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07/11/2013

Are Your Customers as Loyal as You Think?

This might sound odd to say as a writer, but I absolutely love television. While I can certainly spend hours poring through the next great best-seller—particularly when it comes from Jodi Picoult—there is nothing quite like plopping down on the couch after a hellacious work day and enjoying a guilty pleasure on TV.

And when someone messes with this part of my day, simply put… I don’t do well.

Let me paint you a picture of last Wednesday. While many were out celebrating the 3^rd of July—apparently that is becoming an even bigger holiday than the 4^th of July—I was very much looking forward to catching up on my DVR and explaining to my fiancé why “The Bachelorette” is not, in fact, scripted. Yup; I’m one of those.

But instead of showing me Desiree’s romantic date with Drew, all I saw was a bright blue screen. No cable. No DVR. No way to escape. My patience had been pushed, especially since this was the umpteenth time in the past few weeks that our cable box wouldn’t turn on. So I did what any normal person does on the 3^rd of July; I spent my night with my cable provider’s call center.

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07/10/2013

Facebook Graph Search Has Arrived

You may have heard that Facebook has rolled out Graph Search early this week for all English-speaking users in the United States. So what’s Graph Search, you may be asking.

Graph Search adds dimension to your Facebook searches, allowing you to search in a more “natural” way. Want to know what restaurants your friends like in the area? Simply type in “Restaurants in Connecticut that my friends like.” Want to see older photos of your friends? Type “Photos of Jane Doe before 2009” into the search bar.

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07/09/2013

Content Marketing: Your Biggest No-Brainer this Month

Oftentimes, the best decisions we make are those that we don’t over-think but, rather, those that just feel innately right to us.

Maybe for you it was affirming to not come to work on a Monday and instead setting out on a six-month European adventure—a journey about discovery, reflection and passion.

Or perhaps it was when you chose to uproot your life and move to San Francisco, one of the hottest technology areas, saying goodbye to your decades-long career as legal counsel at a massive retail company and hello to your new CTO position at the technology company of your dreams. Continue reading “Content Marketing: Your Biggest No-Brainer this Month”

07/08/2013

HBO’s ‘Girls’ as Content Marketers: Who Would You Be?

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I’m a proud HBO addict. Every single Sunday night of the year is strictly set aside for curling up on the couch and watching one of my favorite HBO series, one of which is Girls. A relatively young series, Girls follows the life of four 20-something Brooklynites – Hannah, Jessa, Marnie and Shoshanna – as they confusingly navigate through life. Each character has chief characteristics that make her stand out and seem relatable to all of us – whether you have a bad case of the mid-20’s or are old enough to be these girls’ parent. This got me thinking…what would the foursome of Girls look like if they were all content marketers?

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07/08/2013

Allstate Drama!

More and more consumers are shifting their attention to online forms of advertisements. With less people actually sitting through TV commercials, marketers have a tough time getting their message across to the masses.

So, like any smart business would do… you either adapt or die.

Allstate has applied this motto and has gone forward and developed a series of teen drama episodes that can be viewed over the Internet. The series is broken up into various episodes and takes various everyday scenarios such as driving to school, teen parties, even running errands and how they can turn dangerous if the driver is not careful. It highlights the worry parents have as their teenage kids start driving and deals with peer pressure and how it can affect driving judgment. It is full of teenage drama and their volatile stressors in life which can seem trivial to adults but can really alter the way they operate a vehicle.

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07/05/2013

Mastering the Art of Writing Shorter

Hands down, the biggest challenge for me throughout college was learning how to write shorter. Prior to mastering this art, I would sit down, get comfortable and then go to town on my assignment. Whether it was an end of the year research paper for my American history course, a short essay for that Intro to Philosophy class or a story for my fiction writing seminar, it always turned out the same: pages proliferated with beautifully unnecessary jargon that made the final product spill over into an insanely long document. While it was well-crafted and still read fluently, it was invaded by words that could have been omitted, sentences that could have been consolidated and phrases that sometimes didn’t even belong. Ouch.

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07/03/2013

Survey Says Fortune 500, Inc. 500 Companies Increasingly Turning to Blogging

In case you needed more proof that your competitors are blogging—though the fact that 60 percent of companies already have a blog is often pretty riveting—here’s one more for you. Not only are most of your competitors blogging, but more and more of them are joining the cyber space conversation every day.

The Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth recently released its 2012 study on the usage of social media in the fastest-growing corporations and found that blogging amongst the Inc. 500 companies in particular has jumped significantly. Specifically, in 2007, 19 percent of the most promising private companies were blogging. Fast forward to 2012 and that number has jumped to 44 percent (in 2011 the number was at 37 percent).

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07/02/2013

Top Three Ways to Beat Writer’s Block

It usually comes without warning, carrying the same air of desperation that comes when you suddenly experience an onset of insatiable hunger at 4 pm, right before that two-hour long work meeting. It has the same feeling of frustration that arrives when you can’t—no matter what—seem to run your 10K in under an hour. And it has that same feeling of regret like when you can’t close the sales deal, despite your most brilliant pitch.

Ah… good ‘ole writer’s block. It’s undoubtedly one of the most crippling incidents that can happen to writers, marketers, journalists and creative people.

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