8 quotes to inspire your writing

One of my nerdy little hobbies is collecting quotes about writing by famous authors. But I just don't collect them—I read them, regularly.
I find that reading a good quote is a bit like a shot of Vitamin B, or, even, a splash of cold water in the face. It energizes you—by helping you resolve to do better.
At other times, a pithy quote is like a tour guide pointing out an important bit of scenery in a strange country. "Oh, that's what I should be noticing," you say to yourself.
Finally, the telling quote can also be a laugh line—a chance to guffaw at your own writing foibles (much more effective than crying over them).

Here are eight of my favorite quotes, collected over the last year:

1. Winston Churchill (1874-1965) knew a thing or three about the high-stakes game of persuasive writing. Here is his well-honed advice:

If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time—a tremendous whack.

2. English schoolmaster Henry Watson Fowler (1858-1933) and his brother, the writer Francis George Fowler (1871-1918), devoted their lives to encouraging people to write more clearly and directly. If you don't have time to read their intimidating (but wonderful) book "Modern English Usage," here's a maxim to keep posted beside your computer:

Anyone who wishes to become a good writer should endeavour, before he allows himself to be tempted by the more showy qualities, to be direct, simple, brief, vigorous and lucid.

3. Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980) was an American poet and political activist. And I suppose it would take a poet to express such a profound thought in so few words:

The world is not made up of atoms; it's made up of stories.

4. Cyril Edwin Mitchinson Joad (1891-1953) was an English philosopher and broadcasting personality famous for his appearance on the BBC program The Brains Trust in which experts debated questions such as, "What is the meaning of life?" He had a deep egalitarian streak, which you can see in this quote about writing. (I agree with his sentiment so profoundly that I'm almost prepared to forgive him for a 77-word sentence):

All the talk about style and form and quality of expression in writing which agitates literary circles is simply highfalutin' bunkum, designed to hoodwink people into the belief that writing is much more mysterious than it really is, by those whose living depends on the maintenance of the mystery, and that if the plain man would only take the trouble to say quite plainly what he thinks, good and even easy writing would be the inevitable result.

5. Whenever I am tempted to overwrite, get too flowery, or obfuscate, I schedule a fast remedial reading of the masterpiece "Politics and the English Language" by writer and journalist George Orwell (1903-1950). Still, for brevity, it's hard to beat his seven-word piece of advice:

Good prose is like a window pane.

6. Generally, I wasn't a fan of Andy Rooney (1919 - 2011). I found his little homilies on "60 Minutes" a bit too precious and his delivery bordering on self-parody. But every once in a while, he hit the mark, as he does here:

Keep in mind that you're more interested in what you have to say than anyone else.

7. Contemporary American writer Annie Dillard can be counted on to both comfort and uplift writers who are in trouble. Here is what she has to say about getting in the writing "zone."

At its best, the sensation of writing is that of an unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it. You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then—and only then—is it handed to you.

8. Many years ago I gave a dinner party at which a friend performed an impromptu reading from the book "Metropolitan Life" by humorist Fran Lebowitz. I remember laughing so hard, I started to worry about whether I could continue breathing. Whenever I hit the writing wall, and when all else fails, I can cheer myself immeasurably by remembering her sage advice:

I hate writing. I will do anything to avoid it. The only way I could write less is if I was dead.

What are your favorite observations about writing?
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Social Media Tips for Politicians

