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Stephanie
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Writer

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Thanks to the Internet

Eat your heart out, sliced bread. I think we can all agree the Internet is ten times awesomer than you. Here are a few world-changing reasons why.

 

Thanks to the Internet: it’s a small world, after all. You can reach outside your own small town and connect with anyone, anywhere the web reaches (through my writing blog, I have friends in Australia, Britain, Canada, India, Namibia and I don’t know where else). You can even help small businesses in third world countries.

Thanks to the Internet: brilliant writers, musicians and filmmakers don’t have to sell their souls to jaded publishers, record labels, studios or networks to get their art seen, noticed and loved. Blogging, video-sharing sites and self-publishing outlets help unknowns reach the world. Just look at William P. Young, Edd Plant and Jake Jarvi.

Thanks to the Internet: we dream bigger and achieve more. It’s the Information Age; with enough ambition and the right Google searches, we can accomplish anything. With a quick search, we can learn to change a tire, tie a tie, or improve the SEO of a website. The web is our one-stop shop for direct access to experts on writing, cooking, entrepreneurship and hundreds of other subjects, offering their knowledge for free on the blogosphere.

Thanks to the Internet: the customer is king. No longer do all the sales go to the company that covers the most ground with advertising, but to the company that does the most for its customers. We buy the product with the best customer reviews. We’re loyal to the company that answers questions and solves our problems on Facebook and Twitter. We recommend the business that offers its expertise without trying to sell us something. Plus, through increasingly sophisticated search engine technology, it takes real, helpful content to reach the first page on Google – not keyword-stuffed sales pitches. 

 

The old-fashioned girl in me sometimes wishes for simpler times, but I ultimately wouldn’t trade my time for any other. Never has there been more opportunity for the average person, not just to achieve success, but to achieve greatness. Sure, like any tool, the web can be used for good or evil, but thanks to the Internet, we are inspired to dream bigger, and equipped to accomplish those dreams, like no other time in history. That’s why this Thanksgiving, I’m thanking God for the World Wide Web.

How has the Internet changed your life? And what are you going to do with it?

 

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Read more:

Chip is grateful for Internet memes

Carol discusses why technology now is better than then

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Photo credit 


The Changing Blogosphere: Why Your Business Should Be Involved

Imagine earning a living by letting thousands of people read your diary. It sounds ridiculous. Crazy. Dangerous, even. But happening nonetheless. Well, sort of.

The blog (short for web log) started out as a sort of online diary where people published their daily musings for all to read. Now, hundreds of millions of blogs all over the web are resources for entertainment, information and income.

Yes, some bloggers make a living blogging. Not by posting random musings, though: by posting fun or useful content other people actually want to read. Niche blogs may help people get out of debt, dress fashionably, get novels published, or (yes) blog for a living. These bloggers build huge followings with great content, then make their income by either selling their own products (e.g. books or online workshops) or selling ad space on their blog.

Business and blogging.

Oh, yeah. Businesses are jumping on the blog bandwagon. And for good reason:

  • Search Engine Optimization – Search engines love keyword-rich content, especially new keyword-rich content. So if you are regularly updating your blog with articles relating to your business, you’re going to get more traffic from Google, Bing and the rest.
  • Trust – Starting a conversation, giving your organization a face and a voice, and connecting with customers. By posting content like how-to articles, you are solving problems for customers and potential customers—so they’ll naturally trust your product or service to solve their problems, too.
  • Authority – Just by being in the business (whichever business it is), you know more about it than the average Joe. Show off that “inside look,” and you give the subtle impression that you know more than your competitors do.

But if you’re going to do it, do it right.

Maybe you already know the benefits of a corporate blog. Maybe you already started one. But are you doing what’s necessary for success?

