“It’s the sweaty socks and dudes hitting on me at the gym that I really love about working out. I mean, it’s great to look nice, but it’s really the EXPERIENCE that I’m after.”

And I pointed out that: “In advertising, it’s never bad to turn a perceived weakness into a positive… Unless your weakness is for Boy Scouts.”

This is the real world where you’re interviewing CEOs of small businesses. And the reader typically needs to get something out of it — if you’re not thinking ahead about why the reader would bit.ly your link and send it along, you’re dooming yourself to obscurity.

We had a situation like that today, so this is what I shot back to the writer:

Here’s what I’d propose: re-read over this and ask yourself what Laura can teach all of us. Because at the end of the day, Laura is NOT a celebrity. So we need some utility for this article. What, as someone outside this company, will make this article valuable? Why would I forward this article on to someone?

Secondly, make your points AFTER you’ve illustrated them. SHOW our “distinct culture of internal support,” rather than tell me. Give me a story. An anecdote. A quote. Don’t tell me he’s funny. Show me.

“A skeleton walks into a bar,” Kevin said, apropos of nothing, talking to apparently no one. “He says to the bartender, ‘give me a beer and a mop.’” Even camels call Kevin’s humor dry.

He didn’t like the idea. Said there’s no better way than to just give back the text all marked up.

I approached it differently:

“You’re gonna scare the crap out of them with so many edits. Show them a few examples of your edits before you finish. Get them comfortable with those. Then they won’t fight as much when you hand it back mostly rewritten.”

He said he’d try.

When you have time to do so, sharing work early makes life easier. People get bought in. You can incorporate good ideas. You make them a participant. You spread the accolades.

The risk you run is that you share an idea too early, and the critical feedback you hear nips a good idea before it can bloom. This often happens when you’re still exploring a concept, and the unfinished nature of it freaks people out.

It’s more important with original work than edits. But if you deliver a piece back that’s bleeding with red ink, you’re best served prepping the soon-to-be-bruised ego. It’s not heartbreak if they agree with you.

So here’s my test about when to start you inside sales job. If you can answer yes, then go start selling:

Can you explain it to your significant other?

Does it have a catchy headline or tagline?

Do you have a specific concept or idea you want feedback on?

With those, you will represent the concept well. You will give your audience a fully-formed thought. And you will likely get some decent feedback as you put on your inside sales hat.

There are Two Types of People in the World: Makers and Managers

There are two types of people in your office, Makers and Managers. And scheduling a meeting with Maker can kill that person’s effectiveness for the day, according to Paul Graham.

I find one meeting can sometimes affect a whole day. A meeting commonly blows at least half a day, by breaking up a morning or afternoon. But in addition there’s sometimes a cascading effect. If I know the afternoon is going to be broken up, I’m slightly less likely to start something ambitious in the morning.

Makers Need Uninterrupted Time

Makers do the work — at Pop Art, our Makers are designers, developers, programmers, writers, designers and media planners. These people create the work that ends up online. Here’s how Graham describes the conundrum Makers face.

They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can’t write or program well in units of an hour. That’s barely enough time to get started.

Managers, however, live and die in increments of an hour. Seeking information, checking in, status updates, reaching consensus, making a decision, delegating are all reasons for managers to call a meeting. Boom!

Interruptions are Relative

If a meeting is advancing the project, it must be a net positive, right? No. Interruptions are relative. An older article on the cost of workplace interruptions (yes, I’m now calling your status update meeting an interruption) qualifies them as such:

• when I interrupt someone (a “good” interruption)
• when someone interrupts me (a “bad” interruption)

Take a look at this list of Top 10 office interruptions: which would be good and which would be bad? When is an interruption really a collaboration?

But Seriously, Your Meetings Are Killing My Productivity

Are the Makers and Creators being overly sensitive? I say no. A News.com article cites “In Praise of Slowness,” saying:

The typical office worker is interrupted every three minutes by a phone call, e-mail, instant message or other distraction. The problem is that it takes about eight uninterrupted minutes for our brains to get into a really creative state.

An even more alarming article from (my favorite) journalist Clive Thompson in The New York Times Magazine cited a UC Irvine study that puts interruptions in stark terms:

Each employee spent only 11 minutes on any given project before being interrupted and whisked off to do something else. What’s more, each 11-minute project was itself fragmented into even shorter three-minute tasks, like answering e-mail messages, reading a Web page or working on a spreadsheet. And each time a worker was distracted from a task, it would take, on average, 25 minutes to return to that task.

OMG: I’m Only Working Two Hours a Day?!?

Leon Ho over at Life Hack did the math on an 8-hour work day:

(8 * 60 / (11+25) * 11)

There are only roughly 2 hours on quality project time. Think about this figure verse [sic] the rest of 6 hours.

And a 2005 study from Basex titled “The Cost of Not Paying Attention: How Interruptions Impact Knowledge Worker Productivity,” puts the cost at more than half a trillion dollars a year.

Unnecessary interruptions consume about 28 percent of the knowledge worker’s day, which translates to 28 billion lost hours to companies in the United States alone. At an average cost per hour of $21 (Bureau of Labor Statistics, June 2005), that costs U.S. companies $588 billion per annum.

Whoa.

As an Interactive Pro, How Do You Deal with Interruptions?

