by Sue Horner | Feb 8, 2008 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Do you ever feel like you’re drowning in emails? My friend, podcaster and fellow writer Donna Papacosta has great tips for dealing with the growing volume of mail in “Taming the email beast.” My favourite: Use the telephone. Not only can it save...
by Sue Horner | Feb 7, 2008 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Does anyone else find this a somewhat odd thing to say? “A successful blog kind of opens the kimono and from a brand point of view lets people know who you are.” This is a quote from Rob Frankel, a Los Angeles-based branding consultant, from an article called Business...
by Sue Horner | Feb 2, 2008 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
The other night, a friend and I attended a showing of the Tony Award-winning musical comedy that just arrived in Toronto from off-Broadway: The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. The play tells the story of six students fiercely competing to be the champion...
by Sue Horner | Jan 29, 2008 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
One of the best reminders I’ve seen lately related to keeping e-mails brief and to the point comes from Matthew Stibbe’s “Ten laws for better email copy”: “Imagine…that you were paying by the word.”
by Sue Horner | Jan 28, 2008 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
January 27 was Family Literacy Day, “a national initiative that promotes the importance of reading and learning together as a family.” I celebrated by reading while Son #2 studied for exams today. I’m a big reader so it’s especially important to me that our two sons...
by Sue Horner | Jan 25, 2008 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Those who spend large amounts of time online will totally understand when T.J. Larkin, in a weekly Larkin Pages research summary, says that we’re the ones responsible for half of our own interruptions. Think of all those blogs you follow, keeping up your own...
by Sue Horner | Jan 24, 2008 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
It seemed an incredible cosmic coincidence that I would start blogging on the very same day as the informative, insightful and strategic Les Potter, but as I found out when Les posted his one-year commentary on Tuesday, it was merely close. Well, two days apart is...
by Sue Horner | Jan 18, 2008 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Sorry, it’s a Friday afternoon vent! The good news is that my ISP, Bell Sympatico, has added a “service status” page to their web site, so you can check it before calling (shudder) to talk to their tech support. If you are lucky, the status is...
by Sue Horner | Jan 17, 2008 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
It’s only marginally related to communications (let’s put it under word play) but if you’re a fan of occasional silly fun, I ran across a quiz (oops, no longer available) through the Mental Floss trivia newsletter: The quiz posted phrases and asked...
by Sue Horner | Jan 16, 2008 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
One of my clients used to challenge those of us (employees and freelancers) who wrote for the employee newsletter to come up with ever more interesting and clever headlines. During a weekly conference call discussing the newsletter, the editor often mentioned...
