Enjoy these bloopers from book manuscripts I’ve edited:

The buzzard sounded and the basketball game commenced.

• If the game gets out of hand, the buzzard can referee, too!

Standing at her kitchen sink, Lisa’s idle hands rested in the warm sudsy water.

• Those hands just can’t decide whether to stand or sit.

Scott noticed the dreamy look that entranced his dishwasher.

• My dishwasher gets that dreamy look, too, especially when I add dishes that formerly held ice cream sundaes.

Sailing high through the air, our eyes followed the kick.

• And our eyes scored a field goal each, resulting in a score of 15-0.

Jared broke the water’s trance after a minute of silence.

• Mystical water, indeed.

Stretching her thin arms and arching her back, she let out an extensive yarn.

• I’ve heard of passing gas… but passing yarn? Ouch!

In yesterday’s post, I presented a case study about how bloggy giveaways reap fantastic benefits for the giver and the receiver.

I’m a strong believer in the barter system, and over the years, I’ve benefited by trading my professional services for goods and services I needed, but couldn’t afford.

• I’ve literally “worked for food,” exchanging public relations services for freezer meals from a meal assembly business.

• I’ve given editing and proofreading services in exchange for tens of thousands of dollars worth of graphic design and printing services.

• I’ve done professional blogging and teaching in exchange for book promotion services and tuition at conferences.

I’m still trying to convince my massage therapist that I’ll prepare her e-newsletter in exchange for massages, and I’m reminding my hair stylist that I’ll give her a spanking new Web site in exchange for cuts and highlights.

I’m also hoping to negotiate a king-sized bed in trade for blogging services. Any mattress companies out there that need a blog?

With a little creativity and a can-do attitude, most entrepreneurs can work out trade agreements that are beneficial to all. Last summer, I attended a CRAVEparty in Seattle.  When we registered, we were asked:

What (services) do you want? What do you have to give?”

We listed both on our name tags, and as we mingled, we had opportunities to negotiate on-the-spot trade agreements.

Our Twitter followers volunteered some of their favorite trade agreements:

• @GHCU (Shannon Perry) - Traded editing services in exchange for a computer when my former boss closed up his independent business to take a job. Woot!

• @karenrobbins -Traded writing articles for advertising for flower shop. Earned a column in the local paper.

What about you? What’s the best trade you’ve ever made?

‘Fess up. You like getting free stuff, don’t you?

Me too. In fact, I have yet to meet someone who doesn‘t like getting freebies.

That’s why, in our blogging partnerships with trade show and event producers, we encourage our clients to give away several tickets to the event in exchange for guest blog posts.

It’s a win-win for everybody.

Here’s how it works (using our client, the Northwest Flower & Garden Show, as a case study):

1.  The event producers allot us a limited number of tickets to distribute to show-goers who agree to submit a guest blog post that chronicles their day at the event.

2.  We:

• Publicize the giveaway on our client’s blog.
• Promote the upcoming guest posts on our client’s blog.
• Screen the applicants, provide detailed instructions to the ticket winners, and handle the intake, editing, and publishing of all guest blog posts.

3.  Our client gets several professional-quality guest posts in which enthusiastic attendees explore all aspects of the show.

4.  The ticket winners - who are usually avid bloggers and gardening enthusiasts - get to attend the show for free in exchange for telling the world about their day.

Win-win.

Here are some notes we received from guest bloggers after last year’s Northwest Flower & Garden Show:

Thanks again for the pass. You did some great edits and added the perfect pictures!

THANK YOU SO MUCH for the tickets & the opportunity to blog about our experience at the show - we had a blast (and just got home)!

I had a grand time today, thank you for the opportunity to share my experience.

Our client wins, too. Why? Because the guest bloggers tell (beg?) everyone they know to read their posts. All their friends read it, link to it on their own blogs, and forward it to their gardening friends. It grows from there… grassroots marketing at its best.

And trust us; those guest posts get read. And read. And read. Last year’s guest posts for the Northwest Flower & Garden Show rank as some of the most-visited posts on Flora’s blog, receiving not dozens, not hundreds, but thousands of hits year-round.

(Aside: My 12-year-old son guest-wrote the blog’s all-time most-popular post, Junior Bonsai Warrior, which has garnered over 5,000 page views so far!)

We’re gearing up for another round of guest posts beginning Wednesday, February 18 and running through the close of the Northwest Flower & Garden Show on Sunday, February 22. We’ve been inundated with people requesting to be guest bloggers for this year’s show, and we’ve scheduled a terrific lineup of guest bloggers.

Hope you’ll follow Flora’s blog this week and find inspiration through the words and reflections of our guest bloggers. Oh, and if you live in the Northwest, plan to attend the show. It’s truly magnificent!

