Doing Words

Fear of the blank page

// March 31st, 2010 // 0 Comments // Fun, Writing

I suppose I suffer from fear of the blank page as often as any other writer — that is to say, often. I feel it all the time, unless I’m writing in anger or I’m drunk, neither of which happens often enough that I could count on it to earn a living as a writer.

In this animated short, George Metaxas confronts the demon of the blank sheet of paper and comes off second-best. It’s an amazing animation, constructed entirely of paper, cardboard and blu-tack, and it took over his bedroom for the four months it took him to complete it. What a creative way to avoid writing for almost half a year! Congratulations to you, George.

You can read a brief interview with George here. Otherwise, enjoy this short film. I know I will be — I have a blank sheet of paper and a deadline to avoid!

the Blank Page from George Metaxas on Vimeo.

Write well always. One day you’ll need to know how.

// November 19th, 2009 // 0 Comments // Writing

First, enjoy this hilariously good customer email from Woot.com:

Dear Bigyahu, esteemed Woot veteran -

You’ve been here from the beginning, or almost the beginning. You saw Woot grow from a weird little deal-a-day site into a whole bunch of weird little deal-a-day sites. You saw us change our colors from eggplant to broccoli & carrots to pea soup. None of the two million new members who have come along since then can say they have your Woot cred. Without your early support, none of those two-million-plus would even know Woot existed.

So we’re hoping you don’t think our newest idea sucks. It’s called Deals.Woot, and it lives at http://deals.woot.com and start clicking. Check everything out. Ask questions. Try to break stuff. Apply the same ruthless diligence to Deals.Woot as you have to the mothership. Our oldest friends are our best BS detectors, and we’re counting you on you to start detecting and let us know what you find.

And thanks a million – or two million – for helping create the big, unwieldy ball of discount energy that is Woot today. Long may it roll…

the Deals.Woot dev team

Sure, there are some little things I’d correct, but in the face of writing something functional and specific, whoever writes the site copy at Woot.com has written something funny, intelligent and genuine. It is also guaranteed to make a Woot customer feel special. Not like those clowns at VirginBlue.

Now, to my point: just because you work for a big, stuffy corporation and not a startup, even though you’re tasked with writing something functional and specific for customers to read, take a moment to do it better. Find a way to add some spice — a trace of humour, confidence, real concern, plain English — whatever you’d love to use to make it stand out in a crowded Inbox.

I know. Your manager will most likely surgically excise it and customers will never see it. But that won’t change the fact that you wrote it, that you’re proving yourself capable of writing it, and that one day you’ll get the chance to write for an organisation that will be ready for it. By then you will have years of practice at doing it and will be as good as Woot’s copywriter, whoever they may be.

In the meantime, stick it to the man by watching Woot.com’s ‘Learn More’ video, which is even funnier, and while not functional at all, worth every moment of viewing time.

Mortimer & Monte: In the Break Room, episode 3 from Woot Video on Vimeo.

VirginBlue shows exactly how NOT to email your customers

// November 14th, 2009 // 0 Comments // Communication, Marketing, Writing

Wow, for a brand that I thought cared about its customer relationships, VirginBlue really messed up this week. Maybe Friday the 13th played a part and everybody wanted to squish the error in a hurry before the weekend began, but this episode was really worth thinking through a second time, even if it meant missing Friday night drinks at the VirginBlue watering hole. (more…)

Email marketing: ring a bell, get a food pellet.

// November 9th, 2009 // 0 Comments // Marketing, Writing

Email marketing can be tough. Your strategy and execution doesn’t have to be that bad for it to shut down communication with customers. Here’s how:

Every time you send an email to a customer, they can:

Open, read and respond to it;

Open and read it;

Delete it without reading it;

Unsubscribe from it; or

Flag it as spam.

You’d imagine that the consumer judges each new unread email from you independently of previous emails. But you’d be wrong.

The hidden gotcha with email marketing is the cumulative effect of response. A Pavlovian (or perhaps more accurately, Skinner-ian) effect in which customers will begin repeating the same response they had to your previous emails. (more…)

Should our company have a blog?

// July 18th, 2009 // 0 Comments // Communication, Writing

I just signed up for the beta of business advice community Bizmore and wanted to contribute something to help them get started. Someone else had asked, “Should our company have a blog?” I’ve answered that many times in person, but I’ve never written about it. It’s a difficult topic to write about without coming across like shallow self-promotion, and the interweb does NOT need any more shallow self-promotion. But when I finished, I realised maybe I’d made a few conclusions you won’t read elsewhere. See if you agree…

Whether it’s worth having a company blog will depend a great deal upon who your ‘community’ is (your existing customers, potential customers, media, analysts, investors, employees) are. If you think nobody in your community would read a company blog, there’s little point investing the time and money.

