Further to an earlier post where I expressed my frustration over technology no longer doing what it was supposed to do, and taking Donna’s, Clarence’s and Max’s point that these days nothing does what it is supposed to do, I have decided to drink myself under the table revert back to trusty and beloved fountain pens, quality pencils and paper.

I already own a gorgeous black leather A4 organiser, very expensive and very chic, but A4 is just way too big to lug around with me all the time. Looks great, but is far too heavy and cumbersome.

So I lashed out and spent $30 on a Day Timer organiser, then another $33 on a 6-hole punch (one retailer was going to charge me $100+ for one!) and settled back to enjoy organising my life into a shape far better than it recently has been.

But Outlook prints out calendars, GTD tasks and projects, contact details, etc., with incredibly ugly black borders around everything, even when you switch off the ’shaded’ option.

Yuck!

For those of who who haven’t been reading this blog for a few years, a good friend of mine, Douglas Arbuthnot Johnston, runs the superbly wondrous DIYPlanner.com site, a site built into an almost-shrine to the paper-based planner.

Doug’s original project, a set of personal organiser sheets you can print off at home, has spawned a whole community who have contributed ideas and layouts. It’s an incredible resource and if you have a paper-based planner and are looking for nicer-looking and far more practical resources with which to fill it, I cannot recommend the site highly enough.

But that aside, I am still stuck with the challenge of fitting three Day Timer sized pages into my organiser.

Print off a calendar, or anything, in Outlook onto A4 paper formatted for ‘Day-Timer Senior Pocket’ and you have space left over at the ends and side, plus there’s no option of adding in page markers so you can guillotine with confidence (now there’s an idea for an album, “Guillotining with Confidence”. I must discuss that one with my patent lawyer…).

And, of course, there’s still the pig-ugly black borders to contend with.

But deep within the musty recesses of my brain I remember seeing somewhere in my stationery collection a set of pre-perforated pages for paper organisers.

I’d actually brought them over from England with me when I moved back here in 1999, that’s how old they were. The packet was still unopened! Lovely Sara N. Dipity!

Perfect! They have pre-punched holes in the right places, the paper is lovely quality… Avery L7901R and of course they are no longer available in Australia. I just scoured Avery’s site here in Oz and no such product exists. Sigh.

Now all I have to do is figure out how I can bypass Outlook’s black template lines but add in faint borders to allow me to guillotine the A4 sheets correctly, and print out my calendar, tasks and contacts with a modicum of taste.

Any clues, anyone?

Filed under: tools
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Imagine my surprise when I read some tweets in Twhirl and saw this:

How did Twhirl/Twitter/raena do that???

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I’ve launched an affiliate program for the products I sell over on the BetterCommunicationResults.com.au website.

You can earn 50% commission on

• my monthly newsletter
• my social media flash cards
• my better business writing course

It’s there if you want it…

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I recently had the pleasure of being whisked up to sunny and beautiful Brisbane to catch up with one of the delegates to a two-day workshop on Social Media I ran in Sydney last year.

Pita Norris works for Powerlink, the Queensland power company, and she asked me to present a quick review of Social Media and how blogstorms and other such events might be averted to her colleagues.

Whilst there I met Powerlink’s CEO, Gordon Jardine (a very nice chap, too!) and Pita’s boss, Michelle Berardone, the rather unfortunately named Business Unit Manager (’BUM’? What soggy excuse for a nitrogenous compound came up with that?) but who in reality is the Head of the Corp Comms Team.

It was a great morning with some amazing outcomes (Michelle jumped straight onto the net and joined Twitter after I had left the room, even though she was extremely sceptical of it, and the whole team read my tweets about how I was relaxing with Mrs BetterComms on the balcony of the hotel after the presentation with a glass of something cold, wet and deliciously bubbly).

But what really blew my socks off was a small email from Pita a couple of weeks later saying that she had been talking about Social Media in Powerlink’s internal newsletter ‘Moving Forward’ and that it had apparently been well received by the 1,000-strong readership. Delighted, I asked to see a copy.

So Pita, with Michelle’s blessing, sent me one (it comes as a pdf).

WOW!

It is a GREAT example of how you don’t need to spend lots of money to get your message across. All you need is someone willing to put something together once a month and make it an interesting read.

It doesn’t have to be about ‘fluffy’ stuff, either. I put together a series of newsletters/updates about a building move project for a company; once the move was completed the newsletter stopped.

