Hey, I Need to Talk to You About This Brilliant Obama Email Scheme – Alexis C. Madrigal – The Atlantic
December 6, 2012 § Leave a comment
Image via Larry Marano at WireImage/Getty Images, published in August in New York Magazine.
If you were on Obama’s mailing list this election season, you’re surely familiar with his relentless emails, with subject lines like “Hey,” “This week,” “Thank you, Mary,” and “Hey.”
No, the poor interns tasked with composing these messages weren’t too glued to the polls to dream up jazzy, eye-catching headlines. Team BO had done its research. Throughout the campaign, strategists created multiple versions of each message, using analytics tools to determine which iterations got opened, generated clicks, and inspired donations.
The campaign’s now-characteristic personable, no-frills tone was what readers responded to best. But the most important thing analysts learned: a good idea is only good for so long.
Says the Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal:
In my experience in the content game, nothing has proven more true. Any detailed social media primer I give you would be out of date by the time I could finish writing it. Any operational headline writing strategy would stop working if everyone used it. Everyone clamoring for your attention on the web is trying to strike that perfect mix of familiarity and novelty. And that means the content techniques that work are necessarily recursive. You change what people like by doing whatever you do. Which then requires that you do something else, which then changes their tastes again.
…Sometimes, I start to think of the Internet as a gatheration of starlings, each reader/writer moving in response to her immediate content environment, and somehow the whole thing seems to move together, following a million different versions of the same core set of rules.
But hey, if it works (even if only for a moment), go with it. Read the rest of the article here.
Take a cue from the greats
November 26, 2012 § Leave a comment
Need some quick inspiration for writing? Read The Longform Guide to Writing Great Nonfiction, a collection of essays on the writing process and craft. Who says you can’t get a little creative boost while you procrastinate?
“Not all sentences end up in novels or stories. But novels and stories consist of nothing but.”
May 23, 2012 § Leave a comment
I’m loving the New York Times’ Draft blog—a page dedicated to discussion of language and the art of writing. A new essay pops up each week (this week, check out columnist and English professor Ben Yagoda’s piece on chronic comma slip-ups). The piece I’ve enjoyed the most so far, however, is one from a couple of months back on crafting the perfect sentence; beyond being informative, it’s superbly well-written. I might be a little biased, though. Its creator, Jhumpa Lahiri, also happens to be one of my favorite authors—I’ve read her novel The Namesake more times than I can count.
The essay speaks for itself—check it out here.
MARY GABLE 