The Department of Redundancy Department

As an extra bonus, she presented me with the free gift of a tuna fish.

— George Carlin

Comedian George Carlin once wrote an essay that challenged readers to "Count the Superfluous Redundant Pleonastic Tautologies."

As his title suggests, Carlin was spoofing the use of redundant phrases, or pleonasm (from the Greek for "too much").

Pleonasm is fine, if you're Shakespeare (who called Caesar's stabbing by Brutus, "The most unkindest cut of all").

It's not, if you're not.

A micro moment sounds silly, not brilliant. So does a digital app.

We don't see it as such, because pleonasm is so common in English.

Every day we encounter it in phrases like armed gunman, convicted felon, famous celebrity, head honcho, unsolved mystery, foreign import, backup copy, safe haven, ATM machine, PIN number, complete satisfaction, totally sure, exact same, overly paranoid and 100% right.

Silly as they are, we don't give those phrases a second thought.

What Can You Learn from a UX Writer?

With all the talk about UX strategy, it's timely to ask, "What can you learn from a UX writer?

A lot, it turns out. 

UX writers are wordsmiths who, in the words of Google's HR department, "advocate for design and help shape product experiences by crafting copy that helps users complete the task at hand."

In simpler terms, they write product instructions.

UX writers preach a 5-point gospel:

• Say it simply. "The words you use need to be as easy to understand as a green light," says UX writer Ben Barone-Nugent. Users won't pause to ponder complex sentences. You need to let them barrel through.
  
  
• Say it economically. Brevity is simplicity's kissing cousin, and comes from omitting the obvious. "I happen to know that it's an actual fact that Procurement orders extra accessories the department doesn't need at least on a weekly basis" simply means "Procurement orders unneeded accessories every week."
  
  
• Use graphics. "You want your users to be able to wield your product without even thinking," Barone-Nugent says. "This means you need to help them move beyond the words you write." The right graphics will do the trick.
  
  
• Focus on impact. "Content doesn’t exist, only experiences do," Barone-Nugent says. Words and sentences aren't important. Instead of calling attention to themselves, they should "meld with your product and go unnoticed."
  
  
• Test. Don't roll out writing without an advance review. Ask others to read your writing before you send it to the intended audience.

Size Matters Not

Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you?

― Yoda

Content marketers, make a New Year's resolution to ignore the idiots who tell you content length matters.

The thousands of snake-oil salesmen like James Scherer who promise, "Scientific research tells us how to write the perfect blog article," leaning on vendor data that "proves" long (1,600-word) posts yield higher rankings, greater sharing, and larger readership.

Baloney.

It's quality alone that counts.

Call Me

Nearly all B2B marketers (94%) plan to use content in 2017, according to a new survey by SnapChat.

But 40% lack the resources to create enough content to make any difference to their success.

B2B marketers have flocked to content because it works.

In 2016, as a result of using content, 50% of B2B marketers saw open rates increase by at least 20%; and 65% saw click-through rates increase by more than 5%. Substantial improvements!

B2B marketers' failure to produce more content puzzles me.

Time and again, I see them waste good content—or, more accurately, ignore opportunities to extend or repurpose that content, and profit from what they already have on hand.

The remedy's pretty simple.

Pick up the phone and just call me. You don't have to go without.

Happy New Year!

The Mighty Copywriter's New Rule for Gender Marking

Among the "lessons" recited at church on Christmas Eve was the annunciation to the shepherds.

My wife complained on the sidewalk outside about the lesson's loss in euphony.

"Glory to God in the highest," the angel proclaimed, "and on earth peace, good will toward all people."

King James had been neutered.

The inclusive "good will toward all people" sounds wrong for a reason: it's too stately. "Good will toward men"—like a shepherd—is plain and unadorned.

"Prose is architecture, " Hemingway said, "and the Baroque is over."

The King James editorial crew should have let it stand, as the US Navy has sagely done, for example, with "messman," letting it stand over the gender-neutral "culinary specialist."

And so here is The Mighty Copywriter's new rule for gender marking:

If it ain't baroque, don't fix it.

Just Add Water

Once in a while, people complain about Goodly—namely, that my posts are obscure; that, in my effort to be terse, I ask readers to connect dots that can't be connected.

To those folks I reply: I offer not sermons, but summaries.

I do so because most other bloggers write long, offhand posts. They do so, mainly, to save themselves time, or to satisfy Google's absurd preference for 1,800-word articles.

That serves their purposes well, I'm sure. I'm not sure it serves yours.

Offering summaries, on the other hand, is my way to be different—brief and to the point.

Short story writer Raymond Carver nailed it. “Get in, get out. Don’t linger. Go on.”

