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Copywriters, Use the Words Other People Use, Not the Ones You Use

Do you know what audio theater is? Does it make you think of something to do with speakers at a movie theater? Or maybe it’s a subset of home theater equipment. Or maybe you’re supposed to go to a play and shut your eyes.

It’s none of those. It’s what we used to call radio theater. (Or radio theatre, if you’re Canadian or British. Or a snooty purist.)

Decoder Ring Theatre cast
Cast of Decoder Ring Theatre, an audio theatre company in Toronto.

You know what radio theater is, right? Remember when Ralph and Randy sat in front of the big giant radio and listened to Little Orphan Annie? We all know what that is, even the people who only hear about it from their grandparents.

But the people who actually do radio theater want to call it “audio theater” instead. Why? Because people don’t listen to the plays on the radio anymore, they listen to them on CD players, iPods, computers, car stereos, etc.

So in order to be more accurate, they changed the name of the art form to more accurately reflect what it is that they produce.

And lost out on a large portion of their potential audience.

There are still plenty of people who used to listen to radio theater with money to spend, but they don’t spend it on the entertainment form from their childhoods because they don’t know it’s called “audio theater” now. Companies like Decoder Ring Theatre have worked hard to overcome this hurdle by being one of the most progressive and dedicated audio theatre troupes I’ve ever seen, embracing social media and Internet marketing, as well as podcasting. (Full disclosure: Decoder Ring Theatre produced and aired six of my Slick Bracer radio plays this summer.) But a lot of other companies have only seen a fraction of this success, and I believe it’s primarily because of this language disconnect between what is “correct” and what is “best.”

How many times have companies harmed their marketing efforts by insisting people call a term by what they want to call it, not what the customers want to call it? How many times have government agencies lost the respect and credibility they worked for, because someone who knows nothing about public communication insisted the agency use the accurate term, not the best term? How many news programs get laughed at because they try to change the commonly accepted term to something that better suits their political biases?

  • An agricultural equipment company I know calls its products by the term they want to use, rather than the more common term their customer uses. This is evidenced by the 1,200 Google searches for their term, and the 20,000+ searches for the common term. While they may rank well for their chosen term, they don’t rank at all for the term their potential customers are using nearly 8 times more often.
  • When the H1N1 epidemic flu first started, the public was calling it “swine flu,” but the media managed — with a lot of work — to get people to start calling it H1N1, because it was harming the pork industry. But the government agencies wanted to call it the human flu, and flu pandemic. Regardless of what they wanted to call it, the media ignored them
  • Fox News’ insistence on calling suicide bombers “homicide bombers,” as per the Bush White House, made them a laughing stalk among journalists and news watchers.

If you’re not sure whether people are using your terms or theirs, go to Google’s Keyword Tool and put in your term and any industry terms you can think of. See which terms have the most global (worldwide) searches and the most local (US) searches. The ones that win are the ones most people are using, and the ones you should be focusing on.

Update: Deleted “Audio” from “Decoder Ring Audio Theatre” above, because despite being a loyal listener for 5 years, and now a contributor, I still can’t get their name right.

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PR & Marketing Agencies, Know Your Stuff Before You Offer Social Media

I’m both heartened and worried by the number of PR and marketing agencies that are offering social media.

I’m heartened, because it means the business world is that much closer to accepting social media as a real form of communication. It means they know it’s going to be around for the long haul.

I’m worried, because a lot of these agencies don’t even understand it They just threw their new junior account exec at it because she has a Facebook page and they think that means she knows enough to run a large-scale campaign for them.

Make sure you know your stuff, AND that it works.

Social media is not an entry-level position, people. It’s not something you turn over to the brand new employee who has never even run a traditional campaign. And it’s definitely not something an agency should try to learn on a client’s dime.

NOTE: This is not to say that entry-level people shouldn’t do social or that PR or marketing agencies shouldn’t get into it at all They absolutely should. But, your experience needs to be more than resuscitating the nearly-dead Twitter account you started six months ago with the “Still trying to figure this twitter thing out. Does this make me a twit?” tweet.

I’ve seen a number of agencies now that are starting to offer social media as part of their service offerings, but I think they’re out of their element, and are only going to screw it up.. For one thing, their Twitter accounts are less than six months old. The agency accounts have fewer than 500 followers, and the employee accounts are all hovering around 100, and are filled with retweets from the agency account.

That is not social media experience. Not enough to start providing services for clients.

Strong social media experience means running campaigns where you can measure the ROI and show how much money you made. Strong social media experience means having more than 2,000 followers, because you know the ethical way to break past Twitter’s 2,000 following cap. Strong social media experience means you have a blog that’s more than a year old, and it’s filled with new social media knowledge and opinions, because you publish 2 – 5 times per week, not per quarter.

