Here’s the deal. A few days ago, I noticed a promotional offer on Google allowing me to take advantage of another $100 coupon. This time, I pounced right away. In about 15 minutes, I had a Google Adwords account set up that went active today.

In just a few hours, my ads have popped up on 12,540 computer screens and I’m seeing clicks going straight to my services pages. Adwords works like a charm and now I’m kicking myself for not getting on this earlier.

I’m also kicking myself for not remembering that coupon from a few weeks ago. Apparently, the value of the coupon dropped to $75 on August 27. And the thing is going to fully expire on September 10, next Saturday. I can’t use this introductory coupon because I just used one already . But you can. There’s still time!

To win the $75 Google Adwords coupon, leave a comment on this blog post about why you think you deserve it. The winner will be randomly chosen on Monday, September 6, by my good pal and social-media averse Luddite, Lyle Neff, in return for a pint of local beer.

Make sure the email you leave with the comment form is one that you actually check, since that’s how I’ll contact the winner.

To all my social media chums out there who might already have taken advantage of Google’s offer and thus are also ineligible to win the $75 coupon, feel free to promote this in your own blog. Or, if you’re eligible but are feeling especially generous and open to competition, promote it on your blog anyway. Cheers.

Writers are usually pretty easy to pick out in a crowd. In the younger, hard-scrabble days of winning our first scribbling gigs more out of bloody-minded pluck than actual talent, writers tend to be a bit skinny. As the years and the writing credits pile on, our bellies start sticking out even as our legs petrify into bony sticks.

Our jobs consist of too much sitting at the desk, tapping away on our keyboards as our veins atrophy and our arteries clog.

I was perhaps worse off than my contemporary wordsmiths. My professional sitting-down career combined with a general lack of exercise in my leisure hours. Too much television and video games. Not enough exercise.

By my early thirties, I had a bad case of what Seinfeld called the Jimmy Legs (AKA Restless Leg Syndrome). Not just at night, either — it got so bad this year, I couldn’t sit down at my desk for more than 15 minutes without needing to get up to walk around, stretch, jump, do whatever I could to get the blood flowing and the muscles moving.

So I started working out again. I bought a bike for jaunts down to the seawall. I joined a gym. I gave myself extra time to go places by walking instead of going by car or transit.

My Jimmy Legs got better. In the last couple of months, I was able to sit down for about half an hour before feeling the need to move, which seems to be a lot closer to the normal range of human toleration for stillness. But the feeling wasn’t quite gone. Not completely. It still bothered me.

I had an epiphany. Why was I exercising my ass off just so I could sit down? Would it be so awful for me to stand up? It’s only been normal for people to sit down at work for less than one per cent of human history. Maybe we’re just not built for this.

Maybe the discomfort we feel when we’re sitting down at our desks isn’t just an abnormal physiological twitch; maybe that’s just our bodies telling us, “Hey, dumb-dumb! Just because you’re not hunting big animals on the Savannah doesn’t mean you can treat me this way. You want to live to see 100? Get off your ass!”

So I took a stand.

On a typical weekday morning in my Vancouver condo, I got up and made a bowl of cereal and I ate it standing up. I drank my first cup of coffee of the day standing up. As my wife left for her day job, I prepared to face my workday — something I normally did with my Macbook from the dining table in my living room, or from the table on my balcony if the weather was nice. But I grabbed my computer, set it on top of a bookshelf in the bedroom and propped it up a bit higher with a thick encyclopedia just enough to comfortable typing height. And I set to work, standing up.

I stood and worked for eight hours. Well, not a full eight hours. I took a break for lunch and wandered into the other room to catch a few minutes of the BBC and Star Trek before getting back to my copywriting projects.

Surprisingly, my knees, feet and back held up just fine. In fact, by the time my wife got home from work, I felt great. My Jimmy Legs were now, well, Jonathon Legs. I was back to my old self.

Between standing most of every workday and keeping up my exercise routine, I feel healthier than I’ve been in a long time. I’m also more focused at work. No more twitching, fidgeting, stretching in my chair as I pound out my web copy and sales letters for clients. I’m all business, all the time. Productivity’s shot up.

