Written by Kyle Reddoch

Have you ever wanted to disappear after committing some stupid faux pas? If it occurs in a professional context, it could be more than embarrassing - it could cost your business or hurt your career. You want visibility in your career. However, that visibility should be a positive one. The last thing you need is a gaffe - that is, doing something (mentioned in the meaning above) that would put you in the negative spotlight. Here are 10 things to beware of:

1. Misspelling someone’s name

A person’s name is one of the most important possessions - so make sure to spell it right. Nothing indicates a lack a professionalism more than misspelling a person’s name. When in doubt, ask. Most people won’t find your question annoying. In fact, they’ll be honored that you thought spelling their name was important enough to check directly.

A misspelling need not involve only a personal name, either. It might be a key term used in your organization, profession, or industry. A company’s name is also among these.

2. Mispronouncing a name

The same logic regarding spelling applies to pronunciation. As before, simple as the person directly. If you have to, make up a phonetic representation of the name and practice it with the person. Again, people won’t mind your taking up their time this way; they’ll be flattered that you care about saying their name correctly (as long as they don’t have to have the same conversation with you more that once).

3. Commenting on a personal/family photo

I once a man and a women, thought they were brother and sister, I managed to keep my mouth shut. They turned out to be father and daughter.

The mistake I avoided, however, can occur with photographs as well. If you see a personal or family photo on a person’s desk, avoid commenting on relationships. That young boy you though was a grandson could possibly just be a son. Similarly, if you know the photo is an earlier one of the person you’re meeting with, avoid comments like “You looked great back then.”

4. Asking about pregnancy

No matter how much the women looks like she’s showing, keep your mouth shut until she actually brings the subject up. If you ask, and the answer is “no”, you will have no graceful retreat. If you’re conducting an interview, you have also opened the door wide open to a discrimination lawsuit.

5. Asking about unseen/absent spouse

Suppose last year you were at a company get together and saw your co-worker and their spouse. This year, you only see the co-worker. As with the pregnancy situation, keep our mouth shut. Don’t be in the position; asking about the spouse only to be told. “We’re divorced.”

6. Referring improperly to your boss

The same errors in determining family relationships can apply to office ones also. If you’re planning to be away and want to refer callers to our boss, that’s perfectly fine. However, make sure that your boss is okay with these referrals. More important, make sure your voicemail greeting or e-mail auto-reply makes the relationship clear. Don’t just say. “If you have any questions, please contact Kyle Reddoch at (phone number or e-mail address).” Say instead, “…please contact my supervisor/boss, Kyle Reddoch…”

7. Failing to reset your voicemail or e-mail auto-reply

When you return from time away from work, undo any absence greeting or auto-replies you’ve setup. Few things make you look dumber than having a greeting that references your return to work date from three months ago. If you think you’re going to forget, try placing a note on your phone or computer monitor.

8. Leaving a departed employee in voicemail / or on the Web

Once an employee leaves your company, remove that person from voicemail and any online directories that you may have. Leaving a person in place can make the company look foolish. Also, you might create the opportunity for an unaware caller to still leave a message for that departed employee, leaving the message to get missed.

9. Correcting the boss

Correcting your boss will rarely endear you to that person. If he or she made a mistake, try to correct it in as low-profile a way as possible. Perhaps you can talk to your boss during a break? However, you may (and should) publicly correct the boss when the boss in wrong about being wrong. In that limited circumstance, public correction is okay.

10. Displaying disunity in public

If you have disagreements with another person or department, resolve them privately. Don’t air dirty laundry to outsiders. Doing so makes your whole organization look bad.

Kyle Reddoch is the Owner of The Everyday Web Expert, a full service web design firm located in Amarillo, TX. He is also a featured writer on many blogs. He loves every minute of his life with his wonderful wife and two kids at their home in Amarillo.

Today I had the opportunity to give a crash course in social media to a group of publishing colleagues at Wiley’s European headquarters. The talk was only an hour, so we covered a lot of ground quickly with hopes that everyone could pick up at least one tool they could put to use right away. If social media is like drinking from a firehose, we all got a little wet today.

