‘If You Can’t Answer Why, Scrap It’
Storytelling has served to build readership since the creation of print media. The emotions drawn out from stories can powerfully affect behavior. Content producers who do not understand this risk...
View ArticleClickbait Site Turns to Content Creation
Say what you will about clickbait sites but they are not doing anything differently than newspapers have done for decades. They write headlines that intrigue, pique interest and draw people in....
View ArticleThe Power of Story
I’m not sure I’ve ever been more moved by a story, at least cinematically, than when the story of the Skywalker clan unfolded in The Empire Strikes Back. I was 10 at the time so the bar was set pretty...
View ArticleMaintaining a Clean Closet
I am the designated “finder” in the family. When items are lost or cannot be located, I am called on to assist. This has more to do with patience than any innate skill. I am challenged, though, by the...
View Article3 Ways to Build Your Audience Now
In a Lego-building session with my son, 4 years old at the time, I told him to make a building starting at the top. Even at that age, he could tell something was not right. Indeed, we tried building a...
View ArticleThere Are No Experts
When I was a young newspaper reporter in a small-town, I worked in between the local sage and the best writer I knew. The green-visored editor possessed encyclopedic knowledge of our community and my...
View ArticleMalnourished Audiences Seeking Long-form Stories
“If you can blow someone’s mind—really, genuinely blow it, again, in a really well-written way—then that’s something they want to share.” Andrew Finn, co-founder, Wait But Why When I wrote for and...
View ArticleKeys to Viral Success
Viral content has been around since the advent of effective methods of communication. I grew up in a small town and it did not take long before the entire town knew when I got my first speeding ticket...
View Article5 Reasons for a Lack of Intelligence
My first piece of published fiction had a distribution of about a dozen people. It was a literary zine (remember zines?) that my college writers group put together. We called it “Jaybird.” When you...
View ArticleWhy Temblors in the GOP are Bad for Readers
As I mentioned in the previous post, a good friend of mine took a critical eye to my book, Reclaiming Your Readers. A non-journalist (but a talented writer), she had a consumer-oriented view of the...
View ArticleRead This or a Kitten Dies: the Critical Importance of Headlines
The cover of the January 1973 edition of National Lampoon magazine featured a dog at gunpoint and a headline that read “If You Don’t Buy This Magazine, We’ll Kill This Dog.” That set the tone for the...
View ArticleThe Latest Email Marketing Benchmarks
IBM released its 2016 Email Marketing Metrics Benchmark Study. Important knowledge for anyone in communications. Among the more interesting revelations was a phenomenon dubbed “the frequency math...
View ArticleThe Eight-Second Window
Jill Johnson of IBM Marketing Cloud led a webinar that looked at some of the benchmarks and data that emerged from IBM Marketing Cloud’s Email Marketing Benchmark Survey. She pointed out that a typical...
View ArticleMeasuring Email Content Effectiveness the Right Way
Most understand that clickthroughs measured against emails delivered is your email’s clickthrough rate (CTR). For those who don’t know, the click-to-open ratio (CTOR) measures clickthroughs against...
View ArticleQuick Tools for Doing an Audience Deep Dive
Twitter LinkedIn Email Print The Business 2 Community website correctly points out that it is a challenge to create content that motivates B2B buyers to act. Also correct: That getting to know your...
View ArticleTime to End ‘Space Shuttle’ Content Management
Twitter LinkedIn Email Print While the costs vary wildly depending on the source, consider these numbers for costs per kilogram for shipping cargo into space: Space Shuttle = $60,000…SpaceX rocket =...
View ArticleBanner Ad Blindness: How to Write Around It
Twitter LinkedIn Email Print A user’s “blindness” to banner ads has been a very real thing for a very long time (it was first documented in 1997). The latest research from Nielsen Norman Group confirms...
View ArticleIs ‘Drip Marketing’ Dead?
Twitter LinkedIn Email Print Let’s take a look at the challenges posed by binge consumption. As media have evolved, so have our media consumption habits…or it could be the other way around. Likely,...
View ArticleThree Methods for Making Your Copy More Scannable
Twitter LinkedIn Email Print I’ve encountered the following scenario in my career too many times to count: Client wants to “put something on the website.” I receive a 1,200-word document. I explain the...
View ArticleMore Signal, Less Noise
Twitter LinkedIn Email Print Many principles of user experience (UX) can be applied to writing and communications. A recent example: signal-to-noise ratio (from Nielsen Norman Group). Consider relevant...
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