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Turns out we didn’t like ASOS buying Topshop After All
When Topshop was acquired by ASOS, word from the fashion ecomms PR team was that this was GREAT news. But according to insight agency Freemavens, all was not as rosy as we were being led to believe. On a post shared on LinkedIn, Freemavens shared the social conversations on Twitter prior to, during and after…
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Kill Your Meetings.
A recent post from Robin Skidmore of Journey Further on LinkedIn got me to thinking about meetings. His post, which talked about how meetings kill productivity and meetings on Zoom kill morale was an interesting thought. True? Not true? His follow up point on how his own team had chosen to tackle this possible truth…
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Watch: How to have Successful Client Conversations
I’ve always been an advocate for speaking to your clients, and at the end of 2020, I took my own advice and conducted some of my own interviews with my handful of etc clients. The responses were insightful, humbling and gave me real clarity about understanding where my value lies and the potential scope of…
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Wintering – rewriting the narrative on dark, cold months
You may remember my recent video referencing a client of mine and how their creativity was sparked to write children’s stories when they were relaxed and well rested. After advocating in the last Rambling On and previous articles about the importance of remembering to revive and restore continuously – not just during ‘holiday’ time –…
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Introduction to Me – A ‘Nice-to-Know’ Onboarding Technique
There are plenty of stats out there to support the woefully obvious observation that onboarding is incredibly important for teaching and keeping the best people, but much of the process often relies on how much information a new employee can retain in the shortest period of time before they’re left to ‘get on with it’.…
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Don’t Die Wondering. Insight into Buyer Motivations and Onboarding Clients
A recent conversation with a client got me to thinking just how important and valuable it is to ‘just ask’ rather than speculate when it comes to client requirements. In summary: A client dropped me a Slack message over the weekend. His agency have landed a new client and they are in the final rounds…
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Everyday experiments. Cool and creative ways to shoot using just your iPhone
Creatives amongst you will love this, and it’s well worth a forward to members of your team. The Everyday Experiments duo show how to capture incredible footage using just an iPhone 12. Balloons + Slo-mo, Oil + Water + Macro and Glow-sticks + Night mode. If you’ve got an iPhone12, there’s not a chance you…
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A practical guide to working remotely with all 16 personality types
As remote working is set to remain commonplace even after the Covid-19 pandemic subsides, rules around engagement and support of employees will need to be re evaluated. Face-to-face meetings and their associated body language, can often help leaders to find out more about their team, but timed Zoom meetings and the inability to see even…
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Communicating. Is it easier in small teams?
You may have heard the famous “two pizza rule” saying from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos —if a team can’t be fed by two pizzas, that team is too big. I began thinking a little more about this recently after stumbling across the below diagram on LinkedIn – an illustration often used to explain how ‘smaller…
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WATCH: Are you Being your Authentic Self from Monday – Friday?
A revelatory conversation with a client this week (who also okayed this post) led me to record this short video on being your authentic self. We were discussing the restorative power of the Christmas break, and how he had become incredibly creative during the time ‘off” – writing children’s stories no less. The conversation progressed…
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10 Things that require zero talent
This is a postcard I produced for our team at agenda21 about 5 years ago. I found it in a box of old papers last year. When we were working on our values, I wanted everyone to start challenging their own attitudes about work and the way we behave. I had a version of the…
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20 quick tips to un-average your agency’s web copy
These 20 quick tips to un-average your agency’s web copy from copywriters Treacle are exceptional and well worth considering if you are contemplating a rewrite in 2021. Agency website copy tip No.1: Front-load the benefits at the start of the sentence, then show your process for achieving it. Like this: “Drive more website conversions with our…
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WATCH: How to build and rebuild trust (and why it is the foundation for all we do)
Trust is the foundation for everything we do. But what do we do when it’s broken? In an eye-opening TED talk, Harvard Business School professor Frances Frei gives a crash course in trust: how to build it, maintain it and rebuild it — something she worked on during a recent stint at Uber. “If we…
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Why is it easier to give than to ask?
A thought from Michael Neill on why psychologically we find it easier to give than to ask. — There’s a two-part question I often ask people on sales and business building trainings: Would you find it easier to walk into a room and try and get a million dollars from the people in the room…
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The most expensive way to pay for anything is with time
When Brian Norgard, Entrepreneur and Ex-CPO of Tinder tweeted ‘The most expensive way to pay for anything is with time’ the response was far-reaching. 896 retweets, over 3,000 likes and a barrage of comments. Perhaps it was the very fact the statement was left so open for interpretation that made the provoking counterresponses all the…
