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 it “falling off the blogging wagon.” Eventually, I managed to climb back on.

To prepare for that climb this time, what did I do? Of course I didn’t just blog. I did what any procrastinator worth her salt would do: I read about blogging. A Google search for “lost my blogging mojo” pulled up about 30,900 results so I see that it’s a common problem!

I already had a few ideas of my own on how to get out of a blogging slump, and collected some other ideas from Google to come up with these tips:

1. Go for something quick, short thoughts on whatever is topical, just to break the ice and get you started again.
2. Figure out a pattern of blogging, where you run a certain type of post on a certain day (from Simone at GreatFun4Kidsblog.com).
3. Ask readers, friends and family for ideas (from Corinne at Frock & Roll).
4. Refocus on what you love (also from Simone) or go back to why you started the blog in the first place (also from Corinne).
5. Go for something easy, like a roundup of links you found that appealed to you.
6. Use mind mapping to come up with structure and direction for topics (from Joanne Newberry).
7. Stop reading blogs by “people who have thousands of dollars behind them,” instead reading ones from the heart (an unnamed blogger at Central Coast Seachange).
8. Schedule “write a blog post” into your day (from my friend Donna Papacosta of Trafalgar Communications).
9. Write a guest post for a fellow blogger (from Louise).
10. Write about something that bugs you or that’s top of your mind, even if it is unrelated to the things you usually blog about.

I know that this, too, shall pass, and it’s just a question of climbing back on the wagon. See you there. And if you have any suggestions, please share!

Image: Simon Howden and FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

Despite company guidelines that encourage lively and clear writing, the pieces I edited were full of reader turn-offs:

• The passive voice:  “The session was facilitated” or “responses were received.”
• Unnecessarily big words: “Facilitate” a session vs. “lead” a session; “utilize” vs. “use”; “precipitation” vs. “rain and snow.”
• Unnecessary extra words: “In order to” and “as a result of.”
• Buried leads: Taking too long to get to the point by including a lot of details about location, time or who was involved, for instance, instead of giving some idea of what was important about the article and why the reader should care.

In fairness, I think some of the articles were submitted by people who weren’t in communications. All the more reason it made sense to hire a professional to tweak the articles before publication.

Photo credit: Daryll Jann Bumanlag via Flickr and Creative Commons.

But the funny thing is that people don’t really want to get cosy with you on Facebook. Sure, they’ll temporarily “like” you to enter a contest or gain access to something you’re holding back, but that doesn’t mean they want to see frequent updates from you.

Via Ragan, I found four infographics that summarize the results of a paper called, “How Millennials Are Interacting With Organizations on Facebook.” It reveals that although 86 per cent of the Millennials surveyed visit Facebook every day, 69 per cent rarely or never visit fan pages. You can temporarily buy a “like” with discounts, products samples or contest entries, but prepare to say goodbye if you’re just trying to sell something. And if you aren’t trying to sell something, what are you doing?

I’ll admit to giving away a few “likes” myself, but these days, when clicking on some kind of offer takes me to a Facebook page and an invite to “like” it, I make a hasty exit. I’m starting to find that being on Facebook is like being on Twitter. Noisy. Crowded. Harder to see my friends. Sure, I can go to my list of specific friends or family to see what they’re up to, but it’s getting more difficult. A quick look at the stream of updates is just as likely to have a link to articles and blog posts or brand updates.

Marketers, I’m not sure what the answer is. I’m sure you’re trying to work it out, too. But for now, you’re driving me away from Facebook rather than pulling me towards your brand.

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 same time. Or is that like being compelled to look at an accident or a  horror movie scene even though you don’t want to look?

The Eloquent Woman recognizes that many of us wear a red “power” jacket for public speaking — something that has been my not-so-secret weapon, thus the Red Jacket Diaries. However, she advises against it, especially for appearances on camera. Instead, she suggests a “less vibrant color close to your face” along with a dark jacket.

