• Clive Thompson’s Collision Detection: In the long run we regret virtue more than vice. A very interesting psychological insight.
• How to record phone calls from LifeHacker. In the UK recording phone calls is highly regulated and you need to know the law on it. I use Skype plus HotRecorder to record some interviews.

Technorati Tags: Skype, Clive Thompson, Collision Detection, LifeHacker, telephone, recording

Two aviation giants, Airbus and Boeing, have been slugging it out recently. Airbus has their new super-jumbo, the A380 and Boeing have the new 787 Dreamliner.

Airbus gets launch aid from European governments. Boeing benefits from huge US military contracts. The result has been controversy and the threat of trade wars.

Now battle has been drawn on a wholly new front: the first blog war.

Boeing’s VP of marketing, Randy Baseler, maintains a blog. A couple of months ago he ran a post, Weight a minute, which compared the cargo carrying capacity of the Boeing 747-8F with the Airbus A380F.

This caused some controversy and, according to Flight International, Airbus devoted four complex slides in a recent media day to refuting his claims. Interestingly, there doesn’t appear to be an Airbus blog.

Technorati Tags: Boeing, Airbus, corporate blogs, subsidies, PR, trade war, A380, 747, Randy Baseler

Dawn Goldberg’s Write Well Me blog had an interesting post the other day: Words with Power. She lists words that have a special meaning for her. MarketingPathway chips in with their favourite words.

(As an aside, it’s pretty impressive to turn Joomla! into an almost-blog. I use it for ModernPilot.com but wouldn’t dream of using it to write this blog.)
Going one better, Nancy Freidman’s Away with words, has a report about the impact different letters of the alphabet have on people.

For what it’s worth, my favourite letter is J and some of my ‘power words’ are:

• Tea
• Help (in every sense)
• Let’s talk
• Start
• Connect
• Consequently
• Because
• You (as when addressing the reader)
• Elbow
• Eiderdown (these last two are more like favourite comfort words)

What are your power words?

Technorati Tags: Power words, writing, marketing

Over the years, I’ve squirreled away a miser’s horde of phrases and saying that I’ve overheard or picked up from things I read. Here are a few of my favourites:

• Errorplane. When the GPS in my plane doesn’t do what I think it should do.
• Idiocracy. The rule of idiots.
• Word of mouse. Like word of mouth but online.
• Administrivia. Stats and data collected to make managers happy.
• Its beer-o-clock. My friend’s favourite saying.
• You’ve done me up a kipper. You’ve stitched me up.
• Lie doggo. To hide.
• Overstand. To totally understand something.
• Power corrupts but PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
• Like scultping mercury.

Please add your favourite phrases and sayings by commenting on this post.

Here are three of my favourite adverts which feature song and dance:

• Blue Man Group adverts (plus Venus Hum video).
• Becks ‘Four Steps‘.  I would love to find a higher resolution version of this.
• Muller Life.  Ahhh… Nina Simone.

I have Tivo so adverts are a kind of opt-in guilty pleasure for me.

Technorati Tags: Adverts, Blue Man Group, Intel, Swatch, Muller, Becks, Four Steps

• WebZen. A links blog with all the words taken out.
• Naming new moons. I wonder what Wolff Olins would call them.
• Joe’s goal. Easy way to track things you want to do every day.
• If you confuse, you lose. PR speaks truth shock!
• Coffee cups with stamps. That way the coffee stain rings are pretty.
• Ticker shock. How mellifluous stock ticker names help your share price.
• Snacksby. Great name. Cool idea. Tell it what you’ve got in your larder and it will tell you what you can cook.
• 50 ways to become a better designer. I envy artists and designers - I have the graphic talent of a tree stump.

Technorati Tags: naming, PR, writing, coffee, ticker, names, design

Good post on John Jantsch’s Duct Tape Marketing in which he urges people to ask lots of questions (obvious really) but he suggests a good way of doing it:

Every time a prospect or client asks a question, write it down. Collect these questions on an ongoing basis, make every sales person note the questions they receive. In a very short period of time you will see patterns develop.

I would go further and urge people to actively ask lots of questions, like a reporter, to find out what’s important to the client and their customers (see my earlier post Why interviews matter).

Technorati Tags: interviews, marketing

Over the last couple of days I’ve been unsubscribing from as many email lists as possible. These are a kind of self-inflicted spam and I’m trying to reserve my inbox for real messages from real people.

This has made emailed press releases much more visible. Including one today about some bogus survey. What baked my noodle was the use of the important flag in the email. Quite simply, it’s NOT important. Not only is not important but it is embargoed until midnight tonight anyway so it’s not even urgent.

Needless to say, this is from the same PR company that invited me to a dinner and didn’t tell me where it was, booked me up for a week for a trip to the US and then cancelled it without telling me and many other sins. It’s amazing that one (large, well-known) company can be so consistently bad.

An update two hours after writing rhe original post. Another PR in the same company sent me this press release again. They lose marks for spamming but at least the second version didn’t have an exclamation mark on it. Being sent the same press release by two different people doesn’t really make me feel that they have a strong personal interest in building a relationship with me.

Technorati Tags: PR, press release, email, etiquette, spam

A while ago I wrote that short words are best. Now, according to a BBC report from the Oxford University Press, they are also the most popular. The top ten nouns are:

1. Time
2. Person
3. Year
4. Way
5. Day
6. Thing
7. Man
8. World
9. Life
10. Hand

According to an OUP expert, 90% of the top 100 words were one syllable.

Technorati Tags: OUP, Oxford English Dictionary, short words, BBC, writing, language, English

I joined LinkedIn a few years ago because these social networking sites were billed as the next big thing. I knew a few contacts on it but I already knew these people and already had their details in Outlook.

Recently I noticed a few former colleagues popping up on it and it’s nice to keep up with their news but this isn’t really a business benefit.

So far, so harmless. Not useful but not a problem either. Then someone approached me who appeared to be a well-connected software engineer from a major IT firm. Once I’d accepted him as a contact, it became apparent that he was a multi-level marketing promoter.

I have a real bee in my bonnet about multi-level marketing. I has hurt people I know and I wouldn’t want to be associated with someone who promoted it. Nor would I want my trusted contacts to think I endorsed it.

This is where the problem starts. You can’t break a connection once it has been made. There is no button for ‘delete contact.’ It has to be done through technical support. However, my two emails have gone unanswered and the unwanted contact is still in my list.

As I understand it, as suggested by Wikipedia and Russell Beattie’s experiences, the only way you can shut down your LinkedIn account is by writing to their technical support in the same way. So, I can’t break the connection and I can’t quit.

I think this is a major problem. It’s not enough that the technology works. LinkedIn trades on trust. Its social networks are built entirely on recommendation and endorsement. I entrust my contacts and reputation to LinkedIn and expect that they will take care of them. But if something goes wrong and the company provides no effective means of putting it right, where’s the trust?

Update 23rd June 2006: The unwanted contact has now been disconnected and I have a named contact in their support department for future reference. I think this problem would have been avoided by a confirmation email when I sent in my message to say that it had been received, much like an Amazon order confirmation email. I probably over-reacted but feel strongly about the issues of privacy and trust involved.

Technorati Tags: LinkedIn, social networking, multi-level marketing, contacts