Make Crazy Moves

I dropped into my Ur-Starbucks this week and was reminded, you can't go home again.

The once-sparkling and cozy suburban store, where I spent many an hour reading, writing, ruminating and conversing with friends and strangers, is now bleak and unwelcoming.

No matter their age, businesses decline not merely because their standards flag, but because the formula that worked so brilliantly in the first place becomes an excuse to avoid risk.

Meanwhile, 67 year-old singer Robert Plant is on a world tour, belting out experimental post-metal songs, disco tunes, and newly interpreted rock classics, including some from Led Zeppelin's catalog rendered in Celtic style.

In his review of Plant's show, music critic Brian Ives praises the singer for dodging a Led Zeppelin reunion, "despite the fact that it would surely be worth tens of millions of dollars to him." Plant instead has taken the road less traveled.

"There’s a lesson to be learned," Ives says, "and not just for musicians, or even artists."

Before the end, no one's story is ever over, he says. No one's bound to an original formula. You're a work in progress and can re-imagine yourself, at any age.

"You can make crazy moves, change the way you’re doing things, and bust out of your comfort zone," Ives says.

"Listen to music you’ve never listened to before. Go to a restaurant that serves food you’ve never tried. Hang out with people you don’t know that well. Learn a new skill. Your story isn’t over."

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.”

Evidence to the Contrary, Short is Sweet

Look and you'll find countless proofs of the advantages of long-form over short-form marketing content. 

For example:

• Tests by Hubspot confirm the long-established fact that Google rewards blog posts 2,500 or more words in length.

• Tests by Neil Patel prove posts of 1,500 or more words capture 68% more Tweets and 23% more Facebook likes than shorter ones.

• Tests by Buzzsumo show Facebook posts linked to long blog posts receive 40% more interactions than Facebook posts linked to short blog posts.

But I'll stick to my guns on the matter.

Gobs of evidence to the contrary, short-form beats long-form, at least in the long haul.

As Don Peppers says, marketing content should be snackable.

"The more frictionless it is to digest your content, the more your customers are likely to rely on it," Peppers says.

A single lesson from history, I'd argue, proves my point:

• In 1863, at the dedication ceremony for the national cemetery at Gettysburg, Secretary of State Edward Everett delivered a 13,607-word address to the crowd. 

• Immediately following Everett, President Lincoln delivered a 272-word address.

You know the rest.

It's history.

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.