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Everything is NOT Content

We’re tossing “content” around a little too easily these days. It’s becoming another vague generic word like “stuff” or “crap.”

Not the adjective meaning fairly happy, but rather “items held within a larger container,” as the stuff in a book or a blog.

The Moz (formerly SEOMoz) is cheapening the word by telling us “Everything is content!”

Except it’s not.

In his latest blog post on The Moz Blog, “Why Local Businesses Don’t Need Big Budgets for Their Content Marketing, author Matthew Barby says, “Content is:”

  • the staff within your business.
  • the design of your shop/office.
  • your products and services.
  • the menus on your tables.
  • your company values.
  • your customers.
  • EVERYTHING.

Bullcontent!

As sick to death I am of the phrase “content is king,” I’ll tattoo that on my ass before I ever agree that “content is everything,” or even any of those things Barby named.

It is not, as Barby says, cupcakes, staff uniforms, foam art in your latte, or the barista’s smile as she hands over your cupcake and arty latte.

Unless you’re a writer, artist, videographer, photographer, podcaster, or musician, the stuff you do isn’t content either. And if you are, you probably don’t want to cheapen your work by calling it that.

Real creators it stories, art, videos, photos, podcasts, and music.

Most Things Are Not Content

Old Ovaltine magazine ad — Now THIS is content!
From the early days of “paper content marketing.” Or as those poor fools from the 30s called it, “advertising.”

Do you know what content is? Words, images, and sounds. Stories, pictures, movies, podcasts, and music.

Do you know what it isn’t? Everything else. Everything other thing in the world that are not words, images, and sounds.

If I can’t read it, watch it, look at it, or listen to it, it’s not content.

If I can eat it, it’s not content. If it’s a person and his or her clothes, it’s not content. If it’s the squishy feeling we all get from maximizing our company’s potential to provide mission-critical customer satisfaction, it’s not content.

Using the word this way will eventually just cheapen the word and make it as useful and nebulous as “stuff.” I’m certainly not going to coin the phrase stuff marketing.

The word usually refers to material contained within another item — contents of a thermos, a book (hence the term Table of Contents), a speech. It has expanded to include video, audio, and photos, but that’s as far as I think people need to take it.

I’ll agree that the staff, their uniform, and latte foam art are features and reasons to like that business. But to call them “content” cheapens both them and the tenets of content marketing.

Do You Know What We Used To Call Content Marketing?

I blame the Content Marketing movement for starting this. They’re the ones who started calling “persuading people with information” content marketing.

Before then, we just called it marketing.

It was just a thing we did. It was brochures and trade shows. It was TV commercials and newspaper ads and CD-ROMs. It was corporate videos and scripts for radio commercials. Then one day, when I was as old as Kurt Cobain when he died, we started using this Internet thingy, and my company was the first in our industry to have a website.

The other companies laughed at us for getting suckered into this fad, until we started kicking their asses and taking away sales worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Then they scrambled fast to catch up.

Do you know what we called doing marketing on the Internet back then?

Marketing.

And do you know what we called the text and the photos on our web pages?

Text and photos.

But we didn’t call customer service, uniforms, or any of that other stuff “marketing,” because it wasn’t. Our accountant wasn’t marketing. Our shipping coordinator wasn’t marketing. Our warehouse guy wasn’t marketing.

We certainly never would have called them content.

But now the latest jargony buzzword is Content Marketing, because we produce stuff to be consumed; Internet Marketing, because it’s marketing on the Internet; Digital Marketing, because it’s now happening via mobile apps and not just the Internet; and, urp. . . urp. . . barf.

Honestly, I don’t care if you debate the subtle nuances of calling it Digital versus Internet Marketing to 10 decimal places. It doesn’t matter. Because it’s still just marketing. It’s not special marketing. It’s not some new brand of marketing that no one has ever done before.

It’s still just persuasive words, pretty pictures, and pleasing sounds.

So can we just skip the happiness-and-rainbows fancy jargon, and stick with the areas we can control that actually persuade people to buy our, uh, stuff?

Because no one is going to walk into a content shop and ask the contentista for a half-caff content with light foam, and a chocolate content with extra sprinkles.

That would be stupid.

