and neuroscience speaking to the biological origins and differences between introverts and extroverts.  Every chapter contains entertaining stories of real people (both introverts and extroverts) in real life situations.  (My favorite story is when Susan attends a Tony Robbins seminar to research extroverts in action.  I loved the descriptions of the cheerleading, the jumping up and down, the chanting, the pumping up of enthusiasm, the mega-screens, Tony as bigger than life, the fire walk – mostly because I could enjoy these things in print and never have to attend a seminar myself!  I know this is not for me!)

She also identifies many famous introverts and their contributions to the world.  Without introverts we would not have the following:

The theory of gravity
The theory of relativity
The theory of evolution
Personal computers
W.B. Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’
Chopin’s nocturnes
Proust’s ‘Remembrance of Things Past’
Van Gogh’s ‘Starry, Starry Night’
Peter Pan
Orwell’s ’1984′ and ‘Animal Farm’
The Cat in the Hat
Charlie Brown
‘Schindler’s List,’ ‘E.T.,’ and ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’
Google
Harry Potter

It isn’t just that I enjoyed this book and learned from it: I felt validated reading “Quiet.”  I felt encouraged.  I gained a renewed sense that I can do anything an extrovert can do and I can do it in my own quiet way.  I have been telling my clients for years that they can love their work and find ways to find clients without resorting to the fist-punching bravado of your classic salesperson.  It’s true!

I would highly recommend this book to people who dread being out in the world in an open, extroverted way but fear that if they don’t “change themselves” their business will never survive.  “Quiet” is a celebration of the “other” way of living – a sweeping validation of the power, creativity, contributions, and self-worth in being an introvert.

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Monday’s Link Roundup.

Posted on September 3, 2012 | Leave a comment

Happy Labor Day! I hope you’re resting from your labors today. If you’re looking for an enjoyable diversion, why not check out my Monday’s Link Roundup?  Every week I bring you an eclectic  mix of articles that I find fascinating and that relate in some way to life stories, memories, and self-employment.

  • In Andalusia, on the Trail of Inherited Memories. “There are scientific studies exploring whether the history of our ancestors is somehow a part of us, inherited in unexpected ways through a vast chemical network in our cells that controls genes, switching them on and off. At the heart of the field, known as epigenetics, is the notion that genes have memory and that the lives of our grandparents — what they breathed, saw and ate — can directly affect us decades later.”
  • The Next Big Idea From Twitter’s Founders? “Evan Williams and Biz Stone think their new site, Medium, could mark an “evolutionary step” in web publishing…their new venture, a platform for collecting and displaying stories, images, musings and more, isn’t just noteworthy for its web-visionary pedigree …In a sense, Medium’s intended to be a Pinterest for our own lives, an elegant repository for photos, projects, and stories we’ve actually lived, as opposed to a re-blogged clearing house for pictures of wedding dresses and eggs baked into avocados found elsewhere around the web.”
  • Apps for Journaling, Keeping track of your memories…“How do I keep my professional life separate from my personal life without driving myself crazy. I want to list a few apps that are possible solutions to this… I also want to list some differences between all of these that I have found.”
  • All About Me: How Memoirs Became the Literature of Choice. “Memoirs are the great equalizer of writing. In a genre utterly non-denominational, there is room for any story in any pattern of prose. The Christian Science Monitor reports that memoirs have seen sales increase from $170 million to $270 million since 1999. Most nonfiction MFA writing programs are geared substantially towards the genre; Hunter College even requires prospective students to submit a memoir proposal as part of their application. Many bookstores can count their autobiography sections among the most frequented and their popularity thrives.”
  • Anaïs Nin on Self-Publishing. “Besides artist and author, Nin was also a publishing entrepreneur. In January 1942, she sets up her own small press in a loft on Macdougal Street, and soon set out to print and self-publish a new edition of her third book, Winter of Artifice, teaching herself typesetting and doing most of the manual work herself.From The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 3: 1939-1944 (public library) comes this beautiful passage on the joy of handcraft, written in January of 1942 — a particularly timely meditation in the age of today’s thriving letterpress generation and the Maker Movement.”
  • Peter Sellers: His Life in Home Movies. [Video]“Peter Sellers was a compulsive home movie maker…In 1995, fifteen years after Sellers’s death, producers from BBC Arena sorted through his extensive archive and assembled some of the best footage for a film called The Peter Sellers Story. In 2002 they shortened it into The Peter Sellers Story: As He Filmed It (above), which tells the story of the comedian’s life almost exclusively with footage from his own camera.”
  • Attracting High-End Clients. ” Everyone wants to attract more clients. But I think it’s even more important to set your sights on attracting more High-End clients.”

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The Best of Monday’s Links Roundup.

Posted on August 27, 2012 | 1 Comment

These are some of my favorite articles  from last year. If you missed them the first time around, now’s your chance to catch up.

