Pam Sykes

#general - January 30, 2025 at 05:40 PM

I wonder if the person meant to say something like “biased people might not hire you”? But then you probably don’t want to be hired by racists anyway.

#local-vancouver - January 23, 2025 at 12:23 AM

Whoop whoop! A little dream come true. 👋 from the WeWork on Burrard!

#general - January 08, 2025 at 05:59 PM

@Krish the reason for the original decision is lost in the mists of time — but at this point we have a really solid presence on Capterra (#1 reviewed app in a couple of key categories) so we have a lot to lose by switching. G2 made a pitch to us, but I didn’t see enough difference between them to justify the friction involved in switching. And we’re a small SaaS company so their enterprise-level pricing is not worth it.

#general - January 07, 2025 at 06:20 PM

We have a paid subscription with Capterra rather than G2 (too expensive to do both), and having lots of positive reviews has served us well. To get reviews, our customer support team consistently asks people who’re happy at the end of an interaction with us to leave a review. We don’t offer any kind of incentive, it would feel icky and probably violates some kind of terms.
This does require having a really good CS team!

#general - December 16, 2024 at 06:56 PM

My primary metric is free trial signups for our product. Oddly enough, it correlates quite strongly with website traffic.

#general - December 11, 2024 at 02:24 AM

@Brandon I have literally showed people a slide with a picture of an iceberg on it before 😆. It’s a way of explaining why writers ask so many questions that don’t always seem obviously relevant to the immediate task at hand. To find the right message, and the right words for that message, we need a lot of context and background information. Every organisation necessarily operates with a massive amount of internally shared (and sometimes tacit) knowledge, and they always forget that this knowledge isn’t available to everyone — it’s the eternal trap of expertise. As a writer you have to try absorb as much of that knowledge as possible. 90% of it will never make it to any kind of publication, but you have to know it to select the right 10%.
It might also be worth pointing out in words of few syllables that everything will be approved by them before any kind of publication, so there’s no reason not to share the knowledge in the first place. It’s your job to make the copy work within the constraints, but you can’t even get started unless you have all the raw material at hand. (If another metaphor might work better, you need to mine a lot of rock to refine a little bit of ore.)
Probably TMI but it’s been a long day.

#general - December 10, 2024 at 10:51 PM

I see there’s silence on this so I’ll bite: Does this client have realistic expectations about what you can do for them? If they can’t talk about client work AT ALL, you’re stuck.

If there’s a little wiggle room, I would try suggesting that I create a composite fictional client. But to do that you’ll need actual data, you can’t just make it up — as you note, that just keeps you stuck in vague, conceptual, bullshit space.

I’ve sometimes had success explaining that content is like an iceberg — you only see 10% of all the information that was collected. But if you don’t have the foundational 90%, the content will be flimsy and floppy.

If they don’t get that, they might be more trouble than they’re worth as a client.

#general - October 16, 2024 at 05:52 PM

Thanks folks! That is helpful info :-)

#general - October 16, 2024 at 12:44 AM

Hi folks, can the hivemind help me bypass the search spam and find an AI video creation tool that fits? I need to make some quick-and-dirty tutorials that will be basically screen recordings with a voiceover, and ideally a friendly talking head to do intros etc. I can do the scripts and screen recordings, and retime recordings to fit a voice over if needed - I just need the voice and face. I looked at Shuffl but they don’t seem to cover my use case, and search results are … let’s say unhelpful at this point.
It may actually be quicker to hire a real human actor, but I’d like a voice+face I can rely on to be consistently available for the next couple of years.

#intros - September 12, 2024 at 09:21 PM

Hello Superpath! I'm a content strategy + execution team of 1 who didn't know this channel existed until yesterday 🙈. Thank you @Victoria Cowan for the intro!
It can get lonely out here, so I'm delighted for the opportunity to meet and bounce ideas around with my peers.