7 years ago, on a similarly cold winter, but less snowy if I remember correctly, I went ahead and started my very own blog on the Blogger platform. It was long before the Google buyout of this popular platform, long before I gave up on my dream of being a journalist and, yes, long before the wonderful world of PR won me over and sparkled this version of the Words of a Broken Mirror Blog.

Seven years later, I have tested a lot  of everything that has to do with blogging, from niches to frequency to communities. I kept learning more about coding and customizing and html, and JavaScript, and how blogs generally work. A few social media channels later, lots of business articles, guest posts across the blogosphere, a few hosted contests, a travel blog and an online magazine for women, I am still blogging with the same great pleasure I experienced 7 years ago. 

I have grown and so has my career. I have launched my own company in the mean time and although we’ve had our share of difficult patches, it has always been profitable and every year made it better. It also gave me the choice I always wanted, at least in theory – choose how and when to work and never have just a job again.

To this day, nothing makes me happier than a comment on a post I’ve written. To this day, I am not more thankful for anything, from new business to recognition, than I am  for the many wonderful friends I made online. Some still are close by after all this time, some have went on with their lives, but I cherish them all, as they have all taught me something, shared a nice word when I needed it, offered their piece of advice when I asked for it and somehow helped me get so much closer to who I wanted to be.

In all honesty, the Words of a Broken Mirror PR and Marketing blog has been a bit sidelined in the past months. Life, work and clients took over and I have posted less often here. The good news is things are about to change. Mirror Communications is doing well, we will expand our team a bit and we have a lot planned for 2012. Nice surprises for us and for our friends, new projects and more services and packages to launch. That is why WoBM will only grow stronger and more useful this year so stay tuned and again…

….THANKS FOR READING, FROM THE BOTTOM OF MY HEART! Happy blogging to you all!

First of all, Happy New Year to you all Hope 2012 is just as you have imagined it to be and then some! Now it’s back to business..

A while back I told a good friend of mine selling career and business related products and services that December will be an awesome month for him. He’d sell more, a lot more than in the previous months. He did not believe me, not entirely. He then told me December had been an amazingly pleasant surprise.

The truth is I drew a very obvious conclusion. Whenever a year ends and a new one starts, we start reviewing our lives and somehow see the negatives, then decide to do something about it. We start working on our resumes in December, we start planning, in our head or on paper, we buy products and services to help us achieve our goals, from business to weight loss and so on.

I suspect the seasonal extended family reunions play a decisive part, that’s why most of our planning effort happens between Christmas and New Year’s Eve! We go to face our loved ones who somehow are our biggest critics as well, tell them about our lives and have them point out where we went wrong. Or they don’t, but they start talking about their accomplishments and all we have to do is compare notes and figure where we need to improve. 

I believe there is nothing wrong with using whatever it takes to motivate ourselves. The problem is we plan and buy in December, start pushing hard in January, and by February we’ve already allowed ourselves to tone it down and take it easy, we’ve already found ways to accept the reality of our life instead of trying to change it. Things might pick up some speed around our birthday, whenever that is, but then we wait for Christmas again to find motivation to go on with our plans.

What’s wrong with new year resolutions is that we should not use holidays and the generally accepted calendar to boost our efforts and decide what our lives should be like. It applies to our personal lives, our careers and our businesses. We should always work on improving everything about us, on getting where we want to be.

As Yvonne DiVita of Lip-sticking puts it,

Here’s the skinny – your business needs to thrive all year long. Your business needs to be on the leading edge all year long. Your business should be launching new ideas and new projects throughout the year. You can time them to specific holidays, if you like, or specific calendar events. But, don’t plan them according to an ‘end’ or a ‘beginning.’

Today is a beginning. It presents overwhelming opportunity to wow your clients/customers. Tomorrow will be the same. Monday will land on your desk and do the same. The only similarity in them is… that they are all open to creative ideas that will make your customers stand up and cheer.

