Thought Leadership Comes From Experience “Welcome aboard, ladies and gentlemen. I’m your captain. I’ve never flown one of these things before, but I’m really excited to be here. Make sure your seatbelts are buckled, and let’s see if I can get us to New York safely.” Article Highlights: It's a mistake to expect junior-level employees to share experiences they don't have to build thought leadership. How would you feel if you heard these words while you were sitting on the tarmac, waiting for takeoff? Ironically, that’s how many content marketing efforts begin. Although it was a nice sentiment, and I appreciated her enthusiasm, it would be interesting to know how many readers were lost that day. I’m not suggesting she should have pretended she knew the industry or had experience; her readers would have eventually discovered that she didn’t. My first real exposure to social media was a few years ago when our CEO approached the marketing department and said something like, “I’ve set up a Facebook account/page for our company.
William Zinsser, Author of ‘On Writing Well,’ at His Work In newsrooms, publishing houses and wherever the labor centers on honing sentences and paragraphs, you are almost certain to find among the reference works a classic guide to nonfiction writing called “On Writing Well,” by Mr. Zinsser. Sometimes all you have to say is: Hand me the Zinsser. “Clutter is the disease of American writing,” he declared in one passage that tends to haunt anyone daring to write about Mr. The book, first published in 1976, grew out of a writing course that Mr. So he listens. “People read with their ears, whether they know it or not,” Mr. Sitting at his table is Gretchen Dykstra, a woman of vast experience as a teacher and public servant. Not long ago North Dakota Quarterly published an essay by Ms. “It reads like a textbook,” he tells Ms. He suggests that Ms. Mr. Lunchtime arrives. “I’ve got ham and cheese, turkey and cranberry, and roast beef,” Ms. Ham and cheese it is. This may be because Mr. “I’m eager to hear from you. Mr. This is what Ms. Mr.
6 traits of great writing—according to a fourth-grade teacher I’ve written severalposts about my 10-year-old son and his developing writing skills. And though he may not share my alacrity for writing, his school curriculum is full of great writing advice. Recently, he came home with a handout called “Six traits of great writing.” Here are the traits along with a few takeaways. Ideas and content • Observe first; tell next. • Develop supporting details before you start writing. • Use a balance of showing and telling. • Make your message clear to the reader. Organization • Link ideas together so there is a beginning, middle, and end. • Use a variety of transitional words Word choice • Use clear, colorful, vivid verbs. • Use “thoughtful” adjectives Sentence fluency • Sentences should mostly begin with different words. • Use smooth transitions and sentence variation. • Use a mixture of simple and complex sentences. • Sentences should flow when read aloud. Voice Conventions • If you can’t spell a word, look it up. (Image via)
4 Guidelines For Improving Your Marketing About every four-to-six months our company goes through the cathartic process of reviewing our marketing performance. Like many companies, we use a variety of marketing techniques, platforms, and processes for generating leads that bring in new customers. Our results have improved considerably over time as we've changed and implemented new strategies, but, like most companies, we still want to get better. Our review process follows some regular patterns: We start with what the goal was and work our way backWe use metrics to determine what worked and what didn'tWe break down our platform performance and campaign performance separately and in an integrated fashion These are just a few of the patterns, but you get the idea. Here are the guidelines we try to follow to maximize the value of the review process: 1. 2. 3. 4. This process is hard on our company because as we often say: "Facts are our friends, even if they aren't friendly." Marketing reviews are crucial to managing your business.
An A-to-Z Guide to 2012's Worst Words - Entertainment Every year is chock-full of words, and we have feelings about those words. We live with them, we love them, we let them roll around in our mouths, and we express them. We think about them and spit them out, vehemently, when we are angry. But, look, the list that follows, comprising our year in worst words, isn't just about word-hating. Of course, you may hate any and all of those words and others; that is your prerogative. Note: We mean no offense to these words, even when we call them despicable. Actually. Artisanal. Baby Bump. Brogrammer. Butt-chugging. Curate. Curvy. Disrupt. Ecosystem. Epic. Fiscal Cliff. Gaffe. Glocal. Hashtag. Hehehe. Hipster. Historic, historical. INITIAL-WORDS. INTERNET-HYPE WORDS. Jeah. Everyone enter @speedo comp and get a chance to win some speedo gear! Kony. Legitimate rape.
The Art of the Simple Blurb | Robert Laing Every week or so, I get asked by a startup founder to make an intro to an investor. Normally these startups are pre-funding, so the founders are inexperienced about talking about their company. So their descriptions of their companies suck, which makes it really hard to make an intro even if they’re working on something interesting. This advice is mainly for founders looking for investor intros, but probably works for any kind of business development. First things firstMark Suster has great advice in general on the ins and outs of making intros. If there’s one takeaway from Mark, it should be this: People who make intros learn to be very careful who they intro, because their reputation can be negatively affected by too many or too poor quality intros. Your blurbIf you’re asking for an intro, provide a simple blurb about your company. The point of the blurb is to give your introducer a piece of text that makes it easy to refer your company to someone else. Like this: Like Loading...
What Clint Eastwood Teaches Barack Obama and Mitt Romney During halftime of Sunday’s Super Bowl game, Chrysler aired a stunning two-minute commercial featuring Clint Eastwood. The ad was a masterpiece of political writing. It acknowledged in stark, unequivocal language that the United States is in rough shape – but it wrapped that tough message in optimistic language that aimed to rally the nation. Here’s the ad: “It’s halftime. So what lesson can President Obama and the eventual Republican nominee take out of this ad? There have been eight general elections since the beginning of the 24/7 media age in 1980. Ronald Reagan, whose 1984 “Morning in America” campaign was the obvious inspiration for this adGeorge H.W. 6. It’s easy to see the theme here. When trying to predict the outcome of the 2012 election, you can almost forget about the economy and foreign affairs.
Princeton Brews Trouble for Us 1 Percenters: Michael Lewis To: The Upper Ones From: The Strategy Committee Re: The Alarming Behavior of College Students The committee has been reconvened in haste to respond to a disturbing new trend: the uprisings by students on elite college campuses. Across the Ivy League the young people whom our Wall Street division once subjugated with ease are becoming troublesome. Our good friends at Goldman Sachs, to cite one example, have been forced to cancel their recruiting trips to Harvard and Brown. At Princeton, 30 students masquerading as job applicants entered a pair of Wall Street informational sessions, asked many obnoxious questions (“How do I get a job lobbying the U.S. government to protect Wall Street interests?”), rose and chanted a list of charges at bankers from JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs, and, finally, posted videos of their outrageous behavior on YouTube. The committee views this latter incident as a sure sign of trouble to come. No. 1. No. 2. Avoid taking questions from college students. No. 3.
A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs I grew up as an only child, with a single mother. Because we were poor and because I knew my father had emigrated from Syria, I imagined he looked like Omar Sharif. I hoped he would be rich and kind and would come into our lives (and our not yet furnished apartment) and help us. Later, after I’d met my father, I tried to believe he’d changed his number and left no forwarding address because he was an idealistic revolutionary, plotting a new world for the Arab people. Even as a feminist, my whole life I’d been waiting for a man to love, who could love me. By then, I lived in New York, where I was trying to write my first novel. When I met Steve, he was a guy my age in jeans, Arab- or Jewish-looking and handsomer than Omar Sharif. We took a long walk — something, it happened, that we both liked to do. I didn’t know much about computers. I told Steve I’d recently considered my first purchase of a computer: something called the Cromemco. Steve told me it was a good thing I’d waited. Dr.