This is not a list of greatest ever books, just a selection totally subjective one from my bookshelf.
John Simmons – The Invisible Grail: How Brands Can Use Words to Engage with Audiences
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I was contacted a few weeks ago by a web company in Cyprus, or more specifically Turkish, northern Cyprus. They asked me to quote for some travel writing for a new site they were building.
I have to admit to being very wary about being contacted out of the blue by people I don’t know about work. Or anything else actually. Nevertheless, I replied to the email and after a couple of exchanges I got the job.
I mentioned it to one or two people I knew who were all very sceptical and one even said I should demand payment up front because it was the only sure way of getting paid. [click to continue…]
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Kaya Project - Elixir
North African tinged electronica. One of the few things that will get me dancing in the street. OK, it was midnight and the street was deserted.
Steely Dan – Aja
Although it’s a 70s album, it sounds 80s. Not a great time in human history and fashion, this stands out like a beacon. Sassy and slick.
Pink Floyd - Relics
This is a funny album. Not a greatest hits but it has nothing new on it. My iPod played me Richard Wright’s Paintbox. [click to continue…]
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Finding new clients is really hard. Especially when you already work with a bunch of good ones that enable you to pay the bills and make a reasonable living.
One thing freelancers are bad at doing (this one included) is marketing and promotion. It’s easy to sit in our little box rooms watching YouTube waiting for the phone to ring rather than doing something about it.
Sometimes it’s good though to shake things up and see how they are done on the other side. Here’s just a few of the possible actions.
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I’ve been flat out since the middle of March doing big translation projects, writing blogs for customers and other stuff that will surface on the Internet at some time or another. We all like to have loads of work to do but the downside is that I’m washed out. I’ve no doubt what I need is a work life balance but when we do things with passion work and life tend to merge into one.
Home offices are there to constantly nag at you. Even if you have them in another room in the house, you shut the door on a Sunday evening, that job you have to do on Monday still nags away. My office wants continual feeding and attention, sometimes I really hate it.
I love my job (well, most of the time), that’s why I spend so much time doing it. Even if the corporate world would have me, I could never go back there. But hey, we all get to saturation point where we have no space and no time. Every so often it’s good to kick out the jams, clear space and make time to make things better. [click to continue…]
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Stuart Maconie described the Advisory Circle on 6music’s Freak Zone as “quite scary”. You can see his point as well. The music recreates the atmosphere of half-remembered public information films and weird and wacky children’s television programmes that the current crop of TV executives would run a mile from. For those too young to remember, public information films were screened on the television in the 1960s and 1970s to “inform” people of a variety of dangers ranging from running for a bus to the aftermath of an atom bomb falling on the country
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I was sceptical about Twitter. I’d had a couple of false starts because I didn’t really understood it. I followed something on the Guardian newspaper and Brian Clark on Copyblogger. I didn’t engage with it so it didn’t engage with me.
In October 2009 I met Claire Sloane. She probably can’t remember the conversation we had about Twitter, she’d just started and she doesn’t know to this day that she was the catalyst to me getting involved. The rest, as they say, is history. I was involved and I learnt things. I was converted. Far from being the plaything of kids, used properly, Twitter can be a powerful (and free) tool for promoting a business.
Engage with people and they’ll engage with you
Imagine walking into a party where you know no-one. If you’re anything like me you’ll be a little intimidated because there’s all these people getting on really well and you have to break into a conversation. [click to continue…]
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I meet a lot of social media virgins. Some are slightly interested but not enough to get involved, some are very interested but don’t know how to get involved and others who are outwardly hostile and think it’s a load of old bunkum and a passing fad. A constant refrain though is “I don’t have time for social media”.
Well, I’ve got news for you guys. The business relationships are changing and whilst, unlike what many “gurus” might think, social media hasn’t yet taken over the world, it sure ain’t going away.
Social media is networking on a large scale
I do a lot of offline networking, mainly breakfasts but other events as well. It involves me (slowly) building relationships with people who sometimes become clients, sometimes they become friends and sometimes they’re just people to pass the time of day with. I build trust in people by being natural and letting my personality shine through. [click to continue…]
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There’s been much wringing of hands about the BBC recently. Under pressure from the media, the Opposition and particularly the Murdoch empire, it has felt compelled to publicly wield the axe on some sacrificial lambs, easy targets like the web site, 6music and the Asian Network.
For those that don’t know or live on the other side of the world, 6Music is a music station that supports new music, it doesn’t play the usual pap you here on normal commercial radio and it has no ads so it can afford to be daring.
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I put my iTunes on random this afternoon as I work on something that is neither interesting or relevant. It played a track from Now We Are Ten, an album celebrating the tenth anniversary of Trunk Records.
Trunk Records
Trunk Records is a one-mand band (excuse the pun) run by Jonny Truck. He rediscovers cult material mainly from the 70s such as the soundtracks to films like Kes, Deep Throat and the Wicker Man. He’s unearthed music from UK television series such as The Tomorrow People, UFO and Vernon Elliot’s wonderful scores to The Clangers, Ivor the Engine and the creepy Pogle’s Wood. He’s also eeked out a nice little sideline in records associated with 60s and 70s pornography such as Deep Throat and Mary Mary Millington Talks Dirty.
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