One of my favorite ezines–and just about the only one I read from beginning to end–is “New Thinking” by web usability guru Gerry McGovern. This past week I helped a client by explaining his complex technical process using little tiny words. And by tiny, I mean single syllables. Short phrases. Dummy language, almost. The clouds parted, angels sang, and his product offering became immediately understandable…and...

Facebook, the world’s largest social networking service, has decided to get even larger, by confiscating the property of all of its users. According to Facebook’s newly updated Terms of Service: You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan,...

I always love getting great results for my clients. This week, my client’s name and website were featured in an Associated Press story about online dating, and the story was picked up by about a dozen news outlets, including ABC News online and MSNBC.com. I pitched the story to an AP reporter a couple of weeks ago, thanks to Peter Shankman’s excellent Help A Reporter Out service. The two biggest hits? ABCNews.com and...

Like me, Peter Shankman is in the marketing and PR biz. Unlike me, he has figured out a way to grow a 60,000-member mailing list. How did he do it? By offering a matchmaking service for journalists and sources. Tired of opening his Rolodex every time a reporter called him to find a quote for a story, Peter set up a Facebook to “Help A Reporter Out.” Reporters emailed their story queries to Peter, Peter emailed the queries out to...

I tend to be something of a control freak. And I don’t like to recommend marketing or PR tactics that I haven’t tried myself first. So when it was time to launch Imagine-That-Creative.com as a Wordpress blog, I spent many late nights trying (and failing) to understand PHP and the innards of Wordpress. Then, when it came time to upgrade to the latest version of Wordpress, I was ready to admit that I didn’t want to deal with...

A million years ago, I had a license to sell real estate. I was a Realtor® long enough to discover that being a Realtor sucks, because you’re dealing with people who are making the largest and most stressful purchase (or sale) of their lives. And invariably, you’re dealing with them at 10:45 p.m. on a Sunday. I let my real estate license expire when I realized that the agent I was working for had an effective hourly pay rate...