Don’t create a mobile app until you’ve mastered social media.

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being antisocial on social media and mobileI work with companies from a variety of different industries, and I also keep an eye on what other companies are up to. In other words, as well as being a writer for the web, I’m also a student of the web.

And here is what I see…

Most companies finally “get it” when it comes to what they should be doing on the web. They pretty much understand what their websites can do for them, and why the web is different from offline media. That isn’t to say they couldn’t improve their websites. 100% of businesses online could improve their websites.

But when you take a look at their social media channels, it’s a whole different story.

Most companies don’t get social media at all.

(Stick with me, we’ll get to the topic of creating mobile apps in a while…)

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If a business isn’t social, it has no business on social media.

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Social group of friendsLet’s say you’re not a very social person. Antisocial even.

When you go to a local bar, you don’t talk to anyone. And people rarely talk to you because, well, you give off a vibe that you’re not interested in listening to them.

It doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. Doesn’t even mean you don’t like people. It just means you’re not social. So people leave you alone.

Now let’s say you do have one friend, and that friend suggests you try a different bar. It seems this second bar is a really, really social place. Your friend thinks it might change things for you.

So you go to the second bar, and you don’t talk to anyone. They get that same vibe of yours and leave you alone.

The point being, in spite of his or her good intentions, your friend should have known that a change in bars wouldn’t make any difference.

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Choose clients that inspire your very best work.

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want more message on signIf you look back over the work you have done as a freelance writer or copywriter over the last year, you can probably identify one or two jobs that stand out from the rest.

These were jobs that brought out the best in you.

They tapped into your core skills.

They allowed you to shine in ways that just didn’t happen with most other projects.

You probably loved the product or service you were promoting.

You respected the company you were working with.

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Freelancers – Do you give yourself time to sit back and think?

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Sitting by a lake and thinkingAs freelancers we like to keep busy.

In fact, if we’re not busy we start to feel nervous. After all, “empty” time is unbillable time.

Beyond that, sitting around and doing nothing is something we have always been told is bad.

Staring out of the window and daydreaming at school was bad.

Failing to keep your head down and looking busy as an employee was bad.

From an early age we have been conditioned to believe that during our work hours we should always keep busy. To do otherwise brands us as slackers.

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Good copywriting is good writing.

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Susie Henry copywritingI had lunch with a colleague last week.

Like me, he comes from an ad agency background from way back.

We have the same opinions about a few aspects of advertising and copywriting.

First, we both get hugely irritated by bad advertising. We hate blunt, clumsy ads and blunt, clumsy copywriting.

And we both agree that really good copywriting is also really good writing.

That shared opinion led me to tell him the story I share in my live talks about copywriting. It’s about a series of ads written for an insurance company in the UK back in the 1970s. The company was Commercial Union and the copywriter was Susie Henry.

Reading her ads is a joy. She followed advertising legend Bill Bernbach’s philosophy that “good taste, good art, and good writing can be good selling”.

Her copy style was also conversational…it was “across the kitchen table” copywriting. In that sense she anticipated the more conversational style of writing for the web.

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How to write for an audience that likes to snack.

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Snacks for your online audienceBack in the early days of the web we followed the lead of traditional media.

Newspaper editors favored long, detailed articles with maybe one or two images.

We did much the same. Except back in the days before broadband, we took it easy on the images. They took too long to download onto the page.

Even with the arrival of broadband we still focused on using a ton of text. Why? Because that’s how we caught Google’s attention. We wrote long articles and posts, included a few keywords and waited for a flood of readers.

Well, things have changed since then.

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