BLOG | presenttense

Apr 6, 2017
4 min

A picture is worth 1000 words... but is content still king?

We’ve all heard the saying: “A picture’s worth a thousand words.” The earliest recorded use of the sentiment was in 1911, where newspaper editor Tess Flanders advised journalists to “Use a picture. It’s worth a thousand words.” Images have always had a big impact on how people approach marketing and brand communication. Companies invest significant sums in the visual components of their brand building: on logos, packaging, flyers, commercials, eye-catching displays on the end

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The road trip of a blog, and seeking expert advice

Elana Duffy

Jul 6, 2016
4 min

The road trip of a blog, and seeking expert advice

We know that we've been gone for a bit, working on some exciting projects we look forward to sharing with you in the coming weeks and months. But our weekly blog is back, led off with contributing writer Stacey Ebert reflecting on how she began her summer. I recently returned from a two-month journey to three countries on two continents (including a four-week road trip across the United States). The preparation, coordination, facilitation, and execution took days and included

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Elana Duffy

Apr 13, 2016
3 min

Rethinking the ebook

ebook is an odd term. Sure, the idea of an electronic book is intuitive in its purest form. You share an author’s words online in a pleasantly readable form instead of printing them onto paper, binding them, and shipping them to a warehouse. That definition is very limiting, though. The technologies which make ebooks possible are multimedia storytelling platforms, where words are only one part of the experience. Imagine you could tell the same stories – with the same exact

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Variety: Not just the spice of your life, but the saver of your sanity

Elana Duffy

Mar 8, 2016
4 min

Variety: Not just the spice of your life, but the saver of your sanity

How many times a week do you find yourself saying, jokingly or otherwise, “I need to get out more”? For me, there are weeks where it’s daily. This week, for a variety of reasons, it’s nearly constant. From reuniting with old friends to planning hikes to diving in oceans and climbing mountains, it always feels like there isn’t enough time in the day (or the week, or the year) to both do work you hopefully love to do as well as everything else there is to see and do in the wo

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Creativity in your work is selling up, not selling out

Elana Duffy

Mar 1, 2016
4 min

Creativity in your work is selling up, not selling out

If you read this blog, chances are that you're a business-minded go-getter like my fellow contributors. You probably also have a decent-sized creative streak. Not me. I'm nearly all creative streak and not so much about the business sense. But I'm lucky enough to work for Present Tense whenever they need a researcher, editor, or niche blog post because they can see the opportunities to add a unique element to their clients’ projects. And while I usually believe that the work

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4 Excellent Books for Entrepreneurs, or Anyone

Elana Duffy

Feb 24, 2016
3 min

4 Excellent Books for Entrepreneurs, or Anyone

Switching careers – especially if you start your own business mid-career – will leave you short on so many resources: time, money, backup support, and in some cases even energy and hope. You will have only one thing in almost infinite surplus: advice. With the goal of cutting through that clutter instead of adding to it, I’d like to highlight the four books which helped me the most when I left a lucrative consulting job in late 2013 and co-founded Present Tense LLC. The books

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Being Remembered: your story in the future

Elana Duffy

Feb 16, 2016
5 min

Being Remembered: your story in the future

Obituaries are fascinating. When you really get down to it, your last impression is very much like your first impression: you only get one chance to tell this story, so make it a good one. Sure, it’s a gloomy topic, but it is a universal truth that there are two realities we all ultimately face: death and taxes. Beyond any personal losses we many have suffered lately, or our passionate awareness of war or crime or other sad affairs, it is undeniable that the first six weeks o

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Why vision trumps likeability: Lessons from the Iowa caucuses

Elana Duffy

Feb 4, 2016
4 min

Why vision trumps likeability: Lessons from the Iowa caucuses

Politics provides lots of possibilities to witness the power of words and stories. What happened this week at the Iowa caucuses in the US presidential election was no exception. In a late night interview, a reporter asked an official from the Bernie Sanders campaign why they had not emphasized his personal background, upbringing, and immigrant family history. “He has a good story to tell,” the reporter said. “We’ll get to it,” the official responded, or something to that effe

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Elana Duffy

Jan 28, 2016
4 min

Getting your book out of you

There's an old axiom that everyone has a book in them and I, for one, agree with it. There's also a slightly more cynical version that ends with "and that's where it should stay," but I don't necessarily agree with that. And it's not what I'll be addressing in this post. I can probably count on one hand the number of people I've met in my life who didn't have an idea for a book they wanted to write. And the vast majority who do have that book in them tend to admit it once the

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Why Outsourcing Blog Posts is the Best Decision Your Company Can Make

Elana Duffy

Jan 20, 2016
3 min

Why Outsourcing Blog Posts is the Best Decision Your Company Can Make

When I was a high school teacher, there were never enough hours or minutes in a day, much less week, month, or year to get everything done. Ask any teacher: the line between work and home blurs often, leading to tired, overworked professionals. More and more “asks” are coming from all different directions and although they are “musts”, they invade the much needed and much desired goal of making a difference in students’ lives. With many teachers frequently asked to do seeming

