Don’t miss repeat business

A simple step to keep customers coming back

I found out in the weekend that my car’s warrant of fitness (WOF) had expired. I never remember to check, and it was my husband who pointed it out.

The amusing thing is, is that he works for the company that does my WOF checks. While he remembered my car needed to be brought in again, the company had failed to remind me. Bad move. Read the rest of this entry »

The demise of kindness

Is doing good bad?

Two young Canadian men recently started a social media challenge, daring their friends to acts of kindness. All well and good. But the comment of one of them brought me up short.

Russell Citron, who has a non-profit organisation called Kindness Counts is reported as saying this:

“I think that society views kindness as a very passive concept. There’s some attitude toward being kind now that it’s not the cool thing to do. It’s not fun. But in order to really make an impact and get people talking at their dinner tables, you have to be creative and unconventional in the way you address kindness.”

Well, I don’t disagree with the concept of the second part of his statement – creativity certainly helps when promoting discussion and action around social issues. However, when did kindness become uncool? And if it is off-trend, then why?

What do you think?

5 steps to conquering ‘reading overload’

Fighting technology with technology

If you are like me you keep a ‘reading’ folder in your email inbox (in my case I use MS Outlook email software application). It’s in that folder I store all those wonderful e-newsletters I subscribe to, each with tantalising teasers and hyperlinks to various blogs and websites with full details on the topic(s) in question. Using a reading folder means the emails are safely stored away till I get time to read them all.

Great, but it can quickly become overwhelming. The reading time never eventuates and thus the number of unread emails grows alarmingly. It’s all very well scheduling reading time once a week (which I recommend incidentally), but what happens when you only manage to read part of an email? By the next week you forget where you were up to and waste time picking up the threads again. Take these simple steps, and you will be sorted: Read the rest of this entry »

The thirst for firstdom

Why the pre-launch pas de deux is a dance you need to learn

Recently I was part of the ‘launch team’ for a new book. This was a novel experience for me (pun intended, although the book was not a work of fiction*).

I enjoyed being part of the select group – of admittedly several hundred – who got to read the entire manuscript, give feedback to the author, write endorsements for online booksellers, and share access to some freebie ‘tools’ the author wrote to complement his book. And this was all before the book was officially launched. Unknowingly I was  being swept up into a new category of shoppers. Read the rest of this entry »