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Five Things Miley Cyrus’ Tongue Can Teach Us About Business

My friend Casey jokingly challenged me to write this post:

After Miley’s R-rated performance at the MTV Video Music Awards (VMAs), including gratuitous tongue wagging and grinding on singer Robin Thicke, social media was ablaze with shocked reactions and stunned disbelief at what they had seen.

Of course, I’m never one to turn down a good “What _______’s tongue can teach” blog post, so I accepted the challenge.

There are a few business lessons, especially related to crisis communication, we can all learn from Miley Cyrus’ tongue.

Sort of.

1) Transparency and visibility are not always highly valued.

Transparency and authenticity are the two big watchwords the social media hippies like to spout. But there’s such a thing as too much transparency. No one wants to know how sausage is made, and no one wants to see your Gene Simmons-esque tongue flapping in the breeze.

There is such a thing as too much transparency. Don’t air the company’s dirty laundry just because you think you should. Which leads us to. . .

2) Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

We hear about the PR stunts and the corporate jackassery all too often in the business pages, and we read with the appropriate amount of shock and horror. And that should clue you in that PR stunts backfire, and jackassery, well, is not looked kindly upon by most people.

This means that while some things may be legal, that doesn’t mean they’re right — looking at YOU, Wall Street!

3) When your actions get in the way of your message, rethink your plan.

My oldest daughter used to love Hannah Montana, and I will grudgingly admit that she has a modicum of talent (“he mumbled curmudgeonly”). Which, I assume, is why she was invited to the VMAs in the first place. But I couldn’t even tell you whether she sang that night, or what song she did sing. And I’m willing to bet that in 10 years, no one will remember the song, but they’ll remember her performance.

Do I really need to draw this particular analogy out for you? Don’t do stupid stuff.

4) If you’re going to screw up, you’d better have a plan for recovery.

In a recent interview, Miley cited Madonna and Britney Spears as positive role models other singers who have made, um, questionable decisions about performances, and she pointed out that people forgot all about it.

Eventually.

Of course, you have to have a lot of star power to pull off a “screw you, I don’t care” recovery plan successfully. For the rest of us, you need to work on containment and recovery. You need to work on overcoming the issue. Don’t hide from it, don’t deny it, don’t pretend it didn’t happen. The road to business failure is paved with bad PR advice.

Just cop to the problem, admit it, apologize, and move on. Assuming your problem isn’t legal or going to see you in court/jail, just shrug it off and promise to do better.

5) When that’s not even the worst thing people are discussing, you’ve got bigger problems.

All the photos I’ve seen of Miley are of her tongue sticking way out of her head. Not all of them are of her grinding on Beetlejuice, but they are all of her and her tongue. And yet that’s not what people are talking about. When every photo is of your tongue, and yet that’s not even the elephant in the room — though, given its size, it does give the elephant’s trunk a run for its money — then you have a problem.

Don’t lose your small problems in your bigger problems. If you’re going through a crisis with your company, you still have to focus on the smaller problems at the same time: deliveries, customer service, sales, etc. You don’t shut down. You don’t assume that your customers will give you a pass. You take care of business and deal with the crisis at the same time.

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Five Things To Stop Putting In Your Press Releases

Press releases are one of those not-dead-yet tools that lazy PR professionals still insist on sending out to hundreds and thousands of journalists and bloggers. I still get press releases for movie releases taking place in L.A., inviting me to attend the red carpet rollout of some indie movie. Clearly they’re not culling their lists.

When I did crisis communication, we got a real sense of pride if one of our releases was published verbatim, or nearly so, by our state newspapers. That’s how we knew the real journalists were taking us seriously. That, and our success rate (it was an outstanding day if you could bat .500 on story placement). To do it, we needed solid, tight news stories, not a marketing puff piece.

Many releases I see are just abysmal. I don’t know if the agencies are teaching young flaks the wrong way, or if they’re teaching it in college, but there are some serious errors that are keeping your stories from getting published at all. Here are five things you need to stop putting in your press releases.

1. Marketing copy, especially in the opening paragraph

“ABC Coffee Stirrers, the leader in the coffee stirring industry since 1978 and the developer of the Turbo-Whoosh titanium stirrer, is pleased to announce the acquisition of Global Stirrings, a Canadian coffee stirrer manufacturer.”

