Take a Breath… Heck, Take Seven and a Half

The life of a freelancer is like a teenager learning to drive: full throttle, screeching halt, full throttle, screeching halt… Ad infinitum. When it’s slow, you’re dying for some throttle, and when you’re at full throttle, of course you’d give anything for a break.

I’ve been pleasantly full throttle for two months now, which makes me very optimistic about the economy. But also is currently leaving me depleted. Which is why I had to remind myself to take a breath.





If you're like me when you’re swamped with new projects, it's very easy to procrastinate on that much-needed battery recharge. "Well, only another week and then this project will be done. I'll take a break then." But the day before you deliver the project, something new comes up, or there's a last-minute addition that means you have another week's worth of work. And no break. What to do?

Take a breath.

And I've learned that one breath is not enough. I can’t tell you the number of times when I've said, “I need to take a moment.” And I take exactly that: one moment. And then immediately get wrapped up around whatever was on my mind in the first place.

I utterly missed the point of the exercise, n'est-ce pas?

So take seven and a half of those giant gulps of air. Seven and a half is the designated number because it's not a neat, round 10 or five: you will get a little bit out of your head just by keeping track of the count. And keep doing it until your mind has wandered on to something delightfully meaningless and irrelevant to your immediate work. (If you are afraid you're going to forget something important, you should be keeping notes written down somewhere other than that tightly wound brain of yours).

Lastly, it never can hurt to ask for time. I got an email from a designer three days ago inviting me into a project she’s working on. "The copy's not right, and I’ve gone back and forth with the client several times. We could really use your help. He wants to launch on Friday." I emailed the client and said I couldn't get to it for a week, fully expecting he'd go find someone else. Instead, he said no problem.

And I could breathe a sigh of relief.

Tribe

Seth Godin, speaking at IAB Mixx, made some interesting comments about "cutting through the noise" to reach consumers.

Give up. (I'm paraphrasing here.)

It's hard to contradict the venerable Mr. Godin, and I'm not going to try. It's very interesting, though, to suggest that we've all been "branded to death." Going further, if consumers are going to choose a product not merely based on the message, but in order to belong to a tribe--how are they going to identify with that tribe? Social media? I'd like to think that the best product will win--at least the first consumers will be analytical about the product, before the followers come.

On a related-but-not note, I was speaking with a colleague who is 21 years old and was among the first Facebook users, and she was predicting the demise of Facebook: "I find I don't use it as much anymore. We're all getting too open. It's too much information."

If we don't have Facebook, how will we find our tribe? Fundamentally, the drive to belong is primal, and s/he who figures that out holds the key to the future, whether it's Facebook or something else.

Best B2B Voices: Part 3

A few days ago I mentioned I’d found 2 great B2B voices. Last week I talked about IBM (which still surprises me how well written their site is—though I should clarify that’s not because it’s sooo head-and-shoulders above the rest, but rather I still hold onto an apparently inaccurate IBM stereotype).

The other voice is TribalDDB.

In the agencies where I’ve worked (which is to say, not big ones), their agency website was always an afterthought since between billable hours and non-billable hours, billable is going to win every time. Apparently that’s not true for biggies. (Huh. Putting as much effort in your own site as you would a client’s. Smart. Maybe that’s why they got big.)

At any rate, what’s working in their voice? TribalDDB makes what they do sound exciting. They don’t overwhelm with too much information. And they speak in metaphor that distills the potentially dry service offering into something easily understood as beneficial. For example, describing SEO/SEM the headline is “Hey needle, time to burn the haystack.” SEO/SEM is spectacularly boring except to people who really understand its power. And guess what? That headline describes its power.

Why aren’t more B2B voices like that? Is the problem that TribalDDB doesn’t want to spend as much time getting to know it’s clients’ benefits the way it does its own? I sincerely doubt that. More likely clients won’t hand the reins over. They’re scared to be too different. And maybe it’s right to be afraid of being different. But standing out is also how you beat the competition.

Best B2B Voices: Part 2

So quite a while back I posted that I’m looking for great B2B
voices. They are hard to come by, in my experience. Over the course of the past few months I’ve looked and have 2 good examples, though I don’t think by any means this is the conclusive list.