Fortunately, on-camera appearances aren’t an issue for me. But what about you? If you appear on camera, is a red accent enough of a power boost for you?

Thanks to my IABC/Toronto colleague Louise Armstrong, who shares my appreciation for a good power jacket, for pointing me to The Eloquent Woman.

Find Pantone colours here.

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 issue by identifying it as (presumably their own) “infrastructure.” Still, they could be more up front.

Impacting. Please, say “affecting,” the way you would if you were speaking to another human being. Teeth are impacted. People are affected.

Well identified. Ditch the “well.” Either you have identified the problem or you haven’t. And “has been” is the signal that this is a passive sentence. Who identified the problem? Take credit for it by saying “we” or “our technicians” have identified the problem.

Closing in on. I feel like they are a pack of hyenas, circling a victim! How about just, “We’re working on it”?

Final resolution. Redundant; a resolution by its nature is final. And what does that mean to me, the reader? Is there a time lag between “closing in on” the “resolution” and when I can access the service again? Assure me that you are working on it.

No apology. I would have expected that in the first line.

Here’s my suggested rewrite:

We’re sorry you can’t access the page you were looking for. We’re working on the problem and hope to fix it soon.

How would you rewrite it?

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, RGD, of Ledden Design. Yet a show of hands revealed that embarrassingly few of those at the meeting have a business plan, which is one of the secrets to being a successful independent.

Having focus and vision allows you to quickly sum up your value when meeting a prospective new client, Paul said. What you say should cover who you are, what you do, when and where you do it, and why. (If you can’t say what you do, how can you tell anyone?) It’s one way to Always Be Marketing (ABM). “If I did nothing but marketing, it would be annoying. But if I take five minutes to say what I do, that’s okay,” he explained.

Paul described “five arrows in the marketing quiver,” none of which we should shoot without a business vision:

1. Generate repeat business. Talk to existing clients after you’ve finished a project and they have paid. Follow up in three months to see if they need anything else; follow up again two more times. Ask if they know anyone else who might need your services. Ask for a testimonial.
2. Network with friends, relatives, associates. They may not be the people who are going to hire you, but they can probably refer you to someone who can.
3. Cold calling and email. Focus on what you do, targeting the people who make sense. Send five to 10 emails a week, and over the course of a year, you will likely pick up at least two or three clients. “It doesn’t take a lot of work but dedication,” Paul said.
4. Website. This is the foundation of your business. Optimize it for Google searches based on your vision. Use it as the hub and drive traffic to it through Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Paul said 60 to 70 per cent of his new business comes through his website.
5. Advertising and promotion. Make sure you have a website before you run an ad anywhere. Run a small ad in trade magazines that target your sector, or write articles. Paul has written about the importance of training as a way of promoting his training business.

Paul added that if you want to produce a book, you can; he used Lightning Source. It can be profitable, and you can use books to help build your brand.  He said Kindle sales of his book, How to Write a Non-Fiction Book in 60 Days, beat print sales within months. Keywords in the title are important to harness search engine power.

Some of Cathy’s tips:

• Focus helps you take on clients who are right for you and turn away the ones who take you away from your core strengths.
• Form teams to bid on work, hiring like-minded people who are better than you.
• Stay in touch with people after a project ends; use the phone.
• Use some of the free technology that’s available, such as Dropbox to share files and Skype to videoconference.
• Buy technology where it makes sense (such as Lynda.com, an online learning system that helps your skills stay fresh) and time with experts (such as MarketingMentor.com).
• Raise your profile by entering awards, volunteering, talking about your work (“tell vs. sell”).  Cathy confessed to not really liking the spotlight, but said, “Feel the fear — but do it anyway.”

See more quick tips in tweets summarized by PIC chair Donna Papacosta.

Were you there? What advice stood out most for you?

Image: Jeroen van Oostrom and FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

A treasured photo can be a memento of a significant occasion, a record of a birth or marriage, the last connection to a late loved one. For families left homeless after the devastating hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005, photos also represent memories of a life washed away by the storms.

