Archives for September 2010

I was looking through several publications yesterday doing some research for a proposal (a tactic that apparently very few marketers still do, but that’s a different post). I in particular needed to study the ads in there, and what I saw filled me with a series of raw emotions. “Gee, maybe this is why advertising is said to be dying,” for example. Rather than do what a lot of people do and harp on the bad ads, I want to talk about what makes a good ad. But before that, a brief word.

Advertising, as I have written before, is not dying, but it is changing. It is clear, from looking closely at a lot of ads, that some people know that change is happening, but they are reacting in a way that won’t be helpful. They are following the adage (no pun intended) that your ad needs to stick out in some way. So, they are going the way of really out there designs, overly cheesy (er, clever?) headlines, and gimmicks. These methodologies are in turn what turn people off to advertisements. Ads have never been popular, but if you just see a mess or something that is of no interest to you, you’re not even going to take 5.7 milliseconds to find out what the ad is about. Advertising, therefore, perpetuates the stereotype of being a waste of space.

To save advertising, you need to apply the same logic that we talk about in Social Media. You need to make it more about your customer’s perspective. You need to make your point clearly. And the print equivalent of red flashing lights is probably no longer a good idea. So here are some basics that a good ad should cover.

1. Your product should be in the ad somewhere. It doesn’t have to be a typical beauty shot, but I should be able to tell what you are doing or selling. Take Dyson as an example. Everyone knows that they make really high-end vacuum cleaners, and yet the product is shown in every TV ad they do.

2. Have some useful information. Show that you are steeped in the business of your customers. Speak their language. Explain why your product or service is beneficial, not why they should buy it.

3. Make sure your copy is legible. I see several ads that try to use white type against a really crisp, beautiful, dark picture. It doesn’t work. If people have to work to read your copy, you are done.

4. Have a call to action. Customize the call to action for your industry. A highly technical audience will probably not be interested in entering a drawing for a beautiful set of artist’s pencils, for example.

5. Don’t try to be clever. Some of the headlines I saw made me imagine what was going on during that creative meeting. I was not wondering, however, about the product or what it might mean for the industry. Let your product be clever. Cheese, even Swiss, can get in the way of your message.

6. Don’t try to fit your entire website into your ad. When you are trying to represent something really important, you can get a bit…carried away. This is why an outside perspective (like, say, the perspective of an agency) can be helpful. You don’t need to put your entire product line plus your company biography into a half-page ad. You just will create clutter, and people will turn the page.

7. Remember to link your ad to other marketing initiatives. This might not strike the reader of a magazine right away, but if they see your ad, then they go to a trade show, there should be some moment of recollection. “Oh, this is the company whose ad I always see.” It helps you get a foot in the door, or said another way, it lets customers know you door is open and your house is organized.

8. Don’t worry about your competitors. Just like politicians always say that they are going to focus on what they can do, that’s what you need to do in an ad. If you spend a lot of time on the competition, you might direct readers to them, plus, essentially, you’re contributing to their marketing and you’re coming off as defensive. Be confident that your product is worth the reader’s time.

9. Have a clear and consistent sign-off. Let people know where to go to learn more about you and your product. Have some contact info there. And make it legible.

10. Most important – make sure you proof your ad. Proofing doesn’t mean just reading the copy. It means looking at the image, it means looking at how the text is wrapping. All of the little details that you think no one would ever notice can contribute to the overall reception of your ad. One “little” mistake can make you look sloppy.

If you follow these 10 steps,  you’ll be on your way to making a better ad, one that is useful for the customers, not just a selling tool for you.

If you want help analyzing your ads or creating a new ad for the coming 2011 campaign, our agency can help you with that.

Image by kamila turton. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/kamila_t

My new friend @tommyismyname wrote a thought provoking post today about the duality of our existence in Social Media – the temptation to create a character while also wanting to be authentic. The struggle to be yourself while also creating a persona or a brand is something I have thought a lot about myself. I was trying to think of an example of a person who seemed to have similar struggles and who ended up benefiting from and blooming as a result of new-found authenticity. Then it hit me – one of my heroes, John Lennon.

