A con game is a form of marketing. How it’s different or what can make it illegal is in what you are selling.

A con or con game is essentially a process of persuasion that results in a transaction that gets one person to trade something of value to another.
A con game is essentially marketing and sales.
It can be a transaction where the “customer” gives the buyer money, allegiance, or an item of value. However, once the transaction is completed, the buyer feels criminally deceived by the value they actually receive for their trade.
Why teach content people about a con?
I’m not saying you should learn how to do a con, but a con is a sales technique. The process and techniques of a con are something that a content person should learn. Especially if you wish to improve creating content and arguments that persuade other humans.

For those who may be the target of a con, it’s important to learn how to see the signs of a con. Especially as a con can happen anywhere or anytime you are being sold something. Whether that is around politics, stocks, medical cures, products, etc. So let’s get started.
Origin of the phrase con artist.
Do you know where the term “con” as in con artist or con-game came from?

It was based on the swindles of Samuel Thompson. Who would be known as the original “confidence man.” In the 19 century, Thompson approached his victims by asking them to “express confidence in him” by giving him money or their watch. To his delight, some people complied and he kept what they lent him.

Seeing people give up something as valuable as a watch shows that the power of people to comply with a con is amazing. But where does that power to make this deceptive transaction come from?

It’s essentially a trade driven by a euphoric or unsubstantiated feeling. The “con” in confidence man, is about pumping up your confidence and emotions to take an action. The key emotional feeling: euphoria.
The euphoria period of a con (con game).
It starts soon after you buy into the game. It ends just as the illusion of the game’s prize or virtue is suddenly whisked out from beneath you like table linen on a dinner table. A quick and often jarring snap back to reality. Like when those who lent Thompson their watch realized it wasn’t going to be returned.

The euphoria period of a con game exists in that window when the promises and joy of a deceitful offer still seem possible. This period is also the hardest time for those experiencing it to see reality or risk.

While Thompson helped coin the term, con games or cons have been with us ever since human beings had something to trade with each other.

The fairy tale Jack and the Beanstalk is really about Jack lucking out after what most readers would see as a con. A cow for some “magic beans.” While those magic beans worked out for Jack, the seller sold them believing that they would not and his Jack was naive enough to have confidence in him, so the intent was to defraud or to con Jack.
The elements and tools used in any con are interchangeable.
It could be the Nigerian prince email offering your $1 million for helping them out of a financial pinch. It could be a political saying he can bring your old industry back if you vote for them.

Whatever it is, the essence of most cons is the promise to deliver a fleeting feeling of euphoria or unjustified satisfaction. The joy that you gained something or are getting away with something almost beyond what you feel you deserve or could get on your own. A fantasy realized.

That’s why the con is seductive. A magical or transformative moment dangled in front of us as obtainable.
A con game is scalable.
When a con is accepted by the masses it becomes even more powerful and scales in seductiveness among the populace. Snowballing and getting bigger as it now carries the authority of social proof.

Just a few decades ago, people excitedly followed other people who believed that buying Beanie Babies was a financially smart investment. Only to be holding worthless cloth filled with beans.
Why did they fall into the con?
To accept the con is to suspend reason and create space for the bliss of the ideal.

Imagine what you’d do with the Nigerian prince’s money?

That multi-level-marketing person is telling you that you’re going to be a successful business person by buying their product to sell to your friends and even get your friends to sell it for you. Even though the math behind MLMs say it’s impossible.
A con is a transaction. Just not a good one.
Unbeknownst to one party, it is an asymmetrical trade. The seller knows the true value of the deal isn’t what the buyer expects.

Because it’s a con, the logistics of both parties being satisfied in the end are pre-determined for failure. But until then, what an amazing world of possibilities. A feeling that everything is possible. A fleeting feeling many will pay for.

While not all religions, some televangelists fall into this category. Selling people through their TV screens that the hope of a better life is nigh you just send them money. Some send their money and that act of hope turns in to the excitement of that new life they just put a down payment on. I just need to wait for it to get there. And they wait. And wait.

The phenomenon isn’t just limited to straight-out fraud. This also happens is “legitimate” purchases of a little boy ( I won’t say who) 20-plus years ago. Like the X-ray specs that kids use to buy in the back pages of old comic books.

The euphoria for those buying the glasses was imagining all the things you could do with the Xray specs. Finally, I can see what my neighbors are doing next door.

The mix of believability and possibilities. It’s the euphoria period. The time you believe the promise is happening or will happen.

Until my Xray specs fantasy was ruined by some flimsy, cheap plastic glasses arriving in the mail that just made what I saw through them opaque, my $10.95 plus tax looked like an amazing bargain.

Was I cheated? Not really. As a kid and like many adults, my excitement focused on the fantasy and not the fine print.
For those who seek to profit from a con, the euphoric window is the key.
It reminds me of the quote attributed to billionaire Warren Buffett about investing. He says that it is wise to be “Fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.”

He’s essentially asking investors to see and seize that window for the opportunity and look past the emotionally led hypnosis consuming others.

To do so, it’s important not to be caught up in the euphoria driven assumption of others. Like with investments or a roaring stock market, as others are caught up in the idea of wealth and are greedy for the fantasy, they may not be able to see the party end, as all economic cycles do. Or when they are caught up in the fear of a bear market, they may not risk change to jump at the opportunities.

As our emotion is powerful, you need to be able to keep yourself rooted in a truth or a principle that tethers you to reality. That firm base will give you the logical leverage and perspective to know how to act differently and the emotionally driven consensus.
Mass con. Mass euphoria.
As mentioned before, a con is scalable across the masses. Limited only by how many are willing to believe the story.

Bernie Madoff made people believe he had the secret to making them rich. Tech companies in the 1990s brought in people who invested with them, even though some were simply burning a lot of peoples’ invested money with shows and parties while not making a profit. Investors simply relied on the hope that this new thing called the internet was magic. And this company does the internet.

In housing during the 2000s, people accepted the story that housing and buying a house is always a good investment because “housing prices always go up.”
Then, one day. Pop. The euphoria of the con ends.
The dot.com companies busted. Bernie Madoff is arrested for running a Ponzi scheme of paying older investors with new investors money to keep the scam going. And having no money or facing loans re-setting to astronomical heights on homes they were told they could afford, Americans were forced out or fled homes as they foreclosed.

The game ended along with the euphoria.
How can you spot the euphoria from the outside?
Business transactions. Economic models. Businesses and political moments that are driven as cons have these components.
Clue 1: The growing belief that the rules of the game are different this time for this idea.
People see an opportunity that breaks norms, rules, and history. They understand the norms but believe that this instance or opportunity is an exception. I believed my Xray glasses had the ability to somehow get around the laws of physics so I could see through things.
Clue 2: Those who aren’t caught up in the emotion, or offer contrary information are summarily dismissed as haters.
A person who knows the truth is dangerous to a con artist as they can bust the bubble of euphoria. So a common tactic, discredit them.

A group of economists and financial journalists spoke out about the housing bubble of the 2000s as it was happening. Often the voices are drowned out by those who have a financial or emotional interest in keeping the belief going. Particularly mortgage lenders, Wall Street investors, and realtors.

The current leader of the free world tends to attack sources of information that don’t conform to the official point of view.
Clue 3: The con optimizes the game allowing more marks and allies to get involved.
Some people who do know the game is rigged, don’t speak out to burst the bubble. Instead, they want a slice. They believe they will make money by simply going along. Like the banks offering highly risky NINJA (No-Income-No-Job) loans) to borrowers who couldn’t afford homes because they knew they could resell the loan, get paid for reselling, and not be on the hook if the lender fails. It is credit rating agencies that did not label bad investment risks on these same loans because it could hurt their firm’s standing and revenue with financial firms that wanted those loans to go through.

This passive acceptance of a scheme by all parties also creates the illusion that “everyone says the water’s fine. Jump in!” Social proof that can fuel the con.
Clue 4: Those who benefit from the con won’t tell you the music has stopped.
The music I’m referring to is a metaphor for the mood around the con game. If it were a song it would be “Happy Days Are Here Again.”

What the people who set the tone around the con that everything’s great. Keep going!

Many con games often give signals that they are about to end.

However, when the con is about to collapse, that music gets harder to hear. It might have even stopped. It’s a change that might catch your attention. You might look to the people promoting the scheme as if to say “hey, what’s going on?

The con artist likely knows the game is up and the music is over and it’s time for them to get out if they can.

But to you, they’ll suggest that the pause you hear is just part of the music. A dramatic pause or “This is a momentary glitch.” Little excuses that usually buy time for the people at the top of the con to wrap up and get the hell out before the public catches on and euphoria dies.

They are the people that sell their stocks before the public knows. Or moves their money to safety or untouchable locations. The point is that they are still using their asymmetrical information about the issue to their advantage over those who still don’t understand yet.
Clue 5. The con artist. “It’s not my fault, you chose to believe me.”
When the dust settles and people invariably look for the bad guy, the con artists are quick to remind the mob with torches, that it was their decision.

Here’s the thing. You know what, they’re usually right.

In most cases, the con-artist painted a picture that was too good to be true. Loans with no assets or income? Build a wall and Mexico is going to pay for it? Ideas that were ridiculous on their face.

Ridiculous ideas pushed by people of questionable morality. But ultimately, it was the buyer’s decision. There were also two choices. One: believe the story that feels good or two: rigidly check the story and decide.

The euphoria made us feel so good, it didn’t seem like a choice, so we chose to ignore option number 2. At that moment, we chose to be lemmings.

Problem with being lemmings, they don’t look at where they are going as they run like a waterfall of animals over cliffs and fall to their death. They are only trained to follow the ass of the other lemming in front of it. Don’t just look ahead. Look ahead of the pack or what’s presented and try to see the destination or rational endpoint to make sure it’s not a cliff.

While the cliff is unfortunate, it’s still a choice.
When the euphoria of a con game ends. The choice always seems so obvious in hindsight.
And It was in real-time… to anyone using information and rationality. But in the euphoria of a con, both are in little supply.

We just have a good feeling. And feeling and hope blind us to the future. One we may not like the consequences.

Let’s make it clear. Not every ad agency is racist.
Nor is every person at a shop that may commit racists acts is racist. Just like it would be wrong to say every male-heavy tech firm hates women.

Yet despite education and talent, certain groups can’t either make it in the door or move very far through the ranks with these firms. Many more simply leave in frustration. What we are talking about is why race has been an ignored and systemic problem in the industry.

In the wake of George Floyd’s death and protests, a lot of firms in media and advertising did their traditional “we think racism is bad” statements.

Nice. And thank you. However, for many current and former African American employees of these companies, watching these statements probably elicited groans and eye-rolling.

What gets many firms in trouble with these “we support racial equality” messages is that they instinctively reached out to their PR and social media team but didn’t check with their history and employees first.
People of color know the real day-to-day experiences of ad agencies and racism.
That’s why it feels like a slap in the face watching agency leadership give platitudes of support and inclusiveness. Statements where black employees’ personal experiences know the reality is different.

I also think that it is why many African Americans in the advertising industry are speaking up this time. Including the 600 professionals that put their names on a letter to the industry speaking out about systemic racism. I’m guessing they feel that by not calling it out this time, their silence would be taken as support. It’s one of the reasons why I’m more vocal on this issue than I normally would be.

This is combined with enough is enough.

Advertising is an industry that has faced controversy about race and hiring issues for decades. In that time it has had many chances to “support” minorities but still has little to show for it. Even now only 6.6% of African-Americans work at ad agencies. The ranks of African Americans that do make it into the door quickly drop off as seniority level increases all the way up to the C-suite where employees are 88% white.
Advertising and marketing firms are designed and paid handsomely to solve problems. And for, some reason, hiring talented minorities is a problem it hasn’t been able to solve for more than 30 years. Ad folks are smart people. Wickedly smart. People who know how to figure out how to get people to buy products and change their minds about issues.
With all that intellectual firepower, there’s a point where you have to ask yourself, maybe the problem isn’t being solved because people really don’t want to solve the problem. That or diversity conferences apparently must be cheaper or more beneficial than action.

Advertising professionals have well-publicized discussions and seminars about diversity. Year after year. They wouldn’t do that for a client problem.

Instead, some team would lock themselves in an office for two weeks and be showing the client an action plan soon after. Or if a client said, I want a diverse client team, the firm would find them, tomorrow. No chief diversity officers required. Which, in a quick micro rant, has always bothered me. If you have to hire someone whose job it is to help hire minorities, doesn’t that mean your HR system is broken?
Does advertising have blatant or intentionally hostile racism?
In most cases, no. In my experience at firms, I find its racism subtly infused, enabled and protected by culture. So let’s talk about culture.
What is culture?
Culture is our anchor for “what’s considered normal” in our environment. It is the habits and norms that people in a group or tribe do.
Culture’s true power over an organization and racism.
Steve Bannon once said that politics is downstream of culture. What he means is our cultural standards define the morals, values, and vision that will shape and direct how people make political decisions.

I’d argue that racism is downstream from culture. That the culture of an organization will eventually define its hiring practices. Because the culture is considered the norm or the standard. Problem is, culture is not a fact or a principle. It is merely a construct and a point of view. A fraternity or sorority has a culture. And when that Greek house or a company team shares or is indoctrinated in that specific point of view, you can create a workplace culture bubble the filters out other perspectives. However, that on its face is not immediately bad. This is why.

There are work cultures and there are social cultures. Work cultures can be that everybody in the office works 15-hour days and enjoys free lattes on Friday. The kind of stuff that is documented and put on the agency’s careers page. It’s clear and you know what to expect if you take the job. That’s not what we are talking about here. Here we are talking about social culture. The unspoken work experience standards.

These two different types of culture often get smashed together when the hiring managers say, “we want to see if you have the right cultural fit.”

Why is social culture important? This culture is the filter that defines who gets in but more importantly who gets to the top. This is not just for race. This includes issues that hinders womens’ roles in ad agencies and tech as well.

Agencies, like all organizations, have social cultures. Where I think agencies differ from their clients is that those social cultures are also part of their work product.

Agency people, especially as they become more senior, must interface with clients. So the agency team is also the agency’s product or client experience. And firms want their product to project a good experience. Many times that is making decisions that people on a team project a certain look, exude a certain socioeconomic background, or a way of speaking.

As a result, agencies want people and a culture that a client feels comfortable with and is comfortable giving money to. And sometimes that does include race. Especially if the client’s culture or a key individual client’s preferences hint that is an issue.

This does happen. I can tell of a story where a senior-level client, upon being shown a concept of Santa Claus in dreadlocks, got angry claiming Santa is white and then quickly devolved into a rant that if his son’s black roommate in college ever wore dreadlocks, he’d drive down to the school and cut them off.

The agency got the message. Not just about the concept.

The social culture at agencies seems to magically screen for certain things that have nothing to do with talent and more with presentation and what makes people internally and external clients feel comfortable.
How many overweight people do you see at an ad agency?
Over 30% of Americans are obese. So there are no obese people of high caliber who can do marketing?

Cultures, from bro companies to the recent stories about Refinery 29 can be seen making cultural decisions that signaled to others what cultural ideas were in and out. Take Refinery 29, where the editor-and-chief was recently ousted. A place where employees wouldn’t use black images except for Beyonce and a few other women of color the editor liked. Her decisions set and affirmed the organization’s view and/or comfort with a culture and different cultures. This rather than being a place open to variations that a more diverse society might bring in.

It’s a culture that can become a fertile ground for and indirect form of racism because it creates a narrow idea and filters what it believes is culturally acceptable. And it is subtle in its enforcement.

Don’t imagine a Saturday morning cartoon villain yelling out his devious plans about racism or giving a bold and hearty laugh as they execute them. It’s a hiring manager or boss making an internal decision that is more akin to asking “what sofa looks good in the living room?” They are looking for something based on how it matches the style or look of a certain environment. And guess what? They happen to be an “oak person.” So if you are a walnut sofa….

Over time, that agency has a lot of oak. It matches. Fit’s together. And we like the look. You were encouraged to add a walnut shelf at a conference. And, yea, it works, but you could take it or leave it. I know! Let’s get some more oak.
That was ad agencies and racism. Until now…
Then George Floyd came. And firms now grapple to get on the right side of this issue. And they are finding it hard. Most because their words today are so far divorced from their years of inaction. For any firm that puts out a statement about how they support our black employees or black lives matter, can be quieted with a single sentence…
“Great, let me see your stats on hiring.”
Others around marketing are stepping into do-do (that’s a technical term) as you can clearly tell the people trying to engage are overwhelmed and out of their league. Like if I had to give an impromptu lecture about nuclear fusion. Something I know nothing about. That would not go well.

But this isn’t nuclear fusion. It is about knowing something about 13% of the population that, unless you are really culturally isolated, should encounter often.
How can I hire you if I don’t know you?
That’s also part of the problem. Ad people, especially as income rises, increasingly have the wealth to live in communities and schools that keep them in that cultural bubble.
Money won’t cure the racism problem in advertising. Here’s what will.
For those trying to support black lives and causes, it’s nice that you give money. That’s quicker and you can write a good press release. But there is a solution that is cheaper. What BLM and others are asking for is to truly understand their pain, their situation.
Show that you are paying attention to racism, not just cash.
In the frantic need to fix the problem, I’d argue that culture has blinded agencies and companies to that focus. You are the problem because you really don’t know or care enough to honestly engage and solve the problem. Money or another conference with a better hook seems easier.

Here’s an analogy I hope makes you think about both you and minority worker’s experiences around culture and race and how to improve the experience.
In this time of racial unrest, agencies, you might try thinking of any race or culture as a language.
Languages speak about the same objects, people, and events, just in a different way from each other. The people who speak it know what you know, have the abilities you do, they may just use different words.

Sometimes when they try to talk to you, you may say, “can’t you just speak my culture’s language?” Or you might ignore their value because how they speak is not the way you would speak.

In the workplace, when something happens around that language or culture, you go to one of the few people who speak that language and say, “you know this language, how do you say this word?” What eventually frustrates the person who speaks the language is they feel they are becoming siloed or put on display as “the language expert” instead of the really great values and skills they offer and may get passed up.

When large social issues happen, you find yourself desperately struggling to try to communicate that you support those social issues. Never bothering to study those other languages or cultures, you find you have a limited vocabulary to engage.

Stringing words together with little understanding of meaning or context, you may say something unintentionally offensive or sound like you’re speaking gibberish.

To those firms struggling with the language, Get a good translator or, better yet, learn more about the language.

Consistency is the key to creating results in life. This also applies to the effectiveness of content. Consistent exposure to content can be good, or as in this case with Facebook, it can be horrifying.
Facebook and their psychologically damaged content moderators.
It’s a story I’ve been following with interest for more than a year.

Facebook content moderators, most being contractors, have suffered trauma and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) from looking at the relentless torrent of content, some of it vile, that gets uploaded to the site by users every day.

The company recently settled a class-action lawsuit and agreed to pay 52 million dollars to many of those contractors for damages inflicted on their psyche.

I think if you understand how a person’s exposure to content works, the effect of Facebook’s content on the human moderators was unavoidable. Well, save, not hiring them in the first place. As I’ll explain shortly, most humans are no match for the frequency of content. But first, some might ask this question…
Why not just use Algorithms to review Facebook content?
Algorithms, artificial intelligence programs, can look at a lot of content that humans and identify clearly defined offensive content (e.g., Black people smell or a picture showing blood and murder).

However, they have a very limited ability to detect the nuances of content that may feature depravity or hate. For example, depending on if you are talking about a slot machine or Asians, saying “ching, ching, ching” may or may not be interpreted as offensive. According to Bloomberg, the current algorithms can only detect around 38% of hate speech.

Due to the limitations of AI, Facebook hired people to apply human judgment to reviewing appropriate content. This had them looking at a cavalcade of hateful messaging, conspiracy theories, disgusting images, and political rhetoric over and over.

An article from last year from Bloomberg described the resulting trauma of being presented with an endless procession of graphic violence, demented thoughts, and disturbing sexual activities.
The exposure to content featuring depravity and conspiracy theories wore the moderators down.
As many contractors developed post-traumatic stress disorder, they attempted to cope by drinking and, according to the Bloomberg report, sex with each other in the office. One contractor viewing conspiracy theories posted on Facebook noted that, despite knowing better, he began to believe them.

These are people who consciously attempted to steel themselves against vile and deranged content. Yet, many were still traumatized by it. Why is that?
I would argue that it’s the power of relentless content.
Think of content like water. It seems harmless on its face. You can drink it. Play with it. It absorbs force to the point we are not afraid to dive into it.

However, its enormous power is seen when it is allowed to constantly flow. Think of the drip, drip, drip of Chinese water torture. The cold water slowly dripped onto the scalp, forehead or face on a restrained victim for a prolonged period of time can make them go mad.

Or think about flowing water that carved and created the Grand Canyon. Twenty million years ago, water of the Colorado River passed over the surface of hardened rock. The liquid carved and carried away stone, grain by grain, until it became a tourist trap my family dragged me out to see on a summer vacation when I was eight.

Seemingly insignificant in the short term, over time, the constant flow of content changes everything it touches, especially you.

I use to go to focus groups for advertising. There, I’d hear a constant refrain. People, usually want it on the record that they are not influenced or swayed by content like commercial messages. I noticed those proclamations were said as they wore wear brands, status items, and products they were sold to them through advertising.

They were persuaded via content. It’s just that the change they make over time seemed so small, it barely registered to them.

Unless you’re Bruce Wayne watching your parent die in front of you, it’s rare that exposure to a single thought or image radically changes you. A change that is too quick or to severe allows us to notice it and be alarmed enough to cut it off.
Content works to change a person over time.
Hence the power of consistency. That’s why we have content marketing. Information presented in stages to move people’s perception or understanding of a product in stages or mental milestones of change. One piece of content here. Another here. Then another…

Each piece of content seems harmless. But when it’s consistent, it becomes a powerful source of change. Anyone who has seen friends watching cable TV news shows who gradually change political views over time has seen this process in action.

Digital marketing experts estimate that most Americans are exposed to around 10,000 ads each day. That logo. That ad. That YouTube Video. That promo in your Facebook feed. News stories. Your social media feed. Over and over and over.

It’s one of the reasons most of us fail to realize just how acclimated we are to consumerism-based concepts. For instance, we don’t question the idea that spending money during a store sale is saving money. Even though we have less money in the end.
Constant content exposure is a Facebook moderator’s job.
That experience of being exposed to content was their daily job. Like water, the flow of content rushed through them, eroding them. Little by little. Until it made a big difference. It’s possible their lives will never be the same.

In marketing, this concept is very similar to the idea of frequency. How a person needs to be exposed to an idea multiple times in order for it to sink in.

There’s a saying a cucumber gets brined more the brine gets cucumbered. And that’s our personal battle against been changed by the constant flow of media. Exposed enough times, will change us more than we change it.

What is essential?
By definition, something that’s essential is something that is absolutely necessary or extremely important. But when we talk about “essential workers” we may be making a perceptual mistake – especially in terms of how businesses think.
When we call people like delivery people, doctors, nurses, grocery workers, meat producers vital, are we really referring to the person as essential or is the service they are providing essential?
What these workers are doing is extremely valuable to the consuming public and we must honor (and tip well for) the workers putting themselves at great danger to do it.

However, look closer with business logic and we can argue that they are currently considered valuable because right now, in our current urgent situation, it’s critical that a person be involved in delivering those services and goods. That can change.
Essential services, meet automation.
In my years as a content designer, I spent years helping to design experiences around automated and smart products for different companies. That include IoT (Internet of Things) and voice assistants.

Their use and adoption has been consistently growing quietly in the background. While the public may think of robots and automated devices as cute things to do small tasks and cute tricks, thanks to the pandemic, their time may now be upon us.
Essential services will be automated.
What would essential services be like during the pandemic if they were automated? If you are not thinking about it, you can be pretty darn sure businesses and industries are – for risk mitigation reasons alone. For more check out this article about why IoT is the future of business.
What essential services can be automated?
Anything that has routine.

The cashier. The delivery service. The person taking your order. Truck driving. Any job or service that has a set of group variables (do you want beef, chicken, hair spray?) and fairly set processes (order X, pay Y, deliver to Z location).

Here’s a bigger list of what is subject to automation.

With that in mind, imagine if this pandemic hit and you could simply enter or speak your order to a robot or virtual assistant. Then it just shows up at your house.

No imagination is necessary.

Amazon’s ability to do that in the current crisis is behind its growth this quarter. Well, almost, save the average person’s reluctance to start orders through Alexa. Then again, two months ago, most people over 35 and not in a city didn’t use Instacart. Now there’s that people are moving to apps that deliver essential services.

55% of the public has now purchased groceries online. Up from the around 32% last year. 500,000 contract workers now pick grocery items in-store to support customer fulfillment. An essential part of the customer experience that’s ripe for future automation.

Now according to research from Apptopia, Instacart, Walmart Grocery, Shipt, and Target represented an increase of 218%, 160%, 124%, and 98%, respectively, over the average number of daily downloads in February alone.

Things can change fast.

Amazon also benefits from automation on the fulfillment side. The company is already known for its increasingly automated warehouses. Machine workers able to mitigate operational and supply chain risk in the age of COVID-19. A robotic order picker isn’t vulnerable to viruses made of DNA.

And companies are experimenting with automated delivery robots. Like the robots from Starship Technologies that could replace the part where humans are essential, getting food and services to the last mile.
Business can’t help but take note of the value of automating essential services.
The argument against full automation of essential services would be that a machine-driven process wouldn’t have the human touch.

No argument there. But for companies who are more worried about keeping the lights on, that won’t be the priority right now.

Only the most commoditized or short-sighted business would be foolish not to think about keeping a human experience around their product. Brand and competitive advantage would suffer. This means we don’t have to think about enacting automation for customer experiences in extremes. It’s possible to have humans with AI as the fail-safe if a future pandemic occurs. In fact, here’s some cautionary voices asking to use reason in automation of functions and essential services.

Automation may need to be balanced. But it will certainly be inevitable. As Bob Dylan sang, “a change is gonna come.”

