Lying is an inextricable part of the human experience. When Grandma gives you a horrendously ugly sweater for Christmas, you can’t possibly say you don’t like it or you risk hurting a nice lady’s feelings. Why do you not just say the truth? Research suggests that many of us lie frequently without even thinking about…
“I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn’t it.” – Groucho Marx No, this is not a blog about ancient dinosaur species or prokaryotic cells. It is about, however, the wonderful world of paraprosdokians. A paraprosdokian is a figure of speech where a sentence or phrase ends unexpectedly, often for comedic or ironic effect.…
Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter have replaced the water cooler as the customer hangout. Business owners need to understand that social networks have quickly become the preferred way to communicate for many people. This means that many of the conventional ways to promote and sell products and serices don’t work so well anymore.
Have you ever had the feeling that you have experienced a sales and marketing challenge before, but were uncertain about what to do next? Have the conventional tools become less effective for you? You tried direct mail, networking, print advertising, and cold calling. Nothing seems to work anymore. Welcome to the “new normal”. New and…
Some of you may think “three dog night” is a rock band from the seventies. There may be others that think this means the neighbor’s dogs are barking too much. Still others may think it means it is cold outside. If you think that “three dog night” means that it is cold outside, you are…
People learn, read, and communicate in many ways. Some people need or prefer more spatially effective communication with both words and images. In that case, consider a mind map. A mind map is a visual outline. It has a central core or box at the highest level, uses topics as bullets below it, and can…
The ubiquitous business card is a critical tool for communicating your brand. Make sure it reflects your image and that you maximize its usefulness. Here are 11 hints for better business cards: 1. Print the card using color. Study after study shows that color printing significantly impacts the readers’ ability to notice and remember. 2.…
At the end of every e-mail is the signature line which tells the reader how to contact you. It also tells them a lot about you and your brand. Surprisingly, many people don’t take advantage of this last step in the communication process in an e-mail letter. The minimum contact information that you should include…
Text messaging has created a new “language” of sorts that is destroying the written word and has infected all aspects of our society. Driven by young cell phone users who would rather text than talk, these abbreviations are appearing in advertising, new media, and college term papers. SMS (Short Message Service) technology is a communications…
E-mails dominate B2B communication. E-mail volume dwarfs that of the telephone, fax, and direct mailer. If you are like me, you are getting dozens if not hundreds of e-mail messages a day; most are spam and are deleted. The rest are scanned or put aside to be read later. The truth is most don’t get…