“Please stop! Don’t do any more!”

My client’s voice on the phone sounded frightened and panicked. But that was not unusual. What was, though, was that she was stopping me from working on part of a larger project. I had ambivalent feelings about halting mid-project.

On the one hand, I like big, multi-faceted projects like this one, involving both print and Web writing. (And, of course, the ability to bill hours for research, communications, writing, revising, etc.) But on the other hand, I had a major problem with the project. Namely, that try as I might, I could not understand what the client wanted. This kind of client (of whom I have had few) might be called the “Oracle at Delphi” type.

The Delphic Oracle client

Guess what I'm thinking.

I am a Gemini, which means Mercury, the astral body named after the messenger to the gods, is my ruling planet. So communication is my happy, happy place. I enjoy it. And I’m pretty good at getting the point and making a point, most of the time, anyway. So I feel terrible when, whether because of the client’s or my own failure to communicate (Did you see an image of Strother Martin wearing mirrored aviators just now? I did.) produces less-than-peachy results.

The most important thing (actually, two things) about which I’m unclear: One, am I off my client’s project, or just on this part of it? And two, is the client panicking because of my bill, which I e-mailed on January 1? Oh, there’s a third thing, the most vital of all: Will I get paid?

I imagine I’ll find out soon. Say, can you direct me to the nearest Delphic Oracle? Umm. Maybe I’d better just consult my Magic 8 Ball.

In summer, my grandmother’s front yard was always bedecked with various interesting flowers and plants: spider plants, bleeding hearts, daisies, and elephant ears sprouted everywhere, with no apparent order imposed on them. That was because my grandmother wasn’t a planter, but a sprinkler. She would stand on the front porch and throw out handfuls of seeds, and the ones that sprouted became her garden that year.

I’ve noticed, as a writer/proofreader, that there are plenty of writers who use my grandmother’s method of seed-planting to disperse commas. My guess is that not knowing how to plant commas where they’re needed, they sprinkle them around randomly, hoping one or two will land in the right spots.

Well, that’s one way to do it. Not the right way, but it is a way.

There are pages and pages of rules about the use of commas, and it’s useful to read them. But it seems to me you could do middling well, comma-wise, by simply reading aloud what you’ve written, then placing a comma every place you paused for breath or emphasis. Because that’s why commas are there. In the music of prose, commas are the beats and rests between the notes that give the melody shape and purpose.

Too esoteric? If you really want to learn the rules of comma usage, there are plenty of resources online. Here’s one I use when I’m unsure.

Sometimes, it’s necessary to break the rules for the sake of clarity, but it’s useful to know the rules, so you’ll know when you can break them.

I proofread documents for several departments of a national financial services company. When they’re pleased, I’m pleased. Here’s a note I received yesterday:

Thank you, Liz, for the quick turnaround and for the edits you made. Excellent changes!

“Liz Craig is wicked smart and a wizard with words. Do your brand a favor and hire her.”
— Joleen K David on Jul 28, 2011

When I moved to Omaha in 1985, I worked as an Associate Creative Director for 19 hellish months at Bozell & Jacobs. I won’t go into detail, but let me say I was not the only creative there who was suffering the slings and arrows of an outrageous GM who crumbled and ate writers and art directors for breakfast like Frosted Mini-Wheats. Nearly everyone in the creative department was taking Xanax, seeing shrinks, or nurturing ulcers.

So it was a sweet relief to be let go during a mass layoff. My art director partner and I rolled our stuff out to the parking lot in a mail cart, and we laughed and laughed and laughed at our great good fortune to have been set free from whatever ring of Dante’s Inferno we’d been inhabiting.

I took the next couple of months off enjoying Thanksgiving and Christmas, and glory be! in January, I got hired at a local ad agency called Smith Kaplan Allen & Reynolds, aka SKAR. My colleague and head of the writers was the kind of woman some women might hate because they’re jealous. A delightfully smart, funny, gorgeous woman named Joleen. I respected her in every way—for her brains, for her client savvy, for her superb strategic thinking and writing, and most of all, for her wacky sense of humor.

