Category Archives: Messaging

Antisocial Media

Posted on by

“Twitter is an ‘all about me’ place. So is Facebook. Both will be replaced with something else someday.” The radio host who said this, a man who lives in the social space as part of his livelihood, was making a fairly shrewd observation. Perhaps the condition is temporary, but most social media is about micropublishing, allowing everyone and their grandpa to broadcast to anyone who remotely cares. As proven in the last election cycle, everyone voicing their opinions and preferences online strains the patience of others, and over time reduces the desire to participate. As a young store clerk in a Forever 21 outlet recently said to me “Facebook is too noisy. Nobody my age hangs out there.” Sadly, a lot of marketers are in the “all about me” mode of social, and achieving the same sad results. I scanned a few B2B twitter accounts to spot check social activity … Continue reading →

Buzz Kill

Posted on by

Two cynical definitions of language neatly describe many marketing communications: The music with which we charm the serpents guarding another’s treasure … and The source of misunderstandings. Marketing’s job is to charm people out of their money, preferably by articulating the true value of necessary products. Yet many marketing managers slip straight to snake oil salesmanship and leverage a ton of text and bunkers filled with buzzwords to attempt recruiting prospects. Misuse of language is a chief cause of unhappy customers and board members. The first task in marketing communications is to promote value. Here at Silicon Strategies Marketing, we defined (copyright alert) value as “the intersection of need and differentiation.” Value intersections tend to be precise, and the language used to describe a particular value must be as well. Generalized and buzzword-heavy statements like “the most cost-effective, easy-to-use, and universally accessible” detract from precise value articulation. The results are … Continue reading →

Evil Email

Posted on by

The worst thing you can do to a good bar is to make it popular. Once everyone goes there, it isn’t worth going there anymore. Email advertising and online surveys used to be good bars. When email first commercialized, it was a great and inexpensive tool for lead generation, prospect follow-up and brand reinforcement. But as emails popularity exploded, so did the number of marketers who abused the process. Today people dread reading their morning email – it has become a disappointment filled chore. Email open rates have been dropping. This has caused some marketers to get smarter and create better and more targeted emails. Lousy marketers just find bigger lists and thus annoy more people, which will continue to drive down open rates. Something related is occurring to surveys. Once online survey tools became cheap and easy to use, every man, woman and hermaphrodite with an email account started … Continue reading →

Promotional Propaganda

Posted on by

Perception is reality, until reality overrides perception. Marketers are branded as liars in no small part because many of them are. So pervasive is the trait that certain smart people have made good money writing on the subject. Marketers are charged with promoting products, which entails setting public perception about the product. In modern use of the word, this often devolves into propaganda instead of persuasion. Effective in the short term, setting unrealistic public perception about a product will eventually backfire. This happens to politicians all the time. Since perception is reality, at least in the short term, you need to have a clear notion of the reality you create for the market. Like the elastic in a fat fellow’s waistband, it can only be stretched so far before it fails. Since product disappointment is the essence of negative buzz, the greater the degree of potential disappointment you create, the … Continue reading →

Media Mutters

Posted on by

Media ain’t what it used to be … thank God. The internet has made everyone a publisher, and as such has completely rearranged from where information and power emit. Dead is the quaint era when all info rained like fetid manna from centralized sources. Today you, the marketing ground workers, have seemingly endless avenues for promoting your products, your brand and your profits. Which is why some of you have been driven to drink (though for a few it was just a short stroll). The reason self-medication is becoming popular in marketing circles has nothing to do with Mad Men or three martini lunches. It derives from needing to orchestrate outreach through all these media channels. Wherever such seeming chaos ensures, it is best to take a deep breath, a shot of something, and distill your options into a manageable set. In media, there are three basic categories through which … Continue reading →

Stupidly Simple

Posted on by

Simple declarative statements communicate most effectively. Kinda like the one above. Marketing messages need to be simple, yet marketing “pros” routinely make them complicated. Nowhere is the situation worse than in tech marketing. Perhaps lingering “feeds and speeds” mindsets pervert messaging. Or worse yet, maybe marketing types are budding authors who use marcom materials to practice their literary skills (there is a novel in every marketing director, which is a damn good place to keep it). Weak marketers rely on buzz words when copywriting skills and product differentiation do not exist. Even I suffer from an alienating allegiance to alliteration. Complexity sucks, and sucks the life out of messaging. People don’t have time to think, and forcing them into unsupervised thinking is dangerous. Keeping messages simple, even sparse, leads buyers rapidly to cognition, self-qualification and motivated interest. Slowing them down with needless and distracting verbiage does the opposite. Yet tech … Continue reading →

Play Real Good

Posted on by

The violin’s heavy vibrato found my ear through the chaos of the subway. Being a music junkie, the stuff tends to get my attention. Hearing a well-played violin in a crowded underground tunnel filled with thousands of rush-hour commuters was a miracle. That it held me for a brief moment was regrettably common. We learned in Communications 101 that there are three factors in passing along info – the transmitter, the receiver and the noise in between. Transmitters, be they buskers or marketers, have to confront noise in order for their product to even be perceived. Like the subway scene in which an aspiring violinist struggled to be heard, marketers have only the tiniest moments of relative quiet to connect. But noise is growing. The ability of people to tune out is positively Darwinian. With promotional messages now coming via radio, TV, billboards, browsers, embedded in apps and on nearly … Continue reading →