Let’s start with the one I found first: IBM. I know, crazy, right? They have nicely humorous TV ads (which, as I mentioned, is where B2B often has fun), but who knew they could nail their voice on their website, too? If you’re interested in this stuff, which you must be if you’re reading this, seriously go to ibm.com.

They do a wonderful job of delivering the facts—which are of course heavy in technology systems and other topics that could easily become tangled, boring and jargony. They manage to avoid that very well. In fact, they are great at keeping it simple, warm and friendly—maybe not compared to a consumer product/website, but certainly compared with the competition.

The most important part is that they place a terrific focus on you.

The design (which is not my focus, but of course is relevant), is simple, clean and lets the content come through. Tabs at the bottom of the home page make for quick scanning of the volumes of info available on the site. Information on deeper level pages is also well divided into digestible chucks for the average scanning user.

Lastly, while their TV ads and website have a very different voice and look, it’s not too radically different. It feels consistent. IBM has a great UX and content team. IBM, give them a raise.

2 Great Ads

I get shivers when I see great ad copy. Just saw two today:

1. Billboard for Group Health Cooperative. For those who don’t know, Group Health is a big coop in this area. It’s a health care option that’s commonly offered especially at tech companies (last I heard, it’s still on the menu at Microsoft). The billboard had simple copy: Live Long and Prosper. Talk about nailing your audience AND benefits AND humor!
2. Small delivery truck for Staples. We all know the office supply company, so this doesn’t need explaining. The copy is “I break for empty staplers.” Brilliant. I love the double entendre of staplers as in the handy little device, and staplers being people who use Staples delivery services.

Always inspiring to see great work.

Blog writing vs. engineering: don't be a frog

Mark Schaefer wrote a good post this morning that discusses a key point in blogging today: about how so many bloggers (or, as I may call them, "blogbots") engineer their blog posts based on keywords.

In my humble writerly opinion, content engineering is a slippery slope that may turn the relationship building aspects of social media into... meaninglessness. It used to be that only those who really had something to say went off and blogged. People who followed them were interested in hearing it. Now many are doing it not because they have something to say, but instead are focused on the delightful end result of
page views --> brand building --> sales.

Ideally, these keywords bubble up organically through what you would normally want to talk about on your blog. If you're forcing it, then you're going to sound funny. Robotic. And unless you're JPL, that's probably not the voice you're looking for.

While such a focus may yield short term benefits, you may well end up sacrificing the relationship part. And it makes the consumer kiss more frogs before finding their prince.

The moral of the story is, don't be a frog.

Spicing up a social media campaign

The marketing world is all atwitter (pun intended, of course) with the Old Spice social media success. @edlee pointed out quite correctly on 15 July that the phenomenal message generation was all started with millions of dollars in traditional media—the TV ads and the witty agency that came up with it.

Social media and traditional media don’t have to be bitter enemies: they actually are great friends. We marketers are still in the process of testing how to best use them (educated guesses, but still guesses to some degree). Old Spice just made the commitment. I mean, personal video responses to tweets? That’s commitment that most marketers would run from in horror.

That is, until they figured out to make it a bigger deal than it really is.

“Boldness has genius, power and magic in it,” said Goethe (I’m citing not to show off my superior intellect, but rather so I don't have to go to all the trouble of linking to the quote).*

On the other hand, @edlee also just tweeted that Old Spice sales are down 7% in the US (not including Wal-Mart). Is that A) a game of knock-the-leader-off-the pedestal or B) numbers from before this campaign or C) proof that humor can distract too much from the real product benefits message? Time will tell.

* After posting I nerdily read up on this quote... apparently it is not really by Goethe. It's really by W.H. Murray who claimed it came from Goethe—presumably using an extremely loose translation of G's work.

Write it bad. Real bad.

Sometimes, you just gotta get out of your shell. As a creative, we're expected to be fresh and different and unique and resonant... all the time. It's exhausting.

There are many ways I've stumbled across to overcome this. Things like going to a different location (other than your desk), handwriting (or hand-drawing) rather than using the computer. Little things like these can make a surprising impact on what you create. They'll help you get out of the proverbial box.

The one I haven't seen written down anywhere is doing Bad Writing. You know the stuff. Cringe worthy horrors of adjective-laden, passive-voiced drivel. My technique is to sit down and purposefully write stuff that would never, ever make it to my portfolio. Throw in some needlessly poor grammar, too (see the headline of this post).

