Jonathan Rick

"Let's put it on our website." The refrain is increasingly common, but, as always, there's a right way and a wrong way.

An amateur will do what's easiest: copy and paste. But a pro knows that merely to copy and paste is to deprive readers of the Web's richness. Shifting copy from dead trees to web browsers is both art and science.

The art: to write for the web, you need to be not only a writer, but also a marketer, a designer, and a publicist. The science: to write...

Everyone thinks they hate PowerPoint. Yet what they actually hate is not the tool, but the way the tool is used. Here's the truth: when used appropriately, a slide deck can be indispensable and indelible - not a necessary evil, but a powerful aid.

You too can deliver a deck as if you were Steve Jobs. You just need to unlearn all the bad habits you've seen embraced by corporate America.

For today's communications pro, it's the $64,000 question. When you describe it, your clients roll their eyes. When you report it, you're lampooned. If you're honest with yourself, you know that every now and then you fake it.

And yet, the requests for it never stop. What is "it"? It's the return on investment (ROI) of social media. After all, if you can't measure it, you can't market it.

In this fun, fast-paced session, we'll walk through the...

Fact: many people are bad at writing. They're clear thinkers, but when it comes to putting pen to paper (or fingers to a keyboard), they're all thumbs. Even among those who should know better, good writers are hard to find.

In this highly interactive workshop, we'll help you hone your thoughts into writing that's accessible, fluid, and energetic. To make things easy and memorable, we'll walk through 10 myths (for example: "by writing densely, I'll impress...

This is my social media 101 workshop. It can be customized to any audience, whether, say, small-business owners or hospitals, and presented in an hour, over half a day, or in one-on-one sessions. Typical topics include:

1. Why social media matters

2. How to think about social media

3. How social media works best

4. How social media benefits you

5. Examples...

To most readers, big numbers - 250,000 impressions, one million fans, 13 million page views - are intimidating. because we can't wrap our minds around them. Put another way, numbers don't mean anything unless you put them in human terms.

In this presentation, we'll study the process by which you can crank down statistics and data into familiar comparisons that everyone understands.

The staple of public relations is the news release. It's been around forever; it follows generally agreed-upon guidelines for format, content, and length; and it still succeeds in its objective to publicize the item in question.

And yet, bound by stale conventions that suffocate originality and don't play well with multimedia, most releases have become cliched and boring. The solution: let's not ditch or overhaul the release altogether. Let's just better match...

If bloggers aren't part of your communications efforts, then you might as well be designing your brochures on a typewriter. No longer pajama-clad hobbyists, bloggers are the new assignment editors-card-carrying members of the media, whom you ignore at your peril (bad press) or worse (no press).

Yet bloggers are neither straight reporters nor pure pundits. As hybrids, they can be your advocate or adversary. They speak their own vernacular, observe their own...

How do you respond to a hostile question from a reporter? How do you answer a question when you don't know the answer? How do you translate your message into a memorable sound bite?

These are just a few of the issues we'll tackle in my media-training workshop. I break the session down into five parts:

1. a presentation on the core principles of mediaspeak, replete with real-life case studies

2. brainstorming to...

Whether you know it or not, you're carrying around a brand online. But in this matter you have a choice: you can brand yourself, or you can be branded. You can actively own your identity, or you can be a passive receptacle of default settings.

Indeed, it's no longer enough to rely on 1.0 staples like the presence of a LinkedIn profile or a company website. Your brand now encompasses everything from the search results when your name is Googled to your email...

LinkedIn is an indispensable but often underused social network. Let's unleash its power and start optimizing your presence here. As a result, you'll build your brand, demonstrate thought leadership, advance your career, and even generate leads.

In this workshop, we'll walk through your LinkedIn profile from top to bottom, and help you to perfect it in accordance with both your brand and LinkedIn's algorithms. Topics we'll cover include the following:

• Which...

Whether you know it or not, recruiters are looking at you everyday. Not just your LinkedIn profile, but also what appears when they Google your name. For example, what if your resume were replaced by your last five tweets? Would you get hired? Indeed, some employers today don't even bother to post a job. Instead, they search online for the right candidate. How can you synthesize your resume, cover letter, and social networks into a portfolio that will place you head and shoulders above your...

When it comes to e-newsletters, everyone knows that your subject line is the silver bullet. Yet there's so much more to email marketing - starting with what we call it.

For example, think about the message you're sending when you refer to your emails as a "blast." Do you really want to conjure up an image of spam clogging an inbox?

Other considerations you may be overlooking:

• Are you using preview...

If you're like most businesspeople today, you've never received any training about how to properly and effectively send email; you just picked things up along the years. It's no wonder why most of corporate America has a love-hate relationship with email. We can't live with its nonstop frequency, yet we can't live without its utility.

Let this presentation remedy that and make you work smarter, not harder. We'll discuss the pros and cons of communicating via...