Examples:

• Powerlink’s internal newsletter ‘Moving Forward‘ (pdf)
• Announcing a building move (pdf)
• Another ‘move’ newsletter (pdf)

Don’t think that you have to hire in a whole design team and spends thousands of dollars to create something of value. Just look around your own organisation and seek out someone who can communicate, who has some sort of eye for design (but don’t worry if they don’t, there’s plenty of free templates out on the web), and who can pull something together in Word, Publisher, Powerpoint or any other tool.

My only suggestions for Powerlink’s newsletter? Ditch the clipart (here’s why) and get your website manager to correct the copyright date in the footer of the website. Oh, and speaking of your website…

Get the search engine to work on the site too — I tried searching for Gordon’s surname but no results came back on ‘gordon’ or ‘ceo’. You might want to add in the names of key senior personnel and their PA’s contact details… because the ‘contact us’ page is SO impersonal! And anyone who has ever attended any of my Social Media workshops can attest to how much I detest faceless, impersonal ‘contact us’ pages with generic email addresses and forms!

Filed under: internal communications, tools
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Word reaches your humble correspondent’s ear that Lee Potts, who is an integral part of the fabulous Visual Being group blog, has started yet another project.

Obviously with far too much time on his hands {grin}, Lee is running solo this time with Breaking Murphy’s Law, a blog about all of the things that can go wrong when you are a presenter or when your are supporting someone else’s presentation efforts.

Here’s a couple of excerpts of recent posts to the blog:

• PittWatch:Video Clip of Brad Pitt on Idol Gives Back — Skip to about 0:50 to catch the stage manager’s amazing grace under pressure as she deals with Brad’s microphone malfunction.
• joeyhagedorn.com: Home-built Blu-Ray Laser Pointer – “In a completely dark room it is even possible to see the beam in air…” You definitely don’t want to give one of these to one of the Jedi Knights I wrote about last week.
• Blinded by the Light - Despite what the title leads you to believe, this isn’t part two of last week’s “letting loose with the laser pointer” post. This week I’m going to talk about how a room’s lighting scheme can render your visuals invisible.

Here’s a snippet of Lee’s prose style to encourage you that a) Lee has ‘lived’ and intimately knows this stuff, and b) the old boy has a great sense of humour!

I don’t want to overdramatize the way it went that morning. None of the things that went wrong were that big of a deal. It’s just that I was running a little behind. Everything had been going well. Then one of the laptops failed. There’s nothing quite like getting the much dreaded blue screen of death in this situation. Okay, no problem, we had backups. Switch the bad machine out with a good one. Boots up. We’re good, just a small, unwelcome adrenaline jolt. Who needs coffee?

Not so fast. Now the remote control isn’t working. Jiggle connections, check the dip switches, reboot the laptops, change batteries. Okay, one of those things fixed it. Anyway, the speakers have been prepared to deal with a remote failure during their presentation so we’re good. Everything’s working on the back end. Now it’s time to take care of the rest. In other words, the projector and the actual image I’m projecting.

Whoops, when did that happen? At some point, while I was busy putting out those other fires, someone came in and changed the room lighting. We had spent more than a few minutes earlier that morning making adjustments so the room would be be dark enough for the slides to show well, but also bright enough so the audience could take notes and not fall asleep after the lunch break.

Unfortunately, The-One-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed (the client team’s head honcho) thought that the room was now too dark and had ordered that some be adjustments made. Problem is, one of the recessed lights that went around the parameter of the ballroom was now shining directly onto the screen, almost completely drowning out and making unreadable anything being projected. It looked a lot like the screen in the picture up there to the right.

But wait, there’s more…

But it’s not just Lee’s new blog that I wanted to highlight here. It’s also the way that Lee has gone about informing the blogosphere about it.

Here’s Lee’s initial email to me:

Hi Lee,

How have you been? I believe we corresponded when you commented on and linked to Visual Being, my last major online project.

I just wanted to let you know that I’ve started yet another (I think this is the fourth) new blog and it might be of interest to you. It’s called Breaking Murphy’s Law (http://www.breakingmurphyslaw.com). Unlike Visual Being, it’s not a group blog and I’m remaining focused on a very narrow range of subject matter. It’s about all of the things that can go wrong when you are a presenter or when your are supporting someone else’s presentation efforts.

I hope you find it interesting and useful.

Regards,

Lee Potts

As I replied back to Lee,

G’day Lee

I will DEFINITELY blog about this!

Cheers and with bon homie from one Lee to another :-),

As soon as I had sent that reply, I realised I had more to say (regular readers will be shocked by this revelation… not! {grin})

P.S.GREAT blogger outreach, my friend!

