Oh, you and your sophisticated CRM system

I had no idea businesses still sent out these kind of emails in 2013 but apparently they do. The whole point of personalization/CRM tools is to foster loyalty on my end and at least a whiff of authenticity on their end. But having obvious customer name/patient name fields destroys that illusion just a bit.

Way to make me and DIEGO feel cared about, University Vet. I had no idea my cat had such a large personality that his name was spelled in capital letters, but apparently you grasped his essence.

(I actually love this place and they have provided excellent care to all of my animals for the last ten years. They just need to tweak their system a bit.)

Do we all need more space?

Here's an interesting statistic on office space: in the 1970's, every office worker had about 500 square feet to call his/her own. Today most workers have about 176 square feet - and  that's predicted to shrink to 100 by 2017.

That's kind of incredible. Amidst all the complaints about stagnant wages and disappearing pensions, we've forgotten to notice that our actual physical real estate is evaporating too. And the effects of this are particularly deleterious to we creatives, or so claims this fascinating article called Introverts,Extroverts and the Future of Work.

Anyone who's spent time in a variety of offices (like, say, freelancers) has noticed the range of seating design. High cubicles, low cubicles, suites, and odd geometric configurations all do a mixed job of offering accessibility while preserving privacy. But surely nothing offers less privacy than open-plan offices -arrangements that force everyone into a kind of exposed togetherness without a barrier in sight.

Open-plan offices usually look stylistically clean and hip, and I suspect it's for this reason that people assume they will foster stylish and hip ideas. But they don't, as studies are beginning to show. Instead they often foster stress, distraction and insecurity. There's a lack of productivity, as the collaboration they're designed to engender comes at the cost of focused work. This is especially disastrous for creatives, programmers and other workers who need a measure of isolation and privacy to make their magic happen.

70% of offices are now open-plan. While more companies show a commitment to designing space in tandem with different kinds of work, the reality that creative work demands its own kind of environment  isn't always a popular one. Too many corporate minds think they can plunk a writer or designer down in front of a laptop, surrounded by conversations and ring tones, and expect a fast and dazzling piece of work. Hopefully the recent research into office spaces will drive home the reality that we all need a little privacy sometimes - that we're humans, not machines.

What kind of marketer are you?

Okay, this insightful article by Frances Yu of Deloitte focuses on CMOs, but let's say it applies to some of us peasants as well. Namely she focuses on why so many CMOs still feel hard-pressed to provide hard data proving ROI. Which I think is a struggle almost every business owner and marketer has tasted at some point.

Is this working? Why aren't the numbers more impressive? This was supposed to rake in the sales. Everyone has felt disappointed by their CTR or some other metric at some point.  But Yu says CMO personality types may be somewhat culpable for a lack of good "proof."  These types are the fighter pilot, the innovator, and the data perfectionist.

You can read the article to find out if you qualify as one (or all three) and learn her solutions for triumphing over self-sabotage. These are very real patterns and stumbling blocks she's identified, such as an addiction to data poisoning innovation: "there is a real risk of past data choking future stars."

Oh, Frances, what pretty things you say. But she's right: getting too obsessive about numbers can cut innovation off at the knees. And if you take her theories a step further and imagine these different personalities working together on the same team, you can imagine the resulting friction and stalemates. It's food for thought, at the very least.

On hiring those expensive freelance writers

Well! My last post got some feedback - not all of it positive. Apparently I came off as "cocky." I expect my assertion that writers deserve to be paid real money and not scraps was to blame, or my failure to show "gratitude" for being paid at all, as someone suggested. Which springs from the exact attitude I decried, that writing and other commercial arts don't count as real labor.

But rather than dwell on the negativity, or take snarky shots, I'm going to put on my client hat - which I do wear from time to time. I hire people too, after all, not just designers or contractors, but other writers for various projects. And like many clients, I've been burned. Writers who failed to make deadlines, failed to show up at all, failed to deliver work that looked anything like the specs requested - it's happened enough that I understand where the Flaky Creative stereotype comes from. So I get why some people only want to pay some creatives a pittance.

To make a few points on getting your money's worth from your writer:

• Look at your marketing as an investment, not an expense. You're not throwing away money when you hire someone to write a press release or case study or web site - you're investing a small amount of money that will be paid back many times over in sales.

• Realize that saving two hundred dollars by hiring a mediocre writer over a good writer is a short-sighted business decision. Just as good content makes money for you, bad content loses money.

