By Alexa Garthwaite Meetings are an unavoidable part of business. Every company, from the smallest start-up to the largest corporate giant, has to hold them. Sometimes, these are productive – participants come up with new ideas, make bold decisions, and leave with a sense of accomplishment and achievement. However, all too often, meetings drag on unnecessarily with uninspired discussion and few conclusions reached. The key to [&hellip... Read More

By Lindsay Bell So, as I sat down to write this post, I had lots of ideas going through my mind. And I’m not going to lie, most of them were negative. You see, in the past few months I’ve encountered some truly despicable behavior in the digital space. No sugar-coating it. I’ve heard people bad-mouthing others. Experienced constant negativity and criticism. Watched as thoughts or [&hellip... Read More

By Philip Given There is a perennial divide between gear-obsessed hobbyists and seasoned photography pros. “It’s not about the equipment,” the pros say, “just get out there and shoot.” This is truer than ever before as we’re armed with an incredibly powerful photographic tool right here in our pockets – the camera attached to our mobile device of choice. In an Instagram-heavy world, you might be [&hellip... Read More

By Gini Dietrich It’s always fun when a media outlet – such as the New York Times - takes a swat at the PR industry. That’s exactly what they did a couple of weeks ago when David Segal, the writer of The Haggler column, wrote “Swatting at a Swarm of Public Relations Spam.” The good news is he took a bigger swipe at the media list compilation companies [&hellip... Read More

By Joe Cardillo The recent redux of Gmail had a lot of people worrying about where their marketing emails were ending up. Did that important, four-alarmer crisis email get buried in the Promotions tab or get flagged as spam? What about the beautifully designed newsletter your team spent days editing and laying out? Where did it go? Once the alarm bells rang, most people got around to agreeing that the [&hellip... Read More

By Gini Dietrich I hope everyone in the U.S. had a really good Thanksgiving! If you follow me on Facebook, you already know that we made bracelets on the Rainbow Loom, took a cycling “class” in my basement, cooked and ate Thanksgiving dinner, saw Frozen, went ice skating, made our own pizzas, and visited The Bean at Millennium Park. All-in-all a very successful holiday weekend (and [&hellip... Read More

By Kate Finley I have a confession to make. It’s hard to say this in front of everyone and I’m hoping you won’t judge me harshly but it has to be said: I don’t use newswire distribution services. I also don’t think “putting a news release on the wire” is earned media (aka organic PR.) Instead, I think it’s advertising (aka paid media). Yikes. There. I said [&hellip... Read More

By Martin Waxman OK – maybe I’m jumping the gun – but I’ve been caught up in the U.S. Thanksgiving/holiday spirit and I must have fast-forwarded to the end of 2013. Have no fear, it’s not my final post of the year for Spin Sucks. But I thought I’d kick off the annual round-up season by reflecting on six things I’ve learned in the past 11 [&hellip... Read More

By Laura Petrolino I once worked on a project focused on improving human connection through better communication. The communication in question was the human connection between employees and the customers they communicated with on the phone every day. The basic dilemma for them, and for many people in similar positions, is how you improve ‘connection’ when the client is a faceless individual. After a while – [&hellip... Read More

By Gini Dietrich I was trolling through Google+ the other day, when I saw an interesting update from Kaarina Dillabough. It was a link from Judy Dunn’s blog post called, “Can You Name 99 Things You Love in 10 Minutes?” Because this is my last post before Thanksgiving (we have our normal guest bloggers tomorrow and then we’re taking the rest of the week off), I [&hellip... Read More