Expectations

Washington, DC-based freelance writer Dan Bailes contributed today's post. His clients include the MacArthur Foundation, National Geographic, the Smithsonian and the State Department. Between assignments, Dan explores storytelling through his blog, The Vision Thing.

We make assumptions all the time.

At a meeting we might say "yes" to an idea, a project or a goal, but what do we expect with that "yes?" We might assume we're all on the same page—but is that really true?

On the road to success, the easiest way to stumble is to ignore expectations.

We often run into unspoken expectations when we're asked to create something specific, like a report, a video or an event. Since expectations are rarely expressed, they don't come to the fore until you present your work. Then you might hear: "Oh, that's not what I had in mind at all."

We can have a conversation, agree on goals, move a project forward, and still hit a brick wall because we haven't asked key questions.

How do you tease out what your boss, client or colleague expects before you start on a project? You ask questions:

• What do you want to accomplish?
• Why are you launching this project in the first place?
• Who is the project for?
• How will the project meet unmet needs or solve a problem?
• Once this project is out there, what do you envision happening—how will people respond?

Asking the right questions up front will help you make better decisions down the road.

What's the takeaway? Don't assume—ask!

Terms of Endearment

The role terms play in the marketing mix isn't discussed outside the pages of the Harvard Business Review.

But your terms matter to prospects.

Here's a case study.

Recently, Bob (yours truly) shopped Craigslist for the services of a freelance editor, on his employer's behalf. Based on his Craigslist ad, Steven seemed a capable choice. Bob phoned Steven, described the project, and sent him background materials.

Below, verbatim, is their email exchange immediately after that call.

From Steven to Bob

I've read over the attached documents and have a good grasp on what you want in terms of the scope of the editing. I can realistically accommodate the edits for the 400 documents you've stipulated for $475 and have them ready within your two month time-frame. Or, if you'd like them ready within one month's time, I could accommodate that for $599. Just let me know which option you choose. Also, if there are any other stylistic recommendations you have for the revisions go ahead and send those over to me. I accept Google Wallet for payment. To proceed, go ahead and send your payment, via Wallet, to me and then I can confirm, put this on my schedule and get started.

From Bob to Steven

Wow, I think you are underpricing this project. A few thoughts:

• How much time do you think you’d devote to each document?
• Advance payment on line won’t work. We can pay in installments or a lump sum, but only as satisfactory work is delivered.
• Doesn’t the style guide I sent you make clear the “stylistic recommendations” desired?

From Steven to Bob

You're right. I sent you a quote meant for a different client. Realistically, I could accommodate this within 2 month's time for $3,500 or within one month's time for $3,999. However, I do not accept checks (they have that pesky ability to bounce...) and I do not do work without a payment, or at least a serious deposit, in advance. You came to me so please abide by the processes that I work by. Otherwise, I'd have to deny this request due to lack of seriousness. The only other payment methods I accept are Square Cash, Chase Quickpay or bank transfer.

As the Harvard Business Review might put it, "Steven's terms erected a considerable obstacle to Bob the Buyer's consideration."

By insisting on online prepayment, Steven demonstrated he works only with students and, perhaps, the occasional entrepreneur. He failed to grasp, in this case, his prospect represented an 88 year-old, multibillion company with customers like McDonald's and Microsoft.

The rest of their email exchange follows, again verbatim.

From Bob to Steven

No thanks, Steven.

From Steven to Bob

No skin off my nose. You're obviously a joker or a scammer. Before you waste more time trolling the Craigslist ads like a desperate prostitute, you should know that no self-respecting professional is going to be doing any work without payment upfront. Perhaps if you weren't a senior citizen you'd realize this is how commerce in the 21st century works.

Do your terms cost you customers?

How about your manners?

Ing-lish Spoken Here

Junior copywriters love to add "ing" to verbs.

Poor souls. 

No one's told them it weakens the most powerful words in our language.