• On that note, don't get hung up on the hourly wage. This is the element that sticks in the craw of most clients - namely because it's sometimes higher than their hourly wage. Leaving aside the obvious compensation package comparisons, consider that a good writer will often work more quickly than the cheaper writer and need less hand-holding and review cycles. The higher hourly wage writer may end up costing less.

• If your cash flow is tight, be strategic. Figure out the priority collateral and don't be shy about repurposing content. (But do be aware of the difference in web writing and print writing if you do that.) If you tell your writer  you can't afford as many projects as you need, the writer might work out a volume discount with you or figure out ways to maximize the impact of the collateral you do produce. A few smart pieces are better than multiple clunkers.

• If you have a decent wordsmith in the office, have them take a stab at the work and then hire an editor. Mind you, this works only when the writing is decent. It's faster to edit good work than it is to write it; but it is faster to write from scratch than it is to edit badly written work.

• If you have a major project that is so critical you're nervous about entrusting it to a freelancer's hands, test-drive them first. Have them do a small project or two, and see if they're prompt and pleasant to work with and can hit the target without multiple phone calls and corrections. It's normal (and smart) to be wary of spending six thousand dollars on an unknown.

• Understand that your writer doesn't just sit down at a laptop and start typing. There is competitive research to do, background reading, studying your style guide, lexicon and branding. There is concepting time. There are revisions. It's not as simple as "You can write 700 words in an hour, right?" which is the kind of thing a surprising number of people say when discussing project fees.

• Lastly, if you come upon a writer who claims she can deliver a compelling, high-performing project for a tenth of what other writers would charge - ask yourself why she's leaving money on the table. Plenty of creatives have great recommendations on LinkedIn (from friends) and slick pieces in their portfolio (edited, polished or even created by someone else.) But if they're charging bargain-basement rates, it's a pretty accurate sign that they aren't good enough to compete with the real talent.

And there you have it - my cocky advice on hiring freelance writers.

Freelance writer rates - real statistics

Here's a contentious topic: the rates of freelance copywriters. This shouldn't be a touchy subject (no more so than any financial topic, anyway) and yet somehow it is the source of so much confusion and animosity. Some writers fret over what they should charge, some clients try to low-ball them, and misconceptions over what's "average" or "fair" spread like an oil spill. It can make the client-creative relationship very tense.

So anyone who's hired writers or worked as such might be interested in the 2012Freelance Industry Report. Carol Tice shares a few figures for copywriters: 78% earn over $50/hour, 53% make over $70/hour, and 24% make over $100/hour. Those are valuable stats for the many, many would-be clients who thinks writers "should" earn $15-20/hour. Or some other cockamamie figure they've pulled out of thin air.

Earlier this month someone called me and delivered a standard flattery-insult approach. She loved my writing, she gushed, I was so talented, had such a perfect voice for her blog, and was a league above her current freelancer. And after listing the current freelancer's many faults... she offered me the exact same bargain-basement rate. I gave her my actual (reasonable) rate and she was aghast, then irritated. Why wouldn't I write blog posts for fifteen dollars? Why didn't a good writer cost the same as a bad one?

I've heard all of the arguments for trying to pay writers badly: that's more than I make an hour; I could write it myself; I'll wait and see the ROI first; I could hire someone in Thailand for $5 an hour; writers are a dime a dozen; are you out of your mind; and so on. People who think nothing of spending two hundred dollars to get their hair highlighted, who don't blink at paying a plumber three hundred dollars for a service that took under an hour, will screech with horror at the idea of spending more than fifty dollars to have a web site written. Even though they're talking about the face of their business - their livelihood, their career.

There's a mental disconnect that often comes into play between service and income when the service is creative. But professional writing in particular seems to incur a certain contempt; an ill-informed but unquestioned conviction that good writing is so easily had and so infrequently needed that a writer should be grateful to receive even pennies as compensation.

Experienced clients know the opposite is true - it's not easy to find a skilled writer, let alone one who can quickly comprehend your business initiatives and partner them with compelling copy that smoothly incorporates SEO, branding and strategy. Which is why the above rates are as high as they are. Good copywriters aren't desperate or starving because we provide a high-value service that makes money for our clients - and our rates are worthy every penny and more.

Add Twitter to your advertising toolbox

I recently joined Twitter. I know this puts me in whatever the next category is after "latecomer." I joined because I do like being connected to what other people are doing and there seem to be some valuable conversations happening on there. 

However, I haven't quite found those conversations yet and the fluff-to-value ratio seems to be 571 to 1. And I've found my own impetus is to tweet about truly trivial things, like the colorful insect I found on my cypress tree or the way my raspberries went fuzzy one day after I bought them at Trader Joe's. No one wants to hear about that, I reason. So I'm mostly in observation mode and leaning toward a quiet exit.