Many if not most of the attendees were involved in some sort of social media activity, either personally or professionally.  Almost everyone was using Facebook to some degree, less using Twitter, and a lone MySpace user.

Like most, the challenge of everyone in the room was in filtering the noise in order to find opportunities where they could provide value. My goal today was to provide a collection of tools that might be used to set up a Social Media Listening Post - a place where all the signal can be collected and where one might find opportunities for conversation.

The group asked a lot of very smart questions, and as a result we bounced around quite a bit from tool to tool, as everyone contributed ways in which they found certain sites or tools useful. I admit I rediscovered a forgotten tool while answering a question, so I came away with something new again as well.

Among the tools we covered were:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• Ning
• Twitterfall
• Google Reader
• Google Alerts
• Google Blog Search
• Social Media Firehose
• Backtype
• Social Mention
• Board Reader
• Feed My Inbox
• Twimailer
• Tweetdeck
• Twhirl
• Firefox
• Google Chrome

What other tools do you use when filtering social media? How did you develop your social media listening post?

I witnessed an interesting use of Twitter today by  Chelsea Green Publishers who promoted their website and books with a very simple contest.

The premise was very straight forward - tweet about a book from their website that you would like to read. The 10th person to tweet a book wins the book tweeted. Free book, free shipping. Easy, right?

There are several things I like about the way Chelsea Green ran this contest including:

1. You have to follow them on Twitter to be eligible
2. They have built “Tweet this book” links into each product page that includes a link to the book, as well as hashtags.
3. They primed the contest with a countdown which was re-tweeted several times to spread the word.

So, how did they do on the first run? Some quick stats:

• Total contest time was approximately 4 minutes
• Total contestants was 27
• Total tweets (entries) was 45

At first glance these look like really small numbers, but consider how many others saw these tweets.  According to my quick study via search.twitter.com it appears that these 45 tweets reached 14,216 Twitter users. And each of those 14,000+ users was sent a book title, hashtags, and a direct link to the book’s product page. And, those 14,000+ followers does not include any users who may be consuming searches for the variety of hastags or terms that were part of those tweets.

As a bonus, it appears the Huffington Post re-tweeted at least one funny entry from @daveburdick (over 5000 followers of the 14,000+ total.)

So if you ask me, reaching 14,000 people in the span of less than 5 minutes is pretty good. Of course, we don’t yet know how many of those, if any, clicked through to the publisher’s website, nor how many purchased books.

But, Chelsea only spent some time and the cost of one book plus shipping to try this experiment, which I think is important to do. We need to experiment a little more.  All in all I think it is a very clever use of Twitter to perhaps gain some awareness of the publisher and their books.

What do you think? Productive use of Twitter, or social media folly? What other examples have you seen?

This week I had a lively conversation about Amazon’s recent Kindle mobile phone announcement with Wiley Author Reto Meier. I invited Reto to share his thoughts with readers on why he believes digital books have a very long way yet to go.

The future of publishing may be digital, but costly Kindles and eBooks on iPhones aren’t enough to trigger a digital book revolution. It’ll take more than the promise of a portable library to convince readers they’re better off without paper.

The iPod heralded a seismic shift in content distribution. Music downloads now seem as obvious as they were inevitable, so it’s reasonable to expect written content to follow music, movies, and TV down the path towards digital distribution. But to get consumers onboard, eBooks will need to supply a superior reading experience and better value for money than they currently offer.

Increased availability satisfies a demand that doesn’t yet exist

Last week Google released Book Search for mobiles and made over 1.5 million public domain books available on iPhones and Android mobiles. As well as introducing a revamped Kindle 2.0, Amazon has announced that its more contemporary range of Kindle titles will be made available for download to devices other than the Kindle.

Both companies are addressing the issue of title availability, but that’s not the eBook bottleneck. Having more titles is an important step, but it’s not enough to trigger a fundamental shift in people’s reading habits.

