Category: Marketing Techniques and Philosophies

By Posted on Posted in Customer Service as Marketing, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Marketing Trends/News, media-general, Uncategorized, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with ,

Lostremote.com has an astounding post: a traditional print journalist ranted that a TV station allowing its viewers to select one story for the nightly newscast was the death of standards. The station, in best-practices Web 2.0 fashion, invited him on the show to debate the issue publicly.

And this is how the journalist responded:

“I’m told that this multiple-choice reporter has called me out with a public invitation, on her blog or her twitter or whatever, to debate her before her ubiquitous Web camera with its on-line audience of literally dozens of voyeurs and three or four lonely, misfit bloggers who spend all their time communicating only with each other. I need not lend my experience and credibility to draw her a crowd.”

Talk about clueless! This kind of arrogance might have worked for The New York Times 100 years ago, but it sure doesn’t work now for an unknown journalist working for a newspaper in Arkansas! What he doesn’t get is that he has no credibility with the audience he’s rejecting (other than he apparently writes a blog on politics)–and that his appearance on the show might have built credibility for his position, and might have gone viral, being seen by tens of thousands.

Now, mind you–I am trained as a traditional print journalist. I have enormous respect for people who follow the old principles and standards–who do research before they write, who understand the importance of objectivity, and who try to tell the important stories that are very hard to find on mainstream broadcast media–and I’m horrified by the decline both in journalistic standards within a story and in the general willingness to go after a tough (and expensive) but important story. That failure in part led us to the Iraq debacle. Journalists absolutely need to ask hard questions, grapple with the answers, and filter the world for their public. In an era where we all have far too much information and limited ability to process it, we still need traditional journalists as intermediaries. Citizen journalism is vital, but it’s not the whole thing. Professional journalism is crucial, still.

But I think you can have both journalistic standards and an openness to listening to your readers/listeners/viewers. You can have deep investigative journalism and a viewpoint, even in nonprint media–look at the amazing radio/TV show, Democracy Now, if you want an example. And you can have dialog without threatening your position. I think this journo was extremely short-sighted.

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By Posted on Posted in Copywriting, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies

I just made up the word “jrip” and the phrase “jargon jrip.” It’s like drip (as in seriously uncool person, common in the late 1950s/early 1960s)–except it begins with a j to go with jargon.

And I made it in response to these couple of lines that showed up in my e-mail (name withheld to protect the guilty):

an Internet-wide shared-user system for user-centric demographic/privacy control, personalization, advertising and content payment aggregation.

Now, I’m a professional writer; I work with words every day. I know what every one of those words means individually, but they make absolutely no sense when strung together. I have no idea from that phrase what this person is talking about. Other parts of the press release and announcement tell me that he wants to establish a new social network that includes an e-commerce component. But the difficult phrase was in the first sentence! I don’t think most people will get far enough to figure it out.

It’s technobabble like this that gives corporate communications in general, and corporate-speak press releases in particular, a bad name. As a copywriter, I make it my business to try to eliminate that kind of press release from the business toolkit, and replace it with press releases that actually communicate both facts and emotion, yet stay out of the hype zone. When I see this sort of crap, it reminds me that we have a loooong way to go.

Clear writing communicates; jargon blocks communication. Down with jargon! Don’t be a jargon jrip!

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By Posted on Posted in Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Politics, Web 2.0/Social Media

Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst for Forrester Research, found some pretty important stats about the uses of various Web 2.0 portals by the two major presidential campaigns. The study looked at Twitter followers, Facebook supporters, number of videos uploaded and watched, and more. And Obama wildly outperformed McCain on every single metric–from 380% more supporters on both MySpace and Facebook to an astonishing 240 times (that’s 24,000 percent!) more followers on Twitter.

Of course, McCain’s cluelessness around the Internet was the butt of many jokes–but Obama really gets it, and that may be a contribution to the landslide victory.

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By Posted on Posted in Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Politics, Uncategorized

While we congratulate Barack Obama for his historic landslide victory, let’s remember that we marketers can take many lessons from this campaign. A few examples:

A transformative, emotion-based, positive campaign will trump a narrow,negative, issues-based campaign. Obama inspired hope, and gave millions of people a voice and interest in presidential politics that they hadn’t had before. The last two party nominees to try this were also successful: John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan (remember “It’s morning in America”?)

Take away your opponent’s advantages by neutralizing the rhetoric. McCain’s campaign claimed to put “country first”–but Obama was the one who walked the talk. His speeches were you-focused, his message was of unity and solidarity.

Stay on message. Obama was so good at this that even when he shifted the message (for example, embracing offshore drilling after opposing it), he wasn’t called on the flip-flop. Of course, this may be because McCain flip-flopped on all sorts of issues, and was pretty vulnerable.

