End-Run

Do you ever turn around and realize somebody has done an end-run on you? It’s not easy to make everybody happy when you’re in Marketing and public relations. Engineers, VPs, execs, and firebrands in Technical Support all want to publish content to make their lives easier. Some of them don’t really know what people in [...]

Preparing the SME

When you hire a writer to interview a subject matter expert (SME) or a customer, you have a bit of work to do on both sides of the relationship. Tell the writer about the interviewee’s specialty and personal characteristics, the kinds of information to elicit, and what you want out of the interview. If I [...]

Learn Not to Say “No”

Are you old enough to remember how Crosby, Stills and Nash made such a splash? Critics and other musicians of the time had trouble comparing them to anybody else on the music scene in 1968, and could only refer to them as products of the groups from which they’d come (The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield and [...]