If you need an end and a fresh start to motivate you, try to do that every morning, or every week, or even every month. Don’t let the December-powered January fever fade away! And try to decide for yourselves what your lives should be or where your business should be a an hour, a day, a month, a year from now! Just keep at it and start fresh every day.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with wanting more. We should appreciate what we have, but wanting more and better is not such a character flaw. We actually all do it: we want to travel more, run faster or further, get more clients, sell more products, touch more people with our words and so on.

What will you do today to achieve your goals?

Guest post by Susan Daniels

Being in public relations today is by no means an easy task. With the internet becoming an increasingly popular avenue for spreading the word about a business, event, or product, PR specialists have to be more on the ball than ever before. In fact, the position now practically requires a PR specialist to also be a novice web developer.

Unfortunately, very few PR specialists received training which included social media and web development, and now may need to seek additional training through an online college class or two. The way in which the public interacts with businesses and organizations has changed dramatically. The common public has greater connectivity than ever before, and no longer does it look to the newspapers or TV news anchors for the latest information. Instead, individuals get online and find the information they want and need themselves without having to wait until the next day or the 5 o’clock new for the latest events.

The way an organization looks on Facebook is just as important as their in-person reputation with the local community, and PR specialists need to be well aware of the various types of technologies they will be dealing with on a day-to-day basis. But who has time to sit down in a web development course when there are meetings to be had, appearances to be made, and press releases to be written all throughout the day?

Very few PR specialists do, and that’s why taking an online college class may be the most ideal.

An online college class affords current professionals the opportunity to enhance their skills on their time and at their own pace. No need to worry about making it to class on time or striving to keep up appearances with professors and classmates in addition to all those you have to do so with on a day-to-day basis. After a hard day’s work, you can come home, change into your pajamas, pour a cup of hot tea, and continue with your course work.

What continuing education offers public relations specialists is the opportunity to learn the ins and outs of the internet, computers, and basic programming. While a PR specialist doesn’t need to worry about becoming an IT specialist as well, they do need to have a basic understanding of the internet and web development so that they can help protect and promote their organization’s image. Over 90 percent of consumers research a business or organization online before giving it their patronage, and you can bet that if they see that a company’s in-person image isn’t consistent with its online image they won’t give it their business.

Online reputation management is just as important in protecting a company’s brand as is traditional reputation management. Public relations specialists need to know how to do basic website manipulations, how to interact with social media sites, and how to properly manage a company’s various websites. They don’t need to be a HTML or CSS guru, they just need to know how to work with these types of media and information sources so that they can provide a more well-rounded promotion of the company they work for.

Receiving the education needed to work well with social media sites and basic websites will help PR professionals more thoroughly enhance the images of the companies they work for. In fact, having the knowledge of web development will also make PR specialist more enticing to employers, and in this job market, being in high demand at the expense of taking an online course or two is definitely worth it.

About the author
Susan Daniels is an internet marketer for 43a.com. In her spare times she likes to write guest posts for marketing related blogs.

Guest post by the Workbooks team

Having accurate records of communications with your clients is vital for any business. Networking, marketing, sales and retention of clients all rely heavily on the ability to easily recall and check on previous interactions. Some of the best tools on the market today that can be used to track and analyse communications and interactions with clients are web-based Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software packages.

What is Customer Relationship Management?

Customer Relationship Management is a strategy for managing your company or business’s communications and interactions with customers and potential customers. Various Customer Relationship Management software packages are available that provide tracking, organization and analysis of various business processes, including marketing, sales, customer service and technical support. Web-based CRM software is especially popular as it provides unparalleled flexibility and accessibility to the software for employees and business owners alike.

What Can Customer Relationship Management Do?

CRM software allows for every communication and interaction of your company with a client to be easily recorded and integrated into an easy to use database. Emails, mailings, telephone calls and the customer’s replies (or the lack thereof) can all be documented. Web metrics, including such interactions as clicks and page views can also be tracked. By using Customer Relationship Management software a business owner or member of staff can have all this information at their fingertips, aiding decision making and allowing customers to experience more professional and more helpful customer service and technical support. Technical support and customer service staff need not ask repeat questions every time a customer has a problem, therefore improving the quality of the customer’s experience.

