Jean Gazis Copywriting & Content Strategy

There's a lot of buzz around content matters these days, but not always a lot of hard facts. The folks at Content Science are aiming to change this with a study on Content and Credibility. Meanwhile, here's their recap of what we already know:

"Consumer Reports sponsored a study of web credibility in the U.S. nearly 10 years ago. The result was a set of tips that we consider to be 'Credibility 101.'

“In today’s information age of Marketing and Web 2.0, a company’s website is the key to their entire business."
—Marcus Sheridan, author of The Sales Lion and blog marketing speaker

How's yours?

If your client or boss doesn't understand why you need a content strategy, s/he sure won't get the what, why, and how. There's a nice summary of pitching content strategy over at Intentional Design's Content Strategy blog, with a downloadable PDF. I especially like the last page of the presentation:

"How much content is out there with your company/organization’s name on it?
• Do you know what it says?
• Is it accurate and up to date?
• Is it helping or hurting your brand?

... Do the next best thing by checking out the results of other people's tests at Which Test Won?, marketing guru Anne Holland's entertaining and informational A/B testing site. It's short and to the point and sometimes surprising. Find out what kinds of small differences can make or break response rates and click-throughs.

I've been trying to mow down the profusion of weeds that is my inbox, and - as previously noted - it's surprising how non-user-friendly some sites make it to unsubscribe. Shop It To Me, on the other hand, absolutely nails it.

A graphic designer I worked with years ago used to quote a printer he had worked with, who said “You can have it fast; you can have it good; you can have it cheap—pick two.” This wonderful bit of conventional wisdom would have you believe that there are always trade-offs between quality, timeliness, and expense. And it’s usually true, there almost always are.

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.

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.

Ideally, OTHER peoples' mistakes. Here's a great bit of marketing advice for web developers on applying lessons learned from the things your users do wrong to improve your site on Gaspedal's "Damn, I Wish I'd Thought of That!. This is also a very good email newsletter - you can sign up on the blog.