Is it a Slogan or a Key Message?

In the continuing discussion of key messages in your business writing, here’s a quick example of how a slogan can reflect underlying key messages.

It can be a chicken-egg exercise deciding whether to start with a slogan or key messages. I usually find it easier to start with the latter and distill them into a slogan.

The difference between key messages and slogans confuses some people. If you need help, please contact me.

Case Study: My Social Media Road Trip

I had the opportunity to debrief the Business Sorority of NC on the vital role that social media played in my 2010 road trip. I used Twitter, Facebook Pages, Vimeo, Flickr, and my travel blog to:

• raise money for my expenses and  the National Breast Cancer Foundation
• get news stories in four states during my trip and hours of local coverage
• find co-riders throughout my trip
• earn sponsorships from Caribou Coffee, AAA and BMW

I asked how many of the Business Sorority members used the same tools for their businesses and was surprised how many used Facebook and how few used a blog; here’s the final tally:

• Twitter used by 10%
• Facebook Pages used by 90%
• Video by 5%
• Photos  by 0%
• Blog by 30%

The most important social media tool

In the Q&A one woman asked which I felt was the MOST useful/important of these applications.  I answered using the Swiss Army Knife example — in social media you’ll use a couple of the tools more than the others, but when you really need that tooth pick/Tweet, you really need it.

For example, when I reached Bend, Oregon (my westernmost destination) I wanted my hometown NBC affiliate to take the feed from the Oregon station and run it in the Charlotte market so I tweeted asking if anyone had a connection to WCNC. Sure enough! While WCNC didn’t get the feed from Oregon, they did three times more than that: they covered my arrival home, featured a live interview with me on their morning show and used footage from my arrival and interviews in a feature story about women motorcyclists.

YEAH, that’s the power of  the right tool at the time!

Start with a blog and Facebook page

While YMMV (your mileage may vary) from project to project, I think you’re best served to start with a combination of  a blog and Facebook (FB). The blog is your hub and the only asset you truly own. Any of the free online apps can change their terms of service on a moment’s notice, making you vulnerable to losing data or functionality at best and money at worst.  For the 90% of Business Sorority members using FB, for example, I asked what would happen if FB decided it was only going to keep the last 3 months of updates?  There is no satisfactory answer to the question if you don’t have a blog.

Why Facebook over Twitter? Notwithstanding my success with Twitter, if you’re a beginning social media user, it’s easier to use and a critical mass of most everyone’s friends and business associates are already using it. The key is to place content in your blog FIRST and then link to it from your FB page. That’s not to say you shouldn’t upload videos or pictures to FB, just store them on your blog for safekeeping.

The versatile  blog

I use a WordPress theme on my own url (not the free one on the WordPress site). Unlike FB or Twitter, a blog lets me write posts of unlimited length  and insert multiple graphics, videos and sound files in each. Facebook allows you to embed ONE thing and with Twitter you can only insert links.  I drive traffic to my blog using all the other apps but also send traffic out to those apps via widgets.  Take a look at my home page for example, where you can follow my tweets, watch my recent Vimeo videos and connect to my other social media outlets.

If you want to know more, reach out to me or Andy Ciordia, the impresario who makes everything I do online possible.

Key Messages that Resonate

Here’s an example of how two bankruptcy law practices’ key messages reflect different business models. Key messages will resonate with certain audiences and be dissonant with others. Use the messages that resonate with YOUR audiences and don’t muddy the waters trying to be all things to everyone.

Decide which audience you want for your business and craft key messages that resonate with them. In another post I’ll differentiate between slogans and key messages.

What is resonance?

To resonate means “to be understood or receive a sympathetic response.” Here’s a video demonstration of resonance using salt on a plate that’s wired to an amplifier. As the sound waves change, the grains arrange themselves into different patterns that resonate with the sound waves. The grains find the sound wave irresistible, which is what your key messages should be for clients and prospects.

What constitutes buying differs from company to company, but whether it means picking up the phone, hitting the “subscribe” button or authorizing a purchase order, you need to produce media with the key messages that resonate with your audience’s  ”buy now” instinct.

Examples of key messages

People always resonate with message they perceive to be in their best interests. This is why marketers use language that resonates with insecurities like fear, shame, and guilt or aspirations like fame, fortune and ease.

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Quick! What two key messages do people associate with your firm/business/practice? If you don’t know, let’s figure out what those messages should be and start publishing them.

How to work with a Ghost Writer

People ask me all the time if there’s A WAY to work with a ghostwriter. Chemistry and work preferences vary so  I can only answer by describing the way I work with my clients.

Choose a writer who knows YOUR stuff

Before you hire someone to write for you, be sure they have domain expertise. My specialty is business writing and nonfiction because I have the background and education to do the job well.  If someone asked me to write for pharma or hi tech I’d have to take a pass — actually I’d have to question why they called me in the first place!

The right relationship starts with due diligence, including work samples and client referrals.