Don’t apologize for your beliefs. Three out of the four most recent prior Democratic nominees–Dukakis, Gore, and Kerry–all crawled on their bellies with messages that basically said, “umm, I’m not really a liberal, I didn’t mean it, I’m soooo sorry!” And all three lost because doing that took the wind right out of their sails. Bill Clinton, who is not a liberal, didn’t play that game. Not surprisingly, he won. Obama never apologized, ignored the L-word, and didn’t even flinch when in the closing days, McCain revved it up and actually called him a socialist (traditionally, the kiss of death in US politics).

When you attack, don’t sling mud at your opponent’s character, but at the specific actions or positions: “You…sung a song about bombing Iran.” “That endorsement didn’t come easy. Senator McCain had to vote 90 percent of the time with George Bush and Dick Cheney to get it.”

Stay clean, tell the truth, and don’t do the things you attack your opponent for. After 21 months of intense scrutiny, neither Hillary Clinton nor John McCain could find much negativity of substance. The man apparently has no scandals. He’s in a strong relationship with his wonderful family, hasn’t been caught with his fingers in the till or with his pants down, and hasn’t shaken anyone down for money or votes. So the attcks were based on ridiculous stuff that didn’t stick:

  • He’s an elitist (and McCain, the son of an admiral who owns numerous houses and thinks $5 million income is middle class, isn’t?)
  • He goes (or went) to the wrong church (and we just won’t talk about the right-wing extremist demagogues like John Hagee that McCain was so cozy with
  • He’s a Muslim (and even if it were true, what’s so horrible about that?)
  • He’s not really a US citizen
  • He “pals around with terrorists”
  • He’s a socialist

    • All these vicious lies came back to bite McCain, and to draw huge turnout among Obama’s base.

    The one accusation that stuck was about his lack of experience. Hillary’s “3 a.m.” ad was extremely effective, and swung Ohio and Texas into her camp. But McCain absolutely threw that argument away when he selected the even-less-experienced, ethically challenged, and totally clueless Sarah Palin.

    Perhaps the most important lesson of all: When you really want something, work your butt off for it, be the kind of ieader that inspires others to help, and take nothing for granted. Obama’s on-the-ground organiation has been awesome since the get-go, and that was a decisive factor.

    Finally, when the universe hands you a blessing, accept it. The economic meltdown was perfectly timed to provide enormous advantage to Obama, and he was wiling and able to run with it.

    In fairness to McCain, I think a lot of the errors in judgment he showed were the result of his handlers. They apparently let him write his own concession speech, and this gracious, conciliatory, and beautiful message was not only his best speech of the campaign, it may have been the best of his career.

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    By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Copywriting, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies

    Fascinating article in the San Francisco Chronicle: “Sex Doesn’t Sell.”

    This is, of course, complete heresy to marketers.

    Two things I want to comment on there: first, this quote:

    According to some studies, the “sex sells” adage in misleading if not wrong. Several studies have found ads laced with sexual imagery of women targeted to women actually turn women off to the product. And it’s not a new conclusion about sex and advertising, either.

    But the obvious response would be, if you’re marketing to heterosexual women, should you perhaps be using sexy men? And certainly there are plenty of companies that do just that.

    Also, remember the old AIDA formula: Attraction, Interest, Desire, Action. In other words, it isn’t enough to attract their attention–which sex does, for sure. They have to move through tthe ladder and take action. I remember one of the worst ads I’ve ever seen. It actually used the headline “Sex. Now That I have Your Attention…” and proceeded to promote a car dealership without even referring to the headline again. It was an all-text ad, no graphics, in our local newspaper. And I made a resolve right there that if this company was going to so insult my intelligence, I wasn’t going to even give them a shot at my business. I’ve bought three or four cars since then, at least, and not once have I ever bothered to visit that dealer.

    Yet Madison Avenue, going back decades, seems to do quite well using sex to sell everything from household cleansers to cars to alcohol–but the ads are constructed in such a way that the prospect almost feels like he or she is in bed with someone gorgeous.

    The other part I found umm, revealing was this wonderfully snide reader comment:

    Two words that prove sex doesn’t sell: Sarah Palin. Other than being a GMILF and former beauty queen who has mastered the art of the saucy wink, she brings nothing substantial to the GOP ticket and has done more to undermine McCain’s credibility with independents and undecideds.

    .

    Generally, in marketing, we learn to harness both the prospect’s emotion and intellect. Perhaps the problem with using misplaced sex in advertising is that it only hooks the emotions and leaves intellect out of it entirely. In my award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, I walk through some of the ways to build the necessary long-term trust to not only follow AIDA all the way down to the second A, but to add more steps: repeating and referring others.