These days, that’s unlikely. That diverse community of businesses and individuals your company relates to is turning away from traditional marketing and media, reaching to the web to research prior to purchase, as a means of understanding more about your company culture and how it is different from your competitors, and as a way of building a relationship with you and your business.

That’s right, a relationship. Don’t think anybody wants to have a relationship with your business? Wrong. Humans are are social species, and we feel better about a purchasing decision when we feel like we know who we’re buying from as well as what we’re buying. We always want a relationship with the person or organisation we’re buying from. Don’t believe me? Then why do we hate it so much when we get treated like that relationship doesn’t matter: like a number, not a person, like our years of brand loyalty don’t matter? It’s true of every commercial transaction and every kind of business, big and small.

That’s why corporations have executives schmoozing customers in corporate boxes and small corner stores have friendly counter staff who remember your name and how you like your coffee.

Most businesses have too many customers to know each of them in detail, to respond to their individual needs immediately, especially 24×7. So we can compensate for that by making sure there is enough personal relationship material available on a company blog. We can help a customer get to know us better while they wait for us to relate to them in real-time.

Blogs can be for press information, product announcements, staff motivation and a million other things. But the unique, irreplaceable benefit that a blog provides over any other means of marketing is that it allows a customer to build a relationship with us, on their own time and on their own terms.

Think about how bad your marriage would be if the only way you and your partner communicated was via press release, direct mail, ad banner or sales call to each other. It’s a wonder that customers felt any loyalty at all towards brands before blogs came along!

So where do you start? Unfortunately, blogging doesn’t come naturally to most businesspeople, it is difficult to do well, and businesses are still learning how to do it successfully. Most of the success stories out there started with an accidental discovery of something that worked rather than a proven strategy executed by someone who majored in Successful Business Blogging at college. I count myself as someone who’s been lucky enough to learn a few useful things along the way but nobody — including me — has all the answers yet. There’s not yet a business blogging profession to turn to, whatever the pro bloggers would have you believe. We’re just a bunch of people learning as fast as we can.

But there’s a silver lining to that cloud: while the industry is still new, consumer expectations are still low — nobody’s going to hate you for making some mistakes at first. You still have time to learn by experimentation and develop your own hard-won experience of what works and doesn’t work. Before you go, some tips to get you off to a good start:

• Find a professional to work with you or one of your staff as a mentor.
• Work hard on measuring what elicits a response from readers and whether it influences perception of you and your brand. There are web platform tools for this.
• Get into the rhythm of doing it regularly by setting a schedule and finding something to write about when a blog post is due, not when you think of something to write.
• Focus on making it second nature to share every new development in your business with your customers.
• Remember that once it’s been blogged, it never truly goes away. But also remember that admitting you made a mistake and rectifying it publicly builds a deeper relationship with your customer than you’d have if you never blogged at all.

Swap Marceau for Cousteau and the fun begins

// June 3rd, 2009 // 0 Comments // Fun, Writing

I’ve rescued this post from my old personal blog, which I’ll be retiring soon. The post was written in 2002, when Marcel Marceau was still alive, but Jaccques Cousteau had just died. The importance of that information will soon become clear if you read on…

It’s a shame Jacques Cousteau is dead, as it effectively ruins my chances of ever persuading him to swap places with Marcel Marceau for a day.

One day I had Jacques’ name on the tip of my tongue but just couldn’t get it out, and instead all I could think of was “Marcel Marceau”. In the end I stuttered, “You know, the French guy, not Marcel Marceau, the other one…” My friend patiently ran through the famous Frenchmen he knew: Mitterrand, Basquiat, Belmondo, Tati, Proust (was he French? Deserved to be) and finally Cousteau. “Yes! I cried, that’s the fella!”

Then I realised that the reason I kept thinking Cousteau and coming up with Marceau was that the two men are, on some deeply fundamental level, entirely interchangeable. Both very successful, both world ambassadors-at-large, both very French, both old (fatally so in Cousteau’s case), both dressing up in silly outfits. Their surnames even rhyme.

They are so similar, you could almost swap them and many of us wouldn’t immediately cotton-on. And if you swapped them, it could be a lot of fun.

Remember the Jacques Cousteau TV series? “The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau” or something similar? Imagine, for a moment, how much fun “The Undersea World of Marcel Marceau” would be. Here is Marcel miming the act of swimming into a strong current. Here is Marcel pretending he is about to be attacked by a great white shark. Here is Marcel 90 feet underwater in only his miming clothes and face-paint, trying valiantly to hold his breath long enough to deliver just one more solo performance piece.

And the comedic potential of Cousteau, on the theatre stage, trying to capture the imagination of a capacity crowd as he mimes walking into a strong wind while dressed in full scuba gear? Priceless.

