How Much Information Should Be Free?

Recently I convinced my association to change the way we publish our magazine online. In the past, we would convert a portion of the magazine to a text file and build individual html pages for each article—reformatting as we went along.
As the person who did this, I can tell you it was a time consuming [...]

Help Me to Help My Bloggers

Instead of sharing my thoughts, I need your suggestions.
My association’s blog is in its infancy and the bloggers who are participating are doing great and really working hard to make the new blog a success. The problem I am having is that a few of them really don’t understand what a blog is and what [...]

CAE Study Tip: Form a Study Group

Overall I think a CAE study group is a good thing. My study group only had three people in it and we met weekly in a Starbucks mainly to review what read. We found sitting for a few hours and talking about things worked great. And knowing that I had other people to “report to” [...]

Don’t Hand Your Your Members a Rake When They Need a Hammer

“There are so many things to do in social media and such little time to do it because if you don’t do it someone else will and you’ll lose members and…” (okay, take a breath).
This is the subtle message I hear about social media and associations when I attend conferences, go to workshops, read articles, [...]

What Do They Call Bloggers Block Anyway?

For the past few days I just couldn’t come up with anything to write. It was driving me crazy. The funny thing is, I noticed the bloggers on my association’s website must be having the same problem (there are zero new threads for the past week). 
We all must be suffering from bloggers block.
To combat what’s [...]

CAE Study Tip: Write, Wiki, Whatever

Write out what you learn while studying for the CAE exam. Like talking out loud, this also helps cement the ideas in your head.  I guess it opens up another part of your brain to the information.
I made flashcards for myself with key concepts on them. I never actually went back and studied what I [...]

Back From the Abyss (Was I Ever Really There?)

I might be a web communications specialist, but surprising, I can be digitally out-of-touch at times (unplugged). I have a cell phone, but I am too cheap to pay the $1.50 per or so it costs to connect to the Internet and I don’t have a laptop (never really needed one as my job doesn’t require a [...]