John Bradley "JJ" Jackson

Business Writing

Is Your Communication Style Effective?

Cultivating strong communication skills takes practice, time, and humility. Word choice is important, but not nearly as influential as body language and tone. The goal of communication is to transmit an idea, not impress someone with your power or intelligence. Be clear. Don’t over think it. Define your message

Blogs and Blogging

Undue Self-Promotion?

Self-promotion is tricky.  Whether online or in-person, you want to promote your business or cause, but don’t want to appear annoying or boastful.  When does healthy self-promotion cross the line?  How can you avoid common pitfalls that make you seem big-headed or bothersome? From a personal branding standpoint, the

Negotiation

Difficult Conversations

Is there a difficult conversation you’ve been putting off?  Managing our emotions during difficult conversations is challenging, but possible.  With preparation, practice, and an open mind, having difficult conversations can be a little easier.  Here are some tips for your next difficult conversation: Prepare. * Practice having the conversation with

Branding

Gratitude is Good

Evidence suggests that people who experience and practice gratitude are happier.  They sleep more soundly, have fewer medical problems, and report strong relationships with friends and family. Hofstra University researchers expanded the research to show how gratitude brings many benefits to children and adolescents.  Grateful kids are overall more satisfied

Social Media

Social Media Management

Who should “own” social media at your firm? The Marketing department? The firm’s Public Relations Agency? The IT Department? Everyone? The answer will vary depending on the size of your company, resources available, culture, and social media goals. For many companies, social media is owned by various departments with

Trends

90% Own Smartphones

The LA Times reported this August that for the first time, more than 90% of Americans own smartphones.  The fact that most Americans today have smartphones means that business and culture at large are changing.  Employees are often expected to be on-call to answer emails at night and on weekends.

Advertising

Advertising Words

Certain words convey certain emotions. But not all words are created equal; some combinations of words work better than others to convey certain emotions or themes. An advertiser might lure shoppers to a big sale by saying, “Hurry! This is a limited time offer!” It would not be as effective

Segmentation

Baby Boomers: Excessively Selfish or Proudly Individualistic?

The answer is probably both.  Each generation has its own flavor, and while not every person is a carbon copy of the stereotypes associated with their cohort, patterns have nevertheless emerged. In a recent op-ed piece in the New York Times, Bill Keller writes that Baby Boomers (born between 1946

Selling

Don’t Stand So Close to Me

The concept of personal space affects nearly every facet of our daily lives. It determines how close we stand to strangers in an elevator, and how long we linger in an embrace with a friend. Personal space is the immediate area surrounding you that you recognize as “your” space.  It

Selling

How to Deal with Extroverts

In the last entry, we talked about how to deal with introverts.  Knowing how to customize your own behavior to make others feel more comfortable may seem like a no-brainer, and it can help if you are aware if the other person is an introvert or an extrovert. Extroverts dominate

Human Resources

How to Deal with Introverts

It is important to know how to handle people who have different personality types than your own.  If you’re like most folks, you probably can sense whether you harbor primarily more introverted or extroverted tendencies.  For this blog, we’ll discuss how to deal with introverts.  In the follow-up

Social Media

Pinterest Generates More Referral Traffic Than Most

You have probably heard the buzz surrounding Pinterest, an image-sharing platform that links products back to their websites. According to Shareaholic, an online sharing service, Pinterest has generated more referral traffic than Twitter, StumbleUpon, Bing, and Google. Back in January, Pinterest first beat LinkedIn, and YouTube – combined.  In February, Pinterest

Gratitude

Loneliness is Epidemic

We all feel lonely from time to time.  For some people, especially the elderly, this is a real problem with serious health consequences. Increasingly, our society isolates people or people are just choosing to be alone. Older people often have had spouses and friends die or move away.  Illness, disability,

Search Engine Optimization

Social Optimization for Your Website

It is important to make your website friendly for social sharing. This means being flawlessly connected to social networking websites, and encouraging social interaction on your website in general. We’ll address both aspects of social optimization and also provide some general tips. Make it easy for users to interact

Social Media

When Should I Publish or Post Online?

If your goal is to reach as many people in your target demographic as possible, then here’s the bottom line: Know your audience. For many people, this means posting during high-traffic times online. Research firm iMedia Connection says that page views fluctuate based on the time of day.  The

Gratitude Marketing

Promotional Products: Beyond the Coffee Cup

From mouse pads and bottle openers to lip balm and mints, you probably have more promotional products at your home or office than you realize.  These useful items quietly advertise their parent company through logos and slogans imprinted on the objects. Traditional promotional products can be effective, and are certainly

Advertising

The Busyness of New Age Marketing

A recent article titled "The Busy Trap" by New York Times columnist Tim Kreider got me thinking about the busyness in my own life and the current state of what I call "new age marketing." This is a powerful article and it sadly describes my own

Gratitude Marketing

Why Promotional Products Are Effective

Even if you have never heard the term “promotional product”, you have undoubtedly used them.  Promotional products usually have a company’s logo on it.  Traditional promotional products include pens, T-shirts, USB drives, coffee mugs, refrigerator magnets, and more.  Notice that all these items are cheap to purchase and distribute,

Social Media

How Long Before a Link or Post Becomes Obsolete?

The short answer: not very long at all. When you post a link or something else online, you have probably noticed that people will “Like” or comment mostly within the first few hours after posting.  After a couple of days, the post is all but forgotten, and the chances of

E-mail Marketing

I Got an E-mail From Jesus

My spam filter let an e-mail from am “unknown sender” named Jesus get through to my mail box today. My first reaction was to immediately delete it or hit the spam key, but instead I opened it. I thought to myself, “What if…?” What if the “big guy” had something

E-mail Marketing

Smaller E-mail Marketing Lists Are Better

Contrary to popular opinion, large e-mail databases are typically not better. Often large databases will include “dead” e-mail addresses which exaggerate the “monetary value” of the list. It makes good business sense to cull your list regularly. This  includes a prompt management of “opt-out requests” which are people who  are

Blogs and Blogging

Personalize Your E-mail Marketing Letters

A highly effective marketing technique used by successful e-mail marketers is to personalize the e-mail letter. This personalization can be accomplished in many ways. One way to personalize an e-mail letter is to use the recipient’s  organization logo or web site. The purpose of a personalized image is to

E-mail Marketing

E-mail Marketing and Children

For many email and web marketers, the youth market represents a tempting financial opportunity. But the legal risks are significant—and ignoring them can be costly. The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), first enacted in 1998 and enforced by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) since April 2000, regulates

E-mail Marketing

Writing Great E-mail Marketing Copy

Writing great e-mail marketing copy is hard work. You can always  outsource it to a professional copywriter, but you will discover that  the good ones are already booked and that they are very expensive. If  your budget dictates doing this writing in-house, here are a few ideas,  in no particular

E-mail Marketing

Trust Enables E-mail Marketing

Trust is hard to define, but we know it when we see it or feel it. And this is particularly true with e-mail marketing. The truest measure of trust in commercial e-mail marketing may be the “reputation score” which is calculated by all the individual ISPs. A reputation score is