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Stop Saying “Value Add”

English is a fluid, malleable language that is ever changing, which I always enjoy. Until someone comes up with a stupid term like “value add.”

(Before I go on, I know some of my friends use this term. Please be assured this is not a reflection on you. You’re awesome. I only harbor a grudge against the person who first came up with it.)

“Value add” — I can’t even bring myself to use the word without putting Quotes of Sarcasm around it — is one of those business words that went from being an adjective to a noun with a flick of the jargon pen. I still remember the first time I heard it. (Oh what a fun conversation that was!)

Friend: I think your ghost blogging service will make a great “value add” to a marketing agency’s offerings.
Me: What’s a “value add?”
Friend: It’s a thing that adds value. You know, from “value-added.”
Me: Why couldn’t you say “value-added service?”
Friend: This way is shorter.
Me: Except I hate “value-added.” You could say “be valuable.”
Friend: But . . . this is. . .
Me: Or “beneficial.” Or “useful.” Or “provide a great service.”
Friend: But I don’t—
Me: Or “helpful.” Or “marvelous.” Or “inestimable.”

“Value add” is one of those business terms that someone created because “value-added” was apparently too hard to say. That somehow the adjective “value-added,” as in “value-added feature,” was bulky and cumbersome, and tripped over the teeth before blubbering through the lips, like Quasimodo trying to recite the Gettysburg address.

“I know!” shrieked some business jargon harpy, whose song lures young marketers to them in their ships, causing the marketers to hurl themselves on the jagged rocks of corporate BS. “Instead of saying ‘value-added,’ which is four syllables, we’ll say ‘value add’ which is only three!” The other harpies cackled with glee, until a young harpy pointed out that “a value add” is still four syllables, whereupon the other harpies ate her.

Look, I was not a big fan of “value-added” when I first heard it. It sounded jargony, even if it took two commonly used words — “added” and “value” — and mashed them up into one awful word. English is malleable and fluid, and we are free to do things like that.

But I absolutely abhor and detest the new phrase, “value-add.” It serves no useful function, it sounds more corporate and jargony than even “value-added,” if such a thing were possible, and it doesn’t enhance the language so much as it makes me despair for the future of it.

The point of language is to find the best possible words to educate, inform, persuade, enrich, describe, and profess. Words like “valuable” do that. If something “has value,” we know it’s important. But jargon takes away from language. It dilutes language. Weakens it. Makes a mockery of it.

Jargon does not add value to our language. It is a “value-suck.”

is the owner of Professional Blog Service, and the co-author of Branding Yourself: How to Use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself. His new book, No Bullshit Social Media: The All-Business, No-Hype Guide to Social Media Marketing, which he wrote with Jason Falls, is in bookstores and on Amazon now.

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Are You an Expert?

Are you an expert?

Do you know more about a particular field than most people? Are you well-versed and well-read in it? Have you practiced or worked in that field for several years? Did you attend a special school to gain that knowledge?

An expert is someone, says the Random House Dictionary, who has “special skill or knowledge in some particular field; specialist; authority.”

A doctor is a medical expert. A contractor is a building expert. A writer is a storytelling expert.

The doctor went to medical school, and then focused on one speciality for a number of years. She knows more than the average person about the human body, and more than most doctors about her speciality.

A contractor has spent more years swinging a hammer and cutting wood than other people. He knows more about building and repairing houses than even the most enthusiastic hobbyist.

A writer may have gone to school, or may be self-taught. She has written news articles, plays, and books for a number of years. She knows more about word smithing than the average person.

These people are experts because they have studied their chosen vocation, practiced to correct mistakes, and worked to become better and more proficient.

Experts do not stop learning. They do not know everything there is to know about their field. The doctor specializes in the brain, and knows nothing about sports medicine. The contractor builds houses, but can’t build furniture. The writer is a novelist, but can’t write marketing copy.

They are not the top dog, numero uno, king of the hill expert in their field. There are thousands of doctors, contractors, and writers. There may be a top doctor, contractor, or writer somewhere, but our experts are not. That doesn’t mean they are no longer experts.

Our experts are still experts when their field changes. New advances in brain surgery come, but our doctor is still an expert in her field. New tools, new materials, and new joinery techniques are created, but our contractor is still an expert. New styles of novels are invented all the time, but our writer is still an expert.