But I was interested - though not surprised - to read that just like every corner of the Internet, Twitter is now allowing advertisers to target users based on their interests. They're also slashing the price of their promoted tweets to directly court those advertisers. This is something that probably would have felt ominous two years ago, but now we're all used to it, thanks to Google and Facebook. Everything we do online is watched and analyzed and parroted back to us in the form of ads - we know this. And those of us who've checked our Google personas know how wildly offbase that analysis can be. (Google thinks I'm mostly interested in recording studios and swimwear, even though I spend all of my leisure time online immersed in literary and science stuff.)

Twitter's conversion rates have been debated, but its word of mouth power is unparalleled. It's just so easy for someone to re-tweet something into a phenomenon. In that sense, Twitter advertising does make sense not just for major brands but even smaller businesses, who can sculpt their targets to regional and interest-based specifications. It's no longer a question of hoping for the finite result of one user clicking on one web ad. It's hoping that user will re-tweet to followers who will re-tweet to their followers, exponentially multiplying the impact to an extent Google ads couldn't dream of.

Overblown as I feel most social media expectations are, I do think Twitter advertising could be a smart option for small businesses who know how to tweet strategically. It's just a matter of employing the mix of creativity and value that will get noticed in the cacaphony that is the Twitterverse.

The top 25 freelancer apps

I think most of us qualify as app-dependent these days, but if you're a freelancer, you may rely on apps more than most. You also probably conduct a lot of your business in the cloud, from backups to project management. And now Best Vendor has thoughtfully compiled a list of freelancers' favorite apps and cloud-basedclients.

It's no surprise to see Dropbox, Basecamp and Google dominating the list, but there are a few names I don't recognize. If you're looking to expand your digital toolbox, this could be a good place to start.

When your marketing fails

If you hang out in various creative online forums, you’ve likely seen discussion about an irate blog post complaining about those lazy and devious con artists known as copywriters.  I’ll summarize it for you: the top freelancers in the world were hired for many thousands of dollars to write direct response copy, whereupon some missed deadlines, some failed to include major selling points, some took six months to write one letter, and most turned in copy that didn’t convert.  "We paid copywriters $249,500 in fees to lose 6 million" is the fetching title.

The post purports to be about coralling copywriters’ wasteful ways (though there’s also some unsubtle subtext about how the blog author – himself a copywriter – was able to provide million-dollar copy where the best copywriters in the world failed. Not that this was intended to be self-laudatory or promotional in any way, I’m sure.)

But it does bring up a good topic, which is: whose fault is it when the copy just doesn’t seem to work?

I don’t do direct response copy too often, and I certainly do not have the Billy Mays voice required to write in UNDERLINED CAPITALS to sell THE BEST OPPORTUNITIES OF YOUR LIFETIME! But this is still something every creative runs into eventually. You do your best work and turn in what you consider killer content or design and then the client informs you that it bombed. The customers flatly ignored it.

What a horrible feeling. Right away the creative wants to think it’s because the business is substandard, while the business wants to blame the creative work.  Ideally both sides did some due diligence ahead of time to allay these possibilities – the client checked out the freelancer’s portfolio, and the freelancer checked out the service or product to make sure it wasn't a stinker. But failure does happen, and before accusations are traded, it’s best to run down a checklist of possible reasons. In fact, it’s best to head all this off at the very beginning.

~ The product isn’t in demand. Most businesses are born out of passion; sometimes it’s a passion shared by very few people. And that’s hard for business owners to see past their own enthusiasm.

~ The product is in demand, but the market is oversaturated. Differentiation is a buzzword for this reason. Everyone thinks their product is special. But there needs to be a solid UVP to beat out the competition.

~ The product is marketed well, but to the wrong people. Sometimes the wrong audience is targeted or the wrong channel used, resulting in low response.

~ The product is good, but the marketing is inadequate. The creative work really has failed to persuade and sell, or has been partnered with cheap production values.

~ The expectations were unrealistically high.

The magic solution to all of that, of course, is research. Numbers can be run, creative drafts can be tested. But if there were guarantees in marketing, everyone would succeed in business - and a certain acceptance of risk is part of the game.

And a new social media titan is born

Salesforce finally completed their Buddy Media acquisition. It's been in the works for a while but the price involved - between $689-745 million - is kind of staggering, given that's about what Salesforce earned in its entire first quarter. Social media is the new gold rush!

(If you don't know Buddy Media, they manage social media campaigns for major companies, from strategy to applications. They're not a household name yet, but their clients are.)

