I was introduced to Twitter in 2007 by a colleague at Constant Contact. Intrigued, I signed up. Within days I was bored. There was nothing to read and very few people were using it. Not to mention I had nothing to say that would fit in 140 characters. Since then, I’ve been an ardent anti-fan of the service, dissuading friends and clients from using what I believed was a service for vain and bombastic people. But recently I’ve begun to change my mind. One word. Egypt. When a country of 83 million can change its leadership with the help of Twitter, who am I to speak badly of it. I decided to give Twitter another try.

Participation not required.

I dusted off my 4-year old Twitter account and began to troll my Facebook and Linkedin accounts for people to “follow”. If you’re unfamiliar with Twitter, “following” a person is simply a way to read what they post on Twitter – their Tweets. Before I knew it I was following 50+ people. I also installed the free Twitter software on my Macs and iPhone. Twitter software makes it easy to read tweets. Otherwise, you have to visit the Twitter website and sign in to your account. Ugh, what a hassle!

So there I was, reading a steady flow of tweets. Some interesting, some intriguing, but most completely useless. I quickly unfollowed the “Tweeters” (yes, there’s a whole lexicon for Twitter) whose tweets didn’t interest me. In the past few weeks I’ve refined the list of people I follow, and now I’m getting some very interesting information. I’m laughing. I’m learning. I’m crying. Oy! But my biggest revelation is that there are actually two ways to use Twitter. One, simply being a voyeur, reading what’s tweeted. Or two, actually tweeting. Hmmmm. To tweet or not to tweet. That’s my next decision.

What’s your Tweeting strategy?

As I refined the list of people who I follow, I noticed a pattern emerge: There seems to be three distinct reasons for tweeting.

• A person tweeting for personal reasons
• A person tweeting for professional reasons
• A company tweeting to promote its products or services

The above is pretty self explanatory, but there are subtle combinations of each that aren’t obvious. For instance, celebrities tweet for personal and professional reasons. People are interested in their personal lives and their professional lives are on screen for all to see. Then there are gurus like Guy Kawasaki who have a lot to share and want to let people know they’re an expert. Then there are Tweeters like Gail Goodman, CEO of Constant Contact. Gail shares her expertise on Twitter, and in doing so she promotes her company. This is my strategy for tweeting. I tweet under my own name and share my knowledge and point-of-view as a professional. And in doing so, I promote my company. And hopefully get some new business!

My point here is that you need to develop a strategy for using Twitter. Carefully consider the things you’ll Tweet about, and the things you won’t. Be methodical and thoughtful. (Shameless plug: We can help you develop a strategy and even tweet on your behalf.)

Should you join Twitter?

If you’re a curious person who wants to quickly know what’s going on in our world, become a voyeur – get a Twitter account, follow some influential people, and simply read. You’ll be surprised how much you’ll learn.

If you’re a professional who’s interested in letting people know that you’re an expert and passionate about what you do, get a Twitter account and start tweeting. You can tweet under your name or your company’s name. As you build your list of followers you’ll learn some interesting techniques for tweeting such as including links to websites and hashtags.

Twitter is here to stay. As time goes by, professionals and businesses will learn new strategies for using the service. My recommendation is to get onboard now, start small, and be consistent. Read your Twitter feed at least once a week. Refine the list of people whom you follow, and people will begin to follow you. KNOW your audience and begin to send Tweets that are relevant to them. And if you’re concerned about privacy (By default all your tweets are public) there’s a setting to keep your Tweets private. But if you’re Tweeting for professional reasons I don’t recommend keeping your Tweets private. Consider having multiple Twitter accounts that have different business/personal strategies.

Have fun and let me know how it’s going. And be sure to follow me @DonLutkus.

Email marketing services like Constant Contact offer a number of useful features – tracking, contact management, list segmentation, and design templates, just to name a few. These are all great features. But that’s all they are – features. They don’t help you with marketing strategy or messaging. And their design templates can only take you so far toward ensuring that your company’s visual brand is reflected in your email messages.

First let’s talk strategy.

