Remembering my Dad
My father — Grant Cunningham — was always the go-to guy for anything that needed fixing. His day job for more than 30 years was with Bell Canada (which he always called “Mother Bell”), but on the side he fixed stuff. In his prime, he built a...
The best of the Red Jacket Diaries so far in 2014
As we take a breather before Canada Day and launching into the second half of 2014, here’s a look at the most viewed content on the blog so far, as revealed by poking around under the blog “hood”: Thinking about hanging out your shingle? Start here...
12 innovations in internal communications (a report from #IABC14)
What forces are shaping internal communications, and what are the best practices that help companies improve their own communications performance? At a session at the an IABC World Conference in Toronto, speaker Kelly Parsons shared what Melcrum’s research...
What the new anti-spam law means for e-newsletters
The looming deadline of July 1, 2014 has some marketers in a panic. That’s when a new law comes into effect, the Canadian Anti-Spam Law — which acronym-lovers shorten to CASL, pronounced “castle.” Running afoul of the law could mean serious...
APEX award for Wordnerdery!
Yahoo! My monthly newsletter, Wordnerdery, has been given a 2014 APEX Award of Excellence for Publication Excellence. APEX Awards are given by Communications Concepts, which helps communicators “write, edit and manage more effective business publications.”...
What question drives your life?
Is there one question “you are never tired of asking and will never know the answer to”? This is the question 2014 IABC World Conference* speaker Lesley Jane Seymour referred to in her keynote session, “Discovering Your Life’s Question.”...
Geeky content can drive reputation
For every narrow, geeky subject, Carl Friesen bets there’s a matching geeky publication that wants your content. At a meeting of IABC/Toronto’s Professional Independent Communicators, Carl outlined how to drive reputation through content that shows off your...
Get more referrals by letting others know what you do
A colleague asked me this week if I knew anyone with a specific expertise. No one person came to mind, so I scrolled through the member lists of a couple of associations. With a somewhat vague idea of what the members did, I had to rely on their brief summary of...