OPI

Social Content

SOCIAL MEDIA / BRAND TONE OF VOICE / CONTENT CALENDAR

SUMMARY

My career isn’t just video games, spy missions, and campaigns about defeating climate change (man, what a braggy sentence).

Part of being a great creative is the ability to instantly synthesize different brand and audience needs. I’ve honed my skills to a point where I can slip in and out of voices and writing styles as easily as…changing my nail polish.

For over a year, I, Joseph Serxner, was the voice of OPI on social media. Me.

Each month I would write over 150 social posts to be used across OPI’s various social channels (FB/IG/Twitter). This is where writing muscles are flexed. Posts would vary between product-specific descriptions, hyping up the newest collection, highlighting personal stories within the nail polish community, and building the brand in general.

Did this work win awards? No. Are there big shiny things I can point to? Not really.

However, I think it’s important for a portfolio to not just show the shiny stuff. I put 100% of my craft, talent, and soul into whatever project I’m on. Not just the ones destined for the Cannes submissions.

I really enjoyed my time writing for OPI. Whenever my partner would go get her nails done, I would grill her on the experience and get feedback on the style and colors that she saw in the salon. Also, OPI is a brand that has really silly names, so it was Pun City, Population: Me. Scroll on for a quick recap of some of my greatest hits.

Roles: Copywriter

Responsibilities: Content Calendars, Blog Posts, Brand ToV

OPI CONTENT CALENDARS

The bulk of my workload was jamming out a massive amount of copy each month to correlate with OPI’s rolling release of new shade lines, combined with other social initiatives (brand building, audience spotlight, professional advice, etc).

Once I had earned trust with the client, I was given a pretty loose leash where I could push the line when it came to humor and engagement. We gradually started incorporating relevant and popular memes to create instantly sharable content.

But as I said, most of my posts were simply product shots, so my major creative challenge was to play off the names of the nail polish while also injecting key brand education points. Even to this day, I have very strong opinions on the merits of gel nails vs simple polish.

To get in the right mindset whenever I need to slip into the voice of OPI, I actually created a unique playlist to make sure I was channeling the best nail-polish-wearing diva I could be.

Obviously, I’m going to share the playlist. 💅💅💅

OPI Tone of Voice guide

One of the things I noticed when I started writing for OPI is that there wasn’t a clear brand bible and codified Tone of Voice. The closest thing the client could point me to was their blog, but no one had ever sat down and established a clear, modern set of guidelines for how OPI should sound across various social channels.

Well this sounds like a piece of business just waiting to be pitched you say?

And pitch it I did! Not without some self-serving interests in mind though, because by establishing these brand guidelines, I was able to justify certain editorial decisions. The final brand bible featured key strategic insights on each core audience of OPI, a breakdown of content types to be featured on social calendars, and tactical considerations for the social channels that OPI had a presence on.

I love exercises like this because it’s a much more strategic endeavor, and it requires a different level of thinking. If done right, you’ll see the impact of your decisions ripple out across companies, on a global scale.