An outstanding piece by Antony Young in AdAge suggests Social Media is a Venue, Not a Strategy. The headline is exactly right. I have been preaching a similar approach for a long time.

Young says, “Social media is a venue for marketers … a set of technologies or tactics that enable us to elevate and amplify brands and their marketing communications.” Quite right (though I don’t care for the word “venue” here.) In my book, SocialCorp: Social Media Goes Corporate, I write:

“When asked about social media strategy, I often respond, ‘What’s your Microsoft Word strategy? What’s your email strategy?’ The point is, all these things, social media included, are tools. You can type anything you want into a Microsoft Word document, and you can communicate anything you want to any audience through social media. They don’t have inherent strategies, or at least, they do not have strategies that stand on their own. A key to success in corporate social media is to tie communications initiatives to business strategy.”

Young writes, “The question shouldn’t be, ‘What’s our social-media strategy?’ but, ‘What do I need to do to make my brand more social?’” This is a tactics-in point-of-view, and not a strategy-out approach. I’ll allow that almost any company can benefit from being “more social,” but that’s not the primary reason to consider any marketing tactic. In my book I also write:

“To apply the right communications tactics to a business situation, you need a communications strategy. And a communications strategy needs to help the company achieve its business objectives.”

The effective use of social media, or any communications channel, is driven by the business, not by the need to be social. If for example the business has as an objective expansion into new countries, it may accomplish this by adding salespeople, sales offices, localization of marketing and technical materials, etc. Corporate communications and marketing will support this effort with messaging, a communications plan, and execution of the plan. That plan might include web, email, direct mail, advertising, social media and other tactics designed to help achieve the revenue and lead generation goals. In other words, social media is low in the stack.

I am glad to see more and more people making the observations Young has made, and taking some of the golden calf-like adoration out of social media. His approach is measured, intelligent and well thought out, unlike that of people calling, even “humorously,” for the death of all social media experts.

Being “social” can be a good thing, but that alone should not drive companies to adopt social media. Don’t misunderstand. Social media doesn’t have to generate revenue or bombard people with “buy now” sales messages. Brand awareness, reputation management and customer engagement are all legitimate communications objectives that might be supported by social media and can help the business as well.

Social media can be a powerful force in a company’s marketing, but only if it somehow supports the company’s business objectives.

Tags: Antony Young, AdAge, SocialCorp, social media strategy

Every word matters. Whether you’re writing to persuade, to inform, or entertain, nearly every word choice affects the meaning of your message. This is especially important in today’s foreshortened communications environments like Twitter, Web banners, SMS, and advertising taglines.

A couple years ago I wrote a competitive response for internal use by a client. The first version began, “You’ve probably heard about company X’s campaign…”. I changed it instead to “Many of you might have heard about company X’s campaign…” The change was subtle but intentional. The first version implies that Company X’s campaign was so successful that everyone had of course heard of it. The second version softens its impact to imply that awareness of the campaign was spotty (the message we meant to convey.)

I like to look for examples everywhere of how seemingly small choices of words influence the effectiveness of a message. (For this and other reasons it can be annoying to be around me as I critique every written message I encounter.) For example:

eBay Listing: We didn’t get to be number #1 by deserving poor feedback!! By structuring the sentence this way, the seller recognizes customer feedback is an outcome of the way he does business, not a passive customer activity over which he has no control. Typically, a seller would boast, “look at our positive feedback,” which is passive, and not as powerful as taking ownership of responsibility for customer satisfaction, as this seller has. By tweaking the wording, the meaning has undergone radical change.

Radio Spot: You’ll enjoy the convenient monthly payments! I actually heard that on the radio. Really? I can’t ever recall enjoying payments of any kind unless they were payments made to me.

Lettering on Truck: Delivering Fresh Foodservice Solutions

Why not just “Food”? I see what Ledyard is trying to do with this. It’s clever, but unless you’re a food service insider, it’s potentially redundant and doesn’t make good use of language. Let’s look at each of the four words.

Delivering: This is a double entendre. The company “delivers” products and services by creating and packaging them and the truck physically delivers them to customers. Every food company does these things, so the word tells people little.

Fresh: This is my favorite word here. Delivering stale food is probably a flawed business model, so this is also potentially redundant, but a nice thing about which to remind customers. (Also a double entendre as applied to solutions, implying the company looks at its business in a fresh way.)

Foodservice: Don’t try to use this word in Scrabble. It’s invented.

Solutions: The worst. “Solutions” is a worn out business cliché. And who says a business that needs food delivered has a problem? I like to think of my business as one that is thriving and needs suppliers of goods and services. Why must people insist they are solving my problems?

Airline Tagline: Delta Will Get You There This is a classic from the 1980s. What kind of promise is that? Delta won’t crash? Other airlines won’t get you there? It’s kind of weird.

Taglines are the ultimate in refined word choice. The very best use two or three words to tell a complex brand story. An article last year in Forbes looked at some of the best advertising taglines, and commended BMW (The Ultimate Driving Machine), Nike (Just Do It), and Verizon (Can You Hear Me Now?). Also mentioned is Apple’s “Think Different,” which Grammar Girl says may be grammatically incorrect depending on what you think the slogan means.

Do you have any favorite examples of the power of words, good, bad or ugly? Please leave a comment below!

Tags: words, messages, messagin,, effective communications

I’ve really been enjoying Quora. If you haven’t used it, it’s basically a Q&A site where people post questions and others answer, comment and rank the responses. It has elements of Wikipedia (community editing) and enough rules, etiquette and oversight to be really pleasant most of the time. I’ve learned a lot there from some amazing people.