What do you think?

How big will voice-driven experiences like voice search and voice assistants become for your business?

Remember how smartphones took off after the introduction of the iPhone?

In just a few years, everybody had one. Especially as smartphones hit the tipping point of having abilities that appealed to both personal and business use.

As consumers and businesses rushed towards adoption, a whole new e-commerce ecosystem evolved. This was because the smartphone increasingly became the prime intermediary between an individual and their ability to access services and product information. From the company email to concert tickets.

It was also the way to communicate with someone wherever they were located. No longer did you have to wait for them to get back to their desktop or for you to find a place to crack open your laptop.

With such rapid change, the desktop, once the traditional access point, lost its dominance for both groups. Mobile became dominant. Soon after, unchallenged.
That’s happening with voice. Just a whole lot faster.
Devices that use voice interfaces, like the iPhone’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa devices are growing at a faster rate than the smartphone. According to Pew Research, 46% of people already use them to aid them in making purchases.

And while most of us have just one smartphone. 40% of us likely have access to multiple voice assistants and devices. For me, there’s Google Assistant on my phone. Google Home, Alexa devices or Siri on HomePod in my house and in my car.

Pew Research confirms my own experience. They report that while the under half surveyed use voice interfaces with their smartphone, more than 50 percent of other users report voice use spread between their computer, tablets and other devices.

All those options mean that, in 2020, over 94.2 million smart speakers among a total of over 125 million devices will have access to consumers. A rise of 75% from 7% in 2016.

Juniper Research is even more bullish on voice. The firm estimates there will be 8 billion digital voice assistants in use by 2023.
Let’s not forget business adoption for voice assistants.
More and more sectors of the economy, like healthcare and the automotive industry, are finding uses for the speech recognition technology.

Industries like healthcare are building voice assistants designed to allow patients to ask questions around a diagnosis in the doctor’s office or call for medical assistance.

Businesses including one I’ve worked for are building assistants for the enterprise. A way for employees to get quick company information and actionable project data through voice requests. As support for employees, these voice assistants can streamline or replace internal management apps and HR services.

Tractica, a market intelligence firm, reports that the voice assistant growth in the business world is expected to increase from 155 million users in 2015 to 843 million by 2021. With that kind of projected growth, revenue is forecasted to grow from $1.6 billion in 2015 to $15.8 billion in 2021.

All those smart speakers and voice assistants for business and consumers are estimated to become a 40-billion dollar market.
So why should your business adopt voice?
Why do you rob a bank? Because that’s where the money is.

As a business, sooner than later, you will need voice to capture if not simply maintain market share. Not to mention that voice is quickly becoming a touch point that consumers are pivoting to.

I’m not talking just voice search. While voice search on platforms like Google is important. It’s also any device that serves as the conversational layer between the user, a business or product information.
Voice assistants are your business.
TVs, cars, refrigerators, wearables, doors, medical devices and more will eventually become enabled with voice interfaces. Those products and the voice services that align with them can establish relationships with future customers. Often within your customer’s own home or on the go; far away from any retail locations you or your competitor may own.

Also, we are coming to an age where customers don’t walk into retail locations until they need to. A trend likely hastened further due to the pandemic.

An example. I have money in the bank and do transactions, but I rarely walk into a bank. I’m not alone. So “Jane” the bank teller in the bank isn’t building a relationship with me. I don’t’ see Jane’s smile. Jane and I can’t meet to joke and laugh together about the weather. The bank isn’t a personal Jane experience for me. Instead, the ATM and the banking app on my phone is my point of contact.

Now imagine if I could talk with the app or services on my phone to make a deposit. Check my balance. Ask about new services. And my engagement is happening through a helpful friendly voice that creates an amazing and brandable customer experience. One that the customer would usually avoid by not going into the bank.
With voice and the AI behind it:

Your business becomes more efficient and beneficial to your customers
You create an incredible brand experience
Your customer experience can be anywhere the customer is
Voice is frictionless. Don’t know what buttons to push? Doesn’t matter. just ask
Personalization. Once I have an experience with your voice assistant, it’s learning about the customer and interaction. Next time, it can deliver an even better experience. It may know your name and remember your preferences from the interaction before. That’s opposed to meeting a brand new human on your next interaction and starting your new transaction from scratch

You can do all that with voice. Or not. The choice. And your businesses’ future, is up to you.

Why voice assistants will be a vital part of how you do business or even if you stay in business in less than five years.

Want to think outside of the box?

First, have a box to think out of.

The definition of creativity or exceptional productivity is all about solutioning a work product that’s able to rise above an existing set of norms and boundaries.

Those of us in marketing, product or experience design are continually trying to create results that exceed those existing rules and boundaries. When we do rise above, we also exceed our clients’ expectations of what’s possible.
Structure guides our work.
As a writer and interactive linguist, I must work with boxes.

My creative and problem-solving process is framed and guided by a bunch of rules.

I must work with rules of grammer (like having to spell “grammar” right). In conversational design, I work with rules of language, meaning, and the information processing rules for both humans and machines. I also work with rules around deadlines and tech requirements related to the agile process.

So many rules. Yet by leveraging those existing rules and structures, I’m able to build new ideas and new experiences that go beyond them. Solutions that, birthed from the womb of rules and norms, have a familiarity to a reader or user. At the same time, they seem refreshingly different and delightful.

So thanks structure.
Where structure goes to die. Working from home.
For those of us who usually work in an office, home is often the place we retreat to in order to be unstructured and get away from the boundaries of work.

When we get home, we jettison our business or professional attire like we’re tossing off the shackles of structure and conformity.

Now due to the pandemic, many of us have to now attempt to do focused work in what was once our emotional and professional sanctuary.

In doing so, we often discover there’s an enemy (or perhaps frenemy) in the house. Choices.

Like a cheetah in the wild, choice is a seductive, devilishly clever predator that will stalk you at home, smelling and tracking you by your desire to enjoy the comforts and pleasures that your home provides. Patiently, it will prey upon you, your work and your creativity.
Working from home can make you a victim of choices.
Having no structure is like having a car and no clear roadway set out in front of you. You are awash in choices.

The good news: You can go anywhere.

The bad news You can go anywhere.

While most of us say we want and love choice, many of us don’t do well with choice. Because when we have a choice, all the results, effort, direction, decisions and motivations now flow back on us. Now WE must define the goal, the direction, the reasons for moving in a particular direction. And even when we do, because “anything is possible” there is no clear promise of a positive outcome.

With no structure, that’s all on you.

So unless we have some deep overriding goal or desire (usually a hard deadline or deliverable from work), we’re not ready to accept, take personal responsibility and be proactive for those choices.
You can do anything. And ironically, that makes it hard to do something.
This is a different experience than when we are working in an office with other people. A place where we tacitly let people and social norms enforce choices and actions on us.
Your office was the structure.
You got up out of bed and to work on time to avoid a boss’ stare when you strolled in a 9:45. Social pressure made you wear pants, skirts, shoes (hopefully), shave and keep the breakroom clean.

Without that pressure at home, there’s’ a lot of people going over the sales figures with marketing in Winnie the Pooh pajamas. A lot of people binging on Hot Pockets daily because the fridge is just a few feet away. A lot of people not going to the gym because “no one is going to see you anyways.”

Free from the office’s social norms, it’s you that now has to drive personal performance.

So what do you do?
Get a new boss for your work at home. Their name is routine.
We’re not talking about imposing totalitarianism by setting up some highly granular or completely unforgiving level of habit and work process. Rather just enough to give you purpose, focus and so you don’t lose the drive for action that you took for granted at the workplace.
My work-from-home routine.
Besides what I just mentioned, my routine has a personal why in it.

What it means for me is to take advantage of the larger productivity dip (people who give in to being at home and around a million distractions) and use that time to make myself a little better.

So what do I do?
I dress up.
Each morning I still get dressed up like I would as if I went into the office. This creates comments on my morning video stand up meetings (often from people still in near-pajamas).

I’m totally fine with it. You act how you dress.

A man stands up a little straighter and walks with more confidence in a nice suit. A woman feels more elegant and composed and confident in a great outfit.

Not saying you wear those at home. Just something that speaks a little more to your professionalism. I’ll be honest, I have to do a lot of video conferences during the day. And I’m speaking to people who normally dress up but are clearly taking advantage of not having to at home.

In group video chats, all I can say is that I’m getting a good idea of what the Hollywood Squares would look like if all the people in the boxes didn’t give a crap.

And here’s the thing. I work with some amazing, dedicated smart people. And no clothing changes that. But when you see them a little too casual, like in something that you know that they are wearing slippers off-screen, it dings their brand a little. And some of that brand perception will come back with them when offices reopen.
I keep some rituals.
In a previous post I mentioned that, wherever I am working, I usually go to Starbucks before I drive in to work as a hack to make sure I get to work on time. Now working from home, I still get coffee from the local Starbucks drive-through near my home (I and the barista share mask tips). That action triggers a mentality inside of me that I’m getting ready for work.
I work out.
Yes. The gyms are closed. Which is why I’m currently using my condo’s stairs as my gym’s stair machine. And two chairs for dips. I started doing burpees for the first time.

Which, for the record, sucks and makes me wonder why they weren’t used in the government’s enhanced interrogation techniques. However, the idea of adding something new to my routine makes my home workout a little more interesting. Also, I will need a healthy body post-COVID-19. Health is wealth. Why lose all the pre-pandemic gains you’ve made?

Also, it’s hard to worry about work issues and COVID-19 when your immediate concern during a workout is where your next breath is coming from. Exercise is an amazing stress reliever.

What is also great about exercise? For content creators and other problem solvers, exercise often helps provide a level of inspiration and clarity that informs our work. Clinically, it helps decrease anxiety, depression and stress. Something we can all use in the face of COVID-19.
Keep writing this blog from home.
Like Steven King says, writing is like weightlifting. If you want to get stronger, do it every day. This blog was my writing routine on my weekly plane travel back and forth to Miami. Originally designed as a personal meditation on my craft and thoughts to be shared. As a lot of us have a lot more thinking time on hour hands, the need to process things through my writing is even more reason to keep blogging during this period.
I learn.
Whether training at work or attending seminars or programs I’m always learning. In tech, it’s almost a must. The more you know, the more you’re able to integrate what you know into your work.

Right now, I’m brushing up on my Tableau skills. Studying Python as it relates to NLP. And a personal chatbot. Oh, and my Spanish.

One of the reasons that I learn…
Some are losing jobs. The last thing to do right now is to lose skills.
Tiger King is fun (a glorious train-wreck) to watch. But don’t just focus on keeping yourself entertained. Keep yourself sharp. What skill can you learn during this time that will make you an even better employee, freelancer or consultant when the virus all-clear is given?

My career has survived through multiple economic downturns. A lot of that I credit to proactively pivoting my skill set and business offerings while my peers and firms were comfortable with the status quo. While it’s tempting you can’t stand still in life. Life will move without you.

Businesses (like advertising) are often the first expense to be cut when the economy turns. Already Ad Age reports that 90% of work for freelancers and contractors in advertising in NYC has stopped cold. Advertising may be the first cut again, but in what is likely a deep, global economic slide and reordering, it won’t be the last. And like after re-emerging after the brutal 2008 recession, advertising was never the same. That will be the same for many industries.
This is your time to get ready while you are at home.
Let’s be honest, for those of us who may have lost or will lose jobs during this time, you will be out on the street competing for your next job with some pretty skilled people.

Some people will have a skill set that some companies will be dying to snap up. Others will be a harder sell. Especially now that we’ve instantly pivoted to being an employers’ market for talent.

In such a competitive market, many freelancers and contractors will fight to justify $30 an hour to money-tight clients only months after casually turning down work offers less than $100 an hour.
Routine is the boot camp for building work skills.
Keep learning and keeping your edge in mind, body, and career. To do that, you must forge successful habits and skills through a routine. Know-how will be your best weapon. Especially if the time comes when you have no job.

Many of us love music streaming services like Spotify and Pandora.

We find it easy and comforting to have the music we love streaming in the background while lounging or working around the house.

What’s also great about it. Through analyzing our music selections and feedback, the music services are using AI and machine learning to get better and better at predicting what we like.

As a result, they are able to really hone in on playing the type of music that we want to hear.

As one friend mentioned about one of the streaming services, it “feels like they know me.”

While the streaming music services may “know us” and are savvy at delivering songs that we like to listen to, here’s something that you may end up not knowing: the name of the artist or song you are listening to.

You may not realize it, but the streaming services that we are increasingly listening to through our voice-UI devices like Alexa, Apple’s HomePod and Google Home are slowly divorcing us from the metadata (data that describes other data) around our music content.

Anyone familiar with these devices will know that any interaction with these devices either exists through your voice requests or via the audio the device delivers in response. No graphics or visual content is presented.

So while you hear a song, metadata such as the artist, the artist’s label and product information, like the album cover, get ignored or made invisible to users without a request by the users for that specific information.
Nice song. What’s the name? Who’s the artist?
Unless the user is already familiar with the artist or song, the user is essentially blind to artist information they hear on many streaming services. Instead, they are only able to see what their ears hear: the song. Not the artist metadata, like the album cover, artist picture, etc.
That metadata makes a difference for identity and brand.
Remember what music was like pre-streaming or if you had digital music that had metadata built into the music file? If you do, you probably realized you gained an extra connection to parts of an artist through that data.

AC-DC’s bold logo on their album covers or iconic covers like Nirvana’s baby-swimming-in-a-pool Nevermind album gave identity and a visually memorable brand context around their music.

A visceral connection because the images around an artist you listen to often become so closely tied with the moments you experienced with the music. For that not to happen would be like going to the senior prom and not remember what anyone wore or the decorations. Just the songs. Not likely. They’re inseparable.
Yet in streaming music and metadata they’re being separated.
Your interaction with the music through a streaming device is usually about telling the voice UI what you want to hear. In playback, the service rarely tells you who the artist is. Unlike radio, there is rarely a DJ telling you that the song was “Closer” by Halsey to help brand the music experience you just had or are about to have.

So with little exposure to branding cues, your music service is adding new artists that you like into your feed without a second thought or glance by you. Or without those special, brand-able connections.

Soon, the ratio of great songs you are discovering may soon begin to outweigh the contextual information that you know about them. Unless you ask Alexa or use a music scanner like Shazam, the song and artist are invisible.

On streaming services, artists make percentages of a penny in royalties for each song you listen to. For many money isn’t in streaming. It’s in touring and merchandising. Two things where a good brand is extremely valuable.

So for artists who need their name and brand recognized in order to promote and make money in merchandise and on the road, losing their identity via streaming services could be a problem.

Sad song goes here. I don’t care which artist. Just play something I like, Alexa.

This might take some of you back to high school.

You want to take someone to the dance. You can tell them how great you are. Talk about how great the dance will be.

Oh yeah, one more thing…

If you want them to go, you’ve got to ask them to go to the dance.

Just because you provide data and information doesn’t mean you’ll naturally create the response you want. While it may seem blatantly obvious to some, the connection to meeting an internal need or desire and a person making a response in kind isn’t apparent to everyone. Sometimes you need to “connect the dots” for people. That’s why you have to direct and ask for a specific course of action.

That is true across all types of sales presentations. Especially digital.

For web design, that means having a call to action (CTA).

Below are some tips for creating powerful call to actions.
Six tips for better CTAs.
1. Make sure your content creates desire.
No one was ever bored into taking action or buying something. Make sure your words create or connect to pent-up demand that the action your CTA suggests can relieve.
2. Make sure your content creates urgency.
Without the need or desire to act now, your CTA is just a wish list. Just something to do sometime in the future or something to be lost in a busy future timeline and simply forget about later.

Get the user to focus on right now. Adding a limited time to take action, like adding an expiration date, helps.
3. Make your action statement simple and clear.
Simple. Ask your user to do only ONE thing (E.g., View PDF, Download Brochure).

When you ask users to act on multiple tasks (E.g. Download and Read Document), you exponentially dilute the power of the call to action by making it confusing or giving the user additional choices they aren’t prepared to make or go forward with.

Clearly write your CTAs so the user quickly understands what to expect or how their desire will be met if they respond.
4. Match the CTA with the level of action or commitment your user is likely to make.
“Donate 100 dollars” as a CTA is a much heavier climb and commitment for users than “Donate one Dollar” and will likely result in few clicks on the call to action. Asking them to download a free brochure or music is more value and less commitment on their part and will likely increase click through rates.
5. Design your CTA button so it stands out.
Your site likely has a lot going on in terms of words and overall design. Not saying it’s clutter but your user still has to make an effort to visually navigate all the content and determine what they need to pay attention to. Make it easy for them to take action by making the CTA button easy to find and use.
6. Learn from analytics and feedback.
Actions on the web are trackable. Track using analytics connected to your website platform, a mail program, or look into third-party analytics. Use the analytical data to gain insights to refine your message and how you deliver your CTAs.
CTAs. Overall, the biggest thing to remember…
Make sure your message gives the user an easy way to take action on what you’ve told them.

Ask, and you shall receive.

What happens by not incorporating content strategy upfront or when you make it an afterthought.

“Form follows function” is a design maxim.

Unfortunately, many times, it also ends up being the unrealized ideal of a completed design, content or marketing project.
Most executions in life end up being “function follows form.”
“Form follows function,” attributed to architect Louis Sullivan, is the idea around industrial design that the shape of a building or object should primarily relate to its intended function or purpose.

In the age of digital design and digital product design, that’s expanded to the idea of designing or building a product or experience around the desired task or experience the user wants. Aesthetics are based on functional requirements designed to delight or satisfy the user.

Conversely in “function follows form,” what happens is the product is built around satisfying non-user focused or distracted objectives with the hope that it, while not optimal, will be still acceptable to the end-user.
Why the reverse of “form follows function?”
The short answer: because we are human.

Somewhere in the process, the needs of humans for feeling beauty, massaging a participant’s ego or some other non-aligned urgency or desire tend to rise up and distort the form. When the form is hijacked for odd reasons, it inevitably perverts the function.
Function follows form happens for a bunch of reasons.
Some valid and non-valid. Including:

A cut budget
Limited resources
Internal politics
A lack of actionable information or insights.
The ego of the client or members of the design team
Monetary. An overweighted need for a firm or designer to sell a site or digital experience to pay the bills

Each one alone can prove to be greater than the need to optimize the digital or content engagement experience.
Function follows form creates a passive-aggressive experience.
When the function of the project is pre-determined by some existing form (say an unvetted decision is made to do an email campaign) and that form does not align with real-world situations or user needs, the design or product eventually delivered becomes a passive-aggressive experience, if not a hostile one towards reality or the end-user.

A predetermined function creates an arrogance or indifference in the design development that demands that other components, elements, and content that might delight the user instead be subservient to the perverted function. And in serving the perverted function, lets down the user.

For example, if a digital product becomes subservient to something say, like cost, the result may affect the level or quality of content, or the speed of the website experience for the users by using a cheap server.

When you give reality and users the middle finger, via this kind of arrogance or indifference, both reality and users tend to push back.

Reality can push back in terms of affecting SEO and reducing the ability of the content users want to be found. Users can push back by simply not finding slapped together content unsatisfying and seek competitor’s content.
In “function follows form” content is greatly affected.
Such an approach of pre-deciding form makes something like a website not the place to optimally deliver content, but all too often, merely a place, like a shelf, to hold content that’s been created, often content structured or created for other purposes.

And without designing and structuring content based on the situation or user’s situation, that shelf may not even hold the content people want. This as the focus of delivering content has shifted to the perverted “function.” In most cases, that perverted function is “keep cost down” to avoid time optimizing content for users.
Why can’t function follow form?
In doing so, you are designing backward. Pick a solution first.

Then, when it’s done, look at the problem that needs to be solved in the real world later.

An example. Imagine if you were designing a gun (just an object. I’m not promoting them). You design the gun to be really cool. Wow, is it sleek. The trigger is delightful and responsive. The weight of the gun is balanced. So cool.

Just as you finish production on the cool gun, someone asks the question, “Hey, what exactly are we using this for?”

Shooting a bad guy is very different than taking down an elephant or a heavily armored tank. And like content, good planning, and success require a different type of bullet crafted and delivered that matches the user requirement or task.

If the team started with the endpoint, the bullet design to complete the task would be very different.

Function following form usually happens when phrases that pre-dictate the form go unchallenged like…
“We need a website (or mobile app or voice assistant)”
What’s not asked:

Why exactly are we doing this?
Who’s this for?
Is this the right forum for our audience?
Is this the best way for users to access content?
How will it help our particular audience?
Are we going to structure our current content to work and be consumed optimally on those given platforms?

With a form pre-determined, a ripple effect is often created. As the form is destiny, there’s little reason for or additional energy and effort and cost in optimizing. Just completing the form. So content-wise, in the name of cost, or laziness, content from another platform or experience is simply cut and pasted.

A situation that can lead to an event like creating a mobile app with endless scrolling and too much content that is a turn off to read. Or sites with content not structured as to be unfindable in the experience or unattractive to growing customer demands like voice search.
“Just send an email (or a notification on mobile).”
What doesn’t get challenged here in pre-dictating the form:

Is selling the user the same as delivering a great brand experience? Spoiler alert: it’s not.

Left unchallenged, this request ignores, often arrogantly, the long-term value in delivering a good content experience to a customer.

This is often because the people proposing it are not valuing the form and how it will satisfy the user. It’s just a vehicle. Instead, they are salivating over what the form can offer to benefit the marketer. In this case, the marketers are more interested in the fact that the medium is a captive channel and the end-user will likely be forced to view the content.

Email is one channel where people constantly check their inbox, so a message sent there (at least the subject title) will likely be viewed.

Another good example. Push notifications.

I’ve worked on notifications for mobile experiences. I have to constantly push back on groups that want a push notification to deliver messages that are not relevant, urgent or actionable to the user. And not to use them as sales channels.

Departments, especially marketers, tend to salivate over notifications because they know the message will be pushed to all the users. Plus those users will at least have to acknowledge the notification message, even if to just dismiss it.

Marketers think about sales and exposure offered by the form more than user experience. That function is more attractive to the marketer more than crafting a form that helps the user.

The function perverts the form because marketing is more short-term thinking and considered more of a numbers game. For them, tactical, not experiential.

Nor is it customer focused with the exception of how to extract attention or value from the customer. That’s why there is the temptation to use the forms like email and notifications as more of a brute-force experience. Send the message to enough people and while many others will be annoyed, someone will respond. And a sale can be made.
When function follows form, frustration follows, too.
The definition of annoying is providing content or experience to those who don’t want it.

Understanding the function or purpose or need of the user for developing and distributing that content goes a long way to avoiding “annoying.”
Design or even design-centric-thinking is about solving around the function. Then finding the right form.
While the pull can be tempting, and sometimes, necessary, working from a predetermined or perverted outcome is the surest way to create a mismatched solution.

The ultimate job of any website, mobile device or screen is the effective delivery of valued information.

When function follows form, user frustration also follows.

“This article about Buzzwords focuses on how obtusely engineered language content leverages greater idea acceptance across various work and social engagement opportunities by enhancing positive content consumption.”
You may not know what I just said about buzzwords.

I’m not sure if I do myself. However, we all do know a buzzword or a cloud of buzzwords in sentence when we hear or see them.
Buzzwords. What are they?
Buzzwords. Words and phrases that seem jargoned to the point of being hip or calculatedly ambitious, haughty, Impactful, powerful, yet at the same time often extremely ambiguous.

At the end of the day, buzzwords are often the exact opposite of what we seek to do when we employ words in everyday conversation – to be simply and clearly understood.

With buzzwords, we often seek to impress or use them as countermeasures to repel deeper questions or accountability for the actions behind those words. For example…
“We need to leverage the digital transformation by level-setting the paradigm to create synergy to the redefine active state of the system”
So, you are saying that you DO want me to plug in the light?

That example sentence could apply to so many things and actions. But it sure sounds important.
That’s one of the amazing things about buzzwords.
They seem powerful., brisk and active. Yet as you put more of them together in the same sentence, the less they actually say and less true impact they have.
Why do we use buzzwords?
Unlike most words, they’re really not meant to communicate for understanding but to signal whether you are a part of a given culture or for virtue signaling.
In culture, Buzzwords serve as culture definers and insulators.
Hipsters. Teens. The military. Tech professionals and others all use physical, cultural and linguistic cues that are used to define and wall off each group’s culture and identity.

In this regard, buzzwords used in each group serve as linguistic drawbridges and moats that are raised to tell others, the castle is here, the linguistic drawbridge is raised and you cannot cross over.
For buzzwords, the language of teens comes to mind.
As a non-Gen Z, I cannot use terms like BAE, On Fleek, Lit, or Fire without a teen looking at me like I’m a 40-year-old man trying to wear skinny jeans. Oh, and I so want to.

Such words are designed to be inside-the-group language. So if I or these kids’ parents tried to use it, it will likely result in eye-rolling and some of those kids saying, “Whoa, those are not for you. For God’s sake, stop! Don’t cross the linguistic drawbridge. Stay on your side of the moat.”
Buzzwords in Tech and Business.
Buzzwords in business tend to serve two purposes: 1) communicating alignment in identity and 2) camouflaging lack of knowledge or requests for accountability.

One: Alignment. Buzzwords signal that you carry or hold in-fashion ideas.
If I were to say “click” that button in the mobile app, more than half of UX and strategy friends heads would immediately snap to look at me in horror.

Why?

In mobile and tech lexicon, you don’t say “click,” you “tap” on something.

That is the language or lexicon the tech culture accepts. So to not use such approved language would signal that I am not in or of that culture.

In business, the words we use are like the clothes we wear. They need to be fashionable and look the part for the group we are seeking to impress. Buzzwords act as those clothes.

Just like Zuckerberg and Jobs made hoodies and black turtlenecks and jeans the visual language of tech people used worldwide, executives and corporations understand they must wear the right words when talking to customers and shareholders.

