Educating India… Addicted to email?… PR ‘what not to do’ list… Google search better again

Education exports to India

Australian universities are turning to the largely untapped business education market in India as a new revenue source following the saturation of some traditional markets and declining enrolments from others, according to a report in The Australian Financial Review.

More than 21,300 Indians began courses here in 2006, a 56.8% increase on the previous year and the biggest growth recorded across the top 10 overseas student markets.

Melbourne Business School has established a student exchange program with the Indian School of Business, and is working with the Indian school to launch a five-day executive education program called Access India to help Australian business people learn more about doing business in India by the end of the year.

Are you addicted to email?

Do you get a small jolt of happiness when the new email message pops up on you screen and pings? You might be addicted to email. Marsha Egan works with companies and individuals who want to recover lost time and money due to wasteful email practices.

Egan told Slate.com that she sets her email program to check for new mail every 90 minutes. She calls email “the silent corporate cancer”. She says:” It eats away at people’s time, a minute at a time. I call it bleeding to death from a thousand pinpricks.”

Her calculation is as follows: “It’s commonly believed and understood that it takes about four minutes to recover from any interruption. If the computer dings at you and you look 30 times, that’s 120 minutes of recovery time. That’s the crisis.”

Don’ts and don’ts of getting your message out

The Idea Grove has put together a handy list of five things not to do if you’re trying to get your message out to the community.

• Don’t use business jargon: Try to avoid cliches and jargon and speak in conversational English. Like the proverbial bath, good writing couldn’t hurt and might help.
• Don’t put a copyright symbol on your press materials: Press releases, fact sheets and bios are meant to help journalists. So if you want them to use your stuff, don’t mark your materials as copyrighted.
• Don’t forget the online readers: Remember to use hyperlinks to get online readers involved. In a press release, link the quoted executive to their bio and link the product you’re describing to its page online. Link to external resources such asWikipedia and even YouTube to enhance your text; links can be made from photos and logos as well as words. And stop using the clunky phrase “click here” to create links. Very 1996.
• Don’t bury the news: Don’t make journalists wonder what your release is about or bury your real news in the third paragraph. Look at your announcement objectively and acknowledge what the real news will be.
• Don’t describe your company in such flowing terms that no one can tell what it actually does. Don’t focus so much on the benefits of your services that you gloss over what your company is and what it does. Don’t make your vendors, investors, prospective employees, media, analysts and other non-customers guess.

Google universal search add-on

Last week Google announced that searches for images, maps, books, video, and news are now integrated. It has since rolled out another improvement for finding books, reports ITWire.

Google Book Search has been expanded to include books that still just exist in “hard” form. The text of these books isn’t accessible, but catalogue entries are available showing title, author, publisher, ISBN and other details. This information is drawn from catalogues in various countries and other sources.