a portrait in Big Blue
Before the ibm.com home page, IBM Design and Smarter Planet, I was promoted from my original job editing IBM Redbooks to marketing writer. That work caught the attention of an editor who brought me onto the ibm.com US home page team to write home page headlines. When Smarter Planet started to grow, I took on Smarter Cities and its related beats such as Smarter Care and Public Safety. Articles for IBM Research topics like Creek Watch and Battery 500. Pages for World Community Grid when they introduced new research projects. And I voiced and produced podcasts.
For five years, I managed the Smarter Planet home page, working closely with the best designer around to come up with creative ideas to bring Smarter Planet topics to our visitors' attention. One ad campaign used a series of unusual images from the artist Noma Bar, and my challenge was to write copy that brought the odder ones back down to earth. This page isn't quite as weird.
Here's what siteIQ thought of our work on Smarter Planet.
My last article for Smarter Planet, a profile of Phil Gilbert, pointed me to my next job. During a one-year rumspringa of IBM Design, most of my work involved editing, coaching and organizing media, but I did brush off my reporting chops to wrap up the Product Leadership Summit.
My most recent project was rewriting product pages to make them interesting(!). Here are two: watsonx.ai and watsonx Orchestrate. These pages contributed to some pretty nice metrics: 150x longer visit time, triple the page scroll depth, and double the clickthrough rate in paid media.
But that's just IBM. Click around the site for the rest of my back catalog, or start with my resume.
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