by Sue Horner | Feb 19, 2008 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
In “I’m done with social media,” Dave Fleet encourages us to write in terms the average person on the street can understand, such as “web site address” instead of “URL”: “I’ll open up my conversations to people who...
by Sue Horner | Feb 17, 2008 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Is it a spirit of “we have so much business, we don’t need to accommodate you” that makes restaurants refuse to take reservations on a busy weekend? Really, if you know, please tell me because I just don’t understand it. Son #2’s...
by Sue Horner | Feb 15, 2008 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Akismet (“You have better things to do with your life than deal with the underbelly of the internet”) has caught more than 8,800 spam messages for me since I activated it on my blog in May, and what a great tool it is. Every once in a while, I look through...
by Sue Horner | Feb 14, 2008 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
From a recent newsletter from the always inspiring Daphne Gray-Grant: “From time to time, I make the mistake of letting myself feel discouraged by the inadequacy of my writing. At other times, I make the equally pointless error of wallowing in self-satisfaction...
by Sue Horner | Feb 12, 2008 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
After last week’s concentrated efforts to spin straw into gold (writing like a woman possessed), I surfaced to finally check my feeds. Boy, was I behind! Chris Brogan, bless his prolific blogging self, had 33 posts I had not yet seen. I particularly liked his...
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...