Content developers like copywriters know that’s happening when clients suddenly ask to include industry-hot buzzwords and phrases in speeches and marketing materials. At one time specific phrases like “digital transformation” and “the cloud” were peppered into any content delivered to show the press, prospective clients or customers, that the business communicating to them is wearing the right and fashionable clothes when it came to hawking new technology and systems.

“Admired industry people are talking about the cloud or big data,” thinks a client. “Ok, I’ll use those words as well.”

It’s “us too” as business speak. No different than the person who buys Affliction (or whatever is popular) brand clothes to signal he’s part of a specific crowd.
Two: Buzzwords are meant to be felt rather than questioned.
I have worked with clients and tech companies that have the urge to speak in full buzzword speak. Often because they believe it offers what they feel is the best of both worlds. Sounding important by having the lexicon of the in-crowd but so unclear to make them understood and unaccountable for what’s said.
For instance, the buzzword “customer-centric.”
“Customer-centric?” Didn’t that used to be simply “pleasing users” or “we focus on the customer?” I guess we can’t say that anymore.

So why the change in the language by most companies?

Frank Zappa once said that, in music, there is no change in music (genre) without a change in uniform.

Heavy metal needed to look different than 70’s Rock “n Roll (Big hair, you’re on stage in five minutes!). Grunge needed to look different than 80’s synth-pop (Buzz off leather jacket with big shoulder pad, flannel is in!). Changing buzzwords for business and tech is the uniform change that signals the bigger change.
Buzzwords to obscure one’s level of knowledge, accountability or competency.
Tech has changed industries and businesses faster than the people employed in them have been able to comprehend and adapt to the change.

A lot of people that were used to older, more traditional ways of doing things, have quickly found a new world that is hard to understand and racing past them. Media buying print ads turning to ad exchanges. Marketing executives finding themselves having to understand things from Google Adsense, retargeting, social media, CRMs and digital interfaces or processes like Agile management (What’s a scrum? Is that a sports term?)

In order to be seen as having the knowledge to be in and part of the in-group, in this case, business groups like marketing. Buzzwords are the way to signal that you do indeed belong. That you are keeping up on your skills. This even when you might be behind on knowledge and expertise. So until you understand the technology, many simply lean on buzzwords as skills camouflage.

It’s possible to say “digital transformation” to look like you’re on the cutting edge as you give speeches or talk about your product, even though you have no clue on what’s being transformed or what transformation means for your company.
Buzzwords in this context also prevent revealing knowledge.
Because they are considered language of the insider. To say a jargoned phrase like “We must operationalize our strategies and holistically administrate around hybrid cloud delivery in order to drive exceptional synergy.” assume the recipient understands the deeper meaning. For a lister to call one term out “What’s a hybrid cloud? or What’s synergy?” outs them as an outsider.

So with people on the inside (deserved or not) not wanting to be outed. No one asks deeper questions and assumes the language is self evident.

The result is that the ignorant-to-less knowledgeable people can exist in plain sight within the organization by mimicking the style and level of language the industry or group is using, they won’t be called out as different
The best way to call BS on buzzwords? Ask for details.
As much as we use buzzwords, they are actually quite brittle and delicate. Most contain a content or logical argument fragility that relies on a tacit agreement between the speaker and audience to not touch or poke at them too harshly, hence they’d break it. It’s also this lack of challenge that keeps such buzzwords weak. If no one asks, “what exactly is digital transformation?” the idea around it never gets honed and sharpened to become stronger.

It’s why people who lean heavily on buzzwords as key pillars in speeches and sales pitches, find their messaging rarely survives facing true scrutiny and skepticism.

Without a robust plan or knowledge, they will quickly pivot to different buzzwords or different topics.

Or as they say, “this results in changing the paradigm, pivoting to differently focused word structuring in order to achieve a strategic quick win.”

You know what I mean, right?
Interesting buzzword resources and articles.
From The Atlantic:

Corporate Buzzwords Are How Workers Pretend to Be Adults

From the Muse:

30 Buzzword-y Phrases You Should Cut From Your Vocabulary (Like, Right Now)

From Wordstream:

The Ultimate A-Z Marketing Buzzwords Bible

When prestige or money comes into a business or industry, too many times the men show up and women magically leave.

Stats show that, even in 2020, when women enter a field, the prestige, the pay and the number of men all go down. This can be seen in industries like tech.
Genderfication. Why we don’t see women in tech.
Cooking.

Technology.

Professions once seen as the domain of women…until they became popular.

Decades ago, the stereotype images of people seen cooking and as cooking experts were women. At that time, there was nothing out of the ordinary in the public belief that cooking “was a woman’s job.” It wouldn’t be surprising to find men saying women should be in the home cooking instead of at corporate job 20-30 years ago.

Yet, today, men like Gordon Ramsay, the now-deceased Anthony Bourdain, Jamie Oliver, Bobby Flay, Guy Fieri, are seen across books and TV shows and on the lips of the general public. A gender change to the point where men don’t even blink to question a male’s cross over into a previously “woman’s” role.
How things change.
If you have seen movies like Hidden Figures or know about the history of women in tech as software programmers, you know that women once dominated tech in areas like programming and math. Now like then, all too often, women were often dismissed as menial laborers or sexually objectified.

For a quick catch-up . Check out this explainer video.

Women had a place in tech. The inventor of the compiler was a woman (Grace Murray Hopper). Yet “Bro” companies (a nickname for companies created and mostly run by men at all levels and retaining a predominately male-centric culture) litter the tech sphere.

Yes, there are women at these organizations. When you think of Facebook, COO Sheryl Sandberg comes to mind. Problem is, in answering the question, “and then who?” Do that, and the executive level and the number of options (unless you’re looking at the HR, marketing and PR staff) start to nose dive.

It’s far too common, that during top-level decisions involving executive leadership, seeing female involvement becomes as difficult as seeing the smallest letters on an eye chart test.

Based on the history of women in tech. I find the phenomena weird. It’s like football or basketball. Sports where the majority of players and people considered superstars are often non-white, but management, the place you’d assume would be tapping this talent to kick upstairs for leadership, is not.

Like I said, “weird.”

Even weirder is that, reported this year, more women are now working outside the home than men. Yet, men dominate the executive ranks in those businesses outside the home.

Weird, huh?
How did we get here?
Two reasons. The change happens in such fields because two other changes happen: cultural and financial.
The cultural reasons for fewer women in tech.
Did you know, in history, that poor people in cities were often forced to live by the water?

Was that because people want the poor to have great waterfront views? No.

In the past, it was believed that diseases came from the water or from water vapor (Miasma Theory). As a result, the more affluent didn’t want to live there and were more than happy to let poorer people live in harm’s way. Later, when disease and water were unlinked and the concept of germs was discovered, waterfront property was reclaimed by the more wealthy.

That cycle is similar to what I believe has happened in industries like tech and cooking. Programming and math, once considered drudgery or “beneath” men or their identity as men, women were “allowed” to hold such jobs as they were considered to support the “real” work that men were doing.
The unfortunate perception around gender and work.
Let’s be honest. The perception of whether an industry is “male” or “female” does drive the makeup on an industry. Fashion (85% female industry graduates). Construction (91% male).

I don’t have to be honest. I can just be factual. Stats show that in industries, like parks & recreation and biology, as more women enter an industry, the men and pay shrink.

A big reason attributed to this is that men attach their identity and self-image to being a high-wage earner and being in a job considered “masculine.” So when an industry starts “feminizing,” men start to leave and other men won’t take such jobs.
To understand the link between genderfication and jobs, see nursing.
Being a nurse can easily pay over $100K a year. Yet even during the great recession of 2008, a time when men were especially losing jobs, many men from previous “manly jobs” refused to consider or train for such jobs, even as the industry was desperately looking for nurses.

If that is the case, it stands to reason the opposite is likely true. A company with an overall “masculine” identity (e.g., construction and “bro” companies) often attracts more men and rewards them with higher industry pay.

Take male-led tech startup companies. It is undisputed that types of firms receive most of the venture capital available to fund their businesses. In fact, in 2017, women-based companies received only 2.2 percent of the total venture capital funding. Even worse, only 10 percent of decision-makers at VC firms that hand out money are women. And in those U.S. venture capital firms, 74 percent have ZERO female investors.

Such environments have produced such stories as executive Ellen Pao who lost her $16 million gender discrimination lawsuit against the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins.
Gender perception shapes work, staffing and pay.
With that construct and applying gender with the metaphor of race, having more women come on board an industry and assuming key decision-making positions can be seen like some men in that industry is a bit like a suburb’s neighbors worrying their neighborhood is getting a little more “United Nations ( a sarcastic code word for “darker” I often used to hear when looking for housing). The mindset is that it was okay when a few showed up, but now it’s looking like a continual and rising trend. It’s a change where people in the neighborhood start worrying about how it’s going to affect the prestige of the neighborhood, property values and if it’s time to think about moving.
Financial opportunity driving “Genderfication”
With the exception of nursing, smelling money in an industry can change the gender balance to men. The change is similar to gentrification that is happening in major cities.

As cities, the place boomers fled from in the 1960s to 1990s, became hip places for young couples and families, prices went up and changed the demographics and culture of neighborhoods.

As housing prices became pricier, people considered buying in run-down, more ethnic neighborhoods. As the money came, the upscale stores that wouldn’t open there, suddenly did. That leads to even more growth. Growth that looked cool. Yet it also pushed out groups living there (often minorities) out. Likely reaching a tipping point of feeling culturally unwelcome and well as their old support system around them dying, it’s simply easier to leave.
“Genderfication” in tech is the same concept.
In the past, while women focused on programming and math, men focused on the “important” part of tech of the latter 1900s: Computer hardware. That became a farm team environment for men in tech.

As Silicon Valley eventually evolves to software and internet data services, the money came in.

Many of those same men, making hardware, made the transfer to that data services side of the business. That already gave men a head start. And because nerdy men only knew nerdy men, the natural inclination to hire buddies, created a nerdy boys club that nourished an exponential growth of men and a culture that would become the modern tech industry.

We still see the results of genderfication today. In 2018:

29% of all Apple leaders were women.
The percentage of Facebook’s women in tech had increased to just 22%.
Facebook’s female employees reached 36%.
Women formed 30.9% of Google’s employees.
25.5% of Google’s leaders on a global scale were female.
24.5% of Google’s newly hired tech-position employees were women.

With more than 50% of the public being women and the future is going to rely on tech, we should be much better than that.
How do we improve women’s place in tech?
One way is via an ask for all of us.

I dare say that we must accept that we are ALL internally trained to see certain jobs as masculine or feminine. We need to change that as employees and businesses build and react based on that perception.

Don’t think so? Then I ask, why on earth, in the year 2020, are we still having debates if a woman (not just a certain woman) can be president? Are the odds of finding a competent woman across 150 million females in the US really that slim?

Another ask is to not think about sexism or gender exclusion in its extremes. If you use that model, you will miss how the process really works.

People and decision makers in companies are usually not trying to keep all women out. It’s more like managing who and how many come in and their role. Like with race, things like tokenism in the workplace, “look, we hired a black person or a woman” (mission accomplished clap hand cleaning goes here) works as a pressure release/control valve. Taking one action that tremendously reduces pressure to take future or additional action.

When hiring, many are also subconsciously managing a level of participation and positioning of gender that doesn’t hurt “the (tacitly masculine) brand.” As women enter, some find an invisible pressure to operate within the “brand.” A brand that is more aligned to male roles and values through non-verbal cues.

As a result, some women who do earn those positions in a firm subconsciously feel they often must act masculine, submit to the masculine vibe or workplace values or have their position or competence questioned.
Why should we change and stop genderfication?
We are a society that has benefited by diversity. While some still hate when that diversity causes someone different to be in your neighborhood or your workplace, many of those same people still love “those people’s music” and “those people’s food.” Pick your ethnicity or nationality for “those people.”

The point is as you go out for a taco or Thai tonight and listen to jazz, or enjoy your German BMW, it’s clear we build off the diversity and insights of those who are not in our immediate tribe.

While those examples are cultural, gender is no different. While we could “steal” those benefits from women (like having them do math programs while men do the “cool” hardware or “you just worry about the PR, Toots”), it’d be even better to have them in the decision-making room.

This is not a listicle about writers, but at the same time, the headline kinda removes a need for a preamble, so let’s get into it.
Writer number one: The linguistic clergy.
There are writers who know a lot about words. And less about people.

We often think of them as grammarians. An expert in grammar, they can often speak with the authority of a religious follower, imbued with the scripture of the rules of grammar. Rules they treat as if passed down from them from word heaven and the gods of literature.

While a follower of God might take offense to saying the Lord’s name in vain, to the linguistic clergy, ending a sentence with a preposition will suffice as blasphemy.

A bit like the spirit of God, the linguistic clergy often believe the beauty and soul of grammar and language is contained within the rules. Which makes the rules sacred and must be obeyed in worship of that beauty. It’s sort of like the town in Footloose with rules against dancing so decorum must be maintained to preserve that beauty and order of the town.

Yet, like that town, the more rules that are imposed, the more others desire to break them. Yeah, I’m looking at you Kevin Bacon and Patrick Swazye and your dirty dancing. I’m also looking at the “u r up?” people texting culture and using cultural slang. “A’ight?”

While I do get loose with rules, I also empathize with the grammar guard and their belief rules are important. In the age of online dating or romance via text, not knowing the difference between “your” and “you’re” can be a turn off to a prospective dating partner. And I’m still counting how many Caucasians online in the dating world can’t spell “Caucasian.” Or how a passionate political argument can turn into farce when someone holds up a sign that says,” Use your brain, morans!”

And at the same time, when someone hounds you because you end a sentence with a preposition, it’s hard to see them as a person who loves rules and is suffering seeing them infringed. Instead it comes off as a ruler who attempts to reign over their subjects via a totalitarian regime of rigid language.

The perception is why many of us rebel against the first form of grammarian that we encounter in life: the English teacher. Often a person who teaches English in a way that downplays it as a method of communication and sharing ideas. Instead, they present it a battery of hard-to-understand and often contradictory rules (i after e, except after c).

Grammarians as writers honestly love and understand rules. But they inadvertently rub people the wrong way because they don’t understand other people who are impatient and simply want the most expedient way to communicate. Impatience that wishes to cut through grammar rules to communicate faster; like a shortcut that takes you off the designated sidewalk route.

A grammarian may love fine literary works, but in their own work, may often write like a technocrat. Precision is shown in the language, but the soul within the sentences seem vacant. Like performing sex for only procreation instead of pleasure. The job is done. It’s acceptable. Nothing more to see.

Or they may write like a jazz artist. A musician who uses rules and techniques at such an intricate level, they can only be understood and appreciated by other technical musicians. Some in that group would say, “Oh look, he changed the time signature of the rhythm!” And then gush and snicker among themselves. All of which comes off as some sort of inside joke.

They are using language masterfully, yet they fail to communicate to most people outside the group.
Writer number two: People who understand people. But not words.
They have an emotional sense and great emotional insight about the people around them. That can intuitively feel how they others thirst for words, knowledge or emotional drama. They are emotionally intelligent. Or have felt pain that has opened them up to hearing and learning insights from the lessons the world has to offer.

Often these people are wise, but lack the ability to tap and share that knowledge in words.

That’s often the bottleneck for them. In the attempt to marry their emotional insights with the right words in order to share them with others , each word paring they attempt seems like a bad date. Frustrated, the writer often seeks the third kind of writer.
Writer number three: People who understand words and people.
This combination makes for powerful writers. They feel that emotional thirst in people for ideas and information and they know how to quench it with language. While they have respect for words and rules, that doesn’t mean being an inflexible grammarian. Instead, they are adept at knowing when to use and break the language standards in order to squeeze the power and emotion from those very rules and words others use to restrain thought.

Instead of restraint, such writers help us see beyond sight with their words. They are skilled at making even technical content feel more emotional and oddly intuitive despite the complex subject matter. That is why the right author often needs to come along to explain an idea or topic in a way that other writers couldn’t.

It takes a while to become the third writer. In my business, I don’t often see it. I see many of the first two. A lot of people in my business are grammatical and can write technically correct and flawless content. A lot of people know what they want to say but can’t.

The third is usually the person who can make it happen. We need a few more of them.

What is Natural Language Processing or NLP?
NLP is the process of how your voice or language in text is translated into an intent for action or a result that a computer can understand.
Natural Language Processing sort of works like a graphic interface.
That’s because, like a graphic interface, the heart of NLP is the process of determining user intent, but through interpreting voice instead of visual engagement or cues.

A graphic user interface (GUI) uses visual-oriented objects and interactive layouts that a user can engage with. Those points of engagement can be things like the menu on a web site or the buttons on a remote control or the visual menu in a product like an entertainment console in a streaming service. In those instances, that voice version of NLP is your finger.

That’s because you don’t speak to the graphic interface.

Instead, you look at the visual menu and, using your finger via button or mouse, you communicate your intent for information or action to the computer by clicking something in a way that the system understands.

For example. Clicking on the home button means you want to go home, or clicking on the play button means you want the computer to play content.

In a GUI, UX and UI designers have to create and display pre-set visual options and actions so users can see and select intents that make their desired task execute. Because the interface is visually oriented, a GUI is something users usually need to look at and learn how to use in order to know how to express intent and get content from the system.

A pure voice user interface (VUI) is mostly the opposite. A VUI works as much as possible to understand how to get information and the intent of the user by what is contained in their voice and how a person naturally speaks. It does that through the exchange and translation of language.

That process of managing the exchange and translation of language is called Natural Language Processing or NLP for short. It’s an application, driven by a programming language (often Python) that takes captured text or identified human language and tries to determine meaning from it.

NLP is used all around you. It’s part of the predictive text on your phone. It’s used in social media to mine texts in order to assess emotions and topic interests in users’ social media posts like Facebook and Twitter.

it’s also in use at companies like J.P. Morgan for mining the texts of President Trump and some market sectors to quickly assess volatility in the marketplace due to government policies. And it’s also used as a processing layer with voice assistants to take the words you say and try to identify what you mean or what task you wish to accomplish (user intent).
Let’s focus on voice assistants.
As I mentioned above, a VUI is an interface that’s trying to understand you. Particularly what you are saying. While it uses a form of AI (weak AI), its intelligence in understanding language is not a sentient or conscious ability to understand words, meaning, and context. Instead, after another process that captures words and text, NLP attempts to use rules humans have developed around language to make a reasonable prediction of a user’s meaning or intent around using those words.
NLP does this through these primary processes.
Parsing.
Breaking out a sentence that the system hears into their separate words. If you listen to your own speech, you know it’s easy for humans to see how we blend one word into another. We usually can tell where one word stops and another begins. That’s much harder for a computer. To help a computer, it analyzes the sound wave pattern of a sentence, and the amplitude of the waves, to help it parse words.
Stemming.
So let’s say NLP found a word. Say “running.” As a human, you know what that means. However, with the present participle “ing” adding more time context to the word, that’s a little more complex for a robot to understand.

So NLP often looks for the stem or the root word and primary meaning. For example. In this case, the root word of running is “run.” Finding the stem of the word allows the NLP to more easily assess the meaning, “to use legs to move quickly” or “to execute.” Based on other words and parts of speech spoken in the utterance, the NLP will calculate the most likely intent meant by the word “run.”
Chunking.
Since language has rules and parts of speech, the software looks to group words that likely go together. Like “the book.” The word “the” is not likely to be used by itself so the software looks for the word or words it is likely related to and “chunks” them together.
“No” words.
Some words don’t really add to the meaning of the sentence so the NLP does not seek to find meaning from them. That’s often parts of speech like prepositions (e.g., at, of, the).
Invoke, Variable, and Entities
With the structure, parts of speech, and grouping set, the system then looks for keywords in the sentence to triangulate meaning and understand the user’s intent.

Let’s say we are a voice assistant named Robbie and we hear a request from a user…
“Robbie, turn on the bedroom lights.”
This is how it breaks down for NLP.
“Robbie”
Robbie is the Invocation or “wake” word.

This is the word or words that help a service understand and identify which app or resource a user wants to act on to the request. In this case, that’s Robbie. In your own life, that may be “Hey Siri” or “Alexa.”
“turn on”
This phrase helps the system understand Intent or what is the user trying to do. In this case, change the state of something from off to on.
“lights”
Objects or defined concepts that are related to the action are called entities or variables. In the case, an action “turn off” will be applied to the variable “lights.”

Once the NLP has determined the intent of the spoken language, it will attempt to match your expression to action it has in its library of actions and will perform that function with the parameters expressed (in this case, bedroom lights). If it finds it, it gives you the response.

While it takes data scientists, programmers, linguistics and conversational professionals to do this, that is NLP in a nutshell. Turning language into intent. And through a voice assistant turning intent into action.

As the tech revolution matures, it’s moving focus from innovation to monetization. As it does, tech’s work culture is being transformed. Employees, consultants, and marketers must adapt to survive.
Culture defines a company. Yet…
It’s been said, “culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Any consultant that has proposed ideas that run against the grain of how a company sees itself and the resulting resistance to those ideas can attest to that.
What we forget is the next bigger predator: the profit motive.

Think of a bigger fish (profit motive) eating a smaller fish (culture) that is eating an even smaller fish (strategy). This dynamic is the circle of life that transforms most organizations over time.

Under this cycle, things like the celebration of innovation, seeing tech founders plastered on magazine covers for their brilliance and tech companies’ focus on employee experiences are fading.

The attention is shifting as tech companies need to make their current innovations deliver amazing profits ASAP or show shareholders how they are establishing competition-resistant moats (E.g.: Facebook’s top app competitors are most often its own: Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp) that will ensure high margins and profits.
The tech industry is changing.
In the dot.com boom of the 2000s, investors tolerated companies with business models that weren’t profitable. That is, until the stock market woke up and finally broke free of the mass hypnosis that the tech industry could defy economic gravity.

It’s that experience, now in the rear-view mirror of shareholders and an aging stock market that has forced investors to keep tech a little more honest this time around. Shareholders and industry analysts are now exerting profit pressure.

We saw the failed 2019 IPOs for tech companies like WeWork and Uber. Companies that asked investors to focus on their big idea more than their balance sheet. As investors said, “uh, no thanks,” companies are now pivoting from selling a seductive vision to a more Spartan-like focus of executing programs that deliver revenue for shareholders. That image pivot is reverberating across their corporate cultures. And it’s driving pressure for internal change.

It’s why we’re seeing companies like Facebook and Google that previously lauded an employee-first, hippy-woke libertarian vibe falling downward from the list of best companies to work for. It’s also seen in companies’ top management enacting policies that are increasingly at odds with their own employees’ beliefs or vision of the company. For example Amazon selling facial recognition technology to law enforcement.An action that met with employee protests.

Like tectonic plates, these cultural shifts are reverberating and creating tensions within companies that employees, consultants, and vendors will have to navigate.

Even Google, whose founders coined the corporate phrase “Don’t be evil” has, under new leadership, like CEO Sundar Pichai, seem to be changing to “Don’t be uppity” as the company has eliminated most of its weekly no-holds-barred all-hands meetings that allowed employees to speak their mind. The company is also making news for “coincidentally” firing employees that “just happened” to try to unionize employees or inform them of their rights as workers.
Why the cultural change in tech?
With some tech firms moving into late teens and early 20s, companies like Facebook and Google are no longer the young innovative newborns. Sharing your vacation with grandma on Facebook isn’t a brave new world, it’s the ho-hum present. And with many of those companies, the new frontier for growth is around data and advertising services. In the face of normalization of once-revolutionary technology, companies are transitioning from being founder and idea driven, to profit-minded growth and pleasing shareholders.

For example, while most think of Roku as a streaming service, its pitch to investors is as an advertising service as it collects data (some would say too much data) on its users to support marketers. For an employee of a company, that workplace shift is like working at a clock company that suddenly changed to making bomb timers. Same technology, but now an application that might challenge how you view your job.

I’m not criticizing what is happening as much as I’m recognizing the growing pains of most companies. Everything changes, including tech companies.

The pressure of the real world and focus on shareholders eventually erodes, or at least, challenges the idealism, egalitarianism and professed values many companies strive for as they get bigger.
Maintaining profit in tech thrives on optimizing production.
Optimizing is just another word for removing the excess around what is deemed most important. Important has changed.

When company goals were more focused around recruiting valued talent for competitive advantage, businesses made efforts to outfit and present their company as sexy for the press and goose market valuations. It seemed like every tech or tech marketing company was rushing to LinkedIn or Instagram to post their “wild and crazy” or woke sides.

As part of a content marketing strategy, it’s a way to look and get exposure as the hip, attractive firm. But today in quarterly profits world, your posted company outing, ping-pong tables, and high-end cafeterias don’t impress investors. Growth does.

Capitalism’s quest for growth demands a marketplace that is relentless in seeking efficiency. Better efficiency yields better profit margins. Efficiency is about prioritizing what’s important to the goal.

For today’s tech firms, that will be more of a focus on creating business motes, better ways of monetizing data and working with companies, governments or markets that might give some moral pause. Why? Like the punch line about why you rob a bank, “because that’s where the money is.”

Growth is change. As change happens in the company, the culture will adapt to the company’s priorities.
What tech’s change will mean in 2020 and beyond.
I have five predictions:
Prediction 1: Buzzwords will go away.
The following statement (and possibly mea culpa) is my opinion by also my experience as a copywriter. “Buzzwords are mostly used to hide lack of knowledge on a topic or put a hazy filter on bullshit.” They are often designed to keep ideas pie in the sky and to waive off any accountability or clear action. It’s why you see lots of companies and executives using them like applying makeup to make themselves or an idea look “prettier” than they actually are.

When people or clients really do want hard answers and facts, buzzwords seem inadequate and collapse quickly. I predict, with the exception of annual reports, buzzwords will tone down for a while as people will be expected to talk less and just get things done.
Prediction 2: Less company lifestyle postings of social media. More ideas.
As I mentioned earlier, people want to see YOU have big ideas that make money. Not that you “like” other people’s ideas and brave stances in social media.

