Writing, marketing and technology
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 [...]
{ 3 comments }
EA used to be a cool company. They published my first game, Imperium and we worked with them on a bunch of games at IG. Everyone I met there was whip-smart and passionate about making great games. Now they are just another big dumb corporation that puts out press releases with frankenquotes like this: “This [...]
{ 6 comments }
Online applications give me a competitive edge. I want to be a ‘big little company’ with the same (or better) IT capabilities as the biggest of my clients. I try to make the maximum use of online applications because they let me deploy new capabilities quickly without adding to my IT or admin burdens. This [...]
{ 34 comments }
Tim Phillips’s analysis of press releases on Factiva shows a worrying trend. The number of press releases that contain the words ‘significant’, ‘substantial’, ‘meaningful’ and ‘unique’ in the same text has nearly trebled in the last seven years. Something should be done. I don’t really understand how writers get away with this. Journalists automatically discount [...]
{ 11 comments }
As Apple’s new slate nears its launch date finally appears, the level of hype is rising almost exponentially. I think there is a real risk that no matter how good the iSlate is, it will not be good enough to live up to the speculation. Mark Morford captures the risks of over-expectation and techno-lust perfectly [...]
{ 2 comments }
Mark Macias takes us inside the newsroom in this guest post. As an Executive Producer with WNBC-TV and Senior Producer with WCBS-TV, Mark Macias has vetted story ideas from reporters, producers, publicists and viewers. He is the author of Beat the Press. It’s the one question every news junkie wants to know. How do the [...]
{ 0 comments }
As promised, here are the headlines for the most absurd press releases sent to my blog in the last month plus the PR companies behind them. I can see no reason at all why these PR companies would want to target ME with these stories. I’m pretty sure that all the PR companies concerned are [...]
{ 6 comments }
Thanks to the success of this blog, I now get press releases from PR firms. A few are useful, such as announcements of books in my field or writing tools or people I might like to talk to. (For instance, myWriterTools who pinged me earlier this year or the folk at MindJet who sent a [...]
{ 4 comments }
BBC technology correspondent, Rory Cellan-Jones, reported yesterday that SpinVox was using call centres in South Africa and the Philippines to do much of the work of transcribing voicemail messages instead of the company’s much-vaunted D2 voice-recognition software. The complaint rests on two charges: that the company wasn’t doing what it said it was doing and [...]
{ 3 comments }
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.