Do you see all that dreck? All that extra crap about ABC’s history? That’s amateur hour. That stuff goes at the end of the press release in the <H2>About ABC Coffee Stirrers</H2> section. You know, the part nobody reads. It’s going to get cut out anyway, because journalists like real openings, not a copy-and-paste of your About Us page. When you write that, you sound like a flak, not a journalist, and the editor may pitch the release out of spite and loathing.

2. Adverbs, adjectives, and competitive language

“ABC Coffee Stirrers have proved to be 33% more effective at mixing a coffee drinker’s cream and sugar into their beloved morning java. And customers have eagerly demonstrated their strong preference for the Turbo-Whoosh by increasing sales by a staggering 12% every year for the last five years!”

Newspapers and TV stations are supposed to present the news in an unbiased, objective manner. That means they don’t get to express their opinion. They don’t get to say whether something is good or bad. They typically don’t talk about products, unless those products killed someone.

That means they’re not going to talk about how much better your product is than anyone else’s. They’re not going to publish the “news” written by your product manager. And they’re not going to talk about increased sales, customer preference, or improved performance.

You may get that kind of coverage in trade and industry journals, but you still need to avoid the adverbs and adjectives. If your press release sounds like a freshman English Comp essay, pitch it and start over.

3. Copyright and Trademark symbols

The company lawyer may have told you to put them in the release, but the ®, ©, and ™ symbols don’t belong in press releases for two simple reasons:

  1. They could interfere with SEO. While we can’t be sure how Google treats these, why risk it? Maybe they ignore those symbols, but maybe they treat it like a regular word. No one is going to search for ABC™ Coffee Stirrers®, so don’t make that a search term.
  2. Those don’t appear in news stories. The editors are going to delete them anyway, so don’t make extra work for them or you.

Unless the company lawyer also has a background as a journalist, ignore anything they tell you about writing press releases.

3. “We’re very excited” quotes

“We’re very excited about the merger between our companies.”

“We’re very excited about our laptop upgrades.

You can’t be equally excited about both things. Saying “we’re very excited” about every damn thing that happens is either lazy writing, or your CEO is off her meds. Find another way to express interest or enthusiasm. Better yet, don’t even bring it up at all. We all know you didn’t interview the CEO for this, and if you did, she probably didn’t say this at all.

Talk about the benefits of the news item. Is the merger going to add jobs? That’s your lead quote. Is it going to improve profitability by $10 million? Then that is. No one cares who’s excited; that’s not news. The jobs and profitability are exciting. Only include things that drive the story.

4. Business jargon quotes

“This new relationship will help us streamline mission-critical functionalities as a way to regenerate impactful niches.”

No one talks that way in real life. If they do, make sure they aren’t having a stroke.

But even if they do, preserve their reputation and avoid marketing words altogether. Make them sound like a real human being since, not a marketing textbook.

(Note: It’s easy to confuse marketers with real human beings, but do your best. Give them the benefit of the doubt, and translate their marketing gobbledygook into real words.)

If you don’t have good quotes, the journalist will either email you or call you for a follow-up quote that uses real words. Save them the time and give them a quote that sounds realistic and not one made up by the Dack.com Bullshit Generator (which is what I used to write that sentence above).

A press release is supposed to sound like a real news story written by a real journalist. Most PR flaks don’t know what that looks like, so they keep putting out the same garbage week after week. Then they complain that their stories aren’t being published and that their clients aren’t getting any traction. Start writing real journalistic stories and send out only newsworthy items. You’ll see your success rate — and self-respect — increase.

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Stop Using These Business Jargon Terms. You Sound Pretentious.

Some of the smartest people I know can be quite obtuse when it comes to language. Not because they use small words to express small ideas. No, rather they use really big, useless words to express small ideas.

“We create a frictionless user onboarding experience.”

Whenever you say “frictionless user onboarding,” a kitten dies.
GAAH! I just want to punch somebody in the neck when I see that. And I see it a lot.

(Update: Sean Molin pointed out that this particular gem was not created by 500px, but rather by Dan Leveille of Quora, who is not affiliated with 500 px.)

