Lion One, Dentist Nothing

Will Minnesotans ever again want a torturer's hands in their mouths?

In an attempt at damage control, Big Bwana Walter Palmer, DDS, has emailed patients, crying for quarter.

In the three-paragraph email, Palmer confesses, "I don’t often talk about hunting with my patients because it can be a divisive and emotionally charged topic," but that "I deeply regret that my pursuit of an activity I love and practice responsibly and legally resulted in the taking of this lion."

Palmer acknowledges that protests and media coverage have ruffled his practice and concludes, "I apologize profoundly for this inconvenience and promise you that we will do our best to resume normal operations as soon as possible."

At the same time, Palmer has darkened his practice's Website and Facebook page.

Judging from his email. I think Palmer believes the hoopla is short lived, that our present obsession with a dead lion will soon revert to our customary obsession with cute kittens.

My guess: Big Bwana's got another thing coming!

Go Slow

Patience is a virtue in B2B marketing, says agency owner Eric Fischgrund, writing for Huffington Post.

Winning the race for leads, revenue and leaps in share price demands not only that you form a content plan, but stick to it.

Repeat thyself

Don't scrap a reasonable plan because results don't materialize overnight, Fischgrund says.

"If a white paper fails to generate downloads and leads, or a blog post fails to drive visitors to the website, there is no need to panic. Go back and review the delivery—consider the time of day or day of the week the content was published, or review the ads you placed on LinkedIn to generate clicks. Perhaps you will find it had nothing to do with the content or landing page, but because you reached your audience via e-mail blast at a time normally spent away from the computer."

Be patient

Don't expect to rally prospects, customers, analysts and influencers in a month.

"In reality, it takes time to establish a platform, cultivate a following, and execute upon strategic objectives," Fischgrund says. "It's a far smarter practice to focus on quality, not quantity of the content and messaging published via social media."

Cultivate the media

Get to know the reporters for trade, regional and national publications.

"Form relationships with reporters and media outlets," Fischgrund says. "Reporters always seek value, and if you can position yourself or your client as an expert, or their news as being important, you will achieve exposure."

Remember: the hare's fast, but the tortoise wins.

The 120 Commandments

It took Moses four decades to write his laws, so we should be grateful it's taken only half that time for someone to codify the rules of email marketing.

And it was well worth the wait.

Writer, editor and e-mail marketer Chad White's extraordinary handbook, Email Marketing Rules: A Step-by-Step Guide to the Best Practices that Power Email Marketing Success, is by far the most intelligible, comprehensive and practical handbook yet written on the subject.

The 300-page book makes it unassailably clear—and not just from his bio on the back— that White is an accomplished "hands-on" email marketer; that he's not only been to the mountain, but around the block.

White walks you through 120 essential e-mail marketing rules-of-thumb, or in his words "the rules that separate great marketers from good marketers."

And the trip is eye-opening.

Encyclopedic in scope, Email Marketing Rules covers everything you ever wanted to know, and leaves out the hucksterism that normally pollutes books of this sort.

Rules aside, the glossaries larded throughout the book make it worth reading. So does the concluding chapter, "The Future."

 
My sole criticism of White's book: I couldn't read it 20 years ago.

Five stars for Email Marketing Rules. Buy it. Read it. Keep it handy.

The Return of Mad Men?

Once upon a time, people believed corporations weren't crooks.

The Great Recession changed that.

It was Corporate America's Watergate.

In today's Post-Recession period, corporations look no longer to Mad Men to tell their stories, but to brand journalists, who pride themselves on eschewing '60s-style corporate hokum.

"I've been a reporter, and I've also been a marcom writer," says David B. Thomas, posting on LinkedIn. "There's a big difference."

The marcom writer, according to Thomas, produces only "buzzwords and grandiose claims."

The brand journalist tells a story. 

"The people who read [the story] appreciate it because it gives a straightforward, unbiased analysis of the situation," he says.

Above all, the brand journalist strives to be informative. 

"Before she starts writing, she asks, 'What's important here for my audience? How will this help them solve their business problems? How can I make this interesting, informative and fun so that people will remember it and share it?'"

A practitioner myself, I appreciate the difference between a marcom writer and a brand journalist, too.

But then I remember how the Original Mad Man, David Ogilvy, once insisted, "The more informative your advertising, the more persuasive it will be."

Ogilvy also scolded contemporaries who relied too heavily on buzzwords. 

"Our business is infested with idiots who try to impress by using pretentious jargon," Ogilvy wrote.

What's old, it seems, is new again.

Picture This!

Emerson once wrote in his Journals, "In good writing, words become one with things."

It turns out to be true of all writing.

Neuroscientists at Georgetown University Medical Center have discovered that, when you read, a tiny portion of your brain behind your left ear sees the words not as strings of letters or symbols, but as pictures.

The neurons in that part of your brain store words in their entirety, as if there were a little dictionary inside your skull.

When you look at a word you know, your brain instantly sees a picture.

Your spongy little dictionary (called the "visual word form area") works precisely like the miniature photo album located in the opposite side of your brain, behind your right ear. 

In that part of your brain (called the "fusiform face area"), pictures of people's faces are stored.

The researchers also discovered that students with reading disabilities can improve their skill by learning words as visual objects, instead of struggling with phonics and spelling.