It is really great that your team does work for the homeless (really it is, no sarcasm). But in an increasingly no-BS minded business world, that’s like telling me how much you take care of your dog in an interview. It’s nice. Now I know you’re not an a-hole. But now, tell me how you are going to solve my problem.

To that, there will be greater pressure to really provide value to others in social media, by giving them tools or insights that help them solve problems. Which means to get that client phone call, you need to share more ideas than “likes.” This means you’ll need to do your homework and research as you provide exceptional content. And exceptional content is that which adds value and makes a client feel they are one step closer to their goal.
Or, you can do that status quo…
“Oh, really? Branding is a good idea? What? Customers want personalized experiences?”

Why not throw in that “gravity is good for keeping you on the ground?” while you’re at it. Create and seek out social media content that takes users beyond trite solutions to “change the game” ideas. That likely means that your social media team has to know your business or really work with SMEs (subject matter experts) just as much as they understand social media channels. This empowers them to convey your organization’s intelligence in your content marketing, not just moving around warmed-over news and your company’s “cool” personality.

Remember, people seek out the consultants and professionals who can tell them something and do something they DON’T know. So find it.
Prediction 3: The new Human Resources: “That’s nice. Now do your job.”
HR departments, often seen in the last ten years as part of an employee recruitment strategy and company cheerleader, will quietly pivot from “empowering” employees to just listening to them. Listening will be more about allowing an employee to vent and cover the firm’s rear end for “listening” to concerns. HR will move away from employee experience, via actions, to tacitly enforcing compliance with the new change in culture and its main goal of protecting the company.

Employees will also likely find many of the “employee experience” trappings will be quietly pulled back. An example from a company I’m familiar with where “unlimited time off” is really only unlimited in that you would be unemployed if you used it (so guess, technically it’s unlimited). Or ping-pong tables in the office that are a great way to unwind, after work hours, when your manager sees your work is done (otherwise, you should be working).
Prediction 4: Employees will need to make personal ethical decisions around employment.
Tech companies are wading into more and more ethical murky areas that face regulatory, legal or moral scrutiny. For instance, how much of a role should your company have in stopping misleading or hateful content on your service or are you just a neutral platform that shouldn’t get involved? As more companies are found approving questionable ads to the collection and use of personal data, more employees will have to ask themselves, “Is this what I signed up for?” You may find that your line and the organization’s line for questionable conduct may be in two different places.

I think back to a discussion in the movie Clerks, that talked about all the contractors in the Galactic Empire who must have worked on building the Death Star in the Star Wars universe. In that world, you may be a person who is simply installing the plumbing in the moon-sized space station. Yet in the bigger picture, your work helped to build something that killed billions. So are you simply a contract plumber doing a narrow job or part of something more significant?
Ask yourself. Just how are you changing the world?
It’s hard to know how you are changing the world. Especially in technology. Great ideas are often agnostic with good and bad determined by their applications. The same idea that enables nuclear energy can also be applied to create the atomic bomb.

Not saying your employers are dictators or evil. But dictators also want to change the world so there are a lot of ways “world changers” can go. And people may follow simply because the money’s good or they don’t see the bigger implications of the change.

The question you may have to ask yourself is that, even though we make compromises all the time, is the compromise you’re making for the greater good? Development and adoption of facial recognition software could improve airport security and save lives. It also may be able to track your movements in public as it can create billions of eyes to watch you. As I mentioned in my first blog post, the Nobel Prize was created by regrets of the inventor of dynamite.
Prediction 5: Individuals will have to constantly ask themselves this question.
If you are in marketing or a consultant this question is more important than ever…
“How do you provide value?”
In a world of global competition and constant change, companies have less and less room for BS. In this world, you can’t be a “nice to have.” You must be a “have to have.” Companies are currently optimizing staff and operations outside of the pressure of a recession. I can only imagine that effort would increase exponentially in an economic downturn.

As the companies mature or run into recessionary pressure, they’ll be looking to optimize. You can’t be the excess.

2020 is here. We are moving from founders to the foundations of business growth. There are a lot of changes and challenges ahead in the next decade. Be ready. Be excited. Be agile. Be mindful. Then, go be great.

Sharing some of the best content around content strategy I looked at this year. Particularly ones I thought might be clues for bigger things to think about.

This one is about voice assistants by Gary Vaynerchuk and how they will radically change consumers and businesses.
How Voice Assistants Will Change Brand Perceptions

Many of us in tech and digital marketing talk about innovation and creativity. But when you look closer, you can see that many of us tend to get comfortable or “innovate” around in the skills we already know well or have been proven. So we change, but really not that much from our comfort zone. Change that truly transforms industries rarely affords us to keep such indulgences.

In that respect, I like entrepreneur and content-marketing-spewing-machine Gary Vaynerchuk as a motivator to keep changing.

If I could summarize most of his lectures into one message, it would be “keep moving and focus on what is really important, not only the ways you’re comfortable with.”

This video is a message from Gary around the rise of voice and voice assistants. A quasi-rant about how the rise of voice will change the game for brands.

He’s right. Those close to search clearly see it.

Those who just think of voice assistants as a way to turn on the light and ask about the weather really need to understand that this is about the future survival of brands and how businesses will engage and capture customers in an ecosystem of products.

A future that is ignored at a company’s or marketer’s peril.

We all know the phrase, “It’s like finding a needle in a haystack.” The metaphor is quick. It also illustrates the value of content strategy.

The metaphor is quick and powerful because it brings together three truths that we inherently know about life and the need to structuring processing like content strategy.

Lesson one: You can have too much information to consume: The big haystack.

Lesson two: When left unstructured, it creates a blinding and unproductive, non-manageable level of clutter.

Lesson three: This clutter and disorganization fights your desire to find valuable content: the needle.
Why do we allow the needle to get lost in the haystack in the first place?
This lesson, too is universal and timeless: laziness or lack of foresight.

Those of us who are not clairvoyant, I included, don’t know what content or when assets, like content, will be important to us in the future. As a result, we won’t manage it well.
Director David Lynch taught me a lesson about managing content and haystacks.
As a kid I had the vinyl soundtrack to the 1984 version of the movie Dune directed by David Lynch. As the movie aged and I cared for it less, I got lazy with where I kept the album. A decade later, a friend from London called and asked if I still had the soundtrack as what once cost me 11 dollars was now valued in the thousands.

As that content literally became valuable to me again at the moment. So I looked for it. And in my case, my haystack” was my parents’ house where I grew up. With the album a faint memory, I had no idea where that album could be in the house. And the fact that my parents’ house was cluttered from attic to garage to shed with decades-forgotten consumer items, made the album almost impossible to find.

Had I thought it was valuable back in 1984. I would have watched over it better and been more thoughtful about where I put it so it could be found.

When it comes to information that we are indifferent to, we treat it indifferently. As a result, we don’t bother to structure it or, like that catch-all drawer we have in the house, we just throw everything in it. Over time, cluttering info we don’t need piles on.

And when a situation arises when the content is needed, we can’t remember it exists, or can’t find it.
Speaking of haystacks. Companies and digital content.
Companies generate so much data and content. And when those pages that talk about last year’s product, or cover a topic that isn’t the bestseller list or not coming off the CEOs lips at conferences, it’s easy to ignore it, then ignore governance, and just keep generating content and pages for the newest, next big thing.

That’s when you get your haystack. And one day, you’ll need to find a needle.

Xiaoice, pronounced “Shao-ice,” or the Chinese phrase for “little Bing, is the name of the AI system developed through Microsoft. Though not noticed in the states, currently, it is the most popular social chatbot in the world.

As form follows function as in its design to support social conversation, Xiaoice’s response and conversational dialog are designed to be friendly and engaging. To use words and phrases that allow it to respond as a friend.

It is such a success, the chatbot is known and sought by users for its emotional response and listening skills.

In fact, millions of young Chinese seek out Xiaoice on their smartphone in moments when the need emotional feedback. Times including when they have a broken heart, have lost a job or have been feeling down.

“When I am in a bad mood, I will chat with her,” said Xiaoice user Gao Yixin,

While conversations may vary based on each unique dialog flow, what is clear is it’s a success as users often responding to Xiaoice (often referred to as “her”) with, “I love you.”

While not exactly clearing the Turing Test for AI conversation, as Xiaoice’s users clearly know the chatbot is not a human, it doesn’t matter. The level of empathy expressed across its dialog flow is clearly resonating with humans. In the process, it may just offer us a glimpse at the future of A.I. assistants.

With results like this, for commerce or connection, they could be the ones we end up turning to for engagement.

If you run or are starting a design or content business, you’ve probably learned, or WILL learn, that being talented is not always the most important part about keeping your firm’s doors open.
Talent is great for a business. Cash flow is better.
To remain a viable content studio, you have to learn how to manage the finances and cash flow of your business, not just produce work. That means acting more like a business that needs revenue than being artists and consultants performing on the street with an optional tip jar.

This matters. When I ran a marketing firm for over 12 years with bills and people to pay, so much of my time was spent chasing down receivables. Often to find that instead of using their funds to pay my business on time, clients often used it to fund their next initiative. While they had our work product in hand right now, they’d expect my business to wait patiently.
Pay me now.
I understand that desire to firmly say, “pay me now” seems in direct conflict with pleasing the client. It’s not. Especially if you clearly set the terms of your working relationship (including fiscal).

That requires an attitude, process, and discipline that sets and keeps boundaries. Particularly in getting clients to pay in and business culture where clients are extending the age of receivables to fit their cash flow instead of yours.
You deliver on time. Clients should pay on time.
Letting them slide too much can make you more valuable to your client as a line of credit than the work you deliver for them. Also depending on the client, they may just hope you give up and walk away, betting that you’ll find paying legal and court fees to get the money back might outweigh the original invoice cost. Or you may decide to settle, which to a client is like getting a discount.
In payment, contracts and action, set boundaries.
This from a person who as lost hundreds of thousands from clients early on my business by letting aging invoices slide and continuing to do more work. While sometimes it was because a client tried to get out of paying, more often it was clients mismanaging their own money. Too much debt or not getting their own customers to pay on time.

When it comes to payment, your hairdresser won’t let it slide. Nor does the grocery store. What should make your business any different?

This presentation by Mike Monteiro, the co-founder and design director of Mule Design, is very enlightening on the mindset to have in order to run a business and have a professional fiscal relationship with clients that can avoid problems, including making sure you have the money to pay to keep the firm’s lights on.

Your best ideas may come in the shower. Still, they’ll get washed away with the soap if you don’t write them down.
The faintest ink is better than the strongest memory.
-Proverb
Why you should write (all) your ideas down.
Creativity is like a chemical reaction between two elements. The interaction of two previously independent substances combine to create a new substance or an entirely different element. If you remember your chemistry classes, you also know that some elements created from these union last microseconds.

As we, as one element, bump into people and ideas throughout the day, those fleeting moments of creative chemistry are born. Yet, so many won’t make it to our laptop if we don’t make an effort to capture them.

In an interview, now-passed but legendary comedian, George Carlin talked about the process he uses to capture all of his ideas and observations.
George Carlin on catching ideas to harvest…
“I take a lot of single-page notes, little memo pad notes. I make a lot of notes on those things. For when I’m not near a little memo pad, I have a digital recorder. Most of the note-taking happens while I’m watching television.

Because the world is undifferentiated on the television set. You may be watching the news channel, but it’s going to cover the breadth of American life and the human experience. It’s gonna go from suicide bombings to frivolous consumer goods. It’s a broad window on the world, and a lot of things are already established in my mind as things I say, things that I’m interested in, things that are fodder for my machine. And when I see something that relates to one of them, I know it instantly and if it’s a further exaggeration and a further addition, or an exception—if it plays into furthering my purpose, I jot it down.

When I harvest the pieces of paper and I go through them and sort them, the one lucky thing I got in my genetic package was a great methodical left brain. I have a very orderly mind that wants to classify and index things and label them and store them according to that. I had a boss in radio when I was 18 years old, and my boss told me to write down every idea I get even if I can’t use it at the time, and then file it away and have a system for filing it away—because a good idea is of no use to you unless you can find it. And that stuck with me. “
George Carlin’s filing system for his ideas.
“There’s a large segment of it devoted to language, which is a love of mine. And a rich area for my work talking about how we talk. One of the files is called “The Way We Talk.” And it’s about certain voguish words that come into style and remain there. But then there are subfiles. Everything has subfiles. There’s one that says “Crime.” There’s “Crime” and there’s “Law,” there’s “Sex” and there’s “Race.” And there’s “Humans”—that’s obviously a big folder with a lot of smaller folders in it, it’s about the human race and the human species and experiences and observations I have about that, or data that I’ve found about it. You know, 6 million people stepped on land mines this year. Those things interest me.”
Digital makes writing down ideas easier.
In the age of digital and the smartphone in our pockets, we are all now walking recorders of life. While most of your friends are capturing their lives and moments for Instagram, Snap, and Facebook with cameras, other tools serve a writer to capture ideas for your next blog or content marketing campaign.

A few I like.
When I can’t use my hands to write an idea down, “Hey Siri.”
I currently work in matters of voice and voice assistants. So it seems natural I would be inclined to use a feature that is coming into its own a little after Mr. Carlin. Apple’s Siri. Or any strong voice agent.

For me, Siri is invaluable. Especially when used with the new reminders app capabilities within iOS 13. While driving or I have my hands full when Siri is within earshot, I’ll simply call out to Siri to record the tickler of the idea I’m having.
“Hey Siri, remind me to ‘be amazing” in my ideas list”
To that, Siri’s response: “Ok. I’ve added “be amazing” to your ideas list.
Write or transcribe your voiced ideas with JustPressRecord.
For really messy ideas and points, I want the ability to vomit up ideas in order to pick through the mess later and find nuggets to build on. For this, I often use JustPressRecord. Tap a button and immediately start recording audio. Whatever babble that comes out of my head will be captured and automatically transcribes into text.
Ulysses. How to hold and structure ideas.
Once your ideas become text, which each aforementioned app does, I use Ulysses to file and further incubate those thoughts. See my thoughts about Ulysses in an earlier post about content strategy tools.
Writing down ideas.
As I heard in a podcast, “Ideas are worthless.” Execution is what makes them valuable. But you need to catch them first to execute. So write your ideas down.

The tone and the way you deliver your content may be the most important part of creating effective, persuasive content.

Both tone and delivery act as components to filter the meaning of your written or spoken content in order to let a specific visceral meaning drip through to the reader or user.

The way a writer or content deploys voice and tone creates emphasis and underlines a particular meaning. In effect, putting their author’s thumb on the scale of a perspective they favor so their readers give that point of view greater weight, importance, and urgency.
Tone is more important than the words.
Imagine that you needed to walk around while being blindfolded. Unable to see anything around you but a depth-less pitch black.

Sightless, all you have left is a voice around you to listen to and speak navigational information to you to guide you.

You try to walk. You step forward. One foot after the other. As you step, you have no idea if you are close to a wall or possibly about to walk into a wall.

Suddenly, you hear a voice calmly say, “stop.”

You feel the casualness in their voice and you respond by calmly slowing to a full stop.

Later you start walking again. In the middle of your stride, suddenly the navigating voice screeches, “Stop!!!!!”

It’s likely that you feel urgency to stop immediately. In fact from the desperate sound of the voice, the need to stop must be so bad that you not only stop immediately, you raise your hands up in front of you in hopes of protecting you from whatever this horrible threat must be.

Same scenario, same content: the word “stop.”

But the different deliveries of that word created very different results. What made them different? The editorial and tonal context the same message was delivered with.
The tone of content is almost as critical as the message itself.
Tone and delivery is a like a secondary channel that people hear along with the message content. An extra channel which tends to frame the validity, priority, or value of the message.
Sarcasm is all about tone.
Think about an example a lot of us use everyday. Sarcasm. The right words, layered with a contradicting delivery.

Think about this phrase spoken sarcastically: “Oh, I’ll get that for you right away.”

You wouldn’t expect to get it “right away” if at all.

Through the tone of sarcasm, we know not to listen to the words because the tone says “disregard what you think you hear me saying.”
Tone and delivery is like the “handle with care” note on a package.
It defines how most people will treat the package. It’s why you must be mindful of it. Via tone, you can communicate levity, fear, anxiety, anger and more that will then cause those words that you use around that tone to be viewed in that context.

So be mindful of tone and delivery. Or don’t. It doesn’t matter. I say sarcastically.

A pure voice user interface, like Amazon Alexa, requires different design thinking then when developing content for a graphical user interface (GUI). With a VUI, you are not designing to navigate and exchange information through the eyes. Rather, you are designing and sharing content and microcopy for the ears.

Specifically, the exchange of information structured within sound, language rules, and thought is being coordinated by both the human brain and the intelligence powering the voice assistant.

In a voice-only interface, the brain and the voice assistant are both relying on the information contained in any audio response to get the information they need to complete the desired task.

But while a user receives audio information from the VUI, the user only has the bandwidth to manage a limited amount of information at any given time from a voice-only interface.

The bottleneck of data is coming from your brain and is a concept called cognitive capacity.
Cognitive capacity.
The idea of cognitive capacity applies to users whether they interface with a GUI or a VUI. To understand cognitive capacity, let’s first look at how it’s different between the two.

A graphical user interface conveys a lot of information to a user. All the images, visual content and how they are presented in a state called permanence. That is, the images, content, and visuals presented in the graphic user interface used on a web page or within a mobile experience are static. Without a prompt, that content doesn’t disappear as a voice does.

Instead, the visual content experience holds that information like it’s sitting on a shelf. The words on a stop sign or the main menu of a website won’t disappear. You can look away, look back and they will likely be there. Because of permanence, you can look back to remind yourself of the exact content or take the time to look deeper for more information.
That’s not how voice works around cognitive capacity.
A voice response is fleeting. Not only is it gone immediately after being spoken, if the sentence or sentences are long enough, the exact words used are disappearing in the air and in the user’s mind even before the entire statement is spoken.

That’s because your brain can only focus on and process chunks of words (usually around 3 or 4) at a time. So the brain is often letting go of a chunk. While it’s still capturing the gist of that dropped chunk, it is losing its ability to remember the exact words it heard in that chunk.

This unloading frees up cognitive space to allow the brain to focus on the next chunk of words in the sentence. So as the sentence gets longer, the idea expressed in the voice response is becoming more abstract in the users’ mind as the exact words and the idea they hold are being separated.
That’s cognitive capacity. The total amount of information the brain is capable of retaining at any particular moment.
Cognitive capacity is the secret sauce behind the game of telephone. The game where you whisper a sentence to a friend, who tries to whisper the same sentence to a friend, and so on, and so on…

If you’ve played the game, you know the fun of it is that by the time the last person repeats the message, it’s laughably different than the original message.

How to manage cognitive capacity in voice responses.

Don’t expect users to remember a whole bunch of things.

Remember the telephone example? Keep your response short and focused. Try to communicate information in chunks where the user can remember the idea if not the words.

For example, if your voice assistant is telling the story of different aspects of the weather, it can say:

“The weather for X is sunny. The temperature is 80 degrees. There is a 40% chance of rain. Would you like more?”

Each line completes a thought and can build on the other chunks to complete a picture. And while the user may forget the exact words of the weather response, they retain the bigger concept to satisfy their request (Sunny. Could rain. Hot. I can get more details).

2. Write for speaking not writing.

Speaking and writing seem like they would work the same. They don’t.

Due to factors like permanence of visual communications or audio style and tone that can contextualize and pace voice delivery, phrases we are comfortable with when written can seem odd or jarring when spoken.

3. Use landmarking.

In voice, landmarking gives users, a premise or context in which to use the rest of the information that follows. The best example is having the voice assistant front-load the confirmation or answer to your question.

So instead of “Bob, Ted, Carol, and Alice will attend your meeting.“

“You have meeting confirmations from Bob, Mike, Jane, and Kim.”

Through landmarking, you set up the premise “this is about meeting confirmations” which then lets the mind focus more on the details of whose attending. Rather than hear details with extra mental energy spent by not yet knowing how Bob, Mike, Jane, and Kim are related to each other.

4. Use vocal punctuation to help users chunk concepts.

The pace, pauses, and emphasis in a voice delivery can help the user to hear breaks in content to be able to chunk ideas, things like extra punctuation can give the user extra time to digest a thought.

Even something as small as addressing the user with a comma:

“Brooks,”

That small pause tells me I’m about to get information which allows me to be ready for it. That’s opposed to hearing a voice response sentence start suddenly and having the user spend cognitive capacity being caught off guard and catching up to the spoken response.

The same goes with periods. Each period lets an idea breathe so your user can digest it.

These techniques can help you manage the information load users get when interacting with voice assistants.

Traditional headline writing is dying. A new form of headline writing is transforming marketing, media, and journalism. That’s good and bad.

While data can be used to judge a headline’s effectiveness via analytics, the crafting and the choices required to make a powerful headline still requires human intuition. An intuition that both empathizes with and caters to the emotional biases that we have as human beings. Biases that override logical best practices in accessing content like headlines.

You’ve heard the saying, “Don’t judge a book by its cover. Well, for most of us, that’s not true. We do judge a book by its cover-all the time. Especially the title. Or with non books, the headline.

So much, the crafting of a headline is absolutely critical to the needs of today’s marketing executive, content publisher, and content reader. Whether it is because we are extremely pressed for time or are lazy information consumers, we have become a nation of headline readers. In fact, for many of us, all we read are headlines. Case in point.
A test case about content headlines that should shock you.
A satirical news site the Science Post published a block of “lorem ipsum” text underneath this headline:

“Study: 70% of Facebook users only read the headline of science stories before commenting.”

The prank ended up imitating life as nearly 46,000 people shared the post. And unless they were self-aware on the irony, they didn’t bother to read the post and its gibberish content within it before sharing.

This phenomenon seems to be born out in a study by computer scientists at Columbia University and the French National Institute. They found that 59% of links shared on social media have never actually been clicked. Those users simply shared the links based on the headlines without ever reading them.
Why do we just read headlines?
In a world where we have so much content to sift through, many of us have come to believe (or hope) the headline summarizes the story.

But it goes further. More not only lean on the headline to summarize the story but to be the final word about the whole story. The headline is used to provide the least bit of reading effort for the most comprehension benefit.

For others, it is a faster way to visually tab and skim across different content offers to make a choice to determine what to read. I’m guilty of going through my RSS feed or Flipboard on my phone just reading headlines to get a feel of the news.
For many businesses, your headline is more important than your content.
In fact, whether you stay employed as a commercial writer for some publications and marketing firms, especially online ones, is your ability to write headlines that engage and drive conversation. If they don’t click. You don’t have a job.

As more publications now live on clicks for revenue, catchy story headlines that create a viral buzz rule. For today’s writer, that means the 75 characters that make up your headline, could define whether your story blows up across the internet or you lose your job.

The skew towards headlines that convert have companies demanding writers create irresistible headlines – even over truthful ones.

This industry change is almost synonymous with a name. Neetzan Zimmerman. Neetzan worked for the now-defunct Gawker writing viral headlines for stories he found on the web. Creating content cat nip headlines like:

Husband Leaves Wife Because Her 550 Cats Kept Stealing His Food
Crappy Teacher Tells Kindergartner Who Pooped Her Pants To Sit On It
How Did a Scarf-Wearing Pig End Up on a Highway Outside Pittsburgh?
Dead And Buried Hamster Emerges From Grave Alive And Well And Hungry For Brains
A Friendly Reminder: Don’t Put Your Explosive Portable Meth Lab Down Your Pants

He was so good at it, he was known for generating more page views than the rest of the Gawker staff combined. That skill in writing addicting headlines often came at the expense of truth.

While some would consider that bad. Zimmerman didn’t care. From the interviews he’s given, it feels like it’s a cynical view he’s come to embrace. That he honestly believes news and journalism has become a viral attention machine to survive. The loss of truth in the process is the end justifying the means.
Nowadays it’s not important if a story’s real, the only thing that really matters is whether people click on it,” and “If a person is not sharing a news story, it is, at its core, not news.” – Neetzan Zimmerman
Whether he’s coming from a cynical place or moral failings the phenomenon of news only equal clicks is real. From Buzzfeed to Raw Sory to Forbes to Huffington Post to The Blaze to to…(you get the picture), the role of headlines is the most important part of today’s content development.
Headlines matter. Ten tips for writing them.
This is why it is important to remember that the headline you write matters. So when writing one…

Know your audience.

Put together a headline that speaks to your audience needs or wants. No one reads what doesn’t interest them.

Tell them why this story matters. Quick!

We live a a world of content skimmers. As they skim, they are looking for a reason NOT to stop and look at your content. You’ve got less than 3 seconds tops before they’ve made a decision to engage your content or not. Get to the point through your headline or they’ll move on.

Tell THE story. Not A story.

The story is the one that best frames your users’ interest or gives the best set up for understanding the rest of the content. Make sure THE story aligns with their interests.

Poke an emotion to help them prioritize the urgency of the information.

If you know your audience enough and what buttons you can push to help them contextualize the value of your content, push them. Just avoid manipulating their biases and emotions unfairly. This can turn into mister Zimmerman’s click bait.

Be brief and punchy.

Something is sharp and penetrating when you deliver more of its mass to a smaller, succinct area. Headlines work the same way.

Be controversial.

There’s a reason people stare at car crashes. People become curious onlookers around drama or the unknown. Bring out the inherent drama in your headlines.

Ask a question.

It tends to focus readers on the idea behind the headline as well as build curiosity on the issue.

Use lists.

“10 Ways to Create a Whole New You. “For some reason, people love to know how many things you’re about to tell them.

Think SEO.

Nobody will read your content if they can’t find it. Think about key words in your headline.

For clicks. Work hard on your title.

Titles are more important than body content. Sigh. In fact, it’s not unusual for editors to demand 20 or more different headlines options for an article.
The right headline equals engagement.
It’s your headline that will penetrate the clutter of information your readers are bombarded with and say, “you must read me.” That is why you must learn the art of headline writing.

How do we define an amateur writer versus a professional writer?

When we think of professionals, traditionally, we think of someone who receives payment for their talent output. However for some tasks, like writing, I don’t think that’s completely accurate.

