Constant Contact, by far the leading email marketing service for small businesses and nonprofits, held a webinar yesterday for Constant Contact partners — people like me who provide email marketing services to their own clients, using Constant Contact. Gail Goodman, the CEO, knows more small business people and more about how things go for them […]
We have been surveying owners of local small and medium-sized businesses about how they handle advertising and promotion. It’s a simple survey; because we wanted to get a feel for how we might help make our local area more commercially successful, and being in the graphic design business, this was an obvious subject to find […]
It’s a fact of the Internet that things can be copied far and wide with very little control. In some respects, that’s fantastic. You can get information about almost anything, any time. Some it is even accurate. But when it comes to betting your business on something you find “in the cloud,” it’s a good […]
If you write business letters or other company documents, there are almost certainly some terms (like your company or product name), that you end up typing a lot. This might not be an issue if your company name is “Acme, Inc.,” but something like “Serious Business Strategies” or “Life Enhancement Supplement” might get a bit […]
Ever since Sprint’s success with their “movie trailer” marketing campaign for the Instinct cell phone, it seems every tech marketer has to have movies. Now it’s Microsoft, with “Office 2010 — The Movie.” It’s been up on YouTube for a couple of weeks, so if you haven’t caught it yet, here’s the link. Actually, it’s […]
At Microsoft’s annual Partner Conference in New Orleans, they announced the “Technology Preview” of Office 2010. This means the new programs will be available to members of Microsoft’s partner network and developers around the world to examine, test and provide feedback. Part of the plan for Office 2010 is an online service, some of which […]
Type designer Thomas Phinney posts in his blog that Microsoft Office 2010, due to be released as a “technical preview” in July, will make a giant leap forward in its handling of typefaces: it will begin to support some (not all, by a long way) of the many advanced typesetting capabilities built into modern fonts […]
The latest issue of Creative Tips, going live tomorrow, details more about what a style book is and how to make one. Very few small to medium size businesses have a style book, far less use one, because nobody teaches business owners (or dentists, or consultants… name your field) that the marketplace does, 100 percent, […]
Microsoft Word, Open Office, Corel WordPerfect: they’re everywhere. Almost every business in the Americas, Europe, Australia (or 90 percent of the rest of the world, for that matter) uses one of the Big Three or an equivalent. We used to use typewriters, back when they were fairly cheap but “word processors” (specialized computers that only […]
I’ve been browsing the Microsoft Office website recently. There are container-loads of “tips and tricks” on there that tell you how to do all kinds of neat stuff except things you really need to know to make your document/presentation/promotional flier actually look good. Pardon me for getting slightly hot under the collar on this subject. […]
