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In this Issue
Spotlight
A Grammatically Inappropriate Love Story
Once upon a time, on a keyboard far, far away, there lived an awkward punctuation mark called Semicolon.
Of all the punctuation marks on all the keyboards in all the world, Semicolon was probably the loneliest one of all. (And understandably so. Because, seriously, when does anybody ever use a semicolon?)
But then, one day (most likely in the mid '90's with the advent of instant messaging services like ICQ and AIM), Semicolon inadvertently bumped into Closing Parenthesis and the two became practically inseparable.
Thanks to the MTV generation, the grammatically odd couple became the hottest pop culture twosome since Ike and Tina Turner.
But then, thanks to gratuitous shorthand and the pressures of public attention, the Semicolon-Closing Parenthesis love affair hit a road so rocky Baskin-Robbins would name an icecream after it.
First, Closing Parenthesis started slinking around with Semicolon's cousin-slash-roommate, Regular Colon. Naturally, a dejected Semicolon found solace in the company of Closing Parenthesis' emo counterpart, Opening Parenthesis.
Needless to say, Semicolon and Closing Parenthesis haven't been the same since. A fate that teenagers and text messaging adults have unfortunately chosen to ignore.
The End
Moral: Symbolic winking is dead. Please, let it go.
; )
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Twicks of the Twade
In case you haven't noticed, the whole world is a'twitter... with Twitter.
Thanks to this peculiar little microblogging platform (that takes its name from the incessant babbling of sparrows), everybody from Ellen Degeneres to Barack Obama to Ashton Kutcher to Yours Truly is blowing up the Internet 140 characters at a time.
But of the 4-5 million tweeters in the twittersphere, how many of us are actually harnessing the true power of Twitter? And, NO, letting the world know that you're "sittin here eatin Cap'n Crunch....." is not considered harnessing.
Regardless, we've incorporated Twitter into much of what we do on a daily basis, and we want to let you in on some of our twicks of the twade.
Depending on your level of Twitter literacy and interest, we've just posted two Twitter blog posts at the Traction blog that you need to check out.
One post consists of everything you need to know to get started on Twitter. The other contains an extensive list of Oklahoma City's resident Twitterers.
The only thing you probably won't find is an annoying overuse of made-up words that begin with Tw_____.
Traction Finds a Little "Me Time"
Like any world-class advertising agency should do, we tend to spend so much time nurturing our clients and their brands that we let ourselves go a bit. Cosmetically speaking.
It's not that we've started looking sloppy and smelling funky or anything. It's just that we haven't changed our facade in a while. And what's the fun in that?
So we recently decided it was time for a new look. Something cool. Something fresh. Something Traction.
The result is a killer new website that highlights all of our best qualities.
What are you waiting for? Click on the screenshot above to see TractionOKC.com's new do, already.
And click here for a welcome message via the newly facelifted Traction blog.
The Touchstones of Social Media
On February 26th and 27th, two of Traction's finest made the trek to Dallas to give a social media presentation at the National Rural Electric Cooperatives Association (NRECA) Touchstone Energy Regional Conference.
Head on over to the Traction blog to take a look at the social media presentation that had Touchstone Energy's co-op managers and marketing heads buzzing about Twitter, Facebook, RSS, SMS, and all things social.
It's also worth mentioning that several road tunes were blasted between OKC and the Big D, but for some reason this is the only one that cemented itself in our minds.
Pay it Social
Over the last few weeks, Traction has begun a fun little Friday afternoon initiative we call Pay it Social.
Pay it Social follows the same premise as the "pay it forward" concept that asks for a good turn be repaid by having it done to others instead.
The only difference between pay it forward and Pay it Social is that our concept is used solely for social media-related acts of goodwill.
Astonishingly, our first ever Pay it Social act of random kindness was acknowledged by the second largest fan page on all of Facebook - Coca-Cola.
The action was simple, really. We noticed that the new Facebook layout was affecting the main images on profiles, pages, and groups. So we created an image that appears to lay on top of the light blue background, posted it on Coke's wall, and told them they could use it if they wanted. They did and they let us know, too.
Check out this screenshot we took of their response. Too cool!
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