This author has not written his bio yet.
But we are proud to say that Anna Goldsmith contributed 177 entries already.
An interesting topic popped up at a recent dinner party I attended: What was your worst job ever? While my summer as a waitress didn’t beat dodging bricks at the city works department, “refereeing” parents at children’s soccer games, or suffering repeated burns from an industrial-sized dishwasher, nothing has been more valuable. No, not for […]
I’ve recently become obsessed with the TED talks. And if you don’t know what TED is, you’re in for a treat. Like the most delicious treat, ever. These 20-minute “genius lectures” (TED stands for “Technology, Entertainment, Design”) take place at the invitation-only annual TED conference and are rebroadcast online at TED.com. To date, there are […]
I’ll begin by saying that I am not a big sports fan. Or even a small sports fan. But I do genuinely look forward to the Super Bowl for two reasons: 1) Hot spinach dip, and 2) seeing the best ads of the year — or at least the most expensive. Well, this year there […]
Everything has a formula: finding square roots, closing sales calls, creating nice-smelling shampoo. And I don’t mean to burst any bubbles here, but so does writing. Web page: headline, subhead, 200 to 300 words of body copy. Sales letter: greeting, introductory paragraph, features and benefits, call to action, closing. Script for a Hallmark Channel Christmas […]
I’m not trying to be all high and mighty here, but I don’t eat fast food. Even if it didn’t give me searing stomach pains, everything about it just depresses me. The mindless trading of quality for quantity, the dull-eyed shuffle to the counter, the … oh, you know! I could go on, and as […]
My friend, colleague and strategist to the stars (okay, strategist to regular businesses) Rich Nadworny of Digalicious sent me this Seth Godin post, which seems very worth reposting. It’s 14 good rules about email marketing. I particularly like #14: “Just because you have someone’s email address doesn’t mean you have the right to email them.” […]
Well, maybe it’s the spirit of the New Year, but today I actually bypassed the article on bad celebrity drivers for something that’s relevant to what we do here at The Hired Pens. I felt an immediate kinship with the writer of “I Hate You, Blue-Tux-Wearing Viagra Guy!” Like Farhad Manjoo, I don’t have cable TV. […]
We all have words and phrases we hate; in fact, our Dec. 1 post about it generated more comments than any other post we’ve written. Well, as I was reading the Boston Globe recently (yes, I still read a real newspaper, delivered to my porch each morning by a real paper boy), I came across […]
If you were a brand, what brand would you be? Apple? Harley? Um … Tide? (This Tide commercial is great.) I know: This sounds like an exercise just made for a corporate retreat … right before the “trust falls.” But in our 2.0 world, where the professional and personal are colliding like never before, it’s not […]
Here’s what it takes to keep people coming back. A few weeks ago, I was at a conference on new media and heard this quote: “Content is the new customer service.” At which point I jumped up on my chair and shouted, “YES!” You know, since we provide content. Then I was like, “Wait, what […]