While you're at it, set your inner critic free and rip it to pieces for not being bad enough.

If you're a designer, throw color theory out the window, mix 72 different fonts, go wild with visuals that make you want to poke your eyes out.

I have a theory that this stuff sometimes gets bottled up in your system, blocking access to the golden harp-strumming prose and design that you need to make a living.

So open the tap. Let it flow. Write the worst possible stuff you can come up with. Often times after doing that, I walk away and come back. And find that towards the end of my flood of atrocities, there's the nugget of something good.

Relationships, relationships, relationships

When it comes to social media, it's all about relationships, relationships, relationships (to borrow the timeless expression about real estate). What's exciting about social media is that these relationships can no longer be Potemkin's Villages constructed by companies. They can't be cardboard cutouts of engagement. These have to be the real deal.

Regarding "why corporate social media fails" - that's the issue. Being real. Real is what builds the relationships. Real demands that companies trust their consumers as much as the consumers trust them and their products (and the money they spend on those products). We socialmediaphiles can type till we're blue in the fingers, but companies have to trust their consumers. Really.

The reason why is that they don't have a choice anymore. That's not nearly as apocalyptic as it sounds. It's an exciting time to be in marketing! Embrace change, Corporate America/World. You'll gain ground vs. your competitors because of it.

Update about no updates

It's a cop-out, I know, but I had a tough couple of weeks of illnesses; not mine, but rather my family and my feline companion.

The family are fine, but my cat didn't make it. The show must go on. I suppose that would constitute my observation about marketing as well as life. Sometimes despite your most valiant efforts in [life/marketing] you get overtaken by other events; then you get back on stage and do your damnedest.

Humor: making it work

Still on the hunt for the best B2B voice, but wanted to dive in on a great, underrated consumer campaign: the Travelocity Gnome campaign. What's working?

1. Voice and message balance. The creatives really nailed the slightly edgy, self-deprecating humor that resonates with the online-savvy, 25 - 45 crowd. Humor has to identify and "be one" with the audience--but not offend. This Travelocity does deftly.

2. On-message. Inserting humor is comparatively easy, but it's tricky to use humor without distracting from the message. The Travelocity campaign manages to walk that fine line successfully, for the most part.

3. Social media elements. The Facebook component of the campaign has been simple and easy, pitting 2 locations against one another for voting. Plenty of terrific photos. Once again, the humor and personality is present but not over the top.

4. Differentiated. Competitors like Expedia are taking themselves very seriously. Travelocity gets the creative advantage of being the underdog--and they're using it well.

I confess I originally thought that the Gnome would be short-lived. I'm looking forward to seeing what comes next from McKinney.

The Hunt for the Best B2B Voice Begins

There was a great article last week from MarketingSherpa entitled “Copywriting Lessons from Social Media.” It’s so good I won’t regurgitate it here, but it’s worth a read, both for writers and every marketer who makes a request from a writer. In short, an honest voice is so rare in copy that it sings when you finally see one.

Even rarer? A great B2B voice.

I can think of a few B2B TV ads (which air during the Sunday a.m. talk shows) that use humor to make the point about a B2B product. In web copy, we tend to get shy and return to our “innovative, industry-leading solutions” and other such gobbledygook. The trick for the copywriter is striking a balance between features and benefits. Obviously the B2B audience is less about having fun than getting useful information about your product. But that doesn’t preclude a great voice.

I am now officially on the hunt for the best B2B voices. Top 5 will be featured in a one-of-a-kind praise-ridden blog post by this humble copywriting blogger. Submit suggestions in the comments.

Tips from the trenches: webinars

I’ve been writing a lot of webinar programs lately, because they STILL work and can be highly cost-effective for driving revenue. Here are some tips:

Leverage happy customers. This is two-fold: 1) to include in the webinar presentation itself, to tell your story to others then 2) to get testimonials for other webinars. Solicit feedback in follow-up thank you emails.

Tell a story. It’s true for any presentation, and this includes webinars. Stories take your ideas from the realm of the abstract and transform them into something real and personal. Even (especially) a product demo needs some concrete examples with which your audience and identify. Use challenges faced by your actual customers (better yet, feature that customer and let them speak in person at the webinar) and show how things have improved.

