Life is a series of choices. And just about every day, you come into a situation where you want people to choose you.
To achieve the result you want, you need to convince them of the superiority of:
- The great idea you have
- The phenomenal product you’ve developed
- The awesome service you provide
You’re in sales, in other words. We all are. Every sale requires the ability to convince your audience to take the next step. This is marketing, and we’re all in that too. And persuasive copy is the foundation of effective marketing.
My point is, you need to know how to write.
Not like Shakespeare, but with a basic level of competence. Even if all you’re writing is Craigslist ads, you need to know how to persuade with the written word. And if you are running your own business today, it’s absolutely mandatory that you be able to reach people and convince them with clear and compelling language.
The problem is that for many people, sitting down to write is as much fun as taking a seat in the dentist’s chair. But writing well is not that difficult. So lets do something about that.
Google’s Web-based e-mail program is far better than any other Web mail program I’ve ever encountered. There’s a lot to like:
- Way more storage than other programs
- Superior searchability
- Nested threads make it easy to see a lot more correspondence at a glance
- Labeling and archiving is simple and effective
- Integrated chat
- Awesome spam filtering
All in all, it’s an incredibly powerful program that saves me a lot of time and effort. And I’m sure it’s going to sync well when I get around to going more mobile with my email. So I’ve been switching my other email accounts over to Gmail, and during this process it’s become apparent that Google knows a LOT about me, my habits, even my patterns of thought.
The first time I saw The Christian Science Monitor, I expected it to be chock full of wing-nut proselytizing, like, say, The Watchtower, that curious piece of rubbish the Jehovah’s Witnesses leave behind after you shoo them off your front porch.
What a pleasant shock it was, back in the day, to discover that this little broadsheet was a respectable, serious newspaper that publishes insightful exposes and often breaks major national stories. And they even had reading rooms, where you could wander in off the street, sit down in a quiet place and read the paper (or the religious books they provided) — how cool is that?
Yesterday the CSM announced that after 100 years, it will stop producing its newsprint edition and publish only on the Web. It finally makes too much sense economically and environmentally not to do that, and it’s only a matter of time before other national publications follow suit.
Salon has a long but great essay by Gary Kamiya on how “massive online feedback has rocked writers and changed journalism forever.”
It reminded me of when I was a reporter at the La Jolla Light and and I referred to Kate Sessions (who lived about 100 years ago and planted much of the foliage around Balboa Park) as a “spinster†in a story about her (unwedded) life. This characterization so enraged one reader (presumably single and with no good prospects) that she cancelled her subscription.
We’ve been hearing for years about the coming convergence of computers and television — and handhelds and GPS, voice recognition, biometrics etc. My household is still TiVo-less, and much of this still seems like abstract hype to me. Until yesterday, when my neighbor showed me the what The Convergence looks like.
The Washington Post today is reporting that the FCC “said that companies engaged in word-of-mouth marketing, in which people are compensated to promote products to their peers, must disclose those relationships.”
Of course, word-of-mouth can be a powerful and positive force — if it’s genuine. The FCC is taking a stand against pay-per-post schemes, in which bloggers pretend to be disinterested parties, when in truth they are being paid to sing the praises of a particular product. Transperancy is a good thing, and it’s becoming more essential for businesses that must find new ways to connect with their customers and prospects. But there are a lot of grey areas here.
For instance, consider the Eagles/Panthers Monday night game two weeks ago. Sly Stallone shows up before the game, and he’s interviewed at the half about his new Rocky movie, his old Rocky movies etc. Are we to believe there was no compensation to ESPN/ABC for delivering to Stallone this prime-time extended-exposure windfall to his key demographic? It sure looked like word of mouth — Sly just hanging out in the booth chatting. Will the FCC require disclosures of this sort of marketing arrangement?
Consumers have become quite jaded, and rightly so. When marketing campaigns are built on non-disclosure, it becomes even more essential to have your own built-in, shock-proof bullshit detector. But every step towards exposing the disingenuous who pretend to be authentic is a good thing too.