  • Produce Great Content – A blog post is an article, not an ad. Leave your sales pitch at the door. Make it useful, entertaining, and related to your business—but don’t list services or product features. In the medical industry? Give healthy living tips or compare fad diets. Sell luggage? Review great destinations and give tips on getting through customs. Ask yourself what information will make your customers’ lives better. Then give it to them.
  • Post Regularly – You can’t just write one or two posts every couple of months and expect new business to come pouring in. The experts say you have to post twice a week, minimum. It helps if you do it the same days every week, like Mondays and Fridays.
  • Reply to Comments – You’re trying to connect with people remember? So reply to every comment: thank supporters, answer questions, and resolve issues with any disgruntled customers. Plus, reach out and become an active commenter on other blogs in your industry.
  • Expect to Spend 10 Hours Per Week Blogging – I know from experience. Sometimes it’s a little more, sometimes a little less, but between researching, writing, reading, and replying to comments…10 hours is a safe estimate.
More resources:

 


No, Mom; I'm Not Bored. Honest.

Mom homeschooled all three of us from birth. This meant that when we were not at co-op, Konos, Boy Scouts, Pioneer Girls, 4-H, or playing with the neighbor kids – we were at home, looking for something to do. You can imagine how often she heard, “Mom, I’m bored.”

There were plenty of ways she could have responded to this. She could have packed us in the car to take us to a movie, a park or a museum (which she did – when she had planned for it). She could have suggested we watch TV or play video games, or any of a million other typical kid things. But no. She was Mom, not our personal entertainer, and she did something much smarter. She suggested chores.

We had regular chores, of course, but if we said we were bored, she would suggest something extra. “You could clean out the garage.” “You could sweep the back porch.” And so on.

We soon learned not to tell her we were bored, which I'm sure was her original intention. More importantly, though, we learned how to entertain ourselves. Which, in turn, meant that:

We discovered our hobbies. I read like a fiend and soon turned to writing.

We became self-motivated. Instead of depending on others for our entertainment or success, we came to realize it depended on us. We don’t expect to be handed anything – if we want it, we earn it.

Our hobbies turned to talents. I’m still writing – and now people pay me for it? I feel like I hit the jackpot. But really, I know I was just blessed with an awesome mom.

 

So thanks, Mom! Happy you-know-what.


7 YouTube Channels I love

If you read my last post, you know I'm a major YouTube junkie. The so-called "amateurs" who produce YouTube content are so talented, I'm starting to think traditional TV is going the way of the cassette tape. And I've just been waiting for an excuse to write about my favorite 'Tube channels. So happy Valentine's Day!

  1. HISHEdotcom
    How It Should Have Ended produces short animated parodies of how new and classic movies should have ended.

     

  2. ImprovEverywhere
    Improv Everywhere plays elaborate pranks on the unsuspecting public – but pranks that make people happy instead of angry.

  3.  

  4. ItsJustSomeRandomGuy
    ItsJustSomeRandomGuy started out doing Mac/PC commercial spoofs using Marvel and DC comic book action figures. Pretty nerdy, right? But well written and totally hilarious. This sample video is the fourth installment in the Ironman vs. Batman series.

     

  5. Vlogbrothers
    Hank and John Green are brothers living in different states, who decided to communicate with each other via vlog (video blog). Since 2007, they've amassed a huge fan base (known as the Nerdfighters), with more subscribers than Oprah. John and Hank always have something interesting to say; either informative, though-provoking, funny, or all three.

     

  6. SmilingLimpet
    Ed Stockham, aka SmilingLimpet, is a little-known animator-videographer guy. This particular video is so charming I just want to hug my computer every time I see it.

     

  7. RhettandLink
    These guys take vlogging to a whole new level. It was super hard to choose a sample video here, but I finally had to pick this one over Ultimate Caption Fail.

     

  8. CharlieIsSoCoolLike
    He's really just a guy in a room with a camera. And sometimes a ukelele. But perhaps the simplicity of his videos is what allows his cleverness to shine through.


The Power of YouTube

Have you been Rick-rolled? Were you duped by LonelyGirl15? Ever clicked on a link in the doobly-doo? Been in Nerdfighter like with someone? Made a “Free Hugs” sign?

