Check Your Sources

Bubbie: The National Institutes of Health has never studied the attention spans of goldfish.

This is one of those "alternative facts" cited almost hourly by lazy writers.

Take your pick: You can blame perpetuation of the factoid on the marketer who fabricated the statement; or on Microsoft, which once cited it in an e-book; or on all the thousands of writers who have since recirculated it.

Enough with the attention-starved goldfish, already.

"Strong research is the backbone of strong copy," says copywriter Tom Wall. Strong copy requires writers to stop sourcing:

• Personal blogs and Tweets (particularly the president's)
• Unregulated contributor websites
• Wikipedia
• Unauthorized biographies

Without strong research, Wall says, "there is nothing anchoring your words to the truth."



NOTE: While truth isn't, opinions are my own.

Young at Art

This world is a dream within a dream; and as we grow older, each step is an awakening.

— Sir Walter Scott

We don't appreciate how formative youthful pursuits can be. They can shape not only the adult, but whole industries—even the whole world.

William Hogarth at 16 apprenticed to a London engraver, who taught him to design business cards and invitations. Whenever he had time off, Hogarth would amuse himself by wandering the nearby streets and sketching the odd characters he saw there. Within seven years, he was able to open his own business, engraving coats of arms, advertising handbills, and plates for booksellers.

Beatrix Potter at 14 began to keep a diary in which she wrote short stories, recorded impressions, and sketched pictures of her favorite pets, including rabbits, mice, frogs, lizards, snakes and bats. Although she never attended school, she learned to develop her skills in observation and draftsmanship from a private art teacher, Miss Cameron. 

Alfred Hitchcock at 15 enrolled in engineering school, but quit when his father suddenly died to take a job at a company that manufactured electric cables. Hitchcock worked in the advertising department there, writing copy and designing ads, all the while moonlighting as a title-card designer for the local silent-film studios. Within six years, he landed a full-time job with one of them.

Woody Allen at 16 held an after-school job with a New York ad agency. Every weekday, he would ride the subway into Manhattan from his high school in Brooklyn, all the while scribbling jokes onto pieces of paper. The agency's executives would place the jokes in the newspapers, attributing them to their clients. Woody's daily output of 50 jokes quickly landed him his first job as a comedy writer, for the TV personality Herb Shriner.

Bob Dylan at 12 would stay up every night until 3 am listening to Southern radio stations that played Muddy Waters, Hank Williams and Jimmy Reed and fingering their tunes on his guitar. While at summer camp in 1954, Dylan met a kid with his own high school doo-wop group. He formed a double act with the kid and, not long after, Dylan wrote his first song, a homage to Brigitte Bardot.

Roger Deakins at 18 enrolled in art school to study graphic design, but quickly discovered he preferred photography, and transferred to film and television school. After graduation, he found work as a cameraman, landing within seven years in the hot, new field of music videos. His music videos eventually earned the attention of the Coen Brothers, who asked him to shoot Barton Fink.

Steve Jobs at 18 audited a college course on calligraphy in which he learned about type design. He became so obsessed with typography, he began to look for a way to build a computer capable of printing multiple, variable fonts. He said of the course 22 years later, “It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating. Ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me."

HAT TIP to Ann Ramsey and Lucy Smith for inspiring today's post.

The Headline I Wish I Wrote

HAT TIP to Seth Godin

Road Closures

You may not realize it when it happens, but a kick in the teeth 

may be the best thing in the world for you. 

— Walt Disney

Business setbacks haunt those unequipped for adversity.

That's just about everyone.

You slave over relationships and infrastructure, only to find the universe doesn't want another product like yours (at least, not enough to pay for it).

So you accept the lesson and move on, sadder but wiser. Or you:

• Don blinders and blame the customers
• Get angry and blame the employees
• Get stoned before lunchtime
• Keep beating the dead horse
• All of the above

Limited information, skills and equanimity all get in the way of clarity and acceptance, especially during business setbacks.

The best way to deal with them is to reconnect with your "why" (why did we start this venture in the first place?) and remind yourself of everything you accomplished along the road to failure.

Website Bogged Down?

In the past 150 years, peat farmers in northern Europe have found about 1,000 so-called bog men, those accidentally mummified curiosities now thought to have been failed kings.

Your customers have a better chance of finding a bog man than they do your website, if your site's outdated.

That's because Google feeds on freshness, says Michael Brenner, CEO of Marketing Insider Group.

And because freshness equals relevance to Google, you have to keep your site fresh. You need to:

• Attract new backlinks from other (authoritative) sites.
• Add new pages to your site (20-30% more each year).
• Publish new content consistently.
• Freshen up your old content regularly, revising outdated statements, fixing broken links, adding new visuals, etc.
• Encourage and respond to comments.

When ranking your site, Google loves to see steady increases in click-throughs and dwell-time. You won't earn those, unless you keep your website fresh.

Your old content may once have been king. Today it's just a curiosity.