Marketing and sales staff can assess the impact of previous interactions on the client, and make better decisions going forward, thereby increasing the generation of leads and conversion of leads into sales. Customer Relationship Management software can also flag up bottlenecks in your communications, such as a particular member of staff who has been dropping the ball or a method of communication that has slower response times. This allows business owners to streamline and improve their client communications.

Advantages of Web Based Customer Relationship Management Software

Many companies now offer – and many employees now wish to take advantage of – flexible working hours and opportunities to work at home. Web-based Customer Relationship Management software allows these working conditions and the benefits that go with them to accrue to a company without sacrificing the advantages that an integrated Customer Relationship Management software solution provides. When employees are on business trips, at home, or away from the office when an opportunity or concern arises from a client, they do not need to be equipped with a company laptop on which the software is installed. Instead, the employee can use any computer with internet access to log on to the secure site and log the communications. This avoids lag times where important communications are not available to other employees, avoiding crossed wires, unnecessary communications and annoyance to the client.

This article was written by Workbooks, leading supplier of web CRM software.

Does any of you know the Rotring Tikky mechanical pencils? They are awesome! The best in the world if you asked me! And you would have a terribly hard time changing my mind! I fell in love with them back in secondary school. We first started seeing them when our teachers used them. Then some of the kids saw them in the specialized writing utensils stores and wanted to try them. They came back the next day to school, telling us how great they were, how much they loved them.

Soon after that, we all wanted a Rotring Tikky! It was a must to all of us and no other pencil could compare to it. We got them and when we lost or broke them (it took a lot of effort to break them, but kids manage to succeed in such dire conditions ), we wanted a new Tikky, not another one. The greatest part of my story is not the hype around our discovering Tikky, it’s the fact that our preference lasted through high-school and college. Even now, when I bought a new pencil, years after my last Tikky, I still went for the same brand.

Why such devotion when it comes to a simple pen? Simply because, other than the word of mouth recommendation that helped us decide what to buy, the product itself never disappointed. It was cool, it was amazing and everybody wanted one, although it was two or three times more expensive than the other pencils in the stores, but it also worked perfectly. It was enough to also convince our parents that it’s better to pay extra for the quality than buy us other 5 or more pencils for the same amount of time.

These days, Rotring Tikky looks a lot like the original pencil I fell in love with back in secondary school. The design and materials have been updated a bit to make it look slicker, more modern. But the original product is easily recognizable, otherwise brand enthusiasts would be unable to spot it in the see of pens and pencils usually sold together…

I have always been intrigued by the relationship Romanians have had with their car brand, Dacia. It is the only brand that still exists and that did not disappear after the Revolution that put an end to communism. But the way we’ve seen the brand, the way we’ve related to it or chosen to ignore it, makes for a very interesting story.

Dacias were not the best of cars during the communist period.  But they were one of the few types of cars you could actually get. Long lists and long waits came before any car purchase. And when I say long wait, I mean years. But then again, that gave you time to raise the money for it. The design was outdated, there weren’t that many options to choose from, and some relatives told me some now funny stories about how they prayed for their car to arrive with most of the parts on it.

After the Revolution, we finally had choices. And we went for them. Foreign cars, used at first, brought from nearby countries, Germany being the leading supplier. I grew up with high-school friends that made a business out of driving to Germany in one car and returning in three. They would work on them for a while, then resell them for some extra cash.

Old school Dacia, Sandero and Duster

Everyone thought of new Dacias (which came with a slightly updated design and a few more features) as cheap, but ultimately bad cars and they bought them only because they found nothing better. Then came Renault, which bought Dacia in 1999. Soon came the Logan brand and things started to change in how Romanians perceived the cars.

Yet there still were plenty saying they’d buy anything else. With rather strong competition on the market, the number of choices was still extremely large and with a negligible price difference. But of course, the Renault brand standing behind Dacia meant something.

