Typically no single source provides all of the information necessary for writing a good marketing plan for your business. This means gathering information from several sources. You may need to gather information on demographics, industry trends and competition, to name just a few.

A quick show of hands: Who knows what an Editorial Calendar is? Thought so. Nearly every magazine and many business newspapers produce an editorial calendar each year, targeting subjects that they will cover generally in any given week or month for the entire year— from regularly scheduled standing features and shorter stories to columns and …

Outstanding customer service strategies is making your customers feel like you understand their needs and their issues. There is another way of letting your customers reach out to you that is faster and more structured than an email exchange and more productive than a phone call. Online Chat is a nice way to personalize your …

Grants represent the most effort for the least predictable return. The question, therefore, is to first determine what resources will be needed before an organization contemplates launching a grants program!! Researching grant sources, planning projects, preparing proposals and budgets and managing funded programs all require a lot someone’s time/labor – all of those comprise the …

Organizational Change Unveiled: Definition and Implementation Every now and then I gift myself with the luxury of time available for reflection, and I “mine” my own learning of what existed. What made that effort a successful change process? Why did that one and that one work well? First of all, my experience is that organizational …

It’s well established in Dr. John Gray’s best-selling book, Men are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, that males and females communicate differently when trying to relate to each other on different levels. While it’s a slippery slope in the universe of communications to equate this gender-based metaphor to the public relations arena, slide with …

In a previous post, I discussed the need to not ignore the informal learning systems that are working within your organization. Research indicates that 70-80% of all learning comes in the form of informal learning; however, it seems to be largely ignored in training and HR departments across organizations. (By the way, if you are already thinking of ways to formalize informal learning, you are missing the mark.)

Let’s take a quick look at a few companies’ policies and guidelines on employee use of social networking. The policy excerpts below offer highlights of their own in-house guidelines.

In case you haven’t yet been there and done that, applying for and accepting a grant is the equivalent of signing a contract – in some cases, there really is a contract. The process is that grantors publish parameters for projects/programs they will fund, and you request funding for a project/program that is within their …

Marv Weisbord’s Model – Two Critical Paths to Change Marv Weisbord’s model “Two Critical Paths for Improving Organizations” suggests, that when it comes to improving our organizations, the first question is, “Who is going to be involved? The second question is, “What is it they are to go about improving?” The answer to the first …