Do you have a vision for your business? Do you know how to differentiate yourself with a unique message?

If you need to do more toward building a brand platform for effective marketing, come out to our IABC/Toronto Professional Independent Communicators (PIC) meeting on Wednesday evening, June 6, 2012, to meet Rhonda Page of KnowYourDifference.com. Rhonda is a trail blazer who has taken her 20 years of experience creating brand strategies for global companies to build a coaching program that makes differentiation accessible to the small business owner.

You can listen to a preview of Rhonda’s talk right here.

Indy Cast 36: Know your difference! by donnapapacosta

For more information and to register, visit the IABC/Toronto Events page.

I feel like the proverbial shoemaker's child. I've been so busy producing podcasts for others that I've neglected my own. Then a technical glitch last night locked me out of my hosting platform. So here, at last, is the latest Trafcom News Podcast. I hope you think it was worth the wait.

In this episode I'm sharing tips for content marketing, along with the slides I used to talk about this recently at HalTech.

Please hop over to the podcast page and have a listen, and let me know what you think.

In case you blinked, here are some interesting communications-related items from the past week.

Clever video: May the Fourth be With You
Let’s start with this smart video from Indigo. It’s interesting how the bookstore chain, while using humour, manages to let us know that they also sell home décor items, toys and Star Wars paraphernalia. Thanks to my friend Kristen Ridley for sharing. 

Mitch Joel on podcasting
In a HuffPo piece, my friend and fellow podcaster Mitch Joel contends that podcasting is a useful business tool: “As businesses and brands clamor for friends, followers, likes, retweets and pins, start tinkering with audio podcasting. You may not only enjoy it, but be able to find some highly qualified new business leads and a burgeoning and loyal community along the way.” Amen, I say.

Content curation survey
The folks at Curata have just published a survey about the use of curation in organizations. The stats are helpful to someone like me, who often speaks to clients about how and why to curate content.

Tech news: LinkedIn buys Slideshare
Business networking giant LinkedIn has purchased my favourite slide-sharing platform. Let’s hope they don’t mess with it.

Inspiration
If you’ve ever thought of following your passion, here’s a beautiful post about living your dreams.

For more links, check out my Delicious bookmarks.

Happy weekend!

Here is my entirely subjective collection of interesting tidbits found online this week.

Birth to 12 years in under three minutes
Here’s a lovely time-lapse video showing the filmmaker’s daughter growing up before our eyes. I hope he continues this project through the teen years.

Content marketing: Not just for large companies
This post explains why organizations of every size need a content strategy.

Why great design is the future of content marketing
It’s funny, but I was just thinking about this topic recently, after noticing how we are seeing more and more visuals; some of them are even well designed!

Curate your way to a successful email newsletter
My friend Christopher S. Penn explains how to curate content so you’ll never have to lament: “We have nothing to say in our newsletter this month!”

15 things people absolutely hate about your website
Since I’m in the midst of a total reboot of my website, I was eager to read this post about the things that really bug site visitors.

The right way to use PowerPoint
This simple post from Nick Morgan explains how to avoid fatal flaws in your presentation when you use PowerPoint.  If only every presenter would follow Morgan’s recommendations.

Surviving a job search
Kristen Ridley shares her hard-won advice for job-hunting in today’s environment.

Related posts from me

• Quick and painless ways to create visual content
• Other recent writings on content marketing

For more links, check out my Delicious bookmarks.

Happy weekend!

Last week a friend and I were reminiscing about our 20s, and wishing we could recapture just some of the hours we spent sitting around smoking Parliaments and polishing our nails.

Today, many of us are almost proud of being “too busy.”

Do you ever look back at the end of the day and ask yourself: “So what did I accomplish with my 86,400 seconds?” I do.

That’s why I’m excited that Ann Max of Productive to the Max is coming to speak to our IABC/Toronto Professional Independent Communicators (PIC) group on the evening of May 2. She will share her insights and help us to set priorities and manage our seconds, minutes and hours more effectively. Ann will also talk about the challenge of finding “me” time.

Listen to this conversation with Ann, where she maintains that: “We deserve to manage our time.”

Register on the IABC/Toronto website Events page. See you on May 2?

