Guest Post by Iuliana Butuc-Cerchez

Sincerely, I hate PR lessons. I really think public relations are much about common sense and diplomacy. And being here for the very first time – thank you Alina for inviting me -, I definitely do not want to bore you with some PR lessons :). Just share with you some facts.

Some days ago, a message from a certain undergraduate student came on the corporate email. The email was not only straight, really aggressive in pushing the core message, but was totally PR-unfriendly :).

Beginning with a “hi” and continuing with “I am … and I want to produce a magazine”, the message is full of bullets (in fact “-”) and short “statements” and ends with a demanding “pls, write me an article on your business mistakes”:) And the email was addressed to our president

How nice, isn’t it? Getting serious, I really think that communication classes should be mandatory in each and every university. Learning how to communicate in a professional manner, especially in a business environment has to be one of the first lessons of a future entrepreneur. A “slang” message makes your chances of convincing the business audience go to almost zero.

Also, if the email is sent from a free webmail account as Yahoo! or Gmail – as the one in my example - the message itself loses half of its “weight”. And why decrease your chances to a good reply making such basic mistakes? Definitely, someone has to teach that guy how to improve his PR skills!

Iuliana Butuc-Cerchez has been the Corporate Affairs Manager of the Gecad Group for over 4 years. She’s an exceptional PR professional and a true mentor for me. Before starting her PR career, she used to be this hard-core IT journalist at one of the best business and financial newspapers in Romania. She’s also a blogger, but as her blog is in Romanian, only part of my readers will be able to enjoy her articles.

As many of you, I depend a lot on my cell phone! Without it, I have no idea how to get in touch with friends and family because since the address book, I stopped learning phone numbers by heart. So if I carry it around and buy a nice one which can successfully replace a laptop for some tasks, I’d love to listen to music on it!

And here comes my problem! The standard headphones such devices come with. I hate them! My ears are a bit too small for them. So if they don’t fall out every 2 minutes, listening to my favorite songs becomes this painful experience making me switch back to my mp3 player that I can use custom headphones on!

I am not saying they should come with three different types of headphones in the standard package. But I’d love to see other options on their site, or at least a referral link to those producing them. But no! Luckily for me, when I want something, I’m pretty good at googling it. And I of course found an adapter for my new phone, which I will order after my vacation. Still, why loose the opportunity or, when a customer calls, say you have no solution for them when it’s actually very, very simple?

What I think you shouldn’t have missed last week…

A new week has just started and I hope it took off wonderfully for all of you. And I’ve got the perfect reading list to help you make your week a little better!

Janelle of Create Business Growth has written about freedom of speech and the lack of it in the online world. We should all think about this a little, as one of my early morning emails told the story of a censored Mixx entry.

Looking for a new way to increase sales? Why not try flagship content? Chris Garrett has just published an article teaching you everything you need to know.

Afraid of falling into a blogging rut? Michael Martine of Remarkablogger has just the tips to help you avoid one.

There’s been quite some debate regarding who should handle social media related tasks within a company. Should it be HR, PR, Marketing or should it be anyone with a genuine interest? The most comprehensive piece I’ve read on the subject is an article by Shel Hotlz of A Shel of My Former Self.

Naomi Dunford of IttyBiz has just revealed a golden rule of word of mouth marketing: not pissing people off and remembering there’s more than your primary target!

All the Marketing and PR professionals thinking of embracing the social media need a few tips and tricks. Chris Brogan has come up with a list with what they should know.

If you haven’t heard the “Content is King” phrase at least once last week, you haven’t been online much. Alex Cristache of Blogsessive shows us how important the kingdom is in the blogging equation.

I’m a proud member of the Generation Y. Not by choice, but by year of birth. And those borne a little before me are Gen Xers. These are the two gens I’ll be spending a lot of my life with, so any statistics on them are of interest. Especially when they are great statistics, like the ones David Wilson has just published on Social Media Optimization.

Hope you’ve found this week’s list helpful and you’ll join me for a fresh one next week!

Happy Monday,
Alina

If there is something everyone loves about Open Source software (FLOSS) is that every issue ever discovered with it is known, there are no surprises. All incompatibilities, if discovered, are out there and anyone trying out the software knows what to expect before they begin. The main benefit of such transparency is that customers are never outraged by bugs. And let’s face it, there is no bug-free software, especially if you try to make it work on Windows

When it comes to closed source software, I’ve been in the industry enough to know the rule of “hush-hush” is the preferred business model. Known issues, bugs, incompatibilities? Keep them buried  and hope no one finds out.  The perfect plan to have everything blow in your face.

I thought a series debating all the aspects of this “hide it all under the carpet” strategy would help software vendors understand that transparency can actually be a great selling point. No customer likes to be bullshitted and asked to remove programs without any real explanation. That is why I’ve come up with a series focusing on how important respect and telling the truth are in this competitive industry and what the lack of these values can lead to. Up to now, I’ve thought of 4 parts, but things might get more complex around the way:

1. How Much Do Sales People Know and How Much of that Do They Hide?
2. Should the Marketers and Communicators Care about What’s Wrong With the Product?
3. When Everything Goes Wrong, Do Support Engineers Eventually Come Clean?
4. Software Utopia: Transparency All the Way! Any Benefits?

This is indeed a large and complicated topic, so while posting each entry of debating the subject of transparency in the software industry, I’d love to hear your thoughts, your pleasant encounters and horror stories involving tech support, sales people and marketer in the software industry.

So stay tuned, and let’s start debating!

I’ve met Robyn Bloom on LinkedIn, after answering one of her questions about getting beauty bloggers and journalists to write about her business, Purely Cosmetics and the line of natural mineral products she created. While talking to her, I wanted to know more about how life as a one-woman-show was in the beauty field. I had only read her LinkedIn profile and some information on her website before sending these questions. I am extremely glad they’ve lead to a great story about following your dreams and doing what you love.

You went from selling prescription medications to selling ad space in the Yellow Pages to then owning your own mineral make up company. Tell me how it all happened!

Most of my life is an accident. When I first went to college, my intention was to become a doctor – I’ve always been intrigued by science. After my first inorganic chemistry class, I nixed that idea. I started out in the fashion industry as a menswear buyer while I was in graduate school (worked in retail all through high school), intending to open up my own clothing store. My MBA was emphasizing entrepreneurship, and after going through the program, I decided I’d rather start new products with someone else’s money rather than mine. Continue reading