Blog

  • Use of the Oxford Comma May 29, 2024 - As a writer, I have often been chastised by other writers about my excessive use of commas. I always push back, unrelenting, unless forced to comply with an editor expounding (and pounding on their desks) examples in their favorite style guides. It’s mostly a personal preference of mine, but it comes out of my years of experience struggling for clarity. What is an Oxford comma? The Oxford comma, also known as the serial comma, is Read More ...
  • Six Common Punctuation Errors that Bedevil Bloggers May 28, 2024 - This is an old one, but the rules of writing and grammar are (sort of) eternal; this applies today just as much as it did 15+ years ago… Proofreading your text for misspelled words and grammatical mistakes is essential. What about the punctuation, though? Despite being more subtle, these errors can equally hurt your credibility. I’m going to point out six common punctuation errors that you shouldn’t be making, and give you examples so you’re Read More ...
  • GDPR: A Game-Changer for Personalized Marketing? March 8, 2018 - If I’m being honest, data privacy is a topic that tends to elicit more eyerolls than expressions of enthusiasm among marketers. After all, data is supposed to be the fuel that powers the modern marketing machine. Marketers are awash in myriad types of data about past, current and potential future customers. Personal information, purchase history, web behavior, social graphs, second- and third-party audience segments — it’s all synthesized, sliced and scored to optimize marketing outcomes, Read More ...
  • The Secret Sauce of Marketing May 16, 2017 - The sauce is S for simple, A for appealing, U for unexpected, C for credible and E for emotional. Simple Simple messages have one central truth and are easy to grasp and picture. Coming up with a simple truth is the hardest thing. How do you boil down what you want to communicate to one thing? Most marketers have several things they want to advertise and aren’t good at sacrifice. Proverbs are the example: simple Read More ...
  • Three elements of an affordable video content marketing strategy July 13, 2016 - Video tool provider Knowledge Vision (www.knowledgevision.com) recently put out a paper about how companies should be using video as a key part of their marketing collateral asset collection. Their purpose is to sell tools, but their message is applicable to any marketing group. The main point is that video does not have to be scary expensive- you can do quite a lot on the cheap. The idea is to break your video production energy and budget into Read More ...
  • Copywriting January 23, 2016 - A great line in an episode of Mad Men last night… A copywriter quits to pursue another career, another says that she’s lucky to be able to follow her dreams, and follows with let’s face it we’re working for… Heinz Baked Beans. I laughed out loud. I didn’t LOL; I really actually laughed out loud. I’ve had many concerns over the course of my career about how unimportant a career in writing is, when compared Read More ...