You’re a small business. Most likely you have better things to do than think about the marketing buzz word, “strategy”. Yes, you want to do email marketing. Maybe you’ve even tried it. But when you sit down in front of the computer you’re faced with quandaries like “what?”, “who?”, “how-often?”, “when?”, “what should it look like?” and “what happens if?” (Yikes! Right now you’re probably thinking “I’d rather be at the dentist.” ) This is where professional marketing brains can help. Solving these marketing quandaries is what we do. A marketing professional can take your email marketing to a whole new level of effectiveness.

On to messaging.

You’re a restaurateur, or an interior designer. Or maybe a professional hit man. (Good. You’re paying attention.) Yes, you’re articulate and a good writer, but you’re not a copywriter. Marketing copy is a special breed of language. Good marketing writing knows what’s in the mind of the reader. It anticipates needs and questions. It always asks for action and it has a voice that reflects your company’s personality. My favorite analogy is “Yeah, I can cook. But when I want a superb meal, I go to a restaurant.” A professionally written email message will polish your reputation, increase open rates, and get more people to your web site. Not to mention give you more time focus on running your business.

Aesthetics is just a fancy word for “really nice email!”

I’m a designer by training. And I’m a self-proclaimed design snob. I’m also a geek, therefore I divide email aesthetics into two categories: The first, and most obvious is visual design. Email marketing services have templates and “Wizards” you can use to build your email. In my experience these tools focus solely on making design easy, but fall down on making design good. Yes, you can get it done, but there are many time-sucking obstacles like fighting with your service’s poorly designed user interface, and making design decisions that – please excuse me for being blunt – are too often, well, they stink – and don’t look as good as they really could. Like good copywriting, good design provides polish that will make your email blasts more effective.

The second aspect of email aesthetics is one you don’t see. It’s the code. The guts of a fancy HTML email are complex – more complex than a standard web page because of the wild diversity of email client software. Even the best email marketing services’ “Design Wizards” do a C+ job of making emails look good. But a web design professional with email coding experience will make your email beautifully detailed, completely customized with your company’s visual brand, and it will look as intended in all email software versions.

Gee, this all sounds expensive.

Yes, hiring a professional is more expensive than the $15 a month you’re spending on an email marketing service. Most of the expense will be in the upfront cost of setting up your email marketing strategy and developing your custom HTML. But once you’re up and running there’s a lot you’ll be able to do yourself.

Step away from the computer.

You know that email blasts are a powerful marketing tool. You can do it yourself and get results. Or you can go back to running your business, hire us, and watch your emails resonate.

The other day John and I had lunch at the Cheesecake Factory in Chestnut Hill. If you’ve ever eaten at one of these cookie-cutter chain restaurants you’ve probably noticed that they run ads in their menus. It’s actually a good business practice because the revenue gained from ad sales is used to offset the costs of these full-color, ring-bound, laminated, 30-page extravaganzas. Most of the menu ads are mundane and uninspired, but that day, one ad caught my creative director eye.

The ad was for Coke and my immediate, out-loud reaction was “This is a wonderful example of contextual messaging!” Disinterested, my non-marketer, psychotherapist partner looked up from his own menu and suggested that I “Put in the blog.” I got the hint, shut up, and ordered my meal.

What the heck is “contextual messaging?”

There are many aspects to good creative. The most obvious being well-crafted strategy, copy, design, and high-quality production. One way good creative can become great creative is by employing what I call contextual messaging. Basically, it’s a technique that understands, and takes advantage of, the viewer’s surroundings at the moment they experience the message. When used skillfully, the technique combines marketing goals, media selection, and creative to produce a message that not only sells the product, but also entertains by recognizing aspects of the viewer’s surroundings. This ad for Coke is a perfect example of contextual messaging.

Coke ad in the Cheesecake Factory menu.

First off, the ad is completely Coke – It truly supports the brand with its clean, white and red design. The main image is a fire extinguisher with the Coke logo on it. The only copy is a headline – “Hot Cajun Jambalaya. Cool Coke.” (I’ll ignore the fact that the headline is in all lower case letters and followed by an “ah-duh” parenthetical statement. Hey, nobody’s perfect.) This ad refuses to be just another pretty lump of words and pictures. It actually becomes a partner in my dining experience, and in the process, inspired a smile.

