[Story. Original image found at Sketchy Thoughts.]

Joy Jennings, who has offered guests posts previously on dumb things that smart communicators do and marketing buzzwords, today brings us seven useful tips for getting back on track when you’re mentally tapped out at work:

1. Take a break. Surf the Web, chat with a co-worker, get away from your desk. Think about other things, clear your head and go back to your project refreshed.

2. Get inspired. Look at award-winning work, peruse your competitor’s work, visit an art museum, skim a favorite book. The great work of others will stimulate your creative side or help you see unexpected solutions.

3. Find external motivation. Examine your checking account balance, make out your Christmas list, re-read your last performance review. Everybody needs to pay the rent. Find the motivation that will flip a switch in your brain and get your ideas flowing.

4. Lose the tension. Exercise, take a nap, eat some chocolate, have a good cry, pop some Advil, master your domain. Got a headache? Feel your muscles tightening? Stand up and stretch, book a massage or find other, ahem, ways to cope.

5. Just start typing. Type your thoughts, type out the project’s mission, type up your notes. Free-flowing ideas can lead to your Aha! moment. Especially if you have a writing project, just start writing about your topic and see where it leads you.

6. Brainstorm. Sketch on paper, map out your ideas, get some coworkers into a conference room and pick their brains. In brainstorming, no ideas are bad — write everything down. Your lukewarm idea may spur a brilliant one.

And finally:

7. Just say no to drugs. You’re a grown-up with a deadline. Drugs including alcohol may relax you, but not in the way you need. Even caffeine can make you jittery, plus the acid in coffee can sour your stomach.

[Image by Diong at Objects and Pixels.]

Since I was such a big fan of Blogging Heroes, I thought it would only be fair to also create a Photochop of select bloggers who didn’t make the Blogging Heroes cut. For lack of a better term, we’ll call them Blogging Zeroes.

Media Orchard plans to celebrate Blogging Zeroes everywhere by including you in our commemorative portrait, just in time for the holidays. Just shoot us an email or post in comments if you’d like to be included.

In October, Media Orchard looked at the Wikipedia entries of top PR firms and found them a bit of a mess. We thought it might be nice to give these agencies a chance to redeem themselves by analyzing their Web sites.

Specifically, we decided to use our new favorite toy, TagCrowd, to assess the messaging these firms project in the top-level content of their sites. TagCrowd, you may recall, creates tag clouds based on word frequency.

So, think of these as the Web site “brand clouds” for five top PR agencies:

Burson-Marsteller –

Edelman –

Ruder Finn –

Hill & Knowlton –

Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide –

For comparison to a smaller firm, here’s one for the Idea Grove –

Why don’t you try it for your own agency? It’s a good spot-check to make sure your site’s content hasn’t gone off message.