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Five Cool Things August 22, 2010

By on September 1, 2010 in cloud computing, e-newsletter copywriter, Portland, OR, online copywriter, website copywriting, writers, writing tips

Happy Sunday to you and welcome to the new and tricked out Five Cool Things newsletter. First up in this week’s issue: A very nicely done online journal, Oh Life. Next, the Paris Review has a John Waters interview in which we learn about tree forts, his reading list and his archaic writing process. Christoph Niemann has a very funny series of drawings about air travel at a NY Times blog, we tip our cap to a great Alice Waters cookbook and we wrap up with a file sharing service, drop.io. Anton Chekhov writes, “Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”

Dear Diary | Oh, Life Online Journal

I’m surprised by how cool this application is. Oh Life is a private online journal with a simple and handsome interface. Once you register, (free and easy) each night at 8pm you get an email that prompts you to write an entry. Just hit reply and write whatever strikes your fancy. Your words automatically land in your Oh Life online journal. It’s that easy. I registered and was quite taken with the simplicity and attractivenss of it all. So I think I now have a diary. A nice touch: the folks at San Francisco based Oh Life are very responsive to inquiries and suggestions. An even nicer touch: they subscribe to Five Cool Things.   Have a look >>

John Waters | The Paris Review

The legendary Paris Review was founded in 1953 by Peter Mathiessen, George Plimpton and Harold L. Humes. It may be that you haven’t perused the Paris Review lately, but you should because it is simply amazing – just have a look at the Paris Review blog, for instance.  There’s more of course, such as an interview with Mr. John Waters. Who knew that John Waters writes in longhand on a legal pad and cuts and pastes with scissors and scotch tape? And why am I not surprised by this? The John Waters Paris Review interview is here>>

Delete Neighbor | Abstract City Blog

Goofy airline hijinks are all the rage these days so this is timed quite nicely. Christoph Niemann is an illustrator with a long list of impressive credits: New Yorker covers, Newsweek, the New York Times Magazine, Wired, etc. In a recent blog entry at the Times, our man pens an annotated cartoon of his flight from New York to Berlin with a layover in London. Hilarious. Check it out here>>

Alice Waters certainly needs no introduction from me. Known throughout the land as the heart, soul and chef of

Chez Panisse in Berkeley, she is a shape shifter in our attitudes to food. I thought I would share her cookbook – The Art of Simple Food – with you. It’s been a rock solid ally in our home kitchen for several years running. It will make you a better home cook and you’ll impress your friends even more than you do now. Her Salsa Verde sauce is perfect for summer. Here’s a link to The Art of Simple Food at Amazon>>

Drop.io is a file sharing service. I cannot emphasize strongly enough how useful such a service is. I’m talking to you, SJ. You never have to use You Send It again. You don’t have to mail files to your client. You create a folder that you and your client “share”. Incredibly easy. In a previous issue, I talked about Dropbox, another file sharing service doing much the same thing. Both of these are great applications and well worth the modest cost.

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To Tweet or Not to Tweet

By on July 28, 2010 in e-newsletter copywriter, Portland, OR, freelance copywriter, web content writer, Portland, OR, website copywriting

These blog posts are part of an ongoing column I write called, Content Critical. This column and others are available for wider distribution in newsletters and blogs. Please contact me at richard at lucidcontent dot com for more information.

Content Critical July 27, 2010

It’s a pretty safe bet that by now you have heard of Twitter. You may be using it avidly, or you may be trying to avoid it. Maybe you’re intrigued and need a bit more frosting on the cake before you bite. Well good news, this column is for you.

First, Let’s Dispel The Myth
Twitter is not about what someone had for lunch. Or breakfast. Do some people use it that way? Yes. Just like some people talk only about themselves at the dinner party. Here’s what you do. Ignore. Do not follow. It’s that simple.

A Whole New Way of Communicating
On the face of it, a “tweet” (the message that you send out via Twitter) with its 140-character limit, seems an awfully limited way to engage with other people. After all, what can you say in 140 characters? As it turns out, you can say a heck of a lot.

Here’s a recent tweet from the Wall Street Journal’s Small Business Section:

Here’s a brief announcement pointing to something of value. The link takes you to a Wall Street Journal article that helps small business owners manage mountains of resumes. In less than 140 characters, at least two important business objectives were reached: 1) WSJ promoted published content and 2) WSJ informed the business community about something helpful to them. If that were all there was to Twitter, it would nice. Cool, even. But we’ve barely scratched the surface.

Customer Service Has Been Twitterized
There are some big, big names on Twitter. Dell. Comcast. JetBlue. Southwest Airlines. Whole Foods. Zappos. The list goes on forever. Here’s one simple reason why those companies are on Twitter. Their customers are on Twitter.

If your customers are on Twitter, and your marketing is sufficiently energized and resourced, then your organization should be there. Plus, the Twitter platform and even its limitations, make it ideal for quick and direct communications between individuals.

And don’t discount the power of negative or positive publicity. If someone on Twitter finds themselves very unhappy with Dell, or JetBlue, or Whole Foods, (or just about anyone) and decides to Tweet about it, lots and lots of people are going to hear about that, very, very quickly. And if you’re being taken to task, you can quickly address the problem. If you are present. Conversely, positive news can be “re-tweeted” and can also spread like wildfire.

Comcast in particular, in the person of ComCast employee, Frank Eliason, has earned a well-deserved customer service reputation by using Twitter (@comcastcares) to serve their customers in a very direct, very efficient way. Here’s an example below.

In this tweet, Mr. Eliason is asking a customer to send him a Direct Message (meaning not viewable by anyone other than the two people communicating) so he can help this customer.

The ways in which you or your organization can benefit from Twitter is simply too big for this space. But I hope I’ve given you a couple of things to think about. If you would like to learn more, here are two very well crafted articles on the business of Twitter.

TwitterforBusiness-1 by small business marketing guru John Jantsch
Twitter 101 for Business – A Special Guide by the folks at Twitter

Enjoy! Next week: The home page of your website is all wrong. Discuss. Follow me on Twitter – @lucidcontent

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