That definition of professionalism is driven by an assumption. A bet that if someone is willing to pay for another’s work product, it must have better value than someone who isn’t paid.

To that notion, I think NCAA players, especially when you think back to a NCAA-league-playing Lebron James or a young Michael Jordan playing for North Carolina refute that. Both basketball players were exceptionally talented in the unpaid stage of their careers. They were likely more talented than most of the people in the NBA being paid millions at the time.
So why weren’t they professionals? Why wasn’t I a professional writer, even though I was paid?
When I was young, I too thought being a professional was just being paid. That money validated worth. I could peck on a keyboard and produce lines of text that looked just like what any copywriter at a big ad agency was doing. But for me, that didn’t make me a professional. I thought that, until people expressed a vote of confidence in my craft by paying me, ONLY THEN would I be a professional copywriter.

After beating on agencies’ doors with a pizza bag of spec work, eventually I got paid to write. I started as a paid intern at Ogilvy and that lead to my first job as a Jr. Copywriter at what is now BBDO. While I had some great ideas and won some creative shootouts early on, I’ll now admit, much of my output wasn’t my best work.

But why? I was getting paid. I had ideas that impressed people that hired me and their clients. I must be good.

In retrospect, I look back at that time with the perspective of Star Trek’s William Shatner who is credited with saying…
”An amateur is likely more talented, but a professional can do it at 8.”
While I could come up with some great ideas back then, it took me FOREVER to write copy. So much, I’m surprised I didn’t reach retirement age and earn a pension after finishing some projects. Things I can do now in minutes then took days. That’s because every part of drafting copy back then was torture. A process of constantly overthinking and struggling…with…every…word…tapped..into…the…screen.

While I understood the fundamentals of writing and had some great ideas, I was afraid of the words I strung together. I conservatively hedged my bets in the use of language instead of boldly producing strong content.

As a novice (even as a paid one) you simply don’t have the experience and practice to understand what to focus on when you write. As a result, you don’t make the bold choices and decisions that truly professional writers make consistently and unconsciously.

Back then, it also didn’t help that this anxiety would tee up moments that shook my confidence. Often after spending a day struggling on a project, I’d carry this barely alive, flat-lining idea into my boss’ office for review. Instead of giving it last rites, I’d watch them make the idea amazing with a couple of copy tweaks.
As Shatner said, my boss could do it at 8.
Why? He (and some she’s) were armed with experience. That magic I saw was true professionalism. And that’s why, at this time in their careers, they were billing for their time at hundreds an hour while I was only billing around 60 an hour.
A true professional earns their title by experience.
Raw talent can produce amazing things. However, getting amazing from raw talent is still a crapshoot. Experience, discipline and the ability to know what to focus on turns that volatile talent into trusted, consistent professionalism.

Though I’m paid as a writer and content strategist (and now one who can do it at 8), most people don’t know my background is in illustration. In fact I took public and private art, design and illustration lessons from early childhood through college. I have the technical skills of a designer, but not tested in the working world. While I understand design fundamentals, it certainly doesn’t mean I can be a professional, much less efficient designer.

In fact, when I do work on some design projects, I’m learning the same lesson I did with writing. It takes much longer. That’s because I’m learning and guessing more than executing the design with clarity, focus, a vision, and experience. The muscles aren’t disciplined to be precise. My mind can’t focus on what’s important to bring out in the design. I’m seeing things for the first time, rather than being able to build off of the last time. So, for me, design is once again, torturous, uneven, and overthought.
There’s a reason professions are called practices.
The true skill and offering of a professional comes from the process of transforming strong knowledge into experienced skill.

To be able to do that means they’ve had practice. A doctor may have read and passed a written test on how to do a heart surgery, but it’s very different to do one without the experience of not having done one before.

That’s why some internships and residencies allow physicians the time, often years, to take their knowledge and talent and sharpen it until it’s delivered efficiently. The practice of doing it again, and again, and again, possibly for years is the price you pay to be a true professional.

Writing is an ongoing practice. While you may have talent, most of us still need time to turn that talent into a professional level of value. I did. Especially if you do get to the point you bill 100s and hour like I have.
The Plumber Story.
It’s like the story of a man who calls a plumber to his house to handle a problem with his pipes.

Once he arrives, the plumber checks around, pulls out his pipe wrench, and bangs an area of pipe a few times. Problem solved. And in just 10 minutes. The plumber then presents a bill for $200.

The homeowner objects to the high bill. “$200 for banging on a pipe? Why on earth do you deserve that!?”

The plumber takes back the bill, details it and hands it back. The bill now reads:
Banging a pipe with a pipe wrench: $2.

Knowing to bang the pipe with the wrench: $99.

Knowing where and how to band the pipe: $99.
A non-plumber or even an amateur plumber would have spent more time to solve the problem. And possibly even more money.

As a professional plumber, he could do it at 8. Or in this case 10 minutes. A professional writer, like the plumber banging on the pipe, is not about being paid to just write words. They’re being paid so much because they have the experience to know which ones to choose.

Clickbait. What to know if you are writing or reading it. But first…

News Flash! Your Mother’s Dead!

Ha, ha! No, she isn’t. Made you look though. Now, let me tell you about ficus trees….
Did that feel cheap, unfair and manipulative? Welcome to the world of clickbait.
Clickbait is a powerful content device because it heavily skews the content headline towards emotional button pushing or taps into an emotional bias that we have.

The best or worst part? It works. Even on people who intellectually know better.
How do you define clickbait?

Clickbait can be deployed in all types of content. News stories, blog posts, interviews, infographics, videos. It can be identified by having at least two of the following traits…

An irresistible, shocking, or highly compelling headline
The premise or angle is easily skimmed
Uses memorable images or video
The appeal is driven strongly to a specific emotion
Appears engineered to encourage viral sharing of content over communicating the depth of content

Clickbait is not only addictive to readers.
It’s addictive to content providers who desperately want you to click on and read their content (but at least click on). That’s because, in today’s content world, clicks are cash. So clicks more than content perspective is the end goal.

Clickbait, while usually emotionally manipulative doesn’t specifically lie to you. It’s more like teasing and toying with you for a while to get you riled up. A bit like when an older brother or sister might dangle a ball that you want over your head, just out of reach.

The clickbait headline is that tease. It does it by not quite putting the final clarifying content in reach and letting emotions fill in the gap. An emotional energy that drives your willingness to engage content.

Some clickbait headlines feel incredibly dishonest. Take this one I recently captured in my Flipboard news feed from Forbes…
“The Yield Curve Has Inverted And You Should Sell Your Stocks”

If you take the headline as a reason for your action, you’ll be disappointed as if you read the body copy, you quickly see the gag…

“That is a simple, declarative statement, and yet one I have not read anywhere this morning.“

While the body content may let the cat out of the bag in a clickbait story, by admitting the true story and readjusting the story perspective…
Statistics repeatedly show most readers, will still view, evaluate and understand the story based on the headline.
So if you are the average reader, you’re likely on the phone with you stockbroker in a panic sell instead of reading the whole article.

In fact, a study found that 59% of links shared on social media have never actually been clicked. Those users shared the links based on the headlines without ever reading them.
Where clickbait gets dangerous.
It can..

Drive a break up with the reader in their relationship with the content provider because it made the user feel had or deceived.
Become the boy that cried wolf. The user becomes desensitized by over-the-top claims.
Train and encourage lazy readers. Either by getting them to just read the headline and they think they have the whole story. Or skimming the body copy and cherry-picking the content that is in line with the over the top headline and their own internal narrative.

Clickbait. Clicks at a cost.
If you are writing sales copy. Something that is driving users and customers into a product sales funnel where they can clearly see they are getting product information, clickbait tactics are probably not that harmful.

Same goes with over-the-top-video or an emotionally compelling image like a cute kitten as most users will understand that you are sharing an emotional experience.

However, if the use of clickbait is more about the information that would be applied to a larger understanding of life and issues. That’s where clickbait is likely to do harm to your reader.

Yes, we the reader are responsible for reading the whole article, but most won’t. They walk away with your headline, feeling they got the key facts from it.

While you may succeed with a succession on one-off clickbait lines. Each one pulling in new “suckers.” However, what you are also exaggerating are events and distorted context which can endanger trust if you are trying to build a relationship with hour views.

Like clickbait itself. It’s tempting. Think carefully.

Have a smartphone? Then you likely know what a push notification is.

Unfortunately, what’s even more likely is that you are exhausted by them as you get one on your phone almost every few minutes.

In case you don’t know, a push notification is an interruptive message that is pushed (sent immediately without a direct ask) by the system to your phone lock screen or during an activity of an unlocked phone so that its app owner can inform or remind you about an event or a status.
Notifications are written with the following three goals.
Those goals are some combination to inform, build relationships or drive engagement.

For example.

TO BUILD RELATIONSHIPS

The mobile LinkedIn app on your phone might send you a notification letting you know: “Bob Smith wants to connect with you.”

TO INFORM

Have an investing or stock trading app on your phone? It might tell you that: “Markets are getting slammed. The DOW is down 600 points.”

TO ENGAGE

Or take Facebook. Who might remind you that: “You haven’t posted to Facebook in a while. Let your friends know how you’re doing.”

Notifications can be helpful.
Then why are most of us annoyed by push notifIcations?
Because like the essential definition of annoying, it’s when the attention you are requesting via your notification is not worth the value you are providing.

Remember, through a push notification, you are trying to stop a user in the middle of their busy life. A life already filled with lots of distractions to visually poke them and say, “hey, look at this?”

If you tap somebody on the shoulder to interrupt them, get their attention, and then tell them something relevant, they’ll understand and forgive you for the interruption.

However, if you keep tapping them and asking about trivial matters, you’ll quickly annoy them.

Often with the best intention, those creating and managing notifications and notification content are tempted to write and push all types of content through the channel. Many times making them mini press releases than helpful notices.
If a user’s push notification channel are flooded with non-valued content, users eventually learn to ignore them.
To stimulate a desired response and avoid user notification fatigue, nudges must continually be viewed by the USER (not your company) as offering value, not just information.

In order to “tickle” the user’s desire to act, the context around any notfication subject should directly communicate or infer:

“What’s in this for me?”

“Why should I care?”
What makes notification content valuable.

Proper Time Context. The user’s behavior, location, or preference triggers the notification. When a notification is given in the proper time context or agreed-upon trigger (notify me when my balance is low) you’re likely in alignment with the user’s expectation and need.
Appeal to Self interest. The content of the push appeals to the user as an individual. The user should be able to quickly understand the value in the opportunity your notification is offering (Pop 30% off sale on our online store within the next hour).
Offers Value Release.When applicable, notification should also give users an opportunity to seize upon that value presented via a tap on the lock screen notification to satisfying content or action.

Notification topics should generally fall into one of the following categories:

Events

Stimulate awareness or remind users about the value of an upcoming opportunity within a webinar or meeting.

E.g., “How will the new tax impact your goals? Join our tax webcast.”

2. Accolades

Deliver value by delivering praise or recognition for a milestone. Stimulate user pride in their association with the event.

E.g., “Let there be balloons! Happy Birthday, Jane!”

E.g., “Congrats on your team’s account win! A special message is waiting for you.”

3. Challenges

Reminder of status as a stimulus to expend additional effort. Effort driven by the value of winning or personal accomplishment. Challenges can also be used for gamification to drive engagement around an feature.

E.g., “You’ve tackled 5 of our 6 fitness goals. Let’s help you keep it going!”

4. Tutorial/Engagement

Opportunity for users to build value or work skills to improve work success.

E.g., “Ready to save a lot of time? Take a little watching our video tutorials.”

6. Event/Time Triggered

Status notification that an event (that the user cares about) has started.

E.g., The Apple Keynote event is starting now”

7. Heads’ Up

A time-driven nudge. The value of the opportunity is dominantly driven by urgency and FOMO.

E.g., “Two days left for 401k contributions. See if your account is maxed out.”

4. Feedback

Give opportunities for users motivated to express their ideas, feelings and feedback.

E.g., We want to hear from you, too. Help us with this quick, one-question survey.

When writing push notifications, remember to give them value. Not just interrupt them with random information.

Writing tips to help ensure your push notifications are better at helping and driving engagement than annoying your users.

Why has the need to produce branded content become absolutely critical with the rise of voice assistants?

To be honest, it’s more of a “oh Sh&t!” moment. Especially if you’re a product owner with products you want to keep selling in an increasingly e-commerce environment.
Quick breakdown on voice’s threat to brand.
Having a brand is about having a distinct identity. It’s the feelings, perceived performance, value, and imagery around a name that people become so attached to that they demand and choose products related to that name over all others in the product category.

Brand identity makes you say, “I don’t just want one. I want that one!”
When you have no brand. Your customers have no preference.
If a person doesn’t have a brand in their head for a product, they probably don’t have a preference around that product. Which means while they may ask for your product category, they won’t ask for YOUR brand.

And if they are that detached from your brand, pretty soon, in the age of search, the voice assistants that your customers will increasingly rely on will get to decide what brand is right for them. Not you.
No problem. You make a voice assistant, right?
What? You don’t make or own a heavily used voice assistant like Alexa or Siri? Looks like you’ve got a problem.
The rising danger of voice assistants for companies.
Almost 50% in the US use voice assistants now. And according to Juniper Research, the world will use over 8 billion voice assistants by 2023, just over three years from now. And it won’t be just the popular voice assistants that readily come to mind like Siri, Google Assistant, and Alexa (throw Samsung’s Bixby in as well, why not?).

In addition, it will come in a variety of once-voiceless products that will include voice agents, including your TV, your car, your video game box, toys, and more.

All of these will become points of contact where consumers like you and I will make product and purchasing decisions.

To your TV: “Hey TV Voice Assistant, I want to watch or buy a movie.”

To your car: “Hey Dashboard Voice Assistant, take me to a place for pizza.”

To your computer or smartphone: “Hey Voice Assistant, where can I join a gym?”

To your video game: “Hey Console, I want to spend credits to upgrade my armor and order food.”

Without the consumer specifically asking for brand, speaking into a product-owned voice agent or one that has a relationship with preferred vendors (Hmmm, your Sony TV seems to show you Sony-produced movies first), your product’s future may depend on your ability to train consumers to demand your product specifically, not just want the category.
Bring your brand’s A-game to voice assistants.
That means, it you don’t control or dominate the search channels your consumers are using, you are going to have to create content, branding experiences and spend the marketing dollars required to build value and loyalty that trains consumers to demand your product when they engage voice assistants.
Branding can survive voice assistants by stimulating sales channels.
It’s actually old school.

As most of us didn’t go through Pharmacy school, how do we know all those pharmaceutical drug names out there? Names even for drugs to solve problems we’ve never personally needed? It’s because after formulating a specific patented product that pharma companies spent millions and years developing, the companies didn’t just want patients to ask for just any solution to their medical issue, they wanted potential patients to pressure the decision point (their doctor) to skip cheap, reasonable, equally effective and give the patient their specific branded pharmaceutical solution. How? Because TV commercials told patients…Ask your doctor if our branded pharmaceutical solution is right for you.
Educate and train your customer NOW on the value of your brand.
If you don’t want a voice assistant cutting you out of the picture later.

In George Orwell’s book 1984, Oceania is a dystopian totalitarian society. The actions of its citizens are tightly watched and controlled.

In this world, even thought is regulated. One of the ways the government does so is by implementing a controlled language that heavily restricts choices in grammar and vocabulary. The result was the official language of Oceania called newspeak.

For instance, if you wanted to say that you really liked something, you might say, “I really enjoyed X” or “Wow! X was amazing and phenomenal.”

In Oceania, you could only say it was “Good.” Or, if you really liked it, “Double Plus Good.” Between normal speech and newspeak, you can feel the regression to a more infantile, near-grunt-level of communication.

In the book 1984, newspeak was designed to eliminate independent traits and sense of self that could threaten the totalitarian regime and eventually lead citizens to revolt.

Newspeak’s function was to:
Eliminate personal identity.
With everyone is limited to using the same vocabulary via newspeak, it’s harder to carve out a different identity.

The way we use words is like a fingerprint. Our particular use and choices identify us. In the real world, there’s a reason kids and groups create and use their own slang terms and unique vocabulary (like bae, fleek, lit) to define themselves as a group and to signal they’re different and unique from others.
Eliminate self-expression.
If the words you use are more narrow or the same words, you can’t express yourself differently than others. If so, then you are robbed of the tools to be different. And when you are limited to small words like in newspeak, like cups that are too small, they’re unable to hold all the personal feelings, passion and emphasis that you want to fill them with (“Double plus good” vs. “Freakin’ Incredible!”). So those excess feelings that uniquely express you never get captured in a tangible form to reach the ear or eye of another person.
Restrain free will.
Words help people understand you, but they also help manage the thoughts in our brains. Like blood cells carry oxygen to feed the body, words hold meaning to enhance the dialogue for the voice inside our head.

The more limited the words in your head, the more restricted your own thinking becomes. The result: locking yourself in a cage of thought to only be able to think in the official or regulated way.
What does newspeak have to do with Emojis and memes?
While both were not created by totalitarian orders to squash expression or control society, both are narrowing the range of human expression. I love memes. Emojis? Meh (personal opinion).

We like them because they are a quick way to grab and communicate a general idea or emotion. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that if we let them become a consistent lazy habit, they limit our ability of expression to “what’s on the store shelf of expression.”

Instead of clearly expressing, “that’s me.” By simply copying emojis, memes and newspeak, we instead agree to limitations by saying, “Me too.” “Yea, what they said.”

Yes, the smiley face that you post in your text message says you’re happy. But in reality it’s what the Unicode Consortium (the organization that approves and publishes emojis) has visually defined as happiness. Not you.

By posting it, all you are saying is that symbol is in the ballpark of how you feel. Not exactly how you feel.

A meme, (a humorous image, video, piece of text, etc.) that is copied and spread rapidly by Internet users) works along the same concept.

While the Dat Boi meme,

100% somehow captures just how I feel on a daily basis. I strongly doubt anyone else finds that most memes completely capture what they want to express. Instead they’re “in the ballpark.”

So like Oceania’s newspeak approved “Double plus good” is in the ball park of “Wow, that’s amazing!” The meme of Kat Williams’ look with his neck cocked back is the the ballpark way of expressing of your feeling that your friend’s idea is nuts.
Want to understand the limiting power of newspeak, memes and emoji? A lesson from Fisher Price.

This might pre-date some readers. In the 70s to the 90s there was a toy called the Farmer See N’ Say by Mattel. I had one. It was a wheel with different farm animals on it. You’d point an arrow towards the barn animal of your choice, pull a string and you’d hear a voice say…

The cow says. “Moooooo.”

“This is a duck…quack, quack, quack”

The Dog says, “Woof!”

Well, what if the dog wants to say, “Whimper” or the Cow somehow says “WTF?” The 12 choices of barnyards sounds won’t allow you to express yourself beyond what’s available. And you’re not going to communicate to people with only 12 well-known but limited messages.

That’s newspeak. And unfortunately that some of what memes and emojis are about. Nothing wrong with using them to make communicating simple. Just be sure it’s not making YOU simple.

Leftovers are a natural part of content creation.
Like a movie remake, most content ideas that you create usually have more value than a one-time release.
Fast and Furious, Fast and Furious 2, Fast and Furious 3, 4, 5, Shaw and Hobbes…
That’s because while you may have presented a strong, clear, and succinct topic within your content (the latest Hellboy movie excluded), it’s natural for people, especially fans of the idea or topic, to seek and consume multiple permutations of that content.

How many version of Batman have you seen (The Michael Keaton version? The Christian Bale version? The Ben Affleck version)? How many times has the origin story of Spiderman been retold in movies?

How far can we consume rehashed content, two words, Sharknado 6 (a.k.a The Last Sharknado: It’s About Time).
Content repetition extreme. Why do we keep watching rehashed content?
Because we’re absolutely okay with multiple ways of telling the same story. We want breadth and depth in the things we like. So if that’s the case, as a content creator, you shouldn’t ignore extracting all the value you can from your existing content by talking about that content or topic in different ways.

As you create content with different angles on the same topic, you help readers and fans around the content envision the topic from a different perspective and feel like they are getting a richer or fuller insight.
How do you recycle content?
Sometimes re-purposing content is simply an act of taking a known topic and restructuring it in a way where a particular reader who is interested in the general topic now feels the topic is even more relevant to them. That’s usually accomplished by adding an additional element to the story.

For example. The article you wrote on “Tips to save for retirement,“ might become “Saving for retirement at 50.” Same base content: tips for retirement. But for a 50-something who might want to know how retirement strategies can be applied to their age and unique saving timeline, that new story feels a little more relevant.

Voila! You’ve re-served content.
Motley Fool does it. Boy, do they.
Speaking of financial content. The Motley Fool. It’s an organization that has fused investment and advisory services with content around promoting their services. It is essentially content marketing. A lot of its content is tailored and written to pull in investing minded or retirement-worried consumers into its content universe and expose them to financial products and its own financial advisory services. To produce a steady stream of content magnets, their organization seems to relentlessly write many different versions of content around the same financial topic.

And it works.

I can’t tell you how many times I have read one of their articles on investing which turned out to be the same content served back to me in what felt like 200 different ways.

“Are you too late in saving for retirement?”

“What people miss that ruins your retirement? “

“How much should you have saved for retirement by now?”

These types of headlines with the same base body content: Start saving now, save as much as you can, take advantage of catchup savings programs and employer match.

It’s like Taco Bell. Five ingredients make up all the food you can order from the fast-food joint.
Another way to recycle. Go back and look at your edits.
When I write, I can’t tell you how many times, I feel like I leave good ideas around the topic I’m writing about on the “cutting room floor” due to space constraints in the current content or the additional idea has too many loose ends to keep what I’m writing focused and flowing easily.

Pick up the “scraps” from your writing cutting room floor. Those ideas you edited out may not be right for that particular content piece, but certainly good for another one. Use it to build a new story or create content that provides a deeper look through that new perspective.
Look at matching existing content with new scenarios.
There was the movie Shaft. Then, at some point came Shaft in Africa. Don’t know why we would expect somebody to ask themselves “Hey, what would it be like if Shaft “threw down his thing” in Africa?” Not sure if scientists were asking that question, but Shaft fans might. And that’s who that new version of Shaft content is for, people who want to see a permutation of a premise.

Think the same way about your existing content. Add a scenario that allows your readers to see and explore a topic in a different light.

The effort to tailor your existing content may make you feel it’s warmed-over leftovers, but to readers eager to know more about your topic, it can still taste pretty good.

Got content-hungry audiences? How to use existing content to make new content readers will love.

When I worked for an advertising agency more than a decade ago, my colleagues and I went to see the movie Roger Dodger.

A movie starring actor Campbell Scott and this kid that played his nephew, Nick. Nick was trying to understand how to meet girls. Nick was played by some actor named Jessie Eisenberg.

Wonder whatever happened to that guy.

Anyway, Scott played an almost diabolically smart copywriter for an ad agency who gets an unannounced visit from his nephew Nick. While at his office, Nick asks Roger what his job is as a copywriter.

Roger, instead of something like, “I write words to communicate products to people,” says, “ I make people feel bad.”
That sets off the following conversation about copywriting:
Roger Swanson: You can’t sell a product without first making people feel bad.

Nick: Why not?

Roger Swanson: Because it’s a substitution game. You have to remind them that they’re missing something from their lives. Everyone’s missing something, right?
Nick: I guess.

Roger Swanson: Trust me. And when they’re feeling sufficiently incomplete, you convince them your product is the only thing that can fill the void. So instead of taking steps to deal with their lives, instead of working to root out the real reason for their misery, they go out and buy a stupid-looking pair of cargo pants.
Turn the dial back just a tad from the cynicism and the strategy that seemed to be laid out by Satan, he’s right.

Rodger just stripped off the corporate-speak and sheen of copywriting marketing speak that’s usually applied to smooth out the rough edges of the job.
That is the key to the job of a copywriter or content writer.
Not to tell, but to connect and clearly communicate the true transactional value within the communication. To let consumers know how they will connect to that “void” of sadness, fear or that feeling that something is missing in their lives. Then you introduce your product as the easier path to filling that void.

That’s what part of a copywriter or content strategist’s skill set needs to be. A bit of a pop psychiatrist or having the empathy to feel other people’s needs, then massage them to take action. That skill helps guide a writer to find just the right words to express that empathy and complete the connection between the consumer and the product’s ability to address it.

I was slow to read Scott Galloway’s book, “The Four” about the power of Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Google over our lives.

Wish I’d read it sooner.

A great book with insights that should put you on notice. Both as a marketer and as a citizen. If you are in digital marketing, you should definitely come away fearing for your job.

Galloway, founder and a brand consultant for a firm called L2 and a professor at the NYU Stern School of Business argues that, in the future, Amazon, Facebook and Google will essentially become complete digital marketing firms unto themselves and at the expense of all others. Dominating the point that anyone at a digital marketing firm, that is not one of these firms, will find themselves destroyed as these platforms come to control the means and process for digital marketing.

He’s right. I currently work in voice and I can see the end as voice rises in adoption and the search and commerce services it supports.

Voice is amazingly helpful to users, but it quietly destroys the power of brand loyalty and heavily restrains a buyers’ choice.

Particularly, by destroying the thought space where products competing for consumer purchase live. Choosing from products on a shelf or web pages is replaced by…
“I found X (my company’s private label product) and maybe Y (so I don’t look completely diabolical). Now pick.”
This is true especially if your voice service comes through one of the platforms like Amazon Facebook, Google, and Apple.

Loved the book. Then on my flight to Miami, I watched a lecture he gave at Berkeley. A good summation of his book. During the lecture, one quote caught me,
“Advertising is increasingly becoming a tax on the poor.”
As those with more means can buy experiences that skip them.

He’s right. Blessed with means, like my peers, I can buy Spotify, Hulu, Netflix without ads. I get to pay directly for content. In the evolving model, ads become the tax or attention payment for those who can’t or refuse to pay for content.

