The Copywriting Maven

photo credit: Torley

I’ve been working since 5:30 am and I haven’t had near enough coffee yet, so of course I found this email subject head intriguing and totally hilarious.

photo credit: tomsaint11

Here’s a fun read to kick-off your week.

Oxford compiles list of top ten irritating phrases -A top 10 of irritating expressions has been compiled by researchers at Oxford University

Do read the comments, too. I love seeing British English and American English compared and contrasted.

How about you? What’s missing from this top 10 that’s on yours? Any phrases to which you’d plead guilty as charged?

photo credit: Lisa Brewster

I’m seething at the moment, so you’ll just have to bear with me.

I’ve spent at least 2 hours everyday for the past week with someone, sometimes several ones, at the FAMOUS NAME tech support center regarding my little corner of the ecommerce world. These folks are unfailingly polite, but remain failingly unable to: 1/keep the server running where my site resides; 2/fix the SSL certificate they continue to break when I asked to downgrade (the horror, the horror!) my service to save $100/month.

Anyway, with all the time I spend on hold, I’ve had the chance to review some interesting tidbits to share.

Three Things Every Recruiter Looks For In A Resume

This is a very good read for those of you who are thinking about revising your resume - and in times like these, that should be on everyone’s TO-DO list. In particular, I liked this section:

For optimum impact, write accomplishments that illustrate the strength of your core competencies, transferable skills and focus. An accomplishment is only valuable to your resume if it promotes the skills your target employers are looking for. Remember the rule of relevancy as you craft each of your accomplishment statements.

This is a useful reminder for us marcomm writers, as well. Your reader doesn’t care a whit about your product/service/company except as it’s relevant to their self-interest.  All messages, self-promotional and otherwise, need to be relevant to the person doing the reading. Otherwise it’s junk and a waste of their time and your effort.

Easy Instructions Are Motivating

At first read, I thought “Well, duh …”, but as I read through the article it struck me that how something looks as well as reads can have a tremendous impact not only on the piece being read, but on the task or action we want from our reader.

More importantly, when the instructions were written in an easy to read font, the students were more willing to make exercise a part of their daily routine. The results of the second experiment were similar. Again, the students who read the recipe in an easy to read font determined it would take a shorter time to prepare and not require a lot of culinary skill to complete.

This is a good reminder for the writers among us to suggest fonts and other graphic approaches before our work is handed off to the client’s art department. And if they ask why, just show them this article.

Marketing Meltdown? It’s Time to Optimize Your Efforts!

Hey, I wrote that! Since everything I do is all about you, I’m bringing back The Copywriting Maven Makeover Series at Copyblogger. Same terms, as before. I hope you’ll enjoy the series and participate in the process!

When I went to vote this am at my son’s middle school, I noticed what appeared to be a lot of secret service around. I noticed our county executive was here to vote but I thought, hmmm … why would he need
the heavy security presence?

Then I noticed that Mike Martin O’Malley, the Free State’s Governor was there
for a meet & greet photo op.

So we meeted and greeted and I got the photo op! I told him it was for my blog, but a very nice blog.

(Watch this guy. He, too, has shown interest in 1600 Pennsylvania Ave at some point down the road.)

And if you haven’t voted yet today … what’s keeping ya?

photo credit: Mike McCaffrey

I saw this listed on TheLadders.com site and was intrigued. What kind of resume would you write seeking presidential office? How long should it be, what would you highlight and how?

Consider these examples:

• McCain resume
• Obama resume

Note these documents aren’t the candidates’ actual resumes, just extremely well-written imaginings — and they’re each just 2 pages long!

BLATANT SELF-PROMOTION ALERT FOR AOC2

As part of our efforts to promote the Age of Conversation 2, Jay Ehret (The Marketing Guy) has been conducting interviews with several of the book’s contributors. Thrilled, as always, that anyone thinks I have anything of value to share, here’s my interview with Jay. Part 2 of the same audio is with the nicest marketing pro I know and AOC2 co-editor, Drew McLellan.

Listen up! Age of Conversation Podcast: Episode 4 - Launch! and The Accidental Marketer starring Roberta Rosenberg & Drew McLellan: