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Stop Saying ‘In These Troubled Times’: 5 Amateur Mistakes Content Marketers Keep Making

We’ve had years of practice, thousands of articles written on the rights and wrongs, and millions of social media “experts,” but we still have content marketers and copywriters making the same stupid, amateur mistakes they’ve been warned against.

Now everyone seems to think the current pandemic shutdown somehow changes all the rules, and everything they’ve been told not to do is now fair game.

Not at all. In fact, if anything, this crisis means you have to really buckle down and quit making them.

Here are five amateur mistakes that content marketers and copywriters need to quit making right now.

1. Stop saying “In these troubled times”

Good Lord, if I see “in these trying/terrible/troubled times” once more, I’m going to Hulk-smash my laptop!

They’re are all troubled times! This is nothing special. (Okay, maybe it’s a little different.) But we’ve always had trying times. Even during the good times, we’ve had trying times. “In these trying times” could be said about any time.

Twelve years ago, during the Great Recession, I had a freelance copywriter who used “in these trying times” or “in these economically troubled times” in every single article they handed in for the next four years, even when things were on the upswing.

Every. Single. One.

Bottom line, do not refer to “these troubled times” at all ever. It’s one of the most useless and overused writing clichés in the entire world.

2. Stop sending emails about what YOU’RE doing

Sign that says I Would Have Preferred a Blank Wall Rather Than This Great Piece of Shit. This applies to most marketing messages, especially the ones that say In these troubled times.I’ve seen plenty of emails explaining what a particular company’s response to COVID-19 has been. Some, like my favorite coffee shop or pizza place, are explaining what steps they’re taking to protect customers, because they know that we’re affected by the things they do and don’t do.

Other companies, like software companies I haven’t heard from since 2012, are telling me the steps they’re taking to shelter in place, practice social distancing, and blah blah blah.

Seriously, Chad? You’re just a software company. No one cares.

The only reason you should send an email about your COVID-19 response is if your response directly affects your customers.

For example, if you have a web hosting company, I want to know what steps you’re taking to keep my servers up and running. If you have a rental car company, I only want to know if you’re going to be open or if I can cancel my reservations. I don’t care how closely you’re monitoring the government’s guidance. Don’t give me a 500-word piece of bullshit that doesn’t tell me anything until the last paragraph. (Read Josh Bernoff’s cutting analysis of Hert’z corporate email.)

And, clean out your email list. If you haven’t heard from certain people in more than four years, maybe you should just remove them.

3. Don’t say anything unless you have something to say

This piggybacks off point #2, but it’s a much broader message. As content marketers, we’re already used to filling up people’s inboxes and social streams. And people are 1) ignoring it and 2) tired of it.

So maybe we should instead shut up and do something useful. People are frightened, anxious, and just trying to take care of themselves and their loved ones. So no one needs more marketing clutter to get people to pay attention to us.

If you want to get people’s attention, do something useful. Offer them something to make their lives easier. Accounting software companies, teach people how to become entrepreneurs, because a lot of people are losing their jobs. Personal finance coaches, create videos, blog articles, and podcasts about how to lower our costs and trim our budgets. Restaurants can offer cooking classes or “ask me anything” sessions.

Some companies are already doing this. My gym, like a lot of gyms, are offering workout-at-home video sessions. My friend the yoga instructor is doing Monday night yoga sessions on Facebook Live. Blaze Pizza hosted a virtual pizza party with their executive chef, Brad, where people could ask him questions and get real-time answers.

But other companies are still sending me emails about booking trips, buying electronics, or buying men’s clothing.

I realize you have to find a way to stay in business, but try being useful before you start being commercial.

4. Update your old messages

For some of you, it’s business as usual. For most everyone else, they’re not buying anything. And yes, it’s hurting the economy. And yes, businesses are suffering and they need a way to stay in business. I’m not saying you shouldn’t.

What you should be doing right now is revamping your old messages and updating them to reflect the new reality we’re going to be facing for the next several weeks.

Case in point, a friend from Indiana posted that she saw a commercial from one of the local TV stations reminding people to check in with them for the local traffic report. That’s fine, except there is no traffic because Indiana is on a statewide stay-at-home order.

