Author Archive
When You Don’t Have a Clue What to Write for Your Next Blog Post
Posted by: | CommentsIf you’re a blogger then you probably know about Brian Clark, founder of the popular copyblogger blog.
Brian Clark
He’s also a successful entrepreneuer, creator of two WordPress themes, and Scribe, the SEO plugin. He also gives courses on internet marketing. He’s no doubt raking in megabucks. Good for him.
He just posted his first infographic and kindly gave his readers the code to embed. It’s called “22 ways to create compelling content.” You can see it when you scroll down this post. Read More→
Social Media for the Human Resources Professional
Posted by: | CommentsCorporate HR departments can’t ignore social media and its impact on employees. Employees are on social media so how do you manage their participation?
HR.com, the largest social network and online community of HR executives, with 194,000 members, is holding a free webinar entitled Social Media and Employee Communications with two days of speakers on March 1st and 2nd.
As the webinar copy states, “powerful enough to fuel revolutions, the tools of social media can connect and enable employees to new levels of communication that enable productivity and alignment with business results.”
Empowering Employees As Brand Ambassadors
As my regular readers know, I’m a big supporter of organizations that engage their employees to serve as brand ambassadors for their companies. So, I will be one of the speakers. Here is a link to my talk at 12:30 on Friday, March 2nd. Read More→
How to Write An Email Using the Best Words in the Subject Line
Posted by: | CommentsWith everyone’s email box overflowing, how do you get someone’s attention to read yours? Baydin, the company that helps you manage your email inbox, analyzed five million emails and discovered the subject lines that got the most responses and those that did not. I read about this in Tech Journal and you can visit the site to see the complete infographic with all the information that Baydin collected.
But I was most interested in the best words to use in email titles — and the ones to avoid. Five million emails seem like a pretty definitive sample to me. I’ve copied the part of the infographic with the best and worst words. Best words: apply, opportunity, demo, connect, payments, conference, cancellation. Worst words: confirm, join, assistance, speaker, press, social, invite.
Funny about the word “invite.” I tend to read those emails. You know, the opportunity for free food and drinks. But maybe that’s only me.
Make Employees Happy by Nurturing Their Social Networks
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Nurture employees social networks
When the prestigious Harvard Business Review devotes most of an issue to happiness, you know that happiness is a serious topic. The magazine cover is entitled “The Value of Happiness: How Employee Well-Being Drives Profits.”
I particularly enjoyed the interview of Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert in an article entitled The Science Behind the Smile. He’s the author of the international best seller Stumbling on Happiness. The study of happiness has devolved into a science whereby you can measure a person’s happiness at a moment in time. Science is in. Intuition about someone’s happiness is out.
What Makes Employees Happy?
Dr. Gilbert is quite clear about what makes employees happy. He says that people are happiest when they are appropriately challenged, “when they’re trying to achieve goals that are difficult but not out of reach.” He adds, “Challenge and threat are not the same thing. People blossom when challenged and wither when threatened.”
When threatened, an employee will get the work done, he says, but thereafter do his best to undermine you, will feel no loyalty to the organization and never do more than he must. But employees will flourish when rewarded, based on a century of psychologists studying reward and punishment. Read More→