It’s easy to blame the slow uptake of digital books on nostalgia for printed paper

There’s a some good reasons digital books haven’t taken off, and the least of them is the ‘I just like paper books’ problem. Don’t get me wrong, like many people, I don’t think that the look, feel, and smell of books will ever be fully replaced. But it’s possible to imagine a future where convenience, cost, and environmental concerns make digital books a mass market alternative to the paperback, in the same way that paperbacks have become a cheaper, more convenient alternative to hard covers.
The true causes of consumer reluctance are more compelling, and more easily addressed, than an enduring love of paper:

• Readability and the user experience
• Value and the total cost of ownership
• Flexibility: to sell, trade, and loan books

eReaders need the readability of a paperback printed on recycled paper, to last 12hrs, and be durable enough to throw in a backpack

Many books will soon be available on mobile phones, letting you read eBooks on hardware you already own, though at a cost to your battery-life and with poor readability. With better batteries, phones may yet become a reasonable platform for reading, but it’s hard to see such a small, eye-straining LCD screen leading to the mass desertion of paper.

Both the Kindle and Sony’s eReader use breakthrough technologies to offer improved readability and extended battery life, as such they seem the more likely catalyst for mass eBook adoption. They’re not cheap though, they cost over $350 and lack the readability, durability, and portability of a paperback. The hefty price tag doesn’t include a contrast ratio that approaches black text on white paper and the low resolution is a problem for the line drawings in text books.

Paper books combine content with the hardware needed to read it in one convenient package

Like CDs, books are a way to distribute content, but unlike music, electronic books introduce a new hardware cost for consuming written content. CDs don’t come with headphone jacks, so the removal of the physical media makes sense for content that’s always needed a separate ‘player’. Fully self-contained, books have never needed extra hardware to be read: no turntable, no CD player, no iPod. Electronic book readers need to be much better value and find ways to justify their upfront costs.

As a reader, what do I gain from electronic distribution?

People like the option of listening to a lot of different music, so an iPod that makes your entire music collection portable is a big win.

Digital books ask readers to sacrifice the advantages of paper for the same reward as iPods, but if you’re not at school or working in publishing how often do you want to carry around more than a couple of books? I’m a big reader, but I don’t often have more than two books on the go.

Until digital books can be traded as easily as their paper cousins, publishers must consider the implicit costs of digital delivery

DRM is a regular source of contention in the tech industry, and there’s plenty of debate over the use and effectiveness of rights management for books. Leaving aside the important arguments over fair use and piracy, it’s worth remembering that the exchange of books has been a powerful force in their marketing. I’ve borrowed, loaned, and traded a lot more books than I’ve bought new, but it’s the books I’ve borrowed that have fuelled my appetite for buying new fiction and trying new authors. It’s important to consider the implied costs of DRM if it means eBook readers won’t share books with friends and family.

Aside from that, by selling or exchanging their used books, readers have been able to subsidize the cost of further purchases. Digital editions, at a discount of only one or two dollars, don’t offer a payoff comparable to exchanging or selling used books.

Without the opportunity to experiment with digital music, it’s unlikely that its adoption would have been so fast or comprehensive

When music started shifting to digital, early adopters could rip CDs they already owned to MP3s. If publishers offered free digital copies along with every paper edition sold, wary consumers could experiment without paying twice. Eventually ‘digital only’ editions could be sold cheaper to encourage people to make the switch.

Until students, editors, and literary agents are reading textbooks and manuscripts on eReaders, there’s little chance that the general public will welcome them

Rather than focusing on paperbacks, publishers and book sellers should look to replace the backpack full of textbooks. Students, and people in publishing, are an obvious target for replacing a bag, or briefcase, full of heavy books with a lightweight, convenient device. At $350 it’s clear why this hasn’t already happened.

By targeting students, you can develop a market for digital fiction through an audience that’s already comfortable with electronic books and the associated hardware.

