by on February 2, 2010 2 Comments

Get creative (copy challenge)!

Quickly after my previous post about MOTIVATION, DAMMIT! I added ‘sloth’ to my list of characteristics.

You’ll know I’m working on a pretty demanding site for a pretty demanding client and where I should have been adding finesse to my PHP and CSS abilities, I was adding a half pint of beer to my stomach during a sojourn with mum and dad.

Shaking the sloth is no easy task but I’m happy to say the chance find of a website (discovered in the comment of another blogger on another site – a really useful comment which shows the absolute veracity of comment potency and don’t you forget it) has almost rid the demon.

Creative Copy Challenge revolves around a ridiculously simple concept, as most amazing things do. This one’s the brainchild of Shane Arthur, Sean Platt and David Wright.

CreativeCopyChallenge.com

Elevator pitch

Shane posts 10 words. Entirely randomised words. Words like iron-ore. His constituents banish all evidence of writer’s block and pour forth sonnets of simplicity or counter-perfunctory prose. Everyone else tells you whether it’s a deal, or no deal.

It’s genius. And while I’m most definitely not, I couldn’t resist pitching in.

My starter for 10:

  1. Stupidity (apt, for my virgin attempt)
  2. Deathtrap
  3. In the name of love
  4. Switchblade
  5. Gunpowder
  6. Clobber
  7. Kindergarten
  8. Sorrow
  9. Goatee
  10. Asylum

Here’s my take on this two-short-of-dozen mots du jour:

It all began at kindergarten. Instead of playing with skittles and rattles, pom-poms and pillows, John Wolfenstein would conjure his own simplistic switchblade with a broken plastic knife and sticky-backed plastic.

As he grew, so his tastes in weaponry changed. From the physical to the emotional. Wolfenstein was a havoc of a man, a charmer, lothario, Casanova and politician of passion.

Outwardly he was suave. Inside, he was a deathtrap: a maelstrom of fear and loathing, desperation and stupidity. A ticking timebomb, with one predictable outcome. The gunpowder was always waiting to be lit; that it had lain dry and meekly harmless in his cerebral asylum for such a time was a miracle that even Jesus would fail to fathom.

The mirror told a tale of discretion. Dressed in the finest clobber,  his messy beard now reduced to an a la mode ‘v’ goatee and angry throat freshly fragranced, Wolfenstein looked the everyman. But history had told, and future would tell, an altogether different tale.

Dressed up after a dressing down at work, Wolfenstein was in military mood, ready to inflict carnal carnage as he took his war to a bar. Any bar. The only prerequisite was in female form, and it was available wherever he chose to inflict his merciless ladykilling ways.

For whoever was his next prey, there would be no sorrow – just an electrifying ending that always drove him past the point of caring. His was a world of ultimate adrenaline for him. Hers, to pay the ultimate price in the name of love.

What do you think? Not a big fan of John, myself, but hey, it takes six sides to make a square world.

Have a go – you know you want to!

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by on September 3, 2009 Leave a Comment

Ghost bloggers

The spectre of expected success often overlooks the tactile ghost of reality.

That’s what I’ve discovered in a worrying number of cases where companies blithely ignore the voice of the brand and hunt forth a writer with all the aesthetic potential of Stephen Hawking on a windsurfer, but with the promise of a hen about to lay golden eggs.

I had an interesting chat with my mother today. She’s an exceptional wordsmith. You’d expect nothing less since she bore me. In any case, I discovered in her a candid frustration in becoming a published writer. She had no track record as a published writer, you see. And to become a published writer you automatically need to be one.

But what’s more alarming than the stilted reality of a catch 22 situation is a sizeable number of people who have become published – perhaps by offering their services for free to desperate recipients – and then building upon a lacklustre job a somewhat vacuous reputation that somehow beguiles future assignors into believing they have what it takes.

This occurs more often in the sphere of ghost blogging than anywhere else, a survey* recently revealed. The number of companies who are jettisoning their brand voice in favour of someone who can patch together in a manner of crazy paving words that breathe an altogether different conceit.

I’ve worked with big brands and those not so big. One thing that unites each and every one is uniqueness. Yet there’s a breed of writer which cannot discern between the subtle nuances of enterprises which, delving a little into the company’s background, are amplified into shrieks of exclusivity.

As a writer I spend at least two days with an organisation that wants me to either speech-make or craft intimate web content. I don’t make this promise for ad-hoc jobs relating to one or two pages of editorial: one has to make a living.

To recruit a ghost blogger, you need to know they share the same personal goals and objectives as those in your professional realm. They must vicariously live your brand and what it stands for. Don’t employ a snowboarder if you’re an abseiling products manufacturer: unless they manage to combine the two disciplines faultlessly.

Like them. If you like them and their work, they’ll probably like you too. And they’ll strive for you. But more importantly, your readers will like them, and respond accordingly.

Make them feel like the CEO. Here’s the rub: if your ghost blogger is exactly who you’re looking for, you’d trust them to run the company. It’s that simple. If you wouldn’t, don’t employ them. Because in a marketing sense their role is more important than the CEO. Customers will live and die by your ghost blogger’s keyboard.

Found the right person? Watch your profits soar…

* Survey was manufactured entirely for the purposes of illuminating a particularly shaky and vague line of argument.

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