Mike Consol is president of MikeConsol.com, which provides business writing seminars, Web 2.0 strategies and media training to midsize and large companies. Consol spent 17 years with American City Business Journals, the nation’s largest publisher of metropolitan business journals with 40 weekly newspapers across the United States.

Have you ever considered creating a personality for your company? Giving it human characteristics that consumers and business customers can more easily and meaningfully relate to? Let’s boil this d...

I’ve said before on this blog – simplicity is always more powerful than complexity.  Some firms are better at putting simplicity into practice than others. One of them is an award-winning branding f...

I have a saying that I’ve repeated to many people in recent years: “If you’re not early you’re late.” This principle has served me well for business meetings, airline flights and all-manner of busi...

Much has been made of the personal branding of individuals. One of the great failures of personal branding has been playing out in public view for years. Enter basketball great Kobe Bryant. His monume...

Word combat is everywhere – especially in politics and business. Put the right words and phrases together and you control the story, or even win the election or turn your newest product into the ne...

Much is made of the ABCs of writing – accuracy, brevity, clarity – but there is a fourth, more advanced component to good writing. It’s called "euphony," a word many people do not know. Yet it is r...

Simply rewording clichés and speaking more directly is just a first-level effort in the campaign to develop a distinctive voice that turns you into an oak among willows. Still, this first-level effo...

How many people in your workplace use distinctive words when speaking or writing? Here’s a wild guess: damn few if any. That’s because we all speak in common phrases and clichés – not to mention tha...

Most professionals seem to regard storytelling as a quaint relic of the past – something modern society and all its technological gadgetry has made outmoded and unnecessary. It’s an easy conclusion ...

So you put a new business plan together for 2010. Whether your enterprise is big or small – and regardless of industry – you almost certainly discussed Social Media. It’s the most talked about and ...

To be a strong writer there are three things one must do. One, write every day and with great avidity. Two, read great writing of all kinds. Three, read great books about writing. This blog post is...

Those annoying long-form TV commercials that go on and on about anti-aging moisturizers, body building equipment and get-rich-quick real estate schemes have some things to teach us about effective s...

The newspaper industry is dead. That has become conventional wisdom. There’s just two problems with that statement. The newspaper business has had its obituary written twice before – once during th...

Most salespeople have the gift of gab. So why do people who talk so well have such difficulty communicating in writing? Here’s the answer to that question – as well as the solution. A hint: It start...

Bloggers need to pay much attention to the subjects they choose to write about. Smart bloggers plan ahead, plotting out the subject matter they will tackle during the next month or two. One method f...