I can’t help to think that over time, that will dictate the type of ads used on the ad-supported version. My guess is luxury brands like Mercedes, Apple will skip these versions while marketing with product at a lower budget or demographic niche will.

Any CEO of an ad agency or digital marketing firm wouldn’t be spilling any dark secret by revealing that the agency-client relationship is already under extreme stress with all the changes in technology and media.

A lot of that deterioration was due to ad agencies and marketing firms sitting idle or moving flat-footed as their clients adopted marketing and business models that rely less on agencies as a valued strategic partner and more as a simple contractor or vendor.

An unraveling to the point where agencies are hired to do the things that we (as companies) don’t know how to do or simply don’t want to deal with.
FAANGS led and empowered the agency-client breakup.
The first wave of this new breed of agency resistant clients were the tech-oriented FAANGs (Facebook Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google) and their brethren. In addition to delighting users with convenient, and often, addicting services, these businesses have a killer and increasingly unassailable marketing advantage: they have vast amounts of data and insights on their customers. Leverage they can exploit for marketing, sales operations, and customer experience.

This data gives them rich, deep strategic insights into their customers. A level of insight far greater than many of the agencies and consultancies that knock on their door seeking to work with them. These are the same agencies and consultancies that once used to come to client meetings with data and research in hand to help guide client marketing programs and the organization. A once important role as clients truly needed it.

As the data amassed within businesses grows and is refined, that consultative space and need for strategic collaboration between client and marketing agencies will grow further and further apart. A deterioration of added value via data and insights that will push marketing agencies to simply providing design or creative tailored to the client’s internally generated data or executing media purchases against creative.
Why hasn’t agency-client deterioration happened en masse yet?
While FAANG companies get it and are doing it, most other companies are only slowly coming to fully realize the power of their own internally generated data.

Nor do these other companies yet understand just how much of an advantage data really gives to the FAANG companies in their marketing and operations. For instance, Amazon can see what products consumers are really buying on their platform and then make their own competing brand.

And worse, like that example, many companies can’t yet see how this trend will threaten their own business if they fail to really exploit their own data.
Amazon’s data drives its marketing.
Let’s go back to Amazon. The company owned by Jeff Bezos knows what you like to buy. Not just from your history of purchases, but from finding predictive patterns in the billions of other purchases of other Amazon customers.

With all that data, Amazon can analyze your buying habits. It knows if you’re price sensitive. If you’re brand conscious. Through its voice-assistant Alexa, a device that you’ve likely shared to-do lists with, song preferences, content interests, and have made purchases through, it knows even more about you – and how to target you.

In fact, Amazon’s data on user buying habits is so valuable, some vendors have tried (some have been successful) to bribe Amazon employees for access to that data in order to use it for their own company’s advantage.

Or let’s look at Facebook. The data customers share with Facebook (“likes” and keywords from shared posts) enables the social networking company to allow advertisers to micro-target consumers.

Use Spotify? It shares music with you. At the same time, it collects data and analyzes your music choices. Data that allows it to tell what kind of mood you’re in or link music choices to demographics to identify optimal times for a sales pitch and to serve ads.

While the FAANG companies are way ahead, eventually clients and organizations are soon going to figure out what companies like McKinsey have been saying for a while:
that their data is the most valuable resource they have to market and connect to consumers.
What key element makes that data valuable for your organization?
The same as the FAANGs, your content.

As customers are interacting with your content, your company or organization is converting your content interaction (especially if it’s finable, engaging and relevant) into data.
Want better data? Treat content as an asset.
Content is one of the most valuable tools you have in building better data and better sales with users and customers.

A McKinsey report Measuring the Full Impact of Digital Capital argues that digital capabilities like content should be viewed as assets, not expenses. Increasingly, your content and your digital environment are where both customer insights and customer contact happens.

An excerpt from the report:
“The need for growth and competitiveness will force companies to build strong digital capabilities. Viewing them as assets rather than additional areas of spending requires a new set of management and financial lenses. Embracing them is a major shift—but one worth making for companies striving to master a still-evolving landscape.“
As an organization, you must create and use the right content to tell customers about topics they want to know about. With the right analytical tools around the content, to measure engagement, behaviors, and interest, you get to know about them as well.
As clients embrace data, agencies are simultaneously surrendering value to clients by commoditizing content.
Creating content that helps you build data is the key. Yet for many clients, I’m finding their agencies have shifted attention and resources to focus on the still-profitable web site development. A focus on areas like design and UX.

Very important in the build-development phase of a website or redesign. But in many cases, many are merely building places for content instead of strategic structuring of content for optimizing engagement and generating insight data collection that will transform content into better assets for their clients.

That is because many are gladly relinquishing being the lead or outsourcing flat content creation or leaving clients to reclaiming more and more responsibility for creating content.

I’m reminded of a quote from, content strategist and founder of Brain Traffic In her blog post The Discipline of Content Strategy, Kristina Halvorson…
“I was mad that digital agencies always left it to the client to “do the content,” when the client clearly didn’t have the skills or capacity to manage it.“
And to be honest, many clients don’t right now. I’ve worked with clients who are horrible at creating engaging content. Usually, by creating great walls of content no one wants to read. Then, pouring it in a web page on the site somewhere that takes a treasure map to find it.

Most clients aren’t good at content. But nothing creates change like a necessity. Like a toddler who keeps falling down when they are trying to walk. If they have to, eventually they’ll get good at standing up, and one day learn how to run.
For an agency, that will prove to be a tragic mistake in the client-agency relationship.
Why? You’re relinquishing the one area that clients are still least able to manage and develop.

A pivot to bet on a part of the business (web design, data, personalizations and analytics) that, very profitable now, but in the future, the client will inevitably become automated to the point where clients will have the tools like data and turnkey data services and website development that they can to do a majority themselves or with in-house design resources.

I see this happening now in a company I used to work for. Most of their promotions on LinkedIn spout capabilities around data and personalization that is power by mass-marketed software solutions like Adobe or another name brand partner. They are merely positioning themselves for the income to integrate them. I always look at them and think to myself, how easy would it be for me as a company to buy the software and have internal resources manage it?

Probably the only thing that keeps them (clients) from doing do is lack of knowledge in house and not wanting the hassle. But like the toddler trying to walk, in time, they’ll get more confident and better at it.
This use of data will change the consultative role with agencies.
“Walking” is not so far in the future. Clients will soon be able to turn to themselves and see that have the data, insights, and with Adobe and other software companies, many of these functions are increasingly being automated and many will be nearly over-the-shelf product or updatable subscriptions.

When they become mass adopted, agencies will be looking through the client’s window to see software they don’t own on the other side with their clients. At them moment, they’ll ask, “what value do we bring?”

They might say to themselves, “Hey, we could help you develop content….oh yeah, they do that now.”

The Cannes Lions Festival wrapped up late week. The ad industry that still attends it to bump elbows with Hollywood was finished long before that. I’ll admit I’m partly jealous of those that go, but even when I was in advertising, I’ve never understood just why the ad community attends.

Hollywood is art, quietly run by business people. Advertising is a business whose sole desire around art and entertainment is all about nothing more than driving commerce.

The entertainment and creativity that Cannes recognizes in advertising are merely a means to an end. It’s like jingle writers attending the Grammy’s. It makes me come to believe that advertising has never really understood what it was.
What is advertising?
At the heart of advertising is a business that seeks to recycle and regurgitate the zeitgeist of society. To capture its current moods, fears, desires for happiness and fulfillment. Then it tries to connect those impulses to accessible and consumer-focused products that society can buy to achieve that happiness.

In order to recycle the public’s mindset in order to feed it back to itself, my old industry was hardcoded not to be visionary or an early adopter of change and opportunity. Instead, we focused on being the peddler of the comfortable. In words, media and imagery, we assured consumers with things they already know, want and are comfortable with.

In time, feeding our clients’ audience a media diet of feel-good platitudes and nostalgia instead of new ideas and technology also made our industry complacent and lazy. As an industry, we failed to think ahead into the future and ask ourselves, “how can we be more? How can we be better? How can we truly give our clients the unexpected?”

Instead, we became a collection of laggards who didn’t want to ruin a good thing. After all, clients paid agencies considerable sums of money to just tell consumers “today is great! Especially if you buy Product X.”

It’s a simplistic attitude that would eventually cost the industry respect, reputation, and leadership.
Don’t get me wrong. Advertising agencies aren’t dead. Yet.
It’s more like they’re ready for retirement and nursing homes. It’s hard not to look at them as if they represent a time gone by. They are still companies that make TV ads, collateral, etc. To talk about them and the services they still provide is like hearing the stereotypical senior citizen talk about the “good old days.”
“Back in my day, we used to spend weeks to print words on a piece a paper and mail them to everybody to get our client noticed. And we liked it!”
That’s a nostalgic success story increasingly told to a generation that can post a picture of their new outfit to billions of people across the world in seconds and have them racing to a website to buy it long before they brush their teeth in the morning.
Agencies used to be gatekeepers and publishers of content.
Now everyone is. Agencies on the once-famous street of Madison Avenue in New York City were known for creating ideas that got people talking in the office (back then, at the water cooler) the next day. Now a YouTube post of the person in Kansas photographing themselves cry overseeing a duck can do that.

If you are a business that wants to reach any modern audience with tactics beyond brand awareness or speak beyond an audience that clings to old media, the traditional advertising agency is no longer the place to go. In the past, it would be the first. Especially as the “wizards of Madison Avenue” touted creative and strategic talent who’s only rival was another ad agency.

Why has advertising lost its place as the consulting lead for helping clients navigate all the technological and marketing changes that are transforming the business of their clients?
Only until too late did ad agencies want to fight for a place at the table.
Then really it was too late. Agencies found that others like the big 4 consulting firms, data and analytic firms and even clients with in-house resources, had taken all the seats around the table.
To champion transformation, you have to embrace change.

For at least a decade and a half, that’s something the advertising industry refused to do. It dragged its feet with almost contempt for the transformation until it was too late.

Like a Shakespearean play, this tragedy can be broken down in acts.
Act One: The Mad Men days.
When traditional media, was the key to mass influence is the period when the advertising wizards of Madison Avenue were king.

TV, radio, and print existed as a content sluce to send messages down and reach the public. Through programs with high audiences and loyal media consumers, your product message would certainly reach the public. That’s why companies who wanted to sell more product did it. Problem was, so were all their competitors.

With so much ad clutter, how would your product or brand stand out?
This is where the consultative power of ad agencies played a role.
Companies needed the creative geniuses at ad agencies to make messages and ads that would stand out among others. Ideas that would capture attention, seduce, and influence.

From the 50s to the late 90s, the “Don Drapers” of advertising were sought and worshipped for creating advertising differentiators for products and brands. By the same token, creative reputation became a key differentiator among ad agencies to potential clients.

It became a symbol of the creative firepower a client could wield on behalf of their product to carve out a niche in the marketplace.

While the creative sold clients on agencies, agencies were really sold on the 15% margin kickback-rebate it made on media buys for clients to place their ads.
$150,000 in revenue just for placing a million-dollars in ads is a formula that makes for some handsome agency salaries.
Because of that, it and not good creative truly defined the ad agency model. For larger, non-boutique firms, billings, and fees around creative were either enough to just cover creative department costs or be a loss leader to win more lucrative media buys.

This didn’t change in the 90s and 00s as the once large universe of agencies merged to consolidate into 5-6 holding companies. While agencies within those conglomerates may be differentiated by creative brands, lucrative media purchases are still at the core of the revenue model. The addiction to this source of revenue would be the platform for the industries undoing.
Act Two: Advertising at peak performance? Or on a cliff?
.

In the mid-90s, the Internet, once the private joy of nerds who could afford an expensive computer and modem, became mainstream.

Along with it, new types of businesses arose to leverage it. With dot.com firms flush with money from investors to spend on awareness advertising, agencies prostrated themselves before them to take their money and promote them.

While advocates for these Internet companies, most were never really true believers, except for the belief that these companies were spending a lot of money in stunts and media buys. This vendor-centric, media-buy-for wild-kegger-party mindset that agencies helped enable began to erode the traditional agencies’ role as prudent and forward-thinking partners and consultants.

But in the meantime, life was good.

As the money flowed, many agencies failed to grasp the idea of the Internet as a new and transformative medium. Especially for themselves. Besides giving employees email and sending print files for a print run or to a magazine, no one stopped in forward-looking realization of what the Internet as a platform meant for agencies.

There was no movie-scientist-that-realizes-the-world-is-screwed-and-dramatically-pulls-off-his-glasses saying “if we don’t get a handle on this, our business could be doomed!”
Like global warming today, ad agencies surely saw the signs of the Internet’s disruption power as it started appearing in other industries.
The music industry faced Napster and music that could be shared digitally and pirated without paying. Email started sapping people’s effort to write letters or create direct mail to send through the post office, eventually shrinking USPS’s revenue and creating a fiscal crisis.
The signs were all around. If the advertising industry was listening it would have realized that the Internet wasn’t a product, it was the new medium.
One that could disrupt them. Even destroy them. But hey, that Pets.com ad. Hilarious, right? Paid the director 2 million dollars to make it.
Act Three: Economic and technological changes face advertising.
But just before the advertising industry’s disruption was clearly imminent, another disruption came first. March 2001 came. Stock prices started to go south with the collapse of the dot.com bubble.

Along with it, all those well-banked Internet companies wanting to advertise. The sudden dry up of money hit agencies hard. Agencies had to wean themselves off the sugar high of a reckless spending euphoria.

It hurt for a while. But that hit turned out to be just a jab. The bigger blow would happen with the housing bubble burst and the great recession.
As all the money dried up, the bullshit went away, too.
Financially stressed companies simply didn’t have the money to spend without a good reason anymore. Frugal, they demanded efficiency. The wanted measurability. They viciously sought ways to optimize costs. Not only within their organization but with their vendors and partners.
That put the existing agency model in the crosshairs. A model where making money just for placing media buys and pocketing 15% seemed like a no-brainer cost-cut target.
Over the years agencies were pressured to concede some of their lucrative fees in order to keep existing clients or win new ones.

To compound this situation, tech entrepreneurs, some arising from the ashes of the dot.om boom, began to roll out technologies and nascent marketing and sales platforms that were able to offer greater scale, productivity, efficiency and measurability than their advertising and marketing brethren.

There was this book company called Amazon. You might have heard of it. A place where you find and choose books, books that weren’t in your local bookstore and have them shipped to your home.

There was this picture service for college students called Facebook. Where students could share pictures of themselves and rate them. And they were looking to expand this service to everyone.

There were search engines companies that made it easier to research information and find things. Including things you might want to buy at a store.
As we all know. If advertising agencies were Skynet, this would be like finding John Connor as a child.
A potential threat but at this stage, the threat could be eliminated easily. Agencies were flush with money as big holding companies. They were buying other ad firms, but they could have easily purchased the next or future Facebook.

As we know, this did not happen.

Instead, agencies did was most industries did when disruptors entered their ecosystem. Downplay it or ignore it.

At his point, I had already been involved on the tech side, developing web applications. Understanding the power and capabilities of technology, the idea of agencies adopting this mindset and offering these capabilities for clients seem natural, if not critical to ad agencies’ future. I would bring it up to friends at ad agencies.

I remember doing interviews and talking about the possibilities of the new technologies and how they could push the agency forward. And almost without out fail I could see this look on people’s face as if to say “yeah, sure.” or “what’s this got to do with us?”
One of the reasons for the foot-dragging by agencies, and let’s just admit it, people in the ad business were artistic and creative minded. Not technicians.
Mad Men. Not Math Men (pardon this sexism, but it rhymes).

The talent at that time simply didn’t have the ability to see what these growing technologies meant. Either to create their own or buying them early to control them and shape them for the industry.
So for years, the agencies kept their heads down.
Fought harder and worked longer hours for more dwindling traditional media scraps. Got a tech request? Rather than learn it and adopt it as an agency practice or discipline, many simply outsourced it to people who could do it and take a revenue cut.

Despite some executive dabbles, the most part, there no in-agency talent who could really drive agency transformation to match the transformation happening all around them.

And the change just got faster and faster…
Act Four: We’re on the wrong side of change.
As the young platforms transformed into the powerhouse we see today, agencies were blindsided by what was really in plain sight.

What made them blind was that they didn’t see platforms like Google, Facebook and Netflix as competition, they saw them as merely (and frustratingly less profitable ) outlets for their creative and marketing efforts. Just another place to place creative.
What they really didn’t see until it was too late, is that most of these companies were at their heart, data companies.
Building larger and larger data sets and linking more user and customer information. Now, these platforms became companies and places that knew the customer – and better than agencies did. A depth of knowledge that turns the platform into the marketing consultant, not just a channel to put content into.

And the modern agencies have no control over this platform and technology outside deciding how they want to set up delivery of their creative. Recently we’ve seen a desperate scramble as holding agencies like Publicis buy data and analytics firms like Epsilon for billions in order to pivot to a new form of business.
Better late than never for ad agencies. But so late, the end could be near…
It reminds me of Amazon and shipping.

At first, the behemoth online seller worked with companies like Fed Ex and UPS and USPS. Now it’s working less and less with them as it’s taking on more and more product shipping. It’s pivoting from the big shippers and using lots of contractors who are the “last mile” to drop off product from Amazon’s distribution center to the customer home.

Amazon does everything else, except that last mile. And someday it may decide it wants to do that last mile as well. So soon other companies will be shut out as Amazon becomes its own shipping company delivering to customers on its own controlled platform.

Because agencies missed their opportunity to be the platform, they are, if not already, the last mile carrier to a platform they don’t control. And one day, they, too, could be replaced.
Very soon Amazon could easily say to an ad agencies clients…
“we have the data on the customer you want to reach from finding patterns in our sales data. Using our proprietary information we can develop the precise marketing and creative that will help you market and sell your product to our worldwide audience.

So what do you need that ad agency for? Hopefully agencies will find an answer to that question.

Yep. I copied and pasted an excerpt from the blog post Ten Years Later: The Discipline of Content Strategy by Kristina Halvorson (with links and attribution of course).

Honestly, reading her reflection of what she learned about content strategy and the feelings she expressed as she wrote the article, frankly, I couldn’t have said it better.

Her writing ten years ago reflects the frustration that so many content strategists feel. Frustrations they feel even now, when working with organizations (including agencies) that don’t always understand the value of managing content or providing content as a service. I’ve mentioned it before (see Why firms hedge on offering content strategy).

So I’m letting her say it here and strongly encourage you to go to her full post at Brain Traffic. Here’s the excerpt:

“What’s important, ultimately, is helping people understand that content decisions never happen in a vacuum.

A shared definition of content strategy is important because it helps lay the foundation for ongoing collaboration, which means better content and happier customers. And that’s worth a hug. Bring it in.

But what I definitely had going for me at the time was that I was really mad. I was mad about constantly getting called about website projects—projects that were almost done and nearly out of budget—and being asked to “just write the content.” I was mad that digital agencies always left it to the client to “do the content,” when the client clearly didn’t have the skills or capacity to manage it. I was mad that designers and IAs kept making beautiful boxes with placeholder copy, expecting that someone would magically make the “real” content work.

And most of all, I was mad that no one was listening to the people who had been yelling and pleading and bargaining about the importance of content since websites became a thing.”
Content strategy. Ten years later.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.

You want to create content that your users like. But you are not a content strategist nor do you know or understand all the details and tools of content strategy?. Here’s a quick-start guide:
Follow the three Cs: Content + Context + Contact.
One: Content.
People will seek out and engage with people and organizations who can offer content (e.g. information) that interests them. In order for you to engage with your prospective customers, readers, or users, you must create content that people can’t resist.

To create irresistible content, you must develop a sense of what content topics excite and please your readers.
How to create magnetic content.
Creating magnetic content is all about getting to know your audience to the point where you can empathize with their concerns as well as know and articulate what satisfies them in your content.

That’s a lot easier to do if you are developing content around a topic that you are constantly, deeply and passionately immersed in.

For instance, say you like Star Trek. I’m talking about a level of like where you’ve seen all the episodes and know them by their official episode number. A passion where it’s also not unusual to find you constantly talking to other Star Trek fans or even going to Star Trek conventions to share thoughts about the show with even more people.

If that’s you, it’s a good bet that you know Treker details that more inexperienced fans do not (like why my use of “Treker” just made thousands of Star Trek fans cry). It’s also a good bet that you know how others feel about all the issues around Star Trek. Is Captain Kirk better than Captain Picard?

Why do most of the villains (from other planets) quote English writers?
Klingon General Chang: “Tickle us, do we not laugh? Prick us, do we not bleed? Wrong us, shall we not revenge?” – The Merchant of Venice Act 3 Scene 1 Page 1.
Does Earth have the market cornered on witty lines?

Anyway. When you understand the informational needs and passions of an audience, build and deliver content that resonates with them. And because you are immersed, your audience will likely sense from the quality of your content that you have credibility and insight and will be more likely to trust and engage your content.
Two: Context.
Make your content relevant to users by understanding the context in which they are seeking information or will be mentally open to taking in new information.

For example, if I just bought a car, content about how to buy a new car likely won’t resonate with me. While I’m actively excited about the topic of a new car, my focus might be in the context of having bought one or wanting information on how to take care of a new car. So any content around the topic of cars is not enough. Only content that is contextual to my needs or state of mind will engage.

Marketers know this. When creating content for potential customers, they tend to segment their audience into groups based on what content context will best engage with them. The names around the content context are called stages and they exist in a bigger system called a content or sales funnel.
Content or Contextual Funnels
The funnel maps the reader or customer content journey between the time they first become aware of a topic or product to having enough information to decide to take an action around it.

The stages of that funnel lay out how a reader or potential customer content needs change as they progress through the funnel.

Awareness

Content that makes a person aware of a particular issue, topic, solution or product.

Research

Information that helps a user understand more about that product or issue.

Consideration

Specific information that helps the reader address any concerns or barriers they might have to take a future action around that issue or product.

Action

Information on how to take the desired action.
How does this system help you create content context?
For example, if you know your reader is in the process of considering a product for purchase, you would develop content for them in the context of where they are the funnel or journey. In this case, give them the pros and cons of one version of the product over a competitor’s. Now you have given users a greater context in which to understand or feel that they can confidently go forward with a decision.
Three: Contact.
Your content won’t make its point if it never reaches your audience.

Find ways of distributing or presenting content where your audience is likely to encounter it.

In short, be where they’re going to read it.

In the world of content marketing, that might mean helping users find content through improving your SEO (being found in search engines like Google or Bing). If your audience is more video oriented, building and posting your content on YouTube or a podcast could prove effective. Or ask to guest blog on sites that cover topics you feel that you could offer additional insight and values.

If you use the three Cs: Content, Context, Contact, you’ll find yourself developing content that attracts and pleases your audience.

There is grammatically perfect English. And there is good advertising copy. And there is good UX copy.

One of these three things is not like the others.
Spoiler alert: it’s grammatically perfect English.
In both ad copy and UX copy, grammar rules are broken all the time in the name of increasing the speed in which users are able to absorb an idea. It’s also done to produce voice and tone to match current conversational or cultural norms.
Shouldn’t grammatically perfect English create better messages?
Besides avoiding angry emails from grammarians, not really.

Most of the time, a more curt version of the language is important to the world of commerce in terms of creating communications that engage users and customers. After all, would Nike’s “Just do it” feel as impactful as, “You should simply do it.”

While a grammarian might feel the urge to say, “You should simply do it, ”the copywriter, like packing a snowball into a harder, icier projectile, feels the urge to compress the phrase and make it more impactful. As the saying goes, “brevity is the soul of wit.” That tighter, punchier copy also gives the idea it conveys a more motivating and inspiring tone.

People who can write amazing prose can be horrible at this commercialized and curt form of communication. Remember, Ernest Hemingway was a failed copywriter.
Ad copy, especially consumer, is usually conversational.
It helps create a tone and style of engagement as if to say, “I’m talking like you talk, so I’m more like you. And because I’m more like you, can trust my message.” This opposed to formal language structure that, inadvertently, feels stiff and, to many, foreign.
The bigger rift between formal English and commercially structured content is due to changing content consumption habits.
Let’s put it this way. Think of words a fruit.
Users just want the meaning inside them (the juice). They think to themselves, “Give me just what I need to be satisfied.”

They want the juice and grammatically correct and formal English keeps giving them the whole fruit (rind and all), not just the juice. With that mindset, everything else about the fruit is a hassle because it’s not the juice. You have to work around the stem, the peel, the skin and remove any seeds.

More words, especially if they seem extraneous, come off as annoying and time wasting. That’s what a complete proper sentence feels like in the world of ad copy and UX copy.

This is especially true in the yeah-yeah-yeah generation. To this generation, good grammar feels like oversharing. Especially for those content consumers with increasingly short attention spans.

As digital content tends to force users to scan and skim information. Content, that doesn’t quickly communicate meaning, can get passed over. Content needs quick hooks and idea structure that is skimmable.
So, sorry grammarians. Or to coin a phrase, “pardon my English.”
However, even though ad copywriter and UX writers might not write perfect sentences, like the grammarian, you do need to be vigilant about spelling. There’s a difference between breaking the rules and proving that you don’t know them.

Writing as punishment? While you might have heard the phrase, “throw the book at him!” in a police show, what seems to be worse punishment is if they ask you to write words from that book.

That’s what I had to do. Hand write a page from the big, thick dictionary if I forgot to bring my gym clothes to the gym class.

Writing as punishment is not uncommon. It’s essentially a meme.

Most of us have seen the opening of the Simpsons where Bart writes, “I will not (Bart’s violation of the week goes here) over and over on the chalkboard as punishment.

If you ever wondered why people hate writing, ironically, where you go to learn it (school) might be to blame.

When school leaders make you write as punishment, it sub-communicates that words are not something you should love and welcome. Instead, they are meant to be vessels and instruments of pain. Something you endure. As human beings, we don’t like things that cause pain. We also dislike things that we associate with punishment.

What if schools continue to teach that lesson about words? Like being abused, how do you expect children to behave when they grow up? And if you hate to write words. You also are less likely to want to read them.

