While scraping the last of the coffee grounds out of the grinder, trying to maximize that pot of coffee this morning, I heard an NPR Morning Edition segment on how people’s trust of Toyota is irrationally affected by incidences such as the recent recall. Apparently, people’s feelings about brands is more than their desire to […]
When creating marketing messages, particularly for technology and software, the industry standard has been to break down the conversation to features and benefits. The argument is that we simply list the elements of the product and call them features. Following that, we affix a significance to those features and call those benefits. When developing that […]
I am just wrapping up a project creating a user manual for an audio device. It was a small-scale technical writing project that is quite easy to turn around. This morning, I just want to crow to the fact that I got the timeline right, the budget right, and all the stakeholders are really pleased […]
Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the internet, is always an enjoyable companion. At a recent conference, he really nailed the shift that marketing needs to make in the next few years: What Google has learned about advertising is that people don’t treat information as annoying advertising if they’re actually interested in the information. […]
Joel is a writer based in Portland Oregon. Joel has been writing about technology since before technology was technology. When he started writing business to business communication, everyone was a-buzz about the invention of bronze. Now we need to explain how software as a service adds value to the enterprise and what our “solution” is. […]