I want to disagree with this comment from Marcel LeBrun but I'm not sure I can: "Social media has caused the biggest transformation in marketing since the Mad Men era, causing CMOs to completely re-think their strategies. By bringing together market leaders Radian6 and Buddy Media, we are doubling down on the Salesforce Marketing Cloud to provide CMOs with the ability to manage the entire social marketing lifecycle."

It's probably the Mad Men reference that strikes me as cheesy. We could split hairs as to whether it's the Internet that's been the transformational engine, with social media its chief piston, but yes, the marketing paradigm has been forever changed. Still, the expectations for social media are so ridiculously high at this point, with its ROI often more diffuse than expected. It's hard to say how deals like this will be regarded in five years, as naively misguided optimism or prescient and profitable.

But one thing is for sure - the efforts of such massive capital and talent focused on social media strategy will create a general education for the rest of us and dispel a lot of the current business confusion on how best to leverage it. Instead of scattershot content and platform saturation, businesses will able to draw on  a conventional wisdom that's more strategic, more nuanced and more, well, wise.

The unpardonable sin of being boring

A few days ago I went to Spark and Hustle. Do you know what that is? It's a tour featuring the energetic career advisor Tory Johnson and her roving band of successful consultants and small business owners. Normally I avoid events like this; I find they tend to be heavy on bombast and cheerleading, and light on practical value. Every time I'm talked into attending some kind of whiz-bang conference, I'm bored and making grocery lists halfway through the keynote address.

But Spark and Hustle delivered the goods, conceptually speaking. A lot of high-value advice was shared in terms of both small business marketing and entrepreneurial psychology. It was also refreshing for me, on a personal note, to network with other women since most of my clients and subcontractors tend to be men. (Notable exception - Ron Gates from Constant Contact, who was smart and entertaining.) 

Most of the social media information was familiar terrain, as I create and manage it on a daily basis for clients.  But it got me thinking of how an avalanche of marketing advice courses through the Internet each day - and how generic, repetitive and ultimately useless most of it is. At this point, I think most of us could recite social media maxims in our sleep. 

The average business knows it needs to have a Facebook and Twitter presence, and probably a blog too -  and so they execute on those deliverables in a perfunctory checklist way, without any genuine interest in content creation or often the business itself. The blog goes unread, the tweets go unshared. Resentment and fatigue set in. This doesn't work, the business owner thinks. But it's not social media that's to blame - it's their boring content.

That's really what I took out of my Spark and Hustle experience. Most of the speakers did not have businesses that interested me. Most of the techniques they shared were old hat to anyone who's marketed themselves or others. But they were all so passionate about their businesses that listening to them was a pleasure. A passionate speaker is a riveting speaker. And content created from passion is riveting content, which is probably why all of the speakers had great success with social media.

What this means for the average business: handing over your content creation to someone who's bored by both the creation and your business is going to equal boring content. Yes, that includes some employees. Hire a good creative who knows how to engage your audience, or do it yourself and focus on the aspects of business you really care about. Only then will you command attention.

Message maps solve everything

Normally I am not a fan of formulas as they relate to creative work. Therein lies the road to wooden and generic content, in my experience. But there's nothing wrong with a good process, especially as a foundation for brainstorming.

And that's what Carmine Gallo provides in his Forbes article, How To Pitch Anythingin 15 Seconds.  He supplies a 3-step technique for creating a message map that involves creating a brief, Twitter-sized headline, listing the 3 key benefits and then supporting documentation. It sounds so simple and commonplace that it's easy to dismiss, until you realize that it solves a legion of issues.

Such as:

- Clarifying subject matter that's abstract or arcane. Of course it's harder to do a message map for a very complex product or service, but that's the point; the benefits and essence aren't immediately apparent. If the creatives behind the scene can't distill the message down to this level, the public certainly won't be able to.

- Poor reading comprehension.  Also known as, a third of America. Some of the most brilliant and educated people in business just do not understand or retain written material - not on the first try, at least. Among the general public, 30 million people read at below basic literacy levels. Simplicity in language (and sometimes repetition) is the safest bridge to making a connection.

- Too many cooks in the kitchen. Provide the same creative brief to a team of ten and you'll get a dozen interpretations. A message map works its own kind of version control.

- Excessive verbosity. People like me who can turn a tagline into a dissertation without blinking really benefit from visual cues and summaries to keep us mindfully on target.

- Creative concepting. While Gallo's article focuses on pitching, message maps are handy for architecting a variety of content such as headlines, teasers, landing pages, direct mail letters, messaging documents, press releases  and so on.