In recent years, the Logan and the Sandero brands have changed perception even more. They are top selling cars and Dacia is one of the most profitable companies in the Renault group. We had to see that Brazil, Germany and other European countries love our cars for us to start loving and consider them as a strong alternative. I have to admit that I am now making plans around a new 4×4 announced by Dacia and Renault, Duster, and I would love to have one!

Was there another way to get us to support Dacia sooner? Was there something more than the price that they could have shown us? Definitely! We grew up seeing Dacia as crappy. Maybe all the reactions from other countries should have been brought to our attention sooner, more often, until we were no longer trapped in what we thought we knew and we could have given Dacia a chance.

No matter how we got here, I am happy to hear Romanians are proud of their car brand. They smile when they hear how well Sandero is doing on the international market and they are looking forward to see what’s next. I for one heard of a very cheap car running on electricity. Rumor has it it will cost about 5000 Euros.

RSS might very well be one of the most overlooked technologies out there. We all use it, to read, to get content on different pages, to promote our content and our influence, but we rarely talk about it, there are a handful of articles on strategies, best practices and the likes. But there are special plugins to enhance your feed, there is RSS feed advertising, there are buttons showing RSS readers numbers. So here’s the paradox: if the technology is actually important, why do we fail to talk about it?

As it happens to some technologies, they are extremely useful, but lack a certain coolness factor, so we ignore them. We use them, we appreciate their value, but they are almost nonexistent in what we say, write or recommend. And then a comment someone makes that they have subscribed to an RSS feed reminds us that we depend on it!

For example, the RSS technology powers the following for me:

• my blogs’ feeds, which makes them easier to keep up with for my readers
• my reading list – blogs, online magazines, you name it, I have subscribed and I check their feed daily. I only go on their website to comment, tweet the article if I find it relevant for those following me or download something if needed,
• promote content – my blog feed is on my LinkedIn page, Facebook page and a bunch of other profiles I have created all over the internet. The RSS delivered version of what I publish here is definitely a more powerful hook than a simple link.

We claim it’s dead, we say it’s not earth-shaking, but how would our lives be without RSS? Wouldn’t we still need a tool to help us keep up with everything that’s published in our field, wouldn’t we need some way to plug in to our blog content from other pages? I know for sure I wouldn’t be able to create new notes for all my posts, I’d forget a few time, and would stop sharing on Facebook. I know I would probably bookmark the several hundreds of blogs I currently read, but would fail miserably at reading them each time they publish something.

How about you? What do you use RSS for? Would you miss it if it disappeared tomorrow? And most importantly, why do you think we’d ignore what’s clearly useful technology just because it’s not as cool or as trendy as others, sometimes less useful, newcomers?

I wish you all warmth, joy, lots of laughter, great food, cool presents and everything else you’ve wished for! Hope you’re all enjoying your Christmas at least as much as I am enjoying mine

Happy Holidays!

2009 has been a year of many changes. It’s been a year of accomplishments and joy, as well as the year when a lot didn’t go according to plan, in both personal and business life. I would have wanted to skip the 2009 review and go straight to my 2010 plans. But that would have meant skipping some important steps of the process and make it less effective. So what happened in 2009?

On Words of a Broken Mirror, it’s been a year full of significant posts and essential lessons. I didn’t exactly meet my own plans of posting frequency, but I am extremely pleased with the quality of everything published here, as well as that of the guest posts I have written for other blogs.

2009 was also the year when I went from part time to full time business owner. Mirror Communications kept growing, I continued to work with IT companies and tackled other fields as well. I switched from spending part of my day in a client’s office to working fully on my own. This of course came with some organization and time management issues. It’s still fairly new but I’m getting better at it every day.

In what my PR and Marketing agency is concerned, there’s much work ahead. But I have had the opportunity to try a lot of things together with my clients and the results made us all very happy. We are currently plotting and planning what to do in 2009 It hasn’t been an easy ride, but it’s been challenging and inspiring and I am sure it’s been a very good decision, career wise, to start my own business.

