Tips to Manage Information Overload:

1. At the start of each work day, take a few minutes to identify that day’s business-critical actions. Guard both your schedule and your media intake so random interruptions do not disrupt your work plan.
2. Determine how often you need to check email, and only check it at your pre-determined intervals.
3. If you cannot respond to an email in under 3 minutes, set it aside, and answer it in the time block you have allotted that day for email.
4. Set your instant message client to invisible, or unavailable, if you need to concentrate.
5. Let voice mail answer your office and cell phone when you need full focus.

While information access is wonderful, each of us needs to guard our time and productivity.

Conversely, as business writers, we must realize this is the environment into which we write. To cut through this fog, we must sequence information, format documents and eliminate wordiness, so our documents are easy for overwhelmed readers to absorb.

We must manage more and more information, and be able to organize it clearly for our readers. Strong communication skills will always be an in-demand skill.

What was your reaction to this video?

Jill Konrath, a highly respected and well-published sales professional, learned from other sales colleagues that a self-professed “Trusted Sales Adviser” had copied their content. Their posts on this subject:
- Dave Stein: Hey! Stop Plagiarizing My Content!
- Charles Green: Plagiarism, Concealment or Coincidence
- Colleen Francis: Hey! That Sounds a Lot Like Me!!

Jill ran a quick search on her own published materials, and in moments discovered her work, also, had been plagiarized She took decisive action: Outing a Plagiarizing Sales Expert

Lessons:

- It is very easy to track content on the web (use CopyScape).
- It is highly unethical to steal the content of others and pass it off as your own.
- Your reputation will likely be damaged, if not shattered, if you do this.

Jill summed this up brilliantly in her post: “What makes this so sad is that Bob Beck is probably good at what he does. He didn’t have to use other people’s words as his own…and it totally destroys his credibility.”

Note: BNet requested a response from Bob Beck, who asserts an intern gave him the copied materials. His response and BNet reader reaction is here. As you can see, this has become an explosive issue. If the plagiarism was truly unintentional, careful fact-checking with CopyScape would have prevented this uproar and professional damage.

My heart aches, considering this professional implosion. Let us all learn from this painful lesson.

You may publish a blog, or post a white paper, sales copy, product details, a newsletter or best practice tips on your company site. CopyScape is a free site that quickly runs a search for duplicate content from your site, offering an easy protection check for your content.

Enter your site URL on CopyScape, and you will see a list of sites that have similar text to your site. Of course, if a site has used your content, it should be linked and credit stated.

What steps should you take if you discover your writing has been used without credit to you or without permission?

1.  Contact the site.
Most sites list contact information, so a politely worded email is a good start: “I wish you well in your endeavor, but you need to find your own words to promote it.”  In nearly all situations, you will receive an embarrassed apology in response, and your material will be removed from the offending site immediately. If you received no response, proceed to step #2.

2.  Run a Who Is domain search, where you can find detailed contact information. Save this in case you need to escalate the issue. Email another much more firmly worded demand for the content to be removed, or call. I recently had a newsletter swiped and called the company and explained I was the author. That call resolved the issue right away, but if the offender stonewalls or refuses, move on to step #3.

3.  Notify the Site Host , alerting the web hosting company that the site contains plagiarized content, especially if the offending site is profiting from your work.

4.  Notify Site Advertisers, which cuts off the offending site’s revenue.

5.  Name (shame) them on your blog!
I don’t recommend this, unless your audience is a very narrow community, because flame wars generally help no one. State the site, link to it, and expose the offender. This is only effective when your audience knows with full certainty that the material was certainly yours originally.

6.  Legal Action
If all else fails. You can always start here, but I’d rather try to resolve it myself before incurring legal fees. And, I confess I’m territorial about my writing, so I want the opportunity to talk directly to the plagiarizer. Usually, it’s a learning lesson and ends well.

Steps 2 – 6 will very likely be unnecessary, because most content thieves apologize and remove the content when caught, but do protect your writing by occasionally checking your site on CopyScape.

Enjoy your writing, knowing credit stays with you.

Mary
Instructional Solutions

Across these past ten years, so many changes occurred:

–Writing standards and online technologies have evolved in ways I couldn’t imagine ten years ago.
–My children grew tall and strong and principled. (And, a special thanks goes to them, pictured above then and now. I don’t know if I would have found the courage to start a business, without them as motivation.)
–I worked with smart, interesting people.
–Businesses and careers prospered, because business writers were able to effectively use their writing to advance business objectives.

