Sunday Best is a curated list of articles I’ve read over the past week or so that I find enlightening, educational or just plain interesting. This week’s focus is on writing and publishing, which is always of huge interest to me. Enjoy! What’s next with your NaNoWriMo project? The whole point of NaNoWriMo is to bang out 50,000 words across November. Quality doesn’t matter so much as quantity. So now you’ve got this… thing… that may or may not be a novel, or the start of a novel. What on earth do you do with it? Luckily, Joanna Penn has an
Continue reading...I was sitting in a writer’s seminar on the weekend, bored out of my brain, wishing the presenter would up the pace and that my fellow participants* would just shut the fuck up. I had paid $60 for the privilege and I expected a lot more for my money than what was dished up. Actually, I wasted $120, because I attended another seminar on the same day (they were run as a tandem) which was only marginally better. I vowed never ever to attend seminars offered by this particular group ever again. Ever. I was over wasting my time and money**.
Continue reading...This guest post is by Natascha Dowsett, who I first met on Twitter and, I’m proud to say, has since become a real life friend. Natascha has worked in feature films, hospitality, recruitment and communications. An entrepreneur, she owns a Big Picture PR and Social Media for Sales Superstars. You can also find her on Twitter as @TaschaD and she’d love you to say hello! I would shout it from the roof tops if I could: I LOVE TWITTER! The people I have met and loved getting to know and the friends that I have made on this social media
Continue reading...Brian Solis wrote an interesting article that popped up in my Reader this morning. The premise of his post is that businesses need to use social media to enhance the experience of their customers. One sentence resonated with me and it’s this: …the landscape for business isn’t changing because of social media, it’s changing because consumer expectations are evolving. Which brings me to the point of this post: businesses need to adapt and change the way they do business with consumers, because we are revolting. And we are revolting through social media. We are as mad as hell, and we
Continue reading...This is the fourth in a series of posts from hand-picked guest bloggers about trust. The idea was kicked off by me rewatching Game of Thrones and thinking about its twin themes of power and trust. My fourth guest blogger is Sukh Pabial, who I first met on Twitter when I was an L&D consultant. Sukh is a L&Der as well, and we have formed a collegiate friendship via Twitter. I have even guest blogged for him on his blog Thinking About Learning, and thought he was a perfect candidate for writing about trust. You can find Sukh on Twitter as
Continue reading...This is the third in a series of posts from hand-picked guest bloggers about trust. The idea was kicked off by me rewatching Game of Thrones and thinking about its twin themes of power and trust. My third guest blogger is known as @aricochet, who I connected with on Twitter (of course). We have had many interesting conversations on all manner of topics including leadership, marketing and brain chemistry. And these conversations have been interesting enough to ask him to be a guest blogger on the subject of trust. Trust is the nervous system of our society. It’s the currency that
Continue reading...This week I did something awesome. Even more awesome than coming in at #12 in the Sunday Mail’s (contentious!) list of top Adelaide tweeters last Sunday. 😉 This week I nominated my blog in the Sydney Writers’ Centre Best Australian Blogs competition. I nominated myself for a couple of reasons, namely because I get fabulous feedback from readers, both here via Comments, on Twitter and Facebook. I’m pretty sure my writing is good and my subject matter interesting – because you, dear readers, tell me it is. But I want to test myself out in the marketplace. Out in the big,
Continue reading...We live in a world that’s more connected than ever. Our voices are heard loud and clear; we can speak about any topic we like (or don’t) on any number of platforms. Our opinions and views are instantly global. Thanks to platforms like Twitter, Google+, Instagram and new kid on the block Pinterest, we can intersect with people all over the world and build relationships with them. A bit like instant pen pals, really. Take Twitter for example. I tweet regularly with people from the UK (@naturalgrump and @changecontinuum, I’m looking at you!). I found these wonderful people via timeline
Continue reading...I will shout it from the rooftops to all and sundry about how much I love Twitter. I have found friends, information and entertainment because I am there. Looking for thought leadership in your field or profession? Check Twitter. Lonely and need a chat? Twitter again. Want to know what’s going on news-wise? Hop onto Twitter. Want more readers for your blog? Twitter. It really is a hub of activity and information. But it does have a dark side, and I have seen it on more than one occasion, particularly over the last few months. I do have to keep
Continue reading...I bought something from Groupon a while back, and I now wished to God I hadn’t. It cemented in my world view that most companies (as with all things, there are exceptions), despite their rhetoric otherwise, really don’t care all that much about their customers or their experience. All they want is a fast buck. A quick dollar. Profit before people. And I have found companies on social media (generally speaking) are making things worse for customers in many instances, not better. They pretend that they are all kinds of caring on Twitter and Facebook (because their presence implies they
Continue reading...Bruce Campbell, for those of you who are blissfully unaware of such things, was an actor boy in 80s com-horror movies and other such capers. Among other things, he was Autolycus in Hercules in the 1990s, and is now in Burn Notice as ex-MarineNavy Seal, Sam Axe. To many, he is a cult hero. But this post is not about that. This post is about how @groovybruce has taken the boring celebrity tweet (and there are so many of them) and made his tweets engaging, interesting and relevant to other tweeters, and at the same time, built his brand. Bruce responds
Continue reading...I have been on Twitter for a little over 2 years. In that time, I have amassed over 45 000 tweets and more than 1 300 followers (not many in comparison to some twitterers, though). I have seen it at its best and worst, and given my recent two year anniversary, this post is about what I love and hate about Twitter – from my perspective. 1. People I have met some fabulous people on Twitter, both locally and across the globe. Locally, people I met first on Twitter (who I would never have had the opportunity to cross paths
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