Look, I know how to write a press release, and I know how to pick up the phone and individually pitch journalists and bloggers. (Jason Falls would say that puts me ahead of the game for knowing that.) I even know how to do good TV and radio interviews. But that doesn’t make me a PR expert.

If I wanted to open a PR agency, I could probably do a passable job. I could fool a couple of small clients, and learn on their dime. But I wouldn’t be giving them the best I could be (or, if I was, the best I could be wouldn’t be good enough).

If you’re in PR or marketing, and you want to offer social media to your clients, you need to do a few things before you ever you’re ready to start:

  1. Put together a team of people who are responsible for social media, not just one person. You at least need someone who can write and someone who knows how to read analytics and research. You also need one person who will be responsible for it all. This is not a time for committees and democracy. You need a social media account executive to take charge.
  2. Understand that social media is as much about sales and customer service as it is about marketing and PR. If you’re going to manage social media for a client, you need someone who can sell and deal with problems.
  3. You need to invest heavily in the ongoing education of your social media team. Require them to read industry blogs, read or listen to social media books, attend social media networking meetings, and pay for any learning they can get their hands on. I met an advertising agency that pays its staff to read books and give book reports to the rest of the agency at a monthly meeting. They pay $25 per book read (they even have a copy of Branding Yourself (affiliate link) in their library).
  4. Send your social media team to at least one conference a year, if not two or three. Better yet, have them learn enough so they can present at those conferences. The great thing about being a presenter is you have to know more than your audience, which means they have to stay on the cutting edge.

If you’re going to do social media, do it right. You can’t sign up for a new Facebook account and pronounce yourself a social media consultant any more than you can record a video on your mobile phone and call yourself a video production house. Take the time to learn as much as you can before you offer it. Don’t feel like you have to rush. There are plenty of clients available, and they’ll still be there in a year or two when today’s agencies are being fired by their clients for bad social media execution.

My book, Branding Yourself: How to Use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself (affiliate link), is available on Amazon.com, as well as at Barnes & Noble and Borders bookstores. I wrote it with my good friend, Kyle Lacy.

Photo credit: Inky (Flickr)

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Can Your Company Survive Without a Corporate Blog?

Does your company need a corporate blog if it’s going to survive the next 10 years?

Maybe not.

Will your company thrive and grow if you don’t have one?

Maybe not.

A corporate blog is a great way for companies to share information with their customers and vendors. It’s a great way to promote their products, answer customer questions, make special announcements, and even sell to new customers.

A corporate blog will help your company appear at the top of the search engine rankings — there are roughly 88 billion Google searches per month. How many of those are you missing out on? — and will give you a place to send your customers when you interact with them through social media marketing. (Uh, you are using social media to talk to your customers, aren’t you?)

People are reading blogs whether they realize it or not. In fact, Technorati estimates that 76% of active Internet users are reading a blog of some sort or another. I think that number may even be higher, because so many websites, online newspapers, and landing pages are actually blog posts, and not regular html pages. People visit the blog thinking they’re finding a page or article, but in actuality are reading a regular old blog post.

The great thing about blogging is that anyone can do it. It doesn’t matter if you’re a Fortune 500 company with a marketing budget measured in the hundreds of thousands, or a one person operation whose total sales are measured in the tens of thousands. At its very core, its very essence, a corporate blog is just a company talking to its customers about the things that matter to the customers.

The blog is the great marketing equalizer. It levels the playing field between big and small companies. I’ve seen small companies with more passion than money turn out great blogs that are well-written and well-received. I’ve seen huge companies with lots of money and personnel that create crappy blogs that are poorly written piles of jargon-filled manure.

A corporate blog can cost thousands of dollars in design, content creation, and web hosting, or it can be one of the many free options hosted on someone else’s server. The expensive blogs don’t always do better, and the free blogs are not always lacking in quality.

What matters is the content and whether you’re creating enough of it.

So will your company survive without a corporate blog? Maybe it will.

But it will certainly be outclassed and outpaced by the companies that do have one.

My book, Branding Yourself: How to Use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself (affiliate link), is available on Amazon.com, as well as at Barnes & Noble and Borders bookstores. I wrote it with my good friend, Kyle Lacy.

Photo credit: Coda (Flickr)

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Four Ways a Corporate Blog Can Help Your Company Increase Profits

A corporate blog is more than just a company diary where someone from marketing talks about the latest trade show. A corporate blog is a support tool that can lighten the load of several different departments within your company. Here are four ways a corporate blog can help your company.

