Don’t you wish you could be inside your reader’s head as he reads your content? What text could you throw away? What text could you monetize? Active listening is difficult. In fact, it’s exhausting, especially if you’re new to it. Do you know people who practice active listening? You’d know if you did. They begin [...]
Bloggers often learn from and post about mistakes. When it’s our customers who are making the mistakes, should we post on them? In the 1968 comedy The Odd Couple, Jack Lemmon plays Felix Ungar. At a dinner party, he mentions that he writes for TV news broadcasts. Doe-eyed neighbor Cecily Pigeon replies, “That sounds like [...]
Ghost blogging backs up a recognized person with professional writing experience. Marketing communications writers may also need to tune the person’s voice. Is it blogging? “By the way,” the vice president of product development told me. “I want the posts to have a certain personality. They should sound as if Alec Baldwin wrote them.” Alec [...]
What’s in your content: Marketing writing or corporate cheerleading? A parable for the marketing manager. A dear friend who does a lot of business writing once remarked, Compact, compelling copy that doesn’t fall into business jargon is tough. So much of it is fake words strung together with cheerleading. I’ve mulled that over for a [...]
White paper summaries or abstracts take time to write and to read. Are they worth it? They are if they help answer tough questions in a hurry. Do you rely on an abstract at the beginning of a white paper to tell you what you’re about to read? Do you think the readers of your [...]
Rescue your marketing communications content from the tar pit. Your readers can find it more easily and it will tell your story better. Around 1900, a few men standing near the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, California, realized that there were animal bones in the tar. “What a find!” exclaimed the first. “We [...]
A parable: Valuable content and searchability are as important to religion as they are to your marketing communication. In our parish, believe it or not, we pay a fair amount of attention to Sunday sermons. You can become blasé about sermons pretty easily, but I’ve heard several of my friends begin conversations with “Did you [...]
Your white papers are good incentive content. If you think nobody’s reading them, maybe it’s because the ideal readers cannot find them. It’s hard not to feel good about having a white paper to give prospects, even harder when you have an entire library of them. If well done, they demonstrate the willingness to align [...]
Half the art to getting found on the Web involves putting out great content. Your marketing communications writer needs to know this and produce accordingly. A post at Problogger this week extols the virtues of linking to other content on the Web: Linking reinforces the relationships – both human and digital – that make the [...]
Re-purposing content is part of the art of marketing. Have your marketing communications writer convert big-bite content into multiple smaller pieces and put them into different channels. “We have a white paper, but it’s too long for this day and age.” Of course, the engineer or executive who wrote the paper doesn’t think that, but [...]
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