Well, once again I apologize for not posting for a while.

Regular readers might think that my reason for not posting has something to do with that fancy new picture of me up there at the top of the blog. You know, the one that switches expressions, making me look like a drunk, then a retard, and then someone who just did something nasty in his shorts on accident.

But no . . . I actually didn’t have anything to do with that. I have a crack team of web designers and IT folks at Ragan who handle the actual look of the blog. I didn’t even know it was being changed until I logged on today!

And I can’t figure out if I like the changing faces or not. It’s hard to tell, because I generally don’t like my own face to begin with . . . so seeing three different versions of it is like getting hit three times in a row with three different blunt instruments.

I’m open to any and all opinions on the new look. . . after all, you poor people are the ones who have to look at it whenever you come to the sight . . . and if the image of Uncle Fester soiling his adult diapers is going to turn you off the blog, please let me know, so we can change it.

Now, if you want to know the real reason I haven’t been posting, just let your eyes wander over to the top right corner of this page. See that ad for my Integrating Print and Online seminar? That’s what’s been keeping me too busy to post.

Not the ad . . . the seminar itself. I haven’t taken IPO on the road in three years, and so much has changed in employee communication in that time that I find myself having to recreate the seminar almost from scratch.

When I started IPO six years ago, there weren’t that many tools to juggle. We had print (some of us, anyway), we had e-mail, and we had intranets. So the seminar was about how to make those three things work together.

Now, six years later, we still have those three tools . . . but we also have blogs and wikis and chat rooms and RSS feeds and podcasts and vidcasts and tons of other stuff.

So I’ve been spending my time digging out real-life case studies on all those tools, and finding out how the best communicators are using them all together to reach and engage employees.

If you’re still reading this, I’d like to ask a favor. Actually, I’d like to ask two favors:

First, sign up for the seminar. It’s going to be a fun-filled two days, with free booze and tons of gourmet food.

No it’s not. There won’t be any free booze at all, but there will be booze that we can pay for in the hotel bar the second the seminar ends at 4:01 on Day One, and 3:59 on Day Two. And the only food will be bagels and coffee in the morning, and whatever treats I can steal from other corporate meetings that are happening in the hotel that afternoon.

But it will be worth the money. I’ve already got some unbelievable case studies on how people are using all the new tools without overwhelming employees with too much corporate crap.

Which leads me to the second favor:

Even though I have a lot of great stuff, I’m always looking for more. I happen to think that the smartest communicators in the field read this blog . . . and if you’re doing anything great with your print and/or online employee communication vehicles, I’d love to hear about it.

Is your online publication working? Are you getting people to read it and interact with it? Are you doing podcasts, or blogs? Have you figured out how to apply RSS feeds to internal communication? Is your print publication going strong, and steering people to the online tools, the way it should? Is it helping you communicate complicated or emotional information?

I'm actually including a component on face to face communication in IPO this time around, too, and I have some wonderful examples of how you can use online tools to help your managers and supervisors communicate with the front lines. So if you're doing anything great with face to face, I'd like to hear about that, too.

If you have something you want to share, I’d like to talk to you about a) featuring it in IPO (and probably one of the Ragan publications); and b) having you as a guest speaker in one of the cities, if you’re interested in that sort of thing.

My goal is to have one speaker in each of the cities—and that speaker and his or her colleagues can come to the entire two days for free.

I’ve already lined up the great and talented Kathy Felong from Erie Insurance for one of the cities. Kathy’s doing wonderful things with integrating her print publications with her online tools, and she’s going to share that case study.

So if you have anything, shoot me an e-mail, at steve@crescenzocommunications.com.

And if you don’t have anything . . . why aren't you signed up yet? Obviously if you have nothing you feel confident about sharing, you need to be at the seminar. I guarantee you that you’ll have stuff you'll want to share after we’re finished.

And again, sorry about the pictures up there.

Once a month or so, I allow myself a small indulgence. I pour myself a drink, put on some Cat Stevens, and sit down with a stack of employee publications. This is a habit I developed years ago, as the editor of the Ragan Report, and I still enjoy it.