These days, we keep in touch via email, and I’ve been back a couple of times to see her and the agency. As the daughter of Wayne Smith, the Smith in Smith Kaplan, now she’s heading up the agency. Under her guidance, the place has been transformed from what was a rather dowdy cubicle city to a cool, sleek, inviting haven for some of the best creatives in the Midwest. Joleen is a natural leader/innovator, and she follows the David Ogilvy philosophy of trying to hire people who are smarter than she is. Which is nearly impossible. But she finds good people and draws the very best out of them.

So thanks, Joleen, for the great recommendation, so many years since I ended my 10-year stint at SKAR., Sometimes I wish I’d stayed, but Kansas City lured me back home, and 15 years and three agencies later, here I am, happily freelancing and recalling the good people and good times at SKAR.

Joleen, I hope you continue to have fun, make money, and always remember me. I’ll remember you, I promise.

“The best way to get a good Google ranking is to blog relevantly and frequently,” I always advise my clients. So imagine how sheepish I feel having ignored my own advice for nearly three weeks. But I have an excuse. Moving.

Multiply by 25.

And not just moving, but casting at least half my belongings overboard beforehand. Have you ever tried to fit 20 pounds into a 5-pound sack? That’s roughly what it’s like moving from a 4-bedroom, 2-bathroom house with finished basement to a 2-bedroom apartment. Oy! The stuff I have/had/still have/don’t know what to do with!

Who are these people??

At my garage sale before the move, I netted a few hundred bucks. I admire the gritty determination of the people who dragged themselves out to dicker over my lounge chair, rusty wheelbarrow, notepads, plastic cups, lizard squeeze-toy, and various and sundry knickknacks in searing 100-degree heat. There’s no stopping true bargain-hunters when the scent of “cheap stuff” is drifting in the fetid air.

But I still have a trunk full of glassware that’s too good to simply give away, and two sets of beautiful china from my mother and grandmother. When this Saharan heat subsides, I’ll try to sell them at an antique mall. That’s what I did with my mother’s Royal Ruby glassware and gorgeous milk glass. If I’d had the time to market it online, I might have gotten more, but time was the one thing I didn’t have.

As I was fretting over getting rid of hand-me-down furniture from two generations, my boyfriend remarked, “You’re going to have to decide if you want to live in your house or your mother’s or grandmother’s house.” He stunned me with that statement, and he was absolutely right. I’m still wondering what “my house” is going to look like when their stuff is gone.

So I am moved into smaller quarters more appropriate to a carefree single lifestyle, and though I’m still surrounded by boxes whose contents I know not where to put, I am back at work as a freelance writer in the Kansas City area, approximately two miles from where I used to live. Two miles, hundreds of worries, a thousand tears and ten thousand sweat droplets away from a house that always was too big for little me. And now, I am experiencing the joy of freedom! I am liberated from lawn mowing, mulching, snow shoveling, property taxes, weed killing, tree trimming, pruning, and all the other things required to maintain a homestead in suburbia. I have no more lawn-related equipment, having traded my mower to my lawn mowing fellow for three last mows. Ah, what a relief it is!

YippeeYiYea!

If you’re an independent creative working from home, do you ever feel like a latter-day Jacob Marley, your clanking chains making you the prisoner of your computer? Or like chain-gang member Woody Allen in “Take the Money and Run?” (If you like to laugh, please check it out.) Or have you broken your bonds, like escapee Paul Muni in “I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang?”

I'm free!

The reason I feel compelled to sit at my desk all day is that most jobs come to me via email, and some must be done post-haste. So when I have to go to the grocery store or pharmacy, I feel as if I’m playing hooky, and I high-tail it back home as soon as I can to check my email.

To feel a captive in one’s own office is not good. There’s a whole wide world out there waiting to be explored! So how can I get out there more?