In Writing Tools, Roy Peter Clark gives two reasons why "ing" sucks strength from writing:

• It adds a syllable. Simple's better. Adding syllables complicates verbs.

• It often appears in a crowd. Writers who love "ing" tack it onto every verb they use. The words quickly begin to resemble each other.

In a 2002 article in The New York Times, linguist Geoffrey Nunberg first named the latter habit "ing-lish."

The junior copywriter's defense: "Marketing copy breaks the rules. Ing-lish is fine. No, it's even better. It's perfect."

Lovers of ing-lish think "ing" strengthens every verb by adding a sense of the here and now; of progress; of the urgent.

But, before you decide whether ing-lish is perfect, consider a few alternate taglines:

• Avis. We're trying harder.

• Nike. Just doing it.

• California Milk Processors. Getting milk?

• M&M: Melting in your mouth, not in your hands.

• State of New York. I'm loving New York.

• Burger King. Having it your way.

• Hamlet. Being, or not being, that is the question.

NOTE: Thanks go to graphic designer Clif Dickens for his "honest" tagline above. Enjoy more honest taglines here.

The Coming Content Arms Race

Marketing strategist Mark Schaefer coined the dystopian term "content shock" to describe audiences' adverse reaction to content marketers' handiwork.

If you've felt a little content shock now and then, seek shelter now.

A "content arms race" is about to commence, Schaefer says.

By 2018, we'll be awash in content, as marketers' annual spend on web ads catches up with their $215 billion spend on TV ads.

Besides flooding the web with content, the spending shift will usher in an arms race, whose victors will be deep-pocket companies.

Small-time players, who until now have considered content their secret weapon against major advertisers, will be buried.

"Those with more money generally are in the best position to create more and better content, as well as pay to have it promoted and distributed," Schaefer says. "Will they always win? No. All things be equal, will they usually kill off the smaller guys? Yes. History bears this out."

Schaefer points to Chipotle's content marketing efforts as proof. "That kind of multi-million-dollar quality is not sustainable for most businesses and will hasten the exit of marginal content producers."

Meet the New Marketer

Most content marketers "live in a delusional bubble of branding hype," claims web designer Gerry McGovern.

He's proven his point with his delete key, boosting clients' sales by expunging 90% of the content on their websites.

"Organizations in general publish far too much of ego, vanity content that’s high on hyperbole and low on information," McGovern writes in his blog New Thinking.

Today's marketer crows about his inestimable edge over old-schoolers like Don Draper.

Today's marketer brings a data-driven, likable, personalized, "un-marketing" approach to the craft.

Yet fewer than 10% of B2B executives say they trust web content, according to a study by the CMO Council.

The revolution brought about by todays 's new marketer, so far, reminds me of lyrics by The Who: "Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss."

The Danger in Dangling

And this news just in from TheAnimalRescueSite.com...

While Shooting This Video, A Homeless Dog Comes On Set And Literally Adopts The Singer!

A clear case of the "dangling" modifier.

A modifier dangles when it isn't pinned to the noun it's supposed to describe.

When Groucho dangles a modifier, audiences laugh ("I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I'll never know.").

When an unwitting writer does it, audiences scratch their heads:

• Before rebooting the computer, the power should be turned off.

• The employees were told they had been fired by HR.

• By inserting keywords into the text, statistics show that SEO improves.

• Though only 14 years old, the company made Han a developer.

• Having driven 20 years without an accident, the CEO welcomed Ruth onto the stage to receive the award.

Beware of those doggone dangling modifiers!

Prevent Slow Burn

In the 1930s, film-goers loved comedian Edgar Kennedy for his mastery of the "slow burn."

When thwarted by a foe, Kennedy would glower, then slowly rub his hand over his face as he fought off—and inexorably succumbed to—his fury.

I find myself doing the slow burn whenever I encounter a self-indulgent blogger; the writer who, rather than informing me from the get-go, drowns me in silly eyewash.

A prime example can be found in a recent post on Hubspot, "Why Blog? The Benefits of Blogging for Business and Marketing."

