Jean Gazis Copywriting & Content Development

If people who say that their vote doesn't matter drive you as crazy as they do me, here's a timely WikiHow page on How to Convince Someone to Vote with some excellent suggestions.

Just one more vote per precinct in Florida in 2000 could have made the difference. If that's really true, wow!

Now, go VOTE. It matters.

I stumbled across (ha! - I was targeted by-- ) this terrific bit of online advertising for the Honda CR-V. I followed a link from the top of my Gmail that said "Are you craving pizza? - www.honda.com - Whatever you're craving, the Crave Reader can guess. Try it out."

Who can resist an Internet quiz?

Some of the very well-known and respected, active community contributors are women, and apparently the Drupal community is generally less gender-unbalanced than other open source projects - women made up a whopping 10% of the most recent DrupalCon. One participant says "Drupal has always had a larger number of female contributors than most open source projects, the percentage just a piddly 2% in open source in general. We've been at 7% for a while now and it's so great to see those numbers increasing."

I came across this interesting article in Chief Marketer's "Marketing ROI" e-newsletter. The gist of it is that the current trend in marketing is towards analytics, which are of course very important, but not meaningful unless balanced with compelling content.

"Customers see only the creative elements of marketing, the content, and they expect it to be good... Ultimately, human beings react to content.

One of the last pieces of sales collateral I wrote when I worked for Ziff-Davis Central Ad Sales almost ten years ago (!) was about the need for continuous advertising and marketing during slow business periods, headlined Slow Times Call for Fast Action.

Fast forward to the current downturn, and – what do you know? – the very same advice turns up in The Entrepreneurial Mind blog on my Google Reader, linking to a newspaper article titled Don't ease up on marketing in these slow economic times.

I said: "Coasting is no way to win a race. During a period of slow sales, one of the first things you may be tempted to do is cut costs by reducing your advertising budget. It may seem like an obvious move, but it’s the wrong move... you can’t get something by doing nothing. When times are good, advertising is important. And when they’re not so good, it’s essential. A strong marketing program — selling to new customers, expanding into new markets, increasing ad spending — will solidify your customer base, take business away from less aggressive competitors, and position your business for future growth."

He says: "One of the expenses that entrepreneurs are tempted to cut back on is marketing. However, a weak economy is not the time to cut back on communicating with your existing and potential customers... With customers cutting back on their spending, small business owners must fight even more aggressively to maintain their revenues. That is why marketing and advertising become more important than ever."

I still think that was one of my best pieces. It's nice to see that it's as true as ever.

I've let my public radio membership lapse but I will rejoin one of these days. Meanwhile I sent in a website suggestion, and I think they're going to use it:

I've been scanning business cards collected from various networking events to get the contact info into a database. I can see why someone might want a two-sided card to put a nice big logo or tagline on the back. But why, why, WHY would anyone design the card so that the actual business name and URL – or worse, their name and title – don't also appear on the front of the card at all? That is just stupid, people!

Effective Marketing Rule #1: Put all the information people want where they can get it easily!

I liked this piece by a customer of mine (I did the initial blog setup) on why scheduling some quiet time for yourself gives tangible results by fostering creativity.

Read it at Ducks in a Flow, Alers Consulting's business blog.

The new, improved Urban Organic website launched over the weekend (December 8-9). I built the site in Drupal, based on the "Golden Hour" theme, using some gorgeous fruit and vegetable images from freedigitalphotos.net. I think it looks nice - I hope you agree.

Using Drupal will enable the Urban Organic staff to update the site more easily and quickly than their old static HTML site, as well as provide the option to add more features later.

And by the way, it's good quality produce!