Don’t you sometimes feel that the world is coming at you too fast? The rush of e-mails, ads, news blips, text and phone messages, Twitter, Facebook, and to top it all off, frenetic music coming from your radio or iPod? Are you overloaded and quietly going mad?

Before you start trying on straitjackets, try this: Radio Bach.

“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.

When I was visiting at my grandmother Barebo’s house one summer, she demonstrated how to tell a male kitten from a female kitten. Someone had brought a fuzzy little kit and said, “I don’t know if it’s a male or a female.” Mom B. seized the surprised kitten, whipped it upside-down, and peered beneath its tail. “That’s a male,” she declared.

What punctuation is this kitten wearing?

Amazed, I asked, “How do you know?” She replied, “If it’s a male, there’s a colon under its tail. If it’s a female, it’s a semicolon.” Picking up the kitten, I took a look, and sure enough, I saw two black dots punctuating the kitten’s backside.

So now you know how to tell the difference between a boy cat and a girl one by their respective rear-end punctuation marks. But do you know the different uses of those two punctuation marks?

To shift, or not to shift? That is the question.

A semicolon is used at the end of one independent clause to introduce another, related, independent clause. Example: (Hey, that’s one way to use a colon, by the way.) “We gave up waiting in the rain to get in to see the new Kauffman Performing Arts Center; it just wasn’t worth it.”

The semicolon acts as an “almost-period,” but it’s not as final. It signals the end of one thought and the beginning of a related thought, or a further comment on the first thought. It often appears where an “and” or “but” might also have been used.

The semicolon can also be used to separate items in a list that might be confusing if you used commas instead. For example, you might write, “Sally had a list of things to do that day that included taking the car to be washed; having her hair re-dyed (the color it was supposed to be in the first place); and driving Nellie, the poodle pup, to the vet, Dr. Neiman, to be spayed.”

Awwww...

If you wanted to introduce a colon into the mix, you could write:

“Sally had a list of things to do that day: take the car…” and then proceed with the rest of the sentence as shown above, changing the verbs from gerunds to regular verbs (“take” instead of “taking”). The colon in this case says, “Here’s the list.”

The colon also can be used after “following,” as in “To create a username and PIN, do the following:” Other words or phrases that precede the colon include “as follows,” “to-wit,” and other words introducing a list of steps or items.

The colon can be used instead of a comma in a sentence like, “Washington Irving said: ‘…..” Or likewise, it can be substituted for a comma in a formal letter salutation, as in “Dear sir:”

For more uses of these kitty-sex-detecting clues, here’s a good source.

So now, each time you see a kitten, you’ll think of the proper way to use colons and semicolons. Right?

Virginia Barebo Schumacher, 95, of Jefferson City, MO, passed away Thursday, September 29, 2011, at Jefferson City Manor Care Center. She was born February 19, 1916 in O’Fallon, MO, the daughter of the late Millard Andrew and Viola Mary (Kessler) Barebo. Virginia, known to friends as “Dink” for her petite stature, was Charlemo Queen at St. Charles High School in 1933, the year she graduated. On November 23, 1938, in St. Charles, Missouri, she married Roy Edward Schumacher, who preceded her in death in 1986.

A natural singer with a beautiful soprano voice, Virginia at one time sang popular and semi-classical music each week on her own half-hour radio program at St. Louis University. In 1949, she gave birth to a daughter, Elizabeth Virginia.

Virginia was a dedicated Christian Scientist who volunteered her time to the church as Music Chairman, Sunday School teacher, and Assistant Clerk. She smiled always, laughed often, and was unfailingly gentle and kind.

She is survived by her daughter, Elizabeth Craig, of Mission, Kansas; one grandson, Jonathan W. Fields, of Shanghai, China; one niece, four grand-nephews and one grand-niece. She was preceded in death by one sister, Mildred Barebo Sebacher, and one brother, Hally Lee Barebo.

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!

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.

