Soundbytes: We?re busy doing nothing

The silly season?s here, and many of you will be wondering what to do over the long summer months.

Redesign your advertising

During the summer very little product is sold, so it is the ideal opportunity to revamp those tired advertising campaigns with a more strategic focus. This can employ subliminal messages to help the customer identify with you. A prime example of this technique is the summer ?Rock The Net? poster campaign recently introduced by Novell. On first look, getting a model to dress up as an executive, taking a picture of him and writing ?Rock The Net? on it in 2ft-high letters seems like a trite and tired execution of an utterly meaningless concept. On closer inspection, you notice that the model is suspended in mid-air and performing the splits while aiming a punch at no one in particular. This summarises the feelings of most IT managers perfectly. Well done Novell!

Identify your customers

Unless you identify your potential buyers, conventional wisdom tells us, you will not be able to sell to them effectively. Nowhere is this more apparent than the retail shops on Tottenham Court Road, where staff put a lot of effort into identifying their customers during the summer months. Often they will spend up to eight hours a day in the doorway of their empty shop, saying: ?There?s one! He?s coming in here. Oh, hang on, he?s gone into Gultronics? or words to that effect.

Re-engineer your business

Now is the time to make the effort to change your working practices for the coming millennium. With business slackening off, the time has never been better to lead the way with a drive for effective teleworking in your organisation. So why not start it yourself: impress the board by calling up one morning and saying: ?I?m not coming in, I?m working from home today.?

There is one important caveat to this. Remember that your bored and sweaty colleagues at work will be watching any major sporting event on the television in the smoking room, so if you are attending a golf/cricket/ motor racing/Southern hemisphere rugby tour as part of your day working from home, try not to be caught on camera while inebriated. On no account run on to the pitch naked except for your company?s official sweatshirt: explaining this as an eye-catching marketing effort may result in a more permanent ?working from home? arrangement.

Take a holiday

The traditional summer vacation of the office worker seeks to combine sun, sea, sand and sex with no mention of work whatsoever, and what better way to do this than to organise a sales conference in your destination of choice. Savvy resellers know that only a sales conference can offer the pleasures of white water rafting, deep sea fishing and getting so drunk you accidentally pick up a transvestite prostitute, while still being tax deductible.

Popular locations for reseller getaways at this time of year include the central European city of Stockrytoff. Join the crowds for the traditional summer Credit Squeeze festival, where distribution representatives symbolically squeeze the life out of a few sales conference attendees, much to the relief of those who aren?t picked on!

Catch up with your email

If your email has been piling up during the winter months, now is the time to get round to dealing with all those non-urgent messages. Last year, people who didn?t use their email were regarded with slight suspicion, rather like people selling Robin Reliants or men with beards. From this autumn, it is likely that your unread email will see you marked out as a troublemaker, more like people buying Robin Reliants, or women with beards. Empty that in-basket today.

When you are in urgent need of a way to sift several thousand unread messages, the general technique is to look at the title and assume the opposite. Therefore, any email marked ?Make $$$ the easy way?, ?Read this to the end? or especially ?Sorority girls strip for free? is guaranteed to be time-wasting, expensive and ultimately disappointing.

But of course, you know this already. If you hadn?t spent two hours 45 minutes and $164.95 encouraging Southern Belle Traci to lower her pom poms over the internet last November, you might have made target and be on the sales conference in Maui at the moment. Instead you?re reading PC Dealer so that you don?t have to answer your email.