While the ad may be a good reminder for people once the order is lifted, it’s still a wasted opportunity. Check your upcoming messages and see if any of them have now aged out or ring a little tone deaf in light of the shutdown.

If you have scheduled your messages days and weeks in advance (which is a bad idea), hit Pause on your drip campaign until you can be sure that everything is still valid, true, and necessary. Take that opportunity to update your messages to better reflect your new approaches (see #2) and any new offers you might have.

5. Never, EVER refer to the “China virus”

We all know what this virus family is called — coronavirus — and what this particular strain is called — COVID-19. Those are the two most widely accepted terms that everyone knows and uses. The media is using them, the CDC and the World Health Organization are using them. It’s only certain government officials who are calling it the “China virus,” and it’s causing a lot of problems for Asian Americans.

They’re being threatened, verbally harassed, and in some cases, physically assaulted, all because some mouth-breathing halfwit thinks Chinese people are perpetuating the virus on our country. These are the same mouth-breathing halfwits who think you can also catch it by drinking Corona beer.

Which is made in Mexico. Which is not near China.

So if you use the term China virus, you’re just buying into the same racist dogwhistling nonsense as those other mouth-breathing halfwits. So don’t do it.

Good content marketers are always learning, always improving, always trying to do better. But there are times where we get lazy and settle into old habits and easy cliches just to get through the next assignment. But now is not the time to fall prey to that kind of thinking.

Your customers are counting on you in these troubled times.

Photo credit: Urban Artefakte (Flickr, Creative Commons)

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Sportswriters, Don’t Give Up Game Recaps for Social Media

I was listening to a recent episode of Jeff Pearlman’s Two Writers Slinging Yang, and his interview with Langston Newsome, a sportswriter with the Columbia (Missouri) Tribune. Jeff talks to sportswriters and other writers about the art of writing and state of journalism.

In this episode, Jeff and Langston discussed the need for game recaps — also called “gamers” in the sports journalism biz — and whether there was a need for it.

Langston said he thought gamers were worthless because “I’m not reading the 600-word gamer on any site anymore.”

Black and white image of a journalist. This is how I imagine old-timey sportwriters looked, pipe clenched in his teeth, holding an old style phone.
“Stop the presses, Jimmy! I got the scoop of the century!”
The need for gamers is an ongoing discussion in many sports departments, as sportswriters and editors struggle with whether they need to write a recap of the big plays and turning points in each matchup, or whether the networks’ and teams’ Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube accounts are filling the gap and shoving traditional gamers to the side.

As a social media professional, I can tell you that social media is not the panacea everyone thinks it is. As much as we think this is an online digital world, and we can do away with things like newspapers, libraries, paper books, and even sports gamers, we can’t. We still live in an old-school world that relies on old-school methods and old-school channels of communication.

Not everyone watches games live; they still want to read about what happened. Maybe they don’t live in the area where the game is broadcast. Maybe they don’t have cable. Maybe they had two games they wanted to see.

Not everyone pays attention to teams’ social media; they don’t see the updates that are happening in real time. Maybe they’re at work. Maybe they don’t follow the teams’ social accounts. Maybe they don’t have social media themselves.

Not everyone is online in the first place; they don’t have the ability to see those updates when they’re happening. Maybe they can’t afford a smartphone. Maybe they don’t have Internet access. Maybe they’re seniors who don’t want to deal with the Internet. (These are your biggest newspaper readers, and they’re part of the biggest demographic in the country; 97 million people born between 1928 – 1964.)

Sportswriters, don’t give up on gamers. There’s still a need for them, just as much as there’s a need for analysis and features.

Gamers are glimpses into the past, social updates are real-time, have-to-be-present highlights.

Gamers can focus on some of the smaller plays and interesting facts, social updates only focus on the big, big plays, not the little things.

Don’t Abandon the Old-School Just Yet

One of the favorite digital marketing stats that gets bandied about is that roughly 50% of the country never reads a newspaper. But that means that roughly 50% of the country still reads a newspaper, even if it’s once a week, even if it’s online.

