The Stranger's Long Neck

Author: Gerry McGovern
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1408114429
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 226

Book Description
The long-awaited new title from THE corporate expert on building the right web presence to drive sales! In an age that is exploding with information, it's now critically important for companies to identify what truly matters on their Web site. The web customer is a “stranger” online to web teams who must work in a medium where it is very difficult to know who is clicking around on your site. Every Web site has a “long neck” or a small set of tasks that are very important to its customers. If you don't make these tasks easy and fast to complete, your customers will go to your competition. This book will give you practical advice and case studies on how to tune in effectively to deliver precisely what your web customers want to make the sale! Gerry McGovern is widely regarded as the number one worldwide authority on managing web content as a business asset. Named as one of the 100 most influential figures in e-commerce in the UK and Ireland, he has appeared on CNN , CNBC and BBC television and has been featured in numerous print media publications. Top 5 Tips for Improving Your Website by Gerry McGovern 1. On the Web, content may be king but the customer is dictator. There's one word to describe the web customer: IMPATIENT. 2. Traditional marketing and communication is about GETTING ATTENTION. Web marketing and communication is about PAYING ATTENTION. When customers are at your website you already have their attention. Don't waste their time by telling them things they already know. 3. Every website has a small set of top tasks what I call the “long neck” that customers expect to complete quickly and easily. The customers' top tasks are often not what the organisation thinks they are—or wants them to be! 4. The BIGGEST key to website improvement and efficiency of “long neck” consumer tasks is most often overlooked: companies must do rigorous, methodical and continuous testing! Great web management is based on facts about your consumers, not opinions offered by the smartest people in your company. 5. The Web is about doing, not talking about doing. A great website puts task-completion features on the homepage. In Web 1.0 you saw a picture of a hotel room on the homepage of a hotel website. Now, you book your room on the homepage. Find out more in The Stranger's Long Neck

The Care of Strangers

Author: Ellen Michaelson
Publisher: Melville House
ISBN: 1612198694
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 222

Book Description
Winner of the 2019 Miami Book Fair/de Groot Prize, The Care of Strangers is a moving story about friendship set in a gritty Brooklyn hospital, where a young woman learns to take charge of her life by taking care of others. Working as an orderly in a gritty Brooklyn public hospital, Sima is often reminded by her superiors that she's the least important person there. An immigrant who, with her mother, escaped vicious anti-Semitism in Poland, she spends her shifts transporting patients, observing the doctors and residents ... and quietly nurturing her aspirations to become a doctor herself by going to night school. Now just one credit short of graduating, she finds herself faltering in the face of pressure from her mother not to overreach, and to settle for the life she has now. Everything changes when Sima encounters Mindy Kahn, an intern doctor struggling through her residency. Sensing a fellow outsider in need of support, Sima bonds with Mindy over their patients, and learns the power of truly letting yourself care for another person, helping to give her the courage to face her past, and take control of her future. A moving story about vulnerability and friendship, The Care of Strangers is the story of one woman's discovery that sometimes interactions with strangers are the best way to find yourself.

All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers: A Novel

Author: Larry McMurtry
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
ISBN: 1631493582
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 283

Book Description
A young writer hits the dusty Texas highway for the California coast in this “brilliant . . . funny and dangerously tender” (Time) tale of art and sacrifice. Hailed as one of “the best novels ever set in America’s fourth largest city” (Douglas Brinkley, New York Times Book Review), All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers is a powerful demonstration of Larry McMurtry’s “comic genius, his ability to render a sense of landscape, and interior intellection tension” (Jim Harrison, New York Times Book Review). Desperate to break from the “mundane happiness” of Houston, budding writer Danny Deck hops in his car, “El Chevy,” bound for the West Coast on a road trip filled with broken hearts and bleak realities of the artistic life. A cast of unforgettable characters joins the naïve troubadour’s pilgrimage to California and back to Texas, including a cruel, long-legged beauty; an appealing screenwriter; a randy college professor; and a genuine if painfully “normal” friend. Since the novel’s publication in 1972, Danny Deck has “been far more successful at getting loved by readers than he ever was at getting loved by the women in his life” (McMurtry), a testament to the author’s incomparable talent for capturing the essential tragicomedy of the human experience.

This Brilliant Darkness: A Book of Strangers

Author: Jeff Sharlet
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 1324003219
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Book Description
“A luminous, moving and visual record of fleeting moments of connection.” —New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice A visionary work of radical empathy. Known for immersion journalism that is more immersed than most people are willing to go, and for a prose style that is somehow both fierce and soulful, Jeff Sharlet dives deep into the darkness around us and awaiting us. This work began when his father had a heart attack; two years later, Jeff, still in his forties, had a heart attack of his own. In the grip of writerly self-doubt, Jeff turned to images, taking snapshots and posting them on Instagram, writing short, true stories that bloomed into documentary. During those two years, he spent a lot of time on the road: meeting strangers working night shifts as he drove through the mountains to see his father; exploring the life and death of Charley Keunang, a once-aspiring actor shot by the police on LA’s Skid Row; documenting gay pride amidst the violent homophobia of Putin’s Russia; passing time with homeless teen addicts in Dublin; and accompanying a lonely woman, whose only friend was a houseplant, on shopping trips. Early readers have called this book “incantatory,” the voice “prophetic,” in “James Agee’s tradition of looking at the reality of American lives.” Defined by insomnia and late-night driving and the companionship of other darkness-dwellers—night bakers and last-call drinkers, frightened people and frightening people, the homeless, the lost (or merely disoriented), and other people on the margins—This Brilliant Darkness erases the boundaries between author, subject, and reader to ask: how do people live with suffering?

