Our Content

  • Here's to 2020 — and to 2030 Here's to 2020 — and to 2030 It’s a meditative time for the Julian Calendar. No question that seeing the “12” turn into a “1” on the month portion of the date is really just an abstract lever, but I am appreciative of how it gives us all a cue consider what we have done and what we are. Let’s dig in to this 2020 thing together.
  • How to Get Your Content on the Front Page of Google How to Get Your Content on the Front Page of Google Imagine there are four people searching right now for that thing your company does best. Let’s say there are 40,000 results – that’s 4000 pages of results. Three of those four people will not even click on the second page.
  • Here's to 2020 — and to 2030 It’s a meditative time for the Julian Calendar. No question that seeing the “12” turn into a “1” on the month portion of the date is really just an abstract lever, but I am appreciative of how it gives us all a cue consider what we have done and what we are. Let’s dig in to this 2020 thing together.
  • How to Get Your Content on the Front Page of Google Imagine there are four people searching right now for that thing your company does best. Let’s say there are 40,000 results – that’s 4000 pages of results. Three of those four people will not even click on the second page.
  • The Power of Content for Microtargeting Ever wanted to reach just the c-suite at a tech company, or all IT decision-makers at manufacturing companies in Alabama? Once upon a time, you would have to build a list, do scads of research, then call them constantly or spend copious time and money to be in the media they read or at the café they frequented. These days, you can use microtargeting to get the right content to the right person in the right way.
  • What I Learned About Writing From Magnetic Poetry To my very first shared house away from home, I brought very little: A nice kitchen knife, a few chipped thrift store mugs, some mismatched particleboard furniture, zero appliances, and a set of Edgar Allan Poe fridge poetry.
  • How to Waste One Hour and Twenty Minutes With a Single Keystroke If you are working in a creative field, I am pretty sure that you are reliant on text communications to be successful. You need to be good at writing an email or a Slack post. If you are not, you will spur elongate communication threads that will cause you to conclude that your clients, project managers, and co-workers are stupid.
  • How a Startup Can Market to the Enterprise Innovation in business thinking, particularly in technology, comes from startups and growth companies. When the purchaser is an enterprise, do you speak to them in a way they can comprehend? In a way that will make them confident in you?
  • Welcome to Sales. It’s not as easy as it looks, is it? By now, I hope we can agree that the lines between marketing and sales have blurred considerably in this age of mobile tech and social media. As put forth in a recent blog, the marketing arm of the operation is increasingly on the hook for the most grueling entry level sales task — discovering suspects out in the wild and delivering them as qualified prospects to the senior sales team.
  • Sympathy for the Web Developer, Compassion for the Client We have made a lot of web sites. However, I had resisted web development as outside of the Lion’s Way core value proposition. Now, I understand that it is a critical part of the service we offer. I had to look at sites and site design differently.
  • How We Blog Fiercely A company blog keeps a website fresh. Our clients face a lot of intelligent competition, and to maintain an image of thought leadership and agility, they need to communicate with their customers regularly. That’s what we aim for with our fierce technical blogging service: we want them to look smart, and we want to communicate that they are actively doing cool things.
  • Our Continuing Evolution 2013 Word Lions have always been more about people than words. (We are rarely actually about lions at all, except in metaphorical ways.) Be it clients, audience, or partners, we earnestly test our efforts to confirm that we are doing good for people.That includes ourselves.
  • How Do You Make a Website Fierce? Word Lions have strong feelings about websites. We think that effective websites, an Internet presence that moves a company forward, need to have a structure as well as content that supports the company’s story.
  • Thankful Have you ever been at a social engagement and found yourself chatting with a new parent? It seems that no matter the topic, all that they can manage to talk about is their child:
  • Presentation Tips for Technical Communicators A former student asked Philip to offer some tips on teaching to a technical audience. Philip has about 10 years experience delivering Microsoft training courses to a variety of audiences, mostly groups of 8 to 15 adult learners. He collected some thoughts, sent it off to the former student, and decided to share those tips here as well. This is not an exhaustive list, but below are some recommendations for delivering effective technical training to medium-size groups.
  • Making Great Docs, Step One: hate the first draft. Update: Our client did like her second draft and immediately took it to meet with prospects. She tells us that it helped her close two deals immediately. We make content with an eye for value. It did not take long for that project to show value!
  • Word Lions Quarterly Report for Q2Y2011 Across the river, windmills spun at the tempo of a Hitchcock film. Philip and I were awash in the white noise of the river pushing its way through the turbines of the John Day dam. Above us, the high voltage wires translated that rush into electricity. It was audible. They crackled like overheated oil in a pan.
  • Social Media and The New Me I am perched in the observation car of the Amtrak Coast Starlight, just passing Mount Shasta and climbing towards the Oregon border. The other occupants regularly jump up with their cameras at the ready when yet another incredible view rolls by.
  • The "Multi" in Multimedia Should Include Text I have been working all day on a project and needed to switch over to another issue late in the afternoon. I also needed some calories. These two problems are easily solved by riding down to the nearest Internet-enabled food source.  After a largely quiet and solitary day creating content, It was kind of nice to be around the babble of people.
  • Explaining Features, Benefits, and Value When creating marketing messages, particularly for technology and software, the industry standard has been to break down the conversation to features and benefits.  The argument is that we simply list the elements of the product and call them features.  Following that, we affix a significance to those features and call those benefits.
  • Formatting Pleasant eBooks As a concept, the electronic book is a grand idea. In execution, it has been a slow starter. For over a decade now, people have been creating Portable Document Format (PDF) documents and sharing them digitally. Digital books can have a ton of advantages: They are easy to transport.  A 1,000 page document doesn’t make your laptop any heavier. They are “green,” not requiring paper. The reader can use the “find” button to browse for particular information. They are easy to publish.
  • We know what you want to ask: how are we like and unlike the kid that can program the clock on your microwave? _From the desk of Joel Barker_Philip and I are both technical pros. We have been asked to perform technical wizardry as IT consultants. Before that, however, we were the kids who programmed our grandparents’ VCR and microwave clocks. We are just used to figuring out technologies. In fact, we enjoy the puzzle. Of course, things have changed a bit – I have less hair (though Philip’s seems to be holding strong) and there are no more VCRs to program. We still have a little bit of that kid in our hearts, but have evolved into the word-crunching beasts of today.