Beatle John

One thing becomes apparent when you read about The Beatles or when you listen to interviews (even the interviews from the at the time 3 remaining Beatles from The Beatles Anthology). During the early years of Beatles fame, through, let’s say, Help!, the Beatles each created caricatures of themselves. They really had to do this to protect themselves from the onslaught of media and fan attention that haunted them at every turn. George was known as the “quiet” Beatle. Paul was the romantic. John was kind of the brooding Beatle. Even at the height of fame, John couldn’t avoid letting some of his true self show. He wrote songs like “Baby’s in Black,” “Hard Day’s Night, and “Help,” songs that didn’t mesh entirely with the head-bobbing, happy-go-lucky image the Beatles as a band were sending out at the time. You sense, as you watch interviews with him during this time, that people weren’t getting the real him, and you sense that he was struggling with that. He talked in interviews about how people came to see the Beatles for the experience, and how he easily could have been replaced with a mannequin and a sound system.

The feeling of being replaceable is comparable to what happens in Social Media when you try to jump in as a caricature of yourself. As I told Tommy, when I first started doing this, I envisioned creating a “character” called Read Life Mad Man. I thought that I’d be able to make quips about how we sure didn’t do marketing like they do on the show, or “it sure stinks being a woman in a man’s world. Oh wait, it’s not 1967. What’s going on?” I was going to try to intersperse little comments like that with useful information (perhaps like the songs that John wrote while he was showing his clownish exterior). During the time that I tried that approach, I was uncomfortable, I was frustrated, my blog traffic was pretty much nothing, and I was right around 67 followers for about 3 months.

John begins to emerge

After a few experiences that he couldn’t ignore, John decided that he wanted to use his extremely unique position to actually use his brilliance for some good things. He started to speak out against the Vietnam War, and he started to speak out against Britain’s continued efforts to remain “the great empire.” As you probably know, John encountered quite a few hardships as he began to show his true feelings. The people who had thought he was just another happy rock star (a myth in itself, clearly) were a little taken aback. He angered several countries, and then, of course, there was the “Jesus” incident, where John’s frank words about how people were more excited about a Beatles concert than they were about Jesus became interpreted as “We’re bigger than Jesus now.” In Social Media, this might be a tweet that gets taken out of context, or a tweet that the wrong person sees. Just like on Twitter, there was no taking it back. It is the biggest fear people have about being authentic. If you are bullied, if you are quoted out of context, there is no rewind key, and even more frightening, you have no idea who can take that bad information and run with it.

Plastic Ono Band John

Regardless of what you might think about the Yoko Ono chapter of John’s life (I think he made a lot of mistakes in his treatment of Cynthia & Julian, but I also think that the way many people treated him and Yoko was tragically misinformed and bigoted), you have to admit that the music on the Plastic Ono Band record is about as far removed from Meet the Beatles as one could get. Not only was this John being himself, it was John showing the entire world all of his demons. It was the chip on his shoulder melting into a pool of vulnerability.

Regardless of what you think of the songs on that album, you have to admit, that takes some amazing strength and bravery.

I certainly have not gotten that point in my Social Media world, and really, my various and sundry vulnerabilities aren’t all that relevant to helping people in the world of business, so I wouldn’t wait for my own version of The Plastic Ono Band to come out. However, I think the act of being yourself can be just as scary as being yourself and completely vulnerable.

I started acting like myself on Twitter almost by accident. People like Lisa Alexander and Suzanne Vara kept saying hi and responding to my posts, so I would chat with them. Then I got involved in Blogchat and the multitudes of chats after that, and found that you don’t really need to worry about being a caricature or bleeding all over your twitter stream. You can just talk to people. Is it scary? Sure. If someone doesn’t like how you say something, that’s the real you that they’re saying that to. It’s risky. It’s scary. By the same token, though, people who engage with you know that you’re not going to be an entirely new person when they talk to you on the phone or when they meet you in real life. You are who you are. It sounds so easy, right?

Just John

Ultimately, “John Lennon the Beatle,” or “John Lennon the Walrus,” evolved to become, quite simply, that guy John. He was a dad. He was a husband. He baked bread. He went to coffee shops. And occasionally people would ask him when the Beatles were getting back together.

Ultimately, we remember John Lennon for the spectrum of authenticity his career followed. We remember the brilliance of Beatles days, but those seem all the more special when we realize how far askew that persona was from who John as a person really was. We remember John because, in the end, he got the courage the be the one thing he had run away from for years. Himself.

Can you get to a point in Social Media where you are “just” you? What does that mean? What is your “baking bread” daily activity? For me, it’s writing here, reading elsewhere, and sharing ideas on Twitter. It’s really quite blissful, but it took awhile to get here. If I can help you in any way with your struggle, or if you have questions, let me know.