Now for the icing on the cheesecake. It’s clear to me that the creative and media teams actually worked together to place the ad opposite Cajun Jambalaya listed in the menu – Freekin’ brilliant. Ok, maybe overstated, but I get excited about this stuff. You have to understand that in this age of glamorous broadcast and online media, innovative and thoughtful print creative is going the way of the dinosaur.
My hat is off to the team at Coke for creating such a great print ad. (And thank you for giving me a really good blog topic!) Oh yeah – Guess what I ordered? Yup. Cajun Jambalaya and a [Diet] Coke. Yum.

I just hate it when good marketing makes me do bad things. Like buy candy bars that I have no interest in. Case in point: Snickers’ recent “Snacklish” ad campaign.

A little background

TBWA/Chiat/Day New York, famous for promoting Absolut vodka, Michelin tires and numerous now-iconic consumer products, is the creative force behind the recent “Snickers Speak” media blitz. Focused on customer satisfaction (presumably, satisfying hunger), it has invented a new vocabulary of words, presented within the familiar Snickers visual brand. Words such as “Nougetaboutit” and phrases like “Get a degree in Snackanomics” appear on buses, in internet and TV ads, and in point of purchase displays. I’ve been aware of these nonsensical expressions for several months, and while I find them pretentious and dumb, they have succeeded in making me wonder, “what is this Snacklish irreverence all about?”

Candy with an attitude.

A quick Google search enlightened me. Well, kind of. Mars Snackfood’s VP of integrated marketing communications, Carole Walker, had some pretty confusing things to say in plain English: “By taking Snickers’ core equities like its unique ingredients and satisfaction, we are reminding our consumers why they love Snickers so much.” (Core equities? What is this, candy banking?) The new language is everywhere, even infiltrating text messaging and blogging. You can post your own Snacklish phrase on Facebook. And while most aren’t exactly AdWeek material, some of these terms are topical and funny. One fave: “Don’t catch the swine chew.”

Discovery

Last week in the grocery store checkout line, I looked down and felt an odd rush. There was a tray of Snickers bars. Unmistakable from their billboard kin, they lay in two neat rows: dark brown wrappers, red-rimmed white fields, energetic blue italic fonts. I picked one up and flipped it over. On the back it read “Hungerectomy.” I overturned another. This one said “Substantialiscious.” In all, I looked at the back of some 20 odd bars, taking verbal inventory. I found “Peanutopolis” and “Nougeticity.” What now? Buy them of course, all four unique ones. It frightened me to know that I was putty in the hands of marketing brilliance, pure and simple.

Delivery on the promise

I ripped into one. The taste was nothing new – still the tooth-achingly sweet, salty and chewy prize of trick-or-treating days. If not in the bar, where was the satisfaction exactly? Inside the wrapper were printed the word and its faux definition, “Substantialiscious: The weight of something when you weigh it with your tongue.” Unbelievable! An adjective flaunting itself as a noun. And the meaning? Absurd! Who are these copywriters, five-year-old spelling bee dropouts? Bad candy!

The agency had grabbed me. They had engaged my attention – or should I say, obsession – and then reinforced my growing interest with each encounter. When I finally discovered Snickers for real, now THAT was satisfying. What’s more, they were there for the taking.

Everything this campaign made me do:

(1) NOTICE the billboard ads.

(2) RECOGNIZE the brand. “It’s a Milky Way.” (close, but wrong.)

(3) GOOGLE “candy bar ads.” Learn the campaign was for Snickers.

(4) BOOKMARK the imbecilic quote from Mars Snackfood.

(5) RESEARCH web sites and blog entries praising and parodying the campaign.

(6) IDENTIFY Snickers at my local grocery store.

(7) PURCHASE several, just for the “Snacklish” words.

(8) SAVE THE WRAPPER to photograph for this blog post.

(9) WRITE this blog entry.

I love a well-crafted ad

This experience reinforced my admiration for viral marketing and ingenious creative. I had been the unwitting subject of a highly effective “call to action.” Like a good divorce lawyer, the campaign used dubious tactics, but it won the case. I will never again look at a Snickers with neutrality. Curiosity, attraction, obsession, consumption – it’s what makes great marketing remarkable.