While I go through hundreds of employee publications, I’m looking for great stories, great writing, new ideas, great CEO columns (which is like trying to find a white rhinoceros in a shopping mall), and items to poke fun of in my C.R.A.P. (Corporate Rhetoric Awards Program) column in Ragan’s Corporate Writer and Editor.

The other day, as I was sipping a martini and going through my stack, it occurred to me how much corporate communicators and their executives love macho business metaphors.

We’re constantly telling employees that we need “all hands on deck” so that we can “chart a course through rough waters.” It’s really funny and sad when companies headquartered in land-locked places like Des Moines, Iowa drag out the nautical references.

Or we let our CEO say things like, “I may be the quarterback of this team, but I’m no more important than you—the offensive lineman, running backs, and linebackers.” And then of course you see a picture of the CEO, and he looks nothing like a football player. In fact, he looks like the kid the football players used to throw in the school shower and urinate on.

Why is it that all of the metaphors we choose are soaked with testosterone? Just once, I’d like to see a CEO get up at a Town Hall meeting and say something like this:

“In order for this business to work, each part of the business has to know what the other parts are doing. You know what it’s like? It’s like ballet dancing. Just as one dancer needs to know exactly where his partner is at all times during a ballet, so to does sales need to be in synch with marketing, and marketing with engineering. I need you to dance with each other! Leap and prance around like the Sugar Plum Fairies in The Nutcracker! I want you to plié until you can’t plié anymore! Pirouette until you can’t feel your legs! As a business, we need to dance! Dance my little fairies, dance!”

Of course, no CEO would ever say that. And no communicator would ever write it. Why? Because business isn’t ballet! Business is war! Business is full-contact football, not some sissy dance recital.

Business is blood and guts! Only the strong survive! We don’t read Amy Tan to get ready to succeed in business. We read Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War,” even though Sun Tzu lived 800 million years ago!

Of course, this is all nonsense. Business is not war. It’s not even a playground scuffle. Business, for most of us, is drudgery. It’s spread sheets and projects and endless meetings and expense accounts and clogged-up e-mail boxes.

That’s why all of these macho metaphors fall flat when we try to foist them on our readers. We’re not rugged sailors, we’re not football players, and we’re not 11th Century Mongol warriors.

We’re accountants. We’re salespeople. We’re machinists and engineers. We sit at desks. We type things into computers. We go to meetings. The closest we get to a battle is the endless struggle for the last onion bagel at the Wednesday breakfast meeting. Which makes the macho metaphors not only silly, but insulting.

I have here in my hands right now an example of this nonsense.

I knew I was in for a testosterone shower when I saw the headline:

Shifting into High Gear

Uh oh, I thought. It’s going to be a race-car lead. Since I happen to think that NASCAR and Larry the Cable Guy represent everything that’s wrong with this country, I hate race-car leads. And this one was actually worse than I expected. Here it is:

“You’re in a race—driving a high-performance car that’s operated tirelessly to get you well positioned in the pack. The smell of exhaust looms over the thick summer air as you eye the competition surrounding you, some whizzing ahead, others languishing behind. How do you break out of the pack and pass the competition? Tune up your engine? Add more horsepower? Change lanes? All of these are excellent choices when you’re serious about winning.”

This metaphor falls flat for many reasons, but there are two main problems:

First of all, the writer doesn’t even get the damned metaphor right! She starts by telling the reader that he’s in the middle of a race . . . and then she tells him to tune his engine up! I’ve never been in a car race, but I’m fairly sure you can’t tune your engine up while you’re going 180 miles an hour. And I’m also quite sure that you can’t add more horsepower in the middle of a race.

And although I’ve never seen an actual NASCAR race (I’ve never had sex with my sister in the back of a pick-up truck, either), I’m fairly sure there are no “lanes” on a race track. Does the writer think this race car driver can turn his clicker on and switch to the passing lane in order to get ahead?