Free, durable hardware and cheaper digital content will make eBooks as inevitable as on-demand movie downloads

Where iPods offer a familiar user experience at a familiar price, with the convenience of having all your music on hand, eBooks on mobiles and $350+ readers offer poor readability at a premium price. Consumers being asked to consider taking their libraries digital aren’t being given enough reasons to take the plunge.

The future of print may be digital, but for a real industry shakeup we’ll need to see cheap, easy to read, durable hardware coupled with cheaper digital editions. If Amazon started giving away Kindles while including a free Kindle edition with every paper book sold, they could quickly become the iTunes of the written word.

Reto Meier is a mobile software engineer and author of Professional Android Application Development. He’s based in London and blogs about Android, technology, and programming.

Did you feel that? That was a tremor in the publishing world. There have been many of them over the past several months, but yesterday’s announcement from Amazon could be especially game changing in my opinion.

Amazon announced plans to make its Kindle titles available for a variety of mobile phones. Earlier this year they announced that they would no longer support PDF or Microsoft Reader formats for their ebooks, effectively locking buyers into its Mobipocket or Kindle formats.

Since the Kindle format is only an offshoot of the Mobipocket format, I wonder if these mobile device efforts will revolve around an updated Mobipocket Reader. The Mobipocket Reader software is already available for a variety of mobile phones including Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and Symbian. If Amazon plans to revamp this application to make it available for other handhelds including iPhone – and they can duplicate the easy buying experience Kindle owners already enjoy – this could really change the landscape for ebooks.

In an article entitled The once and future e-book: on reading in the digital age, published earlier this week, Ars Technica’s John Siracusa lamented that dedicated ebook readers are not the entire answer, and asked why Amazon didn’t realize that devices like the iPhone were where reading was headed.

I do still believe that dedicated readers are more appropriate for a mature e-book market, when consumers can more easily justify the cost of such a specialized device. But that doesn’t mean a dedicated reader can’t succeed. The Kindle is the best example, hitching itself to the star of Amazon’s existing retail store. Maybe Amazon will haul the ungainly Kindle right across the critical mass threshold and it will become “the iPod of e-books.” Then again, maybe Apple will finally figure out that the iPod (and, yes, the iPhone) is “the iPod of e-books.” Amazon’s efforts are handicapped by the hurdle of that separate hardware purchase, so the door is still open for a strong competitor targeting an existing reader-capable hardware platform, whether it be Apple or someone else.

John also suggested that Apple was best positioned to lead us to the ebook promised land.

Will Apple wake from its apparent slumber and pull the sword from the stone—the sword that’s currently taped to its hand and sheathed in a teflon-lined crevice? That’d certainly be the shortest path between the present and the inevitable e-book future.

I say if Amazon plays this right and creates applications that open their ebook store to a variety of devices - including iPhone- they may actually hold Uther’s sword. But controlling formats and owning the largest selection of current and best selling books won’t in itself make this a winning solution. Amazon needs to deliver the right experience, making both the buying and reading of ebooks easy and enjoyable.

What do you think – major shift, or just another ripple?

(Image credit DaveQ)

Written by Mario Sundar

Now, why didn’t I do this before! A perfect way to combine my love of management philosophy and all things Apple, by churning out a playlist of Jobs’ Top 10 quotes.

What started it all, was this recent article in Fortune Magazine that comes on the heels of Apple being selected as America’s Most Admired Company.

Steve Jobs Rocks! And, so does Apple!

But what I unearthed there was a slew of golden quotes from Jobs himself, who has quickly replaced Jack Welch as the one business celebrity I’d like to meet (although I came pretty close to that in the past).

To make it easier to consume, I’ve broken down the quotes into two sets of five each (one set on Management and the other on Leadership). Read and Learn, my friends!

Steve Jobs’ Top 10 Quotes (after the jump)

5 Management Mantras

#10. On Management

My job is to not be easy on people. My job is to make them better. My job is to pull things together from different parts of the company and clear the ways and get the resources for the key projects.

And to take these great people we have and to push them and make them even better, coming up with more aggressive visions of how it could be.

#9. On Hiring

Recruiting is hard. It’s just finding the needles in the haystack. You can’t know enough in a one-hour interview.