And people wonder why people have to read and write.

What’s content sprawl?
Ever have a really messy dorm room, house, or bedroom? You know, the kind that looks like a piled-up, hilly garbage dump?

Unless you’re perfect, the answer is, “yes.” Also, unless you’re weird, no one ever says to themselves, “I’m going to really work to make this room really messy.” Yet it happens, little by little, with amazing ease. Most of us want a clean room, but with busy lives and lots of things to do, it’s tempting to cut corners on staying organized.

For instance, you’re getting dressed for an event. You COULD, hang up all the all the other outfits you tried on but didn’t choose. But it’s a lot easier to just leave them on the bed and worry about them later. The next day you leave store bags all over the room, ‘cause that’s easy, too. The next day, it’s towels on the floor. The next: shoes you don’t put away. It’s the same on the next day, and the next, and the next, until…

Okay, you made a mess. “So what? It’s my room you might say.”

It is fine. That is until you need to find something. Like your keys.

Suddenly your room, piled with junk is your enemy to being happy and satisfied (finding your keys). The clutter you’ve casually created has exponentially increased all the places where your keys could be lost. What’s more, the overwhelming options are likely to increase your frustration and time trying to find them.

We’ve all done it. Large organizations do it too. When they do it to their websites it’s called content sprawl.
Content sprawl is usually borne from lack of content governance.
What is governance? Content governance deals with the process and workflow around managing content to ensure it’s optimized for efficiency and effectiveness.
What does content governance help to resolve?
1. No coordination in the editorial approval of content.

Failure to provide an editorial focus around your content allows a wide and unpredictable swath of language and writing styles to be expressed by all the different content creators. Without an editorial focus, those styles may not sync with each other, much less be able to coalesce to create a singularity in achieving the organization’s desired brand or user experience goals.

2. No coordination of the publishing approval of content.

In this situation, anything can get published at any time by almost anyone. When large organizations with departments or groups that don’t coordinate, each often ends up creating content and publishing work that may contradict, overlap or duplicate the content of the other departments. This duplication vastly contributes to the bloat of site content.

3. No coordination over the review and removal of content.

The other factor that contributes to content bloat is when there is no standardized process for reviewing published content. Content, like produce, can get old, unappealing, and feels like it should be thrown out. When it doesn’t, you end up with a site with a lot of expired content nobody wants.

With no process or no one assigned to check if content is still timely or relevant to their users, bad and/or useless content adds up making your site more and more useless to users.
Avoid content sprawl by having processes in place.
Just like keeping your room clean, keeping content sprawl in check requires a plan or standard for how things are stored and the discipline to enforce it.

Do it. You and users will benefit.

A lot of movies are being remade, A lot shouldn’t.

Which should and shouldn’t? As they say in the movie business, “We have some notes.”

Hollywood is under pressure to deliver content that packs people in theater seats and keep their eyeballs stuck to TV screens.

As they are either running out of ideas or feel the risk of creating new stories with unknown characters is box-office death, a clear decision has been made to appeal to audiences’ nostalgia.

Hollywood is pumping out content featuring characters and stories the public already has relationships with. In their effort to recycle, TV and movie remakes are running wild.

Just to name a few:

Hanna, Akira, Aladdin, Alien Nation, Men in Black, Dumbo, Lion King, A Star is Born, The Crow and Dirty Dancing. Here’s the bigger list.
Remakes in themselves aren’t bad.
Like a song, a good remake or cover can bring new life to a song. I love They Might Be Giants’ cover of Istanbul (Not Constantinople).” A 1953 novelty song originally performed by The Four Lads. Weezer’s’ recent version of Toto’s Africa pulls an 80s song from campy oblivion into the minds of a new generation of music listeners.

Marvel and DC comics have brought back the superheroes I loved from my youth into the present with different looks and backstories. Some have come into the present with incredible success.

Iron Man was a B-level character when I grew up. Star-Lord was a C-level. Now they are commonly known and loved characters thanks to remakes and stepping on screen.
Remakes can be good. But some make you ask, “what’ was the point?”
A remake always walks in the shadow of an idea that’s a legend or at least sets a high bar. To that point, I can’t tell what actually drives green lighting remakes in, but I offer a few suggestions.
When to green light a remake.
1. Dated movie elements that can’t be ignored.

Sometimes it’s hard to get past the language of the time or movie props. The movie Wall Street does that for me. To see Gordon Gecko pull out a cell phone that looks like a bloated banana just takes me out of the moment and makes me think, “I paid 50-times less for a better phone. And he’s a billionaire” Guess I’m living better than he is.” Greed may be good. But that walkie-talkie cell phones and eighties-style suits aren’t.

2. The property or story is bigger than the last movie team’s mess up

Batman & Robin with George Clooney and Arnold Schwarzenegger comes to mind. That horrible version almost left the franchise for dead. But the equity around Batman is strong. So strong, people will endure the pain of bad movie makers and bad sequels to get it right.

The story is stronger than the actors, directors, and writers. That’s usually the case with movie standards. It’s why movies like Scrooge, Robin Hood, and The Three Musketeers get remade every decade or so.

3. “We can rebuild him.” The six-million-dollar man remake.

This is an offshoot of the previous criteria. A movie crashed terribly or was born lame. Yet from the box-office wreckage, you can rebuild something even better from the heart of it.

Battlestar Galactica comes to mind. The 1970s version was more of a cheesy spectacle than brilliant. Then the 2005 mini-series version came along. Wow. Not only did that version change Battlestar Galactica, but it also changed the face of TV drama as it showed a new level of drama could come to the small screen.

4. Your property needs a cultural transplant.

Bond. James Bond. To watch 007 remakes evolve is to watch the definition of male masculinity evolve from toxic masculinity to today’s more complex and modern man. Let’s start with Sean Connery that, super smooth, infallible guy. Dressed in a dinner jacket and surrounded by women presented as disposable pleasures. He was also involved in scenes that would be considered sexual assault today. The style of masculinity doesn’t hold up in the present.

Enter Daniel Craig and Casino Royale. While he, at first, didn’t look the part, his remake character captured the new culture shift on what society’s new leading man was. A fallible and tortured man powered by an indomitable will more than a breezy, smug-driven smoothness. A vision today’s man aspires to as a more realistic role model.
When not to do a remake.
1. Don’t mess with perfection.

The 1998 remake of the Alfred Hitchcock thriller Psycho comes to mind, Did a nearly frame-by-frame remake of this classic movie need to be remade? Unless it was to earn three Golden Raspberry nominations in the categories of Worst Remake. No.

2. The when culture has a “me-too” movement.

Blazing Saddles. Mandingo. Soul Man.

“What are movies that would never get made today for $1000, Alex?”

3. Remake by body transplants.

This is the act of throwing a bankable Hollywood star into every nostalgic franchise as an additional box-office insurance policy. Previous violators include Will Farrell (Land of the Lost, Sherlock Holmes). Today, the current and biggest violator: The Rock. As in…

The Rock + Baywatch.

The Rock + The Towering Inferno ( I mean Skyscraper)

The Rock + Jumanji

You get the picture. This bigger picture is that the property being brought back isn’t really strong enough on its own to warrant a remake.

Remakes aren’t going away. Let’s just hope Hollywood can make them better.

When writing for voice assistants, you must keep in mind that you are delivering a simultaneous mix of content, interactive rules, story-flow feedback, brand experience, and voice-driven design. A mix designed to support human engagement through a conversational UI model. But to help you better understand writing for voice assistants, first things first…
What’s a conversational UI for voice assistants?
A conversational user interface (Conversational UI) is a digital experience around your product or service that creates the feeling of having a back-and-forth conversation between your device and a real human being.

It’s a simulated interaction. Your device’s or service’s responses are triggered by a machine’s understanding of parsed phrases it hears and analyzes from the user. That, coupled with the machine’s ability to extract keywords and set rules and relationships around those keywords, a voice device can calculate the probability of a specific user’s intent or request.
All that translated into English: it understands what the user is asking for.
Once the intent is established, how your device delivers a vocal response (along with its ability to satisfy the request), is what helps humans feel as if they are having an organic and productive conversation. That’s the “conversational” part of “conversational UI.”
Now let’s talk about the “UI” part for voice assistants.
The UI (user interface) refers to the medium(s) employed to manage that back-and-forth engagement. For a web site or most standard mobile experiences, it’s a graphic interface. That includes things like the images you see and the buttons you click on.
With voice assistants, a conversational UI can come a couple of ways.
One way is as a hybrid conversational interface (CI). This is where voice is used in coordination with a graphic user interface (think how Siri or Google Assistant simultaneously present voice and visual displays in their response on your smartphone. The smartphone voice may say, “Here’s today’s weather,” while the screen pulls up an image of the weather forecast.
A conversational UI can also be voice only.
Think Alexa in the Amazon Echo. In this voice assistant product, there is no graphic display. All interaction with the user is through voice.

In voice-only devices and services, you are writing for an audio-based UI. The voice and messaging you write also serves as the medium by which humans understand how to engage with your platform.

That means the voice that you write for in a voice assistant is doing what the graphic interface would be doing. So..

No button taps. Instead, you write to create spoken words that, like buttons, request action. “Play” “Open” “Stop.

No visual-based status. Instead, you create words that give vocal confirmations. “Playing song.” “Unable to find that information.”

You are delivering content. That can be a song. An answer about the weather. Or in a hybrid CI, you are framing the graphic content being presented so the user can better understand what information to consume.
Your writing for voice assistants is also about brand.
Like any other UI, as a writer, you are also a participant in the delivery of an experience. As any experience creates or reinforces a brand, the words you craft around voice are also part of the brand.
If radio is called theatre of the mind. Voice UI is the digital interface of the mind.
In my work on voice for Comcast and well as a product currently in development, I’ve learned some things to keep in mind when writing and creating content for voice assistants – as well as the people those assistants serve: humans.

1. Be brief and relevant.

You’re not trying to be a buddy. Don’t be overly chatty. Stick to proving your worth by being an assistant that provides value. That means being laser-like and focused on delivering content users want as efficiently and as fast as possible.

2. Write in clear, simple language for voice.

Try to write so your responses are purposeful, confident, responsive, helpful and insightful.

Some examples:

With Purpose: “How can I help you?”

Confidently: “I’ll get those forms for you.”

Helpful: “Your subscription is expiring on May 8. Should I renew it for you?”

Insightful: “I see you’ve got a meeting at 3:00 PM with Bob Smith. Would you like to see Bob Smith’s profile?”

3. Don’t make your assistant a liar.

Don’t be lazy or make overstatements with writing for voice response. Doing so can produce logic holes or statements that can be proven inaccurate or untrue. For example:

VOICE: “I’m sorry, you don’t have any records on X.”

Great! If that’s absolutely true.

But companies make mistakes. A relevant record might be misplaced, mis-tagged or not entered yet. This can lead to existing data that your user wants but your voice assistant doesn’t know about. Yet its response has it speaking in absolutes.

Remember, your written voice is an audio UI. So imagine how a user would feel if a visual UI, gave a bad number. Would you want a speedometer in the car you were driving to be “kinda-sorta” accurate?

Discovering that your voice assistant gives information that’s up for suspicion can ruin user trust for accepting any future information.

Make sure you write responses to ensure what your voice assistant says is indisputably true – or cannot be directly refuted. If there is a possibility of an exception to your voice statement, conditionalize your voice response.

So instead of:

VOICE: “You don’t have any records on X.”

It becomes…

VOICE: “I can’t find any records related to X” or “I’m currently unable to find any records related to X.”

Think of your voice response as a spokesperson for your service or company. As the voice representing the organization, you have to think about the company’s needs while still being an honest broker of information in order to keep user trust in your product.

4. Make sure you don’t overshare.

Reading doesn’t make noise. Unlike text, people can hear information given via a voice response. That includes sensitive data. Stories, where this will be an issue, could include regulated markets like financial or health data. If you are giving such information, via voice assistant, do not use voice to deliver it unless specifically prompted to do (and within your organization’s rules for sharing).

4. Your voice is also brand.

Most of us know Siri’s voice when we hear it. Same with Alexa. Same with the famous but fictional HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Most of us would think of Siri as cheerful and confident. While anyone who has heard the HAL 9000s voice has experienced a slight shiver from its calm, detached creepiness.

Voice is brand. For companies and products using voice to deliver services and content, it will become the audio brand. So consciously write with the style, tone, and demeanor you wish to reflect that brand.

“Yo, what up?” Is very different than, “Good morning. How can I help you?” And those are very different than the memorable, “What do you think you’re doing, Dave?” from the HAL 9000.

5. “Sorry” is not a synonym for “no.”

When you have to tell a user that the sum of a request if zero (e.g. “There are no books by that title.”), don’t reflexively use “sorry” to start the sentence.

Sorry is not about your response being X=0. Sorry should generally be reserved for instances where you want your voice assistant (and by extension, the brand) empathizing with your user’s situation. Particularly for circumstances where you know the user may feel disappointment in the experience they expected. That includes a system error or a platform error.

5. Plan for Easter eggs/small talk.

When the user takes a moment of curiosity to play your device or service, it’s a good opportunity to have brand-reinforcing moments. That includes chat that can deliver lighter moments for company connection. Write a few jokes to be ready if the user asks for one. Or put some witty rejoinders in your voice assistant’s quiver to be ready for a user’s smart-alec questions.
Your voice writing: Be helpful. Be human. Be accurate.
The voice you write will define the experience users have with your digital experience. Align with these voice principles and you’ll get there.

Agencies, customer experience firms, and design firms bill for copywriting. No earth-shattering news there. Content strategy? That’s another story.
Firms “kinda do” content strategy.
It can be found as either a charge for ideation around copywriting or spoken about as vague practice or black box ability within the firm. Content strategy and content optimization are generally not embraced as a pillar of a firm’s services.
The main reason content strategy isn’t embraced.
Content strategy, as a full practice, is not thought of as a profit center that can be justified.
This belief about content strategy is short-sighted.
For firms and their clients, content strategy’s true value doesn’t always show up on the firm’s estimate. It does show up on the client’s bottom line.
Outside hard deliverables like content audit spreadsheets, site maps, and editorial guides, the “strategy” part of content strategy feels too aetherial for firm billing.

Or if they wish to bill for it, some will tuck content strategy services in UX-related activities (like wireframes) so clients are less likely to question the time and fees.
The perception of content strategy between firms and clients is a vicious circle.
It’s a chicken-and-egg value scenario. We just don’t know which came first.

Clients can’t see the value of applying content strategy principles, so they’re reluctant to pay for them. Firms, sensing that clients don’t see value in content strategy services, don’t stand up for them.
Why is content strategy downplayed?
Agency operations and revenue tends to focus on billing for time. The creation of content (fill this page up with content) or microcopy (to tether design and bookmark execution copy) fits that billing framework.

Billing for strategy around creating content is often hard for an agency to quantify, must less justify.
A typical talk to clients about content strategy.
AGENCY: We want a budget around how to plan, structure, and govern your site’s digital content. Just need $100,000.

CLIENT: Why?

AGENCY: Um…hey let’s talk about the site map for now and circle back.

Most firms simply don’t have the understanding, experience, and tools or the qualified content strategy staff the communicate the value of creating optimized content.
The same scenario. With an answer for content strategy.
AGENCY: We want a budget around how to plan, structure, and govern your site’s digital content. Just need $100,000.

CLIENT: Why?

AGENCY: Because optimized development, measuring, and distribution of your company’s content will…
1. Produce the content your customers want.
Content is key to your digital experience. While UX and design may be a great door users walk through, make no mistake, content is why they walk through that door.
Good design and good UX mixed with bad content is like a building a hip restaurant with terrible food.
By providing good SEO, design, and easy navigation around content, a user may come. But without content that delights and feels right, they won’t come back.

To steal from the earlier restaurant metaphor, after people try the food, they’ll tell others about the food. Think Yelp. Imagine the cost a bad experience could have on your business.

Begging the restaurant analogy one more time, the reason the restaurant manager comes to your table nowadays and asks if you’re having a good time is that they are deathly afraid of a bad review on social media that could severely damage business. Bad experiences spread fast, so content-wise, you need to proactively offer good experiences.
2. Optimize customer satisfaction.
To help users find what they are seeking and be satisfied, your business’ content and terminology must be structured and optimized in ways THE USER perceives how content is related.

This approach is often in contrast to a business’ reflexive tendency to structure their digital content along their business lines.

Content planning will help your business execute a content strategy to structure content so users feel that your business understands them. This is in contrast to you hoping that your customers will understand and accept how your business is structured.
3. Avoid costly content sprawl.
It’s not unusual for multiple departments within an organization to keep posting and changing digital content. This often happens without procedures for coordinating, updating, or removing it.

The content then layers, and layers, and layers…

Without a plan or documentation, this eventually creates a huge mess (that’s a technical term). That mess is also known as content sprawl.

I’ve worked with clients who have piled up thousands of pages. In a lot of cases, they either don’t know if those pages are up to date, live, or even exist.

With content sprawl, companies don’t know what content assets they have. Or what aged content users are still seeing.

For users, encountering content sprawl can make them feel frustrated finding content – as if they are looking for a needle in a haystack. Or they may find content so old, it’s downright embarrassing that the business still offers it. Speaking of embarrassment, it can also make your company look like it doesn’t know what it’s doing.

What do you suppose is the financial and brand cost of that?

While I said firms don’t usually find content strategy profitable, this “mess” created through a company’s content sprawl is where content strategy does often become very profitable for agencies and experience firms.

It breaks that chicken-and-egg low-value cycle because content sprawl introduces pain and complexity into clients’ lives. Pain they are usually very willing to pay for to eliminate. Especially during site migrations.
What content strategy upfront can do.
By employing a content strategy system upfront to develop plans to review, remove, and edit content, you will avoid content sprawl – and avoid paying a firm just to clean up the mess.
4. Avoid loss of brand value.
Digital is where more and more users experience your brand. Bad content access and poor content quality will hinder the value of your brand, costing your organization possibly millions.
Let’s add up the value of content strategy.
So is a content strategy budget worth $100,000? Especially if you are willing to pay $500,000 or more for the design?
Think of content strategy like preventative medicine.
Addressing content strategy upfront saves much more money later.
In the US healthcare system, it’s not uncommon for people to avoid focus on the prevention of unhealthy conditions and diseases.

Instead of seeing the doctor regularly or create processes for maintaining a healthy diet plan proactively, we often seek a healthcare professional and pay exorbitantly high costs for service when the issues that we’ve ignored become acute.

Companies often ignore content strategy. And agencies often let them until content either becomes messy, richly billable, delivers disappointing analytics that affects sales, or customer support is flooded with costly calls.

Like health care, content strategy offers the best value is when it is treated like a corrective, proactive service. This way, you avoid the pain of having unsatisfying content.

While I understand that preventive steps are hard to sell (and bill) because the client feels fine. Is it really smart to wait until clients discover they don’t feel fine?

.

People do read copy, but ONLY to the extent that they need to.
Readers’ ever-shortening attention spans leave little room to consume fluff or highly refined details.
We now live in the age of the TLDR (Too Long Didn’t Read) video and explainers.

The Marvel Comics’ TLDR series on YouTube is how I caught up on what I needed to know to watch the movie Avengers: Infinity War last year. A breezy, expedient content option that beat the alternative of sitting through all the hours of movies and back story that converged into the Infinity War story.

It’s just one example of how we are living In an age where people increasingly consume fewer content details and tune out to information faster than ever. Even around topics that generally interest them.
This phenomenon is even more important when writing content for digital flow or voice interactions.
Got a lot of good content and meaningful, deep things to say? For many pressed-for-time readers, it doesn’t matter.

I remember all the work I used to do in preparing to present my work to my boss in advertising. I’d sweat and toil to develop this big, rich opening for my presentation to give my work context and delicious depth. A presentation where I’d make sure the messaging covered every detail, every contingency my boss could possibly want.

Filled with knowledge, meaty slides, and a big, robust preamble, I’d start pitching my idea to my boss, only to be stopped dead in my tracks as I heard him say, “ Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just tell me what’s the big idea.”

Irked, deflated and interrupted from delivering my 12-part symphony of a presentation, I was thinking, “I invested a lot in this. This is worth a lot.”

However, my view was competing with my boss’ thought, “Is this worth my time?” And he didn’t see it yet.

My sessions with my boss now stay with me when writing copy or chat and voice responses with users.
Just because you add more to your content doesn’t mean you add engagement value to the user.
Good digital experiences spoil us with the expectation of speed. That also applies to absorption of content.
Uber: get a car in 4 minutes. Amazon Prime: get products in two days. Venmo: pay bills in seconds.

We’ve been coddled and spoiled by the speed of good services. So unless the user is prepared, providing presentations with large amounts of lengthy information are not treated like finding a huge pot of gold. Instead, to the average reader, it feels like a discouraging hill that looks way too big to climb.

And most won’t.
People will read content they are interested in.
What they are interested in is just getting through a flow or getting the answer they asked for. There’s no time for a grandiose story. They are depending on you to tell them what they need to know in the straightest line possible. That’s it.
The user wants just enough content engagement to take action.
This is particularly important in digital user flows that are guiding a user to complete a task.
Tips for writing content that keeps user attention:

Laser-like writing.

No preambles. No excess words. And while long phrases might be nice in the first interactions like a FTUE (First Time User Experience), for most digital flows, keep it tight and crisp. Each word dense with actionable value. Your frugality will be appreciated, especially if the user needs to constantly return to that part of the flow.

Let readers sip your content.

People scan content for bites of meaning rather than review entire paragraphs and sentences. Once a reader finds an interesting conceptual chunk, they usually stop and delve deeper.

With that in mind, break your content into smaller, digestible parts – with the key meaning clear in just a few words. This way, each “sippable” piece of content contains just enough of a new idea, insight or direction that helps them feel it offers value. And like a nice piece of tasty candy or a delicious sip of a drink, they’ll be encouraged to grab the next one. Then the next…

Providing content shortcuts help.

Particularly with repetitive actions like voice instructions or voice feedback for voice assistants. In these instances, there are tasks with little ambiguity between words and intent.

For instance, for voice assistants, I can say “news brief” Instead of having to say, “Alexa, please start my news brief.” The NLP has enough from this short phrase to parse the keywords and act because it’s pretty clear there’s a match of between words and intent and what skills Alexa offers.

If a user needs to know more think they think they do, quickly tell them why to keep their attention.

The user that is not familiar with a flow also may not know what they need to complete the journey. For example, a recent flow I worked on required biometrical authentication to move forward. If they didn’t pay attention to that and didn’t have biometrical authentication, their journey will dead-end and the user will feel like they wasted their time.
Since they don’t know that they don’t know, use your content to tell them.
Usually, it’s just accomplished by using that extra content to quickly tie why they need that extra information to complete the task they desire.

For instance, in the biometrics example:

“To proceed, “Face ID or Touch ID is required to activate this feature.”

Using a little extra content here is like raising your voice a little to say “hey, this is important.” And if you don’t overdo the use of excess content in other parts of the experience, your out-of-the-ordinary action should catch and keep the user’s attention.

Suddenly understanding that knowledge or action you’re describing is tied to achieving their satisfaction, they’re more likely to continue reading to comply.
The user wants to read as little as possible yet get as much benefit or value as possible.
It makes any writer’s job difficult. Writing and telling users they need to pay attention to information they need to succeed is a little like trying to give your kids critical information as they’re barely listening to you and running out the door to school.

But with kids and readers alike, if you love them, you have to try.

I’ve given speeches and presentations about content strategy. Including one I recently gave internally to the Astro UX team a at the PwC Experience Center in Miami. A standard line to such presentations is my official definition of content strategy…
The act of analyzing, planning, creating, structuring, governing and distributing content in a way that optimizes business goals.
The business goals for content strategy serves both business and customers.
Satisfying customers. Giving customers the information they want, when they want it.

Driving sales. Giving customers the content they need to stimulate action and purchases through content marketing.

Reducing custom service calls. Providing content that allows customers to self-service problems and questions in order to reduce customer support costs.

Delivering good online brand experiences. Delivery of relevant, satisfying content via web, apps, and IOT products is also the delivery of an experience. Experience is the visceral delivery of brand. Good content drives that.

Giving employees better access to information. Findable, relevant, and engaging information on the business side also helps employees get to information that allows them to do their jobs more efficiently and serve customers better.
My old content strategy definition is correct. But…
Recently I was at a party. I met a guest. And congruent to cocktail party protocol, the “what do you do?” portion of the conversation came up like clockwork.

“I’m a content strategist,” I said to the guest. Her response was “Oh. What’s a content strategist do?
Expected question, but, this time, my reaction was unexpected.
As she finished asking her question, I suddenly had a flashback across my career. My work on websites, mobile apps, content marketing programs, and now, AI voice assistant conversations. I thought, to myself, what do all those things have in common? Suddenly, all of it all connected and I told her…
“ I make information useful.” That’s what content strategy is.
What did I mean by that?

Words, a form of information, are great. And information is powerful. But information (words, data, images) in itself is like an inert rock. Only when it is utilized and optimized in a way to match a human-centric task does it find meaning or produce value for humans.

Our once-inert rock can be structured to be a part of a wall. Our rock can be used as part of a sling to become a weapon to achieve a purpose like fight a war. Our rock can be positioned to hold a piece of paper in place against the wind.

Giving that once-inert data (or our metaphorical rock) a who, what, where, why and how to its existence is what imbues it with meaning to a user. Content shouldn’t just exist, it needs to have a purpose for humans.
That’s what content strategy is really all about.
Making information useful. And reviewing and optimizing to help that content retain it’s value to humans. If you just focus on the collecting rocks or just stacking words, which is easy to do, you’re missing the bigger picture.

I like the new definition. Compared to the more formal version it’s like a Fireman saying “I put out fires” instead of “I use water-based extinguishing solutions against actively combustible materials.”

Muuuuuch easier.

Content strategy is about creating and delivering content that satisfies your users.
That means content strategy is all about giving users the precise content they want, when they want it.
While there are different content strategy tools and best practices that are available to help you achieve this, when all is said and done, you will satisfy customers when you have content with these three critical components.
The content strategy sweet spot:
Being Findable. Engaging. Relevant.

