Top drawer copywriting, content strategy and content marketing presentation from Adam Singer.

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Seth Godin talks about the difference between hourly work and linchpin work and refers to the story of his college professor Henry who solved a damp problem in a high rise building and saved tens of thousands of pounds in the process. It reminded me of the old Henry Ford tale where Ford explains a problem he’s having to the famous engineer Nikola Tesla.

Tesla hears him out, has a good think and then chalks a small X on piece of machinery. X marking the spot. The source of problem. A short time later Ford receives the bill – $10,000.

Asked for an explanation Tesla tells him: “$1 for marking the X, $9,999 for knowing where to put it.” Ding dong. Know how.

The distance between knowing how and not knowing can be immense; years of experience, insight, practice or study. It might be innate, intuitive, it might be something you read on the bus this morning. Who knows? What’s certain though is that if you want to succeed in an ultra competitive world, to scratch your mark on history then talent rules.  You’ll need to factor in some X.  X is where it’s at. X is the difference.

Anyone can tell a story, anyone can write. Not everyone knows where to put the X.

For content strategy, content development and inspirational copywriting to help build your business, call me now on 07806 064015.

Thanks to Eva the Weaver for the Flickr photo

And neither should good copywriting

There’s a shoe shop in the south eastern Chinese city of Shantou called ‘Good Wine Needs No Bush’. Ha! Those crazy Chinese and their crazy Chinglish. ‘How sweet’ we condescended. ‘What ARE they like!’ Well guess what? It’s not Chinglish at all it’s an old English expression that means (according to Wiki Quote);

‘Something desirable of quality and substance need not be embellished. It was customary since early times to hang a grapevine, ivy or other greenery over the door of a tavern or way stop to advertise the availability of drink within, once something establishes a good reputation for quality the advertisement is rendered superfluous’.

Shows what I know.

But the more I think about it the more inspired it seems. The more slanted the more enchanted and more importantly, the more memorable. It’s classic copywriting. In the same way that a dislocated cliché or spelling might make you stop and reassess so might semantic dissonance or at least something that at face value appears too warped for words. Changing Leopards (the website that growls) makes your mind stumble but in a nice way. Logic gently misaligned. What about Bat for Lashes? What about Microsoft? Sure we’re all used to the name now – it just is. But when it was fresh? Ottakar’s, Google, Vernon God Little, Faulty Scales or a Manchester SEO and design agency called Honey and the Moon. It’s not rocket surgery. You’ve probably got other examples (Andy Maslen certainly trumped mine in my ‘Why did the copywriter cross the road? post with FCUK).

Now maybe I’m wrong. I’m probably breaking every rule in every copywriting or marketing rule book. There’s nothing in these names that conveys benefit, most of the names are a bit of a mouth full and yes… convention counts.

But surely good copywriting challenges convention, doesn’t taste like water, look like wallpaper or… like good wine, need bush.

What do you think?

Humour works in many ways and on many levels. Here’s a Telegraph extract from ‘The Naked Jape‘, by Jimmy Carr and Lucy Greeves that shares some of them. They talk about setting up the punchline, comic timing and economy of language – check it out it you have time, there’s a wonderful Emo Phillips routine that’s worth the admission fee alone. Much humour relies on a simple premise – you set a scenario then undermine it – the insight switch.

Copywriters too, whatever they’re copywriting, from SEO articles, to web marketing copy to blogs can also use the same technique to spike interest and win some fresh angles – to pervert the cliché.

Familiarity breeds content – a good post about preparation, how important it is to have a clear understand of the brief and do plenty of research.

The path of most resistance – some tips and tricks to help you find inspiration for your next project.

It’s not rocket surgery – a post about how geek speak and corporate starch kills your messages.

Sex and drugs and sausage rolls – would look good on a T-shirt (for about 9 seconds).

Apathy for the Devil – Decent title of a ’70s Memoir by Rock Journalist Nick Kent that looks like essential reading

I’m sure you get the idea.

You’re twisting your readers’ experience and snapping them out of just looking and not reading. Hopefully you are offering some useful insight as well as showing clients and prospective clients that maybe, just maybe you’re got the kind of free thinking creative input that can deliver inspirational copywriting. Then again, they might just think you’re a dick.

Seth Godin also likes to take a cliché and turn it back on itself. To act all counter intuitively – ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover’ is the common advice, well ‘I don’t know about you, but I judge books by their cover every day,’ says Seth. You can see what he’s doing – it’s smart. His contrary take on a common expression, a perceived wisdom, is breathing new life and perspective into a lazy, stale throw away bunch of words. His new interpretation, his re-appraisal gives us a new way of seeing things and it offers him a little more clear water between him and those that just want to be him. To paraphrase Patti Smith and a million others, ‘to be an artist is to see what others cannot.’

