Earth Day interactives: Copywriting with a conscience for corporate clients

I've worked on a few copywriting and content development projects for SUBWAY® Restaurants and their SUBWAYkids.com group over the past year (via the Boston office of ad agency Jack Morton Worldwide). My latest project, an interactive game and content for a campaign developed with The Nature Conservancy, the world's leading conservation organization, is now live on the site. This spring, every SUBWAY Fresh Fit for Kids Meal comes in a reusable meal bag with a special code to unlock the interactive game and bonus eco-facts and video clips.

"With your help, we can work to reduce, recycle and reuse—and clean up the planet."

SubwayKids_2

SubwayKids_1

Kids play the "Eco-Quest" by picking up pieces of trash along their journey through habitats on three levels: land, air and sea. With each clean-up or successful answer to a question, users are rewarded with an eco-fact or a downloadable Nature Conservancy feature on an endangered or at-risk animal whose habitat is threatened by pollution. Check it out at www.subwaykids.com. Pretty basic, as it's designed for younger users, but kind of fun. And it was definitely fun to work on. Kudos to big corporations like SUBWAY for catching on, cutting down on waste and encouraging the use of reusables.

Speaking of Earth Day and jumping on the green bandwagon...

The Earth Day content I wrote a couple years ago for the Think Green website, developed for Discovery Education in partnership with Waste Management, is still live on their site. Check it out if you're looking for creative activities for grades K-2, 3-5, 6-8 or 9-12. The content is evergreen because, as they say, every day is Earth Day. By the way, Waste Management, the largest recycler in North America, is offering discounts on battery recycling kits for business as a special Earth Day promotion this year. Find out more about this and other features, like recycle-by-mail programs, at www.wm.com.

ThinkGreen.com: Earth Day Ideas

Think Green WM

Web content and the eternal home page question: How much is too much?

 I love this Venn diagram by xkcd. It was projected on the wall at the start of a Future M seminar I attended this September called “Beyond the University Website – The Future of Digital Marketing in Higher Education.” This image keeps coming back to me, in content decisions for both edu and B2B.Sponsored by ISITE Design, and moderated by chief strategy officer Jeff Cram, the panel included Mike Petroff, Web and Technology Enrollment Manager at Emerson College; Perry Hewitt, Chief Digital Officer at Harvard; Gene Begin, Digital Marketing Director at Babson College; and Tom Baird, Vice Chancellor of University of Michigan Dearborn.

Content Overload? It's all about balance.

I’ve been working on content strategy, optimization, writing and editing for an independent preK-8 school website this year and am about to begin on one for an independent high school. Funny how, regardless of the size of the school, the home page issues always seem to be the same.

How to balance content for current vs. prospective students and constituents? How many news feeds, blog feeds, photo and video galleries do you really need? How can we make sure it's all optimized for search? What is the true purpose of the home page anyway? How much is too much?

I'm knee-deep in content migration from one CMS to another on the above mentioned website, but once I come up for air I'll grapple with this question some more. Got any formulas for success? Would love to hear them.

FutureM wrap-ups:

Here are a couple good summaries of the FutureM seminar, along with some choice tweets on CMS quandries (as universal as the homepage ones, it seems to me), mobile stats for edu, and the need for social strategy:Open Parenthesis: Future M on Higher Educationpost by John Eckman of ISTEInside FutureM: Digital Marketing and Higher Educationpost by Erik Devaney on New England Post  

Content (and copywriters) are king at Groupon, part 2

Continuing my fixation with the group buying site…[See part 1:  The Key to Groupon's Success? A Stable of Great Copywriters]I know much of the genius has to do with the simple business model, but I remain fixated on the creative. Here’s another article I bookmarked a while back, this one from 52weeksofux.com:

Groupon and the value of copywriting

"There is lots of talk of whether Groupon can keep their advantage over new competitors. But the competitors I have seen don’t have the copywriting chops that Groupon does, at least right now. As long as Groupon continues to write such great copy, they’ll have a big advantage over their competitors."Click here for full article.

Editorial style (and schtick) guide

Check out the company's Public Editorial Manual which describes the Groupon Voice in detail and has a whole section on Humor Writing, complete with examples. Here's a small taste:Zog's Dogs"The first deep-frying techniques were used as a means of preserving wedding gowns and Barry Bonds rookie cards; it wasn't until later that they were applied to food...."Guide to Art-Museum Banter"Before taking advantage of today's Groupon, memorize these handy art criticisms, which are guaranteed to apply to any work in the Lowe Art Museum:

• "The brush stroke is large. It would not shock me if the artist painted with a wig or mop. Do you agree with my point of view?"
• "The way color is used is breathtaking. It is either red, blue, green, or purple, but I would need to take a closer look to be sure."
• "Some say those are boxes, but to me they appear as triangles. Either way, this painting is about Lou Gehrig's desire to adopt a dog."