Communications

Measure What Matters

by Chip Griffin on June 3, 2011

In communications and in business, too many people get hung up on measuring for the sake of measuring. Just because you can generate all sorts of metrics with impressive numbers and charts doesn’t mean that what you’re looking at will really make a difference in your ultimate success. I tackle one specific element of this [...]

Surfing Back in Time

by Chip Griffin on June 1, 2011

I had a conversation yesterday that spurred me to think back to the “old days” of the World Wide Web. You see, I’ve been at this game long enough to remember Yahoo before it was at Yahoo.com. Most of you probably don’t know that it used to live at http://akebono.stanford.edu. In any case, I took [...]

10 Causes of Sloppy Email

by Chip Griffin on May 31, 2011

I get a lot of email. And a lot of that email reflects pretty poorly on the sender. Some of the emails I receive wouldn’t even make the cut as amateur ransom notes. They are often laden with misspellings or typos. Frequently they fail to make a succinct point. They routinely seem to be disorganized [...]

How “Energy Efficient” is Your Marketing Campaign?

by Chip Griffin on February 21, 2011

While listening to the latest episode of FIR Live over the weekend, the concept of “energy efficiency” of marketing and communications campaigns came to mind. No, I’m not talking about how “green” the effort is. This isn’t about recycled paper or carbon emissions. I’m thinking more like the energy efficiency of a furnace. Is 95% [...]

Looking to the Future of Digital Public Affairs

by Chip Griffin on February 18, 2011

Earlier this year, we provided our clients at DCI Group with a white paper I wrote to forecast trends in digital public affairs for the next 12-18 months. We recently decided to make it available publicly, and you can download your own copy of the document for free at the DCI Digital web site. Like [...]

Malcolm Gladwell’s “Weak Ties”

by Chip Griffin on November 2, 2010

Malcolm Gladwell’s recent article in The New Yorker magazine continues to generate discussion, so I decided to offer up my two cents over on the DCI Group blog. Though the bonds created by social media may be weak, they can be the glue that binds more lasting and impactful relationships. Read the full blog post [...]

Top 10 Tips for Conference Speakers and Organizers

by Chip Griffin on April 26, 2010

I do my fair share of speaking, and I attend conferences regularly. After having done both over the past month, I have some observations that hopefully may help other speakers as well as those who recruit people to speak at events.

A Briefer History of Time and a Bit of Greater Meaning

by Chip Griffin on March 23, 2010

Most of the time I read recently released books, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t good books out there that were published more than a few months ago. I’m not talking the “classics” — which honestly don’t generally appeal to me all that much (with apologies to my old English teachers). There are books from [...]

Speakers & Writers: Drop the Potty Mouth

by Chip Griffin on March 15, 2010

When a speaker or author drops the “f bomb,” utters excretory expletives, or launches a lusty cuss word, it doesn’t add emphasis. It doesn’t make them look cool, hip, and smart. It makes them seem crass, juvenile, arrogant, and less than they are. I say this not because I’m a linguistic purist. Far from it. [...]

A Tech Geek’s Guide to Politics

by Chip Griffin on March 9, 2010

Brad Feld writes about the current debacle in Colorado where Amazon has shut down all of its affiliates in that state as a result of a new law passed by their legislature and signed by the governor to expand sales tax obligations. Eric Norlin, organizer of the Defrag and Glue conferences, notes in the comments [...]