Entries by Matt Wright

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Dry subject + Imaginative presentation = Instant Attention!

Preventing Against Disasters in your Business (Lewis Silkin) – Cautionary tales for Employers

I loved this presentation. Not especially because of the subject matter – Employment Law – well….yes actually, because of this rather dry subject matter was presented in such a thoughtful and an imaginative way.

This underlines the importance of presentation – setting Five Employment Tribunal Case Studies to rhyme (in the style of Hillaire Belloc’s ‘Cautionary Tales’), complete with characters from Belloc’s tales, all in a pamphlet-style format really helped to grab (and hold) the attention. read more read more

May 2, 2016 /0 Comments/by
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Caffeine marketing

Wake up & smell the coffee

I found this presentation particularly interesting; partly because I’m a regular customer of Café Java in Abingdon (my post-parkrun venue – a great example of social media marketing), and partly because coffee shops are in the ‘sweet spot’ when it comes to social media

Café Java is Andrew’s sole remaining outlet, having sold off the rest of his chain to concentrate upon his coffee shop consultancy business.

Background

On 21st April 2016, B4 hosted the 3rd Annual ‘Business in Oxford’ Event, at the Saïd Business School. read more read more

April 25, 2016 /0 Comments/by

Book Review: Do it Tomorrow and other Secrets of Time Management

Do it Tomorrow and Other Secrets of Time Management – Mark Foster

An interesting little book which I picked up recently. As a copywriter, time management is a battleground – clients always want their copy immediately but are not prepared to look at revisions until tomorrow….you can see where the conflict begins to arise!

The 7 principles of time management set out in this book are a useful guide to keeping this conflict in check:

1 – Have a clear vision

Write a list of the things you are NOT going to do tomorrow; e.g. I am not going to spend more than 30 mins on my email. read more

April 11, 2016 /0 Comments/by
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What came first – the teacher or the book?

The world’s most inspirational physics teacher

“Teaching is not an intellectual thing, it’s an emotional thing. If it was an intellectual thing, you could replace teachers with books”

Carlo Rovelli is an Italian theoretical physicist, author of the best seller Seven Brief Lessons in Physics, and is touring schools ahead of his new book to open the eyes of students to how physics works in the real world, hoping to encourage more to study physics at higher levels.

Rovelli begins by outlining the danger when ‘opinions’ become transmitted as ‘facts‘, something which happens all the time and not just in science (think how many ‘facts’ were spouted during the BREXIT debate?!): read more read more

April 10, 2016 /0 Comments/by

The Vocabularist – Neither lent nor borrowed be…

More borrowed than lent

We like to think of English as the global language.

However, its enduring success is largely due to its ability to assimilate and anglicise words from other languages…..a magpie of a language if you will.

Consider these modern English words which have been borrowed from other languages.

Gorilla – Greek Gorillai, a tribe of hairy women, perhaps of African origin
Hamster – Middle High German hamastra
Kangaroo – Aboriginal language of Guugu Yimidhirr, gangurru , referring to a species of kangaroo
Kink – Dutch nautical term, “twist in a rope”
Moccasin – Native American Indian,Powhatan mäkäsn and Ojibwa makisin
Molasses – Portuguese melaços, from Late Latin mellceum, from Latin mel, “honey”
Whiskey – Old Irish uisce, “water,” and bethad, “of life”

read more

April 4, 2016 /0 Comments/by
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Capability Brown – the original networker

“Since our lives are short, let us leave something behind to show we have lived”  

– Pliny (on a memorial to Capability Brown at Stowe Gardens)

Networker and Gardener

It may have escaped your attention that this year marks not only the Golden Jubilee, but also the 300th anniversary of the landscape designer Capability Brown, so named for telling all his potential clients that their gardens had ‘capabilities’. 

However, Brown was  as much an excellent networker in business as he was an ‘ominpotent magician’ in the garden design world. read more

March 28, 2016 /0 Comments/by
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LinkedIn networking – a must-have or a right pest?

I recently attended one of Steve’s half-day LinkedIn workshops ‘Using LinkedIn to Grow your Business’, to see what all the fuss was about and whether LinkedIn could be an effective marketing tool for my business.

Like most professionals, I have a presence on LinkedIn, but similarly, I am not a frequent user…..erm, truth be told I’m a rather infrequent user – the question was, what was I missing out on?

Some LinkedIn facts & figures

  • LinkedIn has more registered users than the entire population of the USA
  • The LinkedIn joining age limit has been lowered to 13
  • A new member joins LinkedIn every 2 seconds 
  • 95% of companies use LinkedIn for recruitment

The 4 C’s of Digital

The 4 P’s of Marketing are rapidly being replaced by the 4 C’s of Digital read more read more

March 20, 2016 /0 Comments/by

Tips for a Happy Life….from the Writer about Death

In 1996, Heather Lende was asked to write an obituary for her local paper in Alaska….20 years on, she has become an unofficial bereavement counsellor for the town of Haines. This is an edited summary of the interview from the BBC online magazine

Lende’s five tips for a happy life

  • Pretty good is better than perfect
  • Draw lines in the sand so you can move them
  • Send a forwarding address – Lende wrote about a man who lost touch with his family for 37 years after moving from the east coast of the US to Alaska
  • Tell them you’ll miss them when they’re gone
  • Be kind – that’s what everybody needs more than anything

Regular readers of this blog will know that obituaries are something of an obsession – nothing morbid, in fact quite the opposite, as far as I am concerned obituaries are a celebration of life. read more

March 20, 2016 /0 Comments/by

Refer-On, Turn-Off – Mistakes made by Networking Groups

Business Let’s Talk (BLT) is a networking group which grew out of the demise of Refer-On, a franchise with a number of local hubs across the Home Counties.

Why did such an established franchise go so wrong, and what does that tell us about networking in general?

Networking issues

We all need to network for business, informally or formally, whether we work for a large company or are self-employed.

Networking groups have traditionally focused upon the self-employed, SME market, and usually possess the following characteristics: read more read more

March 20, 2016 /0 Comments/by
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Tactical Nuclear Penguin – the sexy side of the rebrand

This is the philosophy of BrewDog, a Scottish independent brewer which was created in April 2007 with 2 employees (+ 1 dog) selling 1,000 hl of home-brewed beer out of the back of a van.

8 years later on, BrewDog has mushroomed to 540 employees (+1 dog) selling 134,000hl of beer and 44-owned bars.

All in the bland, corporate-dominated world of brewing…….

The appeal of the rebrand

Compare some of Brewdog’s named offerings with those of the multi-nationals: read more

March 7, 2016 /0 Comments/by