Author Archives: Tom McKay

Is your boss a psychopath? Fast Company just published an 8-question quiz to help you decide. Of course, if you’ve got one, you probably don’t need a quiz to know it. Avoiding psycho bosses is yet another benefit of self-employment, which I think I’ve mentioned that I love. The self-employed simply don’t have to deal […]

Most of the time in this blog I write about marketing communications, copywriting, and the like. But your company “communicates” with customers in dozens of non-verbal ways as well. Yesterday, for example, I was in a small neighborhood pizza place waiting for some pizzas to go. They have great pizzas, but my wife hates the […]

Sounds like a great idea. Your laptop is stolen, you call a toll-free number, and the company tells you where to find it as soon as the bandits go online. Even police are cooperating to help you track down the perps. But Forbes writer David A. Andelman is rightfully concerned about privacy: “First, the software […]

Probably not immediately, says Rich Brooks in Business Blog Consulting. As he puts it: I argue that business blogging should fall into Stephen Covey’s second quadrant: important but not urgent. I don’t think many people would argue that a business blog alone is enough marketing for any company, even a business blog consultant. However, it […]

If it’s just too much trouble to right-click and choose “Blog this,” now you can draft and even post a Blogger entry right from Word. Pretty handy for guys like me, who spend a huge percentage of our time in that particular program. Has anybody tried it? What’s the verdict? Give me some help, OK? […]

In a humorous and head-slapping post, Seth Godin confirms that marketing is now officially about wants, not needs. Check it out here. Of course, marketers have known for years that people are willing pay much more for what they want, compared to their needs. In fact, they’ll skip their needs to get what they want. […]

Want to get people to pay attention to your memos, slides, sales letters — all your written business communications? Then scuttle those lame adjectives, and replace them with strong “action” nouns and verbs. Ruth Walker has a great tip in the Verbal Energy blog: Think like a newspaper headline writer. “Before there were flying thumbs […]