With every election there seems to be increasing numbers of politicians jumping into social media to connect with potential voters. The younger generation have been at it for years, but we are starting to see more well-established politicians throwing their hats in the social media ring.
Social media is a major tool in the modern-day politician’s arsenal. It provides an opportunity to connect with voters on a one-to-one basis without the need to walk for hours around the neighborhood. Yet, despite it’s positive potential, social media can also be a metaphorical nail in the coffin for those politicians who fail to use it properly. Everywhere you look there seems to be case studies of ‘what not to do.’
Provided below are some tips for the social media newbie politicians. If your local politician does not ‘get it’ yet, please be sure to mail them a link to this article.
Be personal
Make sure you have a complete profile. It should have a recent photo, contact information and interesting information about yourself. Try to make your profile reflect who you are. Nobody wants to see the Twitter egg or some generic profile. Your social media profile is as important as your billboard photo. It’s where people virtually ‘get to know you.’ Transparency is also important. List your views and political viewpoints. People will respect you being up front with them.
Refrain from shouting
Social media is not a space where you should get up on your platform and blast your message out. Treat it as a place to connect with folks on a one-to-one basis. Think of it as more like a telephone vs. a megaphone. You would never phone up your friends and just start talking as loud as you can AT the other person. Don’t do this on Twitter or any other social media platform.
Also, save the bragging for your press release. You would never walk into a cocktail party and just start talking about how great you are. Social media is all about the soft sell.
Commit
Do not come on social media, blast a tweet out and then be silent for six weeks. If you are going to commit to it, make sure you’ve allocated enough time in your schedule to be able to engage at a meaningful level. Nobody expects you to tweet at 3 a.m., but realize that the conversation is happening all day, every day. Sometimes this might require you to be active on a Saturday or tweet a response on Sunday night. If a twitstorm starts on a Saturday night, you may not be able to wait until Wednesday to respond. Don’t be that person who responds three weeks later.
Help Others
The world (or at least the city or State) is watching you. Why not help others with your audience by provided a few caring re-tweets. Helping others is an unassailable position. Even if you do it wrong, you still do it right.
Expect conversation
When you tweet or post, expect it’s going to lead to a conversation. If you don’t want to have the conversation, please don’t start it. Imagine phoning a voter, stating a fact and then hanging up. You wouldn’t win many friends that way.
Don’t ever blame ‘the hackers’
If you accidentally tweet a photo of your backside or say something ludicrous please don’t blame it on ‘the hackers.’ Learn how to use your computer or cell phone well enough that this won’t happen. Own your account and be accountable.
Do you have other tips for politicians? Please add to the comments and lets produce a comprehensive list.

Writing tips from my former newspaper editors

worked in professional newsrooms since high school, and in that time I picked up scads of writing tips from editors. Here are a few of my favorites:

1. Don’t use “over” when referring to an amount. Instead of saying, “Over 10,000 people are expected to attend the event,” use, “More than 10,000 people are expected to attend. “Over” is a spatial indicator, not a numerical one. An editor pounded that into our heads. Now, I cringe when I see it in print.

2. “Both” is frequently unnecessary. You don’t need to say “Both President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden will attend.” The word “both” is implied when you list them. An exception would be when it is shorthand for an already identified twosome: “Shall I bring ice cream or cake?” “Bring both, please.”

3. “We didn’t hire you to write clichés.” In one story, I used the phrase “as the cliché goes …” and the editor made me rewrite it. His point was that if you have to say that something is a cliché, don’t use it.

4. This is the only time it’s acceptable to begin a story with a quote:

“The world is going to end tomorrow,” the President of the United States said in an address to the American people.

Otherwise, there’s no quote that could possibly grab a reader’s attention better than a well-written lead (or lede, if you prefer).

5. Never use the word “important” in a story. One of my favorite editors would never allow us to use “important” in a story. We never got a full explanation, but I assume it has everything to do with showing the reader instead of telling them that something’s important. Either way, I’ve taken it as a challenge throughout my career to never use this word outside of a direct quote. I suppose it’s been one of the most important tips of my career so far.

Your 3-Legged Online Marketing Strategy is Worthless

Maybe I came on too strong. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say a 3-legged online marketing strategy isn’t actually worthless, but instead, worth less. Hmmm. Maybe.
You could also make a case that I’m being PC and polite. But that’s not my style, so let me tell you why your 3-legged approach to online marketing is just as likely to collapse as a 3-legged chair.