My Jimmy Legs aren’t completely gone. I still feel the urge to take a quick walk around the corner if I’m sitting down too long with friends at a restaurant or watching a movie with family on the couch. It’s going to take more than a few months of concerted effort to undo more than a decade and a half of damage caused by inactivity. But if my discomfort was a 9 out of 10 before I made these changes in my lifestyle, it’s now at a 2 out of 10.

I get the feeling there are a lot of other writers out there who are in the same situation right now that I was in. Probably, a lot more people who aren’t writers are in the same boat. Your feet are like numb blocks of ice. You have trouble concentrating at work and can’t sleep at night unless you pace the living room first. And you’re sick of it.

Well, people, isn’t it time for you to make a change? Will you take a stand?

That’s the reason I should hire this guy instead of the other ten thousand realtors who want my business? Because he’s up all night, ever night, singing “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?” and “Faith of the Heart”?

Yes, I know; the point was to get across that he’s available for his clients when they need him… in which case, how about this slogan? “I’m here for you.”

That way, he gets across that he’s available and will probably have to take fewer drunk-dialing home-selling clients at 3 am.

Well, it’s mostly enjoyable. Until I come across the sad case of media liaisons who don’t know how to do their job.

As an in-house communications director, I also worked that media liaison role, so I know how it’s supposed to work from both sides.

The job is to put out press releases and other marketing materials in the hopes of snagging a reporter’s interest. When calls come in from journalists, other skills come into play; the media liaison now has to talk to the reporter to get an idea of what the story is about to direct the call to the best in-house expert. There may also be a chance to tweak the focus of the reporter’s questions to highlight your company’s features.

It’s important to remember that even if the reporter isn’t looking for information directly related to your business offerings, just getting your name into a big magazine is advantageous.

Let me give you an example. We’ll say you run a clothing chain store named Harry’s Suits. A reporter calls and says he’s doing a story for Business News magazine that has a circulation of 1 million. The topic of the story is “in-store music that gets people to buy stuff”. Which do you think is the better response (below) from your media liaison, A or B?
—
A) “I’m sorry, but I don’t think we can comment. It’s true that we do use in-store music in our stores to try to get our customers to buy things. But I can’t really say we’re in-store music experts. It’s certainly not part of my job. Anyway, our business is selling suits.

“Really, we can’t really speak as experts about in-store music because we don’t make the music. We’re not composers. In-store music isn’t really what we’re known for and it’s not what we want to be known for. But we’d be happy to give you quotes and information about our new line of suits that we have available. Otherwise, I don’t think we can help you.”

B) “Absolutely! We use music in our stores to try to get our customers to buy things. I’m afraid I don’t know much about it. But I think Joe Mavis in marketing knows the guy who selects the music for our stores. He can tell you who does that and what goes into the decision.

“I’ll get you his information. He might also have some good data on what kind of response we’ve had from in-store music as well, and which suits are our best sellers for different kinds of songs. Feel free to ask him about that.”
—
For the first response, the reporter will hang up and move on. And he’ll never call them back for another story because the media liaison was being obtuse.

For answer “B”, the reporter will get forwarded along to Joe Mavis or whoever and collect some quotes. Even though the story really isn’t focused on men’s suits, the story will probably include a quote like the following:

“We’ve definitely had better sales of our blue navy suits when we play jazz in the store,” says Director of Marketing Joe Mavis, with the Harry’s Suits clothing chain based out of New York City.

You’ve now got 1 million potential readers of the fact that Harry’s Suits sells blue navy suits and you can find their store in NYC and maybe even your own city. If the article goes online, that sentence might now come up in a search for clothing stores that sell suits. And if the writer was feeling particularly Web-2.0ish, he might even have inserted a hyperlink to the store website. And of course, the marketing people at Harry’s Suits would be free to blog, tweet, email and Facebook the hell out of the story.

That’s how a single line in a news article like this brings in leads for businesses all the time.

As you’ve probably guessed by now, while researching a story for a large-circulation business magazine, I got stonewalled for no good reason by a dumb media liaison because the story I was writing was not directly dealing with their particular service offering.

