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Cool Tool: Death to the Stock Photo

Cheryl Harrison — Thu, 19 Sep 2013 18:43:59 +0000

Visual content is key in digital marketing, but good visual content is also hard to create without a good camera or good eye, and is expensive to buy via stock photo websites (and the content that’d available is often kind of cheesy.)

Death to the Stock Photo emails free high-resolution lifestyle photography to you monthly, to do whatever you want with. No catch. Use the photos on your website, your menu, your social media outlets, whatever.

Here are a few recent photos they’ve sent out:

Did I mention these are all free? Why haven’t you signed up yet?

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How to reach your goals

Cheryl Harrison — Wed, 17 Jul 2013 13:45:39 +0000

I and the other speakers from the Ohio Growth Summit were interviewed about how to reach your goals, and the composite video turned out pretty cool:

You may recall this as the conference at which I was commended for only saying “shit” three times. In an alternate cut of this video I yell “shut the f*** up” (off-camera.)

Seriously.

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A conversation about the freelance lifestyle

Cheryl Harrison — Mon, 01 Jul 2013 15:36:27 +0000

I was recently featured in a video with a few other local entrepreneurs about the freelance lifestyle.

You can watch the video here: http://vimeo.com/66341017

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Cool Tool: Transcriptions

Cheryl Harrison — Fri, 21 Jun 2013 14:49:10 +0000

Whether you’re interviewing someone for a blog post or trying to capture insight from customers for internal use, recording a conversation is usually the best way to ensure quote accuracy and context. (It also spares hand cramps from aggressive note taking.) After recording the interview, the next step is transcription, which usually involves opening a text file on one half of the screen and an audio player on the other and pausing/rewinding frequently while typing feverishly. There are, of course, tools you can use that automatically convert audio into text, but I am forever skeptical of them from an accuracy standpoint and insist on doing things manually.

BUT that doesn’t mean there isn’t a cool tool for the slow-and-steady way of doing things. It’s called Transcriptions, and it basically combines my above-described scenario of text document and audio player into one handy window that adds timestamps to lines of text as you enter, which you can then double click to jump back to that point of the audio file. It’s a super lightweight program, and free! It’s Mac only, though.

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Great moments in speechbubble history, volume 5

Cheryl Harrison — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 15:10:26 +0000

I was invited to speak on a panel about social media at the Ohio Growth Summit this week.

Posted without further comment:

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Great moments in speechbubble history, volume 4

Cheryl Harrison — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 13:20:40 +0000

On a recent rainy Thursday afternoon, one of speechbubble’s community management clients received the following @reply on Twitter.

@woodlandsbkyard Will be there for a work HH… You’ll know exactly who I am by my pants…

— Jake (@jakenick06) April 11, 2013

A foreboding message, but the sender and the bar has a brief fun exchange, and went about our respective days. Well, I was at the bar later that evening because 1) spending time at the bars we work with is important and 2) I like beer. I spotted a fella at the table behind me wearing bright blue pants with cowhide pockets. Hmm.

@woodlandsbkyard YESSSSSSS

— Jake (@jakenick06) April 11, 2013

At this point the blue panted gentlement was so excited that he showed the dozen or so people he was with the conversation, and looked around frantically searching for the identity of his partner in pantalones.

The exchange could have ended there, but when I was discussing the incident with the owner we decided to step it up and buy the blue man a shot – a blue shot, naturally. Delivered anonymously with an inscribed bar napkin.

(Use of the the phrase “bitchin’ pants” was NOT my choice.)

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Spam, Spam, Wonderful Spam

Cheryl Harrison — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 19:55:52 +0000

For our community management clients, we often check who’s following competiting or related businesses on Twitter to see if there’s anyone who might be a good fit for us to engage with on behalf of that business. After all, if you like one local brewery or Grandview Heights neighborhood business, it’s probable you’ll be interested in discovering more!

While searching through one such business’ followers today, I found something pretty amusing. And by “amusing” I mean “upsetting because someone is charging for this and calling it social media marketing.”

Aside from the fact that the usernames are all random letters and numbers, the bios are all generated from the same word pool. Either that, or there are a LOT OF PEOPLE WHO LIKE BACON AND ZOMBIES AND GURUING.

There were hundreds more but after a few dozen my screenshot hand got tired.

Spam bots randomly follow everyone on Twitter. Hundreds of spam bots from the same generator do not randomly follow one account at the same time. Someone is passing this off as a service and promising “more followers on Twitter.”

Sigh.

A thousand fake followers do absolutely nothing to help market your business.

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