According to a Statista.com report, as of May 2017,

  • 54% of people 60 years and older read a print newspaper at least once a week.
  • 44% of people between 30 – 59 read a print newspaper at least once a week.
  • Only 28% of people between 18 – 29 read a print newspaper once a week or more.*

* These are the people to gear digital news toward. They’re the ones looking at game highlights online and following teams’ social media accounts.

While the need for gamers may eventually go away, that day is not today. There are still plenty of people old enough to keep reading newspapers — there are 72.56 million Baby Boomers in the U.S., people born between 1946 – 1964 and another 24.44 million born between 1928 – 1945 — and they’re not embracing digital.

So sportswriters should keep writing gamers for as long as there’s a need and an audience. Don’t go by your own viewing and reading habits to determine what’s acceptable and wanted by 97 million other people in this country.

Besides, gamers help you become a better writer in the long run.

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Four Ways to Protect Yourself Online

This article originally appeared in the February 2017 issue of The Florida Writer, a magazine by the Florida Writers Association. They hold their conference in Orlando every October, and Erik will be giving talks on blogging for writers and humor writing.

Twitter was down for a lot of the Northeast during the Florida Writing Conference this past October (2016). In fact, a lot of streaming and Internet sites were down, including Spotify, Netflix, and even The New York Times.

That’s because a major Internet hub was hit with a DDOS attack — a dedicated denial of service, pronounced DEE-doss — which tied up a major portion of the Internet on the East Coast. In short, some “bad actors” (what Internet security people call the bad guys) were sending massive amounts of data to that one particular hub. Imagine the Three Stooges all trying to go through a door at the same time.

It coincided with a question I got during my personal branding talk at the 2016 Florida Writers Association Conference.

Cybersecurity image of a padlock over a screen of jumbled text. TaskRabbit was hacked by cybercriminals, so we thought this was an appropriate image for an article about how to protect yourself online.“How do you protect yourself online?” a woman asked. Unfortunately, we didn’t have time to discuss it — I could have spent an entire hour on that subject — so I thought it was worth an article here instead. Here are four ways you can protect your blog, your social media accounts, and even your personal safety online.

1. Use a Password Vault to Generate Random Passwords

A lot of people use simple, easy-to-remember passwords, which can be broken by a hacker’s software in a few hundredths of a second. That means you need complex passwords that are difficult to figure out, but those are hard to remember, especially if you use a different password for each account (which you absolutely should do).

That’s why there are apps that will not only store your passwords, they’ll automatically log you into your accounts. That means you can use complex, nearly-impossible-to-crack passwords without ever having to remember them.

I use 1Password, although LastPass and KeePass are also options. I like 1Password because it operates on Mac and Windows, and works on multiple devices, including my laptop, mobile phone, and tablet, and on every web browser. And I can generate 20-character passwords that use lowercase and capital letters, numbers, and special characters, which look like *8)R83CRD[$3cuZGq.

I can also use it to string together four random words instead, which is easier to retype, should the need arise. I generated manpower-lite-feather-pacific for this example, and checked it on a password strength calculator.

According to GRC.com, manpower-lite-feather-pacific would take “7.32 hundred trillion trillion trillion centuries,” at 1,000 guesses per second, to crack (most hackers can only guess a few hundred times per second). And *8)R83CRD[$3cuZGq would take “1.34 billion trillion centuries.” (Check out www.grc.com/haystack.htm if you’d like to test your own passwords.)

2. Turn on Two-Factor Authentication Everywhere

You can also ask for additional protection on certain websites, in case someone ever actually does hack into them. That additional protection is a 6-digit numeric code that is texted to you when you log in to that website. It’s a random number, and is only used once for that particular login. It will even expire after a few minutes.

Services like Gmail, LinkedIn, Twitter, Evernote, Apple’s iCloud, iTunes, and even GoDaddy all use two-factor authentication.

When I log in to my Gmail, I’m immediately presented with a dialog box that asks for my 6-digit code. I grab my mobile phone, and within seconds, the 6-digit code has been sent. I enter it into the dialog box, and I’m finally allowed in to my Gmail. That means if someone ever does guess my password, they can’t get past the second factor. This is important, because if someone were to control my Gmail, they could use the “Forgot My Password” feature on every service I belong to, and dismantle my entire life.