Thanks to all of you, our wonderful clients, for ten amazing years in business. My hope is the next ten years are equally filled with wonder, learning, prosperity and happiness for all of us.

As thanks, I’d like to share the top ten lessons I’ve learned these past ten years helping business people write better and more productively:

1. Our clients’ careers are tied to their ability to harness their business writing to drive business. I’ve seen people promoted fast, lose jobs, cost their company hundreds of thousands of dollars in a contract error, engage a customer and bolster a deflated colleague, all due to their writing. Writing is the means that moves business.

2. I have not met one business person who did not possess sufficient analytical and communication skills to learn to competently manage his or her business writing by honing  innate skills through business writing courses, attention, and practice.

3. Grammar is important in your business writing. Content is very, very important.

4. It is problematic to have grammar errors in your writing, and if you do, it reflects poorly on you and is embarrassing and unprofessional. But, most often, the “cost” is brief and all yours. If you have content errors that cause multiple readers to waste time, or worse, advance a project in the wrong direction, the cost to your organization is exponential.

5. Business writing and information is in a constant state of evolution, and many business writers are either unaware or worry that they are just a bit behind that curve.

6. Not using an RSS feed to organize your web content, for example, when you see others doing so? Concerned your proposal form is out of date? Take a writing class, read good blogs or newsletters to learn and stay current. Everyone is always learning.

7. Many very competent business writers do not remember obscure grammar rules, and cannot define an objective personal pronoun or a pluperfect verb tense, for example. They silently believe other strong business writers do remember exacting grammar rules from grade school.

8. To write successfully in business, it doesn’t matter if you can quote the grammar rule that proves your sentence is correct; what matters is that your sentence is correct. By the time we are six years old, we have absorbed the essentials of our language construction, and this is honed throughout our education. So, you may recognize a sentence to be correct, but perhaps can’t explain why. That’s ok. When grammar errors crop up in your writing, a systematic process of correction will eliminate them. Identify the errors you make, relearn the relevant rules, and pay attention when editing to correct these errors until correct use is habit.

9. Your natural writer’s voice should shine through in your writing. Don’t hide behind business-speak.

10. There is a current vogue for smirky, snarky writer’s voice right now, particularly in corporate blogs and marketing. Snark makes a splash, but in the long run authentic, engaged, warm writing wins the reader – and the contract, project, customer, sale and long-term relationship.

When you are searching for a new job, you are in essence “branding” yourself. Lyn Chamberlin writes The Brand Dame, an excellent blog on branding I highly recommend. In June of last year, she wrote a post about branding yourself during your job search, entitled “How NOT to Get a Job.” It addresses the need to make certain your documents are 100% correct, properly targeted and she offers great suggestions on how (and how not) to submit them.

1) Email address – Not great to use lovesbeer@ISPnamechanged.com. (Use a neutral email address for your job search. Lovesbeer@ definitely does not convey responsibility. Note: I wrote about this issue in last month’s newsletter.)

2) The resume file name should be the applicant’s name, not initials or Lisa’s quest for a new job, or resume version 12. Name it correctly with your first and last name, so a potential employer will be able to find it quickly during a document search.

Today’s word:

cosmopolite \koz-MOP-uh-lyt\, noun:
1. One who is at home in every place; a citizen of the world; a cosmopolitan person.
2. (Ecology) An organism found in most parts of the world.

You can subscribe here.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and it allows you to subscribe to websites and blogs, using a RSS reader or “feed,” so blogs and websites you routinely read are automatically sent to your reader. Information is organized and stored for you, so you can review it in one easy scan when you decide.

For work, I regularly read many blogs and websites about business writing, language, grammar, copywriting and business marketing. For fun, I read several cooking websites and blogs. Ok, I admit I also sometimes check the announcements for NYC clothing sample sales. Instead of taking the time to go to all these websites to stay current (or score a dress sale), I just log into my RSS feeder and scan by category. I can even save, send or star noteworthy articles.

There are many free good RSS readers: Bloglines, Newsgator, and my favorite, Google Reader.

This video by CommonCraft, “RSS in Plain English” illustrates how to set up and use a RSS reader: