Jean Gazis Copywriting & Content Strategy

Do not seek to feel comfortable when communicating difficult things. It's not a good barometer of whether you should speak up or not.

The basis for all usability is to relate the design to two questions: who are the users and what are their tasks?

Oh jeez, not another flexible, scalable, groundbreaking, industry-standard, cutting-edge product from a market-leading, well positioned company! Ugh.

There’s no secret to effective marketing. The key to success is to constantly refine your efforts and concentrate your resources in the activities that generate the best return on investment.

Less is more. After you've finished writing, go back and edit out 25% of the words you've written.

Of course, the more valuable and relevant the content is, the more likely your customer is to share it, which is why e-mail marketers have always placed a great deal of importance on sharing tools such as forward-to-a-friend. It's easy today to add social media sharing links to e-mail campaigns, so make sure you are in sync with your fellow marketers. The more opportunities you provide for the customer to share your content, the more likely you are to create new subscribers and customers who want to talk about your brand.

Before creating your brand's Facebook page or sending the company's first tweet, understand what your strategy is going to be. What information are you going to provide? Where is the content going to come from? Can you leverage promotions and offers from other channels such as e-mail? Driving your customers to social networks without a plan for engaging them will most likely lead to disappointment, so make sure you have a plan for publishing valuable content regularly.

Provide your customers with relevant content. Regardless of the channel—e-mail, social media, print, television, radio—there will always be one indisputable truth: content is king.

I see more and more Web development teams realizing that the biggest reason for late projects is late content (not late wireframes or other IA work products). And late content is almost always a lack of sound, detailed content development planning and tracking.

Content needs to be part of IA discussions, plays a crucial role in Web strategies, and needs to drive CMS decisions. It's an ongoing challenge, because for all too many organizations, it's a radical notion that your Web site needs a plan!