The age of conversation: 3 reasons to buy on March 29

What happens when you give 100 of the world’s leading marketing professionals, writers, thinkers, innovators and bloggers a book title and an invitation to write about that topic in 400 words or less?

The Age of Conversation happens. Born as an off-hand comment, then growing into an e-book and ultimately a printed book, The Age of Conversation takes the individual musings of 100+ authors from all over the world, many of whom have no connection other than shared belief in the power of social media, and turns them into a collection that overflows with creativity and insight.

And just for today, March 29, The Age of Conversation is more than a book. It’s part of a social media experiment. And you can be part of it. [Read more]

Skype meeting tips

As more and more of my business calls are international, I’ve found Skype an invaluable tool for keeping the phone bills reasonable and being able to see eye-to-eye with the person at the other end of the phone line.

So I appreciated Chris Garrett’s Tips for Better Skype Meetings. For example, Chris suggests, [Read more]

Find sample business and legal documents with .docstoc

On the surface, .docstoc is a website for finding and sharing professional documents related to business, law, technology and education.

Need an invoice template but don’t want to create one from scratch? Look on .docstoc. Want to store and share a few documents privately online? Try .docstoc. It’s free, too.

But .docstoc’s cool factor is the ability to embed a document (Word, pdf, PowerPoint, Excel, etc) on your website without all the usual geekery. You don’t even need an account. You just need to know how to copy and paste into your website.

Here’s sample document, [Read more]

Wild Apricot: Association management software for ADR groups

Every ADR association board I’ve ever served on has struggled with this question:

Is there an affordable service for managing our website, member registration and database, communication and event registrations – that’s also easy to use by both the association and the members?

Too many of the solutions are cumbersome to learn, require a huge investment of time and energy that many volunteer board members just don’t have, or assume a level of geekery that’s just annoying. And some of them are ridiculously pricey for what they deliver and the energy it takes board members to make it work well.

Maybe there’s some hope on the horizon. [Read more]

Jim Melamed announces InstantAssist conflict resolution

There are a few ways to succeed in ADR business: Serve a market that’s already served but do it better or differently than the rest. Compete on price point (high end or low end). Or fill a niche that’s under-served and succeed by being among the first.

Jim Melamed is a master at the latter (and maybe the others, too, but I’m focusing on the latter), seeing opportunities in the marketplace and creating ways to address them. Mediate.com had its foundation in that kind of market awareness and now he’s announcing InstantAssist.

InstantAssist’s tagline is “Immediate Conflict Advice,” and its market niche is described this way: [Read more]

And the book-launch prize winners are…

It’s time to announce the 10 lucky winners of my Making Mediation Your Day Job book launch prize drawing!

Thanks so much to everyone who bought my book and entered, and to everyone who generously donated a prize to help celebrate the book launch. You all helped make this celebration lively and fun.

Each entry was assigned a number, beginning with 1 for the first one received, 2 for the second, and so on. I then used Random.org’s Random Sequence Generator to generate a random number sequence from the entries. On the resulting list, the first number shown was the winner of Prize 1, the second of Prize 2, and so on.

Ready for the results? Drum roll, please! [Read more]

Calling all current and would-be ADR bloggers: SOBcon08

Are you thinking about starting a blog as part of your mediation marketing strategy? Have you already begun blogging and want to increase traffic from your target market or learn how to make your blog better?

Then I hope I’ll see you at SOBcon08: Biz School for Bloggers, May 2-4 at The Summit Executive Center in the heart of Chicago’s Magnificent Mile. I attended SOBcon07, the conference’s inaugural year, and can tell you without reservation that it was the best conference I’ve attended. Ever. Of any type. [Read more]

Cole Silver’s raindancing expert audio series

Cole Silver is an attorney and marketing consultant who helps attorneys succeed in their careers by providing business and career development consulting and related services.

Cole’s also the author of How to Create Wealth and Freedom in Your Law Practice: 101 Powerful Client Development and Retention Strategies for Attorneys and a legal marketing blogger at Legal Marketing Secrets.

I was interviewed by Cole last week as part of his Raindancing Expert Audio Series, which features chats with such marketing and PR luminaries as [Read more]

Tech in the mediation room: colorado divorce resolutions

A while back I profiled Colorado Center for Divorce Mediation in my article, Technology in the Mediation Room: Innovation from Colorado Divorce Mediators.

The Center’s Lawrence King recently wrote to update me on their latest technology investments and innovations, including a switch from desktop workstations to laptops that also dock in the mediation rooms, dual monitors, and upgrades to more sophisticated software. I remember when I used to sniff at dual monitors as overkill…until I started using them and realized how much they help my efficiency.

You can read the details [Read more]

What does your email address say about you?

It costs about a nickel a day. Less than a large pizza with the works bought once a year. Far less than a week’s worth of your cell phone contract.

It’s easy to buy and set up, probably less than one hour.

What is it? Email associated with a domain name you own.

So I can’t help but wonder: Why do I see so many mediator email addresses that end in yahoo.com, gmail.com, and hotmail.com?

An email address with your own business domain name conveys some pretty important messages: [Read more]

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