  • A Brief History of Film Title Sequence Design in 2 Minutes. “In his graduation project, an absolutely brilliant motion graphics gem, Dutch designer and animator Jurjen Versteeg examines the history of the title sequence through an imagined documentary about the designers who revolutionized this creative medium.”
  • A Crash Course in Marketing With Stories. “If you want your marketing to really sizzle, if you want people to remember it, you need to turn your marketing messages into stories. I’ve broken down the classical elements of story below so you can begin to think like a storyteller, and make your marketing messages stick.”
  • 10 Essential Books on Typography. “Whether you’re a professional designer, recreational type-nerd, or casual lover of the fine letterform, typography is one of design’s most delightful frontiers, an odd medley of timeless traditions and timely evolution in the face of technological progress. Today, we turn to 10 essential books on typography, ranging from the practical to the philosophical to the plain pretty.”
  • When Data Disappears. “…if we’re going to save even a fraction of the trillions of bits of data churned out every year, we can’t think of digital preservation in the same way we do paper preservation. We have to stop thinking about how to save data only after it’s no longer needed, as when an author donates her papers to an archive. Instead, we must look for ways to continuously maintain and improve it. In other words, we must stop preserving digital material and start curating it.”
  • Selling My Mother’s Dresses. “Some of my favorite things — including the sundress I’m wearing today and the Winnie the Pooh car that Jay is pushing our daughter in — are from someone else’s life. I find no joy in shopping at regular stores anymore…I love trying to sniff out a memory from a bud vase or a favorite song from a case of L.P.’s. The stains and broken switches, the bend in the knee of an old pair of jeans. Sometimes I just want to look at how many Mason jars one person can collect and imagine what they might’ve held. It’s comforting to know that someone has breathed and laughed inside a sweater before me. That I am part of a continuum.” [Thanks to Mary M. Harrison of Morning Glory Memoirs for alerting me to this item.]
  • Tracking Personal Histories Across Time. “Sander Koot’s series Back from the Future is a pairing of new portraits of the individual with an older picture of that person from years past.. he only photographs individuals after interviewing them. “In this project, I ask people to find old portraits of themselves, of which they have good memories,” says Koot. “When talking to them about the picture, you see them reliving the happy moment. Only after I know all the details about the past of that picture, (do) we start the shoot.”

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Encore! The #1Thing You Can Do to Jump Start Your Marketing.

Posted on August 15, 2012 | Leave a comment

Marketing strategies assume one size fits all. We’re told that we must network, build referrals, provide items of interest to the media, write newsletters, blog, give presentations, and so on.

News Flash! It doesn’t matter if we know what we’re supposed to do if we don’t like doing it. And not tending to marketing tasks that we’re told are critical can make us feel inept. This can quickly spiral into doing nothing at all…Read more.

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Monday’s Link Roundup.

Posted on August 6, 2012 | Leave a comment

Happy Civic Holiday to my Canadian compatriots. Being in a holiday mood, I’ve selected some summery items for this Monday’s Link Roundup. Two of my favorite articles are My summer memories are up for sale and Why road trips rule over resorts. And if you can’t get away, then the next best thing might be to read a travel memoir. Check out some good reading at A World On The Page: Five Great Travel Memoirs.

  • The Science of How We Came to Live and Breathe Stories. “Stories aren’t merely essential to how we understand the world — they are how we understand the world…In The Storytelling Animal, educator and science writer Jonathan Gottschall traces the roots, both evolutionary and sociocultural, of the transfixing grip storytelling has on our hearts and minds, individually and collectively.”
  • Memories, Lighting the Corners of Minds. “I went to the annual conference of biography writers last year in Washington DC…I soon realized how much biographers depend on written records, and how often those written records are letters. Letters that have gone the way of the dodo bird in our new electronic world…I realized personal memoirs would be the only written records of what it was like to grow up in West Virginia before electricity. Before a lot of things. Someday in the not too distant future, if you want to know what it was like “back then” these memoirs will be the only way to know.Thus,these memoirs can serve a much greater social purpose than simply memoir. They are the written records of how we lived. It isn’t an indulgence to write them. It’s a social imperative. There may not be a lot of people who want to read these memoirs. There may only be one. But that one might be a historian doing research in the far distant future and if we want them, those kids of ours, to know what it was like, we have to tell them now.”
  • Why road trips rule over resorts. “Road trips have inherent downsides – people throwing up, bad hotels, children fighting in the back seat – but the odd thing is that as people grow into adults, they remember this with fondness. Those difficulties are put into a sentimental context of family memory,” says Susan Sessions Rugh, a history professor at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, who wrote the book Are We There Yet? The Golden Age of American Family Vacations.”
  • Historians discover medieval banking records hidden under coats of arms. “A rare accounting document, half-concealed beneath a coat of arms design, has revealed the activities of Italian bankers working in early 15th century London, decades before the capital became a financial powerhouse. The discovery was made by economic historians at Queen Mary, University of London.”
  • My summer memories are up for sale. “My Mum sent me a real-estate listing today. It turns out that my uncle is selling the old family cottage where we spent our summers when I was a kid. And since nobody in the family can afford to buy it, pretty soon it will no longer be a part of the family at all.”
  • Are You Brilliant At Marketing? “Are you brilliant at marketing? We think you can be., We’ve assembled some great links meant to boost your marketing creativity. Check them out and see how “brilliant” you can become.”
  • A World On The Page: Five Great Travel Memoirs. “Let’s stay put this summer. Let’s live other lives from the comfort of our couches. Crank the AC and allow these five books to take you to other worlds. But be warned: These are dangerous places, the underbellies of our great cities. You’ll meet unforgettable characters: a future first lady, a one-booted hiker on the Pacific Crest Trail, a young Angela Davis. You’ll encounter beauty, bravery, chilling strangeness — and you won’t even have to take off your Slanket.”

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Encore! Being Relaxed Makes People Spend More Freely.

Posted on July 25, 2012 | 2 Comments

The  recent issue of  the Journal of Marketing Research  examined the correlation between relaxation and consumer spending. It turns out that all things being equal consumers are more willing to pay higher prices if they feel relaxed…Read more.

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