3. Never Share Deeply Personal Information

We all like to tell our friends when we’re having fun, so we can rub their noses in it. We share photos of us on vacation, at dinner, at the beach. But you may want to consider who else can see your updates, photos, and personal information.

Just by looking at your social profile and your various photos, people can tell when you’re away on vacation, as well as where you live, while other people are just concerned for their personal safety and people finding out their whereabouts.

To that end, I always recommend the following:

  1. Never share photos while you’re on vacation, only afterward. Don’t tell people when you’re not at home for an extended period of time.
  2. If you live in a smaller city, and don’t want people to know where you live, list a bigger nearby city as your hometown in social bios. For example, if you live in a Louisville suburb, just put down that you live in Louisville.
  3. Don’t share photos of fancy or expensive gifts you received. You don’t want to give thieves a shopping list.

4. Keep Your WordPress Blog Secure

If you host your own WordPress blog on a third-party server, pay careful attention to your security. Your host will manage their server’s security, but you’re responsible for your own blog. (If you use WordPress.com, they’ll manage all security for you. Just make sure you have a solid password!)

There are hundreds of security plugins to keep your WordPress blog secure. I prefer Limit Login Attempts, which will block IP addresses that try unsuccessfully to log into my account eight times, and they’ll email me about the attempted break ins.

Next, I’ll copy that IP address, and then add it to the list of blocked IP addresses in WP-Ban. This permanently bans future login attempts from that IP address, which shuts out any “zombie attacks” — infected computers that are programmed to attack other computers.

Finally, delete the Admin account on your WordPress blog. When you first create a WordPress blog, the default account is called Admin, and it’s usually the account hackers try to break into.

When you first set up your WordPress blog on your server, create a new administrator account with your name. Then, go back and delete the Admin account. That way, hackers can try and try for “7.32 hundred trillion trillion trillion centuries,” but they’ll be knocking on a door that doesn’t even exist.

It’s easy to protect yourself online, thanks to the available tools and best practices the experts have created. The hard part is remembering to stick to them and make them a habit. But if you can follow these steps, you can better protect yourself and your loved ones from an otherwise-unsecure Internet.

Photo credit: TypographyImages (Pixabay, Creative Commons 0)

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FL Entrepreneur Can Fulfill 12 Days of Christmas for 76% Less Than Leading Experts (PRESS RELEASE)

For Immediate Release
November 17, 2017

(ORLANDO)—Entrepreneurs know how to get things done with less money, fewer resources, and in a shorter amount of time. Humor writer and Florida entrepreneur Erik Deckers recently demonstrated that by hypothetically fulfilling all the items mentioned in the 12 Days Of Christmas. Deckers was able to find everything for $8,407, nearly 76 percent less than PNC Bank’s proposed cost of $34,558.65.

For the last 33 years, the PNC Financial Service Group has calculated the cost of every item of the classic Christmas carol. Deckers, a newspaper humor columnist and small business owner, decided he could do better. He did some basic Internet research and contacted a couple of friends, and came up with a figure much lower than PNC, and wrote about it for his latest humor column.

12 Days of Christmas. A real entrepreneur can fulfill this for $8400.“The swans and the dancers were the budget killers,” said Deckers. “PNC was spending nearly $13,000 for seven swans a-swimming, and another $13,000 on nine ladies dancing and 10 lords a-leaping.”

Deckers said he checked a bird-selling website and sourced seven swans for $3,050. He also contacted a friend who works in entertainment at Disney World.

“Based on her recommendations, I think I could get 19 male and female dancers for $50 each for a two-hour gig, plus a couple passes through the craft table,” said Deckers. “That’s $4,000 to PNC’s $26,000.”

Deckers also researched other poultry hatcheries for the geese, partridges, and French hens.

“PNC was spending $180 on French hens,” said Deckers. “I found five of them for $7.75 apiece. That’s $38.75 total, with two hens left over for Easter eggs next year.”

Deckers admits this is all tongue-in-cheek, and he appreciates PNC’s annual efforts. But he also wanted to show that small businesses can achieve nearly the same results as large corporations, especially since they don’t have the same resources.