The author uses 118 words to tell us why she's telling us what she plans to tell us. Her long warm-up leaves me cold:

I had a co-worker email me the other day asking for a blog post about the benefits of business blogging. "It's for a friend," she said.

Sure it was.

I told her I'd shoot over one of our up-to-date blog posts about why businesses should blog and... I couldn't find one. Whoops. Quite the meta mistake.

So I'm doing it now. If you're trying to explain one of the core tenets of inbound—business blogging—to your boss, a coworker, your mom at Thanksgiving, whomever, then send them this post. I hope it helps. For even more reasons why you should blog for business and marketing—and how to get started—download our free e-book here.

Please, spare readers false starts—especially jejune ones.

Remember, only you can prevent slow burn.

6 Energy-Saving Tips for Communicators

Self-taught his trade, Jack London said he discovered how to "transmute thought, beauty, sensation and emotion into black symbols on white paper" from Herbert Spencer's now-neglected 1852 essay The Philosophy of Style.

From Spencer, London "learned that the right symbols were the ones that would require the expenditure of the minimum of my reader’s brain energy, leaving the maximum of his brain energy to realize and enjoy the content of my mind, as conveyed to his mind.”

Foreseeing today's attention-deficient audiences, Spencer preached "the importance of economizing the reader's or hearer's attention, to so present ideas that they may be apprehended with the least possible mental effort."

"A reader or listener has at each moment but a limited amount of mental power available," Spencer says. Most of that energy is consumed when the brain takes in the written or spoken symbols, leaving little to spare for comprehension.

Spencer insists, "the more time and attention it takes to receive and understand each sentence, the less time and attention can be given to the contained idea; and the less vividly will that idea be conceived."

To compensate for audiences' sparse mental energy, writers and speakers should economize; or, as Spencer suggests, follow "the law of easy apprehension."

I've boiled his law down to six tips:

1. Avoid long, Latinate words. Use instead the short Anglo-Saxon ones we learned as kids. Use Latinate words only to express big ideas, because "a voluminous, mouth-filling epithet is, by its very size, suggestive of largeness or strength," and "allows the hearer's consciousness a longer time to dwell upon the quality predicated."

2. Use words that sound like their meanings. "Both those directly imitative, as splash, bang, whiz, roar; and those analogically imitative, as rough, smooth, keen, blunt, thin, hard, crag; have a greater or less likeness to the things symbolized; and by making on the senses impressions allied to the ideas to be called up, they save part of the effort needed to call up such ideas, and leave more attention for the ideas themselves."

3. Use specific, instead of generic, words. "If, by employing a specific term, an appropriate image can be at once suggested, an economy is achieved, and a more vivid impression produced.

4. Watch your word sequence. The order of your words should allow readers' or listeners' brains to process each as it arrives, with minimum effort. Put subjects in front of predicates, and give priority to big ideas by placing them at the front of the sentence. "The right formation of a picture will be facilitated by presenting its elements in the order in which they are wanted; even though the mind should do nothing until it has received them all."

5. Place subordinate parts of a sentence ahead of the main part. "Containing, as the subordinate proposition does, some qualifying or explanatory idea, its priority prevents misconception of the principal one; and therefore saves the mental effort needed to correct such misconception."

6. Place related words and expressions near one another. "The longer the time that elapses between the mention of any qualifying member and the member qualified, the longer must the mind be exerted in carrying forward the qualifying member ready for use. And the more numerous the qualifications to be simultaneously remembered and rightly applied, the greater will be the mental power expended, and the smaller the effect produced."

Don't have the energy to read Herbert Spencer's The Philosophy of Style?

Good news: there's a free audiobook.

Lean In

Businesses sink billions into "designing out waste" and "building lean in," but spend nothing to discourage verbosity.

They'd do their bottom lines a big favor by sending every employee the link to John McPhee's latest article in The New Yorker, "Omission."