In fact, when I Googled the words “frictionless user onboarding process,” there were 112,000 results. In other words, 112,000 people thought this was a perfectly acceptable phrase to use.

As opposed to “Signing up is easy.”

Here are five other words you need to stop saying, because they make you sound like a pretentious snot.

  1. Leverage. It’s not a verb, it’s a noun. “Leverage” has become the 21st century’s “utilize,” with many of the same results: people hate it. Try an experiment the next time you want to say “leverage”: say “use” instead. “We are going to leverage use our customer database for a direct mail campaign.” Did it change the meaning? Of course not. So quit it.
  2. On a going forward basis. Seriously? The phrase “going forward” wasn’t bad enough? You had to go make it worse by adding three more words to it? Come on, man! The word you want is “later” or “from now on.” As in “we’ll start locking the door from now on.” Now, you’ve taken a two word turd of a phrase and added three more words, to mean exactly the same thing. But with more words.
  3. Brand. Yeah, yeah, I’m the personal branding guy. So why is this on the list? Because people are using it to mean “company.” They say “brand” instead of “company,” because apparently that’s what all the cool kids say. When did this happen? It used to be that “branding” referred to marketing collateral, logo, corporate colors, that kind of thing. It became, as Kyle Lacy and I mentioned in Branding Yourself “an emotional response people have to a company and logo, or a person and their reputation.” It should not be the company itself. It may be two more syllables, but go back to saying “company.” The other thing makes you sound vapid.
  4. Learner/Learnings. I was talking with a teacher one time, and she used the phrase “our learners.” “What are learners? I asked. She said “the students.” Then why don’t you call them students? I asked. “Because they’re learning and we’re educating. They’re learners and we’re educators.” Why can’t you call them students and teachers? “Well, it means the same thing.” If it means the same thing, then why can’t you just say the old thing? She didn’t have a good answer to that, and the conversation did not improve from there. Needless to say, I was not the first parent my daughter’s teacher wanted to talk to on Parent-Teacher night. And if I ever hear anyone use the word “learnings,” we are going to have a similar awkward conversation. It’s not “learnings,” it’s “lessons” or “material” or “information.” Learnings is not a noun.
  5. Frictionless. I already mentioned it, but I hate this word so much, I wanted to repeat it. (Hey, if any of this article hits home, you’re already used to people repeating things needlessly, so this won’t take up too much of your time.) Nothing is frictionless. Nothing, except the black Haggunenon ship from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. And if you didn’t get that, then this joke wasn’t frictionless either. Say “easy,” “simple,” or “not that hard.”

The point of jargon is to make hard words easier to understand and say. But with the exception of substituting the three-syllable “company” with the single syllable “brand,” none of these jargony terms make life easier. If anything, they make it more difficult.

Although they give everyone else something to make fun of you for.

I think we’re supposed to call that “humorate” now.

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Google Cracking Down on Hyperlinked Keywords in Press Releases

A shudder went through the PR industry last Friday after articles like SHIFT Communication’s announcing “Bad Press Releases Can Hurt Your SEO.”

Google added the phrase “optimized anchor text in press releases” to their Link schemes document, which meant you can no longer used hyperlinked keywords in press releases, at least those press release distribution sites that have become flooded with link-heavy press releases.

  • Links with optimized anchor text in articles or press releases distributed on other sites. For example:
    There are many wedding rings on the market. If you want to have a wedding, you will have to pick the best ring. You will also need to buy flowers and a wedding dress.

In other words, you weren’t allowed to do this in article marketing, now you’re not allowed to do it in press releases either.

Want to see how strict they are? Mouse over any of those links, or even click on them. They all go to Example.com, which is a domain we can use when we want to show what a hyperlink looks like, but without actually using a real hyperlink and incurring the wrath of an angry Penguin.

In other words, Google does not want to fall prey to Google’s algorithm. That’s how strict the algorithm is. It will punch itself in its own face.

What does this mean for SEO?

Same thing it always has. Ever since Google wrote the Link schemes policy, and added the ban on “Large-scale article marketing or guest posting campaigns with keyword-rich anchor text links, professional SEOs have been walking on eggshells.

But there are four ways you can still use keywords and still get good SEO placement.

