Site Assessments

As someone who tends to focus on the communications experience for clients’ customers, I’ve done my share of assessing a company’s site and outlining what I think works and fails and how I think the site could be improved. Below are a couple of examples culled from site assessments I’ve written.
Reputation management site
General (navigation): You [...]

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Newsletters

I have had a great deal of opportunity over the years to create and distribute corporate newsletters. Although blogs and other social media have eroded the primacy of this method for keeping in touch with one’s customers, it’s a far cry from finished. I’ve included excerpts from several I’ve created below.
From the iKarma Newsletter.
Featured Feature
Most [...]

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Corporate Blogging for Business Companies

Occasionally, I am called upon to contribute to a company’s blog. There’s no trick to it. I just try to a) write about topics of interest to the company’s customers, to the participants in the conversations that the blog, its writers and its company are engaged in and c) show some of my own personality.
Here [...]

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A Series of Tubes

Blogrolls are supposed to be dynamic, to change to reflect the ongoing history of the blogger, a kind of map of what the blogger is thinking, reading, watching and so on. I think they tend to grow rather static, though, on many blogs. So, every rare once in a while, I completely delete mine and [...]

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We Jam Econo

I saw an excellent documentary the other day, “We Jam Econo.” It was about the Minutemen. A band. If you don’t know them, what can I say about them? I remember when Steve told me they were playing at Project Space and how I would really like them. I thought, “Oh, fuck. Please. Another fucking [...]

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Serial Fiction

When I first started out as a reader, it was of serial fiction. I loved Tarzan books, Encyclopedia Brown, Danny Dunn and others. As I got older I read what’s commonly thought of as “literature,” which I still love (hello Harry Matthews). Then I rediscovered the joy of serial fiction, reading Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes [...]

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First Georgic

I will sing of the heavenly gift of aerial honeyTo the god of silence in the rose,The voiced sibilance of summer heatVoided into space between the stars.The moored cape of night closes inAbove us on the trestle.The lit windows of the trainBroadcast the tonic in a burstWe recognize but do not understand.The dark root sweetensAs [...]

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Once upon a time, but not here, not now

In those terrible places designed to rob us of our bodies and our spirits, we sustained each other. – Philip Levine
Once upon a time, but not here, not now,
We sustained each other. Weak and varied,
We communed against the unbreakable dark.
It was not advantage we were seeking
But defiance in the presence of the truth.
We flourish [...]

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The Coral

He needs someone to recognize his voice,This man whose speech snapped off. Its jagged endsNow forming the veiled shoals where black fish school,As aimless as abandoned thoughts, as franticAs a life of half-completed plans.
The threatened happiness of half-remembered musicHints, in yellow bands around the eyes,At greater sadness still, the sadness ofThe irreclaimable, the reason whyThe [...]

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Night and the Body

Y caída hacia arriba – O. Paz
It falls upwardSplashing onto the sky’s faceAnd pooling like hard liquor.The bronze bellsTorn like cardboardRing in the long wellsInfinite and crassAnd the night is eatenTorn into a thousand piecesSheeted into machineryAnd chewed up in the gearsThe puff of breath Mutilated.Mourners watch the bodyBorne off on the watersIn its little [...]

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