We can’t win, so we might as well laugh! For your reading entertainment, here’s the recent “circular” conversation that my husband had with Quickbooks customer service regarding an upgrade for the 2009 version.

Very professional isn’t it?

Has anyone had a good customer service experience on instant message? I don’t think I have. It’s hard to get someone who doesn’t speak your language to understand what you’re looking for on IM!

PS By the way, if you can find out what the upgrade price is for Quickbooks 2010 for Mac, let us know

Let’s face it, everyone’s always looking for a cheaper way to do everything. So I’ve decided to embark on a journey to try out most of the free press release distribution services to see what kind of results they produce. Are they worth my time as a PR person, or am I better to stick with the establishment?

I think it will be fun and interesting. I’ll report my results here when I’ve done a few field tests.

But I’d like to focus on a website that I love: dictionary.com.

I’d like to give them a shout out because this website is simple, does it’s job well, and connects to a great thesaurus. It’s handy in a pinch, and I like the way it is organized. I use it several times each week when I’m writing, especially lately, because some spell checkers like Indesign don’t recognize popular words like “sustainability.”

I don’t even know who owns dictionary.com, but I’m glad it works well and is not a pile pop-up spam! Thanks!!!

Yesterday, thanks to a Twitter post from Peter Shankman of Help a Reporter Out, I read a post on the 10 Best Social Media Tools for PR Professionals and Journalists on mashable.com. I love this post, and I’ll probably be spending some time tomorrow checking out all these tools.

The list includes Shankman’s Help a Reporter Out, as well as tools like PitchEngine and ReportingOn. I was especially excited to see Media People Using Twitter and Twellow, because I find Twitter’s search functionality difficult to use.

Why are these tools so wonderful? Because accessing the right people for an effective PR pitch can be an expensive and time-consuming job–not easy for those of us with smaller budgets. However, this enables us to get great, well-written information into the right hands. I guess I’m becoming a bit of a social media junkie.

I especially enjoyed this short checklist:

• Did I stick to my allotted time?
• Did I develop and present purposefully?
• Was I thoroughly prepared?
• Did I capture attention at the very beginning?
• Did I positively influence listeners?
• Was I appropriately entertaining, or at least not boring?
• Did I end only once?

To read more, go to http://www.maximumimpact.com/articles/read/article_7_reasons_why_speakers_flop/.

Here’s a few more tips to follow to improve your writing process:

• Read out loud. After writing, speak what you write. This unveils awkward phrasing, gaps in the structure, and areas that need revision.
• Strengthen verbs. Replace ho-hum verbs like “go” and “made” with powerful action verbs like “build” and “discover.” Look for spots where other modifying words are watering down your words, “like trying to communicate.” Drop the “trying to.”
• Evaluate the tone (or attitude). Is your writing friendly, funny, professional, intense, curt, pushy or cold? I get a letter from my health insurance that always starts with, “To get the most from your benefits, you need to understand how your plan works.” The bossy, arrogant tone of this first sentence irritates me every time I get the letter. Sometimes a small tweak can drastically improve the mood of what you’re writing.
• Keep it brief. One of the tricks I learned from years of working with a magazine is to cut the word count by 100 words if possible. This will help you to tighten the article, get rid of any duplication and focus your message.
• Get feedback. Find someone to review and proofread your work. You will make mistakes. But with an extra set of eyes, you can avoid a lot of embarrassment and reap a great reputation for you and your company.
• Double-check people’s names. Last stop before completion: fact-check names and other pertinent details. It only takes a minute, and it is worth it every time.

Take to the time to produce great writing. Fine-tune your efforts, and you’ll get more return on your time investment. (And you can avoid looking stupid…who wouldn’t want that?)

Writing has never been more important as we all spend hours every week writing emails. Although this list applies to nearly all business and promotional writing, I wouldn’t suggest applying it to essays and creative writing.

This is, however, a great checklist the next time you sit down to write anything. I know I’ll be using it to polish up the article I wrote last week.

Here’s a few tips to follow to improve your writing process:

• Determine the purpose. Start out by jotting a few notes: Who is going to read this? What main points do you want to make? What actions do you want to inspire the reader to take?
• Structure the outline. Even a simple business letter or email improves drastically with a little forethought. Clarify what you are communicating and plan the flow of the piece.
• Keep paragraphs short. My general rule is to keep paragraphs under 3 sentences for most purposes. Think about thick, black blocks of impenetrable text. Don’t you find that daunting as a reader?
• Use bulletpoints, highlighting, and subheads. These “reader entry points” help a reader scan and follow along with what you are saying. They make reading easier. Plus, they often show the writer when a point or paragraph is unclear.
• Know your style. Most people don’t realize that many writing styles exist, each with its own set of rules. Most business people are familiar with Modern Language Association (MLA), which is taught in English class. Publications use Associate Press (AP) style or Chicago Manual. The science and education fields use American Psychological Association (APA).