1. Reduce Marketing Costs and Improve Reach

In the past, Marketing put a lot of time and money into developing, creating, and printing new sales literature and brochures. But once the specs changed on a particular product you got a new area code (it happened to my company in 2002), or you made an egregious error (guilty), the remaining 8,500 copies of the brochures were rendered obsolete, or you had to hand correct every single one of them with a black marker.

A blog can replace a lot of sales brochures and literature, introducing customers to the new product, letting them read the new specs, and finding out the latest features and prices. A blog will also let you show new photos and video demonstrations, tell people about the upcoming trade show or the show you just finished, or even post a video of the CEO talk about the product and what it means for the industry.

By turning to electronic publishing, you can reduce printing costs, reduce costs per lead, and ultimately, costs per sales.

2. Serve as a Newsroom

The PR department spends a lot of time chasing down the industry media or traditional media, trying to get them to talk about your latest product or service. The problem is, the media isn’t always willing to listen, or they can only publish on their own schedule, not yours. But by posting news articles to your website, you become the news source, not the traditional or industry media.

A blog will let you disseminate the latest news to your customers, helping your most loyal customers not only read what you’re up to, they can share it with their readers, which promotes your news as well. The media can use your blog as an information-gathering source as well. This lets them see what you’re doing, rather than waiting for a press release. They can find your press releases, product photos, and HD video clips, and get everything they need with ease. They can also get further information and details without calling your PR person while she’s on vacation and unavailable.

3. Sell to New Customers

Corporate blogging can greatly benefit the sales department, because salespeople can talk about the benefits of the new product, use blog posts to answer frequently asked sales questions, and preemptively overcome any objections potential customers may have.

While this won’t answer every question and objection for every customer, you’ll find that it cuts down on the time per sale. When I started selling on the Internet in the late-90s, I found I had cut my time per sales call down from 40 minutes to 10 minutes just because of the information I was putting on my website.

Again, this is where video demonstrations can be invaluable to potential customers. This also helps improve search engine rankings, so your site is more easily found during web searches, which means more customers could find you, which in turn means means more sales.

4. Provide 24/7 Customer Service

If you have a product or service that has frequent questions, don’t just rely on an FAQ section. Turn your blog into a knowledge center, and ask your customer service reps to write posts that answer those frequent questions. Make them as easy to find as possible (proper keyword tagging, links from the FAQ page, or even listing them in your “popular posts.”

Ask other customers to leave comments on individual posts about different fixes and solutions they’ve found as well. Incorporate their answers into the official blog posts to continue the discussion, and to make your customers feel like they’re contributing.

Finally, customers can search your website and find in-depth answers to questions they have. This saves phone calls about basic constantly-asked questions, which means you can help reduce customer service costs.

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New Twitter Tool, Twylah, Promises Huge Things for Social Media

Last Friday I tweeted: “I’m easily impressed. I’m not easily flabbergasted. @kabaim just flabbergasted me. Follow him and ask how he did it.”

Screenshot of my Twylah page. Click to see a bigger version.

@kabaim is Eric Kim, founder and CEO of Twylah, the new Twitter tool that Eric says is going to change the way we use Twitter. Twylah (@Twylah)does all these amazing things. So many of them, in fact, that I’ve probably forgotten a few them here.

Imagine going to a website that’s laid out like a magazine theme for a blog. On that page are your tweets, categorized by the topics you tweet about most. There, a visitor can see those categories, and read more tweets within each of them. The layout page will pull out any photos you’ve included with your tweets, and then organize the rest in reverse chronological order.

This does a number of things for you, for the reader, even for search engine optimization.

    • It lets visitors experience your tweets visually, rather than seeing an entire timeline. Don’t like one particular category, like your 90 minute ongoing discussion with your project team about where to have lunch? Replace it with one you prefer. Want to highlight a Twitter topic from two months ago? Drop a less interesting one and replace it with the old topic.

  • It can pull in tweets from weeks, or even months ago. This gives life to your tweets, beyond the typical 1-hour life expectancy that our tweets usually have.
  • Each Twylah page is a real web page. The links on them are shortened using bit.ly, which means they’re not only trackable, but they even count as backlinks to your real site. This will be a big help for anyone who needs an SEO boost.
  • You can direct people to your Twylah page instead of your Twitter profile page, giving people an expanded view of your bio. Now people can see if you’re a real person, and if you talk about what you claim to talk about.
  • People can even follow you directly from Twylah, rather than jumping back to your Twitter page to follow you.

 

These are all pretty cool features, and based on my scribbled notes, there’s a lot of amazing stuff that Twylah is going to do.