Here are links to the 2008 guest blog posts, to help you plan your day:

• Junior Bonsai Warrior
• Gen Xers Go to Market and Buy, Buy, Buy!
• Review: Container Garden Exhibition
• Eat Your Vegetables! Edible Beauty at the Show
• High School Students Rate the Show ‘Really Cool’
• Celebrating the Harvest…in February
• Seminar Reflections
• Unbeatable Plant Picks for Your Garden
• Organic Gardening with Children
• Eavesdropping on Show-goers
• Live, from the Show, it’s Dianne
• So Much To See at the Show
• Gidget Goes Green
• Anticipation…
• Container Gardening Ideas
• Orchids Coming Out My Ears
• Tools of the Trade for Home Gardeners

Dig Deeper

• Services for Services: The Power of Bartering

I was helping an author revise the bio that would appear on his book’s back cover. Here’s the copy he sent me:

I have been a widower since 1978, when my wife pasted away from cancer, we had 11 children of which 3 have past away.

We’ll ignore the run-on and jump straight to this sentence’s sticky issue: past/passed.

Use “past” when referring to a period of time that has gone by:

• In my past, I was married and had 11 children.

Use “passed” when referring to the action of passing:

• My wife passed away…
• Three of my children have passed away…

One does not paste away from cancer… paste is an adhesive.

If you’ve never attended a writers’ conference (or even if you have), you’ll want to check out a terrific resource. The Florida Christian Writers’ Conference blog (which we manage) serves up tips & advice from a variety of editors, agents, and freelance writers.

Here are links to this week’s articles:

• Quotable Quote: Move from wanna-be writer to published writer (Mona Hodgson)
• What to bring to the conference (Cheri Cowell)
• Info to include on your business cards (Laura Christianson)
• How attending a writers’ conference can jump-start your writing career (Shelly Ballestero)
• Meet the “Snowflake Guy,” Randy Ingermanson
• The power of a writing platform (Athena Dean)
• Attending your first writers’ conference? Do some goal-setting first (Jim Rubart)
• Write every day… except during tax time (Ken Kuhlken)
• How to make the most of a writers’ conference (John Vonhof)

When Antoine’s father has a stroke, Antoine - the prodigal son - reluctantly returns from life in the city to his rural French village and takes over the family store.

None-too-happy to be time-warped to the past from which he’d tried to escape, the surly Antoine drives his father’s grocery van around the sparsely-populated countryside, delivering groceries to the area’s senior citizens.

As he makes his daily rounds, Antoine learns valuable lessons about life, customer service, and closing sales:

1.  Offer eye-candy. Antoine paints his white van bright, cheerful colors. The curious seniors emerge from their homes, anxious to discover what this new phenomenon is all about.

2.  Grab opportunities. When a customer foists free kittens on him, Antoine gives the cuddly balls of fur to his customers… and reminds them to purchase milk for their new pet.

3.  Offer second chances. When some of his customers say, “I can’t afford to pay you today; put it on my tab,” Antoine extends them grace.

4.  Give of yourself when your customer least expects it. When Antoine notices the door on his customer’s chicken coop is ruined, he fixes it. And he doesn’t expect any favors in return.

5.  Listen. Rather than talking constantly, Antoine lets his customers do the talking. He silently notes his customers’ likes and dislikes, and stocks his shelves accordingly.

6.  Don’t let quirky customers de-rail you. Antoine encounters more than a few difficult customers during his daily rounds. Rather than allowing personality conflicts to defeat him, Antoine learns creative ways to work around them.

7.  Small gifts count. When Antoine discovers that his would-be girlfriend had a special craving for cottage cheese, he sends her some as a gift.

8.  Work hard. Antoine works harder than he’s ever worked in his life at that little grocery, with little hope of monetary compensation. In the end, his strong work ethic pays off (I won’t tell you how, in case you want to watch the DVD).

Which of these lessons do you most need to work on?

Get the Movie: The Grocer’s Son

When Starbucks passed out pink slips to 100 workers Friday, they called in the big guns (aka, company spokeswoman Anna Kim-Williams) to deliver the bad news.

The spokeswoman’s prepared statement said:

“Some of these partners are being offered opportunity for redeployment and others will be separated from the company.”

Partners?
Redeployment?
Separated?

Talk about a decaf statement! Those are some of the best (meaning worst) euphemisms I’ve seen all week!

The “partners” she refers to are human resources and security workers.

And “redeployment”? Give me a (coffee) break! Are these “partners” in the Army? Why didn’t she just say, “the workers might be transferred”?

“Separated from the company.” We all know what that means. Laid off. Axed. You’re outta here!

I can understand Starbucks attempting to soften the blow and call as little public attention to the layoffs as possible. But let’s swallow the bitter coffee: Starbucks employees have known for months that they might get laid off (trust me on this; a member of my extended family works at Starbucks corporate — unless she was “separated from the company” Friday).