The second reason the damn thing fails as a lead is because the writer didn’t consider the audience. This magazine goes to employees at a financial services company based in New York City!

These guys don’t watch NASCAR on the weekend. They snort cocaine and go to Yuppie bars. They don’t drink Schlitz and watch a bunch of rednecks drive fast and turn left. They drink Stoli Appletinis and watch “The Entourage.”

If this story was going to a meat-packing plant in Raleigh, North Carolina, maybe the car metaphor might work. Probably not, but at least you’d have a chance.

But sending race-car metaphors to financial services professionals is like sending the collected works of Goethe to a NASCAR pit crew. They won’t know what to make of it.

Here’s a tip for corporate editors everywhere: If you’re going to go with some harebrained, contrived, macho metaphor for business, at least know what you’re talking about . . . and try to pick a topic that the readers will understand.

Another day, another lost business opportunity for Crescenzo Communications.

Let me explain.

I had this brilliant idea for a children’s book series. I had the characters sketched out, plot lines established for the first seven books . . . I even had a line of ancillary products—lunchboxes, stuffed animals, backpacks, etc.—lined up and ready to go.

I figured it would only be a matter of time until Nickelodeon or one of the other children’s networks picked up the option on my books, and my character became the next SpongeBob Squarepants.

Then, last week, I picked up the newspaper and saw this horrible headline:

Librarians ban top children’s book for using the ‘S-word.’

At first, I wasn’t concerned. I figured the “S” word was shit. Or maybe suck. Or maybe both, and they banned a book where the schoolyard bully says something like, “Suck shit, assbreath.”

But no. When I kept reading, I got the bad news in the first paragraph:

“An award-winning children’s book about a ten-year-old girl seeking answers about life has provoked an uproar in America because it uses the word ‘scrotum’ on the first page.”

That’s right, the horribly offensive word the author used isn’t shit or suck. It’s scrotum.

Here’s more from the article:

“Susan Patron’s The Higher Power of Lucky, which won America’s top children’s book award, is being barred from school libraries in parts of the country because of the mention of male genitalia — even though the actual reference is to the scrotum of a dog.”

Now, maybe if it was a man scrotum, it would have been allowed. But dog scrotums are off limits, I guess. To everybody but the dogs themselves, who have been known to spend many a pleasant hour with their own scrotums.

Now, you might be thinking: What does this have to do with my genius business idea?

Well, in my series of children’s books, the main character is a scrotum! Sammy the Scrotum, to be exact.

In the series, Sammy is a very shy guy—very sensitive, and easily hurt. The stories were going to be filled with wonderful life lessons about how you have to develop a hard shell in life, and how you can’t allow yourself to get hurt every time life brushes up against you.

I had an entire world created! Sammy the Scrotum lives in the middle floor of a three-story apartment building. His nemesis, Peter P., lives right above him. And below him is an old, wise couple—Mr. and Mrs. Taint, who help him deal with the fact that Peter P. is always doing mean things to him, like sitting on him, or dribbling water on his head.

I had the whole series all mapped out. I would introduce Sammy and the gang in the first book: “Sammy the Scrotum and the Tighty Whitey Nightmare," where Sammy decides to move out of his small, cramped studio apartment into his new building, where he meets the rest of the gang.

Book Two, I feel, was destined to be an instant classic:

“Two Nuts, One Shell: Sammy the Scrotum Learns to Share.”

In Book Three, Sammy finally stands up to Peter P. It’s called:

“Left Ball, Right Ball, Peter P’s in the Middle!”

In my mind, I had Ryan Seacreast doing the voice for Sammy the Scrotum on the TV show (is there anyone in the world who has more practice playing a scrotum than Ryan Seacrest?), and Simon Cowell voicing Peter P.

Mr. and Mrs. Taint would be voiced by George Castanza’s parents . . . and so on. It was all set. The only thing I needed was an agent.

But no . . . if they won’t allow even one mention of a dog scrotum in an award-winning children’s book, what chance do I have that they would allow an entire series about a friendly, shy nut sack?

Back to the drawing board, I guess.