The topic during last night’s #blogchat…chat…was a great one submitted by @WriterChanelle. “Do you blog for yourself or do you blog for your readers?”

In all of the chaos of the chat (and trust me, there was chaos) I realized that what I have been working on is my own philosophy, if you will, about Social Media. I have been saying that I have been a “blog purist,” but I didn’t really have a context for that. Last night I responded that ultimately, if you are doing Social Media right, what your readers want should be the same thing that you want because you are doing this for them. I don’t want to say that my view is “right,” but that statement falls into line with a lot of other things I believe about Social Media and how to use it. It guides me on a lot of things that I say across the board. At the core is one simple belief:

I will always be doing what I do in Social Media because I am passionate about helping others.

Does that mean that I end up feeling rewarded by doing the stuff that I do? Sure. It makes me happy to do what I want to do. But that is different from starting a blog saying, “I hope that this gets me blog traffic.” I write things to help people, to try to fill in gaps that I see, to try to improve a practice that I think could lead people astray.

Some of the tentacles of this core belief are:

1. The number of followers I have on Twitter doesn’t matter to me. If I can engage with the people who are following me, and if  I am providing them value, then I am doing things right.

2. Being listed on a top ten countdown will never be important to me. When compared with 1 person saying, “Thanks, you helped me xyz,” there’s no comparison.

3. I will always be honest with you, which means that I will disagree with you or sometimes say that I think something you did could be improved. This also means that if I think something is really super duper, you know that I am saying that from the heart.

4. My ultimate dream is to improve the world in some small way. If that means that I can help people succeed in business, that would be terrific, and that is one of my passions. If I get to a point where I can leverage my Social Media community’s power to help charities as so many great people do, that would be a dream come true.

Who are you doing all of this for? What are you hoping to get out of it? I’d love to hear your story.

I’ve been feeling kind of uncomfortable about some facets of my Social Media world lately, and I haven’t really been able to put my finger on why. I think I just realized one of the biggest contributing factors, though.

Lately, a lot of the blogs I visit have had themes kind of like:

“I am so busy, this blogging is really getting hard to work in.”

“I’m so busy I put gum inside my shoes and socks inside my mouth.”

“I’m so busy that if I get one more direct message on Twitter I’m going to…xyz that person.”

I haven’t seen a lot of posts lately where someone was really jazzed about their topic, where it was clear that they couldn’t get the words to screen fast enough because they felt so strongly about it.

I have seen a lot of people in Social Media start to kind of go through the motions. And this makes me really, really sad.

I sympathize, but…

I know what it is to be busy. I am essentially doing something work related almost every minute of every day. There are some local friends who I haven’t seen for 3 months. I know that thinking all of the time, constantly giving ideas and help and whatever else, can make you feel like you are bleeding at your jugular.

The reason that I can write a blog post or 2 every day is the same reason why I am immersed in Social Media marketing in the first place. I love it. It touches on issues that I am passionate about. I love sharing ideas with people. I love being taught. I love teaching. It makes me want to get up in the morning. It makes me not want to go to bed.

I schedule time for blogging and for Twitter because I find both extremely enjoyable. Sometimes I might blog about something that is frustrating. Sometimes I might tweet about something sad that is happening to someone. But the sharing of ideas, the whole gestalt of this world – I am passionate about it.

Everybody gets burnt out sometimes

It seems like 2-3 months ago, there would be blog posts by the dozens that would get me thinking all day. I’d find myself arguing with the author in my head while I was making dinner. I’d want to rush to write my own blog post in response. There hasn’t been a lot of that lately though. It feels like a lot of people are just…tired, or like they can’t hear the little jingle of the special bell anymore (that’s a reference to Polar Express, by the way).

If blogging has become a burden to you, a task, something that makes you not want to turn on your computer, I think it shows. If tweeting is something that just annoys you, and you find that all you tweet about is how annoying tweeting is, what is the point in going through the motions?

Don’t stay up for me, Argentina

The perpetual bemoaning of having to blog makes me hesitate to read your blog. If you see that you have readers and comments, are you going to be trapped into making another post? If you are bemoaning having to make a post, is your effort to offer advice really genuine? I never could understand teachers who would stand there and seem to look at the clock more than the students were. It made me uncomfortable, like I was just not getting … something.

