Hard to believe I’ve been blogging and working at Pop Art for more than two-and-a-half years now. In that time, I’ve tried to write posts that other writers will find useful, and maybe even demonstrate that we know what we’re doing.
Lately, my blogging has fallen off since I’ve taken on our media planning and buying department. But I thought it’d be a good time to look back.
The fake layout above comes from one of the funniest jokes ever made at Pop Art. Well, it was funny to me, anyway.
Here’s the link to all the WebVisions chatter on Twitter, using just the #wv09 tag. I’ve been going through and reading it to see what people were commenting on — an excellent reminder about how a hashtag can unify and aggregate people’s experiences at an event. And it makes great notes to crib from later…
My Two Favorite Slides from WebVisions
First day, @bikehugger‘s slide about how to be interesting online: “Do Epic Shit.”
Each one of @erictpeterson‘s slides had his twitter handle and the (wrong) hash tag in the footer. Super convenient.
I’ll keep reading the #wv09 hashtag comments and see what other interesting tidbits I can pull out. I know @texagonian (Kevin Platt) had some good comments and nuggets, as well as at least one laugh-out-loud putdown. As you might expect if you know him.
Every May, I get about 10-15 emails from graduating copywriters hoping to share their portfolio, and looking for copywriter portfolio tips. Most of them suffer from the same problem: no context. So here’s the portfolio tip I usually email back to them.
Dear Madison/Toby/Emily/Tyler,
If I could make just one (very long) comment on your portfolio, it’s this: I want to know why you made the choices you made for each ad/campaign. What business or creative needs led you to these executions? What funny dead-ends did you find along the way? Tell me a little story that explains why you did what you did. Read the rest of this entry »
Research, create, ignore, perfect. When I am learning and practicing new skills, I have to push myself to remember the “ignore” phase of creativity. Letting a problem rest so your unconscious mind can tackle it has long been known as the mark of a diciplined creative.
Telling your own internal task-master “let me sleep on it” will yield better creative time after time.
I have a tendency like most ambitious creatives to just stay head down on a problem until I can’t see the forest for the trees.
Three-day weekends can cure problem myopia better than most tricks for big new skills. It’s long enough to bring you back refreshed and eager to perfect something. It’s also long enough to let your subconscious mind make connections that your conscious mind wouldn’t.
I really can’t stop thinking about pushing clients into this idea of having proactive customer support by using the ambient awareness provided by social media. (No one’s biting, of course, because clients’ purse strings have been double-knotted.) More below about how you can use Microsoft Dynamics CRM to create ambient awareness for all your customers.
Qwest began using social media for customer service recently, according to the Phoenix Business Journal. It’s remarkably nimble for a large, bureaucracy-laden, unionized labor force. I mean that as a positive — clearly, this is their social media prototype. They have not rolled social media out to their entire customer service group, but rather have just seven people tweeting.
Visit Qwest at http://socialmedia.qwest.com
Start Social Media Small, and Learn from It
For a large company like Qwest, starting with a small dedicated group with a motto of “Be Smart” will allow them to find what works and what doesn’t.
Sometimes, I gotta write a blog post for the job. So today the focus was on how smart companies are using social media for customer service. I’d met with Martha Brooke from Interaction Metrics in the morning, and she dropped an interesting point: Her company helps businesses get the most out of their customer interactions, and social media is just another venue for those interactions. “Yes,” I thought. “Someone else who gets it.”
Writing for the web is no joke, because online copywriting always puts the punchline first. Think about the order with which you tell a joke: first you tell a little anecdote, then BOOM! Punchline. Writing for the web, however, requires you to put the punchline in a headline, in the first sentence, and in the first paragraph.
Here’s why: Putting that point of view and main message right at the top of a web page allows your reader to quickly decide if the information you’re providing is the information they want. If it is, they read on. If it’s not, you haven’t wasted their time. Read the rest of this entry »
September, 2008: Sixty percent of Americans use social media, and of those, 59 percent interact with companies on social media Web sites. One in four interacts more than once per week. These are among the findings of the 2008 Cone Business in Social Media Study.
As HP’s experience shows, social media is changing the way we must think about customer service. The cost of poor service, once measured in single consumers, can now have an immediate impact far and wide.
Social Media Implications on Operations, PR, Marketing, HR, Customer Relations
Just like that point in time in the Internet’s infancy, social media has not yet been understood or embraced by most organizations and brands. Even if the ROI is hard to calculate today, it would be wise to consider the harm done by NOT having an organized approach to social media.
A list of companies that were blind-sided by the internet, they didn’t understand the impacts of the power shift to the participants, or how fast information would spread, or were just plain ignorant.
They stripped this tool to the bone. There’s nothing left but the tools you need. If you can’t get out of trouble with these tools, you probably don’t deserve to get out anyway.
These ads helped launch the Leatherman Skeletool and Skeletool CX. I carry mine everywhere, and despite how light it is, I can feel it when I’ve somehow forgotten it. Forgetting your Leatherman feels like forgetting to wear your seatbelt. It feels like walking out with your fly down. It feels like going on the jobsite without a helmet. Read the rest of this entry »