If you answered “huh?” to any of these questions, you don’t know YouTube. There’s an entire online community ready to be tapped by savvy marketers. Ford knows about it. Old Spice knows about it. Netflix and HP know about it. Here’s your crash course.

It’s called vlogging. Regular people, sitting in their bedrooms, talking to their cameras. Becoming celebrities. Some vloggers are successful enough to make a living vlogging – some have well over one million subscribers. Their fans are a force to be reckoned with.

Example #1: The Project for Awesome

Started in 2007 by Hank and John Green, co-producers of the YouTube channel Vlogbrothers, the charity event works like this: on December 17, upload a video about your favorite charity. Include “P4A” in the title. Then, rate and comment on other P4A videos like crazy (in effect, spam them) thus pushing them to the front page of YouTube. (By the way, good YouTubers only spam for charity.) Vloggers organize auctions and raffles to raise money – offering prizes significant to their personal fan base.

In 2010, the fourth year of P4A, YouTube itself got involved – you might have seen the logo change on December 17-18 – and featured 40 P4A videos on the front page. Co-creator Hank Green said: “We went from having to use every trick in the book to get a few more thousand views on YouTube, to YouTube literally banging down our door to get involved.”

The Result:

3,000 P4A videos

600,000 comments

10,000,000 views

$130,000 raised

Here’s a sample video by RhettandLink:

The recap from Hank:

Example #2: The Fiesta Movement

Ford saw the power of social media and harnessed it big-time to introduce the new Ford Fiesta. In 2009, Ford gave brand-new Fiestas to select vlogging celebrities, in exchange for which the vloggers made videos about the car. Vloggers retained creative control. Scary, right? But a huge success.

The Result:

7,000,000 views on YouTube

4,000,000 mentions on Twitter

130,000 consumers clicked through to Ford’s website

83% of them were previously non-Ford owners

Here’s a sample video by MichaelAranda:

 

Here’s one by WheezyWaiter (and his trademark clones):

Commenter MellowJellysaid: “I would buy this car just because WheezyWaiter advertized it. xD” (the comment, as I write this, has 49 ThumbsUp).

Need I say more?

Check out this anthropologist’s presentation to the Library of Congress to find out what makes the YouTube community so powerful. It’s an hour long, but you’ll be glued to your screen.


Mark Twain's New Book

He’s releasing the first volume of his autobiography November 15 – and it’s already #2 on the New York Times Bestseller list. The interesting part? He’s been dead for 100 years. I’m guessing he won’t be available for book signings.

When Mark Twain finished his autobiography, he stipulated that it should not be published until 100 years after his death – which happens to be this month. Twain claimed the reason for the publishing delay was to allow him to say what he wanted without hurting anybody’s feelings. But I think it was just his marketing genius. I mean, even if your experience with Mark Twain up to this point has been limited to a Cliff Notes version of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn back in high school – doesn’t the idea of a never-before-seen-century-old-book make you want to order it on Amazon right now?

Marketing isn’t just the way you word something or the way you make it look – it’s just as much about the timing. Do you launch your holiday campaign after Halloween or after Thanksgiving? Do you launch your website the week of the trade show or a month before? Do you slam your prospects with a sales pitch up front, or do you tease them a little bit first?

When George Lucas created Star Wars in 1977, he had the presence of mind to start counting at “IV” instead of “I.” Twenty years later, when he came out with I, II and III, we all had to see them – we all had to know the missing part of the story. If he had started counting at “I,” and 20 years later came out with the prequels, it would be decidedly less exciting – it would just look like extra bits of story tacked on to make more money.

Bottom line: it’s all in the pacing and the way you order the elements of your story (or sales pitch). Find the magic combination, and you turn something ordinary into something fascinating.