But, there are three things that social media marketers and practitioners need to take note of, because these things are going to be H-U-G-Efor social media professionals. Of course, these will not be included in the initial rollout of Twylah, but Eric expects them to be available around 6 weeks later. (I hope I didn’t just jinx that.)

Further down my Twylah page.
  • Users will be able to subscribe to a person’s categories of tweets. For example, if you’re following Douglas Karr, but only want to read his tweets about the Marketing Technology Blog radio show, you can subscribe to that category. Here’s the even cooler part: Those tweets will be emailed to you as a newsletter. Subscribe to several people and their categories for a bigger newsletter, and read their interesting tweets at your leisure.
  • Twylah will have an analytics package. Not only can you see how many times your stuff was retweeted, or how often you tweeted about certain topics/categories, but you can see how many people engaged with your tweets — retweeting, clicking links, etc. For example, if you tweet about the Android phone, you can also see the engagement with those tweets has gone up. If you also tweet about the latest Twitter meme, you may see that your engagement went down for that topic. Translation: You can adjust the topics, and even time, of your tweets accordingly, based on the engagement of your tweets by your followers.
  • Twylah’s analytics will also tell you what you need to tweet about and when, to help your engagement improve. Twylah will actually help you figure out when most of your network is actually using Twitter, and what sort of tweets interest them the most. What’s cool: This is especially useful for people who are very particular about following people with certain backgrounds, such as book marketers trying to build a following of independent bookstores.
  • Twylah will eventually aggregate the total engagement of different topics. Imagine being able to know which of Twitter’s trending topics are actually engaging the readers. Maybe the new iPhone 5 is one of the trending topics in July, and 20% of the people are engaging with those tweets. As an iPhone marketer, you would then know that you need to tweet more about the iPhone with links to important information, like nearest retail location.

A lot of these way cool Twylah features are still in the Alpha stage, while Eric and his wife, Kelly, are working feverishly to roll the beta out in the middle of February. If you want to be a part of the beta, go to Twylah.com and register. Also, ask Eric for a personal demonstration of Twylah.

You’ll be flabbergasted. I know I was.

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Search Engine Optimization is NOT Gaming the System

I’ve heard the question so many times, I want to shout at something: “Isn’t SEO just gaming the system?”

Andrew Hanelly wrote a great post for SocialMediaExplorer.com about why search engine optimization would be important even if the search engines stopped running.

And he makes a solid argument for why we should practice SEO techniques, even if we’re not actually trying to win search.

But I want to respond to the people who think SEO is somehow distasteful, or even cheating. Those critics and nay-sayers who think SEO is “just gaming the system.”

No, it’s not. It’s participating in the system that’s already in place.

First of all, this is the system. You go to a search engine, you search for something like “Italian wedding soup recipes” or “how to repair a bicycle tire.” The search engine tries to deliver what you want, because it knows what it should deliver. It looks for certain clues, like the title of a website — “1,001 Italian Wedding Soup Recipes” — or keywords in the body copy, and gives you the results that it thinks will most effectively meet your requirements. That’s the system. If you want to succeed in the system, you have to do the things that tell the search engines you can provide exactly what the users are looking for.

Second, the search engines can tell if a site isn’t very useful. It gets rid of sites that are pretty much useless. So even if someone wanted to game the system, if they’re not providing useful or valuable content, the site will soon be dropped when no one visits it, so the system weeds out anyone who isn’t giving users the things they’re looking for.

Third, using black hat SEO tricks is gaming the system. It’s cheating, because it uses tricks that have been banned by the search engines. Using tiny text or invisible text to cram keywords onto a single page is cheating. Building link farms with thousands of links on a single page is cheating. People who do that are immediately banished from the index, and will never show up on the search engine results. So the system eliminates cheaters and Internet ne’er-do-wells.

Search engine optimization is just the way Internet marketing is done. It’s no more gaming the system than buying a targeted direct mail list, or translating a website into Spanish to reach Hispanic customers. There’s nothing wrong with it, and people are going to continue to use it, because it works.

Even the people who think “gaming the system” is somehow wrong use their own life optimization techniques without batting an eye.

Would you turn in a half-finished crappy resume, because writing a good resume is “gaming the system?” Would you submit an RFP that didn’t meet all the requirements, because turning in what you’re asked for is “gaming the system?” Is practicing for a sales presentation gaming the system?

Of course not. So why is search engine optimization — a common business practice — somehow gaming the system, when that’s the only system that’s available?

Until you find a viable alternative, this is the only system we’ve got.

Photo credit: VizzzualDotCom (Flickr)