Internet Explorer 8: the unfaithful ex-girlfriend

// April 23rd, 2009 // 0 Comments // Featured, Fun, software, Writing

Sorry, but I'm with someone new, and it's better (photo by Michael Sarver)

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer IE 8 showing up now is like an unfaithful ex-partner showing up a long time after you’ve found someone better looking and less likely to break your heart.

Wrote this post after Amnesia Razorfish asked me to write about IE8, for Microsoft’s http://microsoft.com.au/ie8debate. You can find other opinion-leaders and read their leading opinions there (warning: many are not as funny as mine). I’m impressed Amnesia Razorfish and Microsoft were up for constructive criticism since IE8 is such an important product. Evidence Microsoft is learning to listen and ready to begin changing. You can contribute your opinion on http://microsoft.com.au/ie8debate or just twitter with the hashtag #ie8debate

There was a time (though it seems like centuries ago now) that Internet Explorer had me by the heart-strings. It was the mid-nineties, I was but a young stripling then, and all I could think about was the beauty and the power of the internet. I was a producer with a small internet business called Yahoo! that hoped to make some money selling ads on web pages when people went searching for stuff (as if!) and Internet Explorer was one of two browsers that most consumers used to access what many people still called “the world wide web.”

Back then Internet Explorer (IE) had a small but rapidly growing slice of the market and I was in love with her promise of fast times, with her sexy interface. (Can an interface be “sexy”? Can I get a “hell yeah” from the geeks in the audience?) In those days, compared to Netscape Navigator, Internet Explorer was attractive; alluring, even. IE was great for me, great for Yahoo! and great for our customers. She made me look good, and she was going to help me make money — who can ask for more from a girlfriend?

Then the relationship began to go bad.

IE started to get carried away with the power she had over me. She wanted more money to keep Yahoo! search as an option for IE users searching the web. She wanted me to adopt new technologies like ActiveX that weren’t compatible with Navigator. By now, Navigator was just another browser I was just friends with, but that wasn’t enough for IE — she wanted me all to herself.

Then she started to hang around with a bad crowd, and developed a crack habit. Spyware and malware and all manner of nasty types started exploiting security vulnerabilities I hadn’t noticed when we first started dating. She had a problem, and although she kept releasing updates to address each vulnerability, there seemed to be a new crack in her armour almost every week.

At first I thought it was just a phase she’d grow out of. Slowly the crack habit began affecting the time we spent together — I’d have to download and install a big new patch before I began browsing the web, and it was costing me money and time in bandwidth (which was expensive and slow back then) just to maintain our relationship.

Even then, I probably would have stayed with her if it weren’t for two of her friends: MSN and Windows.

There’s a common observation in single guy relationship theory: the more beautiful the woman, the more likely she is to have a needy, unattractive best friend. The unattractive best friend (who my mate Tony calls “the bonus monster”) doesn’t like you, and will always be around just when you really want to be alone and romantic. She will undermine you, and if you’re not careful, she’ll manage to shut you out altogether.

IE’s bonus monster was MSN, this overweight, insecure, unattractive consumer web portal that kinda-sorta-wanted-to-be-AOL-and-Yahoo!-put-together. At first I didn’t believe MSN was a threat to my relationship with IE because nobody who knew how to change their default homepage really wanted to use it. But soon IE started to insist that we think of MSN’s feelings on every decision we were making; including MSN in everything we did together, even insisting I use MSN if I was going to do something online. Ick.

Then there was IE’s fat, clumsy and often aggressive big bully brother, Windows. At lot has changed since Windows got in trouble with the law and lost, but back then, Windows was a pretty scary guy to deal with. There was a tiny core at the centre of Windows — a brainstem that remained almost literally unchanged since the Jurassic equivalent of consumer computing evolution — and on top of that, all manner of computing services had been stacked, sometimes carefully, sometimes haphazardly. Sometimes the stack would fall over several times a day.

(Once I taught myself to juggle during a two week period of hell when Windows would crash my laptop hourly and then take 5-10 minutes to recover itself when I rebooted.)

Microsoft, IE’s dad, decided about mid-way through our relationship that it would be a good idea for IE to spend more time with Windows, and began insisting that they hang out together in what became an uncomfortable, unnatural way. It seemed like the more successful IE became, the more determined Microsoft became to make IE take care of her bully brother. Sometimes it was like Windows and IE were just one person; they started sharing a plate, started hugging a little too closely, began finishing each other’s sentences. It was wrong on so many levels. It was incest. And yet, when the courts finally sought to intervene, for a while Microsoft tried to say it was no longer possible for Windows to exist without IE. That was so weird it was embarrassing.

I’d been through a lot all this time, putting up with the constant downtimes, updates and workarounds I needed just to stay in this relationship, but I still had eyes only for IE. At least, until poor bloated, dependency-addled IE could no longer keep up with advances in HTML itself. And I bought an iPod.

