Ein bier, bitte!

ImageMatrix Halloween Party, City View Tavern, Cincinnati 1989

For those of you who aren’t Cincinnati Krauts, that means “Beer please!” As I was going to press last time (or whatever) I learned that the long-gestating Kroger Supermarkets beer web page I had written had gone live.

This one was fun. Working with a Cincinnati web marketing firm that I can’t name, I had to dig in to all kinds of beer ephemera to write web copy about beer trivia, food pairings, beer history in America and so on.

As I said previously, I have done a bunch of beer writing for Anheuser Busch, Miller Coors and Kroger – mostly for video. And of course, being some internal merchandising or training video, I almost never get to see the final product. So it’s really fun to see it all come to life. Especially the timeline of Beer in America. So check it out!

And now, I leave you with the words of Norm from Cheers: “Women! Can’t live with ’em, pass me the beer nuts!”

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And if YOU can’t live without compelling copy for web, print, social media or video, Please contact LivelyExchange (at) gmail.com!

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A Busy January, Just How You Like It!

A video production friend of mine (and frequent partner in Las Vegas shenanigans) made the mistake of asking “What are you working on now?” I answered, and thought I would share with you, my Legion of Fan:

• Consumer electronics website, point-of-sale, brochures and trade show materials,
• Real estate website,
• Social media for a consumer testing firm,
• Legal Services website,
• Liquor and spirits press release and article,
• Mental health practitioner website,
• Residential and commercial HVAC website,
• Social media for a home security firm,
• Producing a video for a certain giant healthcare firm, and a
• Financial planning website

…all at different stages of development, of course.

I then asked him, “What are YOU working on?” His reply? Editing “Party Sluts Invade Lake Havasu!!” Which is infinitely cooler than all my stuff combined and multiplied by Pi!

So, how’s YOUR two-thousand-eleventy so far?

Contact livelyexchange (at) gmail.com!

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Getting Back in the Social Media Groove

Re-using old Baby New Years: Part of the "new austerity"

January 2011: New Year, new resolution to blog more consistently, blah blah bling bling blah.

Anyway, so far so good in the new all-freelance era of Freelance Copywriter Charleston SC (see what I did there?) The Philips stuff is less prominent but more satisfying, pound for pound, so there’s that.  The healthcare client is undergoing some personnel changes, but I am confident it will find its equilibrium.  My Charlotte web marketing client is hitting the ground running in 20-oh-11, and apparently they aren’t sick of me yet.  I’m doing a couple of web and print projects for a giant Midwestern grocery chain.  A law firm in Columbia SC needs some web copy. A Charleston realtor needs some blogging, a mental health professional needs web content, and so on. My biggest new project has been cooking along for about 4 months now – social media coordination for a marketing website. Nice steady tentpole gig, Praise Be, though the workload and the success of it is a primary reason for my lack of personal blogging lately. What, you mean I have to log out of THEIR WordPress site and log back in to MINE? That reeks of EFFORT!

So, that’s the update. I actually have several ideas for blog posts upcoming, so consider yourself warned! Talk soon!

Please contact livelyexchange (at) gmail.com

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Invent the Disease, Provide the Cure

It’s a fairly common tactic in advertising: inventing a fake disease or syndrome that only your product or service can relieve.  Goodwill did it recently with TMSS, or Too Much Stuff Syndrome.

And now, Philips joins the fake disease game with DBA, or Dead Battery Anxiety.  I believe the local creative director came up with this idea. I like it because it could almost be a real thing. People living in fear that the batteries on their cell phone or MP3 will die at the most inopportune time – haven’t we all been there?

So we conjured up this fake foundation to promote awareness, and started writing various case studies and video vignettes to illustrate the heartbreak of DBA. I did several of the pieces here, an agency did several more, and there are several yet to be produced. In addition to the copywriting and script blocking, I also got to help direct the casting session, and I even did some voiceover work. This took me ALL the way back to the corporate video days!

Anyway, check it out. And if you’re wondering which pieces are mine, the answer is simple: whichever ones you like!

Contact livelyexchange (at) gmail.com!

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Motivation

I would love to know how other bloggers find the motivation to keep it up. Let me clarify – I don’t mean model train enthusiasts, or movie fans or music aficionados who blog about their particular passions. I mean professional writers like me who also blog. These are people who spend all day researching, brainstorming, writing and rewriting. How do they find topics to write about, let alone find the energy to do the actual writing?

For the millionth-billionth time, I will tell you that I began this blog in order to drum up some Google wonderfulness in this new market of Charleston SC.  I didn’t have any compelling urge to write about copywriting, nor did I think I had anything in particular to say.  What I had was a need for exposure, and time. Lots of time.

So, for the first two months or so I wrote every day. Every day! I can’t imagine. And as I did it, I began to like it. I began to feel the urge to write about copywriting. And I realized I did have something to say. And slowly the blogging, combined with tireless cold calling, led to more and more work. Subsequently, I had less and less time for blogging.

You may say, why not blog about the various projects you work on?  And I do. But again, success is the death of variety. I have been blessed to find regular gigs with the healthcare newsletter, the “everything Charleston” consumer website, and the web marketing agency in Charlotte. They chug along nicely, but I have already told you as much as I can, other than the fact that two of those three gigs also involve blogging!

I don’t have the answer. But I am determined to figure it out. And I would love to hear some suggestions! Oh, and Happy New Year!

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Helpful Holiday Hint!

If you’re like me at Christmas, you spare a good bit of no expense to provide nothing but second best the best for the guy whose name you picked out of a hat your loved ones. In that helpful spirit, here is how you get out-of-print songs that you don’t own off of the internet and onto your knock-off brand X mp3 player!