I hope you'll think of my posts as bullion cubes. There's a whole cup of soup condensed into these tiny foil packages.

Unwrap what's inside.  

And just add water.

How to Make an Evidence-based Ask

Social science findings should guide fundraising appeals, says Esther James, "The Happy Fundraiser."

James sifted the peer-reviewed papers of social scientists throughout the English-speaking world.

She uncovered 10 tips for forceful fundraising letters:

1. Always tell one beneficiary's story, both in your letters and follow-up materials—especially your thank-you notes.
   
   
2. Include at least one "sad-faced" photo of the beneficiary. Avoid group shots, because they'll trigger "compassion fatigue."
   
   
3. Describe the consequence of inaction. When St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital told the story of a baby it treated for leukemia, donors were informed 70% of the other babies with the disease would die without their help.
   
   
4. Ask for money. And do it all year.
   
   
5. Partner with a foundation, corporation or major donor to offer a matching gift. It need not be dollar-for-dollar, but it must be at least $10 to work.
   
   
6. Leverage social pressure. Spur donors by saying “people like you gave $_____."
   
   
7. Test different forms of social pressure. Donors respond well when their identities (gender, race, Zip Code, etc.) match.
   
   
8. Spend more on letters for new donors, less on letters for repeat donors.
   
   
9. Send "signals of trustworthiness." There are many. Longevity. Prominent board members' names. Grants received. Affiliations with other trusted organizations. Audited financials. The breakout of your administrative and fundraising costs. Lists of your past achievements. Testimonials. Media mentions. And charity watchdog ratings.
   
   
10. Talk up your awesomeness when writing to big donors; don't when writing to others.

PS: Esther James is my daughter. For more fundraising tips, follow her blog.

The Content Marketer's Dilemma

If I'd asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.

— Henry Ford

What's a content marketer to do?

Scrape the web for feedback to create content customers search for? Or create content based on your vision of a better future?

We all know the merits of creating content based on web feedback.

Study upon study shows customers begin their "buying journey" by Googling familiar keywords... prefer those brands whose content they find... and find that content because it's stuffed with those keywords and conforms to their notions of a "buyer's guide."

And we all know the pitfalls of creating content based on a vision.

That kind of content isn't stuffed with all the keywords customers know and doesn't otherwise meet their expectations of a "buyer's guide." So they never find it; or, if they do, don't click on it. Like the tree that falls in the empty forest, content based on a vision makes no sound.

How do you create content?

B2B Marketers are Freaking Out

B2B Content has reached petrifying proportions. Marketers are freaking out.

As Rebecca Spary says in Smart Selling Tools, "the current content cycle is fundamentally broken."

Like food in America, millions of tons of fresh content are being shipped every day, only to wind up in the landfill (or what Gary Slack calls the "brandfill").

Salespeople—three in four, anyway—blame marketers: they produce content that looks tasty, but is irrelevant to buyers. In reality, that assessment is baseless, because nine in 10 companies don't own a searchable CMS. No one can search for content based on relevance.

And it doesn't help that most salespeople are numbskulls. Only:

• 62% understand their own companies' products
• 25% understand their buyers' businesses
• 22% can position themselves as trusted advisors
• 21% believe they have relevant content to share with buyers

CMOs are supposed to align the two parties.

That's no mean feat, considering each is rewarded for different things (marketers for accumulating vanity metrics like traffic, likes and followers; salespeople for closing business at any cost).

Until CMOs can hold both parties to new standards—marketers for their efficient contribution to pipeline and sales for closing profitable deals—little will change.

5 How To’s in a [Blog Post] w/Photo. For Who? Content Marketers!

You've just encountered a viral headline. That's if you buy marketing maven Arnie Kuenn's tips in Chief Content Officer.

And it took a mere 30 seconds to write!

You can write a viral headline, too, Kuenn says. Simply:

• Imply the post is a list
• Include "who,” "photo," and "how to"
• Make the headline no longer than 65 characters
• Include your audience's favorite keyword(s), and
• Describe the content that follows in a bracket ([slideshow], [blog post], [infographic], etc.)

Got it? Groovy! Now, I have a bridge that might interest you...

Crap Content Portends Crap Customer Care

A friend once told me he paid a call on a prospect while battling a sudden-onset flu. My friend was ushered into the executive's office and promptly threw up on the man's desk. Not surprisingly, he didn't close the sale.

When you publish crap content—ungrammatical, tortuous and jargon-heavy—you kill sales, just as surely as my friend did.

Crap content portends crap customer care.

Need proof? Then consider the following, courtesy of the crap-content creators behind United Airlines' blog, Hub:

Top 5 things to know about the United Polaris experience

We're very excited about our brand new international premium cabin service—United Polaris first and business class—which offers comfort and relaxation for restful sleep in the sky. To make sure you know what to expect with United Polaris travel, see below for a few key reminders. You can learn more at united.com/Polaris.