See, for the past decade my employer had chosen the operating system I used at work, and while my shiny new iPod worked OK with my Windows laptop at work, I was blown away by the ease-of-use and clean simplicity of my iPod. I’d used Macs before in the past (I’d been a Mac evangelist and Editor of Australian Macworld magazine before there really was an Internet) and I began to wonder if perhaps the great times I was having with my iPod would be the same if I tried using Mac’s OS X instead of Windows.

When I left Yahoo! to go do my own thing, I bought a Mac. On my Mac there was IE, but not the IE 6.x I was used to, just something slow and clunky labelled IE 5.x. Not very much like the IE 5.x I’d used on Windows before. There was also Safari, another browser from Apple, which was basic and short on some features I’d miss a bit, but it was much faster than IE, and it was really stable.

There was also this new girl: Firefox. Somehow while I’d been focused on just getting by in my tumultuous relationship with IE, the un-sexy, clunky Navigator I’d known in the ’90s had dramatically changed. After a near-death experience and a long time in rehab she had gone into a kind of group therapy called Open Source and come out transformed. She was now everything I might want, and as my needs changed, the open source community ensured that she not only changed with my needs but often anticipated my needs before they changed. She was light, she was fast, she was flexible, and I could dress her up with themes to suit any occasion.

She was even OK that I was still good friends with Safari and wanted to stay that way. I’d found the girl of my dreams.

So a few years went by. Then just the other day, Firefox and Safari and were are at the coffee shop, working and talking via Twitter and Skype and Jabber with our friends, and you’d never guess who walked in. Internet Explorer 8. Looking cleaner, less seedy, and for a change, not joined at the hip to her scary brother Windows and her ugly best friend, MSN. I hardly recognised her.

So I asked Firefox and Safari if they’d excuse me, and I moved to another table to talk with IE 8 for a while. And every thing I learned just made me certain I’d made the right decision in leaving her.

She made it clear that she wanted me back, but I don’t think she even really knows what I want anymore. Yes, she has has some new features but I’m not overwhelmed by them, in fact, I’m not even whelmed. They’re very similar to stuff I already get with Firefox and Safari. Yes, IE 8 is now less befuddled with crud than before and more able to support the advanced scripting web services like to do these days, but that’s something I’d expect of any modern girl.

We went through a lot together, IE8 and I. I know it hurt both of us, not just me. But it takes a long time for those scars to heal. It takes a lot of upside for me to give her a second chance. I can’t see that upside in her right now.

And I’m a Mac guy now. Is there an IE8 for Mac guys? Ah, no. In fact, there isn’t even that terrible IE 5.x for Mac users anymore.

Sorry IE, but you’re the unfaithful ex-girfriend, and I’m in a better place now.

When I first started as a web producer, everybody I knew worked with only Netscape Navigator and IE in mind and they did it only from PCs. Now, in my consulting gig at Pollenizer.com Our team are nearly all Mac-based and we work mainly in Firefox and Safari (when we’re not testing for browser-compatibility). Times have changed for me. How have they changed for you?

About the bottom of your emails

// April 6th, 2009 // 0 Comments // Featured, Fun, Writing

If you’re going to be wasting bytes by putting all that fine print at the bottom of your emails, at least be honest and do try to be funny. Here’s how:

(more…)

Can crowds create brands as well as the pros?

// June 24th, 2008 // 0 Comments // Advertising, Writing

   

NameThis.com – prone to gaming?

Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy

For a few moments, I loved the idea of using crowdsourcing to brainstorm new brand names, business names and taglines on namethis.com.

The website for the business behind this, kluster.com, is the coolest I’ve seen in months, and everything from the front page to the jobs page has more sharply-defined character than a Raymond Chandler novel.

But can great brands be unearthed by the unwashed masses, or must they always be the domain of marketing genii? I have a half-day brand brainstorm workshop scheduled for a new client tomorrow morning, so this question couldn’t arise at a more pertinent time for me. Especially since I’ve been managing writer’s block by reading about namethis.com on Australian Anthill. (more…)

Mum’s the words

// May 22nd, 2008 // 0 Comments // Social Media, Startup, strategy, Writing

I’ve written before about the importance of developing great elevator pitches and business narratives, and about how often the best ones come from your customers, not your marketing team.

In the last week I was privileged to observe a group of passionate, involved customers do exactly this for Clay Cook, entrepreneur, angel investor and founder of Minti.com, an online support and advice community for new mums.

Clay had no budget to get some copy written in a hurry for a direct email shot out to a church email list. I heard about this when he Twittered, asking if anyone could help. I got in touch but I couldn’t really help.

It didn’t matter because in the meantime, Clay had a better idea: he already had an abundance of engaged, communicative, passionate Minti customers who would share a lot in common with the women on this group email list. Why not run a competition to see who could write the best email for Minti? (more…)