Getting started with a ghost writer

With a bit of ramp up a qualified writer can get to work writing newsletters, blog posts, articles, white papers, presentations, even memoirs in short order. The ramp up includes determining your key messages, perhaps some SEO targets and an editorial calendar. I talk about key messages and an editorial calendar in this video.

Getting YOUR voice out of a ghost writer

If you haven’t yet watched the video above, or stopped it before the end, queue it up to 2:30 where I talk about the advantage of using a sound file when working with a ghost writer.

I find that if clients begin a project by writing it themselves, or responding to my questions in writing, they focus on their spelling and grammar and perhaps their bad typing skills. This means I get less out of them and their project takes longer than if they simply respond to my questions in a natural, conversational way.   Any smart phone can serve as a recorder with a downloaded app. If you must buy a recorder, get a Sony with a USB for less than $75.

A voice recording enables me to write for clients in a way that replicates the way they think and express themselves. Of course  I clean up grammar, arrange  the piece sequentially, dig for case studies and add headlines, tags, illustrations, etc., but the end result is something that sounds familiar to the reader — only better than my client could have produced without my assistance.  My clients really do say, “It sounds like me, only better.”

Argh! Piracy in the Newsletter

Today I received a newsletter from a small human resources consulting company featuring an excellent article on disengaged workers. Too bad the newsletter sender didn’t make clear what the writer’s relationship to the firm is. The newsletter only included her name — not even a proper byline.

Problems with this approach

A consulting company exists to solve client problems  through its expertise and thought leadership. Newsletters should highlight both. This one did neither.

If the writer worked for the firm sending the newsletter it should have said so. If an employee of the firm wrote the article I might have been inclined to recommend her to the next person who complains about their workforce. That would have been a newsletter marketing success story.

After I went to the trouble of searching the sender’s website for the writer’s name and didn’t find it, I wondered if the sender simply lifted the article out of a professional publication — without attribution. That’s not only careless, but also possibly an infringement of copyright law. Piracy. This leads me to the conclusion that this company is unprofessional. Enough said.

The right approach

If you’re going to send a newsletter, you’ve got to write SOMETHING original, even if it’s just an introductory note explaining why the articles were chosen. This demonstrates your professionalism and avoids any question of copyright violation.

Nothing original to say?  Fine! Refer to an article written by an outsider in a way that highlights YOUR  expertise. In this case, the newsletter sender could have said something like “Clients with disengaged workers are usually making one of these common mistakes…”  or  ”We recently helped a transportation company avert a work stoppage by…”

Call to action

Close your newsletter with a distinct call to action. In this case, the company could have said, “Download this case study on how we helped a manufacturing firm improve absenteeism rates and productivity,” or “Join us for our quarterly roundtable discussion on getting more out of your existing workforce.” Heck, even something simple like this will do: “Call us if you see signs that your employees are disengaged…”

Your mom was right — sometimes it’s better to say nothing at all. If you can’t produce a newsletter that reflects well upon you, don’t produce a newsletter at all.

Mark Twain, The First Blogger?

Can’t wait to sink my teeth into the new Autobiography of Mark Twain. I went to his birthplace, Hannibal, MO this summer on my road trip.

Reading reviews of this great work, which Twain wouldn’t allow to be published until 100 years after his death, I found this in a CBS News story about Twain’s decision to dictate, rather than write, the book.

The autobiography is highly unconventional, in many ways ultra-modern – not telling one straight story from birth until death, but skipping around.

“Mark Twain wants this autobiography to be random,” Hirst* said. “You know, he’s going to talk about what he wants to talk about on this day, change his mind and move onto the next thing.”

You heard that right . . . talk. One of the greatest writers in American history decided the best way to tell his own story was NOT to write it, but SPEAK it.

Daily dictations over four years, about whatever he found interesting that day.

So was Mark Twain the first BLOGGER?

“I would say that is exactly right,” Hirst said. “Partly a journal, partly a diary, and partly recollection. So yeah, I think of it as a kind of blog, a blog without a web!”

*Quoting Robert Hirst, curator of the Mark Twain Papers at UC Berkeley, where a small army of editors has been laboring for six years to reconstruct the autobiography just as Twain wished it to be.

Speaking as a ghostwriter

I totally understand Twain’s decision to dictate his story, mostly from his bed in the four years before his death at age 74. He argued that speaking his recollections and opinions, rather than writing them down, allowed him to adopt a more natural, colloquial and frank tone, and Twain scholars who have seen the manuscript agree.

Working with clients on newsletters, blog posts, white papers and the like has taught me the benefit of unconstrained speech. I talk about it here.

I’m Baaaaaack! Watch Me Tell the Tale

I feel like a kid on the first day of school telling my classmates what I did on my summer vacation!

I think most of my regular readers also follow me on Twitter or Facebook, but for the record, I traveled across 20 states with a pink bra strapped across the windshield of my motorcycle to raise awareness and money for breast cancer research.  Along the way I interviewed financial traders for a book I’m co-authoring with Matt Davio called “Tradeoffs: Leveraging the Longs & Shorts of Life.”

