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.

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.

Like unknown thousands of other VirginBlue customers, my wife, Boy8 and I all received an email from VirginBlue telling us that, even though we hadn’t yet earned enough points to qualify, the decision had been made to upgrade us all to ‘Gold’ — the top tier of the VirginBlue frequent flyer program.

VirginBlue's nice surprise that quickly turned nasty.

The following morning, we all received an email telling us in a brief and casual manner that a mistake had been made, we weren’t getting the upgrade, and VirginBlue wished us their “warm regards.”

And then, this email, which really couldn't have been handled any worse.

The effects of that email are still rippling through trade press, online media, Twitter and the blogosphere and will probably be in the weekend’s papers when I’ve had a shower and walked the dog to the shop.

Like most other customers who received the email, I feel like I’ve been treated shabbily by a brand that cared about its relationship with me. Unlike most other customers, I understand why the email made me feel that way, and what VirginBlue could have done differently to salvage the customer relationship it has enjoyed until now.

This will be hard for the IT department to understand, but it wasn’t so much that the error occurred, it was how VirginBlue handled the communication that has caused the crisis. The two emails couldn’t have been more inflammatory if they’d been deliberately written to offend. Allow me to break it down:

So some customers get a better deal than I do?

The first email made a big deal of how I’d been upgraded even though I hadn’t earned enough points. So now I know that even when the system is working perfectly, some customers get upgraded before they’ve earned enough points. That’s an unfairness in the business rules that should not have been communicated so widely, and when it was, should have been the primary focus of the communication. Something along the lines of, “we’ve reviewed our business rules in light of the system error and have revised our policy so that in future, no members will be discriminated against on their qualification for upgrade.”

The economics of rewards points

For me as a Red level member, being granted Gold status would bring significant benefits that I would value far higher than their likely cost to VirginBlue (that is, after all, the way points systems are designed to work.) To upgrade and then downgrade a customer — to reveal and then remove benefits of high personal value — is a big deal and it has a significant effect on your relationship with most customers affected.

VirginBlue (and anybody operating a loyalty program) must remember the true value of reward points is not their cost to the company but the way they make the customer feel.

Don’t be casual when you apologise — always over-do it

VirginBlue way underestimated the impact of the error to follow-up with a brief generic email beginning “Ooops!”. This was always going to end in bad publicity, but a better email could have softened the blow and salvaged the customer relationship.

The email should have been personal — from person to person, not from brand to person. It should have been written in the name of a VirginBlue senior executive with a signature and a photograph at the end of the email.

Next, the email should have detailed the approx. number of customers affected by the error, the cause of the error in layperson’s terms (not just “a system error”) and the steps taken to ensure it doesn’t happen again. Being too brief about it just gives the impression the company doesn’t take it seriously and doesn’t care if it happens again.

How to let them down more gently

Detailing the approx. number of customers affected helps segue into the most difficult — but most important — part of the email: explaining that it’s not possible to honour the upgrade promise.

When I received the second email, I was not one of thousands of affected customers, I felt like the only customer affected. It was only because I bothered to search for information online that I realised I wasn’t the only one affected. The email sent only said, “you do not qualify for that upgrade.”

The final element of a better email communication would have been to offer some small token gift in reparation. If VirginBlue values the customer relationship it has with me, it should show that it cares about the damage to that relationship by administering itself a penalty.

We’ve already talked about how points programs work because customers value rewards more than their cost to the company, so any small reward given at this point will earn VirginBlue more in customer relationship value than the bottom-line impact.

While offering affected customers a small token reward doesn’t add up to the benefits of Gold status, it does at least make the customer feel like VirginBlue cares enough to punish itself for the mistake. VirginBlue deliberately positions itself as the underdog in the Australian domestic aviation market and fosters an “us-against-the-establishment” relationship with its regular customers. That relationship only works if VirginBlue shows it values its customer relationships more than its competitors do.

By making such a dramatic error and then doing such a bad job of communicating it, VirginBlue starts to look much more like the establishment than the underdog.

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.

