6 ways PR is like grilling out

What can PR pros learn from the spring grilling season, which is finally upon us? As it turns out, applying grilling tips to marketing produces some tasty results.

1. Select a cooking method.

What’s better, gas or charcoal? The answer likely depends on who you’re asking and their preferences in regards to flavor, convenience and cost. An initial step in forming a communications strategy is to identify audiences and consider their values and priorities, as well as how they prefer to consume information.

2. Don’t forget to preheat.

Heating up the grill 15-25 minutes before starting to cook kills bacteria and ensures properly-cooked food. Similarly, planning ahead and allowing enough time for target audiences to get fired up and excited is often essential to PR success. A preheated grill sears food immediately and improves flavors through caramelization. Likewise, if you hit people with a carefully-crafted campaign that took some preparation, they’ll love it first bite and won’t forget it.

3. Marinate.

The best ideas often rise to the surface after hours of brainstorming. Allow time for ideas to soak and develop the best flavor, just as meat and veggies taste best when left to marinate for a while before being tossed on the grill.

4. Measure the temperature.

Timing is critical when it comes to everything from marketing to the perfect burger. Take your audiences’ temperature before launching a new initiative to get a feeling for what their tastes are, how they may react, and how best to serve them. Don’t take that meat off the grill, or launch, until the thermometer indicates it’s go time.

5. Be safe.

Even pro grill-masters still have to pay attention to basic food safety rules, such as using separate cutting boards to avoid cross-contamination and refrigerating uncooked meat while it marinates. PR pros, too, must remember the basics, such as careful editing and proofreading, double-checking work before sending to a client, and ensuring updates are being sent from the correct social media account. It just takes one little slip-up to get burned.

6. Clean up immediately.

As soon as you’re finished grilling, but before the grill cools down, take a wire brush and scrub away any debris. It will come off much more easily when the grill is hot. Evaluate the results of a marketing effort as soon as it wraps and before momentum dies down. Identify any issues or problems that may need to be brushed away for next time, so you can start with a clean grate.

Happy grilling!

8 Things Productive People Do During the Workday

Forget about your job title or profession – everyone is looking for ways to be more productive at work. It’s time to set down your gallon-sized container of coffee, toss out your three-page to-do list, and put an end to those ridiculously long emails you’ve been sending.
Experiencing a highly productive workday can feel euphoric. But contrary to popular belief, simply checking tasks off your to-do list isn’t really an indication of productivity. Truly productive people aren’t focused on doing more things; this is actually the opposite of productivity. If you really want to be productive, you’ve got to make a point to do fewer things.
Recently I spoke with project management and productivity genius Tony Wong to find out the secret to a more productive workday. He provided me with some excellent insight into what he and other like-minded productive individuals do during their work week.
Harness your productivity by taking note of these eight things:
1. Create a smaller to-do list. Getting things accomplished during your workday shouldn’t be about doing as much as possible in the sanctioned eight hours. It may be hard to swallow, but there’s nothing productive about piling together a slew of tasks in the form of a checklist. Take a less-is-more approach to your to-do list by only focusing on accomplishing things that matter.
2. Take breaks. You know that ache that fills your brain when you’ve been powering through tasks for several hours? This is due to your brain using up glucose. Too many people mistake this for a good feeling, rather than a signal to take a break. Go take a walk, grab something to eat, workout, or meditate – give your brain some resting time. Achieve more productivity during your workday by making a point to regularly clear your head. You’ll come back recharged and ready to achieve greater efficiency.
3. Follow the 80/20 rule. Did you know that only 20 percent of what you do each day produces 80 percent of your results? Eliminate the things that don’t matter during your workday: they have a minimal effect on your overall productivity. For example, on a project, systematically remove tasks until you end up with the 20 percent that gets the 80 percent of results.
4. Start your day by focusing on yourself. If you begin your morning by checking your email, it allows others to dictate what you accomplish. Set yourself in the right direction by ignoring your emails and taking the morning to focus on yourself, eat a good breakfast, meditate, or read the news.
5. Take on harder tasks earlier in the day. Knock out your most challenging work when your brain is most fresh. Save your busy work – if you have any – for when your afternoon slump rolls in.
6. Pick up the phone. The digital world has created poor communication habits. Email is a productivity killer and usually a distraction from tasks that actually matter. For example, people often copy multiple people on emails to get it off their plate – don't be a victim of this action. This distracts everyone else by creating noise against the tasks they’re trying to accomplish and is a sign of laziness. If you receive an email where many people are CC'd, do everyone a favor by BCCing them on your reply. If your email chain goes beyond two replies, it’s time to pick up the phone. Increase your productivity by scheduling a call.
7. Create a system. If you know certain things are ruining your daily productivity, create a system for managing them. Do you check your emails throughout the day? Plan a morning, afternoon, and evening time slot for managing your email. Otherwise, you’ll get distracted from accomplishing more important goals throughout the day.
8. Don’t confuse productivity with laziness. While no one likes admitting it, sheer laziness is the No. 1 contributor to lost productivity. In fact, a number of time-saving methods – take meetings and emails for example – are actually just ways to get out of doing real work. Place your focus on doing the things that matter most as efficiently and effectively as possible.
Remember, less is more when it comes to being productive during the workday.
What’s your secret to productive workdays?