So often, bad writing results from rushed, sloppy words. Good writing can evoke joy, teach new skills, inform and entertain, and improve lives, not to mention increase your paycheck!

Highlights from the “Research Project on Gratitude and Thankfulness” are available at: http://psychology.ucdavis.edu/labs/emmons.

Some interesting findings:

• Gratitude journals improves physical and mental outlook: Individuals who kept weekly journals of what they were grateful for and why “exercised more regularly, reported fewer physical symptoms, felt better about their lives as a whole, and were more optimistic about the upcoming week, compared with those who recorded hassles or neutral life events” in such journals.
• Gratitude helps reach goals: The study shows that people who keep such journals were more likely to have made progress toward personal goals over a two-month period.
• Gratitude builds empathy: As Associations Now points out, this might be the most important factor for leaders. The study found that “people with strong disposition toward gratitude have the capacity to be empathic and take the perspective of others. They are rated as more generous and more helpful by people in their social networks.”

I’m grateful to be a member of ASAE, where I get access to interesting articles like this!

You can send an email anytime you feel like it, but you can’t call your kid’s baseball coach at midnight.

Some simple tips to help mitigate the email insanity and SAVE TIME:

Use descriptive subject lines. Tell the person what is in the email and if there’s any action you want them to do. I will often put the action first, followed by a description of what is in the email. Example: Please proof by tomorrow: press release on email tips.

Avoid conversations. Email works great to send documents and share one-way communications. But if you need to hash out something complicated or deal with a sensitive topic, choose a phone or a face-to-face conversation. I was told at a time management seminar that it is faster to make a phone call than it is to write an email. Time it sometime!

Use bulletpoints and numbers. Long emails turn off the reader. I get impatient if I can’t figure out what is being communicated if about 10 seconds. If you take the time to organize your thoughts, you’ll get faster, more effective answers. Plus, people will think you are smarter (not so much with rambling emails).

Proofread. Do you want your typos recorded for all posterity? One quick re-read can save you a lot of embarrassing apologies. Let’s face it: the recall email feature in Microsoft Word rarely works.

Reply. Have you sent an important document to someone and never knew if they received it? We all have. With spam filters and other techno-breakdowns, it’s good to hit reply and confirm that the message was received.

Never reply in anger. We’ve all got those zinger emails that seem unnecessarily nasty. Friends don’t let friends write angry email responses. Wait. Show an objective person. And in some cases, avoid replying on email at all–this may be a “in person” discussion.

Be personal whenever possible. It’s easy to seem distant and unfeeling on email. Forwarding 9 levels of conversation and expecting a co-worker to make sense of them all is unkind and rude when it would only take a second for you to explain the situation.

Although I have a lot to say on website redesign, I’ll save that topic for a later post. Instead, I’d like to share the useful tips shared by Kurt Greenbaum, director of social media at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He writes a blog for the Post’s, Virtual St. Louis. Although Kurt’s tips were specific to St. Louis, I am going broaden them out so they’ll be useful anywhere.

Thanks again to Kurt for these great tips!

1. Use the news submission tools on your local papers’ websites. Many papers, like the Post, enable press releases to be posted or submitted on their website. The Post-Dispatch has a nifty feature, PR Zone, on its site, stltoday.com.

2. Read blogs. You can engage in your community by searching blogs or checking out those being offered by local media. Post comments, answer questions…The Post also is offering blogs now at their Blogzone.

3. Watch forums. Forums are usually more utilitarian, set up in a Q & A format. Again, you’ll be shocked to find out how much discussion is going on. What is being said about topics of interest to your organization? Anyway you can participate? Again, the Post-Dispatch (and many other metros are offering forums).

4. Use Google Blog Search. You can set up an alert that emails you every time someone mentions you or your organization in a blog or forum. You can create an RSS feed of those searches or get email alerts. Check it out at blogsearch.google.com.

5. Use Summize to set up specialized Twitter searches. Like Google, you can watch specific topics, set up an RSS feed to be alerted when anyone talks about your topic. Kurt shared that he uses Twitter feeds to stay on top of breaking news for his newspaper.

6. Use Google Reader. Set up your RSS feeds for a variety of websites that you want to watch. You can search the feeds you subscribe to in Reader. It’s a great way to monitor hundreds of websites quickly and easily. Check it out at reader.google.com.