McPhee clarifies why lean writing is good writing: it's what's left out that counts.

Lean writing comes from heavy editing, which McPhee compares to shortening a train. 

"The idea is to remove words in such a manner that no one would notice that anything has been removed," he says. "It’s as if you were removing freight cars here and there in order to shorten a train—or pruning bits and pieces of a plant for reasons of aesthetics."

Not only editors, but artists, designers and comedians understand that, always, less is more.

Hemingway called it the Iceberg Theory:

"If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.”

Emotion Trumps Promotion

Think B2B branding's about promoting product features? 

Think again.

Research firm CEB recently asked 3,000 B2B buyers whether they can tell one company's brands from another's, based on product features.

86% cannot.

More importantly, CEB's study revealed B2B buyers have stronger emotional ties to business brands than their B2C cousins have to consumer brands.

Why? 

Because buying the right brand can make them heroes; and buying the wrong one can make them unemployed.

In fact, for B2B buyers, "business value" has only half the importance "personal value" does, the study shows.

B2B buyers, in addition, are eight times more likely to pay a premium price for brands that offer "personal value."

A Farewell to Apps

It was a pleasant cat café, bright and clean and friendly, and I took my tablet out of my brown and saffron backpack and started to write. I was writing about the next all-hands meeting and the email was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it. I did not look up nor know anything about the time nor think where I was nor drink my mochaccino. Then the email was finished and I read it and saw that it was a good email but very long.

A girl came in the cat café and sat at the table next to mine. She was very pretty with a face as clear and clean as an iPhone box if they packaged iPhones in skin and painted the logo on with crimson lipstick freshened by a cool autumn rain. She smiled at me with her gently modeled face and her eyes looked inquisitive. "Using the app?" she said.

"To pay for my coffee?"

"No, The Hemingway app. It edits your writing."

"It's news to me."

"It cuts dead words from your writing and highlights passive constructions, so you write with the power and clarity of Papa, only faster and easier and without the beard. It costs only $9.99."

"I'll be sure to read the reviews."

She nodded and then I went back to my email and read it a second time and felt sad because it was very long. I clicked on Safari to download the app and launched the beach ball of death showing the wi-fi was broken and all the sadness of the big city filled me suddenly, with the streets turned to wet blackness by a cold winter rain and the storefronts all dark as if they were once Radio Shacks and Borders and Blockbusters and A&Ps and I thought my writing was slow and bloated and perhaps out of date like those stores.

I finished reading the last paragraph and looked up and looked for the girl and she had gone. I hope she's not saddled with student debt like one of the mules we took up the mountainside at Caporetto, I thought. But I felt sad. I shut down my tablet and put it in my backpack and said psh psh psh to a black and white tuxedo kitty that came and restored my dignity.

How to Present Perfectly

Great speakers love triads.

Gaelic bards loved them—because they can be readily memorized.

Roman orators loved them—because they structure ideas.

Modern leaders love them—because they inspire.

In their new book, Communicate to Influence, speech coaches Ben and Kelly Decker urge execs to use triads whenever they prepare a presentation, calling triads the "perfect framework" for sales pitches, product launches, motivational talks and business briefings.

In three short strokes, triads create patterns and rhythms, which makes them inherently more intelligible than longer lists of things.

Triads are also more persuasive and memorable than long data dumps. Just think of the many you remember:

• Veni, vidi, vici
• Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears!
• Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness
• Liberté, égalité, fraternité
• Government of the people, by the people, for the people
• The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth
• Truth, justice and the American way
• Stop, drop and roll
• Wine, women and song
• Location, location, location

As writing instructor Roy Peter Clark says, "In the anti-math of writing, the number three is greater than four. The mojo of three offers a greater sense of completeness than four or more."

Roll Over, Richard Branson

Real brand spokespeople can't hold a candle to imaginary ones for tugging heartstrings.

Personification, hypnotizing us since Homer's day, attributes human qualities to animals, abstractions and inanimate objects.

