He makes six good points. Here’s the top one:

Don’t give a brief. Or a bad one. Or an incomplete one. I’ve said it before, but almost every bad project can be traced back to a bad brief, so this is your go-to screw up if you want to guarantee an epic fail.

I agree. I’ve just started a writing business here in New Zealand and while I haven’t yet developed a standard brief template, I can already see getting a formal brief can help enormously.

A good brief doesn’t have to be long or complicated. It does need to be clear.

Winston Churchill made mistakes, but his communication skills were second to none

A great post from Clare Lynch on Ragan’s PR Daily looks at the speech Winston Churchill made at the fall of France during the Second World War.

This was one of the lowest points for Britain during the war and Churchill doesn’t sugar coat the pill.

Lynch wisely uses the speech as a lesson for managers and executives steering them away from the corporate double-speak which inspires no-one and leaves everyone confused.

Churchill was a great communicator. If you need help polishing your writing or speeches, get in touch with me. I can help.

5 writing tips from Winston Churchill | Articles.

Although site owners have little control over WordAds, WordPress decides where they go and what ads are displayed. The company promises they’ll be tasteful. So, let’s see how that works out.

It’s one thing to speak to a microphone and one or two others in a studio. Standing in front of a crowd or on a stage is something else entirely.

I cracked it by starting out small:

• a small crowd,
• a short talk
• and an easy topic.

My first official public speaking engagement was for a local computer company in Wellington, New Zealand. The company had regular evening events with food and drink for its customers and would invite speakers.

The company’s managing director asked me to talk for about 20 minutes on my work as a technology journalist. It’s a subject I can talk about for hours.

Thankfully, the audience was unintimidating, maybe 25 or so people and the mood was friendly.

When I finished a discussion started which went on for almost another hour – I didn’t realise until afterwards that I chaired the discussion keeping things moving along when it flagged. I just did what came naturally.

Over the next few months I had a few similar speaking engagements, the audiences remained small, but the session length and topics would be quite different. After around five or six events I was comfortable enough to tackle a larger crowd.

Related articles

• How I conquered my fear of public speaking (billbennett.co.nz)
• Presenting And Public Speaking Fear: Solution to Conquer Fear of Speaking In Public (ste3eg0vro.wordpress.com)
• Set aside your fear of public speaking – embrace it (ournewsroom.wordpress.com)

This suggests to me a strategy for copyright holders campaigning against illegal downloads.

At the moment they unconvincingly try to paint video pirates as a menace to society. Many of the people the campaign targets would be flattered by such a description.

Instead anti-piracy campaigners could use Game of Thrones information to their advantage, as evidence piracy is for lonely, geeky fantasists who can’t otherwise get to see girl’s naked chests.

No self-respecting young male would be happy wearing that badge.

Related articles

• Game of Thrones is the Most-Pirated Television Show of 2012 (mashable.com)
• HBO Has Only Itself To Blame For Record ‘Game Of Thrones’ Piracy – Forbes (exitlanguages.wordpress.com)

Me speaking on stage at the IBM Partner Awards

For years I couldn’t speak in front of an audience. I was terrified.

Speaking informally to a small group wasn’t a problem; put me on a stage in front of a crowd and I’d freeze.

My voice would crack or go up an octave. I’d be muddled, confused and unable to remember what I had to say.

If I had notes, I was too nervous to read them. It was painful. And embarrassing.

By the time I was in my mid-20s and my career was talking off, my fear of public speaking was starting to limit my options.

Then almost overnight, I cracked it.

The secret was something quite simple: radio.

At the time I edited a computer magazine for beginners. One Christmas, BBC Radio London asked me to come to the studio on Boxing Day to field questions from new computer owners who didn’t know how to get started.

It was something I was comfortable talking about, there were only two or three of us in the studio and it was a long session, long enough to get over my nerves.

The show went so well, the BBC asked me back. Soon I was getting on air radio spots all over the UK and national ones too. I had regular appearances on BBC Armed Forces Network and then, the BBC World Service.

At this point I realised I was speaking to a large audience and people found what I had to say was interesting.

This gave me the confidence to speak in public, but to stand on a stage still felt scary. I’ll write about how I managed that in a follow-up post.

