Jean Gazis Copywriting & Content Strategy

This week's Chief Marketer piece on the lessons social media marketers can learn from email marketers leads off with, you guessed it, a plug for compelling content. "Regardless of the channel—e-mail, social media, print, television, radio – there will always be one indisputable truth: content is king." And how did I find this piece of relevant content I'm now sharing with you?

This is a very interesting presentation on "Designing for Social Traction" by Joshua Porter. Even a quick page-through offers some useful nuggets for design and copy.

See it on Slideshare

Usability expert Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox newsletter is always worth reading, and this issue his discussion of when an expert is needed and when an amateur will do is spot on. The article compares usability to cooking as things that are worth doing and learning for everyone, without lessening the value of professional expertise when you need it. I think the analogy works for a lot of other kinds of work, too.

According to this amusing little jargon quiz on another content marketing site, I am "well qualified to be the Director of Corporate Communications at a Fortune 500 Firm." How scary is that?

Take it yourself here: The Super-Fantastic Corporate Confusion Game.

There's a nice, short list of innovative ways various marketers have used social media to get results over on the Chief Marketer site: A Dozen Applications for Social Media. It might give you some good ideas.

Search Engine Watch has a nice article on things that are most annoying on online shopping sites. Don't Be That Site.

Freelance Switch offers this Buffy the Vampire Slayer Guide to Freelancing. I've never actually followed Buffy myself, but I feel almost as if I have from all the pop-culture references that come my way.

Here's what the NY State Legislature has brought us:

• Candidates who run unopposed...
• Late budgets year after year...
• Shortchanging NYC's public schools...
• Meddling in New York City government...
• The current deadlock...

Whether they contributed to this mess or just let it happen on their watch, they aren't doing their job. Let's send a message to politicians everywhere: politics as usual will end your career. Pledge not to vote for any candidate who was a NY State Senator in June 2009, for any future office, ever again.

I couldn't agree more with this article in Chief Marketer on How to Earn Customer Loyalty. It's the kind of thing we all know, but can stand to be reminded of now and then.

Now that I think of it, isn't it astonishing how much bad customer service exists out there, considering that all of the people involved must certainly also be customers themselves in other contexts?

I've been working on promotions for Event Horizons, an Internet Week event hosted by Box of Rain (aka my other half) that happens tomorrow at Webster Hall. My role was to do a slew of website updates (including pulling together content such as speaker bios that were needed, setting up a webcast player, and just tweaking things in general), do some promotion such as online event listings, write a press release, and create this postcard graphic for an email blast.

I'm psyched to try out some of the new stuff that the conference speakers & panelists are developing, especially Zeitbyte and Mobify.