    (Thanks to Chris McDonald, who pointed me to this article).

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    By Posted on Posted in Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Politics, Social and Economic Justice

    Barack Obama’s acceptance speech tonight showed me why he is electable–and actually got me excited enough to stay up late and blog about it.

    As rhetoric, it was superbly crafted:

  • Attacking the Bush/McCain policies (and their tendency to attack those who disagree) while honoring McCain’s patriotism and sincerity–never trashing the man, only his politics and policies; positioning him as out of touch and unqualified to lead, of having a vision of America’s greatness that was incompatible with the majority of Americans, and contrasting his own vision of America’s greatness, as a champion of the poor and oppressed, as a catalyst for improving the lives of others, and as a country ready to reclaim its fallen standing–and he said, once again, that the campign was “not about me. It’s about you.”
  • Unifying Democrats who did or didn’t vote for him, by paying tribute very early to the others who sought the nomination, and especially Hillary Clinton
  • Bringing in the ghosts of major Democratic Party heroes like Kennedy, Roosevelt, and Martin Luther King, Jr.
  • Also honoring the working people of this country: teachers, soldiers, veterans, factory workers
  • Using some of the most effective rhetorical devices honed by oratorical sharpshooters from Ronald Reagan to Jesse Jackson (an area where McCain, a remarkably insipid speaker, can’t touch him)
  • Showing the failure of Bush’s policies around the war, foreign policy in general, and the dismal response to Katrina, among other areas, and linking McCain to these failures
  • Building on the months-long campaign talking points of hope and change and unity–but adding at least a few specifics, especially on energy, terrorism, and education

    • On those specifics–I endorsed Obama last winter (after Kucinich dropped out), and I found myself agreeing with about 80 percent. I have issues with his energy policy, which relies too heavily on big, scary technologies such as nuclear and coal–but I thoroughly applaud his commitment to get us off imported oil within ten years (something that should have started in the Carter administration, or even the Nixon). I have issues with his foreign policy, which strikes me as unnecessarily hawkish, though light-years ahead of McCain’s. But I commend him for consistently opposing the Iraq debacle at the beginning and putting forth a timetable, even a slow one, for withdrawal.

    And the last time there was a major-party nominee who more-or-less agreed with me on 80 percent of his positions was George McGovern in 1972–when I wasn’t old enough to vote. The one before that was probably Henry Wallace in 1948, when I wasn’t even born. The one before that might have been Thomas Jefferson.

    So Obama is real progress. Not anywhere near as far as I’d like, but that may actually be to his advantage–because I think when the American people listen, they will find a genuinely likable and sincere individual who is of the people, despite the GOP’s absurdist attempts to paint him as an elitist or as a dangerous radical. He’s not very radical at all, and he comes from a broken home, worked as a community organizer, and talked quite a bit tonight about the economic hardships he faced, and how they reinforce his commitment to make sure every American can afford a college education and decent health care. In language that the typical red state voter (if not blinded by racism) can see and hear.

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    By Posted on Posted in Copywriting, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies

    I’ve long been an advocate of writing marketing copy that uses both emotional and rational appeals.

    Here’s a specific example: my all-time favorite of the hundreds of press releases I’ve written. I did it back in 1999 when a client hired me to write a press release for a new book on electronic privacy.

    Most PR books would tell you to do a press release with a headlne like “Electronic Privacy Expert Releases New Book.” But I say they are wrong! Over 1000 books were released in the US alone every single day of 2007. There’s no news in that headline. So this is what I did instead.

    Below is exactly what I produced, except that I’ve changed the author’s name/identifying data/book titles and removed contact info. (Note that had this been a more recent book, I would have brought identity theft into the mix.)

    It’s 10 O’Clock—Do You Know Where Your Credit History Is?

    ST. PAUL, MN: It’s 10 O’clock—Do you know where your credit history is? How about your employment records? Your confidential medical information?

    How would you feel if you found out this sensitive and should-be-private material is “vacationing” in computer databanks around the world—accessible to corporate interests who can afford to track down and purchase it, but not necessarily open to your own inspection?

    According to electronic privacy journalist and technology consultant Mortimer Gaines, this scenario is all-too-common. In a groundbreaking but highly readable new book, Information Attack: Privacy at Risk, Gaines explores the twin issues of privacy in an ever-more-wired world, and citizen access to crucial information that governments or corporate conglomerates might prefer to keep hidden.

