I was at a party on Saturday and several people asked me what I do.

“I’m a writer” gets a good response until they realise that I’m not a ‘creative’ writer.

“I’m a marketing copywriter” produces a yawn and a comment about the weather.

“I’m in marketing” gets a laugh and then people tell me what a crook I am.

It’s very difficult. I’m tempted to go with “I’m a marketing consultant” or “I run a marketing company”.

It was worse when I used to run a computer games company. For some reason, people think that if you make a fun product, you can’t be a serious person or run a serious business.

Anyway, Jakob Nielsen has a great article on how to write an “About us” page which is helping me with this quandary.

One of the hardest jobs I do is my own marketing. It’s always low priority compared to fee-paying work. Worse than that, it’s very hard. As my own client, there is no objectivity or creative dialogue. But, I’ve got you, dear reader!

I’ve written a marketing plan that covers the next year and I won’t bore you with all the details but my main focus is the website at the moment.

In a fit of masochism I hand-coded the Articulate Marketing site in HTML. This makes it fiddly to update. I don’t have time to rebuild it in WordPress or some other CMS so I have to live with it for a bit longer. However, I am making some changes.

• Clearer description of what we do. Deleted the whimsical home page and made the “what we do” page the home page. If someone comes to the site now they will get a one-hit view of everything we can do for them.
• Stronger tagline. Changed the tagline from “Our passion is communication: we help businesses talk about technology” to “Articulate helps companies communicate more effectively” which is both more concise and reflects the broader range of work we do now; with the new training and presentation services we offer.
• Adding detailed product sheets. I’ve added spec sheets for case studies, proofreading and the initial consultation service. They take time to write but eventually I hope to have a spec sheet for every service I offer. This is part of a process of ‘productising’ Articulate’s services. Each one takes a while to do so it’ll probably take me until Christmas to finish them all. Then I want to go through and add examples and case studies for each service.
• Added terms and conditions. Yes, I spoke to a lawyer. Oh well.
• Deleted the ‘how we work page.’ It wasn’t very specific and people weren’t looking at it.
• Refreshed the examples page. It’s hard to choose which clippings and samples to include and a lot of my work isn’t public or doesn’t boil down to a single document. Still, now the list is recent and has up to date endorsements from clients.

Now - and here’s the scary bit - I’d love it if you could go to the site (www.articulatemarketing.com) and give me your feedback on how it’s going and what I can do to make it work harder for my business. Please email me or leave comments to this post.

Assuming the goods or work is satisfactory, I pay my suppliers on the day I receive their invoice. I pay them online so they get the money the same day.

Apparently, in Estonia this is normal business practice. In the UK, however, there is a culture of late payments.

(All my current clients pay promptly. This is not a rant about anyone I work with now. Just so we’re clear about that!)

Back when I was a freelance journalist - the media industry’s equivalent of a battered wife - most of my clients took 90+ days to pay me. Several never paid me at all.

I was just paying a contractor a few minutes ago and it made me think about what late payments actually say about a company. I reckon it means one of four things:

• We’re teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.
• Our finance department is staffed by monkey descendents of George Bush.
• We left our wallet in a parallel universe.
• We’re so mean that we’d rather stiff a freelancer for a few points of interest.

To be sure, they’re not doing it for hugs and puppies. So why do editors think it’s perfectly okay to pay a writer months and months after they write something? You can guarantee that they’d they’d complain bitterly if they got their salary a day late.

There is one simple antidote: MoneyClaim.gov.uk. There’s nothing like a county court summons to concentrate the mind of a finance director. Freelance journalists of the world, sue! You have nothing to lose but shitty clients.

Dear Uncle Matthew

I’m wondering how to get my CEO to stop reciting scripted responses. He’s really engaging, intelligent and witty, but has a background in PR and sales. Sometimes his answers come across as an all too blatant sale for the company.

The position of PR agent was given to me after working for the company for four years, and I have no background in PR… I’d be interested in hearing how you’d deal with this.

- Reluctant PR flack

Dear Reluctant,

Welcome to the wonderful world of PR. There’s an old saying that a diplomat is someone sent abroad to lie for their country. But when it comes to PR, in my view, truth sells not hype.

I have a couple of suggestions that might help you encourage your boss to let his personality shine and, in doing so, put the best possible light on his business.