Send a few emails to someone that they delete without reading, and the odds begin to increase that they will delete the next email from you, no matter what’s in the email itself. They are increasingly  likely to repeatedly delete emails over time, even if it those emails now include a generous reward targeted exactly at them. The odds also increase that they may unsubscribe on the next email, or flag your email as spam, moving ‘down’ the list of options above.

In short, customers will behave like Skinner’s pidgeons, and instead of ringing the bell in return for a food pellet, they will be increasingly likely to ignore email communication from you.

Just like pigeons, customers can be trained to do just about anything.

That cumulative response pattern can go either way — upwards toward response or downwards towards unsubscribing and flagging you as spam.

You’d like to think most reasonable people would try unsubscribing but a large percentage of any random sample will go straight from deleting to flagging as spam. In my observations, as much as 20-25% of users will skip straight from (3) Delete Without Reading to (5) Flag It As Spam.

In our busy modern lives, extra reading for the sake of extra reading does not make us feel wanted, or loved, or appreciated. It makes us feel like this business does not understand our needs, that it treats all its customers the same, and that it has nothing interesting to say.

So if all your email communication is either improving or damaging your customer relationships, how do you make sure you’re trending up the list from the first email and not down towards losing the opportunity to communicate with a customer?

The biggest single influence I’ve observed is the content of the email subject field. Write a great subject line, and you will get an open. Write a subject line that does nothing but prompts the decision to open the email, and response is more likely to follow.

Recently I signed up for a new service and their email email newsletter subject began “[Company Name] News Vol. X” and I had to wonder what they were thinking.

The original purpose of putting a volume number on a publication was for print periodicals that had to be referred to by volume number for archiving and recall. You might feel that this heritage feel might be comforting or add character, but it has no place in the email marketing world. You just wasted a few precious characters you could have used to deliver an engaging subject line and you wasted a tiny fraction of your customer’s time with something that you care about but the customer doesn’t. You’re off on the wrong foot, trending down towards ‘delete without reading’ before you’ve even told them anything.

If you must put a unique ID on your emails for your own reference, put that somewhere in the HTML or below the footer so it doesn’t interrupt the reader.

Meanwhile, reserve the subject line of your emails for the most exciting news you have to share with the customer. And remember that by “exciting” I mean “exciting for the customer” not “exciting for your business.”

Finally, here’s my most important rule of email marketing:

If you don’t have something engaging to say, don’t say anything at all.

Some marketing folks get all caught up in the idea that a regular schedule of email communication deepens the relationship with the customer. I’m calling bollocks on that one: does receiving a bill on the same day of the month make you feel any closer to the phone company? No, it does not. In our busy modern lives, extra reading for the sake of extra reading does not make us feel wanted, or loved, or appreciated. It makes us feel like this business does not understand our needs, that it treats all its customers the same, and that it has nothing interesting to say.

Worst of all, it trains us to ignore future emails. Or worse: flag them as spam. Now, I’ve written my blog post, where’s my food pellet?

Update: Perkler implemented some of the recommendations in this blog post and have reported an increase in open rates from 2.0% to  3.4% (industry average is about 3%). Yay!

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.

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.

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?

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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.

To an extent, any new brand does require a lot of new ideas thrown up on a whiteboard. Every brand brainstorm should include a free flow of ideas, guided by a moderator who is quick and experienced enough to encourage the workshop participants to follow some trains of thought into wilder flights of fancy in the hope of unearthing a golden nugget or two.

The moderator’s role is crucial. A good moderator is always on the lookout for groupthink, fatigue, cynicism sarcasm and other common symptoms of asking inexperienced communicators to do something as new and threatening as invent a new brand.

Namethis.com lets you write a brief, then just collects a single date/time-ordered list of user submissions, which appears to be the online equivalent of a brainstorming session without a moderator. Browsing through some of the active projects there I can see clear evidence of each of the symptoms of an unhealthy brainstorm, especially groupthink.

Another problem is that branding brainstorms can be much more effective if everyone in the workshop starts from the same point and heads in the same direction. A detailed brief helps, and none of the examples I found on namethis.com had what I’d call a good brief – they seemed to reflect the same level of emotional investment as the $99 dollar investment it takes to submit a request for brand names.