Not only do educators and entertainers like Sesame Street, Disney and Pixar tap into personification, but marketers bank on it to spur customers' cravings for parity products.

Personification is a breed of metaphor, and the DNA of every marketer's imagination, says marketing professor Stephen Brown.

"Our very understanding of the world is reliant on figurative thinking," he writes. "Metaphors are both unavoidable and invaluable. They are the bits, the bytes, the binary code of the imagination and the crucible of today’s creative economy.

The most powerful metaphors symbolize human embodiment, sensations and emotions, Brown says.

"Hence, we sniff out market opportunities, listen to the voice of the customer, keep in touch with technological developments, spot yawning gaps in the market and lament the chronic myopia of top management. Our basic worldview is personified, in other words, and marketing’s root metaphors reflect this fact."

A sampling of famous personifications includes:

• Mr. Peanut
• Mr. Moneybags
• Mr. Clean
• Michelin Man
• Marlboro Man 
• Uncle Ben
• Aunt Jemima 
• Betty Crocker
• Peter Pan
• Californian Raisins
• Pillsbury Doughboy
• Jolly Green Giant
• Keebler Elves
• Snap, Crackle and Pop
• Google Android 
• Budweiser Clydesdales
• Tony the Tiger
• Dove Soap
• Red Lobster
• Angry Birds
• Playboy Bunny

NOTE: Thanks to photographer and video producer Ann Ramsey for suggesting this post; she personifies creativity.

3 Words You Should Never Ever Use

We reward disruptors like Uber and Airbnb for obliterating needless stuff.

You can reward audiences by eliminating these three needless words from your writing.

That

Writers too often use “that” without purpose. Whenever you use the word, ask yourself whether you can ditch it; chances are, you can. I think that you will find that our prices are competitive becomes I think you will find our prices are competitive.

Very

Writers hope to intensify words by slapping "very" in front of them; but the word adds no value. Our CSRs are always professional reads better than Our CSRs are always very professional.

Awesome

Overuse has sullied “awesome.” The word once meant "inspiring" or "daunting," and was reserved for descriptions of mountains and miracles, not candies and cupcakes. So avoid it. Our cloud suite is awesome is less credible—and more cheesy—than Our cloud suite is first rate. (Least cheesy might be Our cloud suite is comprehensive, reliable and easy to use.)

But never say never: needless words can enhance your writing.

E. B. White, a crusader for concision, once advised a fellow writer:

"It comes down to the meaning of ‘needless.’ Often a word can be removed without destroying the structure of a sentence, but that does not necessarily mean that the word is needless or that the sentence has gained by its removal. If you were to put a narrow construction on the word ‘needless,’ you would have to remove tens of thousands of words from Shakespeare, who seldom said anything in six words that could be said in twenty. Writing is not an exercise in excision, it’s a journey into sound. How about ‘tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow?’ One tomorrow would suffice, but it’s the other two that have made the thing immortal."

Now that is very awesome!

Good Storytelling isn't Measured in Words

When it's concise, even long-form writing seems short.

Magazine writing proves the point.

Nonfiction writer Joan Didion mastered concision by writing for magazines like Vogue, Mademoiselle, and Life for decades, says Louis Menand in The New Yorker.

Didion, the "quintessential magazine writer," drew readers into her stories by leaving things out (the fiction writer's trick).

She developed "methods of economizing the exposition and managing the reader’s experience, ways of getting the reader to participate in the job of making sense of whatever it is that the writer is trying to think through," Menand says.

Didion mastered concision because she was forced to. When a writer works for a magazine, Menand says, her ability to write concisely gives her a Darwinian edge.

"The job of the magazine writer is never to give readers a reason to stop before they reach the end. The No. 1 sin in print journalism is repetition. Pages are money; editorial space is finite. Writers who waste it don’t last. Conditions demand a willingness to compress and a talent for concision."

Can Your Brand Pass the Cool-Test?

Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart defined his pornography-test by saying, "I know it when I see it."

Consumers also rely on Stewart's standard when judging whether a brand is cool, according to Professors Margaret Campbell and Caleb Warren.

Their article in the Journal of Consumer Research, "What Makes Things Cool," pinpoints five cool-tests for a brand:

• Cool is whatever consumers think is cool
• Cool is distinct from simply likable
• Cool expresses self-styled independence
• Cool grants social standing
• Cool varies by consumers' ages

Because cool is subjective, it's hard for brand marketers to anticipate consumer response to their products and promotions. 

But, based on their studies, the professors believe there are three ways for a brand to pass the cool-tests. A cool brand must:

• Portray itself as rebellious, but in a nice way (endorsing personal, but never political, revolution)
• Associate with cool spokespeople
• Introduce innovative products and product packaging

Can your brand pass the cool-test?

A $49 Cure for Tone Deafness

Tone deaf? 

Well, good news: there's an app for that.

For only $49 a month, Crystal will provide you the empathy you sorely lack.

A Gmail add-on, Crystal scrapes your colleagues' social media posts; analyzes the posts; and attaches to each individual one of 64 different personality types.

Then, whenever you craft an email, the app prompts you to revise your words and ideas, so they sync with the reader's personality type.

Autocorrect, meet Myers-Briggs.

Crystal also suggests when to tighten your message; toss in an emoji; or use a little humor to soften things.

The end result? All your emails turn out more pleasant and pithy.

Crystal's developers claim their algorithm assigns personality types with 80% accuracy.

You can boost that accuracy, too, by answering multiple-choice questions about a colleague (such as, "If there were a conflict at work, how would he or she react?").

Please Kill the Zombies

Clichés are writing's walking dead.

You can pretend they're harmless, but soon they'll take over—and come back to bite you.

A scrupulous writer kills clichés when they begin to pop up in her work.

"A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions," says George Orwell in his 1946 essay Politics and the English Language:

• What am I trying to say?
• What words will express it?
• What image will make it clear?
• Is the image fresh?

A scrupulous writer will ask, in addition:

• Could I say it in fewer words?
• Have I said anything avoidably ugly?

"But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble," Orwell says. 

"You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you—even think your thoughts for you, to certain extent—and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself."

Before you click publish, do readers—and yourself—a favor.

Please kill the zombies.

Alpha Dogs

I'm as much a fan of Larry Page, CEO of newly formed Alphabet, as the next guy.

Without his efforts, I'd still have to haul around dictionaries and encyclopedias; and I'd be writing blog posts with software other than Blogger.

But Larry overstates and overwrites, as shown in his August 10 letter to investors.

While exemplary in tone, the letter is littered with dogs.

Borrowing from some new-age infomercial, he tells investors (twice) that he's "super excited" about Google's prospects, and "really excited" to announce Alphabet.

Who wouldn't be? The reorganization lets him put "tremendous focus on the extraordinary opportunities" at Google, and lets him continue to work alongside its new CEO, a diversion Larry is "tremendously enjoying."

And why not? Google's new CEO brings about "amazing progress" and "incredible growth."

It all adds up to a "very exciting new chapter" in Google's life.

And it all spells "hooey."

Overwriting betrays under-thinking.

Overstating strains credulity.

We're All Water

Streetwise Americans—my spouse among them—used to vie for MBA degrees in international marketing.

Then globalization happened, and there were no international marketers, only marketers.

The value of those MBAs evaporated, and the people holding them had to find new ways to distinguish themselves.

Marketing Week columnist Mark Ritson predicts the same fate's about to befall anyone claiming pedigree in digital marketing.

"Digital has changed the world so much that it has become the world," Ritson writes.

The very word, in fact, is a "dodo," Ritson says—doomed to disappear from business's vocabulary.

There are no international marketers, there are no digital marketers.

There are only marketers.

As Yoko Ono sang, "We're all water in this vast, vast ocean. Someday we'll evaporate together."