When I was about 15 my best friend’s mother asked me what I was going to do with my life – as if I would have any clue at that age. I told her that I wanted to be a writer, to which she replied “And how are you going to make a living Cheryl?” Well Mrs. Bingham, it turns out that I’ve made a pretty good living as a writer, thank you very much – albeit with some other skills adding to my marketability. The point is I’m first and foremost a writer. It’s what I do. And I do it for people who are not writers, who don’t like to write, who don’t have time to write and who need help writing. The second point is, if you’re not a dedicated writer like I am, and you need marketing communications written, you should probably engage a writer to get the job done for you.

Writing takes time.

Is there anything worse than trying to write when you don’t have time to write? Well, maybe but according to a lot of my clients, it’s a pretty stressful situation. So if your other responsibilities keep you doing the quick step, step aside and let a qualified writer write it for you. It will be better and faster – and you can get the other stuff done.

Everyone’s good at something; maybe it’s just not writing.

Over the years, I’ve worked with a lot of engineers, financial people, manufacturers and others who could wax eloquent about their chosen field – but only to an audience of people just like them. They found it nearly impossible to write about their field in terms that others could understand. So while you and your colleagues may have astounding capabilities as electrical engineers or be brilliant at estate planning, that does not mean you’re good writers. Enough said.

Why take the risk that it won’t be right?

I cannot count the number of times a client has come to me with self-written copy for an ad, a piece of collateral or a web site. I generally tell them that I can use the copy as direction but that I will need to apply my skills to their information in order for their communication to be effective. Some are offended; some are skeptical; most are grateful. Why? Because it takes the heat off.

After all, most marketing communications are done because of the need to sell something – quite often under adverse circumstances. So why would anyone take a chance on screwing up a chance to generate sales/leads? It really doesn’t make sense.

As a writer, I’m still amazed that other people aren’t as fond of the practice as I am. But I suppose CPAs might wonder why I’m not all that fond of numbers, too. So I try to strike a deal with my clients – I won’t practice marine research or sell floor coverings or develop any software if they’ll just let me do the writing. It works out well for all of us.

My nephew, now a teacher, briefly went into business as a personal chef. Having a fine marketing brain, he did all the right things – scouted out the competition, networked, designed an appealing web site. He handed out little spatulas with a terrific tag line printed on the handles: “Eat Right at Home.”

His value proposition was perfect. Most take-out food tastes good, but is terrible for you. The deliverable? Literally, fresh, healthy meals, any day of the week. No other catering company or take-out service had chosen that angle.

Then he picked a company name: “Dinner Sanctum.” The fork dropped from my hand. Clever… and something else. Blood red dining room walls. Too many candles burning on every surface. What sort of catering was this? Despite my nephew’s belief that eating is “close to a religious experience” and that home is “the place where people feel safe and protected,” I couldn’t keep the Goth imagery from crowding out the main idea, that this was about food, GOOD food.

Not all bad business names are intentional.

It’s tricky.

Entrepreneurs can be in love with a business name without thinking about how it affects their audience. Not that it always matters. To wit the scores of hair salons innocuously named for children or boyfriends. Or the marketing firm I once collaborated with named for the two principals’ dogs. Certainly there are lots of now world-class companies that began as start-ups with unusual names that roll off the tongue: Amazon, Google, Hulu, Etsy. But for the small service business not yet entered into the hall of start-up fame, names are brands, and brands are relationships. And relationships are everything. Too frequently, business owners let their creativity guide where, well, no one will follow.

My own example.

In design school, I didn’t yet own a business, so I made one up. Surrounded by countless “Missy Designs” and “Flair One Design Studios,” I rebelled against the self-important, the obvious, the stupid. I would be “Domestic Blitz.” Everyone knows that residential interior design can be a source of marital strife, especially if there is kitchen work involved. But my cynical title referenced a pun too subtle for most. Instead, it conjured up Rosanne Barr on a relentless cleaning rampage. Moreover, folks were confused. I’d positioned myself as a maid, not a designer.

Here’s the point.

Every business relies on building an avid clientele, so, when naming a business, think like the customer. And not just the like-minded customer, but different ones, gathering many reactions. The name may sound cool, even provocative. But consider your promise. Take connotation as seriously as insight, humor, cleverness and the other motivators that spawn these happy little moniker campers. Check out competitors to make sure your name – and domain name – are available. Be positive, as well as unique. Unless you want to later invest in a re-branding. Name that endeavor “let’s get it right this time.”