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5 myths about writing books … and why you should start writing yours

Elana Duffy

Jan 6, 2016
4 min

5 myths about writing books … and why you should start writing yours

A book can be an invaluable marketing tool for yourself or your business. By book, I don’t the mean the proverbial Great American novel, that half-finished pile of fiction that so many people supposedly have stored in the cloud somewhere. I mean a focused, well-crafted non-fiction book. Whether in e-form or physical form, books are a very efficient way to transfer knowledge with enough depth and detail to establish and enhance the author’s reputation and give readers useful i

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The Next Step in Your Master Story: The Right Words Matter

Elana Duffy

Dec 17, 2015
5 min

The Next Step in Your Master Story: The Right Words Matter

This is the latest in a series of blogs on what we at Present Tense LLC call a “Master Story”. In this installment, Frank gives us the next steps in the process of story creation: using your words to provide a consistent story across your content. Sure, we have all heard it said: our actual words make up only a small part of effective storytelling. This saying dates back to the early 1970’s and the work of UCLA psychologist Albert Mehrabian, who derived a famous formula (verb

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Storytelling for Professionals: How it helps and how to get started

Elana Duffy

Nov 23, 2015
4 min

Storytelling for Professionals: How it helps and how to get started

This is the latest in a series of blogs on what we at Present Tense LLC call a “Master Story”. In this installment, Frank Luby looks at the role the Master Story plays in helping professionals use storytelling to establish their name and reputation. Read the first part of the series, on why you need a Master Story, here. The next time you have a few minutes to fill, start a list. Write down a few things you wish your customers knew about you. Don’t sort it yet, and don’t over

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Elana Duffy

Nov 18, 2015
3 min

Honing Habit: Creating a Master Story

This is the first in a series of blogs on what we at Present Tense LLC call a “Master Story”. In this installment, Chris Thunder looks at the role the Master Story in creating mindful habits and routines in business. Many people disparage habit as this soul-crushing addiction that leads to mindless routines, sapping the marrow of life. But think of how much habit helps you. What would your life be like if you had to think intensively and consciously about each and every task

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Sons, fathers, and robots: humanity in business

Elana Duffy

Aug 6, 2015
4 min

Sons, fathers, and robots: humanity in business

A few months ago I grew impatient waiting in the lobby of the unemployment office. As is generally the best use of idle hands and minds, I began to eavesdrop and people-watch those around me. Working in sales, I like to euphemistically refer to this as “niche market research.” How are people getting their information these days? How are they networking for jobs, connecting about products, interacting with feedback? And really, are they interacting at all, and what are the sec

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It's after the action. Here's how to write the review.

Elana Duffy

Jul 29, 2015
5 min

It's after the action. Here's how to write the review.

The military has perfected a few things over the many years of its storied existence, and one of those happens to be paperwork. You don’t always think about the military as such, when the movies show the glories and brutalities of battle. There is little footage of the mounds of papers that go along with each of those actions. Going to the rifle range? That will be several orders (warning, operations, maybe a fragmentary), requests for ammunition, requests for the range, and

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Behavioral Pricing: Why coffee and music don't mix

Elana Duffy

Jul 17, 2015
4 min

Behavioral Pricing: Why coffee and music don't mix

Let’s talk numbers. Say a specialty drink at your favorite coffee shop costs $5. If you gave up two of those drinks per month, you would have enough money to pay for a standard $9.99 per month subscription to a music streaming service such as Spotify or Apple. I used that example recently in a talk at the New Music Seminar and have seen people make similar comparisons on social media. It is convenient and it also gets people’s attention. Both coffee and music are very familia

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Benefiting everyone through community service days

Elana Duffy

Jun 25, 2015
3 min

Benefiting everyone through community service days

As a founding member of Race2Rebuild, a charity racing team raising money for disaster recovery projects, I’ve been lucky enough to help plan and attend ‘build days’. These are large events where hundreds of people from all walks of life come together to do good for a day by working to rebuild communities destroyed after natural disasters. Individuals and other charity organizations are part of the mix, but there are always teams of company employees that turn up for the day

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Elana Duffy

Jun 17, 2015
4 min

Learning a Violin's Lessons

A simple Internet search will tell you that the average amount of time it takes a person to learn to play the violin properly (which I assume means well enough that the instrument rarely makes the ear-piercing shriek of a misplayed string) is two to three years. I can't speak to the accuracy of that yet, but I hope to be able to confirm it in roughly 20 to 32 months. Having taught myself to play the guitar some years ago, I recently decided to do the same with an even more co

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Apple just launched a “value war” in music streaming

Elana Duffy

Jun 12, 2015
4 min

Apple just launched a “value war” in music streaming

We’ve talked about this before: music has value. Potentially, a lot of value. And now, Apple is seizing their share. But Apple and its music industry partners have done far more this week than enable the launch of a new music streaming service. They offered the world some common-sense lessons on what strategic pricing means, how to do it without Big Data razzle dazzle, and how to explain it in basic jargon-free language. In doing so, they also went against a lot of convention

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