It can often help to work together on defining some of the elements of the brand – dimensions of personality, colours, sounds and practice with a few “if this product were a <product category> it would be a <brand name>”  questions to make sure everyone is starting from the same point. There is no opportunity to do that on namethis.com

Finally, I do think that some products – like yet another bogus weight-loss pill – are open to guerilla criticism on a site like this. I’ll be interested to see whether and how the site moderator or the pill merchant take action on my suggested product name, “Eating A Healthy Balanced Diet and Exercise Didn’t Work For Me“.

In the end, namethis.com probably represents appropriate value for $99.00 – your chances of turning up a gold nugget brand are about as likely as spending that $99.00 on 15 minutes of a good professional creative’s time. But you may have to spend a little more than that to get the result you need, either way.

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?

Clay gave them a short brief, his own attempt at the email, a deadline of only three days, and a prize for the winner of M$20,000 (about $USD40, which can be used on Minti.)

Some of the entries were very good, and the winning entry nailed it, showing Clay and Minti exactly what it is that makes Minti special to its customers (rather than its investors, partners, press and employees.) Here’s my favourite excerpt:

Minti (www.minti.com) is the most amazing site for parents I have ever come across. It breaks down the walls of social isolation that many parents face. The members are real people with real problems, and real solutions. Whether you are a parent of your first newborn baby, your teenage grandchildren are becoming difficult to understand, or you are planning a child and want to get a better idea what you can expect, Minti has the answers… or we will quickly find them for you!

It’s wonderful; right on voice and credible because it’s written by a real person, not a copywriter or a marketer. No buzzwords, jargon or feature lists to trip the mind’s marketing alarms and alienate the reader.

Congratulations Clay, fantastic job!

What’s the lesson for the rest of us? Simple: all you need to distil a great elevator pitch is a small group of passionate customers, a place for them to cooperate, compete and egg each other on, a good brief and a meaningful reward.

Of course, if you don’t have an online community of passionate, engaged, communicative customers, you’re out of luck, in which case, you might consider engaging me to help. I can help you identify and bring together passionate customers online and offline. If you don’t have passionate customers yet, I can derive some of what’s needed from you, your staff, the marketplace, and my experience writing great pitches for other startup businesses.

Blogs are about quick snippets, so here’s the upshot: practice, practice and more practice separates you and I from the great business story tellers of our age (Stephen uses Steve Jobs as a great example – have you ever watched Job’s address to Stanford University students? It’s incredible. I’ve added it at the end of this story.)

Sammartino makes a valuable point: don’t leave it until the moment it really counts to practice your business stories. When you meet that potential investor, you need your business stories polished to a high sheen. When you’re trying to engage a potential hire you really need, you want to set their imagination on fire. When you’re pitching to your first customers, you want them to be swept away.

Nobody – not me, not Steve Jobs – gets that to happen without a lot of practice; but how to start? First, we need to dig down to the bones of the story.

Getting started on digging up your bones

Start right now. Write one of your business stories down. Choose one of the following; (a) what your business offers customers; (b) how your business was founded; or (3) the most valuable lesson you learned since you started this business.

Don’t get fixated on how long or short the story is in the first draft, and write it in your own story-telling style, without being formal, and without using business jargon wherever possible.

Once your first draft is done, put it away and let it mature overnight. During the maturation, your mind will be polishing it, even when you’re not consciously thinking about it.

The following day, pick it up again and write a second draft. If the first draft was longer than 500 words, try to get it down to under 500 words by removing elements of the story that aren’t necessary rather than by changing the language you’ve used.

Put the second draft away again to mature for at least another day.

When you pick up the second draft again, read it through again and you should now find that you have the ‘skeleton’ of the story clear in your mind. Like a joke must have a punchline, a story has a skeleton – the essential points that must be delivered for the story to have meaning. You should be able to remove the ‘flesh’ of the story itself from the story (the language) and still see a connected, coherent skeleton underneath.

