Businesses Need to Avoid Schlocky Content

Erik Deckers contributed today's post. Eric is the president of Pro Blog Service, a content marketing agency with clients throughout the US. He is also the co-author of Branding Yourself and No Bullshit Social Media. He has been blogging since 1997, and has been a newspaper humor columnist for over 20 years. Erik was recently writer-in-residence at the Jack Kerouac House in Orlando.

A couple years ago, when Buzzfeed and Upworthy first started making a digital splash, we all saw the headlines on Facebook.

17 Life-Changing Travel Hacks: #14 Will Take Your Breath Away

12 Super Foods That Will Make Your Jaw Drop 

87 Photos of Cute Baby Pets That Will Give You All The Feels. #63 Will MELT YOUR FACE OFF! (Slideshow) 

Most people soon blocked the two "news" sites from their Facebook streams, and now Facebook has even begun looking for ways to block all Buzzfeed-like headlines from their news feeds.

Can I get a 'hallelujah?'

But that doesn't mean you can escape them completely. There's still Twitter and even LinkedIn, where some people share this dreck.

The problem with it is, it's still popular, and still gets traffic, which means people think it's okay to do. And if people think it's okay to do, I'm worried businesses will begin to adopt this kind of writing. They're already well on their way with schlocky content and Buzzfeed-like headlines.

It's Some of the Worst Writing Ever

I've read some pretty bad writing in my day, but Buzzfeed and Upworthy have been some of the worst-written content I've ever had the misfortune of looking at.

And I say that as someone who read the Star Trek/X-Men crossover book.

Imagine an article composed entirely of 18 full-motion GIFs and their 5-word captions, and you have an idea for some of the things that pass as "writing" on these websites.

I had never actually seen someone use "(lol)" in journalistic writing until I read some Buzzfeed articles while researching this post. I'm waiting for them to punctuate their sentences with some damn emojis!

Now I'm sure your business' blog is not going to have anything as terrible and soul-crushing as a Buzzfeed "18 Times 'The Walking Dead' Referenced 'Saved By The Bell'" (not a real article), but that doesn't mean businesses haven't put out schlocky business writing before.

Here are a few ways you can avoid schlocky content for your own writing.

Get GOOD writers. Writing may be a skill we all learned in school, but don't assume everyone can write. Everyone who played a recorder in middle school music isn't in the symphony. Everyone who played softball in gym class isn't a professional ball player. So don't assume that everyone who can string two sentences together is magically a good writer.

If you want good content on your website, get good writers. Get people who are passionate about the written language. Get people who understand the importance and gravitas of language, and would never add "(lol)" to a professional article. Find employees who love to write as a hobby. Better yet, hire or outsource to a professional writer. These are the people who will make your content amazing, and attract people's attention.

Keep list posts to a minimum. I'm a big fan of list posts, because I know it brings in readers, often more readers than my "normal headline" posts. But that doesn't mean I'm going to make every article I write a list post. If I limit those to only once every 8, 10 or 12 blog posts, they have a more dramatic impact.

Remember, "if everyone is special, then nobody is special." So don't overdo it on the special content that people clamor for, or you'll dilute its effectiveness.

Avoid 101-level content. Content marketing has been around for many years, but I'm still seeing basic "Five Secrets to Content Marketing" articles that still include "write good content" as a "secret." You can find the same five secrets on thousands of marketing blogs, and they all say the same damn thing. No one has said anything new on this subject in years.

You're going to run into the same thing in your industry. So many companies will try to be thought leaders that they'll publish the same basic content as everyone else. That means everyone will only cover the basics and never really say anything new or of any consequence. Talk about new regulations. Respond to other blogs or trade media articles. Tell success stories about your clients. Just don't try to educate people like it's their first day at work. That's been done to death.

Dive deep into a subject. I've often said, if you want to blog about a large, generic topic like "marketing," you'll run out of things to say in three weeks. But if you write about something specific like "content marketing for the manufacturing industry," you'll never run out of things to talk about.

Use your blog to explore your industry and your specific niche. Your blog is an opportunity to establish you and/or your company as an industry expert and a thought leader. You're not going to do that by only scratching the surface of your field and writing 101-level content. Get deep into your subject, explore the nuances, and talk a lot of inside baseball.

Businesses that truly want to have an impact on their industry, and want to reach their customers effectively, need to avoid being a Buzzfeed-like source of information. Skip the easy, low-hanging fruit of list posts and animated GIF stories; there are hundreds of other writers already plucking at it. Hire some real writers who have a respect for language, as well as their readers. And sink your teeth into your topics and explore them the way the schlock writers would never dream of doing.

This is the best way to make your blog and your content marketing campaign be a true success. And you can do it all without a single cat GIF.

Trust Issues

Where have all the flowers gone?

                                                                                 — Pete Seeger

Prerequisite to any purchase is trust. 

Yet, hour after hour, high-handed CEOs, white collar bandits and cagey politicos destroy customers' trust. Joining them are hordes of con artists, jackleg manufacturers, self-dealing bloggers and unsavory street marketers.

It’s no wonder companies face a trust deficit of Biblical proportions. And no wonder 8 in 10 customers turn to family and friends, not companies, to sanction their planned purchases.