Top Tasks: A How-to Guide

Author: Gerry McGovern
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 1916444601
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 186

Book Description
Essence of Top Tasks is a prioritized list of what matters most to customers. You then continuously improve these top tasks based on evidence of customers trying to complete them. Developed as a result of 15 years of research and practice. Implemented by some of the world's largest organizations: Cisco, Microsoft, NetApp, IBM, Google, European Union, Toyota, Tetra Pak, and hundreds more. More than 300,000 customers have participated in Top Tasks studies in over 40 countries and 30 languages.

The Strangers

Author: Jacqueline West
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0803736908
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 322

Book Description
After something crucial goes missing from the strange old house on Linden Street, 11-year-old Olive and her friends must decide how to get it backNput their faith in a strange and dangerous magic, their odd new neighbors, or someone more uncertain and terrifying than both.

Always the Young Strangers

Author: Carl Sandburg
Publisher: HMH
ISBN: 0544784014
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 449

Book Description
The Pulitzer Prize–winning poet and historian recalls his midwestern boyhood in this classic memoir. Born in a tiny cottage in Galesburg, Illinois, in 1878, Carl Sandburg grew with America. As a boy he left school at the age of thirteen to embark on a life of work—driving a milk wagon and serving as a hotel porter, a bricklayer, and a farm laborer before eventually finding his place in the world of literature. In Always the Young Strangers, Sandburg delivers a nostalgic view of small-town life around the turn of the twentieth century and an invaluable perspective on American history.

The Strangers on Montagu Street

Author: Karen White
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 110154581X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 354

Book Description
Charleston psychic Melanie Middleton discovers the past isn't finished revealing unsettling secrets in the third novel in the New York Times bestselling Tradd Street series. With her relationship with writer Jack Treholm as shaky as the foundation of her family home, Melanie’s juggling a number of problems. Like restoring her Tradd Street house...and resisting her mother’s pressure to ‘go public’ with her talent—a sixth sense that unites them to the lost souls of the dead. But Melanie never anticipated her new problem. Her name is Nola, Jack’s estranged young daughter who appears on their doorstep, damaged, lonely and defiantly immune to her father’s attempts to reconnect. Melanie understands the emotional chasm all too well. As a special, bonding gift Jack’s mother buys Nola an antique dollhouse—a precious tableaux of a perfect Victorian family. Melanie hopes the gift will help thaw Nola’s reserve and draw her into the family she’s never known. At first, Nola is charmed, and Melanie is delighted—until night falls, and the most unnerving shadows are cast within its miniature rooms. By the time Melanie senses a malevolent presence she fears it may already be too late. A new family has accepted her unwitting invitation to move in—with their own secrets, their own personal demons, and a past that’s drawing Nola into their own inescapable darkness...

Talking to Strangers

Author: Malcolm Gladwell
Publisher: Little, Brown
ISBN: 0316535621
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 316

Book Description
Malcolm Gladwell, host of the podcast Revisionist History and author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Outliers, offers a powerful examination of our interactions with strangers and why they often go wrong—now with a new afterword by the author. A Best Book of the Year: The Financial Times, Bloomberg, Chicago Tribune, and Detroit Free Press How did Fidel Castro fool the CIA for a generation? Why did Neville Chamberlain think he could trust Adolf Hitler? Why are campus sexual assaults on the rise? Do television sitcoms teach us something about the way we relate to one another that isn’t true? Talking to Strangers is a classically Gladwellian intellectual adventure, a challenging and controversial excursion through history, psychology, and scandals taken straight from the news. He revisits the deceptions of Bernie Madoff, the trial of Amanda Knox, the suicide of Sylvia Plath, the Jerry Sandusky pedophilia scandal at Penn State University, and the death of Sandra Bland—throwing our understanding of these and other stories into doubt. Something is very wrong, Gladwell argues, with the tools and strategies we use to make sense of people we don’t know. And because we don’t know how to talk to strangers, we are inviting conflict and misunderstanding in ways that have a profound effect on our lives and our world. In his first book since his #1 bestseller David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell has written a gripping guidebook for troubled times.

The Stranger

Author: Albert Camus
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307827666
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 144

Book Description
With the intrigue of a psychological thriller, Camus's masterpiece gives us the story of an ordinary man unwittingly drawn into a senseless murder on an Algerian beach. Behind the intrigue, Camus explores what he termed "the nakedness of man faced with the absurd" and describes the condition of reckless alienation and spiritual exhaustion that characterized so much of twentieth-century life. First published in 1946; now in translation by Matthew Ward.