Exorcize This

Few people know I played a bit part in the 1973 horror film The Exorcist.

It's true. I appear with two of the stars, Ellen Burstyn and Max von Sydow, in a wide shot that's on screen for a full three seconds.

Don't cover your eyes, because you'll miss me. Don't blink, either.

Want to know what's super-scary?

I'm always playing bit parts.

Edward Bernays used to warn students who were considering a career in marketing to think twice, because his was strictly a "sidelines job." 

Your sweat will go into glorifying others, Bernays warned. All of it. And that's as it should be. Marketers are paid to make non-marketers look good. 

But most social marketers have never heard of Bernays, nor heed his advice. They continue to break social marketing's Number 1 rule: It's not about you.

Get with the program, please. Quit striving for stardom. Get used to bit parts. It's about the glory of others.

As Geoffrey James puts it in Inc, "Stop talking about yourself. Stop thinking about yourself. Stop trying to be unique. Put yourself in service to the world. Figure out how to help other people."

It's the perfect time of year to exorcize your ego from your social marketing.

Bread and Circuses

For 25% of Americans, entertainment trumps accuracy in content, according to a new study by Adobe, The State of Content: Expectations on the Rise.

And the younger you are, the more entertainment counts, the study shows.

Entertainment is more important than accuracy for 10% of Boomers; 20% of Gen Xer's; 35% of Millennials.

In his new collection of essays, Notes on the Death of Culture, Nobel Prize winning novelist Mario Vargas Llosa laments the fact we've become puppets of “emotions and sensations triggered by an unusual and at times very brilliant bombardment of images that capture our attention, though they dull our sensibilities and intelligence due to their primary and transitory nature."

Our addiction to spectacle shows its worst side in politics, today a “mediocre and grubby activity that puts off the most honest and capable people and instead mainly recruits nonentities and rogues," he says.

Instead of leaders, we settle for clowns, ready to do anything to grab a moment of our attention.

Why is So Much Business Writing So Bad?

Why is so much business writing so bad, irritating customers and wasting workers' time?

It begins with box checking.

In the race to "get it done"—and check yet another box—marketers and product managers flout good-writing fundamentals.

Foremost, as journalist Shane Snow points up, is simple diction.

Readers are impatient drivers. Simple diction lets them speed. They want writers to keep the highways open. And they prefer the ones who do.

To prove the point, Snow entered passages from a variety of popular writers—including Cormac McCarthy, Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, Seth Godin and Malcolm Gladwell—into five proven calculators of "reading ease."

The resulting scores showed:

• McCarthy, King and Rowling write for people with fifth-grade reading skills; and

• Godin and Gladwell, for people with eighth-grade skills.

Snow asks: Do readers love only these writers' story-telling abilities? Or do they also love their approachability—in other words, their simple diction?

With half the US population reading at no better than an eighth-grade level, the answer's obvious. 

Yet most business communications are written as if we all could read like grad students, who don't slow down for Latinate words, jargon, run-on sentences, and page-long paragraphs.

But unapproachable diction isn't the only problem.

Good writing takes time. Time and the determination to inform, research facts, and think critically.

It takes more than the urge to check another box.

Ing-lish Spoken Here

Junior copywriters love to add "ing" to verbs.

Poor souls. 

No one's told them it weakens the most powerful words in our language.

In Writing Tools, Roy Peter Clark gives two reasons why "ing" sucks strength from writing:

• It adds a syllable. Simple's better. Adding syllables complicates verbs.

• It often appears in a crowd. Writers who love "ing" tack it onto every verb they use. The words quickly begin to resemble each other.

In a 2002 article in The New York Times, linguist Geoffrey Nunberg first named the latter habit "ing-lish."

The junior copywriter's defense: "Marketing copy breaks the rules. Ing-lish is fine. No, it's even better. It's perfect."

Lovers of ing-lish think "ing" strengthens every verb by adding a sense of the here and now; of progress; of the urgent.

But, before you decide whether ing-lish is perfect, consider a few alternate taglines:

• Avis. We're trying harder.

• Nike. Just doing it.

• California Milk Processors. Getting milk?

• M&M: Melting in your mouth, not in your hands.

• State of New York. I'm loving New York.

• Burger King. Having it your way.

• Hamlet. Being, or not being, that is the question.

NOTE: Thanks go to graphic designer Clif Dickens for his "honest" tagline above. Enjoy more honest taglines here.

Edward Bellamy's Incredible Crystal Ball

“Marty McFly Day” is as good a day as any to look back at another time-travel entertainment—one that electrified our grandparents' grandparents.

Published at the height of the Gilded Age, Edward Bellamy's 1888 utopian novel Looking Backward became the Number 1 best-seller of its time.

It tells the story of a Boston Brahmin who time-travels to the year 2000 and discovers that life in the future is pretty comfortable:

• War, waste, global warming, crime, unemployment, income inequality, gender differences, advertising and political parties have disappeared.

• Everyone is at least bi-lingual. People speak a native language and the universal language.

• The only form of money is the debit card. People use it to shop at vast warehouse clubs like Costco, but act with civility towards one another, because everyone's well educated. All purchases are delivered to shoppers' homes, via pneumatic tubes.

• Employee engagement approaches 100% and job promotions are based solely on merit. People who refuse to work are imprisoned, and receive only bread and water.

• People retire in comfort at age 45.

• Housework is fully automated.

• Congress meets only once every five years.

Bellamy sold more than a half million copies of Looking Backward. His blueprint for the year 2000 was so talked-about, over 160 "Bellamy Clubs" sprang up across the US.

Forty-seven years after the novel's appearance, Columbia University named it the most important book by a 19th century American.