Write down the skeleton of your story as a brief series of bullet-points. These are the bones of your story’s skeleton.

The story’s bones are the memory aid you need to deliver your story flawlessly every time. You only need memorise each bone and then deliver them in the correct order for your story-telling to get a ‘B’ in story-telling school.

Because the story’s bones are so light and easy to carry in your memory, you’ll find you’re capable of carrying the bones of the many different business stories you’ll need with you everywhere you go.

Memorise your bones however you like, but there’s nothing wrong with writing them on your hand for a few days. I have it on good authority that Steve Jobs is so passionate about portable devices (Apple’s Newton, iPod and iPhone) because he can’t stand having pen scribbles on the inside of his wrist all the time

Now, go practice your bones!

Until your bones are polished, you won’t deliver them any better than you would delivering any other randomly-chosen series of bullet points. You need to practice the story-telling process now, which is the act of putting the flesh back on the bones each time you tell the story. Start with your first bone, flesh it out, then move to the second bone, and repeat.

This method of story-telling lets you develop slightly different story flesh for different audiences. A potential investor may hope to see the ‘muscles’ across your revenue model in a bit more detail than a potential alliance partner. An audience member might interrupt you with a question just as you move from one bone to the next. Using the bone metaphor you are still OK, because you know the bone you’ve just fleshed-out, you know which bone comes next, and within the time available you can build out any part of the body of the story as you need to, as long as you deliver each of the bones you’ve memorised.

When you’ve mastered the art of getting to the bones of a story, you’ll be ready for the next step: adding pace, drama and colour to a story. I’ll write that soon.

In the meantime, how many bones can you count in Steve Jobs’ commencement speech on YouTube? How well do they connect?

Oh, and it’s also a story about why your company needs a narrative too.

Have you heard the one about…

The power of a company narrative is easy to illustrate. Most of us have one or two we remember, some large and significant, some silly but amusing. I like to draw upon some of the company narratives I was taught – and passed on to others – when working at companies like Yahoo!, when the crazy early days of Web 1.0 were fertile ground for imagination.

One Yahoo! story goes: in a particular room, there was a mess of servers and cables that admin guys were forbidden to mess with “because Filo put them together like that, nobody’s quite sure what they do, but if we unplug them to relocate them, it just might bring all of Yahoo! down.”

I’ll leave others to tell the tale of the Yahoo! employee who got a share price tattooed on his butt.

At WordPerfect, a company founded in Orem, Utah, which employed many Mormon staff, my favourite company narrative was about how the company’s database product, DataPerfect, was based on the Mormon church’s own genealogy software, and that completing and returning the warranty registration form was helping the church complete its goal of recording the genealogy of all humankind.

Like all good myths, these little narratives are simplified, tweaked, burnished and enriched by being handed down from person to person, and told and re-told. The weak ones die and the strong ones get stronger, becoming an element of viral marketing, moving beyond your company to customers, partners, competitors and the media. The greatest narratives will survive – even thrive on – being debunked on Wikipedia.

Johnny Cupcakes has an unusual name, and sells t-shirts from a small but successful chain of stores that look like bakeries, with trays of t-shirts instead of. What’s the story behind the name? Why sell clothes from a retail outlet that probably attracts more hungry junk-food fans than fashion buyers?

Johnny has all the motivation he needs to make his company narrative front-and-centre on his website. Before you’re ready to buy his products, you have questions – you want answers.

Johnny’s website is full of character, and the ‘about us’ story is a great example of how to do company narrative. The story is engaging, full of character, well separated into discrete episodes, and entertaining.

We could improve the viral and recall properties of this narrative by chunking it up into several separate narratives, each with their own space on the website, and rewritten so that each has the essential elements of a narrative: a hero, a story arc with a beginning, middle, climax and end, and a take-away message – a ‘moral’ to the story.

The introduction would work better if it started off with something along the lines of, “Hi, my name is Johnny Cupcake, do you have a moment for a great story?” – most good stories start with an introduction from the storyteller themselves. Warning the reader that this is a bit of a ‘shaggy dog story’ (it takes a while to tell) would also be helpful.