As previously noted, the Yellow Pages are now as antiquainted and useful as dial-up rotary phones. Yahoo and Google have redefined how people find businesses by offering simple but powerful search functions. And now a San Diego start-up is poised to unveil a next-generation business directory that will incorporate Web 2.0 features to give consumers a voice — and maybe a lot more influence in the marketplace.
MojoPages is in alpha and rolling toward beta, and doing so in very transparent fashion. You can follow the impending Mojo launch through a series of videos on Veoh, a new one shows up every Tuesday, and on the MojoPages blog here. The video series introduces the team, tells the story well and captures some of the early-stage energy behind what looks like a great idea.
And the timing for an interactive business directory that enables consumer ratings and feedback couldn’t be better. Just last week Citizen Marketers, a new book by Church of the Customer bloggers Ben and Jackie was published. As the big media behemoths continue to lose ground to new media outlets like MySpace and YouTube, businesses are necessarily searching for new ways to effectively reach their customers. The trend is toward engaging customers in conversations, and businesses that ignore the trend do so at their peril. Your customers are your best evangelists, and they are about to become your marketing team too.
So why not an online outlet for raving fans? While MySpace and to some extent YouTube are great for the narcissistic, it’s-all-about-me set, there’s room for a practical, useful Web 2.0 play — one that helps you find a decent plumber when one you need one, or a muffler shop or whatever. Word of mouth, after all, is the mother of all marketing, the ancient method of assuring that the cream rises to the top. If MojoPages can become an agent of truthiness (props to Stephen Colbert) we all win.
Umair has a thoughtful post on the role of marketing in a networked economy, and he asks the question, from a marketing strategy point of view, “is the relationship between truth and advantage more powerful today than before?”
The answer of course, is yes. The blogosphere has allowed us to know faster and with more certainty when people in corporations, um, bend the truth, to put it charitably. Does that give an advantage to the authentic and honest? How about those who pretend (see Edelman.)
Good marketing has always been about the unexpected, and actually telling the truth to audiences would certainly shock them — maybe even into making purchases. But who will craft these messages? Spin generation is the core competency in a lot of places these days. But maybe the tide has turned…
Practicing what he preaches, George Siemens has made his new book “Knowing Knowledge” available for download as a pdf, and posted it as a wiki. It’s also for sale on Lulu.com. Scanning it, part one is theory, part two appears to be more focused on practical implementation, but it effectively raises some interesting questions right off the bat:
Is the book still a viable vehicle for knowledge transfer? Think about it, a book is essentially a snapshot in time from one tiny pin-prick of a perspective. Business books typically assert an authoritative viewpoint — this is how to solve this problem. But how can someone sitting at a keyboard in a small room for a certain period of time anticipate the particulars of your specific problem? If that person is knowledgable, they can produce an artifact that has value, sure. But can they compete with say, a network of semi-experts?
Will kids being born today actually consult “books” when they reach adulthood? Or will all human knowledge be readily available, and accessible on the fly, in other formats?
“A great deal of wreckage is caused by boys behaving badly. The healthy ones — well-balanced human beings in full command of their alpha strengths — are natural leaders who are trusted by colleagues, respected by competitors, revered by employees and loved by Wall Street. But other alpha males are risks to their organizations — and sometimes to themselves.”
– Kate Ludeman and Eddie Erlandson, “Alpha Male Syndrome: Curb the Belligerence, Channel the Brilliance”
New today from the Harvard Business Press, a book on a topic that grows more relevant every day. Chest-thumping aggression and posturing had it’s day, and still does on the savannah. But in the concrete jungle there are cell phones, blogs, IMs and other ways to spread the word on those inevitable occasions when the emperor is unclothed.
Together we are smarter, even, oftentimes, than the CEO, president or whomever we have ceded power to. Is there really any doubt about that today?