That said, one element I would add to his process is the inclusion of differentiation in the pitch. Sometimes going too simple boils out the unique flavor - as in his somewhat unimpressive example, 4G is a mobile broadband technology that will change the way your department communicates, collaborates, and operates. For a pitch that might be fine, in that it stirs interest to learn more, but for other vehicles it's too vague and reminiscent of a zillion other salesbites.

Brevity partnered with differentiation is possibly the ultimate formula for any kind of messaging. And I don't even like formulas.

San Diego Comic-Con: lessons in marketing

Even if you’re not a nerd, you’ve probably heard of San Diego Comic-Con. If you can recall seeing a puzzling July newscast that featured costumed adults, you’ve definitely seen some footage.

Comic-Con used to be about comic books – and it still is, nominally. But in the last decade, it’s boomed from a nerdy convention for comic book readers and gamers to the biggest pop culture expo in the world. Hollywood is king, and studios roll out their flashiest, loudest attractions to dazzle the crowds. It’s such intense sensory overload, in fact, that most of us attendees go into a half-dazed, half-excited trance where we’re highly suggestible.

Knowing this, vendors from movie studios to indie artists to t-shirt stands roll out their best tactics to sell to us. In a sense, the whole show is a fast-track seminar on marketing. To witness:

Promote benefits, not features. Sorry to lead with a cliché, but vendor booths live and die by their grasp of this one. I had one video game guy describe a very boring list of technical features that sounded like “jargon jargon jargon” to me, but another described the parts of his game as I would enjoy it – the cool effects, the characters, the prizes. He made it appetizing; he sold it.

Be viral. Not that The Walking Dead needs more publicity, but they really understand how to promote. While other television shows were offering forgettable trinkets, the Walking Dead set up a classic scene from the show as a photo op tableau: a lead character and her two pet zombies. Of course everyone wanted their photo taken in it, whereupon they posted it to Facebook and emailed it to all of their friends. The word of mouth went way farther than a bookmark or keychain.

Be immersive. This is where Comic-Con excels. Your hotel room key is an ad for a TV show, the elevator doors are decorated with scenes from your favorite movies, and the Hard Rock Café becomes the Syfy Channel café, with dishes based on hit shows. Rather than the marketing being pushed at you, you’re pulled into it. And because it’s fun, there’s less resistance.

Respect your audience. In what’s become an annual tradition, a comic book artist selling me his work has asked condescendingly: “Is this for your boyfriend?” Assuming that women don’t read comic books is not a good way to win readers. Insulting your audience is not a good way to win anything. But the artists who’ve chatted me up or taken a minute to suggest another book I might like, always make a new fan.

Provide value. There is a ton of promotional swag at Comic-Con. The shiny but useless postcards get dumped in the nearest wastebasket, while the more practical gifts, like tiny flashlights or containers of hand sanitizer, are highly coveted and long remembered.

Hire a professional writer. No, really! I picked up a promising comic book by a young artist who had shelled out cash for a slick production team but apparently didn’t think an editor or a writer was important. The book was not only riddled with errors, but the writing was so wooden and full of plot holes that I ended up donating the issue to the freebie table.

It’s easy to see San Diego Comic-Con as a four-day festival of geeks in costume, but in the end it’s very much a business. It’s also a fascinating case study in who grasps the new rules of marketing and who doesn’t – and an example of how throwing money at a marketing campaign isn’t a solution unto itself.

Tumblr welcomes your paid promotion

Just as Pinterest is being invaded by marketers, Tumblr is slowly moving from the personal to the commercial with its new "Pinned Posts." For $5, you can force your posts to the top of a user's dashboard for 24 hours.

This isn't terribly new - Tumblr has already had "Highlighted Posts" which allow users to draw attention to specific posts for $1-$2 via special labels - but it is another sign that every platform, everywhere, will eventually go promotional. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but the efficacy of said promotion can spread like fire or fall flat, depending on how well the audience has been analyzed.

Tumblr as I know it is popular and effective for artists, musicians, writers and small businesses who know how to capitalize on its intimacy and visual appeal. For every company trying to connect with its Facebook fans, there's a solo shop on Tumblr engraving their brand on the psyche of every follower. It's a place where you'll never hear anyone say "Unique Value Proposition" but see it conveyed and sold, time and again. Mostly this is because Tumblr doesn't feel like marketing or promotion, but more like someone's personal diary-scrapbook-portfolio.

Probably we'll see the rise of a new platform that forbids all commerce, like a secret clubhouse with a "no girls allowed" sign. But relationship marketing being what it is - the reality that we all sell, pitch and network even when we don't mean to - it's going to be hard to say where the personal ends and promotion begins.