Shaggy dog stories like this one definitely need a counter-balance – the elevator pitch. Nowhere on Johnny Cupcakes’ website is there a brief, concise encapsulation of what the business is about and why you should care. Three bullet points that anyone can remember and deploy when a friend asks, “what’s all this about Johnny Cupcakes?”

Still, Johnny’s site is full of personality, wit and charm. It’s a great shaggy dog story presented in an engaging and self-effacing manner.

Every good company needs narratives. Get started on identifying yours and testing how well they are passed on from generation to generation.

If you don’t have one yet, drop me an email!

• Attention: breaking through the clutter so people are really listening to what you have to say.
• Retention: making sure that people remember what you’ve told them so they can tell others.

It’s Love Story on a boat

The original “elevator pitch” was in the movie industry, where you might get 10-15 seconds in an elevator or topping up a customer’s water glass to pitch a script to a Hollywood producer. You might pitch the script for Titanic as “It’s Love Story on a boat”. Very simplified, and by referring to Love Story, an enduring classic with big box office receipts, the pitch has a clever, highly-compressed ‘payload’ designed for easy consumption by a Hollywood producer.

Say Love Story and the producer can unzip that payload for himself and think “big box office, love story about two kids from opposite sides of the track, at the end, one of them dies.” Even better, because he’s unpacked all that meaning himself, there’s a tiny voice in his subconscious telling him that he’s figured out something that you might not know, that might give him leverage over you when it comes to negotiating the value of the deal. You’ve captured his attention.

Stop talking, my ears are popping!

Internet startups need to capture attention too, but I often meet startups (sometimes even established companies) who seem to take longer elevator rides than me. What should be 10-15 seconds runs for twice or three times that long. Where are these 250 storey buildings? I had a coffee with a new contact earlier this week who took nearly eight minutes – I felt like we were flying from Sydney to San Francisco, it took so long.

I asked him how business was going. He said the company was having some trouble differentiating itself from its competitors… no kidding! Could that be because nobody had the attention span to listen for that long? Partly, yes, but there’s a deeper problem: nobody retains eight minutes of information about your business.

You and your business partners can certainly retain that much – if you’re like me you can talk for hours off the cuff about what you do. However because we all stand too close to our own business, we massively overestimate how much information other people will retain when we talk about our business.

If you’re interesting, memorable and concise, you might get people to retain only three simple points about your business. Yes, only three.

The three bullet point rule

It’s not a strict rule, but you’ll take it more seriously if I call it a rule, and you should take this seriously: keep your elevator pitch to around three key points (maybe four, two is even better) and more people will remember what you’ve told them.
It’s so simple you’re probably going to have to read it again to remember it:

keep your pitch to three points – more people will remember and repeat it for longer.

Don’t leave bullets as bullets

It’s a key discipline to distill your elevator pitch into a few key points, but is it a good idea to actually deliver them as bullet points?

• No, it’s not
• Readers tire quickly
• Bullet points don’t tell a story

When you’re practising your own elevator pitch, visualising them as bullet points will help you retain them. But you should avoid actually delivering them as bullet points – verbally, on the page, or in a slide deck.

Bullet points help us summarise information because they allow us to do without bits of a story – the bits that bind together the separate elements to craft a narrative. But if we’re striving for retention, we don’t want to leave people to stitch together their own story out of the bullet points, because people don’t always assemble bullet points into a story the way we intended.

For instance, eye-tracking research shows that people often skip a few bullet points, reading the first and then skipping to the last to see if there’s a conclusion there that will save them from reading the bullet points in-between. Looking at the stories assembled when they do this suggests that people will assemble the bullet points in almost any order they like in order to come to a quick and straightforward story… even if it’s wrong!