First idea was to get a smartphone, so I could tell when email came in, and whether I needed to tend to it right away. FAIL! Got a paygo plan that offered a free Samsung phone. Now I know why the phone was free! It stinks. Oh, yes, you can check email, but it takes flippin’ (as dear Sarah P. would say) forever. And the batteries hold power like a sieve holds water.

This phone stinks.

Okay, I know some people who have ditched their landlines and gotten iPhones or other smartphones that let them do everything but clip their toenails with them, but am I ready for that? I have both cell phone and landline, the equivalent of wearing suspenders with a belt. But someone pointed out to me that if you only have a cell phone, when the power to the cell tower goes out, you have no phone. HELP! No phone at all?

Right now isn’t the best time to think about going out on the town, or in the town, actually. I’m preparing to move a certain amount of my stuff from my 4-bedroom house to a 2-bedroom apartment nearby. Right-sizing my lifestyle. Problem is, I’ve inherited a lot of stuff (beautiful dishes, linens, etc.) from two generations before me, that I never use. Like my mother before me, I have kept them in storage in the basement because they’re “too nice to use.” Now, there’s a silly idea. As long as I keep them, I’m chained to this stuff, too.

I’ve got some lovely pieces of Royal Ruby glassware on Craigslist, and today I’m listing my mother’s milk glass. All of that stuff is beautiful, but I have to think of the 3′ X 4″ storage cage at my new apartment, and exactly how much will go into it. Not much, that’s how much. And my son in Shanghai doesn’t give a chopstick for any of it. Not to mention, it would cost more than the national debt to send it to him.

All this Royal Ruby glass for sale!

In an attempt to downsize, I took five U-matic cassettes containing all of the TV commercials I’ve ever written and produced to a fellow nearby who is transferring them to DVD, so I won’t have to lug these obsolete plastic boxes of tape around forever. I also gave a 16mm film my dad had made back in the 50s for Purina to a friend in communication studies, and someday, he says he’ll transfer that to DVD. So I’m at least shrinking my media load.

Remember George Carlin’s terrific riff on “stuff?” It’s all true. And moving stuff is very trying. Moving while trying to get some work done is doubly trying. Oh, AND trying to organize a big garage sale (though you get more for your stuff at an “estate sale,” I’ve heard). Never have I done a garage sale, and this will be a pretty big one. Anybody have folding tables I could borrow?

Anyhow, when I am finally ensconced in the new apartment, I dearly hope I will not feel chained to my desk and stuff. As I recall from living in an apartment before, I tended to go out more. Say, tree leaves are still green, aren’t they?

Today, I outlined and wrote a sales presentation for a company I’d never heard of until a few days ago. A PR friend of mine had called and asked for my help on the writing end of a big branding/positioning project with a number of closely-spaced deadlines for items progressing to a complete revamp.

Hey, doing anything is easier when you don’t have time to do it. You doubt it?

Without thinking time, you don’t have ruminating time. You go with your first instinct and make it work. It’s kind of exhilarating. Kind of devil-may-care, even!Of course, background info helps. And on this project, it was coming through in small drips as the writing progressed. It’s still coming in, even as I’ve just finished the presentation script. Do I go back now and change things? Heck, there isn’t time! My PR friend has to present the danged thing in about an hour!

Thank goodness for tight deadlines, I say. Now for a little nap.

For the past 10 years, I’ve been calling myself a freelance writer. But recently, a friend who is cognizant of the kind of counseling I give my clients, suggested that “writer” is a bit limiting.

There's the whole thinking part, which "Writer" doesn't address.

By way of explaining this to a foreign client who was unfamiliar with the process and wondered what I had been billing him for, since he hadn’t seen his campaign yet, I drew a picture of an iceberg (I do have some artistic skills, but anyone can draw a triangle.). I drew the waterline close to the tip.

What you see is not all you get.