The pillars of online marketing depend on each other.
As a website copywriter, I create, or improve, websites everyday. When my clients lean on me to lead the way online, I tell them the greatest website in the world won’t bring in a single dollar. A great site is merely phase one. If we’re to stick with a chair metaphor, it’s the seat. Chairs need legs, four of them. None is more important than the other.
Same goes for online marketing. You have four legs:

• Search
• Content
• Social media
• Metrics

You miss the mark when one’s missing.
Often, when I school clients on this 4-pronged principle, they want me to let them off the hook with one, whichever one seems inconvenient, or unaffordable, or foreign. It’s human nature, right? We deny or shy away from the unfamiliar.
For those new to online marketing one or more of these pillars are bound to be unfamiliar. What’s a poor boy to do? Learn. See it through. Know what? There’s 26 letters in our alphabet. Sure, if we were to nix the vowels we’d have a far more convenient 21, but we’d have almost no words.
Let’s look at online marketing’s four legs.
Let’s blast through the obvious real quick. You need a website. It should be clean, clear, compelling and engaging. We’ll keep it at that for now and aim to keep the rest of this lesson simple too by assuming your site meets these marks. Now how do we seat a whole bunch of butts down on your www-dot-something chair?
Search—Most call this “SEO.” It’s the more common (and more searched) term. I don’t like it. It’s complicated, a bit misleading, and less meaningful everyday. But who asked me?

Spelled out, as you know, SEO means “search engine optimization.” Fuzzy stuff, no doubt. However, the goal is clear: you want your site to get found. There’s no denying search is the engine that powers online marketing success.

It can’t be the leg you opt to live without. But can you cut corners? No sir. You need to understand search and optimize according to your market, opportunities and business strengths. If that smells like liver and onions to you, find someone who knows the territory.

This article won’t allow for a dissertation on SEO. The point is, it’s one of your four legs. It’s leg number one really. Search is about keywords and keywords are what your entire online marketing strategy is based on. If search puts you out, do yourself a favor and get out. Go offline. Many a gardener grows his business by placing door hangers on front doors throughout the neighborhood.
Content—This is what your customers are searching for. And with search engines and the search mechanisms on popular social sites, you can rest assured they’ll find what they seek. But will they find it on your site, your YouTube channel, your online spaces and places?
You need a content strategy and the resources for creating it day after day. The more useful content you offer, the more customers will come to know you. The more value they get from your content, the more they’ll like you. The more guidance, substance and authenticity you offer, the more they’ll trust you. And getting known, liked and trusted is the key to getting, keeping, and growing a loyal customer base.
Again, to disregard this leg is to surrender to the companies in your space that take online marketing seriously.
[Help yourself to a fun lesson on making your content magnetic here: article]
[21 Ways to Attract Customers with Magnetic Content: eBook/presentation]
Social media—Was that a groan I heard? Open your mind. Open your laptop. Open the gates to a powerful and wonderful new world of networking, caring and sharing.
Operating and sustaining a successful business is based on building meaningful relationships. The fact that Facebook’s home to flirtatious floozies, Twitter entries are abbreviated, LinkedIn’s largely for job hunting, and Pinterest’s populated with pretty pictures doesn’t define the true power of social media.
Social media is what you make it. Make it a place to build community, share ideas, teach, promote content, converse, conduct research and connect. It’s not a “nice-to-have-when-you-have-the-time" type of deal. It’s the connective tissue of communication today. Get a handle on social media and handle it with care by making it another pillar of your program.
[If you're just getting started with social media, here's some good starter stuff.]
Metrics—Analytics gives you the fourth leg you need to make it all standup. The Internet has made almost everything measurable. So you’ll need to understand what’s worthy of measuring, the tools it takes to do the job, and the processes required parlay data into action items that make your online marketing perpetually more powerful.
You’re going to analyze your search efforts, content marketing, and social media activity. This is your four-legged approach.
The end?
Hardly. Online marketing is Silly Putty, my friend. Its shape is ever-changing. You're connected now, so you’re painfully aware how fast search, social media and content marketing evolves. You need to keep up and keep on it.
But don’t let it make you crazy. Power down your devices and sleep tight tonight. Come tomorrow, if you’re going to make online marketing work for your business, you'll park yourself in front of the computer and remind yourself that seat propping up your posterior has four legs.

