Archive for the ‘Communication’ Category

Seven Great Questions to Ask at a Job Interview

If you are going for an interview as a prospective employee then you should do some research. Read the job description and requirements carefully. Browse the web site to see how the organization presents itself. Search for news items and comments about the company on news sites and blogs. For the interview itself you should dress smartly and appropriately. It is important to have some questions prepared and here… Continue reading

June 30 2009 | By Paul | Tagged: business, candidate, career, interview, job, sales | 21 comments»

Six Ways to Transform your Presentation

How many times have you been bored rigid by conference speakers?How can you make sure that your presentations engage and interest your audience? How can you really get your message across?Here are some great ways to liven up your pitch and avoid boring your audience to tears: 1. Throw away PowerPoint. PowerPoint presentations are the norm but are they the best way to communicate your message?The trouble with them is that… Continue reading

May 22 2009 | By Paul | Tagged: audience, interest, keynote, powerpoint, presentation, speech | 15 comments»

8 Tools to Find Someone Online

Finding a way to contact someone has gotten a lot easier: just type their name into Google and follow a few links. For many people, you'll quickly find a profile on Facebook, a blog or even an email address you can use to get in touch. But a Google search doesn't turn up good results for everyone. Maybe the person you're trying to reach has a fairly common name. You… Continue reading

May 14 2009 | By Thursday | Tagged: contact, recruiter, sales, search | 24 comments»

How to Be Offended

I teach things that many find offensive. Whether it's articles containing racist language in my "Gender, Race, and Class" course or descriptions of oral insemination as part of the Sembia male's coming-of-age rituals in my anthropology course, I know that some students are going to be offended, sometimes deeply.

Over the years, I've come to view offense as a particularly useful state of being – but only when the offense one… Continue reading

May 11 2009 | By Dustin | Tagged: conflict, learning, offense, personal growth | 24 comments»

From Mind Map to Presentation

I've got a couple big presentations coming up in the next month. For each of them, I have to start from a very broad topic and then focus in on information that will actually be useful to the people I'm speaking to. It's something I've struggled with: I've tried just jumping straight into making a presentation and tossing my thoughts on to slides, but then I've got a very disorganized… Continue reading

May 5 2009 | By Thursday | Tagged: mind-map, presentation | 17 comments»

Networking Without Power: Going Old School

Remember the old days of Rolodexes, before mobile phones had every gadget and gizmo now known to man (and woman)? Remember when we didn't have Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to connect with other businesspeople and had to actually, you know, talk to people? The way many of us network today, using online social networking and keeping track of things via Blackberry, iPhone, PDA and other "smart" devices, is superior in many… Continue reading

April 23 2009 | By Susan | Tagged: entrepreneur, networking, professional, small business | 9 comments»

The Lazy Social Networker: Should You Go Offline?

I know networking is crucial for everything from finding a new job to making a sale. And sites like Facebook and LinkedIn can make all that networking go a lot faster. But I'm not sold on the idea that they always make it better. For one thing, social networking online is a ton of work. Between responding to notifications, wishing everyone a happy birthday and clicking ignore on ridiculous Facebook… Continue reading

April 16 2009 | By Thursday | Tagged: | 13 comments»

5 Networking Connections Every Entrepreneur Needs to Make

Networking is a crucial skill for any entrepreneur. But if a person has been building his network with getting the biggest stack of business cards in the state, that network can be useless. The key to creating a network you can rely on is building a useful network — making connections for specific reasons and finding people that will help you and you can help in return. There are a… Continue reading

April 14 2009 | By Thursday | Tagged: entrepreneur, network | 13 comments»

Ten Great Ways to Promote your Book

So you have written a book and had it published. Congratulations. Now you face the challenge of what to do next. Many authors think that marketing is a job for the publisher so they sit back and wait for the royalties to roll in. You might have a very long wait. The market for books is extremely crowded and most books do not sell well. However… Continue reading

April 9 2009 | By Paul | Tagged: amazon, author, book, marketing, promote, publish, review | 13 comments»

Building A Team Without Silly Teambuilders

"As we go around the circle, tell the group your name and something special about you." That kind of team builder may have been useful on the first day of kindergarten, but when you're building a business team or putting together a team for another important project, you need to go far beyond silly icebreakers to create a cohesive group. There are hundreds of groups that offer to help you create… Continue reading

April 7 2009 | By Thursday | Tagged: group, icebreaker, introduction, team | 7 comments»

3 Tips to Improve Memory Quickly

Memory is not something you don’t have; it has little to do with genetics or environment. The problem has never been that we have “faulty” equipment; that our brains are broken or don’t work. The problem has always been awareness. We haven’t been taught how to properly use our brains. For most people, it’s a just a muscle that is underused and underdeveloped. It’s turns out that having a good memory has… Continue reading

April 1 2009 | By Steve | Tagged: improve, memory, mnemonics, posture | 15 comments»

Do You Need A Personal Business Card?

I have a business card collection. It started out unintentionally: I have one box that I throw any business cards into, after I add the relevant contact information to my address book. Every so often, though, I like to go through my little box and take a look at what the current trends for business cards are. Of course, there are some major differences between industries, but I have noticed… Continue reading

March 31 2009 | By Thursday | Tagged: business card, career, contact information | 18 comments»

Repositioning Your Personal Brand in This Economy

The economy isn't getting better anytime soon and tons of people are losing their jobs every second. The number of unemployed persons increased by 851,000 to 12.5 million in February, and the unemployment rate rose to 8.1 percent. When you get laid off, you have far more choices than you could possibly imagine. The problem that most people have is that they freak out and quickly apply to as… Continue reading

March 27 2009 | By Dan | Tagged: branding, career, career development, job, job searching, personal branding | 9 comments»

A Quick Guide to Email: Not Being “That Guy”

If you're reading this, odds are you are a knowledge worker whose time is very valuable and who requires large chunks of uninterrupted time in order to do whatever it is you are being paid to do. You aren't cranking widgets. Instead, you're trying to discover the history and social significance of widgets across cultural contexts, or you're trying to design a revolutionary new machine to produce widgets, or you're… Continue reading

March 11 2009 | By Art | Tagged: email, etiquette, priority, time-management, time-wasting | 10 comments»

Tell Stories

We live in a world with information overload. Data, facts, statistics and definitive answers to specific questions are immediately available from search engines on the internet. But people want more than facts. They want understanding. They want meaning. They want context. They want stories. Children ask their parents to tell them stories because they like to fit the pieces of the story into a context they can understand. It is… Continue reading

March 9 2009 | By Paul | Tagged: convey, emotion, example, feeling, messge, personal, story, tale, tell | 7 comments»