To build trust, you first need to establish a comfort zone where customer engagement and conversation can begin; inside that zone, you earn trust. (The English word "trust" in fact comes from the German "Trost," which means “comfort.”)

The age-old way to establish a comfort zone was to use symbols. But, thanks to the relentless pursuit of margins, that practice has largely vanished. 

Hotels used to display fresh-cut flowers in the lobby. Banks used to build with a lot of granite and marble. Department stores used to welcome you at the door and serve tea and biscuits. And gas stations used to be staffed by attendants dressed like hospital workers.

Today, businesses no longer use symbols to build comfort zones, but rely instead on "transparency" (a notion that only surfaced with the arrival of e-commerce).

There's a huge problem with that. 

Transparency can't be the bedrock on which to found a comfort zone, because customers care about what you symbolize, not what you divulge. (Don't believe me? Think about our two major presidential candidates.)

If your business hasn't embraced symbols, hoping instead to gain trust by appearing "transparent," it's urgent to do so. And if it has abandoned symbols, it's time to go back to them.

Judge. Jury. Executioner.

A critic is a eunuch working in a harem. 

He watches it, but he knows he can't do it.

— Howard Fast

In the moment we forget, the critic always has an agenda far different from the creative's.

When it appeared in 1929, critics trashed William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. 

Clifton Fadiman headlined his review in Nation, "Hardly Worth While," and wrote, "The themes and the characters are trivial, unworthy of the enormous and complex craftsmanship expended on them."

Twenty years later, the novel was a chief reason Faulkner won the Nobel Prize; and today it's considered the apotheosis of modernist fiction.

Critics—without qualifications or qualm—act as judge, jury and executioner. (Fadiman wrote a lot of criticism in his lifetime; but never a single novel.)

Critics who can't do what you do aren't worthy. 

They're bystanders. Peeping Toms. Eunuchs in a harem.

So fuggedaboutem, whatever you create.

Let a real jury (the market) decide.

Coda: Seth Godin says, "If a critic tells you that, 'I don’t like it,' or 'this is disappointing,' he’s done no good at all. In fact, quite the opposite is true. He’s used his power to injure without giving you any information to help you to do better next time. Worse, he hasn’t given those listening any data to make a thoughtful decision on their own. Not only that, but by refusing to reveal the basis for his criticism, he’s being a coward, because there’s no way to challenge his opinion."

Fuggedaboutem.

Rebel, Rebel

"Don Draper with a conscience," copywriter Howard Luck Gossage created ads in the 1960s for airlines, breweries and oil companies.

But his favorite and finest work was extracurricular.

Nicknamed "The Socrates of San Francisco," evenings Gossage turned his agency, headquartered in an abandoned Barbary Coast firehouse, into a salon where iconoclasts like Tom Wolfe, John Steinbeck, Marshall McLuhan and Bucky Fuller met regularly to booze it up and brainstorm.

Gossage was the first marketer to see advertising as a "conversation," coining the word "interactive" to describe the ads he created. Their goal, he said, was to get audiences to opt in, join communities and converse with brands. "Our first duty is not to the old sales curve, it is to the audience," he said.

Gossage also dreamed up "pay per view" (30 years before we could access the Web) and was the first marketer to integrate advertising and PR.

In 1966, Gossage took on the fledgling Sierra Club as a client, creating ads to protest the damming of the Grand Canyon. The ads galvanized activists everywhere, halted the government's project, made Gossage's client a household name, and spawned yet another group, Friends of the Earth, which was kickstarted in a rent-free back office in Gossage's agency. Friends of the Earth today is the largest grassroots environmental organization in the world.

David Ogilvy once called Gossage, "The most articulate rebel in the advertising business."

Rory Sutherland, vice chair of OgilvyOne, calls him a forgotten hero of advertising's Creative Revolution.

"Gossage is the Velvet Underground to Ogilvy’s Beatles and Bernbach’s Stones," Sutherland says. "Never a household name but, to the cognoscenti, a lot more inspirational and influential."

Marketers Haven't Learned the World's Oldest Lessons

How does storytelling (new school) differ from arguing (old school)?

Let's look back—to 350 BC.

In Poetics, Aristotle taught that stories have three acts:

1. An inciting moment
2. A climactic struggle, and
3. A resolution.

In Rhetoric, he taught that arguments have two:

1. The statement

2. The proof.

Three acts versus two. That's the difference.

While marketers crow on and on about storytelling, most default to arguing. Benefit-laden bullets are safer than heroes in a bind.

"Eighty to 90 percent of all commercials are not story-based; they are premise-based," says brand consultant Richard Krevolin in The Hook. "There is a much greater comfort level wth TV spots that convey specific product benefits to the consumer and do not tell stories."

Krevolin cites Tabasco's TV spot "Mosquito" as a case in point. It dramatizes the statement Tabasco wants you to remember: its sauce is hot.

But "Mosquito" isn't storytelling. All we see is a guy who relishes eating a meal doused with hot, hot, hot sauce. Cute, but not buzz-worthy.

"If we rewrote the spot so that at the beginning we see that he is plagued by mosquitos biting him and terrorizing him all day and night, we would feel for him and understand his dilemma," Krevolin says. "Then, when he fails to defeat the mosquitos with conventional means and decides to use Tobasco sauce instead, we would cheer for him when he achieves victory."

Storytelling always takes three acts.