Business Insight Zone

An open message to all P.R. people:

If you want me to read your press release, please do me the very simple favor of starting it with “Dear Tim . . .”

You could go a step further by indicating some familiarity with this blog, but I won’t put my foot down about that.

I will continue to delete unread any press release blasted out with no personalization at all.

Regards,

Tim

~ ~ ~

Yes, I’m basically asking for a level of personalization that has been possible with mail-merge features since the 1980s — but I can assure you that setting up this one simple hurdle will allow me to continue to trash half of the pitches that hit my inbox.

Yes, I’ll still get lots of irrelevant pitches that have nothing to do with what we discuss here — but I’ve given up hope that the can’t-be-bothered P.R. flack will pay attention to something as strange and provocative as relevance.

And before anybody complains that I paint with too broad a brush: I know many outstanding P.R. people who are a credit to their clients and their industry. It’s just that knowing these people — and counting quite a few of them among my friends — makes the gross failure-to-grasp-the-clue of the bad ones all the more cringe-inducing.

Here endeth the rant.

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Image source.

[UPDATED -- 5:20 p.m. Tuesday with still MORE topics . . . ]

There are more topics on my mind this week than I can get to, especially since I’m traveling up to Dallas tomorrow for my fireside chat with Suzanne Hoenig and Colleen Barrett for the DFW Servant Leadership group. (More information and registration for the event available here; more information on the principles of Servant Leadership via the Greenleaf Center.)

Here are some posts I am working on:

• What to expect from the (amazing!) new Hoover’s site functionality, coming soon for our subscribers.
• Why it’s a mistake to make too many predictions about this economy — and what to do instead of making predictions.
• Following up on Professional networking: overcoming obstacle #1, a series on tools and techniques for cultivating your professional network.
• Sports metaphors: “Trash Talk.”
• “Look at your work with fresh eyes.”
• [NEW] Sports metaphor: “Line drive hitter.”
• [NEW] Sports metaphor: “Don’t try to make it all back at once.”
• [NEW] Sports metaphor: “Blocking and tackling.”

Here are more topics I could work on:

• “The Garden of Forking Paths for Finding Relevant Twitter Users.”
• Sports metaphors: “Winning Streaks.”
• Using Social Media in your job search. (Series.)
• [NEW] An elaborate football/social media metaphor comparing stats for quarterbacks (read: ROI) with teams’ measurements of linemen (read: metrics).

Here are a few I might not get to:

• “What will it take to get Facebook to stop showing me ads for Mafia Wars?”
• Ford’s — and Hyundai’s — continuing ascendance over their competition.
• How to host a webinar.
• Reflections on Drucker’s “purpose of a business.”
• The daily hilarity of searching Twitter and the Web for “Hoover’s” and “Hoovers.”
• Pursuing seamlessness in your work.
• [NEW] The New York Times’ adoption of a pay wall for some users.

Which of these interest you? And what topics would you like to see me add to the first and second lists?

(By the way: all these ideas are free. If you’d like to blog on any of them, be my guest. When you do, please alert me and I’ll add comments of my own.)

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Image by Isabelle Palatin, used under a CC-Share Alike license.

Who knows what eldritch algorithms at Hubspot’s Twitter Grader allowed this to happen, but for at least one brief, shining moment this morning, the two Twitter accounts I run (personal and corporate) were ranked #1 and #2 among all the tweeters in Austin. Take that, @lancearmstrong!

As of this writing, my two accounts are ranked 5th and 7th for Austin. We seem to be trending back to normalcy.

No, that’s not an error in the title — I’m asking for your help. In the spirit of my last blog experiment (which drew some interesting responses), I’d like to propose another venture in blog crowdsourcing.

This time, I’d like you to propose business topics to go with each of these three pictures.

First up, a skateboarding pic (CC-Share Alike license) from Daniel Catt:

Next, a turtle from SuperFantastic:

Finally, a great surfing photo (Share Alike license) from rappensuncle:

Please offer your suggested topics for any or all of these pictures in the comments.

Thanks — I can’t wait to see what you come up with!

Just a reminder: I regularly bookmark items of note using the service Delicious. The most recent five bookmarks appear in the “Worth Reading” box in the sidebar, but you can see all of the bookmarks — nearly 900 of them, tagged according to category — via my Delicious page.

Happy browsing!

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Image by poolie.

Credit: Jeremy Burgin.

Thanks to this post from ProBlogger,¹ I’ve been fiddling with Feedburner’s handling of the daily e-mails² that subscribers to this blog receive.³

So, if you’re an e-mail subscriber, feel free to let me know (a) if you like the minor stuff I’ve already changed, and (b) if you’d like me to change anything else.

Thank you for your continued custom.

~

Notes⁴:

I’m back from vacation, I’m well-rested, and I have a tall hankerin’ for reader requests. (Hey, I’m from Texas — I can have a “tall hankerin’” if I want, right?)

So, if there’s a business topic of general interest about which you’d like me to opine, please tell me so by leaving a comment here, by tweeting your question to me, or by e-mailing me at

twalker {the symbol known as “at”} hoovers {a dot} com

I look forward to hearing your questions.

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Photo by Marcin Wichary, used under a Creative Commons license.

Here are the top five posts, ranked by page views, published on this blog in June.

1. Dell’s big Twitter returns: let’s not break out the champagne just yet.
2. eMusic, Sony, and the future of the music business.
3. A thesis about stress in the workplace.
4. Using Hoover’s in your job search — for free.
5. E-mail: the root of all evil?

Note, though, that all of these were beaten by a post that went up at the end of May: “Social media and the acid-bath of ROI.”

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Image by woodley wonderworks.

I’m doing a fair bit of traveling over the next couple of weeks, which means:

1. Any comments that land in the moderating queue (typically because you’ve never commented here before) may take longer than usual to process.
2. I probably won’t be replying to your comments as quickly as usual.

Please let this not deter you from rampant, trenchant commenting!

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Photo by Robert S. Donovan, used under a Creative Commons license.

Lately I’ve been trying to use the Pareto principle to carve down my work — i.e. to focus my efforts on the 20% of inputs that yield 80% of outputs.

At the moment, I’m staring at a loooooong list of potential blog topics that I’ve been accruing over the past several months. Rather than torture myself trying to write them all, I thought I’d put 15 of the also-ran topics here. Feel free to use them yourself — or to try to convince me that I should put them back on my list. ;)

1. How you can apply the principles of change management to your own working habits and career.
2. Using TweepSearch for prospecting and competitive intelligence. (It would build off of this.)
3. How companies can use the quest for energy efficiency to build better management habits.
4. How I find and use blog images.
5. When hubris runs afoul of the credit markets (with examples like this).
6. How to read a 10-K.
7. The paradox of openness vs. seclusion in business management.
8. Weekly state-of-the-economy analyses.
9. Moving yourself and your team into Covey’s Quadrant II. (It would follow up on this.)
10. New generations of semiconductor technology. This was my favorite beat in our Editorial department — it’s handled expertly now by Jeff Dorsch — and I wish I could keep up with it like I once did.
11. Reviews for several books on my shelf that I’ll probably never get to.
12. China’s solar-power industry.
13. More on stress in the workplace.
14. What neuroscience suggests about business management.
15. Deep-dish media history.

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Photo by Lauren, used under a Creative Commons license.