No wonder an offer by HP to restore damaged photos brought out nearly 200 families clutching hundreds of precious photos, often soaked and seemingly irreparable. To think so, however, underestimates the enormous talent of HP employees, the great technology at our fingertips and the heart that drives us to help in the community.

Extreme Task, Extreme Conditions

It all happened in St. Bernard Parish just outside New Orleans. The producers of ABC’s Extreme Makeover: Home Edition show had heard about work done by a local photo restorer, Bryan Wagner. After touring the area, they decided to help the community as part of a special called “After the Storm.” They approached HP about restoring photos for two specific families for the episode that would air April 6.

HP did better than that, volunteering to restore all photos brought in during the three days the show was being filmed. Led by Bob Gann, HP Digital Imaging, a team of five HP volunteers used an SUV as a mobile restoration centre, outfitting it with a generator, HP computers, scanners and printers and internet access. They drove to New Orleans and set up in a shell of a building. There was little electricity in the area, no street signs, no homes, no businesses.

“That level of devastation certainly brought home that any problems we face are quite manageable,” says Rod Hardman, Category Business Manager, IPG Commercial Marketing for HP Canada, the lone Canadian on the on-site team.

Ask and HPers Will Volunteer

Rod was among more than 70 people who responded to Bob’s broadcast e-mail request for people willing to do photo restoration and able to travel to New Orleans.

“I have a fairly technical background, but I think what made Bob choose me was a throwaway comment I made about having been in the Canadian Army Reserve, so I don’t mind standing in the mud,” Rod says.

Three weeks later, with the support of his manager Peter Grady and IPG general manager Lloyd Bryant, Rod was in New Orleans for the whirlwind project.

The team arrived on Sunday night, February 19, set up Monday and put the HP ScanJet 4890 photo scanners to work on Tuesday. “One of the most moving experiences was that rather than just collect the photos, we had the families sit with us while we worked,” says Rod. “Officially, we were only supposed to do three or four per family, but I know we did much more.”

A Global Team Effort

Over Tuesday night and Wednesday, the team uploaded photos to an HP ProLiant high availability server cluster using a custom website created for the project. Some 300 HP employee volunteers from around the world downloaded and worked on one or two photos each, returning more than 350 restored photos.

Among the Canadians who did so were Amy John, Online Merchandiser for HP Shopping, and Brian Kneebone, Solution Architect for IPG.

“It was a great system, catalogued so you could find a photo you felt you had the skills and time to work on, check it out while you worked on it and upload it when you were done,” Amy says.

“Even though we worked remotely, it was a good feeling to be part of the project and able to offer some help,” says Brian. “There is a perception that everything is back to normal in New Orleans, but Rod shared the reality with us in regular dispatches. The part on the show about HP was brief but powerful; it showed the level of volunteerism that we have in HP.”

An Emotional Ending

The local team worked quickly to download and print the restored images on HP Photosmart printers. The “reveal” – the emotional moment when families get to see the results of the Extreme Makeover – happened Thursday night.

“The reveal alone was worth the price of going there,” says Rod. “I don’t think there was a dry eye in the place.”

In addition to the restored photos, the participating families received digital copies on a LightScribe archive CD and an account with HP’s online photo finishing service, Snapfish, already loaded with their images. Once the project wrapped up, HP also left the parish all the equipment and supplies, which Bryan Wagner will use to keep the restorations going.

“HP employees put their hearts into this project, and we also realized that HP technology is pretty amazing,” says Rod. “What also hit home during the experience is that we all need to think about copying and storing our family photos offsite in case of fire or flooding. It’s a whole lot easier scanning now than trying to restore later.”

Like the canary in the coal mine signaling air quality, frogs and toads move in when an ecosystem is healthy.

“To most people, toads may not be the ‘sexiest’ wildlife species out there,” says Leo Paquin, reclamation co-ordinator at Oil Sands. “However, we’re definitely encouraged that we’ve provided habitat on our reclaimed areas for a species that’s provincially and federally listed as endangered.”