In order to illustrate the variety of discussions that happen on Quora, here are excerpts from five questions. If you’re signed up for Quora, you can go read the rest of the answers. (If you’re not registered, email me or any Quora user for an invite.)

1. How can car dealers generate more organic automotive leads?
Jonathon Hewitt

In order to answer your question accurately it would need to be on a case-by-case basis as most dealerships employ a vast variety of web applications, different inventory controls and website platforms, CMSs (Content Management Systems) as well as the fact that most dealers have a revolving door of the very individuals that could be most effective in helping them generate additional organic (free) leads from their website or social media efforts; their Internet Managers/Directors and BDC (Business Development Center) Managers. Each of the processes of each of these various dealership assets and personnel can play a factor in the total number of organic automotive leads that a dealership may receive on an ongoing basis. More…

2. Should we be more frustrated with content mills or the “writers” contributing to them?
Joel Postman

The Internet is the great equalizer of markets. This was well articulated by Thomas Friedman in his 2005 The World is Flat. http://www.thomaslfriedman.com/bookshelf/the-world-is-flat How many times have we seen the Internet make things less expensive/valuable? In the late 1990s, trading exchanges were all the rage, and Fortune 500 companies experimented with reverse auctions to get the lowest price on a purchase order. eBay forever changed the value of many classes of collectibles by bringing the global supply to the surface and reducing rarity and therefore price. More…

3. What typeface does Wired Magazine use for its article copy?
Joanna Pearlstein

The serif typeface we use for body copy is called Exchange. The sans serif typeface we use is called Gotham Rounded.

4. What restaurants in the world have the best views?
Jonas M. Luster

The Ithaa at the Maldives. Great skylines are one thing, majestic mountain ranges another, but this is the only underwater restaurant that’s not just a dirty glass dome. The hotel is located in the Rangali island jetty.

5. Who designed the adorable foursquare loading graphics?
Matt Healy

It was a collaborative effort! That character’s name is Marsbot, and she’s the creation of our lead designer, Mari Sheibley. I designed the animation sequence for the Explore tab, which features Marsbot feeding icons into a giant machine, which represent all the types of data used by our Explore feature. More…

Matt Healy is a designer at foursquare. Below Matt’s answer is a response from Alex Rainert, head of product at foursquare. Questions on Quora are often answered by employees of the company referenced in the question, like the foursquare example. Joanna Perlstein, mentioned above, is a senior editor at Wired. She isn’t guessing about Google’s typeface, or doing a a quick Google search to find an answer. She actually knows the answer.

That’s Quora. You’ll find depth, a level of participation, and authority on Quora that just doesn’t (and can’t) happen on Twitter.  If you’re interested in participating in thoughtful, often passionate discussions, on nearly any topic, with people who know and care about their subject, you should check out Quora.

Tags: Quora, Jonathon Hewitt, Joanna Pearlstein, Wired Magazine, Jonas M. Luster, Matt Healy, Marsbot, Alex Rainert

How do you measure content quality? Copywrite, Ink, which bills itself as a “strategic communication and writing services firm,” launched its Fresh Content Project in an attempt to rank content quality among popular bloggers. The project:

“tracked approximately 100 blogs (currently at about 250) frequently referenced by a capped Twitter list of 300 communication-related professionals (currently at 248). From those blogs, we narrowed the ‘Fresh Content’ to choosing a single standout post every weekday (with weekend posts spilling into Monday). There is no algorithm. We picked one post per day. You can find out why we picked them here.”

Of course I was pleased that the Socialized blog made the list, and ranked quite highly at #11:

11. Joel Postman is an internal communications executive for Learning@Cisco. His blog, Socialized, is rough to read in the format in which it is presented. But if you can get past the gray on gray tight columns (or subscribe in a reader), the content speaks for itself. Of late, Postman is making a great case as a well-meant contrarian who turns some readily accepted social media ideas on their heads. You have to love that.

Copywrite, Ink’s Rich Becker is not the first one to mention readability issues with my current blog theme, and I am looking into changing the color scheme in response.

Becker makes an observation that doesn’t surprise me:

“There is no correlation between popularity and content quality. None at all. Not a stitch. When comparing fresh pick authors against Alexa traffic measures, the scale is neither right side up nor upside down.”

Which makes me wonder: Do people care about the quality of the content they are reading online? And what are the measures of content quality? I consider them:

1. Relevance: Is the information useful, informative, related to my work or other interests?
2. Topical: Does it apply to something that is interesting to me right now?
3. Tight: Does it get to the point with a minimum of meandering and asides? (I am guilty of violating this one.)
4. Well written: Does the piece pull the reader in and carry them through to the conclusion without requiring the reader to expend excessive effort to understand the premise and conclusions of the piece?
5. Properly written: Does it adhere to a reasonable level of spelling, grammar, style and usage?

As a writer and student of language, I take great pride in the quality of writing on this blog and in everything I do. It often prevents me from “quickly putting up a blog post” because my self-imposed standards prevent most quick posts. (And by that I am not saying my writing is perfect. I make plenty of mistakes and don’t mind having them pointed out.)

And I do know that by posting more often, I can drive up the rating on that Advertising Age Power 150 badge over there on the right sidebar, but my day job, and my unwillingness to post crap, keeps me from doing that.

What do you think? Is content quality measurable? Is it more or less important than content designed simply to drive site traffic and/or optimize SEO?

Tags: Copywrite Ink, Fresh Content Project, measuring content quality, social media, blogs, bloggers, writing