No big deal on my part — I have plenty of other sources who were only too happy to provide me with quotes. And maybe no big deal on their part, either. Maybe none of their potential customers were going to read that article — even though I suspect a good number would have (either in the original magazine, or perhaps excerpted on the company’s press page).

For the vast majority of companies (and I’m guessing this one, too), reporters are not banging down their doors everyday. If this is the way that this media liaison deals with all media requests — “either write about specifically about our awesome products and service offerings, or we can’t be bothered” — then they’re not doing their job. Instead of creating promotional opportunities, they’re wasting them.

That’s why someone needs to fire their media liaison.

The ad is an utter failure.

The advertisement is for a course that will get students thinking about God, spirituality and the meaning of life.

The problem is that the photo in the advertisement doesn’t match the content. I look at the image of the guy embracing the awe-inspiring sight of nature unbound.

Based on that, my immediate answer to the question in the ad is “No. There’s nothing more to life than this. Clearly, this beautiful material world is what it’s all about. I have nothing to learn from a course on spirituality or religion because the meaning of life is all around me.”

Just to clarify, that answer above is not my usual view of religion and spirituality. The ad persuaded me to respond in this way. So, how to fix it so that it will actually work?

The fix is simple, actually. Change the line from “Is there more to life than this?” to “Is there more to life?”, cutting out the last two words. The person looking at the ad suddenly conflates spirituality and religion with the wonders of the world.

On the other hand, you could make the ad way better by changing it to something like this:

I took the liberty of checking out the speaker bios and realized I also had the chance to provide a bit of a teaching moment. To wit, How To (And How Not To) Promote Yourself In A Bio On A Website:

First, showing how not to do it, we have Dave McClure of 500 Startups. Dave decided to take the quick attention-getting route of making himself out to be kind of a weirdo. I’m not sure it paid off for him, unless you subscribe to the idea that all publicity is good publicity — which hasn’t really worked out that well for BP, Conrad Black or the junta in Burma.

(And before any of Dave’s friends start talking about stones and glass houses, I know very well that I’ve crossed the line on a number of occasions using this very strategy [examples here and here]. So yes, I’m a hypocrite. Such is life.)

I’ve highlighted the, uh, best bits:

Dave McClure is a greedy, blood-sucking venture capitalist & founding general partner at 500 Startups, an internet startup seed fund and incubator program in Mountain View, CA. He likes to hang out with entrepreneurs, and occasionally help or invest in their startups if they are foolish enough to let him. Dave has been geeking out in Silicon Valley for over twenty years, and has worked with companies such as PayPal, Mint, Founders Fund, Facebook, LinkedIn, SlideShare, Twilio, Simply Hired, O’Reilly Media, Intel, & Microsoft. Years ago he used to do real work like coding or marketing or running conferences, but these days he mostly does useless stuff like sending lots of email, blogging, and hanging out on Facebook and Twitter.  Dave also likes to play ultimate frisbee when his knees don’t hurt

As I said, I’m not too fond of the above. But what do I know? I just put words together for a living.

Next, to show what I think is a good example. To compare, I’ll use Clarity Digital President Leonard Brody’s bio. It’s a bit long, but it works. Again, I’ve highlighted the parts I like — phrases that focus not so much on who he is as what he does and why he appears to rock the flock:

Leonard has been called “a controversial leader of the new world order”. He is a highly respected entrepreneur, venture capitalist, best-selling author and a 2 time Emmy nominated media visionary. He has helped in raising millions of dollars for startup companies, been through one of the largest internet IPOs in history and has been involved in the building, financing and/or sale of five companies to date. In 2004, Leonard co-founded, and was CEO of, NowPublic.comnamed by Time Magazine as one of the top 50 websites in the world, was inducted into the Newseum in Washington and was recently acquired by the Anschutz Corporation. Currently Leonard sits as the President of the Clarity Digital Group responsible for overseeing one of the largest online news conglomerates in the world including Examiner.com and NowPublic, which between them, share over 20 million unique visitors a month and over 200,000 contributors. which is a pioneer in the field of citizen journalism. The company was

I see the difference. Can you see the difference?