Toronto Content Marketing Blog

Writer's Workshop - Writing can be a female dog

12/15/2013

I'm going to date myself horribly here but the first cultural reference that comes to mind is the old Young MC song, Bust a Move. The troubling line? "Play hard to get, females get jealous."

Female what, exactly? Oh, he meant WOMEN. Both words have the same number of syllables, so there goes that argument!

The next time you're planning to use male or female in a written piece, make sure the answer to male WHAT or female WHAT is already answered. Or better still, if it's something like "female teacher" or "male nurse" consider if mentioning the sex of the subject is even relevant at all.

Check back next Sunday for another tip to tighten up your writing.

Staying Sane While Working From Home

12/12/2013

When a lot of people think of working from home, they envision a life in front of a screen in a bathrobe. That's a good or bad thing, depending on your perspective. The adjustment from working outside the home full time to working at home can be a rough one, but it doesn't have to be! Here are some tips to help make it work for you:

Get dressed. Sick days are made to be spent in your PJs, but you're not sick now, you're working. Getting up, showering and getting dressed changes the scenery enough to give your day an official start. Yes, comfy clothes are fine, even preferable. Skipping the trip to the dry cleaner is a pretty nice benefit, after all.
Keep a schedule, of sorts. One of the advantages of working from home is NOT keeping a schedule, right? Sure, you're your own boss now, but any clients you're working with are going to have the not unreasonable expectation of contacting you at normal times of day. Best to avail yourself to them fairly regularly.
BACK AWAY FROM THE COMPUTER! Especially when you're getting started, it's tempting to work all the time. You probably started working from home because it allowed you the flexibility to do other things. If you're not doing those other things, what exactly is the point of not leaving the house? It won't be long before anyone who shares your home gets annoyed by your "absence while present" so try to head that annoyance off at the pass by setting appropriate boundaries.
Talk to people whenever possible. It can get pretty isolating holed up at home. Having a quick phone chat rather than an email with a client or taking a break to talk to a friend can help you feel a little more connected with the world.
Don't forget about self-care. Just because how you look in a suit matters less these days, don't think it doesn't matter at all. You're missing out on the moving around that leaving the house for work naturally includes now. Take regular breaks for feeding, watering and walking.

Oh, one of my two reasons for working from home is clamouring for lunch. I guess it's time for one of those breaks!

Everyday Writing Workshop - Don't do THAT!

12/8/2013

Welcome back to the writing workshop, a weekly series of tips to help everyday writers sharpen their messaging. Today let's talk about the extraneous THAT placements just waiting to take over the world.

It was a commonly held belief that Dickens' novels were so long because he was paid by the word. It would seem that is not the truth. So apparently Dickens' issue was the need for a better editor? Anyway, nobody is getting paid by the word in today's world of notoriously short attention spans, so make sure you ruthlessly cut any extra words from your writing.

The word "that" is a good starting point.

Any time you have finished writing a piece, do a quick scan for the word "that" and read the sentence back to yourself without it. For example, if you remove that from "I think THAT Sean Connery is the best Bond of all time," you still have "I think Sean Connery is the best Bond of all time."

See? Removing the extra word didn't change the meaning of the sentence at all! So stop doing THAT and check back next Sunday for another tip to tighten up your writing.

Developing Content for Small Business

12/5/2013

Your shiny new website is finally live. You have a spot for your company blog, a Twitter handle and a Facebook page. Great! Now what? Well, there's no time like the present to start developing your company's content. Your content strategy will differ from that of a big company with its own eager marketing and communications team, but that doesn't mean you can't build on the same principles.

Make an editorial calendar. Have about 10 (or 20 or 30) strong, simple ideas for topics you'd like to expand on. They can be about your business, about your industry in general or about hot trends you're keeping an eye on.
Don't be afraid to course correct. If you started out with a conversational tone but that's falling flat with your audience, try something more formal - or vice versa. Try a few different tones to see where your audience is and what gets the best response.
Consider hiring help. If you're having trouble keeping up but you're not ready to throw in the towel, consider hiring help to generate your content. There is an opportunity cost associated with writing your own content, and it's probably higher than you think.
Stay updated. Once you get started, if you can't keep up just take your ball and go home. DO NOT leave a long-neglected company blog or Twitter account out there for all the world to see. It's too attractive to hackers and it's terrible for your image.

Building and staying connected with your audience doesn't have to time consuming, and having a plan will help you spend less time staring at a blinking cursor on a blank screen.

Outsourcing Social Media

12/3/2013

As a small business owner, you wear a lot of hats every day. You're also possibly wearing a chef's apron or a tool belt too. You may feel like managing your business is enough. It is. Your time and expertise are best spent doing what you do best - growing your business!

Did you know maintaining a presence on multiple social media outlets can help boost your company's search ranking? To be effective as a search tactic, your social media platform has to be updated frequently to let crawlers know it's a going concern. Customers also like having the ability to follow the brands they love on social media for news and updates.

You probably know why you should have a social media presence for your business, but that doesn't give you more hours in the day, or the expertise to handle a negative situation online. That's when you need to seriously consider outsourcing your company's social media efforts.

But before you hand over the keys to your social media kingdom, ask any company you're considering the following questions:

How will you build my following? You want real people following you, not bots. That's why you want a real person engaging with the online community. If the words "script" or "program" come up in the discussion, other than to disparage them, move on.
Can I give a prize for Facebook "Likes" to get new fans? No. This is a violation of Facebook's TOS and this should be known by anyone purporting to be a professional online community manager.
How will you answer customer inquiries? A social media pro will get acquainted with your products and services and work with you in advance to develop answers to FAQs, rather than forwarding everything to you. Because that would defeat the purpose of outsourcing!
What will you do to address any negative feedback? A community manager should be experienced in the best practices of online reputation management. The should be able to produce an escalation chart and response strategy at the outset. If someone is being disruptive to your brand online, you don't want it to continue to escalate for three days while the social media management firm you hired dithers!
What monitoring tactics do you employ? Social media monitoring isn't quite a 24/7 job, but it's pretty close. Your community manager should be checking in after hours or on weekends and holidays. If they're only around during business hours, that's a red flag.

Outsourcing your social media efforts should make your life easier. If you get the sense that you'd have an easier time doing it yourself, the company you hired is doing it wrong. It's time to make a switch!

Everyday Writing Workshop - Just Use It!

12/1/2013

Welcome to the writing workshop, a weekly series of tips to help everyday writers sharpen their messaging. For our first feature, we're going to take aim at a personal pet peeve: Just use it!

There is a common societal misconception that the more syllables the word has, the more articulate it seems. This leads to the rampant misuse of words like UTILIZE in blog posts and publications everywhere. I'm looking at YOU, technical manuals! Utilize is not a fancier version of use, it has its own very specific meaning.

You are UTILIZING something when it is being used for something other than its intended purpose. When you USE a large kitchen knife to dice vegetables, you're using it. When you UTILIZE the back of that same knife to whack a jar to loosen the lid, you're utilizing it.

Now go forth and USE the word UTILIZE correctly!

Check back next Sunday for another tip to tighten up your writing.

Forward>>

Writer's Workshop - Writing can be a female dog

Staying Sane While Working From Home

Everyday Writing Workshop - Don't do THAT!

Developing Content for Small Business

Outsourcing Social Media

Everyday Writing Workshop - Just Use It!

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