It’s a fact of life: Whenever you sit down to write something, you can presume that the audience is in some state of attention deficit.
The person you are trying to reach (that’s you, right now) is multi-tasking in one way or another: monitoring the e-mail coming in through Outlook; maybe taking a call or a text message on the cell phone; keeping an eye on the TV and/or carrying on a conversation with someone else who is actually in the room. Or scrolling through TweetDeck, for crying out loud.
When you are trying to reach this person, less is more. People don’t have a lot of time to 
waste, so you want to get to the point quickly, because you are considerate of their time.
Maybe you have a lot to say, and it’s all important. You’re going to have to be patient. Marketing is a conversation, and in every conversation, there’s a give and take.
Sure, there is a thud factor that can be impressive when you have volumes of information. This can be good if people have paid you for CDs and binders full of printed content. Online, this kind of info-bloat works against you.
Online, everyone is scanning and trying to catch the whiff of a particular scent. It’s the scent that tells them they are right track — getting closer to what they want.
That scent is in your headlines and subheads, in the copy you choose to put in boldface, in your tone, your graphics and your entire presentation.
It’s in the fact that you do not demand too much of your audience’s precious time, and you choose not to insult them with epic, long-copy sales letters full of outrageous half-truths in all caps.
Speak to people in their language, and get to the point, and you may find that you have an audience — and that is a precious asset indeed.
I don’t think so. He had an associate who put in a good word with the Queen, but he didn’t have someone asking him if he was working on the right problem.
Neither (as far as I know) did Leonardo da Vinci, Ben Franklin or Sam Walton. Yet they each pushed themselves to achieve incredible, world-changing feats.
OK, they each had their own special genius.
Guess what? So do you.
I’ve worked for a couple of coaching companies, OneCoach and TEC /Vistage, so I’ve seen how having a business coach in your corner can make a huge difference.
I ran a faster marathon (and achieved one of my life goals) because I had a great coach, pushing me further than I might have gone on my own.
But here’s the thing: You can actually coach yourself.
This is not just me biting the hands that used to feed me. I really believe that while it’d be great to have a Vince Lombardi in your corner, only you can make the commitment to do the things you need to do to get your enterprise (and your life) to the next level.
Sure, new skills, and what they call “out-of-the-box thinking” and are required. But if you’re motivated, you really can transform your business and your life.
Researchers at Oxford University have compiled a list of the top 10 most irritating phrases currently in use. Who knows what methodology they used, but it’s hard to disagree with their findings, even if they reflect the Queen’s English more than the American idiom.
The top ten most irritating phrases:
1 – At the end of the day
2 – Fairly unique
3 – I personally
4 – At this moment in time
5 – With all due respect
6 – Absolutely
7 – It’s a nightmare
8 – Shouldn’t of
9 – 24/7
10 – It’s not rocket science
The article in the Telegraph (worth clicking through for the comments) also mentions the regrettable “it is what it is, ” meme, and the often misused “literally” and “ironically.”
To which I might add:
Hopefully (also misused)
Just for the record
Oh my God
Dude
Totally
What up?
Are you kidding me?
Mission statements had value once — they served to get people focused on what the company’s purpose really was, so that everyone could aspire to fulfilling it really well.
Achieving that kind of clarity seemed like a good idea, so pretty soon we were all supposed to create our own individual mission statements, so we could march to our our own well-defined beat and lead more productive, purposeful lives.
Extreme clarity is not for everyone, however, and somewhere along the line, mission statements started getting mushy, full of weasel words that create wiggle room. Today they all seem like they were written by committee and carefully crafted to offend no one — in other words, engineered to be totally meaningless.
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 were at Home Depot the other day, picking up a load of bricks for a backyard project. The only manned checkout line in the garden section was four deep, and the guy at the cash register was in no hurry. He actually came out and swept the floor while an elderly woman in front of us tried to figure out how to swipe her credit card. Then a woman came in pushing a cart with a tree-sized plant that she wanted to return.
“Not here,” he told her. She would have to go back outside and push it down to the next entrance, where they handle returns. She wasn’t pleased. He didn’t seem to care. He had a job to do, processing transactions at the checkout. He’d be done at the end of his shift, then he’d go home. At least that’s what it looked like. You can never know for sure what someone’s motives are, but you can see their actions, and his guy didn’t seem particularly interested in helping customers solve problems (and people come to Home Depot only because they have problems to solve).
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.
The beer company ads featuring out-of-context post-game press conference clips of retired NFL coaching legends Bill Walsh and Dick Vermeil have started a lot of conversations — like one I had with some football-watching buddies.
First, people wonder if the clips are real (they are, I’ve been assured). People discuss the ages of Walsh and Vermeil; how long ago they were actively coaching (longer for Walsh) and when these clips were taped; and finally amusement at the way the beer company’s marketing team has taken comments about games and players, and misappropriated them for their product.
The campaign turns on its head the press conference sound-bite phenomenon we’re all familiar with. It’s slyly subversive in hinting at how we’ve all been manipulated by mainstream media’s selective use of sound bites — we never really get the whole picture on the nightly news, only what’s deemed to be significant and in the context that someone else decides upon…
It’s also a remarkable campaign in that it reaches beyond the 18-34 demographic that this beer company has targeted in previous campaigns– in ways that went too far in glorifying binge drinking for my taste. Football fans of all ages revere Walsh for his gridiron genius, and many fans have a soft spot for the effective but more-often-tearful-than-usual-for-an-NFL-coach Vermeil, portrayed recently by Greg Kinnear in “Invincible.”
What makes the ads work as attention-getters (that’s not to say they actually help sell the product) is that they let us, the viewers, in on the joke. They require you to think critically and determine whether or not they are staged, and that gives you an appreciation for the cleverness (or, um, duplicity?) of creatives at the ad agency. Good marketing starts and furthers conversations — it gets people talking…
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…