Makers in an interactive setting face additional pressures — the expectation to participate in interruptive social media like Twitter, instant messaging, Facebook, Yammer, etc.

(Just as I wrote that, for some reason I felt compelled to check Twitter. Weird.)

That pressure requires creative solutions. Microsoft Labs created Scalable Fabric to minimize open windows. Apple created Spaces. A search for the “inbox zero” mantra of “Do it, Delegate it, Delete It” turned up about 1.3 million results.

Beating Interruptions in the Office

Productivity is a huge business in the U.S., and there’s a reason. Productive employees get noticed, get promoted, and retire early to beautiful privately owned islands. I can’t say I’m the master of productivity, but here’s a few tips I’ve been using lately with good success.

1. Turn off IM. This has been a tough one for me, as I thoroughly enjoy chatting about work (and other stuff).
2. Block out work time. If I have to do some serious writing, I put it into my calendar. (I also put my gym time in there.)
3. Go away. People swing by my desk all the time with questions, concerns, ideas, or just to talk. I can minimize these distractions by leaving.
4. Say no. So let’s say I’m working at my desk and have found a groove. Someone drops by and asks, “can I interrupt you?” I’m trying now to say “in an hour?”

My role here is a hybrid manager/maker. Graham’s suggestion of “office hours” seems to me an excellent idea to avoid office interruption, though I have no idea how to make it happen short of blocking out all my time except a few hours a day.

What about you? What are your biggest distractions and interruptions? How do you deal with them?

This cracks me up to no end.

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.

1. The fake layout above comes from one of the funniest jokes ever made at Pop Art. Well, it was funny to me, anyway.
2. At some early point at Pop Art, we moved a lot of the SEO responsibility over to editorial. Here’s why.
3. What good will those brand workshops do if your writing doesn’t reflect it?
4. Viral ideas need support to get them to pandemic mode and beyond the sniffles. One way to do that is to study how wildfires grow.
5. I actually had a client say that they wanted to market their small travel agency to everyone. Bad idea. But here’s a good idea: figure out different elements of your company and let them appeal to different people. Targeting online is a great way to do that.
6. In case you hadn’t heard, there’s a recession on. Here’s what I’ve learned about managing people and balancing work demands during lean times.
7. When we set out to re-do the Pop Art site, one concept we considered bringing forward was the people. I did some quick and dirty research into our team. Very interesting.
8. How do you measure creative? Perceived ad spending.
9. Call it the Tiger Effect; it says in the face of a dominant force, people play for second place.
10. When I look back on hiring my most recent intern, Kevin, I’ll remember the experience not so much for finding him, but for having to say “no” to three other insanely qualified people. One continues to work for Babywit.com, and we correspond every so often about interactive marketing. Here’s an interesting conversation about e-commerce and email.
11. Social media and transparency. Duh.
12. Last, but the first blog post I wrote at Pop Art: The nine-point copywriting checklist.

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.

It is the copywriting equivalent of your fourth-grade math teacher harping on you to “show me the work.” As your future boss, I want to know how you approach a problem. Because unlike math, copywriting never provides a single correct answer.

And here’s the real twist: Only your future boss will care about this. The person who’s reading the advertising doesn’t care — they don’t get the benefit of that context.

But if you’re a copywriting and social media expert, you’d better be able to tell me how/why you’ve targeted Headline A to Audience A, and Headline B to Audience B.  Or why that line works for a print ad, but not for a direct mail piece. Or what emotion you’re trying to elicit. Tell me a story.

Anyway, add a little intro to each of these (no more than a paragraph) explaining what you were trying to do, and why you feel it works. And shoot it back to me sometime soon.

-Thom

p.s. Please proofread. I’m not a huge stickler for the traditional rules of grammar and punctuation, but tweak them consistently or you risk me focusing on the wrong thing. Besides, it’s always a good idea to get a second set of eyes on something you’re sending out. Especially to another writer — we’re a prickly bunch!

Another frequent portfolio email? Where I explain to aspiring copywriters that their blog is NOT copywriting. Oh, it’s funny, sure. But it’s not copywriting. Copywriting has a point. It has constraints.

Copywriting is writing for hire — where a client gives you a product, an offer, an audience and a medium, and then you write something more brilliant than they could’ve hoped to read.

But blogging about the smelly guy on the bus, or tweeting about the colossal ass you made of yourself at the bar? That’s not copywriting. This rant? It’s not copywriting, either, and I sure would never put it into my portfolio. Please don’t put it in yours.

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.

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.

This concept isn’t really new, but it was driven home to me during a two-day course on presentation and public speaking skills. Putting your point of view and punchline first was one of several skills that overlap between online copywriting and public speaking.

During the seminar from Blue Dragon Communications, we practiced again and again stating our point of view right off the bat. “Point of view, action requested, benefit of the action,” coach Denise Harrington would remind us. Again and again.

When it comes to applying this to online text, copywriters need to remember this sequence because they’re typically funny people. It’s usually the copywriter who’s loudly telling a joke in the office. It’s usually the writer who’s got the amazing story that keeps the clients and co-workers in stitches.

And that’s part of their job. A quiet copywriter is a writer who isn’t testing his ideas, constructions, and interpretations out in the real world.

But when it comes to putting that information online, the punchline and the point must lead. Putting the core of your message first is almost never the way you’d speak casually. But if you’re presenting publicly or writing for the web, you should.