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creative briefs |
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Book of the Month. OK, I know this almost smacks of self-promotion, but I'm going to do it anyway. Double Dead, the debut novel by my lovely bride, Terry Hoover, is now available.
It is a mystery set in Charlotte, NC in 1961. The characters are people you feel you know, and the sense of place is dead-on. Follow this link to Barnes & Noble to buy Double Dead online or find the book in your local bookstore, like Park Road Books, here in our hometown of Charlotte. |
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Want to know what your peers are reading about? BNET, a comprehensive web repository of information from business thought leaders, has a feature that tells you just that.
Here is what folks in media and advertising are reading right now. This site has some other great content that you should check out. |
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Carter Langston is a pod person. No, aliens have not taken over his body. He produces highly informative and insightful podcasts concerning issues and crisis management. Carter interviewed me recently on the topic of deceptive marketing. Here is the home for his podcasts. |
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DIRECT Magazine says a recent study indicates that 85 percent of women 25 - 44 read direct marketing pieces they receive by postal mail, while 53 percent of the same age group read email marketing messages. Exclusive deals and coupons, the study found, boost the effectiveness of direct mail. |
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Do you know about SPIs? They are Social Persuaders & Influencers, a group that word-of-mouth marketers want to get their hands on.
A recent study of these influentials indicates that 61 percent of them are more likely to learn about products and services through online and offline reviews. In other words, they are readers. See more results. |
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Greetings, The calendar says it is still winter but things are heating up here at My Creative Team. We're working on everything from new websites and PowerPoint presentations to media relations projects and new email campaigns. I hope things are going well for you.
We've had some requests for more tactical articles and we have delivered. There's one on website promotion and another on best practices for PowerPoint presentations, as well as our usual helpful creative briefs column. Let's get going. |
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Creatively yours,
Harry Hoover
harry@my-creativeteam.com
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11 Ways To Promote Your Website  |
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By Harry Hoover
Headers, Tags, and Titles - Search engines continue to evolve but there are a few things you still can do to give them a clue about what's on your website. One is to include your keywords in header tags. Additionally, craft a one or two sentence description that explains the content of each page, including some keywords from the page. This should go between the tags. Finally, you should write short, descriptive titles for each page. Don't use the same one for each.
Keywords - Look at your website copy. Are your keywords in the first paragraph? They should be because that is where the search engines expect to find them. But don't go overboard with keywords.
SEO - The above tips actually are fairly basic SEO activities, but there are some higher level SEO tactics that will help raise you site above the crowd. Hyperlink your keywords to make them stand out for both search engines and for carbon-based web visitors.
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Phil, Annie & Tim - A Tale of Three Presenters  |
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By Brant Waldeck
Research repeatedly has shown that image, not content, is king in presentations. Clip art and bad animation are guaranteed to project the wrong image whether you are presenting your findings to a supervisor or pitching that new account.
Large corporation employees or small company owners can unleash the power of good presentations to kick-start their careers and boost their acquisition of new business, or ignore the basics of presentation and spiral down into oblivion.
Let's learn a few key elements of good presentation by watching three different presenters from three companies.
The first presenter, Phil Aslide, uses his slides to display every word he intends to say to his audience. In fact, the slides often have many more words than he intends to say.
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