In the post “Is your communication department getting the resources it deserves?”, the Melcrum Blog reports on the results of Melcrum’s tri-annual international research into communication budgets, salaries and structure. What struck me was the average number of employees in respondents’ internal communications departments: 13.8! Does that seem like a large number to anyone else? [...]
Monthly Archives: August 2007
Keep your voice
It’s a holiday in Ontario (Simcoe Day, a “celebration” of John Graves Simcoe, who was the first Lieutenant-Governor of what was then known as Upper Canada; it’s also often called the boring “Civic Holiday”) and in between dog walking and yard work I am catching up on my blog reading. I also just finished reading [...]
Words in a death trap
Dan Santow (a senior VP at PR firm Edelman) had a great post on his blog Word Wise about words that people latch onto and use “until their meaning and power dies.” His list of “words that have fallen into the death trap” includes some pet peeves of mine (many of them much beloved by [...]
Dog with a rap sheet
My dog is known to police. I found this out from a hanging door tag left by the local Humane Society while I was out. “Please call the officer below re: incident involving ‘Jake’,” it said. Uh oh! While I was away one weekend, Jake had stayed with my mother, and she and a neighbour [...]
Can execs speak plainly?
No wonder employees find it hard to understand company “leaders” (the new word for managers, apparently). The latest “BigExec-speak” I ran into this week: Action as a verb, as in, “We’ll action those areas.” Ugh. Criticality. I wasn’t sure exactly what it meant, but Dictionary.com came up with “the quality, state or degree of being [...]