7 errors even good writers miss

When your job entails putting words together at a breakneck pace, the odds are good that your devious fingers will try to put one over on your brilliant mind. Caveat scriptor!





Listen, even good writers make mistakes, from obvious repeats to subtle misspellings. It means we're human.
If you're like most writers, you're probably making common blunders on a regular basis. Don't lose heart. Awareness is half the battle: By becoming alert to typical mistakes, you become less likely to make them.

Before you publish your next blog post or submit another magazine article, do yourself a favor and check it against this list. Below are seven mistakes that even good writers miss:

1. Accidental repeats. You know that feeling of telling a friend a story and then realizing you've already shared it? It happens in writing, too. When you're not paying close attention, you might repeat a phrase, a story, or a point without realizing it. One good way to catch these accidental repeats is by reading your content aloud; often your ears catch mistakes that your eyes don't.

2. Empty adverbs. Let's be honest. When you add "really" to a verb, what are you adding? Is calling something "very" cold better than calling it frosty, frigid, or icy? The truth is, many common adverbs are empty: They add little or nothing to the meaning of a sentence and only clutter your copy. Cut them out.

3. Dangling modifiers. Dangling modifiers are a classic symptom of writing exactly as we speak. Although casual, conversational language may contain dangling modifiers, written language should not; they muddy your message. A modifying phrase should immediately precede the thing it modifies. So, instead of writing, "Setting an editorial calendar, the blog mapped months of topics," write, "Setting an editorial calendar, the writer mapped months of topics on her blog." The blog is not setting the calendar; the writer is setting the calendar.

4. Which vs. that. The words "which" and "that" are not interchangeable. Both begin clauses, but "which" clauses are unnecessary to the meaning of a sentence (and thus set off by commas) and "that" clauses are essential.

5. Overly complex words. Using overly complex words in place of simple ones is a perfect way to alienate your readers. Better to be clear and get your message across than to be fancy and lose your audience. When reading over your content, ask yourself whether the meaning is obvious. If not, rewrite.

6. Common misspellings. Most writers understand the difference between "your" and "you're," but it's all too easy to accidentally type one when you mean the other, especially if your spell-check program doesn't pick up the error. Be on guard for common misspellings such as these:

• They're/Their/There
• Lose/Loose
• It's/Its
• Effect/Affect
• Weather/Whether
• Then/Than

7. Your personal "tells." A writing "tell" is like a poker "tell": It's something you regularly do—without meaning to—that gives you away. In poker, it might be the way you tap your fingers when you have a good hand; in writing, it might be the way you always use words like "just" or something else. Once you identify some of your overused words or other crutches, you need to ruthlessly cut them out. Using them once in a while is fine, but using them all the time dulls your writing.
Shanna Mallon is a writer for Straight North, a Chicago Web design firm providing specialized SEO, Web development, and other online marketing services such as website content writing services. Follow Straight North on Twitter and Facebook.