In late August, together with two friends of mine, I have launched an online magazine for women, Cenusa de trandafir. It will turn 4 months on Christmas and it already has quite some traffic, good ranks and my personal reasons for happiness and excitement – over 1000 comments already, daily conversations with our readers on Twitter, many guest authors of which some became permanent authors! Compared to our competitors, we’re doing great at building a community around the magazine. The future holds a complete redesign and a lot more work from the entire team

I kept planning all year to revive my travel blog. It took me a while, but in November I again started posting frequently on Travel Spells! Better later than never, as the saying goes

I also started writing a book in 2009. As I have mentioned before it’s a vampire story. A few close friends (including Joanna Young whom I haven’t thanked enough for all her help and support) have read what I have written and their positive feedback fueled my desire to keep going. I was planning to release the book in December, but things got a bit delayed.

The personal part of 2009 has definitely been a wild ride. Yet I am happy and thankful for everything that has happened! Life sometimes makes us the most wonderful surprises ever!  And based on how I feel in the month of December, I can honestly say 2010 will be an amazing year on all levels

I remember dancing around the room at my 10th birthday party on “Will you be there”. Vynil of course! It made me forget my dad didn’t call that day. It helped me enjoy the party my mom worked so hard to organize.

I remember the concert in Bucharest, my friends crying because we were too young to go. I remember watching it on TV and enjoying every second of it.

I remember wearing a glove and trying to dance like him. Some moves I got right and I was in the center of attention for it!

I remember reading the first song lyrics in a book of a girl who was the president of the Michael Jackson Fan Club in Romania. I remember it was the first time I read every line in “Will you be there”. And although I love Billie Jean, Black or White, Bad, Dirty Diana, and almost every song he ever released, although I listen to Thriller twice a day driving to and from Bucharest, “Will you be there” is my absolute favorite Michael Jackson song.

As I was blipping and tweeting earlier, thank you Jacko, thank you for the music, for the lyrics and the wonderful, wonderful dancing!

Hold Me
Like The River Jordan
And I Will Then Say To Thee
You Are My Friend

Carry Me
Like You Are My Brother
Love Me Like A Mother
Will You Be There?

Weary
Tell Me Will You Hold Me
When Wrong, Will You Skold Me
When Lost Will You Find Me?

But They Told Me
A Man Should Be Faithful
And Walk When Not Able
And Fight Till The End
But I’m Only Human

Everyone’s Taking Control Of Me
Seems That The World’s
Got A Role For Me
I’m So Confused
Will You Show To Me
You’ll Be There For Me
And Care Enough To Bear Me

(Hold Me)
(Lay Your Head Lowly)
(Softly Then Boldly)
(Carry Me There)

(Lead Me)
(Love Me And Feed Me)
(Kiss Me And Free Me)
(I Will Feel Blessed)

(Carry)
(Carry Me Boldly)
(Lift Me Up Slowly)
(Carry Me There)

(Save Me)
(Heal Me And Bathe Me)
(Softly You Say To Me)
(I Will Be There)

(Lift Me)
(Lift Me Up Slowly)
(Carry Me Boldly)
(Show Me You Care)

(Hold Me)
(Lay Your Head Lowly)
(Softly Then Boldly)
(Carry Me There)

(Need Me)
(Love Me And Feed Me)
(Kiss Me And Free Me)
(I Will Feel Blessed)

[Spoken]
In Our Darkest Hour
In My Deepest Despair
Will You Still Care?
Will You Be There?
In My Trials
And My Tripulations
Through Our Doubts
And Frustrations
In My Violence
In My Turbulence
Through My Fear
And My Confessions
In My Anguish And My Pain
Through My Joy And My Sorrow
In The Promise Of Another Tomorrow
I’ll Never Let You Part
For You’re Always In My Heart.

Rest in peace, Michael, rest in peace!