Writing, marketing and technology
Steve Jobs obsessively tinkered and polished Apple’s products (and his yacht, apparently). Jonathan Ive said that Apple doesn’t do focus groups. As Jobs once remarked, before Henry Ford, if you asked people what they wanted they would have asked for a more efficient horse. Mark Zuckerberg built the first version of Facebook in a few [...]
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I sometimes do free work for causes I believe in. For example, I’ve been a governor at St. Anne’s Nursery School in Kensington for nearly a decade. I think I get more out of it than they do because I find the warmth and energy of the place inspiring. However, I was recently asked to [...]
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Over the past year or so, we have produced a range of white papers and guides for HP and now they’re available free on Scribd. I think they’re pretty good, useful and interesting so I wanted to share them on Bad Language too. HP Business Answers eBook Secrets of the Internet Marketing Gurus Small is [...]
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I run HP’s Business Answers blog and we’re holding a free event for entrepreneurs TOMORROW AFTERNOON (Friday 20 May) at the Soho Hotel in London. There are just five places left and I thought I’d share this invitation on Bad Language, in case any of my readers might be interested. Here is the invitation: Have [...]
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I originally wrote this as a guest post for MarketingProfs.com. There is no law that says small firms can only do business with other small firms. If you can get your foot in the door, working for Fortune 500 companies is the smart way to grow a profitable marketing firm. This article is about one [...]
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3.2 million people in the UK fall for mass marketed scams ever year – around one person in every fifteen. Swindles cost the public £3.5 billion every year. The OFT conducted a report to investigate those who had been conned and concluded that: 20 per cent of the UK population could be particularly vulnerable to [...]
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The economic downturn brought about a boom in mid-career gap years. The so called “sabbat-packers” took unpaid leave and did something adventurous thousands of miles away from their recession-struck offices. The idea behind “sabbat-packing” was improve your quality of life by getting away from your job. But does it work the other way round? Can [...]
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The last week has seen the beginning of a coalition government in the UK. For me personally, it has seen the start of two new client relationships and the renewal of an older one. It seems like a good time to think about what makes relationships work and how to ensure that each marriage is [...]
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Like most writers and entrepreneurs, I have a bulging to-do list. It’s like a bottomless cup of coffee; it stimulates, comforts and raises blood pressure all at once. My to-do list runs my life. I manage it on Outlook and via my iPhone with TaskTask. It is the epitome of the “do something” approach to [...]
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I’m reading Max Hastings Finest Yearsand there’s a lovely quote in there: “An Englishman’s mind works best when it is almost too late.” It’s the same for writers. But I wonder why? This is a slightly different problem from the one I discussed in November which involves doing stuff at the last minute because a [...]
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Matthew Stibbe is CEO of Articulate Marketing and Turbine, the easy, online way to deal with office paperwork. He edits Golf Hotel Whiskey and writes the Forbes Aviator column.
Check out my new, free eBook, 30 Days to Better Business Writing, 71 pages of expert tips and advice to make you a better writer. Available on Kindle, paper and free online.