  1. Use one keyword in the title and a couple times in the body copy. Keywords are not dead; Google still uses them. It uses them the way a library uses the cover of a book. Without a cover, the library has no way of knowing where to shelve the book. Without a keyword, Google has a harder time figuring out what your blog posts are about.
  2. Use synonyms. Google is getting smarter. It understands what words mean. It knows that “running” and “jogging” mean the same thing. It knows that “band,” “music,” and “artist” are all in the same category of performing arts, but it can also figure out that “rubber bands” and “painters” could also be synonyms, so it uses context.
  3. Use co-occurrence. I’ve called this co-citation previously (my bad!), but I should have been using this term instead. Co-occurrence is when two terms appear in close proximity to each other. Rather than using the phrase “stainless steel coffee mug,” I can use the phrase “coffee mug made from stainless steel” once in a while. Google will still recognize the co-occurrence of the term, and treat it like a synonym.
  4. Use Google’s Authorship. Authorship, which uses the rel=”author” and rel=”publisher” tags, tells Google who wrote a particular article or is responsible for a particular piece of content. If you want Google to recognize your contribution, use Google+ and the Authorship tags, and link your name to your Google+ account. Put that inside your bio and include it in everything you write.

Google is destroying the link-building schemes we’ve all come to love and rely on over the last few years. They’re making it harder and harder to do this kind of SEO work. This latest volley from them shows they’re not screwing around. They’re forcing us to do a better job to sound like real people, rather than putting out keyword-stuffed, over-optimized crap that real humans don’t actually want to read.

If you’re going to use any kind of link-building tactics, you’re better off writing guest posts on blogs and only linking to your author bio, or using links that make sense editorially (like the ones I’ve used in this post).

The press releases door has been shut, and Google isn’t done yet. Look for more serious measures in the coming months.

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The Two-Letter Word That Speaks With Authority: The Royal We

If you’re trying to achieve a sense of authority and credibility with you’re writing, there’s one little word you can use to convey that feeling, without ever actually stating it.

We.

Queen of England at William and Mary College

This week’s Grammar Girl (Mignon Fogarty) podcast, The Royal “We”, focuses on all the different usages of the first person plural of the word “we.”

There’s the:

  • Royal We, which the Queen uses;
  • Editorial We, which editorials will often employ to refer to a publication’s leadership;
  • Political We, which politicians use to refer to their campaign, and later their administration;
  • Urban We, which refers to Fogarty’s finding them in the Urban Dictionary; and,
  • Nanny Narrator, which a doctor might use (“how are we feeling today?”)

But there’s also the “We’re In It Together (WIIT) We,” which didn’t make Fogarty’s list, but I’m a big fan of.

Fogarty even uses it herself in the narrative:

Point of view signals the writer’s stance toward the information or events he or she is describing. We usually describe literary point of view as “the first-person” (the confessional I, the inclusive we, or the royal we), “the second-person” (the informal “you,” or the implied “you” in the bossy imperative mood) and “the third-person” (the objective he, she, it or they, the starchy “one”).

Did you see it? “We usually describe literary point of view…” Who is “we” here?

It’s the author and the reader. It’s you and me. The implication is that you and I agree. That right thinking people — that’s me, because I’m espousing this point of view, and you, because I want you to feel smart and special — believe this and do this regularly. Not like those people who are completely wrong-headed, nasty, and never call their mothers on their birthdays.

We, who are so knowledgeable about literary points of view, use these terms to describe them.

This WIIT We pulls the reader in and makes them feel like they’re on your side. It’s one thing to speak with that “Voice of God” tone, where the writer never uses “I” or “me,” but rather relay information as if it’s been handed down by God.

But it’s entirely another thing to put your arm around the reader’s shoulder and whisper in his or her ear, “I’ve got this cool idea, and I want to share it with you.” It’s almost empowering to the reader. It lets them know that if you’re right, then by definition, they’re right too, because they agree with you.

It’s a subtle, but powerful secret that can boost the level of your writing, without making any drastic changes, or even altering your regular writing voice.

If you want to add some authority and credibility to your writing, try sprinkling in the WIIT We a few times, and see if that makes a difference.

We believe one will be pleasantly surprised.

 

Photo credit: Physicist Erin (Flickr, Creative Commons)