1. Service


2. Lounge


3. Seat


4. Amenities


5. Cabin names


What makes this crap content?

• Prolixity. Why does the blogger use superlatives to excess? He's not "excited," but "very excited." The service isn't "new," but "brand new." It doesn't provide "comfort," but "comfort and relaxation." The blogger doesn't offer "reminders," but "key reminders."
  
  
• Jargon. The blogger packs the 180-word post with jargon like "long haul," "roll out" and "soft-launched."
  
  
• Nonsense. Planes fly, but since when do "seats take flight?" What the hell are "sleep-focused amenities?" And who really cares that United has renamed its first-class cabins?

Crap-content creators like United's will say: Who cares? It's only marketing content: here today, gone tomorrow. Their indifference reflects the brand's values to a T.

They'd be well served to take the advice of critic Alexander Woolcott:

I count it a high honor to belong to a profession in which the good men write every paragraph, every sentence, every line, as lovingly as any Addison or Steele, and do so in full regard that by tomorrow it will have been burned, or used, if at all, to line a shelf.

Lunch-pail Mentality

Playing the game for money produces the proper professional attitude.
It inculcates the lunch-pail mentality.

— Steven Pressfield

You can spot a pro a mile away. She carries a lunch pail.

The dilettante, on the other hand, carries a bag from Pret.

The pro shows up, rain or shine, and works her plan.

She persists.

The dilettante sits and waits—often in meetings—for the Muses (or the cavalry) to arrive.

He resists.

I love the name of conference planner Warwick Davies' company, The Event Mechanic! It perfectly—and authentically—describes Davies' lunch-pail attitude.

Journalist James J. Kilpatrick once likened the professional writer to a carpenter:

Our task is deceptively simple. It is as deceptively simple as the task of carpenters, who begin by nailing one board to another board. Then other boards are nailed to other boards, and, lo, we have a house. Just so, as writers we put one word after another word, and we connect those words with other words, and, lo, we have a news story or an editorial.

Jack London trained himself to write for money by copying other writers' phrases into notebooks, "strong phrases, the phrases of living language, phrases that bit like acid and scorched like flame."

And journalist Hunter S. Thompson trained himself to write for a living by typing for days on end the works of Faulkner, Fitzgerald and Hemingway.

That's persistence.

No Wine before Its TIme

According to a study by Regalix, The State of B2B Content Marketing 2016, 73% of CMOs are dissatisfied with content marketing.

Crap content, of course, explains much of the dissatisfaction. Crap content won't give a brand a welcome seat at customers' tables.

CMOs' impatience explains the rest. They've spent all this dough. Where are the results?

Maybe they expect too much, too soon.

Content marketing isn't branding; but it sure as hell isn't selling, either.

To work, it takes time and amplification. Before results arrive, you have to cultivate an audience and win its trust.

Look at the number of readers you're getting. How large is your readership? How many readers are clicking from your blog to other value-added content? How many are sharing and recommending your content? If the numbers are low, you can't expect stellar results. Those take time.

So exercise some patience. Be like Orson Welles, who earned his "grocery money" in the 1970s by shooting TV commercials, the most famous of which has aged pretty well.  

In Praise of the Short Sentence

Want to release a powerful idea?

Use a short sentence.

The short sentence gains its power from its adjacency to long ones, which comprise the bulk of most any piece of writing.

Long sentences, says writing teacher Roy Peter Clark, "bring clarity, create suspense or magnify emotion."

Short ones pack punch. They're pithy, truthful, Tweetable.

Consider how our world is the better for these bantams:

• Hunger is the best sauce.
• Good is the enemy of the great.
• A little learning is a dangerous thing.
• No man is great if he thinks he is.
• Be sincere, be brief, be seated.
• You can’t always get what you want.
• Eighty percent of success is showing up.
• Easy does it.
• To finish is to win.
• Do, or do not; there is no try.

Is Your Content Fat and Soggy?

Is your content fat and soggy?

A story memo can cure it.

Professional writers use story memos to pitch ideas to editors and producers.

The brief memos answer five questions:

• Why does the story matter?
• What's the point?
• Why is the story being told?
• What does the story say about the world?
• What's the story about in a single word?

With answers to these questions, a theme emerges. That focuses the story, makes telling it easier, and serves readers a tasty treat.

Fat and soggy's fine, if you want to appear "content rich" to boobs, bosses and bots.

But crisp and thin converts customers.

Your Blog is Like Your 401(k)

Trust is built with consistency.