Up to speed

The last time I spoke of my trip here I didn’t have a motorcycle and hadn’t completed my training. Happily, I’m now the owner of a BMW G650 GS that carried me 7500 miles across the country without incident!

I posted a series of videos on my travel blog from a breast cancer fundraising event in Charlotte, NC this month.  If you watch the entire series you’ll learn the basics: how I prepared, what I saw and did along the way, lessons learned and how advances in treating breast cancer have benefited other cancers.  Here’s the first segment; the rest are available on the road trip site.

Let’s talk about the presentation

If you set aside the obvious things like the audience being seated to the side of the screen and other items of ambiance outside my control,  my performance illustrates a few things I’ve been preaching about here on the blog for a while.

Zen slide design

Sometimes I have the advantage of working with a talented designer like Andy Ciordia, but when I have to go it alone (which was the case this time), I do my best to employ Garr Reynolds’ advice about structuring and designing a presentation.

Oh, and if you need a speaker for your next event, please think of me. I can talk about my travels, breast cancer, or how I used social media to promote the trip and garner media coverage.

Social Media: Ethics & Best Practices for Attorneys

Like financial professionals, attorneys bear the burden of using good sense and propriety online.  Would that everyone bore a similar burden! (but I digress).

Friday morning I co-facilitated a continuing education seminar for the Mecklenburg County Bar on social media with Andy Ciordia and Ted Claypoole . The attorneys asked great questions and the three of us presenting enjoyed the lively discussion.

Peppering his ethics guidance with jaw-dropping anecdotes of ethical lapses by legal professionals, Ted boiled everything down to four categories of concern:

• Talking too loosely
• Improper investigation (pretexting)
• Sites that don’t provide room for proper disclaimers (think: Twitter)
• Advertising Rules

I’m unqualified to say anything about legal ethics, but from a middle-aged lay person’s vantage point,  much of what Ted said seemed like common sense and good manners: don’t say anything about someone behind their back that you wouldn’t say to their face; don’t misrepresent yourself or your behavior; and don’t tell a judge you need a continuance because your father died if your Facebook page shows you were getting smashed at your college roommate’s wedding!

Advice for blogging, Facebook and Twitter

Andy and I showed several examples of what to do and not to do on the big three social media platforms:

Blogging: We didn’t need to dwell on the oft-repeated advice to publish frequently — they’d all heard it.  We took it further to show how you can subscribe to content feeds to supplement your own articles but also warned to keep non-pertinent content off your site. We showed an example of an otherwise-good blogsite by a divorce lawyer who inexplicably featured an article on SEO and Google.

Huh? Stick to your knitting.

Facebook: We see lots of lawyers using their personal FB profile as a professional site. Some even call it “The Family Law Firm of Jane Doe” or similar appellations — a big no-no and a violation of FB’s terms of service. FB created “Pages” for commercial use.  Go to my AUTHOR PAGE of FB and you’ll see how it differs from the personal.

Twitter: The main concern Andy and I expressed here is lack of engagement. Most of what we saw lawyers do is BROADCAST new blog posts or news of the firm. Blech. If you’re not engaging people on Twitter, don’t waste your time with it.

If you’re unsure where to take your social media marketing efforts, reach out. If I don’t have the answers, Andy or Ted will.

Presentation Note Taking

This morning I co-presented a workshop on social media for real estate agents with Andy Ciordia and Beth Griffiths.  The Broker In Charge asked us to provide the presentation in advance so that she could print it out for everyone to  take notes on.

This is what people ask you to do because they’re accustomed to death by PowerPoint. In such a death, the speaker lards the presentation with bullet points and basically reads them to the audience (like a first grade teacher at story time).

We don’t subject people to so-called presentations of this ilk.

Our presentations lend visual interest to what’s being said and reinforce the points.

Responding to the request

What did we do? We devised a handout for “guided note taking” that gave our audience questions and prompts to go with the slides.  For example, Stop thinking about “creating” traffic. With social media, it’s about “getting in front” of it. What are you doing to use web-based sites and tools to get people to notice you?

Try this technique next time and be sure to wind it down with a solid question like these:

• How many homes would I have to sell each month to pay for this service?
• How many more homes could I list/sell if I were doing this?

In case you’ve never seen this video on the proper use of PowerPoint (or any multimedia during a presentation) be sure to watch it here.

Strategy First, SPAM-Avoidance Second

WOW, it feels good when a stranger calls from two time zones away and says “Thanks to you I know everything I’ve been doing wrong.”

Disgusted by his email campaigns’ lousy open rate, he turned to Google. My blog posts kept turning up in his searches, where he learned that long subject lines with words like “Free” and “Limited Time Offer”  are surefire ways to shoot yourself in the foot.  YES, nice to know my blog is yielding high search rankings and helping people solve their problems.

He then went on to ask if I could write his email campaigns (double YES!)

Whiplash

Not so fast, Tam.  Turns out, he doesn’t know “who” his target market is or what triggers them to buy. A writer can’t get a foothold without that information. I can’t knowingly send a client’s money down the drain, and without a strategy, that’s what I’d be doing.

Although cliche, it’s nevertheless true: if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.

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