Related articles

• Scared Of Public Speaking? 3 Quick Tips To Conquer Your Fear (fastcompany.com)

Thank you for adding the wonderful full screen editor to WordPress. I’m a professional writer and I just love the way I can get everything else out of the way and type on a screen which looks and feels like a blank sheet of paper.

One small feature change would make the full screen editor perfect. I’d like to mark headers – what we journalists call cross-heads – directly from the editor. At the moment, I have to leave the full screen and switch to the normal edit screen to do this.

It’s not hard or unpleasant, but being able to say in the full screen editor would be better.

Thank you.

Hermida, a journalism professor, looks at a list of best practices guidelines for journalists using Twitter. Top of the list are two I consider the most important:

• Have a voice that is credible and reliable, but also personal and human
• Be generous in retweets and credit others

Too often media tweeters come across as cold and impersonal. In some cases the Twitter accounts feel robotic, because that’s exactly what they are.

And media outlets are often the least generous when it comes to crediting sources. It’s as if they fear they’ll lose readers if they point them elsewhere. Of course, they will lose some traffic that way, but they’ll gain more in terms of credibility by being more open and generous.

Reportr.net » 10 best practices for Twitter for journalists.

Image via CrunchBase

Amazon dominates the e-book business. Reports say the company may have as much as 60% of the global market in electronic books.

So there’s hope a deal where Microsoft invested US$300 million in Barnes & Noble‘s Nook reader will challenge the giant online retailer’s grip on the growing market for ebooks.

The deal also ends a long-running series of lawsuits between the two companies.

Microsoft will build a software Nook reader into the next version of Windows due to go on sale later this year or early in 2013. And the deal will give Barnes & Noble pole position when it comes to marketing books on Windows PCs.

Tying up with Barnes & Noble will give Microsoft an entry into the tablet market. The rival Amazon Kindle is the dominant Android tablet, Microsoft desperately wants to get a foothold in the market dominated by Apple’s iPad.

This isn’t Microsoft’s first foray into electronic books. The company had its own reader and electronic book store – both are now defunct.

It’s a smart move for both companies. Last week Barnes & Noble was a major player in a dying market, Microsoft was looking at the tablet boom from the outside.

There’s even something in the deal for die-hard Apple fans. Having Microsoft’s still-deep pockets fund an alternative tablet will fuel the kind of competition which keeps designers on their toes.

The trouble is, once your follow list grows beyond a few hundred, sorting the wheat from chaff becomes much harder. Twit Cleaner is a New Zealand-developed application which automates the process.

Using the service is as simple as opening the web site and entering your Twitter address. A few minutes later you’ll get a Twitter direct message with a link to a page showing people you might want to unfollow.

Clearing out the junk

When I first tried Twit Cleaner I was following more than 1000 Twitter accounts. A message at the top of the Twit Cleaner screen told me I around 170 of those accounts were potentially garbage. I didn’t agree with all the named individuals, but quickly culled the 30 or so most annoying accounts. More will follow.

Twit Cleaner divides the potentially bad accounts into seven categories:

Potentially dodgy behaviour are accounts which mainly post links. You might want to keep some of these if they are news feeds, but individual accounts like this are often worth unfollowing.

Posting the same tweet too many times.

App spam means messages mainly come from those annoying services like 4square which tell you someone is now mayor of simpleton.

Other dodgy behaviour, now absent applies to accounts where people have been a bit silly but have stopped tweeting.

No activity in over a month is self-explanatory. In some cases these are people just taking a breather. I deleted anyone who hadn’t tweeted for 90 days.

Not much interaction is when people just pump out a feed and don’t chat or otherwise engage. Often robots run these accounts.

Hardly follows anyone is people who follow back fewer than 10% of the people following them. In other words, they not very giving with their Twitter activity.

All talk, all the time are accounts which are possibly too noisy.

Little original content applies to people who mainly retweet others.

Not so interesting are self-obsessed Twitter users who mainly tweet about themselves.

Relatively unpopular applies to Twitter users who hardly anyone follows back. I suspect some of these are just not trying hard.  

I’d like to see something similar to Twit Cleaner for Linkedin and Facebook. Any suggestions?