5 steps to measuring success with mobile rich media

The ubiquity of handsets and tablets may have helped mobile gain the attention of top brands and agencies, but it's the impact of its advertising that is securing its place in the advertising mix. As shown by Medialets' recently published mobile ad benchmarks, mobile rich media advertising in particular is proving to deliver exceptional metrics -- the kind of numbers that can make even digital advertising blush.

Of course, mobile's buzz-worthy performance isn't guaranteed just because you have allocated budget to the smaller screen. Success requires a well orchestrated campaign -- a smart media plan, thoughtful creative, battle-tested mobile-ready ad technology, and, last but not least, the right approach to measurement.

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To ensure you're on the most direct path to mobile success, we've rounded up some best practices to keep in mind as you embark on your next (or first) mobile rich media campaign.

Establish key performance metrics early on

You can't measure your campaign until after it starts running, but that does not mean you should wait to define your measurement strategy. Key performance metrics will inform every step of your campaign execution, particularly creative. Define them in the earliest stages of your campaign -- during planning and buying -- and ensure that every person involved in the execution understands what those metrics are. When KPIs are established and universally understood, you'll be better positioned to execute a campaign that will meet your goals.

Know what can be measured

Mobile rich media advertising is exceptionally measurable, providing standard metrics such as impressions, click-through rate, engagement rate, and every interaction within the creative. It's important to understand what metrics are available to you and how those metrics may differ based on the technology or ad formats you choose. For example, if you're running an expanding banner, will expand rate be measured? Or, will you be able to measure the percent of users that completed all or part of the videos in your ad? Can you measure what products are most often tapped on in your gallery? Find out what reporting is available to you to tell the story of your ad's success. And, per step one above, do it early on in the campaign for best results.

Seek out consistent, cross-platform metrics

It's no secret that the mobile landscape is complex. Different operating systems and versions, device types (like handsets and tablets), and properties (like mobile apps and websites) introduce variables that can make ad creation, serving, and measurement tricky. But don't fight fragmentation with fragmentation; when you choose different solutions to accommodate different mobile devices, you end up with a different set of metrics for each segment. Spare yourself the nightmare of conflicting spreadsheets and seek out a solution that can provide one set of metrics for your campaigns across devices, operating systems, mobile sites, apps, and so on.

Don't rely solely on click-through as a success metric

Click-through is a valuable metric, but it shouldn't be the singular focus of your campaign performance. Rich media ads enable users to perform a host of different actions that bring value to the brand experience. A successful measurement strategy makes it possible for you to share the details on not just whether or not an impression generated a click-through to a landing page, but also the nature, depth, and length of time a user was engaged by the creative. If you're only reporting on click-through, you miss out on the opportunity to tell a more interesting, comprehensive story.

Embrace engagement rate

Engagement rate, the "power metric" of mobile rich media, measures whether or not an impression generated a desired action. The beauty of engagement rate is that the desired action could be anything that happens in the ad, from playing a video to tapping an image gallery or shaking the device. For example, a recent ad for Johnny Walker Blue Label ran on The New York Times invited users to digitally engrave a bottle for Father's Day. (Users could then order that engraved bottle as a gift.) Another recent campaign for Mazda CX-5 prompted users to slide to "x-ray" the vehicle. In each case, when a user performed the core action -- digitally engraving the bottle or sliding to x-ray the vehicle -- an engagement was counted. In this way, engagement rate provides a standard metric by which to measure non-standard activity, making it easier to get a high-level view into the success of a creative and compare performance across different creatives.
Mobile rich media ads may be the new kid on the block, but that doesn't mean that its measurement should be daunting. By following these basic practices, you'll be better positioned not only to succeed in mobile rich media advertising, but also to share the story of that success.