Archive for July, 2008

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Some PowerPoint Tips…

I get to review many, many PowerPoint presentations. Some of them long, some of them short. Many littered with the same basic nitty, gritty errors. Here are some things to watch for:

  1. Use one font and one font only. “Fonitis” is a disease. Don’t let it infect your presentation.
  2. Watch bullet types. Keep them clean and consistent.
  3. Use tabs in the ruler to adjust space between the bullet and your text, not the space bar
  4. Use the line spacing tool to adjust the space between lines and paragraphs. Do not use the font size. As soon as you reapply the template you will nuke your presentation.
  5. Get consistent font sizes via the template tool. It’s a nightmare doing it slide-by-slide
  6. Review it on the big screen. You’ll be amazed what you notice

Just some thoughts…

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All Mikes Are Hot

Media training 101… all mikes are hot… hot, hot…

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Are We Consciously Abandoning Print…

Steve ponders how we are abandoning print media…I think we attach way too much value to people consciously making a decision about print vs. digital. Is green a factor? I’m not so sure…

…For the vast majority, I think they’ll continue to switch to digital as part of their daily habits and technology use. Before they know it, they are driving over the paper each morning. The reality is most papers aren’t going to be road kill by virtue of a revolt – if only it were going to be that grand. They are just going to quietly ride the irrelevancy curve into oblivion…

Like any product, most newspapers are dying because to lousy product management. Content that isn’t interesting. Bad design. Lack of promotion… They have just become uninteresting to so many…

So do they switch to digital forms because of “greeness“? Don’t think so. Mainly to find their lost customers.

There might just be one exception – where communities are strongest (say Austin) papers might thrive due to their relevance and high-degree of localization. Where communities are most diverse (say New York), the broadcast form of print seems to be having less appeal in favor of real-time and highly localized digital ink.

The joke in all this is that the future of print might actually be in small run, localized rags with rich and relevant content – this in an industry so keen to scale to volume and reach…

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Recommended reading

  • Love this quote: “Conversational Marketing and Social Media Marketing, to me, aren’t truly rooted in marketing at all, nor should they be. This is about learning from listening first, and engagement afterward”…
  • Allow Your Employees to Be Digital Nomads … “Digital Nomads are growing in numbers, and they will create ripples, accelerating the use of Web 2.0 technologies in the workplace. Over time, they may have some effect on marketing channels, potentially slowing the efficacy of e-mail marketing and accelerating the reliance on social-media engagement in marketing.”
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hacks’s flacks take a whack

  • When Fox News Is the Story: “Once the public relations apparatus at Fox News is engaged, there will be the calls to my editors, keening (and sometimes threatening) e-mail messages, and my requests for interviews will quickly turn into depositions about my intent or who else I am talking to. And if all that stuff doesn’t slow me down and I actually end up writing something, there might be a large hangover: Phone calls full of rebuke for a dependent clause in the third to the last paragraph, a ritual spanking in the blogs with anonymous quotes that sound very familiar, and — if I really hit the jackpot — the specter of my ungainly headshot appearing on one of Fox News’s shows along with some stern copy about what an idiot I am.”
  • In other opinions about the Fox-New York Times controversy:

    • PRWeek blogs
    • “Well done, Mr. Carr, well done. Expect a horse’s head in your bed,” says FishbowlNY co-editor Noah Davis.
    • Broadcasting & Cable’s Mike Malone says Carr did “a helluva job” with the column.
    • Huffington Post media editor Rachel Sklar says Fox’s PR strategy scares off positive mentions.
    • Radar’s Choire Sicha comments that dealing with CNN can be “difficult and uptight,” but working with Fox “can actually be frightening.”