Replace their tools with new tools and they’ll retain their knowledge. They just have to learn the new tools. The doctor didn’t quit being a brain surgeon when someone invented the laser scalpel. The contractor didn’t become an apprentice again when they took away his hammer and saw and switched him to a nail gun and miter saw. The writer didn’t lose her ability when she got rid of her typewriter and switched to a laptop.

An expert’s status doesn’t end just because they switched tools. That’s because their expertise lies in the execution, not the method. It does not stop because their field changes or grows, because every field changes and grows. To claim these people are no longer experts shows a lack of understanding about progress and change.

Expertise is not negated because they’re not the best ever in their field. To say that means only one person can be an expert at anything ever.

Expertise is not eliminated because they haven’t learned everything there is to learn. Otherwise there will never be an expert at anything.

Expertise is based on amassing more knowledge than most people, not all knowledge. That’s it. It’s not a fixed milestone. It’s not a zero-sum competition. It’s not something that changes just because there’s a new development. And it’s not lost when tools are replaced.

To say otherwise means you just don’t understand what an expert is.

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Your Blog Openings Suck

I truly don’t care why you wrote your blog post.

It doesn’t matter that you were sitting in a coffee shop with your friend, Joe, when you were discussing some amazing idea. I don’t care that those of us who may know you may know that you’re committed to saving the manatees. I don’t care that you’ve been reading Gary Vaynerchuk’s new book, “And The Horse You Rode In On.” (Not a real Gary Vaynerchuk book.)

I want you to impress the hell out of me and make me want to read your post. And frankly, telling me that you were discussing the importance of light bulb recycling over a non-fat lemon chai with ginger sprinkles — which is Doug Karr’sfavorite drink — doesn’t impress me at all.

Want to write good leads? Study newspapers.

(I will admit that I am still guilty of these kinds of leads sometimes, but have committed to never do them again.)

An opening sentence in a blog, also called a lead — or lede if you’re a newspaper traditionalist — is supposed to grab your readers’ attention and fling them to the next paragraph (graf, if we’re still going old-school newspaper). The goal of that graf is to propel people to the one after that, and so on.

But you’re not even going to get out of the starting gate if your lead sucks.

When I took my Intro to Journalism class way back when newspapers were still thriving, our professor drummed the importance of writing good leads into us for weeks. “It’s the most important sentence in the entire article,” he would tell us. “Your lead tells people exactly what happened, but it does it with drama and flair.”

In short, your lead doesn’t blather about coffee shops and books. Your lead needs to grab people and intrigue them, or it needs to provide information, or both.

My lead — the fact that I don’t care about why you wrote your blog post — is a true one. I really don’t. Or if I do, I don’t want it to be the first thing you tell me. Drop it in later, if you want to give me the background. It can almost be an aside, but it shouldn’t be the thing you start with.

I think we get into storytelling mode when we write blog posts. We’re so used to “Once upon a time” that we think it’s important to our blog writing as well. Believe me, I love a good story. I love telling stories, hearing stories, reading stories. But when I go to a blog, I want to be educated and informed.

Chances are, your lead is buried under 3 – 4 paragraphs. You could get rid of the opening couple of paragraphs and be all set, although some writers will tell you — maybe a little cynically — that most people could get rid of the first half, and still be fine.

So when you write your blog post, start it any way you want. But then go back and start deleting paragraphs until you get down to the most important point in the whole piece. Lead off with that. If you need to add the old paragraphs back in for background information, do it. But do it later on in the piece.

As you get better, and your leads begin to surface sooner, you’ll reach the point where you’re writing that stellar opening lead right off the bat, getting your readers’ attention earlier, and propelling them all the way through the post. Time on site will go up, conversions will go up because people made it all the way to the end, and you’ll look like a genius.

And you can tell me all about it over a cup of coffee.

Photo credit: JudsonD (Flickr)

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Fast Company Doesn’t Know You Can Calculate Social Media ROI

Fast Company seems to have an aversion to math or basic research. Their latest story, Does Social Media Have a Return on Investment, says that no one is able to calculate the ROI of social media, and that large brands like Audi and Home Depot are just fumbling around in the dark on determining the ROI of social media.

This is complete and utter crap.

People have been able to calculate the ROI of social media for a few years now. In fact, as Katie Paine (@kdpaine) pointed out in the comments section to this article:

This is ridiculous. Back in 2008, Wells Fargo and SAP were calculating solid ROI from social media campaigns. Social media agencies like Organic have been using sophisiticated data analytics for years to predict outcomes.  You stumbled across a few creative types that are allergic to math and haven’t a clue what data is available who don’t care about measurement or  ROI. And if they are using Klout, the really don’t care much about the accuracy either. Other marketers, the smart ones, are embracing all the data and analytics now available and providing solid ROI on a regular basis.

