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Very few writers really know what they are doing until they've done it. - Anne Lamott This quote from Anne Lamott resonates with me quite a bit. I seldom know what I'm doing until I've done it. I also seldom know what other writers are doing either. I recognize what I enjoy reading … aaaaand I've little idea why I enjoy it. That's what makes the topic of linguistics and language so fascinating to me because it helps explain all the whys behind the writing I love, the tweets I read, the updates I favorite, and the copy I crave. There's an art and a science to writing that sits just below the surface, and I'd love to share with you what I've learned about how to reveal it and incorporate it into your marketing messages-and how to write copy that people love! Linguistics, Microstyle, and the Beauty of Small Writing Simplicity is not a given. It is an achievement, a human invention, a discovery, a beloved belief. - William H. Gass, Finding a Form When I look at a format like Twitter, … [Read more...] about How to Write Social Media Updates People Love

If you want a history of Google’s search battles with European antitrust regulators, a new article from Brad Stone (and colleagues) at Bloomberg will more than satisfy you. While there’s very little truly new information, the well-researched (and lengthy) piece is nearly comprehensive and captures all the intrigue, as well as the evolving nature of the dispute. The article is provocatively titled, “Google’s $6 Billion Miscalculation on the EU.” The $6 billion refers to the potential penalties and fines that Google may face in Europe. The “miscalculation” reflects some of Google’s missteps there, chief among which may have been its misplaced reliance on former European Commission competition czar Joaquín Almunia. Almunia has now been replaced by Danish politician Margrethe Vestager, who is taking a tougher line against the company and is almost certain to seek financial penalties. For example, the article says she is now socializing … [Read more...] about Bloomberg’s Massive History Of Google’s EU Antitrust Case

Tomorrow, March 8th is International Women's Day and Google has a special Google logo, aka Google Doodle, for the day. The logo is going live 12 hours early on all Google properties around the world, in order to make sure those who don't go to Google on Saturday see it the day before. The Doodle is heavily animated and features a 90-second video showing how women have historically been underrepresented in almost all fields. Here is that video. It is interesting Google is posting this because just the other day a study came out showing only 17% of Google Doodles in the past two years had women in them. Team lead Ryan Germick agreed with the study, saying "We've been working to fix the imbalance in our doodles." In this Doodle Google has featured over 100 women, they include: Cee Chatpawee, TV host, IT Princess, Thailand Chinaza Godwin Christiana, Student, Nigeria Easkey Britton, Surfer and the first woman to surf in Iran, PhD and doctoral candidate, Ireland Rahimah Yussof, Developer … [Read more...] about Google Posts Women’s Day 2014 Logo After Agreeing Its Logos Are Male-Dominated

The UK’s Conservative Party has a new co-chair, The Right Honourable Grant Shapps, Member of Parliament for Welwyn Hatfield. Honorable except with Google, which considers the business he apparently founded to be pushing a tool designed to spam its search engine and fill its listings with rubbish. According to The Guardian, Shapps founded HowToCorp in 2005, a site that, among other products, pitches the TrafficPaymaster software. The software apparently “scrapes” or copies content from all over the web, from RSS feeds to even sets of search results, to automatically generate pages that probably make little sense to the human visitor but which may pick up some traffic from Google and, in turn, generate clicks on Google AdSense or other ads. Let’s talk about the software first, then I’ll get back to the Shapps connection. Scraping & Auto-Generating Content I’ve qualified my second paragraph above with “apparently” and … [Read more...] about New UK Conservative Party Co-Chair Grant Shapps Founded Google Spamming Business

Last month, I talked about how marketers need to distinguish between interactions and true engagement*. As part of that, I referenced the fact that Facebook and Twitter had been written about in relation to events such as the death of Amy Winehouse, the massacre in Norway and the Egyptian revolution. But since writing that, social media has again been rolled out as a whipping boy, this time being blamed by some for the riots that broke out in London. This led to politicians, including the British Prime Minister, and some of his most loyal followers, suggesting that at times such as these social networks should be censored or even closed down. Leaving aside the fact that this would mean that Mr. Cameron had a similar view on this topic to the likes of the Arab dictators he’s so keen to see toppled, what it shows is a massive misunderstanding about what social networks, and indeed what the social Web in general, actually is. In 1964, philosopher Marshall McLuhan coined the, now … [Read more...] about The (Social) Medium Is Not The Message