Roy Clark, executive director of the Centerof Innovation for Education in Grand Rapids, gave one of the keynote addresses at Orgpro, the Michigan Society of Association Executive’s annual conference last month.  This dynamic and moving speaker talked about mentoring, and described seven qualities of a good mentor, although you could really say that they were seven qualities of a good person:

• Thankful
• Thoughtful/tactical
• Teachable
• Truthful
• Tenacious
• Transparent
• Trustworthy

The one that stuck with me the most was “Thankful,” a quality he used in, of all places, job applications.  If the applicant couldn’t list 50 things for which they were grateful, they didn’t make it to an interview.

Can you list 50 things for which you’re grateful?

On this site and elsewhere I have recommended a blog/enewsletter combination as a good marketing tool for businesses that sell expertise; sell products that are enhanced by knowledge, or have prospects who aren’t necessarily going to make an immediate purchase.

All these businesses benefit when they share information; that is, share enough information to demonstrate their knowledge and provide some real value to the reader but, of course, not enough to give away the store.

To succeed, though, someone has to want to write, to share information, to engage in a dialog with the readers.  The question I ask my clients is this: Are you curious?  Do you read your industry’s publications?  Do you read a daily newspaper or a general business magazine?

Better yet, this article offers 20 questions you should answer before you initiate a blog.  Here are three good ones:

•  What are your objectives?
• How will you link it to social media?
• How will you know it’s working?

I’ve tried over the years to use Outlook to manage my tasks, but never successfully.  I want to be able to organize my tasks by due date, priority and/or client.  I don’t really need to be able to share them with others.  Recently I decided to switch to an independent, web-based task manager.  I started with Wunderlist but it didn’t let me alphabetize by category and the screen display was fussy.  In his entertaining and useful presentation at the 2011 Orgpro conference, Sterling Raphael of Avectra mentioned Remember the Milk and I’m sold.  The display is clean, it lets me categorize and tag tasks and share them if I want.  While, for now, I continue to use Outlook’s calendar and email client, I could integrate Remember the Milk with Google, if I so choose.

The American Express Open Forum frequently offers concise, useful articles on marketing and public relations issues.  They recently described the seven mistakes that can make a bad crisis situation worse.

• Distancing yourself from the problem
• Lacking quick, tangible action to remedy the situation
• Looking insincere in front of the media
• Writing a boring news release and letting things be
• Keeping the CEO out of view
• Having vague communications

Read the entire article here.

A journalist acquaintance described her first reporting job, in the newsroom of a small daily paper with a curmudgeonly, old-school editor.  She turned in a story to him and he called her over to his desk.

“See this exclamation point?”  he growled, pointing at her copy.  “You only get three of these.  Ever.  In your career.  Are you sure you want to use it here?”

Because emails are brief, they risk also seeming brusque.  Thus, while you won’t see exclamation points in my news releases, I use them often in email. They’re a cheery signal of my benign intentions.

Honest to Pete, three days after I wrote and posted this item, the New York Times weighed in on this subject.  Their article quoted Will Schwalbe, co-author of the book “Send: Why People Email So Badly and How to Do It Better,” who said, “E-mail has such a flattening effect:  it’s toneless and affectless.  The exclamation point is the quickest and easiest way to kick things up a notch, but not if you’re angry.  Only happy exclamation points.”

Have a nice day!

One of my longtime readers recently mentioned how much she enjoys the epigrams that appear at the bottom of each of my enewsletters, so I figured I’d share them all again, all in one place:

1. “The less people know, the more the suspect” – Josh Billings.
2. Better is the enemy of good enough.
3. Everyone is always right.
4. Nobody likes me.  They like themselves when they’re with me.
5. Sometimes it’s easier to get forgiven than it is to get permission.
6. The world is run by those who show up.
7. Fundraising rule #1:  You have to ask.  Rule #2: Ask for enough.
8. Crowded is good.
9. Lumpy is good.
10. There should always be a bottle of champagne in the refrigerator.
11. Don’t let people who make less than you decide your salary.
12. Share the credit; take sole possession of the blame.
13. “Who cares?”  isn’t a flip question.  It’s the launching pad for every successful marketing campaign.
14. Email will never replace print media as long as people still read in the bathroom
15. Big won’t beat small.  Fast will beat slow.
16. “If you think hiring a professional is expensive, wait ‘til you hire an amateur.” – Red Adair
17. “It is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust.” Samuel Johnson
18. · “Learn from the mistakes of others. You won’t live long enough to make them all yourself.” – Martin Vanbee
19. When tempted to fight fire with fire, remember that the fire department usually uses water.
20. “The newest computer can merely compound, at speed, the oldest problem in the relations between human beings and, in the end, the communicator will be confronted with the old problem of what to say and how to say it.”  Edward R. Murrow
21. Market where your competitors aren’t.  “The short road to ruin is to emulate the methods of your adversary.”  Winston Churchill
22. Never screw up on a slow news day.
23. “Some people without brains do an awful lot of talking.” The Scarecrow
24. “Advertising is the price we pay for being unremarkable.” Robert Stephens, Founder of the Geek Squad
25. For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required. Luke 12:48

According to Erik Meier, when you examine the day-to-day conversations that take place in the business arena (or almost any setting), you’ll discover examples of miscommunication and non-communication occurring in varying degrees. Conversations will contain distortions, deletions, and generalizations. They are part of the fabric of interpersonal communication. And, it’s the distortions, deletions, and generalizations that get in the way of closing more sales…and closing them more quickly.  Read more.

When I decided to write an article about how I don’t like those three word taglines I figured I’d be better off if I buttressed my opinion with those of others so I did a Google search for “three word tagline.”  Well.  I seem to have touched a nerve here.

April Dunford at Rocket Watcher says they often do not say why your company is different from (better than) the others. “Your competitors can probably claim to be just as ‘innovative’ or ‘advanced’ as you are,” she said.  Most such taglines just come off as bragging, Dunford said.

“Simplistic. Awkward. Ineffective,” says Tate Linden at Associations Now.  So many people use this marketing device that the words have lost their meaning.  Several other bloggers also linked to Linden’s content.

And then I found this satire by 37signals.com, which is so dead-on that, for a moment, I thought they were serious.  Most of the links on the final page of this 1999 site are broken and the first one is now a porn site, but “The Buzz Saw” and “Web economy bullshit generator” are funny.

Apropos of the preceding item, I’ll remind you that an effective slogan or tagline starts with a well-thought-out positioning statement.  Here’s a good tutorial, which reinforces something I often tell my clients:  Keep your eyes on the competition.  “Identify aspects of your product or service that your competitors cannot imitate. Put a star beside anything that cannot be easily duplicated, reproduced, or copied.”

Client Harvey Ovshinsky of HKO Media and I tag-teamed in this article for Ann Arbor’s NEW, a nonprofit whose mission is to help nonprofits succeed by strengthening nonprofit management and offering solutions to issues facing our nonprofit community.