1. Download some cheese-eating audio editing software… like the one that rhymes with “Shmaw-dacity.”

2. Get a mini-to-mini audio cable (stereo.)  It helps if you swiped a bunch of these from the place you used to work. (Sorry, I left that out.)

3. Connect the audio out from one laptop to the mic in of a second laptop. (Oh yeah, you need two PCs. Dang it!)

4. Find the song on YouTube or something.

5. Record the song into the editing software.

6. Save As something remotely usable, like .wav, instead of whatever goofy proprietary file extension they give you.

7. Load the song into Windows Media Player on the first PC.

8. Burn the song onto a CD. It’s better to get ten or songs before you do this. (Again, sorry.)

9. Rip the songs BACK into Media Player, as .wma’s this time.

10. Sync the song to your cheesy brand-X mp3.

11. Repeat until exhausted, or until mp3’s become obsolete.

In all seriousness, Audacity is a little chunkified, but I have used it a lot to get my old LP’s (look it up, kids) into my mp3.

Anyway, that’s it for now. Remember, friends, Christmas can be a time of frustration and deep family weirdness…

…oh, were you expecting a “but“? I thought you knew me better!

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Just When I Was Mellowing on Facebook

Question: What’s more cynical than deliberately writing a post about Facebook because it is guaranteed to draw hits?
Answer: Facebook itself.

I hope you’re sitting down when you read this (we pause as a million chairs drag across the scarred linoleum floor of our global consciousness) …but retarded Facebook apps like Farmtown and Mafia Wars are cynical cesspools of personal information-gathering disguised as “community”…and worse. This according to an article in The Consumerist, inscrutably titled “Mafia Wars CEO Brags about Scamming People from Day One.”

Long ago I wrote a cranky, Andy Rooney-esque piece called “Putting the Grr! in Facebook,” in which I grumbled about the various idiosyncrasies of hapless users. This post is consistently my top drawing piece – even surpassing my scholarly (!) review of the film Lars and the Real Girl (my top post among perverts searching for Artificial Partners, wink wink.)

Since that post, I have mellowed out a bit and hooked up with all kinds of friends from the past. But a constant beef has continued to be all of the stupid apps. Jenny has sent you a hug! What famous dead composer are you? And a bunch of others I can’t recall because I “HID” them long ago.

But the games are the worst. I got as far as Scrabulous, meaning, I signed up for Scrabulous, knowing that it was nothing more than a scam for gathering personal information, but hey, I like Scrabble. But the first time I saw on  Facebook’s News Feed: “Michael has spelled the word INCONTINENCE on Scrabulous! Can YOU do better? Sign up NOW!” …I pulled the plug.

Trust me, I “get” Facebook. If you know anything about Web 2.0, this practice should not be a surprise. While everyone whines about the ads, I say “that’s why it’s free.” But you read something like “Mafia Wars CEO Brags about Scamming People from Day One,” …and you are looking at the epitome* of corporate cynicism.

*Epitome: The embodiment or precise representation of an ideal. Pronounced “uh-PIT-oh-mee”…or “eppa-tohm” if you’re from West Virginia (like me.)

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Just in Time for Veteran’s Day

Photoshop presents a dude with some other dude's arm holding a picture he forgot to bring!

Well, we set out to honor America’s veterans, and to sell medical devices. I’m confident we did the honoring part. The selling? It’s too soon to say.

Despite a last minute freakout caused by someone watching an old rough cut and asking for changes that were made two weeks ago, the Veteran’s Day videos are up.

So HERE is the LINK. What you will see is a nice rah-rah about the Veteran’s Health Adminstration and its care mission, and how this healthcare manufacturer’s mission coincides. To drive home the point, the rah-rah is followed by interviews with employees of the manufacturer who also happen to be Veterans.

There are four videos at the bottom of the page. Sort of the donut effect, where the openers and closers are the same, with the interviews filling the donut hole. (mmmm….DONUTS!)

Anyway, check ’em out (and I suggest you do it sooner than later – The client can be touchy about this sort of thing.) And Happy Veteran’s Day! That’s next Wednesday, commie!

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Speaking of Editing

I sat in the editor’s chair, off and on, for about 10 years. It would have taken me just about that long to come up with this: a music video comprised entirely of audio cues from Pulp Fiction. Enjoy!

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The Smoke Clears

I admit, I never got used to the smell of Napalm in the morning, so it’s nice that the smoke is starting to clear on the Veterans Day tribute video. So, as the last chopper leaves Saigon, and the Embassy is overrun, I need to crack open the briefing book and see what I have missed lately (because I certainly haven’t missed any weak-ass ‘Nam references!)

It looks like a bunch of websites I have been writing for have gone online during my tour of duty (bonus reference!) Here is a sampling, with some background info that you don’t need.

Harris Communications: Charlotte area provider of wireless solutions for business and industry.

Carolina Records Storage: Pretty much what it sounds like. Again, from the Charlotte area.

Leitner Construction: Commercial construction company in Rock Hill, SC

Climatech Heating and Cooling: Located in the swank-tastic Lake Norman area of North Carolina, and

Flatfish Island Designs: A fun one. A long time Charleston area residential architecture firm decided to start a new venture, selling coastal-style home plans.

Other than that, it’s the usual mix of websites, print ads, product brochures, and maybe some more videos scripts coming over the horizon. Speaking of the horizon, do you remember the closing shot of John Wayne’s The Green Berets? Duke and the little kid stand on the beach watching the sunset. Did you ever question the logic of that shot, seeing as Vietnam has only an EASTERN coast? If you did, you are a commie.

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