Asking people to assemble their own story out of your bullet points has a markedly different effect on the mind than the ‘unzipping the archive’ effect of the title Titanic in the Hollywood producer’s mind. Having to assemble a story from bullet points brings a mind ‘out of the moment’ – out of the ‘little dream’ we all fall into when someone tells us a great story. It interrupts, reduces the emotional impact, excitement, and drama. Just ask yourself whether you’d rather watch a movie or listen to the elevator pitch that sold it. (OK, I don’t mean Titanic because if you’re like me, the elevator pitch would actually be preferable. )

Crafting an elevator pitch that can be expressed in a few bullet points is a valuable discipline because it’s going to help you deliver a compelling story in 15 seconds. Don’t make the mistake of delivering the bullet points instead.

The frankenvator pitch

Why is retention so important? Why can’t my elevator pitch just be effective at the moment of delivery?

You need 100% retention of your elevator pitch because the pitch must accompany your business card when a friend hands it to a new acquaintance. The pitch must be passed on when a consumer recommends your service to a friend. The pitch must be in mind when a journalist begins reviewing your product. Your delivery of the pitch is just the beginning – a successful pitch must remain intact as it is passed on from person to person.

Measure average retention after one, four and 24 hours and you’ll discover that even if you get 100% retention after one hour, it will drop off rapidly over time. Having invested the time necessary to deliver your elevator pitch, you need people to retain it for as long as possible, so it can be passed on to others intact, not as what I call a “frankenvator pitch” (think: “Umm.. I think it’s called Titanical and it’s some kind of love story, there’s some steamy sex in the hold of the ship and then a lot of people die.”) We’ve all played Chinese Whispers before – we know this happens eventually, but the longer you can hold it together, the more people you reach with every delivery of your pitch.

How do I find my compressed payload?

Remember the “It’s Love Story on a boat” pitch from Titanic and how the film Love Story was actually a compressed payload of meaning for the Hollywood producer? How it allowed the producer to unpack and decode some additional value of his own from the pitch and feel like he’d got an insight? How do you find a similar compressed payload for your business?

I have to admit at this point that Doing Words doesn’t have a compressed payload yet. These things can’t be rushed, but I am at least on the lookout for one. When I find it, it will be included in my elevator pitch (which is in the title of my blog – “Helping startups build a better story”.)

In my experience helping other companies craft a payload, I find the best way to find them is to ask friends, family, customers, fans – whoever you think is passionate about your business but who isn’t close enough to the company to be familiar with your eight minute nosebleed version of your elevator pitch.

In fact, some of the best payloads I’ve seen have come from market research focus groups using consumers who have never heard of the company and the product/service before. Ideally, consumers who could be in the target market but currently aren’t in the target market.

For instance, if you’re selling word processing software, find retirees who aren’t yet familiar with word processing software but who have made up their minds to write their life’s memoirs and have decided to buy their first computer. Get them to talk a little about what sort of concerns they have about that whole decision and the learning curve they’re worrying about. Keep that feedback in mind when you give them the simplest possible demonstration of your software. Then get them to describe what you’ve just shown them.

Without the benefit of the inside knowledge, jargon and nosebleed elevator pitch you and I would be handicapped by, these consumers will be forced to describe your product as a compressed payload. The ideal payload will be in there, perhaps described as “it’s as simple as writing a love letter when you just can’t wait to see each other” or “sometimes I just want to dash off something in a hurry, and this keeps up with me.” These sorts of statements can then be compressed into a payload.

If you’re a technology startup don’t be seduced into a common mistake of using a currently popular internet company as your Love Story compressed payload. Even if you happen to be in the search engine space, don’t be tempted to say about yourself, “We’re Google, with a nicer interface” because fashions come and go so quickly on the internet.
Good payloads are viral and have high retention, and may last longer than the company you’re likening yourself to. You wouldn’t want people to be talking about your search startup as “We’re like Yahoo!…” in any way, shape or form these days. Microsoft, Novell, Borland, WordPerfect… the IT industry is littered with once-great companies you don’t want to be likened to.
Once a well-crafted payload is out there, it will stay out there doing its job until you go to considerable effort required to craft an even more memorable and compelling payload. Assuming you can!

NOTE: Many of the ideas and examples above originated in
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference and Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. You should really buy both books if these ideas have been of interest.