Turning Pro

I think almost everyone who works in a creative industry, who has struggled with addiction or making any kind of major transformation, has read The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. Certainly anyone who knows me has read it, or at least heard about it, because I love it that much and am always recommending it.  It is quite simply the best book I know for battling that tricky inner sabotage that keeps us from achieving our dreams.

Pressfield has now released a sequel of sorts called Turning Pro. This book addresses the turning point where we move from amateur status to professional - not just in creative work, but in any endeavor in which we can't quite move out of a time-wasting, self-doubting mindset. He talks about "displacement activities" (draining our energies on peripheral fluff) and "shadow careers" (such as teaching writing instead of actually writing.) Which are real and valid dynamics, and the world is indeed full of people who are going to write a book one day or form a band, but right now are just too busy with other things.

In that sense, Turning Pro is not just for artists, any more than The War of Art was. Addicts, dilettantes and toxic dreamers - anyone who anesthetizes their days with a steady diet of physical or digital narcotics - are experts at postponing their real lives. Turning Pro swings right at that delay with encouragement to live in the present and pursue a scarier but ultimately more gratifying dream. Going pro in this book is ultimately not about achieving an empirical benchmark of success, but committing to purpose.

But the roadmap there is not provided. This book is about spurring an inner catalyst, not practical guidance. It skirts, as these books tend to do, the reality of people who did turn pro and failed to find happiness or security despite making all the right moves. Which is fine, as this kind of book is about inspiration - but anyone hoping for the kind of inner toolbox they found in The War of Art may be disappointed.

Still, Pressfield has some great insights. “The amateur is an egotist. He takes the material of his personal pain and uses it to draw attention to himself. He creates a "life," a "character," a "personality.”  Anyone who works in marketing, advertising or any creative industry knows that ego is the enemy of successful work, blotting out an effective message in favor of self-exaltation.  Turning Pro nails the vital element of humility that perhaps is the foundation of all mature work.

Pinterested

Pinterest rocketed into our national consciousness a few months ago, but it seems like the marketing dialogue is just hitting its stride. The New York Times looked at a cleaning equipment company's experiments on the site and Mashable offered up some examples of clever Pinterest campaigns. Jezebel pouted about the marketing infiltration of a fun-only site and Forbes makes the impressive claim that Pinterest has surpassed Twitter for online referral traffic for some industries.

So will everyone jump on the Pinterest train? Probably not right away. Platform saturation has long since set in among many companies, who still aren't sure if their social media ROI even exists. It's easy to dismiss Pinterest as a giant online scrapbook and thereby irrelevant. Except, as the Forbes article notes, the site caters mainly to women between 25-54 who have an average household income between $50K-$70K. And since most Pinterest accounts are essentially consumer wish lists, these users are clearly motivated to buy.

Whole Foods has capitalized on the site by showcasing their products in eye-catching, mouthwatering photos. This is marketing strategy at its prettiest and more primitive. Pinterest is a visual site, offering up eye-pleasing photos with little sales copy, which can make the site feel more attractive and indulgent than other social media. But it does offer the same linking and endorsement possibilties, which means the corporate invasion of Pinterest has probably just begun.

Please stop saying "innovative"

Ha!  I've blogged on here (and complained elsewhere) about the deadening overuse of "innovation" and now the Wall Street Journal agrees with me.

In a nutshell: despite the saturation of innovation initiatives, strategies, teams and collateral,  companies "are using the word to convey monumental change when the progress they're describing is quite ordinary."

I burned out on the term eons ago for two reasons. One, it's the latest buzzword that clients demand to include in collateral even when it's clearly ineffective. Such buzzwords become marketing Godzillas, dominant and destructive to the good content hosting them due to their oversaturation. Nothing is more stale and anesthetizing than a cliche - it's the opposite of good writing, the opposite of fresh and memorable. Yet people who favor a mechanistic formula to developing "good content" often think buzzwords are the most guaranteed formula of all.

The other reason I dislike it is because it often obscures what's actually special and compelling about a business. I sat down for a discovery meeting with a client a few months ago who said, "We innovate" when I asked about her business. I kept asking what elevated them above the competition, asked about their USP, asked how they served their customers - and the answers were all, "Well, we're innovative" or "We look at what people need and we innovate." It turned out the company did have some pretty unique offerings but I had to fight my way behind the innovation curtain to find out the details.