It’s not that hard to calculate the ROI, or to measure anything when it comes to social media. Here are the basic steps you can use to calculate even the most rudimentary ROI of a sales page:

  • Set up Google Analytics on your website. Make sure you put the code on every page.
  • Set up Google Webmaster Tools, and use their Campaign Code Creator.
  • Append any URL you tweet out or put on Facebook with the Campaign Code Creator.
  • Shorten every link you send with Bit.ly, including the campaign code, and send it out. Assign different campaign codes to different messages, tools, and campaigns.
  • Track down the visits that filtered down into visits to the sales page. Total up the sales from those visits. Cross-reference them with the contact data that came from the sales form.
  • Subtract the cost of your campaign from your sales total. That’s your ROI.

And that’s the writer’s method of dealing with ROI. There are entire suites of tools built to answer the ROI question, and professionals like Katie Paine have been doing it for years.

With thinking like this being erroneously spread by Fast Company and writer Farhad Manjoo, it’s no wonder businesses are afraid to spend money on social media. When uninformed media — who frankly should know better, or should have done some remedial research — start spreading bad information based on their own misunderstanding, it not only shows their ignorance of the industry, it spreads bad information to the rest of the business community.

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The Newspaper Industry Isn’t in a Position to Sneer at the Blogosphere

The Indianapolis Star just suffered another round of layoffs this week, losing 81 jobs to Gannett’s ineptitude and bean counting. Of these cuts, 26 of them were in the newsroom — including 8 reporters and 12 editors — and 19 were unfilled jobs, all made in the name of budgetary concerns and profitability. The cuts were part of Gannett’s larger bloodletting of 700 employees nationwide.

Meanwhile, their CEO raked in $9.4 million in 2010, doubling his pay from 2009, including a $1.75 million blood moneybonus that was partly a result of his “restructuring costs and creating efficiencies.” Translation: ruin the lives of 700 people, and we’ll give you their salaries.

You

Believe me, even though I’ve called for more citizen journalism — and this is exactly why — I have complete sympathy for the Star employees who just lost their livelihood because Gannett wasn’t making enough of a profit. I worry about them and their families. Gannett seems to excel at accounting and numbers, but they suck at news reporting and suffer from a complete lack of understanding of community. Where Indianapolis readers see stories and personalities, Gannett sees dollar signs.

But Bobby King, president of the Indianapolis Newspaper Guild, managed to throw a damper on my sympathies stick his thumb in my eye with this line from his latest blog post.

So, the answer that Star publisher Karen Crotchfelt came up with was to gut suburban coverage, eliminate an entire layer of copy editors (that last line of defense which separates us from the animals in the blogosphere) and make a nip here and a tuck there to reduce expenses.

Animals in the blogosphere?

The one thing I can’t stand from journalists is the way they look down on bloggers with this sense of smug superiority. Look, you guys don’t have any special knowledge or skills that any other writer can’t get. You have editors who save you from misspellings and continuity issues. Without them, you’re no better than we are. You print your words on dead trees, we print ours on a free software platform. Your printers cost millions of dollars, and without them, you’re dead in the water. I run my entire corporate blogging business on a $1,000 laptop, and if it breaks, I can get another one and never miss a beat. Our industry is growing, yours is shrinking.

If journalists want to survive this, they’ll quit looking down on the blogosphere as the gathering of the great unwashed and recognize it’s the future of news. They’ll quit acting like the crew of the Titanic and sneering, “ew, a rescue boat? How droll.”

Look, Bobby, I know you’re pissed, and scared, and are watching the dismantling of a once-great newspaper by some clueless nimrod 1,000 miles away. But don’t attack bloggers or refer to us as animals. Sure, we didn’t go to J-school or spend 20 years honing our craft. But blogging is more than 15 years old, and there are some bloggers who can outwrite most newspaper reporters. Hell, a lot of reporters and columnists have found a new career and a new voice as a blogger. (And it wasn’t lost on me that your “animal” comment was made on a blog.) But these former journalists are the ones who make blogging better.

So you can sneer at bloggers all you want, but we’re going to be here for a long time. You can look down on us, or you can join us.

