The holidays are a stressful time of year, especially if you have to run around doing last minute gift buying.  C3/CustomerContactChannels recently offered great tips for reducing holiday shopping stress.  These tips were picked up by publications around the country, proving that holiday shopping stresses out more than just Floridians!

Here are their secrets:

Do your homework and ask questions.  Learn the store’s return and exchange policies before you buy something; know which coupons a store will accept and ask about promotional deals before you get to payment.  Read product reviews to maximize the valuable time you have with a busy employee.

Be prepared. Lines may be a mile long, so be courteous to other shoppers.  The cash register is not the place to realize you don’t have your wallet.  If you’re buying over the phone, be prepared with the recipient’s shipping information and your payment details.

Communicate clearly. If you have a problem or complaint, get to the root of the situation immediately and state what went wrong without raising your voice.  Tell a salesperson what you expect to be resolved and what you’d like them to do.  Bring up your brand loyalty as appropriate, but don’t overstate your store experience.

Be solution oriented. Focus on what can be done to resolve a situation.  If a product is out of stock, find out when the store will receive new inventory.  Find productive solutions and recognize that the ideal resolution may not be possible in all cases.  Customer service is a two-way street.

Take a deep breath. Take a moment to think clearly before you escalate a situation. Don’t use profanity at other shoppers or customer service agents.  Be the type of person you would want your grandma to speak with – anger and frustration will get you nowhere.

For more of C3’s shopping tips, click here.

Let’s face it— there’s no such thing as a straight print journalist anymore. If you’re in the journalism field, never has going multi-platform been more important.

Miami Herald reporter, columnist, blogger (and tweeter!) Cindy Goodman agrees, encouraging all journalists to use new media to enhance their brand as well as the quality and readership of their stories.

This is 2011. If you’re not on the new media train, you are most likely soon without a job.

Goodman was one of the first writers at The Miami Herald to start a blog (eight long years ago!), The Work/Life Balancing Act, and is an active voice on Twitter. She has additionally developed her own blog, Raising Teenagers in The Digital Age, uses a website for her own personal branding, and has Facebook pages devoted to her stories.

Goodman is an awesome example of using new media to stay alive in journalism, without sacrificing her journalistic integrity. Here are some tips and tools you can use to follow this new media maverick into the realms of multi-platform journalism:

BLOGGING

• Have fun with voice and personality in your blog. It’s a platform where there’s some wiggle room for editorializing. But don’t go overboard! You are still a journalist at heart.
• Make sure your blog has a consistent theme, voice, or message to establish yourself as an “expert” or “go-to” on your topic.
• Use your blog as a place to put ancillary, fun, less relevant information that didn’t necessarily fit into your stories.
• Keep up a conversation with your readers on your blog. Listen to their opinions and give them what they want!

TWITTER

• Be smart about your tweets to bring traffic back to your news story rather than give it all away in 140 characters.  Always try to tweet with links to a bigger story unless you are giving periodic updates from an event.
• Create a conversation with your followers. Don’t simply promote yourself, your brand, and your stories.
• Be careful about retweets: even if you’re not the one writing them, they still reflect on you and your journalistic voice and integrity. Make sure your retweets are reputable and that you are willing to be liable for them.
• Follow and retweet relevant sources to expose your readers. Twitter is all about vanity, so retweeting twitpics from your followers will encourage others to send in their photos, and ultimately follow you.

VIDEOREPORTING

• Be sure your videos complement the print/online story. They should not reiterate the print but augment it.
• Keep your videos short, from 90 seconds to 3 minutes.
• Sometimes you can use footage from an interview as online video; an interesting fact that didn’t necessarily fit into the story could make it in to the piece this way.
• Again, don’t shoot video for the sake of shooting video. There has to be a reason for people to play it.

With regards to all of this new media, take a deep breath before you post or upload. Think, do you really want to say this? Once you click submit, your words, pics, and video have free reign in the online vortex. You can never really take anything back! So next time you write a story, grab your flip-cam and your smartphone, because you’ll need them!

As a journalist, you may be entering uncharted waters, but with street smarts and adaptability, you should be a-okay.

In an age where face-to-face communication seems to be on the outs, even the gruesome act of firing someone has transposed itself onto the social media platform. Rather than do the deed in person with a melancholic handshake to seal the deal, many have taken to mass media outlets instead.

Chris Colfer of Glee reported last week that he found out he was not going to be a cast member for the show’s third season…through Twitter. According to People Magazine, Creator Ryan Murphy took to Twitter before letting Colfer know he got the boot, and of course, thousands tweeted Colfer with their reactions.

“I didn’t necessarily know that it was going to be our last season next year,” he told Access Hollywood. Well, he certainly knows now! And Colfer isn’t the only one that’s gotten the bad news from the media. According to Crushable.com, former American Idol judge Kara DioGuardi found out she’d been expunged via a news article, Fox-News on air commentator Marc Lammot Hill got notified of his expulsion by checking his own Google Alerts, and Alyson Hanigan reportedly heard she had been slayed from Buffy the Vampire Slayer by tuning into a co-star Sarah Michelle Gellar’s Entertainment Weekly interview.

Though this certainly means bad news for Colfer and his fellow ousted co-stars, Lea Michele and Cory Monteith, it could be worse for Fox if they don’t enact some sort of crisis communications plan. Having yet to comment on the incident, Fox needs to address the hurt done unto the three actors as well as the mistake made by the Glee producers.

And most importantly, while media, both social and traditional, is a current craze, some institutions require personal attention. As in, in person! If you’re letting someone go, do so respectfully. Look them in the eye, explain the reasons for your decision, and shake their hand.

The New York Times announced this week that beginning in 2011, All The News That’s Fit To Print no longer will be free online.

The questions become, “Will South Florida media – the Sun-Sentinel, the Miami Herald, the Palm Beach Post – follow suit?

In what it’s calling a “metered policy,” the Old Gray Lady will allow registered visitors free access to a set number of articles each month. Beyond that, they’ll be charged for content.

Good news? Blasphemy? A peek for the rest of us into what the future of online news media portends? Probably a little of each. (more…)