So, in the end, it’s ultimately based on your gut. How do I feel about this person? What are they like when they’re challenged? I ask everybody that: ‘Why are you here?’ The answers themselves are not what you’re looking for. It’s the meta-data.

#8. On Firing

We’ve had one of these before, when the dot-com bubble burst. What I told our company was that we were just going to invest our way through the downturn, that we weren’t going to lay off people, that we’d taken a tremendous amount of effort to get them into Apple in the first place - the last thing we were going to do is lay them off.

#7. On a CEO succession Plan

I mean, some people say, ‘Oh, God, if [Jobs] got run over by a bus, Apple would be in trouble.’ And, you know, I think it wouldn’t be a party, but there are really capable people at Apple.

My job is to make the whole executive team good enough to be successors, so that’s what I try to do.

#6. On Product Strategy

It’s not about pop culture, and it’s not about fooling people, and it’s not about convincing people that they want something they don’t. We figure out what we want. And I think we’re pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That’s what we get paid to do.

We just want to make great products. (I think he means “insanely great products!“)

5 Leadership Mantras

#5. On Leadership

So when a good idea comes, you know, part of my job is to move it around, just see what different people think, get people talking about it, argue with people about it, get ideas moving among that group of 100 people, get different people together to explore different aspects of it quietly, and, you know - just explore things.

#4. On Evangelism

When I hire somebody really senior, competence is the ante. They have to be really smart. But the real issue for me is, Are they going to fall in love with Apple? Because if they fall in love with Apple, everything else will take care of itself.

They’ll want to do what’s best for Apple, not what’s best for them, what’s best for Steve, or anybody else. (this actually reiterates my oft-repeated mantra of “ubiquitous evangelism” in companies)

#3. On Focus

People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully.

#2. On the User Experience

Our DNA is as a consumer company - for that inpidual customer who’s voting thumbs up or thumbs down. That’s who we think about. And we think that our job is to take responsibility for the complete user experience. And if it’s not up to par, it’s our fault, plain and simply.

#1. On Creativity

That happens more than you think, because this is not just engineering and science. There is art, too. Sometimes when you’re in the middle of one of these crises, you’re not sure you’re going to make it to the other end. But we’ve always made it, and so we have a certain degree of confidence, although sometimes you wonder.

I think the key thing is that we’re not all terrified at the same time. I mean, we do put our heart and soul into these things.

-

And, my favorite, which nails the ethos of living the dream at your job (that I’ve written about here)

We don’t get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life.

Life is brief, and then you die, you know?

And we’ve all chosen to do this with our lives. So it better be damn good. It better be worth it.

amen.

Written by David Schwartz

In fact, we love South Park so much, we treasure it above KFC, Xbox and our own mothers.  Really! More than KFC. It’s that good.

And, of course, one of the main reasons for this love is Eric Cartman. We think he is one of the greatest ever TV characters of all time. But don’t take our word for it, just check out his finest moments.

As always, if you think we have missed something, please let us know. There are so many funny Cartman clips, keeping it down to just 24 was almost impossible. Plus, we wanted to spread the clips around rather than just feature entire episodes.

Anyway, enjoy!

24. Cartman eats his own underwear

23. Casa Bonita

22. No hall pass

21. Pretending he has Tourette’s so he can say whatever he wants

20. Kyle’s mom is a bitch

19. Cartman starts Christian rock band

18. Cartman’s tea-party

17. Cartman restarts Civil War

16. Cartman pretends to be a robot

15. Cartman joins the Special Olympics

14. Ben Affleck dates Cartman’s hand

13. Cartman and NAMBLA

12. Cartman dresses up like Hitler

11. Cartman wants a Wii

10. Cartman and KFC

9. Busting my balls

8. Heat of the Moment

7. Cartman’s Ginger snap

6. Cartman’s gay polarity

5. Kyle has sand in his vagina

4. Respect my authoritah

3. Cartman’s anal probe

2. Bad pie

1. Making Scott Tenorman eat his own parents