I *may* have to comment on that too, since there is sooooo much shite flying around at the mo about clueless pr; it obviously shows that bloggers know how to liaise with each other (even if you might have done it via a personalised mass mailing, it absolutely shows that you understand your audience).

To which Lee replied

Wow, thanks again. I just try my best to follow the Golden Rule with this sort of thing. It might not be very fast or efficient but it’s better for keeping things human.

It’s that last sentence that gets me in the heart:

“It might not be very fast or efficient but it’s better for keeping things human.”

Please note that, corporate marketers and PR practitioners — it may take you longer to put together a blogger relations/outreach programme, but it will be worth it in the long run! If your clients kick up about the billing time, send them over to this post for an explanation!

Filed under: PR, blogging, customer service, ethics, marketing, public speaking, tools
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Okay, technology is something I love. Truly.

When it works.

But now it’s got to the point where it is ridiculous. Nothing is communicating with anything else and I’m “thick, thick, thick up to here” as a very old English comedian used to day.

I have in my possession:

• a hiptop3/Sidekick3 which no longer talks to Outlook2003, despite several downloads and uninstall/re-install hoops (and has never spoken to Outlook2007);
• a Dell Axim x51 pda with a broken screen (it got crushed in airport baggage handling) which is now useless as Dell don’t sell pdas anymore;
• a Linux-driven Asus EEE PC (I am refusing to load Windows onto it, because it starts up so quickly under Linux and I’ve never known a computer start up quickly under Windows);
• a filofax/day planner, because a) I love the tactile nature of writing, and b) at least I can carry something with me that I can sort of keep up to date.

All I want is to be able to synchronise my various computers and use my EEE PC as my electronic filofax.

But Google Gears doesn’t yet let you keep offline copies of your contacts and diary.

The PIM (Personal Information Manager) in my EEE PC doesn’t allow me to sync my calendar with my Google calendar (which if it did would at least allow me to keep my diary fully electronic and synchronised). It certainly doesn’t allow me to sync any contacts.

My Hiptop/Sidekick is a wondrous piece of technology and I truly love it. But not being able to sync it to Outlook (oh, believe me I have tried; I have wasted over two dozen hours trying to get the effing things to talk to each other!) causes me more heartache and stress than is healthy in someone my age.

My E3 cruzer usb stick is a marvel of technology, but I am exceptionally scared that it will one day break, fail, or otherwise lose my password data, secured as it is by ‘SignUp Shield’. Of course, the E3 stick only works as an E3 tool under Windows… rendering it as just another drive under Linux and not loading any of the E3 programs like ‘SignUp Shield’.

So I have resorted back to pen and paper, which I consider a ‘failure’ of both the technology and of myself; Mrs BetterComms gloats over the fact that my beloved technology cannot yet beat pen and paper.

Please help me. I am in despair. I need to have everything current — calendar, contacts, tasks — across phone and personal information system(s). What technology would you suggest in an environment that is not ‘always connected to the internet’?

Filed under: tools
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Watch this and marvel at the human being’s ability to create much out of little, courtesy of our imagination.

So, the business outcome is this:

Never say it can’t be done; there is always some imaginative way to get your message across!

Filed under: PR, nonverbal communication, tools, videoblog
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Well, you are in for a surprise if you are a male who happens to be visiting the Congo on business.

According to well-placed sources (a friend of mine who reads the ‘bizarre’ sections of news websites), men in the Congo are having their ‘private parts’ either amputated or shrunk.

Says the Reuters article:

Purported victims, 14 of whom were also detained by police, claimed that sorcerers simply touched them to make their genitals shrink or disappear, in what some residents said was an attempt to extort cash with the promise of a cure.

Joe Bavier, Reuters’ man in the street down in the Congo, says that rumours of penis theft began circulating last week in Kinshasa, quickly dominating radio call-in shows. Listeners were reportedly advised to beware of fellow passengers in communal taxis who were wearing gold rings.

Apparently, reports of penis snatching are not uncommon in West Africa, where belief in traditional religions and witchcraft remains widespread, and where ritual killings to obtain blood or body parts still occur.

“It’s real. Just yesterday here, there was a man who was a victim. We saw. What was left was tiny,” said 29-year-old Alain Kalala, who sells phone credits near a Kinshasa police station.

Don’t say you haven’t been warned!

Thank goodness I’m receiving all of those penis enlargement adverts in my emails these days — very timely, indeed! I feel bigger better already!

Filed under: humour
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