BY MARK SWARTZ, THE CAREER ACTIVIST®


Sooner or later everyone does something dumb at work. Missing a crucial deadline. Accidentally sending confidential data to the wrong e-mail address. Or, if you happen to work for Apple, inadvertently leaving a prototype of your super-secret new phone in a very public bar.

The point is that when you do screw up, it’s up to you to try and fix things quickly...


Read More >> BY MARK SWARTZ, THE CAREER ACTIVIST®


Earth Day 2010 has come and gone. In case you blinked, it was celebrated on Thursday April 22nd.

Why does planet Earth deserve only a single day of commemoration when something as mundane as procrastination merits a full seven days during National Procrastination Week? That’s for the folks who create these memorials to ponder.


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BY MARK SWARTZ, THE CAREER ACTIVIST®

Promoting yourself as a specialist in your field – be you a media, branding or product management maven – is one of the main uses of Twitter.com.

In Part 1 of this series we looked at the basics of setting yourself up on Twitter: signing up for free, claiming your own Twitter URL, sending out initial Tweets, and injecting your expertise into your maximum of 140 characters per Tweet.

Now we’ll move on to the next stages of Twittering. This includes getting followers to read your precious Tweets, and disseminating these Tweets to other forms of social media, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, so that you quickly broaden your base of readers.




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BY MARK SWARTZ, THE CAREER ACTIVIST®

So you want to make a name for yourself as a respected specialist in your field, but you don’t have time to write detailed articles and get them published by credible sources, nor can you afford time away from the office to speak at all sorts of distant conferences on your area of expertise.

What might you do easily then to widely distribute your knowledge and set yourself up as a guru?

The answer may lie in that latest of social media phenomena, Twitter.com.




Read More >> BY MARK SWARTZ, THE CAREER ACTIVIST®

Minhea, the Brand Manager for product X, leans forward in his chair. His face flushes red while speaking to his boss Suzana, Director of Marketing.
“Look, Suzana, I don’t mean to overstep my bounds, but I’m wondering whether or not our agency is up to the task in terms of media placement.”
“Take it easy, Minhea,” says Suzana. “What happened now?”
“You and I agree that their creative for the campaign was good, once we helped them fine-tune it. But this is a major re-launch for us and I’m having a hell of a time, pardon my language, with their Media Planner.”


Read More >> BY MARK SWARTZ, THE CAREER ACTIVIST®

For the eleventh time today your email pings with another message from Client X. You grit your teeth – this client is giving you hives. They already switched their media buy twice this morning and demanded a major rate cut. Won’t lunchtime ever arrive?

Now they’re complaining that the plan you drafted so carefully for them is “light on social media ... why are you focusing more on frequency than reach?” Arggh! If they know so much about audience metrics why don’t they just place the frigging ads themselves?



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In her new book The Male Factor, author Shaunti Feldhahn reveals “The Unwritten Rules, Misperceptions, and Secret Beliefs of Men in the Workplace.” She argues that women who want to climb the office ladder have to start by penetrating the mysterious inner workings of male minds. Only then can females figure out how to get ahead.


Feldhahn conducted research over seven years and interviewed thousands of men at all levels in the workplace, to distil profundities about how guys like me perceive, and react differently to, our distaff co-workers.


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Let's face it—work today demands a tremendous amount from us. Often we give our employers almost everything we’ve got. Like when we stay late to get the report done. Or come in on the weekend if we have to meet a deadline. Or make the boss look great but not take credit for it.



Such are the imperatives of today’s hyper-competitive workplace. Sacrifices like these are common. But what about the flip side: what have you taken away from your employer lately?

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"Have you done your Christmas shopping yet?"

It’s one of the happy refrains floating gaily around offices these days. Pretty harmless stuff. Unless you happen to be Muslim. Or Hindu. Atheist. Or anyone else who subscribes to one of over a hundred other belief systems. For the 40% of Canadians who are non-Christians, December can be an unexpectedly cruel month.

At no other time of year do minorities feel quite so marginalized. You may either end up pretending to be in the spirit of the majority, which belittles your own identity, or you constantly have to reveal your own background. Either way, it can be less merry than the Jolly Fellow might have you believe.

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You probably haven’t spent a lot of time Googling the Ontario Human Rights Code lately (if you have, may I respectfully suggest that you get out more). Anyway one of the more riveting things it says is that every employee is entitled to freedom from harassment in the workplace.

Even so it happens regularly: unwanted sexual innuendos, getting insulted while co-workers are present, being exposed to racist comments. So what can you do if you're being abused on the job by your employer or colleagues?

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A friend of mine called to say she’d landed an interview with the ad agency of her dreams. Big budgets. Stellar clients. Wildest roof parties in the industry.

Nice gig if you can get it.

Only problem was she’d left her last employer on bad terms. "Fired" isn’t quite the way to describe it. More like downsized for lack of fit. (Alright, so she’d jumped into the job because it paid a whack of cash, found out the place was a hell hole, but they turfed her before she could quit).

"How in the world do I relate this to the person I’ll be interviewing with?," she asked.

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Raise your hand if you’ve ever been to a therapist, psychologist or psychiatrist. How about a career coach, financial planner or substance abuse group? Hey, how come your arms are still planted firmly at your sides? Hopefully your life is so trouble-free you’ve never had to reach out for help. Or is it that, like most of us, you’d rather admit to getting de-friended on Facebook than having sought assistance for your problems.

Fret no more; there is free, confidential counseling available to just about anyone in the marketing or advertising and communications sectors.

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