Looks matter. You don’t need to be a presentation wizard, but a few animations, colorful text or photos can make a world of difference.

Invite often—but not too early. Unless it’s a one-of-a-kind, can’t-miss, groundbreaking webinar, folks aren’t going to feel capable of planning that far ahead. I’ve seen a lot of success with webinar invites sent the day before and day of the webinar (obviously, test to see if this applies to your target customers).

Leverage content after the fact. Creating a great webinar is a lot of work, so use the content in whitepapers, testimonials, audio/Podcasts, on-demand replays, etc.

Quality with a capital "K"

I drove past one of those letter-board signs this morning, one describing a service or product as "quality." As a copywriter, I cringe at the word, for a variety of reasons:

1. ____ Quality Widgets. Good or poor? The best or the worst? Quality originally was a noun, not an adjective, and it still screams for a modifier when immediately preceded by a noun.

2. Don't make me think. Good ol' Seth. Quality is abstract--it's not going to create an emotional reaction. It's going to make me keep driving. Did I remember what that sign was about? Nope.

3. Accuracy. Don't waste characters. Is "quality" really the strongest adjective out there for your particular product? Is there another word that's more specific? Of course there is.

A Vitamin for Building a Facebook Fan Base

I learned of a bold move by VitaminWater yesterday. I was reading through a LinkedIn discussion of examples of great copy on the web, and several writers admired VitaminWater.com (in comments dated about a month ago). When I went to the site… I was redirected to the product’s Facebook fan page. I was so surprised that I tried it again, then took a closer look at the Facebook page to see that the content is focused on March Madness. Ah ha, it’s a temporary promotion.

And it’s a bold move. When I mentioned this to fellow marketers, they replied, “How annoying!” and “Who would go to vitaminwater.com anyway?” This latter question is actually a great one because the answer is: fans. Fans who aren't looking to study their copy--fans who would much rather engage with their beverage of choice.

Rather than having a middleman website driving folks to your Facebook page, why not drive them straight to the source, where they spend a lot more of their time? I am impressed with this idea and with the derring-do of the execs who approved it. It is a powerful way to jumpstart your Facebook presence. Also a little scary to relinquish control, even for four weeks of a basketball tournament.

Will be interesting to see if this becomes a trend for products to use during short-term promotions to build a Facebook fanbase—or even a more permanent brand engagement method?

5 Secrets to Create Product Evangelists

The launch of the “extra strong” Marmite XO shows an excellent dialog between product and its most loyal and passionate consumers. Here’s the overview slideshow. Here is how to create a set of passionate evangelists for your product:

Secret #1 Extend an invitation. Give your loyalists the opportunity to reveal themselves. If you’re not sure who your most passionate consumers are, invite them to tell you, via social media. Surveys are all well and good, but a chance to upload a quirky video or photo of your pet with the product in question is priceless.


Secret #2 Consistency, consistency, consistency. The whole campaign is richly Victorian, from creative to the “Marmarati” event, even while it’s very 21st century. They surely could have thrown a simpler and less expensive event for the “first circle,” but they knew the more special these folks felt at the start, the more loyal they would be.

Secret #3 Exclusivity. The reward for being a product evangelist should be truly special. They should be given privileged access, such as the private Facebook group. More privilege makes them even greater experts in comparison to the general public and therefore better advocates for your product. If you let them have a hand in determining it (like letting the Marmarati discuss different formulations of the product or the design of the container) you can forge a stronger-than-steel bond.

Secret #4 Make it easy. Have your content easily postable on whatever social media your audience uses—and encourage them to do so.


Secret #5 Engage. Talk, respond, ask questions, offer kudos. Reward and acknowledge what your evangelists are doing for you. For every tweet you respond to, countless customers are watching. And isn’t that what social media is all about?

The Strategy of the King

I just read a great wrapup of the recent SxSX Interactive conference from Adam Schwabe. Since I was unable to attend, I really appreciated his overview, which hopefully will tide us all over until next year.