Sure – copywriters aren’t necessarily paid for their artistry but if a little colour (or is it color these days?), a little twink catches the eye, isn’t that a good thing? Isn’t that a copywriter’s job?

For phonetics sake!

What do you think? What about spelling? Is correct spelling clichéd too? What about corrupting spelling to differentiate?  SEO copywriters already deliberately misspell words to capture search spelling errors. Brands often warp spelling too for phonetics sake. But copywriters deliberately misspelling words for marketing purposes? Inglourious Basterds.

Imagine – a massive billboard with a big fat misspelling slap bang in the middel. Or even a little one snuck in the corner. Would people share? Would they talk about it? Would it create?

Is ridicule something to be scared of ?

Would you? Dare you even put it to a client?

Tell me what you think.

It’s true. I haven’t always been the gifted copywriter I am today. Not always the UK copywriter of choice for the SEO great and the web marketing good of London Town, Manchester and the shires……. no less. In a roundabout way though I’ve always been a writer, songs, reviews, stuff, though the copywriter I’ve become has been more by accident than by design. A product of previous lives.

In one of them I lived in China for a couple of years where I taught English and Business English and went on to sell containers of miniature, remote control indoor helicopters and UFOs for Turkish Americans out of Shantou – ‘the ceiling’s the limit!’ I wrote for them, and we laughed and drank Gong Fu Cha and rode our bikes.

A world that many find more interesting than easy, China leaves you with more questions than answers. Without getting too philosophical, the further time takes me from China the more I want to understand. If you’ve spent any time there, you’ll likely know what I’m saying…… my relationship China feels like unfinished business…… there’s stuff I need to work out….. so with a fair wind I may well return in the not too distant future – for interest’s sake.

As well as living for a while in the wild east of beautiful old Shantou and in high-tech Zhuhai on the Macau border I also taught in a city called Wuxi, about an hour and half north west of Shanghai, one stop on from Suzhou. Nice enough, manageable size, sat on the shores of the giant lake Tai Hu. Very beautiful, scenic in places, in others, as many Chinese cities are, scarred with a rash of modernity – ill conceived, poorly executed – charmless fail. On a rainy day you could be mistaken for thinking you were in an Oriental Basingstoke. No thanks.

Teaching Business English

Gotta say though, Wuxi paigu……. If you ever get the chance and are into meat, in this case ribs…… fantastico. All the food in China was a treat, Chaoshan restaurants, food to die for. Xiou Mie, belt fish, the simplest bowl of noodles was heaven…… Anyway,…… One of the lovely classes of Chinese professionals I taught business English to, a group from Bosch studied a book called ‘New Business Matters – business English with a lexical approach‘ by Mark Powell and Ron Martinez. What a great piece of work. Modern, relevant, well written, a superb read. Certainly challenging for my students, but hey, it’s good to push it a bit.

The very first unit was titled Career Management with the text article titled ‘Me PLC’. It went on to talk about Steve Jobs, hired guns, employability, the corporate ladder, re-engineering, change management, empowerment. ‘The thing about the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat,’ it said. Ouch.

Sure I’d come across Michael Porter and read a load of other business gurus and experts when I was at college, but I hadn’t come across the expression ‘me PLC’ before. The single cell corporation…………………. now web enabled.

A UK Copywriter

Well… times move on and doing what I do, now, back in the UK copywriting, a copywriter UK based commentating, observing, formulating and sharing ideas, it requires a lot of reading and researching, mooching about online and generally working to get a feel for the way things are hanging together. Innovative times and online copy, copywriting skills, sales, marketing, content marketing and all that jazz deserve close attention. Trying to get under the skin of what’s happening and what people are doing to be ‘effective’, the claims, the counter claims, the blah blah, the words for words sake, the quality.

Well it’s strange because virtually all I see now, all I’m surrounded by, all we’re surrounded by, immersed in………. is ‘Me PLC’.

Chris Brogan asking the question ‘Are We Addicted To Giving Our Own Opinions?‘ is a product of exactly this.

Sit back and reflect on a really well written piece… say a Seth Godin blog like Everyone is cluless or a Copyblogger article like Why Content Is No Longer King…. and they genuinely engage. You can easily relate to the sentiments and motivations, to experiences in your own life, thoughts and contemplations. Fertile ground for us would be code breakers, especially if you don’t swallow the baby with the bath water as many do.

Now don’t get me wrong…..there are many many sincere, well-intentioned, honourable people and sites on the interweb – I’d be inclined to include Mr Godin, Mr Brogan and Mr Clark amongst them – professionals.