He explains, “Unlike most frog species, Canadian Toads don’t require water year-round. These toads mostly use water in the spring for breeding purposes and then move inland for the remainder of the year. The closeness of the wetlands to the reclamation site led the experts to speculate that the Canadian Toads were using the reclamation site to hibernate.”

This led Suncor to hire Golder Associates’ wildlife team during 2005 to investigate the movement of the Canadian Toads. They accomplished this using tiny radio transmitters placed on small belts fastened around the waists of the toads. During 2005, Golder found, tagged and electronically tracked 10 Canadian Toads, and then tagged another 29 in 2006.

A tale of 10 toads

It’s not easy to get a transmitter on a toad. “They are very good at avoiding predators, and that makes them next to impossible to find,” says Shanon Leggo, wildlife biologist for Golder. “You can’t rely on your eyes; you don’t see them unless they blink even when they’re right in front of you.”

The researchers patrolled the margins of the wetlands with a small spotlight and a dip-net at night, when males were calling. Once they found a toad, one person held its legs straight while the other slipped the transmitter on. The researchers attached the transmitters in the spring and removed them once the toads began to burrow into over-wintering sites.

Oil Sands employees felt a connection to the original 10 toads after a contest to name them. “We wanted to refer to each of them as something other than ‘toad one,’” says Leo, whose daughter suggested Jeremiah, after the lyrics in the song Joy to the World (it starts “Jeremiah was a bullfrog…”).

The transmitters showed that Suncor activities didn’t bother the toads, who were often tracked to areas close to roads, equipment lay-down spots and even the Upgrader plant site.

Golder found more toads (more than 50) near one pond on reclaimed land than ever recorded at a single pond in the boreal forest. The nearby Suncor dykes and berms also support healthy toad populations, as do Crane Lake and the nearby duck pond. All sites surveyed also show evidence of boreal chorus frogs and wood frogs.

The toads tell the tale: Suncor’s reclaimed wetlands and tailings pond dykes are a great place to call home. As for Jeremiah and friends, the toads are no longer tagged, so it’s impossible to say whether are still on the hop. We like to think so!

My first reaction was dismay. No matter what the format, print or electronic, twice a year is just too little to engage employees.

It’s possible employees were getting all the information they needed online or in person. If that was the case, you could certainly reduce the frequency. And in that case, you might as well just go with once and make it an employee annual report. But it didn’t sound like that was the situation, especially when it appeared employee engagement was an issue.

Like many areas of communications, the answer to newsletter frequency appears to be the not-so-helpful “it depends.”

• You want your publication to be seen often enough that it’s familiar, maybe even expected or anticipated, but not so often that it’s annoying.
• You want the content to be timely enough to be useful, but not so infrequent that it’s out of date.
• You want it to complement the information available elsewhere (online in the case of print), providing the background and perspective, rather than rehashing the once fast-breaking news that has become old news.

To answer the “how often” question more precisely, go back to your strategy and the reason for the publication. And notice I am talking here about any kind of publication, print or online. How often do you need to publish to serve your purpose?

• Once is fine for an annual report, but few purposes would be served by twice a year.
• Monthly is a nice regular way to keep employees informed and to encourage a connection to the company.
• Quarterly isn’t bad if you have lots of regular content online.
• Short, weekly or even daily updates might work, too, if your company is undergoing major upheaval.
• Update: Respected strategic communications expert Les Potter, ABC, says this: “Communicate frequently. A more frequent and cheaper production value publication is always better than a more expensive, less frequent publication. If you can afford it, you could have a frequent newspaper-style employee publication plus a quarterly magazine.”

And don’t worry that employees are drowning in information. Sure, their in-boxes are overflowing. But you know yourself that when you get something of value, you’ll read it no matter how much else is in your in-box. And that’s the other key — VALUE.

Please weigh in. What do you think is the best frequency?

Image: graur razvan ionut and FreeDigitalPhotos.net.