“There are plenty of entrepreneurs in this country who are doing great things on shoestring budgets,” said Deckers. “We don’t all get millions of dollars from venture capitalists, and we don’t have the huge budgets of the corporations. So we get things done by being resourceful and calling on our professional networks for help. I thought this was a great way to remind people of that fact.”

About Erik Deckers

Erik Deckers has been a newspaper humor columnist since 1995, and has owned his own small business, Pro Blog Service, since 2009. He recently published the 3rd edition of his book, Branding Yourself: How to Use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself (Que Biz-Tech), with co-author Kyle Lacy. The book is available on Amazon.com, and at Barnes & Noble and Books-A-Million.

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Photo credit: Xavier Romero-Frias (Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons 3.0)

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Twitter Verified Self-Proclaimed White Supremacist

Twitter verified a Nazi yesterday.

You know those little blue checkmarks some people have next to their Twitter handles? That basically “verifies” that yes, this person is at least semi-famous. Or is someone of “public interest.”

A few years ago, when the Verified symbol first showed up, only celebrities had them. Movie stars had them. Rock stars had them. Professional athletes had them. Big-time authors had them.

Basically if you had a little blue checkmark next to your name, it meant you were someone famous.

Then, less famous people started getting them. Journalists of national publications got them. Radio DJs got them. Local TV anchors got them.

And soon after that, not-really-famous-but-you’ve-maybe-kind-of-heard-of-them people started getting them. Scott Monty (@ScottMonty) got one, partly because he’s been a big name in social media for years, partly because he’s a well-known Sherlock Holmes podcaster, but mostly because he was in the public eye as Ford’s social media manager for years. Other local journalists got them, novel authors, and small business owners.

Even people who have over 100,000 followers (that they most likely got through cheating) but haven’t even published 10,000 tweets are Verified. (I know, because one of them followed me yesterday.)

I, however, am not.

I’ve struggled with whether I even want the little blue checkmark. On the one hand, it seems rather needy and high school-ish, like jumping on the latest fashion trends because all the cool kids are wearing them. On the other hand, I never did what the so-called “cool kids” did in high school because I thought they were morons.

My good friend and book co-author Jason Falls (@JasonFalls) is not Verified. He thinks it’s stupid. And I mostly agree. It just seems so needy and insecure to try to fit in with the cool kids, because the cool kids are by and large insufferable asshats.

Still, it would be nice to have. There’s still a small part of me that wants that little blue checkmark, because it would be so validating. Like what I did was important. And in the public interest.

But I don’t have it.

Twitter verified this white supremacistOh, it’s not for lack of trying. I applied for it a few weeks ago. I cited the four books I co-authored — including Branding Yourself (which has a whole chapter on Twitter), No Bullshit Social Media (which mentions Twitter constantly, and was a groundbreaking social media book in 2011), The Owned Media Doctrine, and of course, Twitter Marketing for Dummies (which I “ghost co-authored” in 2009).

I also mentioned my newspaper humor column, which I have written every week for the last 21+ years.

And I mentioned that I was the 2016 Jack Kerouac House writer-in-residence.

But it wasn’t good enough. I received a rejection email that didn’t actually explain why I didn’t get it. That’s fine. I can deal with that. Maybe my books aren’t famous enough. Or they were all written more than four years ago (although the third edition of Branding Yourself dropped this month). Or that nearly all the 10 Indiana newspapers that publish my column are weeklies.

Or maybe it’s because I’m not a white supremacist.

Because Twitter verified Jason Kessler, the self-professed white supremacist who organized the Charlottesville white supremacist rally that left one protestor dead.

They verified him, and Twitter went nuts and started tweeting to Twitter’s CEO @Jack Dorsey in protest.

Am I bitter that I wasn’t verified? No. Am I angry? No. Am I annoyed that a Nazi was verified before I was?

Sure, a little bit.

I write books that help people find jobs. I write books that help businesses be more successful. I write newspaper columns that make people laugh. I don’t try to oppress people, denigrate minority groups, organize violent rallies, or joke about the death of a protestor and call her “a fat, disgusting Communist.”

I mean, if you were to ask people who should be verified I would hope “four-time non-fiction book author” would rank somewhere above “white supremacist Nazi dirtbag.”