Buzzwords aren't going away and of course a new heavyweight champ will rise to steal Innovation's title. But a smart business will realize that the competition's reliance on such generic marketing provides them with an easy way to stand out - simply by not falling in line. Instead of saying "innovative" (see, you're sick of it too now), tell people the ways in which your business is adventurous, exploratory, inventive, progressive, creative, courageous. Use distinctive language that captures the eye and ear. Because blending in has never been a smart strategy for getting attention.

Oh, and the most annoying part of the WSJ article: "The innovation trend has given birth to an attendant consulting industry, and Fortune 100 companies pay innovation consultants $300,000 to $1 million for work on a single project."  Clearly I'm in the wrong business.

Social media: not always about marketing

For quite a while now, social media theory has centered around the rather vague deliverables of networking, branding and customer engagement. All of those are valid, but not always easy to measure, and there's been (a somewhat inevitable) backlash on the true value of social media as a business tool. Some of the criticism is founded; as with any new horizon, businesses weren't sure how to use social media at first and quite a few of the initial efforts have been obligatory and unproductive.

But it looks like businesses are moving beyond the "build it and they will come" approach and using their platforms to meet solid goals that have nothing to do with marketing. At least that's what I got out of this article on how social media is changing business. Staff training, new product feedback and operational crowdsourcing are all getting done on blogs, YouTube and Facebook. (And hopefully soon Google Plus, which is designed far more efficiently for business than Facebook.)  Large companies with far-flung workforces can connect their managers and aggregate their knowledge to develop unified solutions in one stroke.

While a lot of old-school business thought still places social media in the "fad" or "time drain" categories, this resistance will evaporate as the workforce gets younger and seizes the competitive edge. New applications will arise, and the Facebook hegemony will likely diminish at some point, but social media will be a permanent element of all business - not just marketing.

Guest blogging on the Business Journal

I'm guest-blogging on the Business Journaltoday. Topic: the essential elements of social media.

Partner vs. Supplier

I really liked this article by Lauren Brown on the different levels in a client-agency relationship. She articulates differences in expectations and behavior that I've experienced myself, but haven't put words to. Instead I've usually chalked it up to, well, variety. Companies are people and people are individuals. I'd never expect one client to be just like another. But her post puts forward some helpful ideas on clarifying our thinking and consequently, our deliverables.

Such as the differences between partners and suppliers. Sometimes when a client hires an agency, they're looking for a finite service: they need an annual report designed and written, or they need a writer to start and maintain a company blog. The parameters are defined and usually one-dimensional. That's a client-supplier relationship.

A client-partner relationship is multi-layered and founded on a deeper commitment. Here the client wants an agency who's going to delve into their business philosophy, their initiatives past and ongoing, who's going to exemplify the same devotion to a project as the client themselves - because they understand their success is intertwined.

Lauren identifies the work itself, and the benchmarking and logistics, as "hard wiring" and the enthusiasm and collaboration chemistry as "soft wiring."  Which are differences that I think all of us - client, creative, coworker - have felt in all their variances. Sometimes we don't like to call out these distinctions because it seems insulting or awkward to point out a deficit in the "soft wiring." But because unvoiced expectations can lead to unhappy relationships, it's probably a good thing to align those expectations from the start.

The rising cost of a bad reputation

Every year, the Internet rips away another layer of anonymity. Facial recognition technology, IP address tracking, the unchosen "sharing" that is the Google/Facebook juggernaut - it's almost impossible to keep anything secret online these days.

But even those of us who are well-behaved can find negative content about ourselves or our companies online. Inaccurate or vengeful reviews and blog posts can be published by anyone and are vetted by no one - and they're usually permanent. In a time when employers, neighbors, dates and customers Google us relentlessly, they can shape a negative persona far more visible and powerful than our real-life selves.

And so Online Reputation Management was born.  If you've looked seriously into ORM firms, you might have had some sticker-shock: they can charge prohibitive fees.  They can do so because of the helplessness people feel at discovering embarassing photos or personal information online, and a misguided concept of ORM as a mysterious mojo worked only by experts.

But there's a lot of effective ORM you can do yourself. There are two simple steps - monitor and bury. That's it. You monitor what's out there about you (don't be scared) with tools like Naymz and Google Alert. And then you bury the bad stuff with fresh and positive content. Articles about your company's philanthropy efforts, press releases on a new product line, case studies showcasing happy customers: it all works. It is true that negative gossip will spread like wildfire online, where a dull story about a fundraiser isn't quite so juicy or link-worthy. That's where good writers and social media experts can help by crafting riveting content.

And if you want to start polishing your online image right this very second? Try BrandYourself, a quick and effective tool that helps you control your Google results. Aimed more at people than businesses, it doesn't use shady tricks like some ORM firms, and allows you more control in your Google results.