 


Four Tricks for Shaping Your Inspiration

People often ask artists (yes, art directors and copywriters are artists) where they get their ideas. We don’t really know. “Inspired” literally means “God-breathed” – and maybe there is a clue there. But inspiration is only the beginning of genius; it must be molded and twisted and smacked around before it is truly great. So here are four ways to turn that idea into art – with examples by some of the writers who inspire me.

 
 
1.     Be a poet, not a pop star
 
A lot of my brain food was cooked up by the classic rockers (and other musicians) of the 60s and 70s, who weren’t just lyricists – they were (and are) poets.
 
Literally, in the case of the Moody Blues; the drummer, Graeme Edge, wrote several poems, which keyboardist Mike Pinder recited on the albums:
Pinprick holes in a colorless sky 
Let insipid figures of light pass by
The mighty light of ten thousand suns
Challenges infinity, and is soon gone
Morning Glory from Days of Future Passed
Pink Floyd was another British rock group whose albums told entire stories:
So you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking 
Racing around to come up behind you again. 
The sun is the same in a relative way but you're older, 
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death.
Time from Dark Side of the Moon
 
Or the American folk duo Simon and Garfunkel. Honestly, I don’t understand half of Paul Simon’s stuff (“there’s something about you that really reminds me of money”?), but it’s awesome:
In restless dreams I walked alone 
Narrow streets of cobblestone
Beneath the halo of a street lamp
I turned my collar to the cold and damp 
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light 
That split the night 
And touched the sound of silence
The Sounds of Silence from Sounds of Silence
Just to get some perspective, let’s compare this to something more modern.
 
Lady Gaga, named number one on Fast Company’s list of 100 Most Creative People, condescends to bless our ears with this little diddy: 
 
I want your drama, the touch of your hand
I want your leather studded kiss in the sand
I want your love
Love, love, love, I want your love.
Bad Romance from The Fame Monster

I suppose the creative part is the phrase “leather studded kiss”. I get what she’s trying to say, but I think “studded leather kiss” would have been more accurate – you can’t stud a kiss with leather, but you can kiss someone who is wearing studded leather – except who wears leather to the beach? Sure, the song is catchy…but so is the flu.
 
It’s something like the difference between the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and a stick figure. Use words like you would use brush strokes – do more than paint an outline: infuse it with color and dimension. Ultimately – get creative.
 
 
2.     B short.
 
It’s not about using fancy words, but about understanding that words are ideas you plant in the minds of your readers. It can be super short and still say everything you need it to (which is essential in copywriting).
 
In the 1920s, a few of Earnest Hemingway’s colleagues bet that he could not write a complete story in six words. Hemingway came back with this:
 
For sale: baby shoes, never used.
 
Needless to say, his friends lost the bet. Hemingway considered it his best work, and it’s also one of the saddest things I’ve ever read.
 
 
3.     Get at it 
from a 
different 
angle.
 
Sometimes it’s about learning how to look at something from a different angle. Douglas Adams, famous for his hilarious five-book trilogy, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, said this to describe a fleet of spaceships:
 
They hung in the air exactly the same way that bricks don’t.
 
And described the ease of achieving human flight:
 
The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.
 
 
4.    Avoid clichés like the plague.
 
Sometimes it is simply about avoiding clichés, as Markus Zusak does so well in The Book Thief:
Upon her arrival, you could still see the bite marks of snow on her hands and the frosty blood on her fingers. Everything about her was undernourished. Wirelike shins. Coat hanger arms. She did not produce it easily, but when it came, she had a starving smile.
 
My favorite parts are “bite marks of snow” and “coat hanger arms”. Any other writer would have said, “the cold nipped her nose” and “bony arms”. This is a perfect example of “show, don’t tell”; he never even used the word “thin”.
 
 
What art, music, or literature inspires you? What tricks do you use to shape that inspiration?

 


5 Things to Impress People With

If you are a freshly graduated advertising or PR major now diving into the job search, here are a few fun tidbits that may or may not impress your future employer (translation: I cannot be held legally responsible if you use one of these in an interview and it totally bombs).

 

 1.