The Seducers

There are also a whole stack of angular, tales from topographic oldwives, backslappers, ‘I grew up poor as a kid but I’m rich now’, tipsters, tricksters, web 2.0 nuuuuu media schticksters, pseudo academic, nudge nudge wink winkers, ‘I’m gonna let you in on a secret’ sonny jimers……..the seducers.

The question is who’s who? Who’s going to bore you into a catatonically hysterical hypnosis and a £5000 information product credit card bill, leave you neck high in vacuous verbiage and who’s going to share information of genuine worth of real benefit, interest, amusement and value?

Who’s going to waste your time and who going to wise you up?

You’re probably familiar with the John Wanamaker (father of modern advertising according to Wikipaedia) quote “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” Well if you substitute the words ‘half’ for ‘90%’, ‘money I spend on advertising’ for ‘stuff I read online’ and the word ‘wasted’ for ‘self aggrandising bullshit designed to make you sleep skip to the money shot where you can’t help but hand over the cash,’ then you will quickly be able to identify the problem we all face.

The difficult realisation I am unfortunately duty bound to share is that there really is no defined, demarked delineation between the two. To one extend or another they map across each other. There’s a reason for this……………………’Me PLC’ or put another way………… life’s a pitch.

But the pitch isn’t for a product or a service, a new this or a new that. It’s not for something that can make your life easier, happier, more productive or more profitable. The pitch is for trust. Trust is the only thing that matters. It’s the only currency of real value. Without trust you’re going nowhere and everyone of these smart marketers know very clearly that trust is the key that will unlock the door to profits. Win trust and you have won.

Me PLC MUST be for real…… or at least appear for real.

Content Marketing

And the thing is…….. we’re ALL at it. Everyone does it and we do it all the time. I’m doing it now. Here and now. So please can we just all admit it and stop treating people like they’re plain thick and can’t see what’s going on. There’s only one thing worse than someone trying to take you for a mug and that’s the sheer stupidity of those that do it and have the arrogance to genuinely think you aren’t aware of them trying to do it. The 24 page sales letter, the canny forum post, the ‘geeee Sonia what an AWESOME article, man you ROCK me.’

Even many people’s Twitter persona’s are crafted, chiselled from grins and wishful thinking. A bad thing? No not necessarily. We all adopt personas, espacially in business. ‘Your personal brand is a fictional character.  So make it a good one,’ says Nick Usbourne. He also talks about Why we are so susceptible to the idea of buying into get rich quick.

Come on, let’s cut to the chase. I’m telling you straight. I’m telling a tale, I’m shooting the breeze, I’m reeling you in. I’m going to make you trust me if it kills me. Admittedly you’ll have found enough of interest to get you to read this far. And if you’ve read this far you’ll also have noticed that I haven’t invited you to buy anything. I’m not trying to sell you anything…….. yet.

So what’s in it for me that I should be bothered to continue to write at all? After all, the sun’s shining, the birds are singing and there are 1001 better things to do than sit here banging out copy. Is it my ego? Nah…. not really. That I simply enjoy going off on one? Nah. Am I mad? No. Philanthropic? Well I’d like you to believe that.

Trust

The actual honest reason, the true hand on heart motivation – one that most web marketers, content marketers and commercial websites actually try to conceal is that I am simply trying to establish a relationship with you. It’s a simple matter of trust. It’s a simple matter content marketing.

Most people think that by admitting this they’re letting the cat out of the bag. That once you know that all they are doing trying to generate trust, that they crave your trust, that YOUR trust is the ONLY thing that gives their business any value, then the scales will fall from your eyes and all the inane, vacuous, patronising, condescending toss they emit will stand exposed. In many cases…. the king is in the altogether.

Honestly they really really don’t want you to see it. I’m going to be straight though.

All I want is your trust. There I said it – All I want is your trust (an email address would be cool but I’m not going to Madoff anybody for one).

I want you to have got something out of this little meeting of minds and feel you’d like to come back. I want you on board. An advocate. I want you to believe in my writing, to believe in me, that I’m capable, can do a job for you… all that sort of stuff. When I hit you with my pitch, which of course I will one day when I get my act together I want you to feel so inclined towards me that you’ll likely say, ‘yeah I’ll go with that, he’s clean, he’s cool. Yeah, Martin Williams is a man I can trust with my brand, with my copywriting, my advertising, with my message. Someone I can do business with.’

You need to know that my work will save you time, represent you creatively, effectively and make you a lot more money than you’ll spend hiring me.

We NEED to inspire trust.

Even more than that, we NEED to be trustworthy.

No trust – no ‘Me PLC’.

Life’s a pitch……..and then you buy.

Thanks to pixeljones for the image via Flickr