August 21, 2015

Use Twitter to Tighten Up Your Writing

A consultant once told me that “tighter is righter.” A handful of well-chosen words provides so much more power than paragraphs that endlessly spool on and on and dilute themselves.

As a guy who writes advertising slogans and headlines, I’ll tell you right away that a powerful one-line headline trumps anything I can do in the descriptive copy to follow. If I can’t punch through the clutter and noise and commandeer your attention with a three-word statement, then whatever wonderful language I employ in describing the product is moot, because you’ve already moved on. Luckily for me (and the many others who make a living by churning out words) modern social media is a perfect whetstone to sharpen our verbal tools.

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August 5, 2015

The Future of Innovation is Customer Co-Creation

I’ve always believed in the idiom “two heads are better than one,” but what happens when a company adopts that mantra and expands on it? What happens when a company involves not only two people, not only their entire company, but outside consumers in their decision-making? If done right, it can transform your business into an efficient, innovative, and profitable machine.

This process in which companies involve consumers in the design and development of their business’s offerings is called customer co-creation. Customer co-creation focuses on understanding and meeting consumers’ needs and if a business is willing to listen, there are many benefits to this tactic.

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