    Gaines, author of over 20 previous books including the acclaimed Internet Guide series (Windows Press, 1993-94), is not a rabid privacy nut. He recognizes that consumers often gain value by sharing personal information, in order to take advantage of express car rentals or frequent flier programs, for instance. But Gaines suggests the transaction should be voluntary, freely given in exchange for a clear benefit.

    When, for example, America Online mines data from its customer records and combines it with outside market research to create—and sell—precise demographics with specific identifying information (p. 143), Gaines feels the transaction exploits the consumer, who sacrifices privacy and gets nothing in return. Gaines is equally cogent on issues of citizen access to government and corporate records.

    Information Attack: Privacy at Risk, ISBN 0-00000-00-X, includes detailed references to specific websites, a comprehensive index, and a six-page bibliography. The 336-page 6×9″ trade paperback is available directly from the publisher for $25 plus shipping at (phone), https://www.domain.com, or at your favorite bookstore.

    Journalists: to obtain a review copy and/or interview the author, please contact (e-mail and phone).

    Notice how I started in the realm of emotion, then transitioned to credentials and facts.

    In his blog today, master copywriter Clayton Makepeace credits his success to his ability to create precisely that union of right- and left-brained processing–that inexorably leads to action.

    Clayton’s better at this than I am, and the post includes a fabulous example. Of course, Clayton also charges orders of magnitude more than I do. He does direct-mail copywriting and has made himself and his clients very wealthy. I suspect he’d not want to get involved with anything as humble and affordable as a press release. But he’s one of a very few copywriters who has a whole lot to teach me, and whose posts I read regularly. Because reading his stuff makes me a better copywriter–and could have the same effect on you.

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    By Posted on Posted in Marketing Techniques and Philosophies

    I found this link on Guy Kawasaki’s blog: a fellow named Mitchell Weisburgh describes how he had absolutely no intention of buying, yet is now the owner of a handmade Turkish wool rug as the result of a casual encounter on the streets of Istanbul.

    Weisburgh puts it in the context of a lesson in marketing and sales, using the principles of Robert Cialdini’s Influence as a guide. I’ve known about Cialdini’s book for years, and it’s been on my to-read list. Certainly, as a copywriter and marketing consultant, I use his principles even without studying them directly (along with several others who write about influence).

    Interestingly, I happen to own a small rug that I bought in the Old City of Jerusalem. Nothing as fancy as Weisburgh’s, but again, a rug I had no intention of buying. Of course, at $15 versus Weisburg’s four-figure price, it was a lot easier to let myself be loosened up to buy.

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    By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Business Ethics, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, People Helping People, Shel's Personal Life

    One of my favorite marketers, the brilliant and unconventional Sean D’Souza in far-away Aukland, New Zealand, claims he built his entire Psychotactics business on strategic alliances.

    And I believe him.

    Strategic alliances are that powerful. Two world-class examples:

    Apple, IBM and Motorola joined forces in the 1990s to design the PowerPC computer chip–which dominated at least Apple’s product line (and I think was used in various IBM models as well) for the next several years.

    And a person in the audience of one of my speeches reminded me that until it formed a strategic alliance to supply operating systems, Microsoft was just another two-bit hole-in-the-wall computer business.

    The comments on Sean’s blog page got into a discussion of the typical Internet-marketer JV, but Sean correctly responded,

    The downsides to strategic alliances? I know of few. One is, that because they’re not motivated by money, there’s less momentum–that is they’re less likely to be motivated to help. But this hasn’t been true for me. Our alliances have literally built our business, and continue to do so. And the entire relationship is built on trust. And respect.

    The downsides to Joint Ventures, I can list by the dozen. The essential problem with joint ventures is money. When the money dries up, so does the motivation. But it’s also an upside. I don’t know. Call me crazy. I prefer alliances over joint ventures.

    I agree with Sean. In fact, I posted my own comment, “Most people can’t see beyond the typical JV arrangements to see the much greater power of strategic alliances (and the friendships that can come out of them)” to grow a business.

    Strategic alliances have been an essential tool in building my business, and I haven’t yet structured one like the typical Internet-marketer JV (though I may, down the road). At the moment, thanks to a strategic alliance with Sean’s Aukland neighbor Mark Joyner of Simpleology (another fantastic marketer–what’s in the water down there?), I’m about to participate in what could be the most powerful strategic alliance of my career, a partnership that involves one of the most famous names in marketing as well as a large publishing corporation. I’ll tell you all about it once the papers are signed. 🙂

    Meanwhile, if you want to know more about strategic alliances, I cover them in some detail in my award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First. Incidentally, my alliance and friendship with Mark came about because he ordered this book, and I was brave enough to seize that opportunity to begin a correspondence with him.

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