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I'm reading a fascinating new book by historian Sean Wilentz, Bob Dylan in America.
With a nod to David Meerman Scott and Brian Halligan, there's a lesson or two for marketers in it.
All artists are sponges; great artists are sponges with vision.
Wilentz's book chronicles how Dylan devoured (and continues to devour) the sounds and words of forerunners and fellow travelers and sculpted from them his own view of contemporary America.
"He belongs to an American entertainment tradition that runs back at least as far as Daniel Decuatur Emmet (the Ohio-born, anti-slavery minstrel who wrote 'Dixie') and that Dylan helped reinvent in the subterranean Gaslight Cafe in the 1960s," Wilentz writes. "But he belongs to another tradition as well, that of Whitman, Melville, and Poe, which sees the everyday in American symbols and the symbolic in the everyday, and then tells stories about it."
The question for marketers: how does a solitary artist the likes of Dylan produce so many masterpieces?
The answer: he doesn't produce mashups. He produces marriages. He spots harmony and concordance where others compartmentalize. Chuck Berry and Bertolt Brecht. Jack Kerouac and Martin Luther King. Authur Rimbaud and Jimmie Rodgers.
Dylan divines counterparts and BobDylanizes them.
Marketers who want to give birth to innovations can take a page (or a back page) from him.
A lot of social media marketing efforts fall flat.
That's because a lot of business people who post forget Emily Post.
Lacking in basic social graces, they push out one boorish self-promo after the other. They succeed only in making it clear to the world that they put profits before people.
What do successful social media marketers do differently?
In their article in the latest issue of Communication World, "The Return of the Hyper-Social Organization," Francois Gossieaux and Ed Moran (coauthors of a new book on the subject) answer the question.
Successful social media marketers turn business processes into social processes.
While that sounds pretty cool, Gossieaux and Moran warn that success in social media marketing won't come from "taking a business process and layering it on top of social media."
"Social media PR does not mean distributing your press release via social media channels, and social media marketing is not about pimping your wares through social media," they write. "Turning a business process into a social process has to be steeped in humanity and recriprocity: You give, you take, you share, you help, you enable, you empower. We recommend that you start by giving. If you don't, people will not only shut you off, they will punish you for not respecting the basic social rules that have existed in human societies for thousands of years. People are no more likely to enjoy a Twitter feed that constantly spews company information than they are to enjoy a person at a party who only talks about himself."
Today I acted on a recent decision to put my money where my mouth is.
I decided to quit griping about illiteracy and do something about it.
Beginning this month, The Mighty Copywriter will donate four percent of all profits to Washington's literacy council, DC LEARNs.
DC LEARNs provides materials and training to literacy programs throughout the city and works with them to recruit volunteers and reach out to new learners.
Illiteracy is terrible social problem. It affects people’s health, employability and chances to participate as full citizens.
And it's a growing problem. According to the US Department of Education, a whopping 44,000 people join the nation's ranks of adult illiterates every week. Hundreds of these folks end up living in Washington. Right now, one in five DC residents has low literacy skills.
By contributing to DC LEARNS, I hope to give literacy in our nation's capital a little boost.
Helping to solve a social problem feels good.
And I hope that feeling will be shared by the clients who work with me.
Marketing copy should be easy to read. Business-to-business copy is no exception.
Who has time for fluffy, convoluted sales materials?
I cringe when I come across sentences like the following (which appear on a software provider's Web site):
"The PanSoft Analytics Suite’s powerful visual reporting and ad-hoc query applications make it easy to understand and gain insight from operational data. Operational Dashboards provide everyone—from executives to operations and business managers—with pre-defined interactive visual models and charts that give a point-in-time view of line-of-business activity."
With a little care, this could have been said more clearly:
"By presenting data in charts, PanSoft Analytics Suite makes it easy for managers at every level to understand business activities."
A critic might say my streamlined rewrite sacrificed the credibility of the original version.
I wouldn't buy it.
Expressions like "ad-hoc query applications," "interactive visual models" and "point-in-time view of line-of-business activity" are gobbledygook.
What's the right reading level for B-to-B copy? I recommend 10th grade, the reading level of The New York Times.
It can't hurt to aim lower, but you should never aim higher. Unless, at your topline's expense, you want immortality or a prize for literature.
And aiming higher won't guarantee those things anyway.
Yes, Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg Address at the 15th grade reading level. But Harper Lee wrote To Kill a Mockingbird at the 5th grade level.
This week, Seth Godin wrote in his blog, "The market is not seduced by logic."
"People are moved by stories and drama and hints and clues and discovery. Logic is a battering ram, one that might work if your case is overwhelming. Wal-Mart won by logic (cheap!), but you probably won't."
A stick-in-the-mud B-to-B marketer would react to Godin by saying, "Sure, that's great advice for a B-to-C company, but it doesn't apply to us."
But B-to-B marketers who "get" the power of case studies would nod in agreement with Godin. What else are well-crafted case studies but stories with drama, hints, clues and discovery?
Case studies woo customers for one simple reason. People love stories.
Case studies work because customers empathize with fellow customers in plight. They like hearing that others face predicaments comparable to their own. And they like learning how others escaped those hair-raising (more likely blood-pressure raising) situations.
Case studies are also a lot more credible than 99 percent of the propaganda a company typically pumps out.
And when products or services are complex or arcane, case studies go a long way in clarifying what a company's actually selling, because they provide examples. Think about it. How often have you sought to understand someone by asking, "Can you give me an example?"