— Lincoln Chafee

Trend-watching corporate blogs like The Allstate Blog, GE Reports and CMO.com can lure you into mistaking your own blog for a newspaper.

But it's more like one of those ancient People magazines in mom's bathroom. Sure, the articles may be dated, but they're still worth your time.

More accurately, a corporate blog is like a 401(k). Each post is like a dollar invested. And regular posting is like the familiar investment strategy called dollar-cost averaging.

When you dollar-cost average, you stash a fixed dollar amount in your 401(k) every month. That money buys you shares at the then-current prices. When share prices decline, the money buys more of them; when prices increase, it buys fewer. But things average out—and you never need worry about "buying low and selling high." You end up with a ton of equity.

Key to dollar-cost averaging is consistency—your pledge to invest on a regular basis. You should make that same pledge to blogging. Publish consistently. Don't worry about "timing the market." In time, things will average out. And you'll earn a ton of trust.

Good Things

Good things, when short, are twice as good.

                                                           

— Baltasar Gracián, The Art of Worldly Wisdom

The Jesuits taught me, if you use a lot of words to express a thought, you're not thinking very hard.

Or you're covering your ass.

As Polonius said, "Brevity is the soul of wit."

As Dorothy Parker said, "Brevity is the soul of lingerie."

That Old Black Magic

Whoever Americans elect as president next week, I hope she has a witch as her top aide, as does South Korea's president. We're going to need that old black magic to get well.

Writers need black magic, too; and editors are its source.

In his new memoir, The Accidental Life, Terry McDonell quotes Norman Cousins, the longtime editor of Saturday Review, on the art of editing:

Nothing is more ephemeral than words. Moving them from the mind of a writer to the mind of a reader is one of the most elusive and difficult undertakings ever to challenge the human intelligence. This is what being an editor is all about.

Editors are advisers, coaches, cheerleaders, therapists, parents, midwives and—as Cousins implies—sorcerers.

They're also missionaries, as Robin Lloyd, contributing editor for Scientific American, says:

My motivation as an editor is clear, compelling communication for the reader. Delivering that is my first job. Readers are looking at every word for an excuse to bail out—to stop reading a story. My job is to prevent that and to keep them reading this story by focusing on clarity, pacing, logic, arc, and sparkling prose.

Above all, editors are match-makers, pairing willing writers with willing audiences.

That means an editor must be conversant in many fields; sense which topics are ripe for coverage; and know which ideas, words and phrases will keep readers reading.

No mean feat.

Laundry Lists Kill

Want to kill audience interest quickly? Use a laundry list.

"We think dumping the entire contents of the benefits-basket onto a reader, viewer, or listener will outpull selective choice," copywriter Herschell Gordon Lewis once said. "Not so, because emphasis becomes diluted. When you emphasize everything, you emphasize nothing."

But wait, it gets worse.

Laundry lists not only kill interest. They can kill a deal.

Good salespeople know this intuitively: If you want to kill a deal, introduce an extraneous element. Laundry lists introduce baskets of them.

Laundry lists bar interest and block deals. So avoid them.

To create a responsive ad, letter or email, choose one benefit your audience values, and subordinate the rest.

Content Marketers: Don't Take It Anymore

Content marketers: Don't be a one-hit wonder.

By repurposing your most popular piece, you can enjoy a string of hits, says Emily King on ContentMarketingInstitute.com.

Copywriters at King's B2B agency transformed "The Seven Types of B2B Copywriter," an article in the firm's newsletter, into 10 additional pieces over two years.

"We realized that this message had legs, after seeing good click-through rates," King says.

"We decided that it would be a shame to limit that message’s audience to the select (read tiny) bunch of discerning B2B marketing professionals who subscribed to our newsletter. We had to take the message wider."

By "atomizing" the article, King's agency stretched the shelf-life of the original piece, and reached audiences who prefer their content delivered through platforms other than an e- newsletter.

As a result, her agency's revenue increased 28%.

From the article, King's copywriters created:

• A blog post (a simple cut-and-paste job)
• A podcast (featuring an outside journalist)
• A board game (Funnel! The Content Marketing Strategy Game)
• A conference presentation (The 7 Types of B2B Copywriter)
• A second podcast (featuring highlights of the presentation and a slide deck)
• A second blog post (recounting the development of the board game)
• A third podcast (featuring interviews with the game creators)
• A quiz (allowing B2B copywriters to identify their types)
• An infographic (depicting the 7 types of copywriter)
• A third blog post (namely, the King wrote for ContentMarketingInstitute.com)

Chunking the original article worked, King says. "Each new effort not only garnered new interest in our idea and our business, but also brought a new audience to our related content pieces."

Try it yourself.

You don't have to be a one-hit wonder anymore.