1. Redraft the ’scripted responses’ as talking points or background briefings. Make it clear that they are meant to inform him but that they are not meant to be read out verbatim. You could even write bullet points rather than sentences so that they can’t be read out.
2. Show him video clips of how he comes across in a stilted press conference and the normal engaging, intelligent and witty version at a private function. He may simply need some feedback about how he comes across.
3. You could also show him videos of well-known good speakers - the politicians and business people of your choice - and show him how they use their personality and intelligence to make their points without hype and bluster.
4. Get him some media training. Perhaps he feels nervous in front of the press and reverts to what he thinks is appropriate language in self-defence.
5. Talk to him. Tell him what you told me. Explain that you don’t think that the job of PR is to stifle his personality or turn him into a corporate drone. Help him to differentiate between stuff he has to be careful about (things that affect the share price, announcing job layoffs etc.) and things that he can be more direct about.
6. If none of that works, draft better speeches for him. If he’s going to read out scripted responses, give him scripts that incorporate his own personality and thoughts. Work with him before a PR event to get his normal human response and then script it back to him.

It won’t be easy. Most PRs seem to want their spokespeople to stick to the script. But if you succeed in turning your CEO from a robot back into a human you will be doing a good job for him, your company and yourself.

Uncle Matthew

I bought my iPhone a few days after the launch and I’ve been using it constantly for several weeks now. It’s great.

In theory it doesn’t do anything that my old iPAQ didn’t do three years ago. Web access, GPS navigation, email with Exchange integration, third party applications or music.

The difference is, of course, the user interface which makes doing all these things easy, fast and delightful.

This is what I most like about my iPhone:

• Email works. Messages are easy to read and download quickly. I have an Exchange Server so it synchronises with that. My contacts and diary also synch automatically.
• I use SMS more. I was never a big fan of SMS but now it has an immediacy and urgency that email lacks and iPhone makes it very easy to track conversations and send messages.
• Third party apps. I have a stack of them and some are really good. (See list below)
• Automated updates. I tried to update my Samsung. Big mistake. I spent four hours to find out that I couldn’t do it because the update was region-specific. D’oh! On the other hand, apps and operating system update seamlessly on the iPhone.
• The clock. It’s a simple app but with a shut down time, programmable alarms and the ability to display different time zones it’s actually really useful.
• The Internet. This is where iPhone really wins. It delivers a real, usable web browser on a phone. This means I can get real-time weather from AvBrief.com, radar displays from Meteox and file flight plans on HomeBriefing. I used to have carry my laptop to do all that.
• Videos. I’ve been watching House and the Sarah Silverman show. It’s misanthropes anonymous on my iPhone this week. TV shows are a great way to pass a boring train journey.
• Podcasts. I like listening to From Our Own Correspondent, In Our Time and This American Life and the iPhone is a great way to do it.

Here are some of the (current) limitations:

• GPS navigation isn’t as easy as, say, TomTom and you have to have a good internet connection to download maps.
• Roaming data charges on O2 mean you have to take out a second mortgage if you go abroad.
• No Task synchronisation with Exchange. My old Samsung i600 did this and since I am married to my task list I miss it. Luckily Chapura KeyTasks fills the gap pretty well. A Notes sync tool would be nice too.
• Battery life isn’t great. The latest 2.1 software claims to improve things but I’ve only had it a couple of days so I can test it. It would be nice if Apple gave us the option of adding a longer-life battery.
• No dictionary. I’d love a dictionary, thesaurus and quotations application.  I’d pay. It would be useful. Ideally, the entire OED.

Cool third party applications:

• NetNewsWire - RSS reader that syncs with my desktop
• tvGuide - buggy but cool TV listings
• TubeStatus - real time updates on London’s underground network
• WordPress - update your blog from your phone
• Stanza - forget Kindle, read eBooks on your iPhone. It’s really good
• Tuner - internet radio over EDGE
• Last.fm - semi-programmable internet jukebox
• FlightPlan - E6B, W&B, WX and more for pilots (including a valuable critical point calculator, which is very useful for channel crossings etc.)
• Pilot Wizz - more shiny pilot stuff
• Monkey Ball - mindless entertainment
• Facebook and LinkedIn - social networking
• Traffic UK - GPS-cued road jam avoider
• Wikipanion - Wikipedia with an iPhone interface
• Frommer’s San Francisco - travel guide ready for my holiday
• X-Plane - yes, a flight sim on the iPhone
• KeyTasks - synchronises tasks with Exchange

I’ve been on a sci-fi kick recently and I’ve been astounded by the quality of the writing in some of the books I’ve read. The most notable in this regard is Samuel Delany’s Babel-17. This re-released 1967 masterpiece features a cool heroine in a spectacular space opera. Part poet, part space pilot, her mission is to break an alien ‘code’. The joyful use of language in this book is a delight to read. The description of space battles in particular is more like poetry than anything else.

Two other great books on decoding alien communications are: Stanislaw Lem’s His Master’s Voice and Carl Sagan’s Contact. Both excellent.

Actually, while I think about it, Lem’s Cyberiad is one of the most charmingly-written books I have ever read. It’s a sort of Brothers Grimm sci-fi and transmutes the language of science into the language of myth, legend and folk tale. It’s also funny.

View Babel-17, Contact, The Cyberiad and His Master’s Voice on Amazon.