December 2009

The Tyranny of Weekend & Holiday Emails

by Chip Griffin on December 29, 2009

Barbara Nixon, Shonali Burke, and I had some interesting dialogue on Twitter this morning, and it inspires this post. The conversation started when I remarked that I had not slept well last night and kept waking up with ideas spinning around in my head. Naturally, that led me to firing off a number of emails [...]

The Lost Art of Letter Writing

by Chip Griffin on December 27, 2009

Photo by a.drian via Flickr

It has become increasingly common for me to find myself in conversations with colleagues where I recognize the reality that I have gone from being a young turk to a budding grayhair. I explain things that seem entirely foreign to the 20-somethings who I work with. For example, I did not have a PC or [...]

A Fire at Equinox Restaurant

by Chip Griffin on December 19, 2009

My favorite restaurant in Washington, DC suffered a serious fire early yesterday morning while the place was empty. Check out the pictures from Tim Carman at the Washington City Paper to get a feel for the damage at Todd Gray’s Equinox. It certainly wasn’t as bad as it could have been, but there is clearly [...]

Making the Company Holiday Card a Little More Interesting

by Chip Griffin on December 19, 2009

At DCI Group this year, we decided to have a little fun with our holiday card. Instead of sending out scads of printed cards that would just get lost in the pile of others just like it on the desks of those we work for and with, we went with a holiday e-card. But we [...]

Issue Branding vs. Issue Action on the Web

by Chip Griffin on December 12, 2009

The web is all about metrics. Unique visitors, sessions, page views, time on site, impressions, click-through rates, cost per click, number of engagements, cost per engagement, and more can all be tracked for a web-based issue advocacy campaign. Inevitably, internal and external clients get excited by the biggest numbers. How many eyeballs are seeing the [...]

Pay to Play is Alive and Well

by Chip Griffin on December 7, 2009

I had a conversation recently with an ad sales rep for a prominent web publisher who quite bluntly pitched a pay to play scheme. While I understand that the editorial side of the publishing business is not blind to the needs of advertisers (nor am I a purist who believes that business interests should not [...]