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."

3 Easy Hacks to Make You a Great Writer

Imagine earning $1 for each encounter you have with some grifter hawking simple hacks for turning your mediocre copy into gold.

You'd soon be another Warren Buffet.

But life's just not that easy… until now.

You've reached Mecca on your journey to $1 million every month.

That's because I'm pulling back the curtain to reveal the three most awesome writing hacks ever offered:

1. Read. 

2. Read. 

3. Read.

These three magic bullets come endorsed by a NOBEL PRIZE WINNER.

On April 16, 1947, novelist William Faulkner led a Q & A session in the English department's creative writing course at Ole Miss.

During the session, a student asked him, "What is the best training for writing?"

Faulkner advised, “Read, read, read! Read everything—trash, classics, good and bad; see how they do it. When a carpenter learns his trade, he does so by observing. Read! You’ll absorb it. Write. If it is good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out the window.”

So that's it. Read, read, read. 

Killer!

Wait, there's more in my pipeline!

In my next post, I'll share the greatest hack in the history of modern media.

For now, here's a teaser.

Your Content Marketing is Broken

Most marketers treat mobile as a poor cousin, even though 61% of online content gets viewed on mobile devices in the US, according to comScore.

Websites, blogs and ads are still designed by rote, looking swell on desktops and laptops, but broken on mobile devices.

The majority of marketers also ignore the fact that customers often switch throughout the day from mobile phones to tablets, designing content for just one of these devices.

By failing to design "adaptive" content, marketers are merely distracting chronically distracted customers.

Analysts call the right content marketing strategy for today a "mobile-first strategy."

Maybe it's time to get smart about your strategy.

If the shoe fits.

How Did We Function before Autocorrect?

Before autocorrect made us all morons, there was the malaprop.

Named by Lord Byron after the fictional character Mrs. Malaprop (as in "inappropriate"), the malaprop is a familiar brand of verbal slip.

Malaprops are funny because, though unintended, they seem to work.

Mrs. Malaprop, for example, advised a woeful Lydia Languish to illiterate him from your memory.

Rick Perry once called state governments lavatories of innovation, while an anonymous office worker called a colleague a vast suppository of information.

Speaking of which, Richard Daley once praised Chicago's members of Alcoholics Unanimous.

Boston mayor Thomas Menino called his city's parking shortage an Alcatraz around my neck.

Comedian Norm Crosby worried when he misconscrewed what you said.

President George W. Bush warned we cannot let terrorists hold this nation hostile.

And my boyhood pal Mookie called the corroded faces in monster movies decroded.

But that was just a pigment of his imagination.

A Pen as Mighty as His Sword

In his masterful Mask of Command, the late military historian John Keegan makes the case that Ulysses Grant's dispatches were as much responsible for victory as his grasp of tactics and infamous determination.

General George Gordon Meade’s chief of staff Theodore Lyman once wrote, “There is one striking thing about Grant’s orders: no matter how hurriedly he may write them on the field, no one ever had the slightest doubt as to their meaning, or ever had to read them over a second time to understand them."

It was clarity, simplicity and directness that made Grant's dispatches so astonishingly effective.

Lyman said Grant's dispatches "inclined to be epigrammatic without his being aware of it,” chiefly because the general used “plain and unmistakably clear words.”

Three examples:

In February 1862, hunkered before Fort Donelson, Grant sent this note to Confederate General General S.B.Buckner:

Sir, Yours of this date, proposing armistice and appointment of commissioners to settle terms of capitulation, is just received. No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately upon your works.

In April 1864, while advancing on the Wilderness, Grant dispatched the following order to Meade:

Lee’s army will be your objective point. Wherever Lee goes, there you will go also.

And after Spotsylvania, in May 1864, Grant sent the army's chief of staff, Henry Halleck, this note:

We have now ended the 6th day of very hard fighting. I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.

When your goal is clarity—to write so that your readers will understand exactly what you mean—write like Grant, with simplicity and directness. 

Clarity eliminates ambiguity and confusion, and makes reading effortless.