Behind the scenes at 37signals: Copywriting Dec 10
10 comments Latest by Marcelo
This is the fourth in a series of posts showing how we use Campfire as our virtual office. All screenshots shown are from real usage and were taken during one week in September.
This time we’ll take a look at how we use Campfire to help us write copy for our apps, marketing sites, blogs, etc.
Collect ideas for copy
Jason asks for suggestions about a blog post he’s writing. Ryan, Mark, and Sam offer up some ideas.
Suggest a copy change
Jason suggests adding a message to an app that says, “Upload photo, one moment…”
Kickstart a blog post
Ryan points to a link at a site. His comments lead to a blog post on the subject.
Highlight smart copywriting by showing it in context
Campfire is also great for pointing out smart copy elsewhere. Here, Ryan shares a thoughtful phrase spotted inside an iPhone app.
Related
Behind the scenes at 37signals: Design
Behind the scenes at 37signals: Coding
Behind the scenes at 37signals: Sysadmin and development
Over 1 million people use 37signals' simple web-based software to collaborate on projects, track contacts, and organize their business with an intranet.
10 comments so far
Noah Everett 10 Dec 07
Great series of articles. Its very interesting to see how your internal work process operates.
David Andersen 10 Dec 07
Recently I saw some marketing copy for some tech product that claimed to ‘add radical value to the customer experience.’ I’m not sure any industry tops IT in terms of hyperbolic marketing. Pick up any trade rag and you’ll find plenty of examples.
Justin 10 Dec 07
I was just telling my wife the other day how annoying the lightbox “popups” are. Hopefully a good SvN post will help put a stop to them.
JF 10 Dec 07
Justin, it’s already been posted.
f5 10 Dec 07
It could be argued that ‘amazing’ has become the most emotionally-hollow, overused word in our society now…regardless of product promotion, etc.
Geoff 10 Dec 07
I’ve always found the evolution of these adjectives to be interesting. Especially as it pertains to the latest and greatest technology of the day. Space travel seemed to usher in new phrases like Super and Ultra into our products and so on.
Chad Crowell 10 Dec 07
Re: Amazing- I posted about how Amazing has jumped the shark last October. Its amazing how diluted it’s meaning has continued to be. Tisk tisk.
Just last night, watching the Amazing Race, some teams flew into Croatia, and on a taxi ride they were all talking about how stunning and beautiful it was. I commented to my wife- “at least its not amazing”. The next team called out how amazing it was, of course.
Felipe Koch 10 Dec 07
I was reading this blog and saw the comments about lightbox. Just a few posts bellow, I saw the products blog post, linking to the pulse app (which is not from 37signals).
Funny enough, at the home page at pulseapp.com, you have links for screenshots of the app.
Any clue how those images are presented to the user?
Anyway, great blog!
clifyt 10 Dec 07
Hey Felipe,
I love how pulseapp.com’s screen shots work…they totally keep the context of the page without throwing you out of context by opening a new window and disorienting you as to where you are now and what we were discussing.
:P
Oh wait…that was pretty much my comments in the last complain about lightbox where I thought 37 didn’t know what they were talking about, yet everyone there decided to get in line with each other so they could seem unified and cool.
Are there any interface decisions that the folks from 37 seems to have extremely differing opinions on? I’ve seen disagreements about other items, but ya’ll all do seem to fall in line with each other on these…just curious…and if so, what was it?
Marcelo 17 Dec 07
Hi, I’d like to start using Campfire in my company just like you do. We’ve been using MSN Messenger and Google Talk so far.
But how do you manage different chat rooms? E.g. If I want to chat with X? what do you do? you have to search X in the different chat rooms? you have to email X telling him “hey, join me at Z chat room?
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