ORM is not an arcane science. One day it will doubtlessly be an automatic part of online life, personally and professionally, just as security is now. And it's a technique that can be practiced by anyone, no matter what kind of budget they're on.

SEO content loses rank

If you’ve searched on Google, you’ve probably noticed some changes – and how you feel about them may depend on your own business reliance on page ranking.

The Web search formula is now incorporating technology called “semantic search.” Keywords are still attractors, but Google is now striving for relevance by supplying links and information related to the meaning of those words. If you have developed your own Google techniques, this can be annoying at first – you’ve learned to game the system, but now the system is gaming you.  And if you’ve keyed your web site and online content to cater to the old search engine formula, you may be really annoyed when you find your rankings affected.

The implications are many for content marketing . At first glance, it seems much optimized content is now useless. The present algorithms are sophisticated enough that creators won’t be able to effectively optimize with the same guarantees as before.

But Google will parse content more skillfully than before, which means the focus in content creation will shift to quality over quantity. Instead of creating as many backlinks as possible and applying SEO ranking criteria, writers will need to craft highly informative content. This means we might finally see the end of those bogus keyword-babble “articles” online.

Google says this is a process, so it’s hard to say how it will all shake out in the end. (If indeed there is an “end” in web strategy.) But for now, it looks like a brighter day might be dawning for web content strategy - if marketers and business owners get on board.

When TALs are a PITA

I don't speak C++ but I do have plenty of tech clients. I've come to love them in that befuddled mix of admiration and head-shaking that we get toward people we really don't understand, but like nevertheless. The engineering brain is so different from the writing brain. I'm sure if you autopsied control groups of both, research would bear this out. (Maybe it already has.)

So I understood where this Silicon Valley article was coming from, because a third of what I do for my tech clients is decipher their acronyms and jargon. It really is a foreign language; I'll get a phone call in which someone earnestly describes their project on HSC or how they've changed their MSF and need to communicate that. Whereupon I say, "what?" Managed Services Firewall, they explain. Whereupon, I say again, "What?"

Not speaking technicalese can be a benefit for a writer, because I can approach projects from a customer's viewpoint and bring greater clarity and advocacy to a piece. Each industry has a lingua franca and it's easy for all of us to fall into it, so it's helpful to have an outsider pointing out the TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) and jargon that sounds like gibberish to the public. The chief distinction is communicating within the technical sphere and without.

It's important not to view this as "dumbing down." It's communication. Getting your point across by speaking the customer's language. It's true that a lot of commercial collateral is written at a simple level, thanks to declining literacy.  But clarity is never a bad thing, and neither is education. Which is usually the end goal when tech companies communicate to their customers - education and persuasion.

Ultimately all writing is an act of translation.

Relationship Marketing

I'm really hoping this doesn't become the new "innovation" (a word I could not be more sick of) but Relationship Marketing is shaping up as the major dialogue of 2012. In other words:  businesses everywhere have discovered that all of their behavior, not just their official marketing, affects how people feel about them. It's safe to assume we creatives will be saturated in theories, projects and debates on how best to exploit this new paradigm, though it's only "new" in the sense that America was new to Columbus.

Bob Garfield and Dave Levy have written a great article on this called "The Dawn of the Relationship Era" that everyone should read. Really a lot of it is common sense, but I can already sense the impatience with advice such as this: Your essence is transmitted continually via your relationships with consumers, employees, suppliers, shareholders, neighbors and the Earth itself. Or: let's meditate on the new currency of commerce: trust. Okay, I've selected some of the more woo-woo nuggets from the article, but the essential message - that businesses have lost the hegemony of marketing control and must now operate within a more interactive, unpredictably "human" dynamic - is solid.

We're now in an era where our marketing imperatives have evolved beyond research charts and clever ads to courting customer love. We want to inspire good reviews, retweets, word of mouth that goes digital - and that's where it gets tricky. The old methods of publicizing philanthropic gestures, or creating a reassuring tagline, just don't work with today's sophisticated audience. In a climate of business transparency and jaded consumers, only one option works: authenticity.

I can already envision corporate committees formed to produce sincerity as a key deliverable. There will be revamped mission statements, "reaching out," all kinds of clumsy attempts at manufacturing human connections out of traditional marketing methods. Managing business image and courting public appeal is going to be a long learning curve in this new era. But before companies can sell their purpose and authenticity to their customers, they're first going to have to get honest with themselves. "Integrity" has long been a favorite word of corporate slogans but the era of relationship marketing may force it to become a reality.