The public has known for weeks that the layoffs were coming. So add a double shot to my vanilla latte and tell it like it is:

We’re sorry to announce that we laid off 100 workers. When the economy improves, some of them may eventually be reassigned to other departments, but most of these folks are dead wood, so they’re outta here.

To heap even more verbose pain and suffering on the laid-off employees (excuse me–partners), the head of human resources (check out his cool job title below) sent the following memo to them:

A Message from Chet Kuchinad: Workforce Reduction in Partner Resources and Partner & Asset Protection

Dear Partners,

As we communicated on January 28, Starbucks is reshaping our operating model and organization structure to ensure the long-term health of our business. This includes the difficult but necessary decision to reduce our global workforce.

As part of our commitment to transparency throughout this process, we wanted to inform you that approximately 100 non-store partners (including Partner Resources and Partner & Asset Protection) are being notified today that their positions have been eliminated. About 40 of those partners are located at the Starbucks Support Center (SSC) in Seattle.

You may be wondering why these groups are being notified this week if we have not yet notified other displaced partners. PRO and P&AP have unique responsibilities supporting internal client groups during a workforce reduction. Due to the organizational changes in these groups, we felt it respectful to inform these partners now, prior to our broader notification day in mid-February. For partners in a few international markets, this may be somewhat later in order to comply with local employment laws.

We are thankful and proud of the contributions our partners make to the organization, and we are committed to treating all partners with respect and dignity — those who are departing Starbucks and those who will stay.

We recognize this period of uncertainty is unsettling for all partners. We commit to communicating openly with partners as soon as we are able.

Regards,
Chet Kuchinad,
evp, Partner Resource

Well. I certainly feel unsettled. Does Chet honestly believe he’s communicating in English, or is he practicing some internal Starbucksese (similar to Vulcan…or Klingon?).

Here’s your latte challenge, readers:

In the Comments area of this post, re-write Chet’s memo in plain English. Try to condense his 236-word statement to 50 words or less.  We’ll award a copy of our e-book, Blogophobia Conquered ($19.99 value) to the entry we judge to be most creative and to-the-point.

Have at it!

Source:
“Starbucks Lays off 100 Office Workers,” by Melissa Allison, Seattle Times, Feb 5, 2009.

We’re pleased to announce that we launched a blog for the Florida Christian Writers’ Conference today.

Held at the Lake Yale Conference Center near Orlando, the four-day conference  is one of the premier writers’ conferences in the U.S. More than 40 publishers and publications are represented, plus 34 freelance writers and three keynoters: Davis Bunn, Dr. Calvin Miller, and Cec Murphey.

In addition to over 70 elective workshop, a highlight of the conference is its 11 Continuing Classes:

• Career Track (12 hours) – Eva Marie Everson
• Teen Track – Bryan Davis
• Writing the Devotional – Mary Lou Redding
• Writing Articles – Jeff Herring
• Writing Fiction – Al Gansky
• Writing the Non Fiction Book – Cec Murphey
• Writing for Children – Mona Gadsberg Hodgson
• Marketing – Randy Ingermanson
• Writing, Just the Basics – Larry Leech
• Mentoring: Fiction Project  – Ken Kuhlken (limited: 10 participants)
• Mentoring: Non Fiction Project – Janis Whipple (limited: 10 participants)

Jim and I are teaching four workshops on social media marketing, branding, blogging, and pitching your project to editors/agents. When conference director, Billie Wilson, asked us over the weekend  if we would consider creating a blog for the conference, we hopped to it.

Forty-eight hours later, the blog is up and running, and we’ve collected blog posts from several faculty members whom we’ll be featuring during the next few weeks.

Minutes after we launched the blog, Billie e-mailed us:

I LOVE the blog you created for us!!! It’s beyond anything I expected and I am thrilled.

If you’ve never been to a writers’ conference and are mulling over whether to attend one, we urge you to read the Florida Christian Writers’ Conference blog. You’ll learn a ton about how writers’ conferences work, and how to prepare to attend one.

We hope you’ll join us in Florida Feb. 26-March 1. We’d love to meet you!

Subscribe to the Florida Christian Writers Conference Blog by e-mail

And I so desperately hoped Mr. Ed would be reading these, or Stewart Little, or one of Dr. Doolittle’s buds!

I realize they’re trying to promote a benefit, that their books aren’t computer read, but does everyone know about computer reading software? Probably not.

And why not turn a feature into a benefit? Human narrated is a feature. The benefit is I don’t have to listen to R2D2 read me an entire book. I get a warm human voice instead.

If it were your job to replace “(human narrated)” and “(Click here for download page)” with copy that made the intent of their message clear, how would you do it?