Then I explained that all the background info gathering, analyzing, thinking, strategizing, getting bids, estimating, budgeting and planning were in the part below the waterline. You can’t see them. The part you finally see, the finished project, is the very tip of the iceberg. You have to pay for all of that, just as you have to pay for an architect’s plans before you build your house.

My client’s question brought to mind the image of a dad-to-be looking at his third-trimester-pregnant wife and saying, “You’ve been saying for months that you’re going to have a baby. I don’t see any baby. So what gives?”

But getting back to services I offer clients: beyond simply writing, I do project management.

Business owners are busy. Really busy.

Managing a project in print or Web or video for a client is child’s play, compared with my duties as an ad agency writer/producer. In that capacity, I was in charge of every aspect of a production, from keeping the client happy (Number One, always) to producing estimates to riding herd on the production company, casting talent, directing same, selecting wardrobe set designs, keeping costs in line, and overseeing anything else that would affect the final product.

Would he have been as famous?

This is my first attempt with xtreme media. I was inspired a couple of years ago by a video of a graphic designer and totally clueless client. It was obscene and funny, and completely true, if you know the biz.

Give me a break on the quality. The motions don’t match what I wanted, but I have a request for help in to the company. Maybe more better videos later.

The unfortunate reality in social media marketing today is this: many clients think “someone on the staff” can handle the company’s social media program “in their spare time.”

Spare time? What spare time?

“Social media? Not worth wasting time or money on.”
Some clients see social media planning as an afterthought that’s not important to waste money on. They don’t see any need to hire a dedicated social media manager or train someone on staff to conduct the social media program full-time, let alone hire an experienced consultant to create an effective social media marketing strategy.

Who has time for strategy? Why not just go ahead and implement?

To a “naive” social media marketer (meaning someone who is just getting into it), it may not even be obvious that a strategy is necessary. Heck, social media is free, isn’t it? So why bother? Just do it! Tweet, blog, get a FB page, and you’re golden, right? WRONG.

Social media marketing requires a strategy, just like traditional advertising and marketing. And a sound strategy comes about by knowing the answers to some very specific marketing-related questions.

Not every staff member you might pay to tweet or blog for you will know how to ask the right questions to inform a marketing strategy. You don’t jump into even the simplest purchase at Walmart before asking a few questions, do you? So why would your company’s image on the Web be less important than the functionality of the camping stove you asked a hundred questions about? Ask the right questions, or regret it when your social media marketing program either dies or blows up in your face.

What are the right questions?
What is it we want to sell (Often not as simple as “a widget.”)? What’s our unique benefit? What’s our message? Who do we want to hear it? What’s our tone? Where do we need to show up so our audience will hear us? How do we combine social media with traditional media?

Okay. Now I know the right questions. So what?
Answering the questions is only the first step. Companies need expert help in formulating and executing a social media marketing plan based on the answers to those questions, just as companies have needed it in any other communication endeavor. And yes, time and money will need to be spent. It’s a fact of social media life.

Who can help?
The person who puts together your social media strategy can be a stated “expert in social media marketing plans,” a social-media-hip agency, or an independent contractor. But whoever you hire, make sure they know the right questions to ask. Anyone who has spent time as a writer at advertising agencies should have a basic list of questions to ask before suggesting you jump into execution of an ad hoc marketing plan. And some idea of how to proceed from there.

During my couple of decades as a senior ad agency writer, I learned how to develop marketing strategies, then added two other tools that help fine-tune the communication needs of the client and the campaign. Armed with these tools and my experience, I can help any client develop an effectively targeted, well-written and pitch-perfectly voiced marketing plan in traditional and/or social media.

Think like a successful marketer.

My budget’s too small to hire an expert.
If you have a small budget, you can’t afford NOT to hire an expert to help you focus your traditional or social media marketing efforts as sharply as possible. If you need your marketing brain sharpened, give me a call at 913.236.7595. Let’s think together— about making your campaign a success to be proud of.