Walk a Mile in My Shoes

One of my all-time favorite songs is Elvis' rendition of Joe South's Walk a Mile in My Shoes.

That's good advice to anyone, but especially association marketers.

This week, Association Trends honored the best of association marketing in its 2011 "All Media Contest."

The 22 categories in the annual competition ranged from advertising kits to Websites.

"As in previous years," Trends reported, "judges found that content is king. Clear, crisp, rich, strong content catapulted some publications from unranked to gold."

The judges rejected content that was "dense," instead warming to writing and design that followed a "magazine-style format." 

They also fled from jargon-heavy copy, cluttered pages and "content that is simply straightforward" (in other words, dull).

Steven Cline, marketing and communications director for the Property Casualty Insurers of America took home more awards for his work than anyone else.

Cline cautioned association marketers above all to guard against subjectivity. 

"Look at whatever you are working on from your audience’s perspective. For a few moments, be a reader, not a communicator. Aspects that are crystal clear to you may be indecipherable to your audience."

Disclosure: I can't miss the opportunity to brag about my own Gold. A sales kit I wrote for Fixation Marketing client Food Marketing Institute took first place in its category in Association Trends' 2011 All Media Contest.  You can view the piece on my Website.

You Have to Meet People Where They Are

Sure, you're on the up-and-up.  You know what you're talking about.  You have a great solution.  You have the facts to prove it.

But customers are suspicious.

So, if you hope to convince them, you have to adjust for mistrust.

What's the first rule of adjusting?

DO NOT contradict customers' version of reality.

Instead, study the language they use to portray things and situations. 

Get a good sense of the "scene" they've painted in their heads.

Because, for better or worse, that scene is the world they inhabit. It's the only one they know.

Once you've mastered that scene, revise your message so it conforms faithfully.

And when you next speak, at all costs resist the temptation to challenge your customers' worldview.

Customers will dignify your effort to communicate with a moment of their attention only if your message meshes with their preconceived notions of who's sincere, honest and caring.

Wellness guru Roniece Weaver said it best: "You have to meet people where they are."

Are You a Flake?

In his blog, Seth Godin asks, "How do they know you're not a flake?"


A "deluge of noise" in the market has made every prospect distrusting, Godin says.  So when you pitch an idea, the prospect automatically asks:

• Who recommends this guy?
• What will my boss think?
• Where does he work?
• When I visit his Website, is it flaky?

"Notice that all of these questions get asked before the idea is even analyzed," Godin writes.  That's because, "not all good ideas are pre-proven, sophisticated and from reliable sources."

In my view, there are four other questions a prospect asks during the first contact:

• Does this guy speak my language?
• Does he only use jargon and superlatives?
• Does he like scare tactics?
• Does he blather?

Word derivations say a lot. The English word trust comes from the German Trost, which means "comfort."

Do you make prospects comfortable?  

Or are you a flake?

Pure Poetry

Nearly everyone's favorite TV commercial during the Super Bowl was Chrysler's, featuring a crusty Clint Eastwood promising "the world’s going to hear the roar of our engines.”

The lyrical copy for this spot was in part contributed by Matthew Dickman, as the Website Co.CREATE notes. 

Dickman is a respected poet whose work has appeared in The New Yorker.

With his Chrysler spot, Dickman joins an august band of litterateurs known to have supplemented their income by writing ads.

They include Sherwood Anderson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joseph Heller, Don DeLillo, Salman Rushdie, Robert Bloch, Elmore Leonard and Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss).

Brick by Brick

Since early morning, a small crew of masons has been busy replacing an old concrete patio behind our home.  Soon we'll have a stately new brick one in its place.

Although I don't envy the guys one bit (the work is backbreaking and it's bitter cold out), I feel empathy with them.

While they're just outside my door stooping to remove concrete shards and stacking bricks in neat piles, I'm inside, hunched over my computer, stringing words together, then taking the strings apart; typing phrases, then deleting them; inserting punctuation marks, then replacing those same marks with different ones.

And I'm beat after whole a day at it.

Writing is hard for me, even though I've done a lot of it.  Composing sentences, paragraphs and whole pages feels a lot like laying a brick patio.

Ann Chenoweth and John Hayes are two social scientists who've studied writers.  They've discovered that writers compose sentences in a pattern: burst-pause-evaluate; burst-pause-evaluate; and so on. 

Inexperienced writers, they claim, produce short bursts; experienced writers, long ones.

Either way, it's slow, brutal work.

In my book, the Jack Kerouacs of the world—the writers who burst with the force of a firehose—are few and far between.

Sportswriter Red Smith was once asked if grinding out a daily newspaper column wasn’t difficult.

"Why, no," Smith answered, "You simply sit down at the typewriter, open your veins, and bleed."