From Facebook's Timeline to Pinterest to Slideshare to ubiquitious infographics, we live in a visual world. At an event about creating compelling content this morning, one participant asked the speaker how to create multimedia content without breaking the bank. So, here are a few quick and painless ways to introduce visuals to your communications:

• Find photos to accompany your blog posts and articles. If you don't have your own cache of pictures, get an account at istockphoto.com. Yes, you can grab royalty-free photos on Flickr and other sites, but in my opinion, it takes too long to sift through the dross. Istockphoto.com's easy-to-use search engine will help you to find the right photo for just a few dollars.
• Share your presentations on Slideshare.net. Without you to speak about the slides, the presentation is not as powerful, but people often do ask to see your slides. As long as there's no proprietary content in my presentation, I'm  usually happy to share it. Especially if you work in the B2B world, Slideshare can be an effective way to spread your ideas and put you in front of potential buyers. (With almost zero promotion, one of my decks on Slideshare has garnered more than 9,000 views.)
• Start using Pinterest. I admit that when I first saw Pinterest, I judged it to be a cute site for people who like sexy shoes and decorating “porn.” But now that I've started pinning, I've changed my mind completely. When you add a photo to your blog post, pin the photo with a link back to the post. Create a relevant Pinterest board title and include your pinned post. I'm amazed at how much of my blog traffic is now coming from my Pinterest boards.
• Publish a screencast. If you want to show your audience how to do something, why not make a screencast? You can take screen shots in sequence, or capture the live motion with a tool like Camtasia. Add an audio track with a snappy narration and you’ve created a useful, shareable piece of content without spending a lot of  money.
• Create a quick video. I know what you're thinking: A quick video? Seriously? Yes, seriously. The most difficult aspect of video is distilling your message down into as few words as possible. As a communicator, this probably comes fairly easy to you, right? Add some photos or graphs and put it all together with a tool like Animoto. Here's an example I created recently to tell my own company story.

Let's face it. Humans love to look at pictures. So satisfy their needs while telling your organization's story visually.

If you need help creating quick and painless visual stories for your organization, let's talk.

Yesterday I spent much of my time with a client and his client, conducting and recording interviews as fodder for an eventual video script. As I set up my gear for the first session with a senior banking executive, I went through my usual procedure to check the recording equipment, ensuring that everything was working properly. It was.

During the interview, I repeatedly glanced at my gear to see the reassuring blinking lights.

At the end of the 75-minute conversation, I hit the “stop” button on my trusty Samson Zoom H4 digital recorder, and saw the words “File Error” on the tiny screen. My stomach sank to about the level of my ankles.

I put my headphones in my ears and played the first few seconds of the file. Silence.

So now we have spent an hour and 15 minutes with this fellow, and I have nothing.

Breathe.

Then I looked at my backup machine, my good old Edirol R1, the very first digital recorder I’d ever bought, back in 2006. I played the file for a few seconds, and there it was. Just fine.

If I had not packed two recorders in my bag, I would have looked pretty bad. Worse, my client would have lost face in his client’s eyes. And we would have wasted more than an hour of a senior executive’s time. Sure, we had cryptic hand-written notes, but these scribbles did not capture everything.

What happened to the file? I don’t know. Has this happened to me before with this machine? No. Might it happen again? Sure.

That’s why I carry a backup.

And what did I do in the afternoon when we interviewed another leader at the bank? I ran my Edirol, my H4, and iTalk on my iPhone, just in case.

This fear of digital failure – and my preparation for such an eventuality – probably began back in my days as a systems analyst. We backed up everything, knowing that systems fail. It’s just a matter of time.

The point of this post is to remind you that you can’t always rely on your hardware. When the mission is critical, as they say, think twice about what you would do if your main piece of equipment let you down.

As for me, I’m thinking of buying a Zoom H2 to add to my arsenal.

Happy Friday the 13th! You’re not superstitious, are you?

Here is my totally subjective list of interesting communications-related items spotted online in the past week.

Caine’s Arcade
Many of us were totally charmed by this video. Watch as an amazing young man’s dream comes true, thanks to a thoughtful new friend and social media. (Bonus: More than $125,000 has been raised for a scholarship fund for Caine.)

Music at the heart
This video demonstrates the powerful influence of music on memory, emotion and behaviour. You can’t help smiling as this senior citizen comes alive upon hearing his favourite tune.

Learning from Ze Frank’s return
I’m an unabashed fan of Ze Frank, and I’m delighted that he’s returning to the online video world. In this post, Robert Bruce outlines lessons learned about creativity, thanks to Ze’s return.

Curation within communications
Here is a point I’m fond of making: corporate communicators need to learn how to curate content! And now, here is IBM, in a Forbes article, agreeing with this point.

To pin or not to pin
Here’s a nice outline of some of the ways in which businesses can trip up using Pinterest. Read it and learn.

New app of the week
Ah, we iPhone users love our new apps. This week I grabbed Nightcap, but I haven’t had time to put it through its paces. It’s supposed to vastly improve low-light photography and give you control of shutter speed, admittedly a weakness of the iPhone camera.

How to record a phone call
Here’s my video on how to record a phone call for a podcast, customer testimonial or other use.

For more links, check out my Delicious bookmarks.

Happy weekend!