At any rate, one trend he mentioned is an increasing emphasis on content, and the rise of the content strategist:

We’ve always made pretty bold proclamations in this industry that Content is King, but it really hasn’t been. Content is all too often considered as an afterthought after wireframes and design comps have been presented to and approved by the client. Relegated to boxes as placeholders and Lorem Ipsum, too many of us take a “do it later” approach with what is most important to the user. People aren’t visiting your site to look at colours and boxes, they’re there for a purpose, and the content should be at the core of any design.

It's true: in the past I was often called in to apply content after a design was already locked in place, or (slightly better) asked to create content at the same time as the design so as to keep timelines short.

The "insert content here" approach may occasionally be expedient, but I'm excited to hear that content strategy is being recognized as important. And I confess the content strategist role is also fun. When "Content is King," a site can more easily achieve its goal of brand engagement, sales leads, etc. Long live the King.

MarketMix and Another Reason To Skip the Ugly

Just got home from an interesting MarketMix conference. Overall, it was great: good conversations, lots of idea sharing, a sense of camaraderie. Compared with a certain current client of mine, it was a breath of fresh air to hear things said like "Reward failure." This quote was from Tom Vogl of REI, suggesting that experimentation and innovation need to be encouraged. Yes, we all need to pay attention to ROI, but new technologies and even optimization have learning curves.

There were some low-lights: the first breakout session was taken over by folks who didn't seem to even have a Twitter account (the session was about PR and Social Media). While that's fine, my humble request is to keep your lips shut and just listen, if you're that new to this. However, I still felt the panelists kept things moving and I did get something out of it, namely, that what your instinct is about doing PR via SM is correct (message to the right audience, stay relevant, etc. etc.)

I met some great people--and I'm fairly shy, so that's really saying something. The surprise hit of the day was Tom Douglas (yes, THAT Tom Douglas, our local food celeb). He's a terrific speaker, and while his talk was all over the place, was not in "marketing-ese" it was wonderful hands-on, full of his examples and humor. I had very low expectations, and he instilled me with civic/regional pride (as did Vogl of REI). His political leanings showed occasionally (re: healthcare, buy local, etc.) and these meshed with my own, so of course I'm a little biased.

At any rate, let me wrap up with the new reason to say no to ugly marketing (see my previous post). Tom Vogl used Nordstrom and Costco as local examples of online/offline integration (national presence with brick-and-mortar retail stores, so similar to REI). Costco was an example of what not to do: hideous website, not usable, all the most useful tools were buried. He compared that to Walmart--while not local, I'd argue a similar value prop and target consumers. The Walmart site was clean, easily navigable, and still on-brand. See folks? It can be done.

3 + 1 Reasons to Just Say No to Ugly Ads

Hot topic of late: ugly marketing. Every direct marketing knows how ugly pieces get response. Heck, even the local news knows it: if it bleeds, it leads. We’re all as fascinated by the “ugly” side of human lives, especially when “beautiful” celebrities do something “ugly.” But we don’t do that sort of thing, do we? We are better marketers than that, right?

But then one random Tuesday, you see the responses from that ugly DM piece that slipped past the brand police and suddenly there it is: temptation. What a great response! What will happen if we do it again? More leads. More revenue. More profits. Brand? Who needs brand when we can get our fingers wrapped around that bubbling bucketful of oodles and oodles of LEADS?!

Ahem. Sorry. Got a bit carried away for a moment. And lest you get carried away yourself, I’ll give you a few good reasons to just say no:

1. Three words: Un. Sub. Scribe.
In a recent example of ugly-love, an ugly lead-gen email was sent out (a resend of an old email), and the sales floor became giddy over all the leads they received. However, the unsubscribe rate was better than TWICE what it normally is.

2. Getting to home base.
Or lack thereof. You need to build a relationship with your would-be customers as well as your current customers. I liken virtually all marketing to dating: you meet a smart intellectual on the first two dates, then smarmy gold-chain-chest-hair guy on the third? Yuh, there won’t be a fourth.

3. I feel pretty.
We’re marketers. We’re collectively responsible for that barrage of messages that we ourselves experience every day. We know that these messages work, but whenever we use them, we lower the standard just a little bit. And our world becomes even more cluttered by ugly old yuck.

4. Would you do it if the queen were watching?
In other words, are you a little ashamed of the piece? Would you be proud to share it in your portfolio? Not every piece is a masterwork of design and copy, but we must strive.