Lorem ipsum” which Bs usually refer to as “Greek”, actually comes from the Latin “dolorem ipsum”, meaning “pain itself”.

 

2.

Check out this must-have t-shirt only art directors, production directors and printers will understand.

 

3.

When Coca-Cola entered the Chinese market in 1928, they struggled choosing Chinese characters that would approximate the sound “ko-ka-ko-la”. Chinese shopkeepers chose random combinations that translated to mean “female horse fastened with wax”, “wax-flattened mare”, and my personal favorite “bite the wax tadpole”. After sifting through 200 different characters, Coke’s own marketing geniuses finally found the perfect combination, literally translated “to allow the mouth to be able to rejoice”.

 

4. 

Check out these 15 Brilliant Billboard Ads – just don’t claim any of them as your idea.

 

5. 

Finally, if you caught the grammatical error in the title of this blog:

When Winston Churchill’s editor rearranged one of the Prime Minister’s sentences to avoid ending it in a preposition, Churchill wrote back: “This is the sort of English up with which I will not put.”  

 

 

 


The Future of Conversation

Blogosphere; flash mob; threequel: just some of the terms added to the Concise Oxford English Dictionary over the last few years.

In an age of instant communication, new ways of speaking are popping up everywhere. But What’s Next in language is frequently road-blocked by cynicism and even fear. Generations raised by ruler-slapping grammar gods often reject effective phraseology with the narrow-minded excuse “that’s not a word”.

But language is created by conversation, not the other way around. William Shakespeare coined anywhere from 1,700 to 10,000 new words and phrases, including fashionable, published and satisfying. He also used existing words in ways they hadn’t been used before; he was the first to use the word “advertising” as an adjective. The words we use today exist simply because somebody made them up yesterday.

So what does this mean for your brand?

It means you can do more than sell a product or service; you can change the way people communicate.

Take, for instance, Bandaid® and Kleenex®. We know the official names for these types of products are “bandage” and “tissue”, but chances are you use the brand names in regular conversation. Google™ isn’t a “proper” word, but it’s already more than a brand; it’s a verb. Word-of-mouth advertising at its height.

It doesn’t stop with names; some Internet subcultures create mantras and whole new dialects that are nonsense to the rest of us. “All your base are belong to us” began as a translation error in a Japanese video game, and quickly became a battle cry for gamers all over the English-speaking world; so popular it’s been shortened into an acronym, AYBABTU. Perhaps it is the TANSTAAFL of Generation Y.

Bottom line, more words with more uses means there are ever-increasing ways to perfect your tone and define your brand’s personality. That’s not to say you should use words just because they are new; choose phrasing that speaks to your unique audience. The grammatical atrocity that is “lolcats” wouldn’t be preferable for use in a banking ad, but if you are trying to sell footwear to teenage cat-lovers, a headline that reads “I can has shoes?” might just pwn.

So be a little braver when you're naming your brand. Get a little more creative with your copy. And the next time someone tells you frenemy isn’t a word, just tell that zigblat to farfle it.

 


Green...around the gills

 

So the other day I’m enjoying a little snack, wiping my mouth with one of Starbucks’ signature brown and green napkins, when I see it. A friendly little fine-print note:

 

“Made from 100% recycled fibers…”

 

Okay…recycling is good. It’s not like it used to be someone else’s napkin, right?

 

“…with at least 40% post-consumer material…”

 

It was someone else’s napkin? Okay…remain calm. I’m sure they used some kind of disinfecting process.

 

“…in a bleach-free process.”

 

What? I put my MOUTH on this! It was probably a white napkin the first time around. Ih. Who knew the "green initiative" would come to this? What next? Picketers defending the rights of bacteria? Protesting the use of Lysol?

 

Despite this startling revelation, I know I’ll still go to Starbucks. Why? Because according to H. G. Wells, when Martians invade the Earth, germs will be the only thing that can stop them. Plus it's the only place you can get a Caramel Apple Spice.