Popcorn Girl
Short Story – 860 words
©2011 Liz Craig

My name is Dorthy Parrott. I live in Mexico, Missouri, population 13,000. It’s the kind of place you get born in, get brain-dead from boredom in, and forget to leave.

Excitement is pretty scarce around here. Driving around the courthouse square with its miniature Statue of Liberty is about it. Oh, one time Roy Clark came to town to appear at the Audrain County Fair. I saw him at the Acapulco Lanes after his show drinking beer out of a plastic cup, but I didn’t want to bother him.

As a native Mexicoan, my expectations have never been high. Until recently, I spent most of my waking hours sweeping up popcorn off the floor of the Liberty Theater, which keeps you looking down in general. The best thing about the job was getting to see all the movies for free. Watching the beautiful stars up there, I could forget Mexico, being fat, wishing for a boyfriend, and Mama bugging me to do something with myself.

It was pretty much the same routine every night. Watch a movie, sweep up the popcorn and Milk Duds afterward. Tie up trash bags and lug to dumpster. Repeat.

But then one day, something different happened. Larry Bright gave me a Powerball ticket to repay me for letting him in for free whenever Mr. Doumanian, the owner, wasn’t around. I had a crush on Larry, but I knew he’d always see me as the lump I was in high school, even if I slimmed down to my ideal weight according to Cosmo. I thanked him for the ticket and stuck it in my uniform pants pocket, then forgot about it.

A couple of days later, though, I found the ticket when I was about to wash my uniform. I thought, “No way will I win more than a couple of bucks.” But when I compared my numbers with the winning numbers in the paper, I nearly passed out on the kitchen linoleum. Then I started screaming, and I couldn’t stop. Mama ran in from the yard to see what was wrong. When I told her I had won $110 million with Larry’s Powerball ticket, she started screaming, too, and when we were all out of screams, we entwined our arms the way they do on TV at New Year’s and toasted my luck with a 10 a.m. beer.

Mama wanted me to build us a house in Branson, so she could go see that Japanese fiddle-player any time she wanted. I said nobody actually lives in Branson. Besides, the sight of all those seniors from Arkansas in plaid polyester outfits would depress a person after awhile.

The question was, what did I want to do with the money? What did I want in life, anyway?

First, I decided to give a million to Larry. Mama started yelling, but I stood firm because I thought it was the right thing to do. After all, he had been nice enough to give me the ticket. A million would ease his suffering over having blown it.

Then I quit my job and let the money (still about 6 mil after they took out the taxes) sit in the bank while I figured out what to do next.

A few days later, I had a dream. I was thin and gorgeous, and I was dressed in a long white satin gown. I swiveled my hips sinuously as I glided down a long white marble staircase to meet a crowd of screaming fans waving autograph books. I smiled graciously and signed my name in their books, making each fan feel they were the most important person in the world for just a moment. They all loved me. Then I sashayed out to my sleek silver limousine and waved like the Queen, turning my hand in little circles, as it pulled away from the curb. I woke up with a warm feeling in my heart and a clear idea of what I wanted to do.

So this is it: I’m going to hire a personal trainer and a nutritionist and get down to my ideal weight, and then I’m going to have my face re-sculpted and my teeth capped, and I’m going to get into the movies. I know you can buy your way into Hollywood. Look at Pia Zadora. Well, maybe she’s not such a good example. But anyway, Mama just wants to take one of those “See the Stars’ Homes” tours, but I told her nobody who lives in Hollywood takes those tours. Because you know all the people who live there, and they invite you over.

United Van Lines just pulled up. We’re only taking a few things to get us started; I’ll buy good stuff when we get to Beverly Hills. The real estate agent found us a house there that once belonged to Jean Harlow. We saw the pictures of it, and it’s fabulous. The best thing about the house is that it has a movie theater and a popcorn machine. You know, I might even sweep it out now and then, just for old times’ sake. Come and see me sometime–in the movies.

- 30 -

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.