The Red Jacket Diaries blog

Sue Horner is a freelance writer in Oakville, Ontario, who blogs about writing, communications and running an independent business in The Red Jacket Diaries blog.

Er, it’s ‘social’ media, not ‘numbers’ media

By Sue Horner | Published: May 22, 2012

Despite what some people will tell you, Twitter isn’t a numbers game. Nor is Facebook. Nope, not LinkedIn either. Social media is all about connection and community. Oh, spammers will offer to get you thousands of Twitter followers or Facebook ‘likes,’ cheap. You can even buy followers on eBay; one found by Mashable offered to [...]

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Friday word fun

By Sue Horner | Published: May 18, 2012

It’s Friday, and it’s the start of a long weekend (at least here in Canada). Seems like the perfect time for some word fun! Is it a piece of IKEA furniture or a type of cheese? An amusing quiz from Mental Floss. Thou wayward rump-fed malt-worm! Have some fun with the Shakespearean insult generator. Which [...]

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10 tips to reclaim your blogging mojo

By Sue Horner | Published: May 14, 2012

I seem to have misplaced my blogging mojo again. It started slipping away during a busy few weeks leading up to a week’s vacation. Then, between my writing business, and school, and networking/volunteer activities, and family, the blogging momentum just slipped away. The last time this happened, my friend Louise Desmarais of Mud Creative called [...]

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Are you putting readers to sleep?

By Sue Horner | Published: May 2, 2012

Working on a client’s employee newsletter has kept my nose to the grindstone for a bit (why hello blog! should I re-introduce myself?). And it also reminded me that the corporate world has much to do to keep employees reading their newsletters. Despite company guidelines that encourage lively and clear writing, the pieces I edited [...]

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Like Millennials, I don’t want to ‘like’ you

By Sue Horner | Published: April 12, 2012

It’s easy to understand why businesses want to be on Facebook. There are more than 500 million Facebook users, and half of them are logged in on any given day (thanks, DigitalBuzz, for the stats). But the funny thing is that people don’t really want to get cosy with you on Facebook. Sure, they’ll temporarily [...]

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Red has the power, or not

By Sue Horner | Published: March 29, 2012

  Oh, dear. Bad news for someone who loves red jackets for networking and presenting; according to researchers: “Red makes you sexy, dumb, attractive and repellant.” Well, wait a minute. I could live with attractive, and maybe just a little sexy. And I’m not sure how you can truly be attractive and repellant at the [...]

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Aim for plain language

By Sue Horner | Published: March 22, 2012

I encountered an error message this morning trying to get to a Paper.li page. Talk about corporatespeak!!! The infrastructure issue impacting the service has been well identified and we are now closing in on a final resolution. Let’s pick it apart: Infrastructure issue: Well, points to Paper.li for apparently, sort of, taking ownership of the [...]

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Secrets of successful independents

By Sue Horner | Published: March 13, 2012

The F-word cropped up early in the March 7 “Secrets of successful independents” session put on by IABC/Toronto’s Professional Independent Communicators. I’m talking about FOCUS. Coping with changes in the freelance landscape requires both focus and business vision, the foundation of a business plan, agreed speakers Paul Lima, author and freelance writer, and Cathy Ledden, [...]

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The discussion about how often to publish continues

By Sue Horner | Published: March 8, 2012

While the last post had been in the works, it got finished because of a comment made by Steve Crescenzo in the latest issue of IABC’s Communication World. I know Steve is a big fan of print newsletters, so he shocked me by stating that three or even two times a year was often enough [...]

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Newsletters: How often should you publish?

By Sue Horner | Published: March 2, 2012

I recently spoke with a colleague who mentioned that her company had a small print employee newsletter. They published it three times a year, but were thinking of dropping the frequency to twice and increasing the size. My first reaction was dismay. No matter what the format, print or electronic, twice a year is just [...]

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