The constant belittling of your tweety followers or responders makes me not want to try to respond to you. What if I too end up saying something that bothers you? Will I become the subject of a blog post you once again didn’t want to write?

I still believe that Social Media is about sharing ideas. Learning. Teaching. That’s what I love about it. If you are burnt out, if you’ve lost interest, or if you just simply don’t have the time, it’s okay. People will understand. I will understand. Don’t kill yourself for me. I’d rather you take some time away, rev your engines, and come back with a post from the heart. To me, Social Media and all it entails should be a toy, not an albatross.

What do you think?

Or, as I wanted to call this post, “I feel like I’ve been duped.”

Let me tell you a story.

When I was in college, I went out to McDonalds with a bunch of friends. A friend said that there was a new way to test a person’s IQ. He stuck a quarter to his forehead, then started hitting the back of his head till the quarter fell off. “3 hits, that’s pretty good,” he said. “Do you want to try it, Margie?” Well, being me, I of course said yes. He came ’round behind me, stuck the quarter to my head, and told me to start hitting the back of my head. I of course eventually realized that the quarter had never been stuck to my forehead. I had been stupidly tricked into hitting the back of my head repeatedly at a McDonalds. I felt stupid, and I was disappointed a little that a person I liked and trusted had made me feel that way (though I admit, gullible is my middle name).

Right now, as I am writing this, I am feeling that same red hot feeling of humiliation, disappointment, stupidity, and anger. I feel like I’ve been let down by people I really like and trust. And I feel stupid for not realizing this sooner.

My issue – I have been buying these great marketing books. I, a person without a lot of money, have spent a pretty fair chunk of change this year buying books from people I wanted to learn from. This evening, I realized that with about the same time investment as it took me to read the book I could have read said person’s blog, going a ways back and reading forward, and acquired the same information, written, at times, in exactly the same way. I quite frankly feel duped.

The part that isn’t a surprise

It’s not a secret that a lot of folks engaged full time in Social Media marketing have been using their blog posts as fodder for books, speeches, and webinars. In fact, you’ll find that a lot of people recommend repurposing content from blogs in this manner.

The part that is a surprise

What I realized tonight is that people are not taking an idea from a blog post and extrapolating it out into a fully researched chapter or power point presentation. Rather, they are taking a blog post, maybe mushing it a bit with another blog post, and literally plagiarizing themselves. They are also enticing me to buy a book  or pay hundreds of dollars to watch them speak based on the understanding that this is content I will not be able to get anywhere else. This is not true, apparently. I could get it in all kinds of places, just not bound together.

If Content is King, this has to stop.

Let me step back here and explain why doing what some of these folks are doing is a really bad idea for them and for Social Media marketing. And by the way, I understand that we are all strapped for time. I understand that sometimes it’s hard to figure out how to actually get paid for all of the time you put in. I understand. I sympathize. I’m just still sticking to my guns.

1. It’s clear when a book has been written and when it has been woven. Maybe the tonality of books is changing or has changed, or maybe the tonality of blogs changed and I didn’t notice it, but blog writing, to me, is different from book writing. In a book, chapters build upon each other in a logical way. Each chapter assumes that you have read the last chapters. There might be references to previous concepts or chapters, but because the work is cohesive, you don’t need to insert the same phrases over and over. In a blog, you do. You have to link to that blog post you wrote 6 months ago because it was written 6 months ago. When you see blog-type references in a book it signals sloppiness to me.

2. It makes you look like you don’t really care. I signed up for a webinar once and the presentation was essentially a book report on the presenter’s own book. There was hardly even an effort to customize the content to what the webinar was supposed to be about. This made the presenter look like they were a) lazy and b) didn’t care. I was highly disappointed.

3. Your circle of influence is finite. You know how sometimes skeevy guys get caught using the same pick-up line on a bunch of girls who are all friends? When you use the same content, right down to the same joke or the same little aside, it’s the same kind of feeling. As much as we all feel like Social Media marketing and Social Media in general are infinite universes of being, in fact it is not so. If someone reads your blog, they will very probably hear about speeches you’re due to give or a book you’re promoting. If you give them the same information 3 times, they will know it, and they will lose respect for you. Like I have lost respect for some folks.