Doesn’t that make sense? That someone who contributes to the betterment of society would be slightly more worthy of verification than someone who calls for the wholesale genocide of an entire race of people?

I mean, I know I’m old-fashioned, but I figured helping people succeed was more noble than joking about their deaths.

At the very least, Twitter, don’t verify this guy. Remove the verification. I don’t have to have it. In fact, I don’t think I want it anymore. If you’ve granted it to something you find on the bottom of your shoe, I don’t want it.

But for God’s sake, don’t give it to someone who promotes hate and genocide. I thought you were better than that.

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Outrunning The Little Man: Dealing With Impostor Syndrome

There’s only one person I’ve ever been afraid of my entire life.

He’s average height, and skinny, very skinny. He’s got a bad combover, wears outdated glasses that are too large for his face, and a tie clipped onto a pistachio green short sleeve shirt. He’s an older Kip from Napoleon Dynamite. He’s very officious, and kind of an asshole. The kind of guy who loves wielding his teeny-tiny bit of power over other people’s lives.

I call him “The Little Man.” He’s not little in size, but in spirit and vision.

I live in fear of the day The Little Man knocks on my door. He’ll look at a form on his clipboard and say, “I’m sorry” — except he’s really not — “but there’s been a mistake. You’re not supposed to be a writer. You’re supposed to be a claims adjuster. Sign here, please.” I’m afraid The Little Man is going to show up one day and take everything away because of a clerical error.

Impostor syndrome makes people worry there's some bureaucrat out there trying to get us and fix some error about our lives.I’ve been looking over my shoulder for The Little Man for the better part of 30 years. Ever since I published my first column in my college newspaper, I’ve been trying to outrun him.

It’s like the movies. The hero runs as fast as he or she can, knocking shit over into the bad guy’s path. But the bad guy just steps over everything like it’s not even there.

So I’m amassing evidence to slow him down and prove him wrong. Evidence to show that his form is wrong, and that I’m where I’m supposed to be.

I’ve thrown four books in his path. Twenty-one years of newspaper columns. Thousands of blog articles. Writing awards. Writing residencies. Speaking opportunities. But he won’t stop. I’m throwing it all in his path, and he won’t even look at it. He’s a mindless bureaucrat, a drone who refuses to see evidence in front of him or use common sense. He only believes what the paperwork says, despite what real life is showing him.

I’ve been running for 30 years, and he won’t stop coming.

I thought I escaped him once last year, when I was a writer-in-residence at the Jack Kerouac House in Orlando. It’s a prestigious residency where only four writers are chosen out of over 300 applicants from all over the world. To me, this confirmed that there had been no error, there was no form on a clipboard.

“This will stop him,” I thought. “There’s no way he can find me here. I’m supposed to be here. They said so.”

But when I stepped inside and closed the door on my first day, he was right there on the sidewalk in front of the house, staring up at it. In fact, it was the closest he’d ever gotten.

He chases my other artist friends too. They’ve seen him, following them wherever they go, whatever they do. To a man and woman, they’ve all seen him, no matter how successful they get, no matter how much stuff they throw in his way.

In fact, the more successful they are, the closer he gets. So we all run faster and work harder, and throw more stuff in his way. But he steps over it and continues on.

It’s a rare artist who isn’t afraid of him. Every capable creative professional I know keeps one eye on their work, and the other looking over their shoulder.

The ones who aren’t afraid often don’t know enough to be afraid. They’re not committed to their craft and they don’t take it seriously. The Little Man leaves alone those artists who wait for inspiration or think they’re masters of their craft. (Because even the real masters don’t think they’re masters; they’re looking for The Little Man too.)

So we work, because that’s the only thing that lets us outrun him. It doesn’t stop him. He never stops. Because he’s waiting for the day that I stop, when I give up and quit running. That’s when he’ll get me. That’s when I’ll have to take his pen and sign his form, and finally give up on my dreams.

But that’s not today. Today, I still have things to do and dreams to win. I still have the energy and the drive to work, and to outrun him one more day.

Photo credit: Max Pixels (FreeGreatPicture.com, Creative Commons 0)