Category: Content Strategy

When you try to target an ad to every possible audience by being everything, you tend to say exactly nothing. I've long fought cliches and buzzwords. But Dissolve, a company that makes stock footage, combined the very best cliches with a fantastic script from Kendra Eash at McSweeney's. The result? Brilliant. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YBtspm8j8M This could be a commercial for any company that… Continue reading Trying to Be Everything…

Steve Jobs changed the world. It's easy to point to the iPods, iPads, iPhones and Macs as evidence of this, but it goes farther. Jobs was uniquely able to translate a vision into a reality, and to anticipate customer desires decades before they were imaginable. True, he was a jerk; prickly and difficult to work… Continue reading Steve Jobs, Vision – and Fun

When I started “doing” social media for a living in 2009, it was shiny, new and nebulous. New platforms kept springing up, only to be acquired by a slightly larger company. Every time we created a best practice, things changed again, and we had to learn and evolve. But the things that make a social… Continue reading Beyond Social: A Digital Mindset

A good storyteller knows how to give just enough information to intrigue the reader. But so often in business writing, we meander to the point and bury the lede. When readers arrive from a social link, they're even more apt to skim, giving your work just a few seconds to get to the point. Master storytellers… Continue reading Don’t Keep Them Guessing: Get to the Point

"Wow, that link is from 2011!" "Wait, aren't we on version 3.2 now? This page is about version 2.0." "So this blog post is great, but where's the context? How do I find out more?" In the past few months, I've moved from a social media role to a more traditional web content role. And… Continue reading Web Stock + Social Flow

Day-ta. Daaah-ta. Dat-um? However you pronounce (or pluralize) it, big data is making even bigger headlines. While many businesses are finding better and cooler ways to actually use this data to become more efficient or solve problems, a disconnect remains: how can the average person really take advantage of a plethora of petabytes? The most… Continue reading Visualizing Data: Beyond “Chartjunk”

Storytelling is what makes us who we are. Stories connect us with others, unite us for causes and carry on traditions. Whether it was cavemen gathered around a fire or painting on stone or Millennials oversharing on Facebook, we inherently share stories. Stories are also how we sell things, from the earliest marketing campaigns onwards.… Continue reading Why Stories

It's one thing for a company to tell its own story. It's an entirely different animal when customers tell your story for you. Trader Joe's - who does relatively little in the social space - has inspired legions of rabid fans. One of them created their own "commercial," a video homage to the store and its products, which has earned more than 882,000 views as of this date....