4. You’re dealing with people who are immersed in this world. I am hungry. I am hungry for knowledge. I am hungry for you to teach me. And I’m not stupid. Do you think I’m not going to look someone up on Twitter and in the world of blogs if I really really like a presentation they give? Do you think I’m not going to get your book if I have been loyal to your blog? Now multiply that by a bunch more people. What if I see that all of the parts of your presentation that I thought seemed really authentic and genuine were written in a blog post, verbatim, a couple of weeks before?

If it’s a duck, call it a duck

If you really feel that you don’t have the time to generate enough content for constant blogging, a book, and other stuff you are doing, be honest about it. When you publish your collection of blog posts, market it as, well, a collection of your blog posts. Maybe with some additional notes and interviews that you added. If the main thrust of your speech is a series of blog posts you did 2 years ago, integrate the 2 together. Use your actual blog on some of your slides. Show your foundation, then show how you are adding icing to the cake. Give me something extra when you are asking me to pay something, or start charging for your blog straight up. Just like the pay walls in newspapers, maybe this is an inevitability we can’t avoid for much longer. But don’t get me excited about seeing new content for you and then let me find out that it’s just your blog in hard cover.

By the way

I had an idea for a book a month or so ago, and I tried my hand at doing some blog posts that I could use to create the book since, as I have mentioned, that is increasingly being called a best practice. You know what? Writing a blog post is not like writing a chapter of a book for me. There was no way I would ask anyone to pay for those posts as they were. They were written as posts. The tonality is that of my blog. The tonality tied in to other perhaps unrelated blog posts surrounding those blog posts. It would not have made sense in a book. It would have looked uneven, sloppy, and lazy.

Is that the new standard for us, my peers in Social Media?

I’m open to your thoughts, and I’m definitely open to being proven wrong.

1st Image by Sufi Nawaz. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/sufinawaz

2nd Image by Piotr Bizior. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/bizior

3rd Image Credit: http://www.sxc.hu/profile/Kiapalmang

I have been revisiting the topic of my thesis – picking up the strands of research, trying to look at it in new ways. The process of my thesis got in the way of really enjoying it, so now that I’m working at another career 12 hours a day, I thought I’d revisit my student days too. Why not?

Anyway, I’m reading a classic book of literary criticism called The Signifying Monkey, by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. You might recognize his name from the recent “Faces of America” series he did with PBS. In the book, Gates recounts a tale called “The Two Friends”

Once upon a time, two men swore that they would be friends forever and ever, but they didn’t mention the god Esu, who, in the Yoruba tradition, basically writes your life and tells you what you are going to do. Esu decided to test the friendship of these men who hadn’t bothered to think about the force behind their lives. Esu put on a cap, half black and half white, and rode down the center of the field in which the 2 men were working.

Upon taking a break, the 2 guys mentioned the nice man that had ridden by. The first friend said, “oh yeah, you mean the guy with the white cap?” “Um, he had a black cap, but yeah, that guy” (I’m severely paraphrasing here). The two friends start calling each other names because they think the other can’t tell the difference between white and black. Finally, Esu comes back and pretends that he doesn’t know what the fracas is all about. Neighbors explain that the 2 men were fighting furiously, and the 2 men explain to Esu what happened. Esu tells them, “That guy was me. And you’re both right. You’re also both wrong.  The cap is both black and white.”

Great Wisdom Translates

The story resonated with me, as all great stories can resonate over centuries. It made me realize that Social Media is kind of like the trickster god Esu in a way. It makes us think that things are either black or white. If you think it’s black and someone else thinks it’s white, you both call each other stupid.

I’ve seen this so many times it’s almost too difficult to give examples. I saw two posts yesterday that said that every post talking about how Google Instant was going to affect SEO was ill-informed or even dumb. I’ve seen posts about how doing things a certain way is “the best way” or “the worst way.” I’ve seen people argue “this or that” on lots of things, from quality versus quantity, influence versus engagement, and the list goes on.

How Broad Is Your Paint Brush?

Before making a proclamation just to see if it can get you blog traffic or some retweets, consider just how broadly you want to paint the people and the world around you. The fact is, just like Esu’s cap, many issues are both and neither black or white. They are a little bit of both. We can still converse in the grey. We can still make points for the black or the white in the grey. But to take a stance that there is only one opinion, and to hold that opinion so tightly that you will resort to name calling, may be a method of engagement that you want to think twice about. Or maybe it’s not. Maybe this is a grey area, too.

What do you think?

http://www.sxc.hu/profile/Sanae78