Photo credit: evelynyll (Flickr)

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3 Secret Blogging Ideas That Professional Writers Don’t Want You To Know

I’ve written enough blog posts that I’ve figured out what it is that wins readers, and what bores the bejeezus out of them. If I’m stuck for a blog post idea, I’ve got a few general topics and idea kickstarters that will get my creative juices flowing, and get a decent post out of it. I use these same kickstarters to come up with topics for my own clients, especially when they think they’re stuck for ideas or have run out of things to write about.

These are the three best kickstarters I’ve found that work, regardless of the topic or industry.

List posts

I know, I know, you hate them. They’re boring, they’re trite, they’ve been done to death. But do you know who loves them? I mean, really looooooooooves them?

Your readers. They eat them up. They love that there is a small number of ideas that they can read and understand. It brings order to chaos. “Five Best Dishwashers” is way more interesting than “How to choose a dishwasher.”

Secretly, you still think they’re interesting too. Why else would you be here? Admit it, you saw the number 3, and thought, “Three, huh? I guess I have a couple minutes to check it out.”

Still don’t believe me? Do a little test. Next time you’re in the supermarket, pay attention to the magazines at the checkout lane, especially Cosmo. Look at the headlines on the cover. They all follow this format, and they sometimes use the next two ideas.

Every month, for years and years and year, we’ve been promised “Three Secrets Men Won’t Tell You About Sex,” and “Five Ways to a Sexier Love Life.” For YEARS, I tells ya!

And why? Because people love lists. If they didn’t, Cosmo would quit doing it. So I’ll keep writing list posts for as long as Cosmo does. Why? Because if you’re a fellow blogger, you’re not my customer. Corporations and small businesses are my customers. They’re the ones I need to appeal to. And if they want list posts, then I can think of Seven Reasons Why People Love List Posts.

Debunk long-standing myths and stick it to The Man

This is ingrained in our culture. We’re the little guy. We despise the big guy. David hates Goliath. Everyman and Everywoman hates bullies, corporations, and faceless bureaucrats. And if we can see evidence where the little guy sticks it to The Man, we go nuts! So who’s the Man? Big business, the government (state and local too), bullies, TV preachers, and teachers.

Not today’s teachers. Our teachers from when we grew up. We were little kids back then, and had all kinds of knowledge jammed into our brains that we didn’t want. We wanted to rebel, but were held down. Even people in their 60s still harbor a little of that Inner Rebel, and they still want to stick it to their old English teacher who’s been dead for 30 years. By writing a post about debunking an educational topic, I can reach that Inner Rebel and make him or her want to read.

Last week, I wrote a blog post about Five Writing Rules You’re Allowed to Break, and people liked it. Another one — Five Grammar Myths Exploded — was extremely popular. Why? Because I attacked the sacred cow of 7th grade English and showed where it was wrong. The little guy stuck it to The Man by proving he was wrong.

Special professional secrets

Want to get someone’s attention? Share something special with them that no one else gets to find out about. Or “they don’t want you to know.” (And who’s “they?” The Man.) But if it’s something secret — that “they” don’t want you to know — it must be really hot stuff.

Posts like “Five Gas Saving Secrets the Oil Companies Don’t Want You to Know” or “Three Secrets Your Credit Card Company Won’t Tell You” are a whoooole lot more interesting than “Five Ways to Save Gas” or “Three Little-Known Tidbits About Your Credit Card.” People love this kind of stuff; they eat it up.

I used all three of these tactics with this post, and chances are you were very intrigued by the fact that I:

  • Used a number.
  • Promised secrets.
  • Stuck it to an elite group of people — professional writers.

It was actually the idea of sharing secrets that led to this blog post, and I added the other two tactics to the headline later. But even if you just use one of these three kickstarters in your own industry or niche, you can come up with some awesome ideas on your own. For example:

  • Three Ways to Lower Your AC Bill This Summer.
  • History Answers: Who REALLY Flew the First Airplane?
  • Five Secrets to Avoiding Fines Your Library Doesn’t Want You to Know.

So the next time you’re stuck for a post idea, ask yourself: Is there a number of small ideas I can list, a sacred cow I can slay, or “insider secrets*” I can reveal to entice my readers? Once you start thinking this way, there is no end to the number of posts you can write.

* Please note that I don’t mean real insider or corporate secrets. Do not reveal business secrets at all ever. EVER!

Photo credit: Marcmos (Flickr)