Findable content.
Just as you don’t win the contests that you don’t show up to, no one is wowed or sold by content that doesn’t show up when they seek it. In other words, if they can’t find it, they can’t see it.

The best practices of content strategy should help you to research, create and structure content in ways that optimize information so that it becomes discoverable and attractive to your potential readers.
That means making your content findable to two different audiences.
For robots or “bots.”
These are the search engines and their automated content searching programs (spiders or bots) that scour and scan content on the web. You likely know the result of this process as search engine optimization (SEO). These bots collect information in your content about word use, links to other related content, subject matter authority, your URL and other factors in order to judge and rank how valuable your content is to topic-seeking users.

The higher that the bots assess the value of your content, the more likely users will find it through a search engine. If you want to be found, you must work to make your content SEO friendly.
For humans.
You must write content and structure the navigation of your content to please people. That means making it as interesting and as intuitive as possible. It must be cataloged as people think. That’s not always as logic would dictate.

If your content is placed into content containers that don’t seem appropriate (e.g., putting “about us” content in the photos navigation section, you make it harder to find the content they seek.
Relevant.
What every piece of content that you develop has to answer:
Why should I read this?
That’s relevancy. To answer it, have messaging and content that makes it clear why your user should invest their precious time and attention to engage it.
How to make it relevant.
Do your homework. This is where having marketing skills or an intricate understanding of your audience is really important. You must understand how your audience sees things in order to understand and create what matters to them. Think about:

What are their needs?
What kind of content would help satisfy or solve their problem?
How can you talk about a seemingly distant topic in a way that connects with your audience?

Know and express that and you will have relevant content.
Engaging.
Vegetables are clearly good for you. Yet a lot of people don’t like to eat vegetables. Many of us might remember an experience where a good idea that we were so sure would be adopted and take off ended up being ignored and died in a meeting due to a boring, uninspiring presentation.
Good ideas are not always ideas that get read.
The key is to build content in a way that pulls the reader into your world of content. You must create content where users don’t feel as if they are being forced fed to consume it. You must craft your content to make it tempting and exciting in a way that they are pulled in and excited to learn more.
To be engaging ALWAYS ask yourself:

What is in it for the reader? Why would he or she care about this information?
Who are we talking to?
How can we make the content satisfying and not overwhelming?
Are we making our content easy to scan, consume, and understand?
What tone or attitude would help to convey this message?

To write engaging content, remember:

The average web user doesn’t “read” your content.

They skim, scan, and browse selectively. If they don’t quickly recognize useful, relevant content, they will often move on. If they do read, they pick up and collect short chunks of ideas and information that speak to their knowledge goal or task.

Make content “scannable” and “snackable” to help readers catch and retain important ideas.

Reading from a computer screen is 25% slower than reading from paper.

Studies show that people are less likely to read long pieces of text on a webpage than in printed format.

Be mindful of content that taxes the reader’s time.

Reserve longer copy for areas in which it is important for the reader to have a deeper level of information before taking an action. For these same reasons, it’s not optimal to simply post a print-designed document without adapting the content for the web.

When you create findable, relevant and engaging content, you deliver what you readers want most: satisfaction.
CONTENT STRATEGY CONSULTING
Content strategy is defining today’s successful business and leaving those too slow behind. Looking for more ideas and strategies around content marketing and delivering satisfying digital experiences for your brand, website or mobile application contact me for a free consultation.

I tell clients that the irony for people who sell and market technology through content is that technology is the last thing that you are, in fact, selling to your prospective customer.

What you are really selling is a disruption of the relationships and balance of power in their company or system. Sound a little scary? For your customer, it may be. That’s why you need to be conscious of this dynamic when you sell technology. It’s a help to some. A threat to others.

Technology like Microsoft Word software and personal computers eventually replaced secretarial pools. Human resources software like Bamboo HR reduced once larger HR staffs. Remote cloud servers threaten to idle the IT server maintenance staff in your office. Uber and Lyft ride-sharing technology replaced taxicabs and drivers that sometimes just “weren’t in the mood” to pick you up.
Technology means change. People don’t always like change.
An introduction of a new technology must convince customers and their staff to disrupt their current relationships and the power structures within their company that may be involved with adopting the technology. Business to customer and/or employee to employee. It’s the benefit seen from that disruption created and who stands to gain from it that will make or break the sale of your technology.

Technology is personal because its adoption relies on people’s narcissistic value and focus. “What does this product do for me?” “How does it help me?” “How does it protect me or my job?”

What makes this fear of technology by a business or organization different than a technology around a consumer item? It’s that adopting your app-enabled toothbrush doesn’t affect other peoples’ self-interests or the way they brush. The toothbrush’s limited scope of use won’t demand changes to the accounting department or threaten IT jobs.

In other words, technology marketing in the business enterprise space must deal with a distributed version of narcissism: “What in this technology for us? (But I really mean me).”

While your department may push for the technology because your team will be more productive, another group’s self-interest can perceive the same technology as a threat and try to stop or limit the purchase.

It makes sense. A business is just an organization of people. And the one thing the acquisition of technology does is change the relationship between people as it empowers some and can weaken others.

When we develop marketing content to sell technology, we must be subconscious about the audiences, their fears, insecurities and other dynamics.
The audiences your technology pitch must balance:

The visionaries.

CEO and senior leadership who see the technology as helping them realize an operating or corporate vision (make us stronger, fast, agile, profitable, save money).

Priests of the temple.

These are people who have been in power due to the fact they have been in control of the information or a process that others in the organization don’t understand or can’t do themselves.

A technology that empowers former priest worshipers to understand it, or use it without assistance, weakens and threatens the stature of the priests. Their power comes from being the informational spigot for tech or process salvation. If the new technology creates new rivers of information flow and control, they could lose influence and possibly their jobs.

Anyone whose job can be automated through technology.

Often IT makes industry expertise more available or changing the balance of IT power by commoditizing it. Through the internet, an expert radiologist in a hospital in New Jersey can have their work and analytics skills moved to am equally killed radiologist in Mumbai.

Slackers.

There are areas where the lack of technology or poor technology can hide lazy or incompetent work and workers. When a technology comes along that is more efficient and creates transparency around those who formerly worked (or hid their lack of work) in the shadows can be threatened.

New owners or departments seeking to acquire power or influence.

Technology is power. Like any power, people who can acquire and control more of it become powerful. For example, not too long ago, all tech fell under IT. Now increasingly, decisions and control of tech decisions are leaning towards the CMO suite. In turn, that changes the CMO relationship and influence in the organization.

Purchasers and financial relationships.

A company or a department could have a long-standing and comfortable relationship with a vendor. Technology that causes a shift to a new vendor, can threaten an existing financial relationship or those Eagles tickets a vendor always has for you.

Anyone who’s been at an organization that’s re-organized, hired, moved or fired personnel knows that changes, even what seems to be a small one, is a tectonic shift. It can create hurt feelings, new workloads and responsibilities and uncertain futures. It may be better for the firm in the long-run but it still creates a disruption. Technology does the same thing.

So it’s not always about how great your technology is. It’s what does your technology means to the work process, fortunes, balance of power to the company.

As you look at your “pain point” sales sheet focused around logical benefits your technology addresses, don’t forget, often the illogical ones are the ones that lock in the sale.

Or for content marketing, have other materials that can be shared to empowers the promoters of your technology the messaging they need to allay the fears and concerns of other departments and groups.
CONTENT STRATEGY CONSULTING
Content strategy is defining today’s successful business and leaving those too slow behind. Looking for more ideas and strategies around content marketing and delivering satisfying digital experiences for your brand, website or mobile application contact me for a free consultation.

Suggestive selling, also known as upselling, has been with us for ages. It’s how businesses coax you to buy more of their product than you might do normally.

Upselling is all around you. You are likely being pitched an upsell every day. It might be super-sizing those fries at McDonalds, taking advantage of that BOGO (Buy One Get One) shoe sale or walking to a store to buy a simple phone and walking out with the deluxe version.
Suggestive selling. Effective content strategy?
Yes. Suggestive selling is powerful as the messaging component of content strategy as it stimulates increased consumption of a product or service. It does it based on a core premise of leveraging the consumer’s existing decision in making the initial purchase.

At this point, you are no longer wrestling with buying into the category (do I want coffee or soda?), you are now choosing what experiential version of the product or service you would like.

For example, “I’ll take the LARGE coffee with a DOUBLE SHOT” of expresso.” “Large” sizes and adding a “double shot” are upgrades from a small, plain coffee order.

As a marketing writer or salesperson, through suggestive selling, you are leveraging and further commoditizing a customer already predisposed to agree with you.

This has been used by content developers like advertisers and content marketers to increase sales and profits.
How Alka-Seltzer doubled sales with suggestive selling.
Alka-Seltzer. It’s what many of us still look to when we have heartburn, upset stomach or indigestion. When we take it, many of us use two tablets. You know, like the jingle in the Alka-Seltzer ads used to sing to us, “Plop plop, fizz fizz, oh what a relief it is!”
Ever wonder why you take two tablets?
You don’t truly need to take two. But most of us do. Welcome to the power of suggestive sell. Two things the makers did to suggest that you take two tablets.

The packaging design
The jingle. “Plop plop, fizz fizz”

I’ll explain.

The directions on early Alka-Seltzers packages gave directions to only take one tablet. The older commercials also showed the use of just one tablet. Marketers eventually changed the directions on the packages and began showing two Alka-Seltzers dropping into a glass of water in every commercial.

Taking the suggestive sell campaign to another level, ad campaigns started using the “Plop, plop. Fizz fizz” jingle. A song that suggests dropping in two Alka-Seltzers tablets when you want relief. Fast fact: the song was created by the dad of actress Julianna Margulies.

Miles Laboratories, then owner of Alka-Seltzer, created portable foil packs that held two Alka-Seltzers each instead of individual tablets.

Nothing changed about the product’s benefits or effectiveness. However, the surface changes signaled suggestions to consumers to buy more. As a result, sales shot through the roof, nearly doubling as people got in the habit of consuming two tablets instead of one.
Why suggestive sell works. People look to you for guidance.
In a vacuum of clear knowledge and direction, people will look for guidance from wherever they can find it. That’s where the power of suggestion and suggestive sell ultimately comes from.

As people are simply seeking pleasure or resolution, they don’t always want to do the work to understand a product or solve of problem. When we become lazy to do research, we often defer to the most confident idea, accepted social signals or a person who seems to represent expertise. In this case, it was “medical company” Alka-Seltzer implying that two tablets mean stomach relief.
Tips for suggestive selling.
How to get your customers to buy more.
Cost sensitivity for up-sell and choosing a product are not the same.
Do I want coffee or soda? A product category choice like this is more difficult as you are competing with every type of product and brand in the category. Soda. Water. Tea. Sports Drinks, etc.

At this level of choice, you may ask yourself if you want to pay the price of one versus the other, (e.g., the cost of a $1 soda versus a $4 coffee).

Once you’ve made a decision on a category, like a coffee, you tend to focus on lifestyle or pleasure details. At that point, price becomes less about a hard price, but instead gets evaluated in comparison to the experience that you desire around your choice. The more you desire a better experience, the more a higher price is validated.

Do I want my coffee with a double shot expresso?
More milk?
I have an airline seat for coach, do I want first class? More leg room?

Suggestive sell takes advantage of reduced price sensitivity.
An example of this phenomenon is pointed out in the book The Undercover Economist, by Tim Harford. He explains how Starbucks menus on the back wall are designed to detect price sensitivity and suggest sell.

At Starbucks, you can get cheaper and sometimes better coffee, like a short cappuccino, but most price value options aren’t on the menu and you have to specifically ask for them. Starbucks “suggests” there is no more room on the ordering board behind the barista to display such offerings that they carry.

Harford points out this is suggestive sell strategy aimed a quieting or deterring “cheap” customers from asking for certain products and to keeping higher margin, less price sensitive buyers focused on buying higher-priced coffees.
The difficulty is that if some of your products are cheap, you may lose money from customers who would willingly have paid more. So, businesses try to discourage their more lavish customers from trading down by making their cheap products look or sound unattractive, or, in the case of Starbucks, making the cheap product invisible.
Harford also points out this suggestive sell strategy is as old as time itself.
The French economist Emile Dupuit wrote about the early days of the railways, when third-class carriages were built without roofs, even though roofs were cheap: “What the company is trying to do is prevent the passengers who can pay the second-class fare from traveling third class; it hits the poor, not because it wants to hurt them, but to frighten the rich.
The modern equivalent is the airport departure lounge. Airports could create nicer spaces, but that would frustrate the ability of airlines to charge substantial premiums for club-class departure lounges.
Customers don’t know that they don’t know. Fill in the gap.
When a customer feels a vacuum for expertise, they may rely on you and your message for guidance. Train your staff or write messaging that moves beyond just pointing customers in the direction of the product they’re looking for. Point them toward ideas, product levels and consumption that appeal to higher aspirational goals or is the socially validated approach.

To paraphrase Seth Godin, suggest to customers that they need to buy at this higher level because “people like us do things like this.”
Suguest an add-on in line with expressed need or affinity.
Two Alka-Seltzers is in line as is inferred to help bring better relief. Or extra shot of expresso with a coffee is in line with taste experience. Asking the coffee drinker to upgrade by adding a salad bowl, even at a discount, doesn’t make sense with that particular experience.
Use visual cues and copy signals.
Changing the packaging on Alka-Seltzer helped create the idea that two tablets were required. Starbucks being “unable” to list cheaper products on their menus board visually implied those products were not really options. Add visual cues or value-emoting words that help suggest product benefits or features worth an upsell.

You don’t have to do any of this. I’m just suggesting. And as you just read, you know how that works.
CONTENT STRATEGY CONSULTING
Content strategy is defining today’s successful business and leaving those too slow behind. Looking for more ideas and strategies around content marketing and delivering satisfying digital experiences for your brand, website or mobile application contact me for a free consultation.

“It sucks.”
Unless you were presenting a concept for a powerful new vacuum cleaner, that’s probably not what you want to hear after presenting something to a client that you put your heart and soul into.
When a moment like this occurs, one of two urges will attempt to overtake you:

You distance yourself from the idea with the reaction as if the client just pointed out a creepy spider crawling on your shirt. Or “hey, how’d that idea get in here?”

Or get defensive as if the client made a joke about your mother. You start loading up on rapid-fire answers to shoot at the client like you’re preparing to repel hostile fire.

Each reaction comes from the same place: you are emotionally attached to the outcome. That fear of a wrong outcome can turn feedback into becoming overly defensive and reactive. Neither is healthy in making any feedback more productive.
Welcome to the art of feedback Kung Fu.
Did you know there are different types of martial arts? Some are “hard” styles. You may know them as the styles that use the hard hand-swinging Karate chops. It’s style of combat is designed to injure and inflict damage in order to disable or discourage an attacker to back off. In many ways, similar to how our gut instinct wants to respond to client feedback.

“Bam! Now, Stop!” Unfortunately, just like the harder martial arts style, you are in greater danger of destroying things rather than making them better.

In martial arts, there are also “soft” styles. A couple of examples are Kung Fu and Hapkido. These styles work by energy conversion. That is, redirecting their opponent’s energy back at them rather than bluntly stopping it. By engaging them correctly, you use the momentum of their feedback or criticism to deflect or convert comments into more productive actions. This way you get to the same objective and are more productive without hard conflict. So in terms of handling client feedback, think Kung Fu.
How do you use a softer style in working with client feedback?
Step one: Stop. Breathe. React calmly.
Don’t follow your gut and use a “hard” style and be confrontational. Wait for the client to make the first move and let them spend their energy and work towards helping you by giving valuable feedback.
Step Two: Use the client’s “momentum.”
View and speak with your client with the belief that feedback is opportunity and insight waiting to happen. Not failure. Believe that you can use that energy and feedback and convert it toward something positive.
Step three: Get details.
Make the best of the opportunity by asking the client to elaborate and offer specifics to help you, and them, better clarify the issue you are both trying to resolve.
Step Four: The winning move. Show them you REALLY hear them.
If you really listen to their reaction, you’ll know if your idea is truly off base, or what concerns really need to be addressed to satisfy the client. Nothing soothes an angry client more than feeling a breakthrough moment that makes them feel you “get it” and that you understand how to move towards what they want.
Step Five: How to really hear: Don’t listen to the words. Listen to the needs and motivation.
“It sucks”

It’s strong feedback. But not clear or actionable feedback. Since you are, presumably, the subject matter expert in your craft and the client is not, you must also account for the likelihood, the client sometimes can’t put their concerns into actionable words or language your practice commonly uses and acts upon. Hence their use of “it sucks” is really feelings and instinct that’s been put into a vague word container. Your job is to unpack that word container, see what’s inside and put the ideas into new thought containers that you can act on.

It reminds me of the movie Amadeus where the king says to Mozart that he didn’t like the composer’s symphony because it had, “too many notes.”

What’s true about that vague statement is that there something about what was presented that troubles Mozart’s client, the king. What may not be true are the exact words the king is using to define the problem.

“Too many notes” could be be driven by issues like:

The king was bored.
They were overwhelmed and turned off.
He didn’t like it at all, so it was bad from the first note.
Or maybe it was so different than what he expected, the king just needed more time to absorb it.

So there may be richer, substantive feelings and motivations about your work within a client’s shallow comment. How do you draw it out of them?
I use the three whys.
What people say is a problem is not always the real problem. You need to help the client reconnect to the real motivations that’s influencing their reaction.

I use the three whys. The idea that if you ask “why?” about a reaction three times, the third why will likely get you to core reason. And example:

YOUR CLIENT: “I think we should scrap this approach, I really don’t think it’s working”

YOU: “Why don’t you think it’s working?”

YOUR CLIENT: “It feels off base. It’s not projecting our brand.”

YOU: “Why don’t you think it’s not projecting the brand?”

YOUR CLIENT: “I think the tone is not right?

YOU: “What do you feel is a wrong about the tone?

YOUR CLIENT: “My boss took a look and feels we need to be more chest-out about who we are.”

See? Asking “why?” three times revealed a much deeper and more specific issue. Your immediate client doesn’t hate the work, but they are concerned that their boss thinks it should have a stronger tone.

If you had just accepted the client’s statement that the project didn’t work without asking why, you would have missed an opportunity to correct the problem. Instead, by digging to the core of the issue, we found actionable issues and concerns that we can improve and satisfy the client.

Feedback is not always about reflexively making changes. A lot of times, it’s people just kicking the tires on a good idea. By actionizing client feedback properly, we can turn client feedback into success.
CONTENT STRATEGY CONSULTING
Content strategy is defining today’s successful business and leaving those too slow behind. Looking for more ideas and strategies around content marketing and delivering satisfying digital experiences for your brand, website or mobile application contact me for a free consultation.

How intertwined are content strategy and design? Or to ask the question another way…
Should content strategy be a subset of design or a separate and independent collaborator with a design team?
I’ve worked at places where content strategy operates within a design group, as a separate but collaborative silo and a collaborator that resides within a larger UX team.
As far as content strategy working within a design group. No.
Content strategy and design should be separate, or at least independent for each other by direct authority. This, even though both are responsible for crafting and presenting front-end content experiences.
Why should content strategy and design stay separate?
While a content strategist and a designer’s work must seamlessly meld on the same space on a web page or product device user interface, they are unquestionably “brothers (or sisters) from different mothers.”

A 23andMe-like test will confirm that a full-service content strategist (the one responsible for planning, creating, structuring, reviewing, measuring and distributing content) has digital DNA that is distinct. A closer look will reveal the strategist’s extra data examination and content management chromosomes. Essentially their skills around information management. A mix that makes them different in mission from a designer or non-UX staffed design group.
Content strategy. Design’s brother from another mother.
Because of those extra chromosomes, content strategy and design end up related in purpose and overall goals, but not in function, back-end processes or responsibilities. How to describe and distinguish design and content strategy by definition:
Design is information delivery of visual, action patterns and tactile engagement. While information, the process leans toward more focus on how information is presented and human patterns for making the association between elements.
Content strategy is about information delivery and presentation but comes from the perspective of information management. The who, what, why and how and when of what to present.
Where content strategy and design meet.
They meet at content design.

Content design the collaboration between design and content strategy as to how the content chosen will be presented at the visual and surface consumption level.

The results of content design will create the point of visual contact where users encounter and interact with visual and text content. Think of it as a theatre stage where the audience will see visual props. They also see actors and the words created by writers.
Content design is the on-stage performance.
Like the actors and writers who have done a lot of work preparing before showing their work on the stage, a lot of the work and preparation that content strategists and designers present happens off stage as well.

As you go “backstage” past the content strategist’s content design contributions like microcopy, or placing or editing copy on a page that are involved in content design, the work of designers and content quickly diverge.

Think of it this way. Let’s say we want a nice faucet that delivers water.

Design’s focus will likely be about the look, patterns and action of the faucet design, usability of the faucet, where the water will come out. And as long as the presentation and functionality create a useful and satisfying moment to the user, the job of content design is done. But, in the bigger scheme of things, content design is not the only job required.
Content design is the overlapping point.
In this same faucet analogy, both design and content are concerned about how should the water come out and how much water is required for good presentation and functionality of the faucet.
Where content strategy and design diverge.
Before they meet at the intersection of content design on the faucet, content strategy is asking how much water? What type of water? Where is the water coming from? Is there enough water to meet demand? Do users really want water? Is the current water supply adequate? Where does the user want the water to come from? What temperature is pleasing to users?

Like the needs of this faucet, without assignment to other UX professionals, areas like information architecture and research around a digital project will fall to the responsibly of a content strategist for solving those pre-design portions of the content structuring and delivery experience.
If they don’t diverge, you don’t have a content strategist.
Or you have one with a very limited role (likely writing). A content strategist can work with or under a design group. However, such an arrangement is only possible if all parties are really aware of their jobs and each’s ultimate responsibilities in the customer experience process. And in a world where people, even experience teams, are still figuring out what a content strategist does, that’s not likely.

With quite a few teams, I’ve found a content strategist is often viewed more like a copywriter (the word wrangler or “voice and tone” person). This, at best, keeps the content strategist role and function at just content design or, in most cases, fill-up-this-section copywriting.
One caveat to content strategy and design working together.
Product design teams (teams charged with developing a physical or digital product) are often more conscious of a content strategist’s larger role and multiple functions. That is because content, research, development and structure is usually seen by the project team and business owners as important to achieving business goals around the product. That’s been my experiences at places like LiftDNA, Comcast and PwC as well as my own company.

That often includes ensuring customers are successful in using the product and reducing customer service support costs. Both of those outcomes make it vital for users to get to the information they need to be self-sufficient and satisfied. I suspect, as more and more companies start investing and creating more digital products that are more directly related to the bottom line, this perspective will increase.
Why the “copywriter” content strategist role is a problem.
In reality, a full-service content strategist for web development is like being a front-end developer (content design) and back-end developer (IA, content modeling, metadata) around content. Meanwhile, designers and front-end developers are more and more becoming one and the same.

In working with some design teams, some still have a blind spot for a content strategist’s work around the back-end aspects and forward flowing effects around structuring and delivering previously unstructured content – which, at the back end- phase is really information management.
This looks amazing. Love that pattern. Hope the copy fits.
A content strategy needs to plan and make decisions as to the what, where, why and how and when of structuring content across the digital platform.

When you think of it as just words, it’s tempting for design to focus on content strategy development just enough to sketch a direction design, rather how to manage and design the information experience to effectively provide the full information delivery a user demands.

That mismatch of engagement between design and content strategy can often mean, being off to the races with navigation and microscopy to frame on-page content before true content structure and content modeling across the site is established.

Yes, the development of a digital project is often iterative, so there are opportunities to review and update pages and copy.

But what tends to happen when microcopy or a proto-navigation gets too far ahead of the information delivery needs is that the design and that microcopy starts to calcify as the experience design firm and the client “get used to it.“ Even though all intellectually understand that it’s still just a prototype.

As the structure starts to calcify, it begins to resist future informational findings (or the budget no longer allows for them) and focuses on simply implementing the current design theory. What can happen is the hardening design can start to limit and new content needs or findings.
High performance. Low usability and satisfaction.
If this unbalanced process was a car, I’d suspect this is how a Bugatti, the world fastest production car gets made. Amazing design. Cool. Fast. But content wise, it only holds two passengers and that glove compartment that WILL serve as your suitcase, like it or not. An incredible, inspiring design, but unable to offer what a family would need to use effectively.
Remember, the ultimate job of any website or digital product is to deliver content in a way that satisfies a user. Not just hold content.
Design and design usability getting far ahead of content can overtake purpose, which is the proper delivery and availability of content that satisfies users.
Separate. But content strategy and design do need to work together.
Digital product performances are not guitar solos. They are more like symphonies. In fact, when only one part, like copy. design or interactive behaviors becomes the focus, it’s like one member of an orchestra playing too loud or off key, the focus moves from “the music” to the over-the-top performer.
Every performer needs to work together.
For the proper convergence and a great digital experience, both design and content strategy need to do their job well with each other.

Design has to be more in touch with how and when all the content will be delivered. This includes using visual design and patterns to be more anticipatory of making the relevant content needed findable when the “aha!” moment or decision of action comes to the user. Such action ensures that the next step in their interaction with the digital product gives them precisely the content experience they want.

This rarely happens with a “some words will go here” collaboration between copy and designer. This approach only serves to make a page or display panel logical in just the context of itself. Yes, the page, standing alone, makes sense, but it can fail to anticipate other logical user needs or next steps as they consume information.
Seamless collaboration. Seamless user experience.
Content and content strategy must structure content that gives design more freedom to present a powerful, intuitive and effortless experience. Whether it comes from design and or UX, the collaboration must make it possible for the content the user wants to get to them, intuitively with minimal effort.

Both must be focused on presentation. At the same time, they must think about the functionality and modeling of the content and how it will be moved, altered and distributed to outlets around the design. This creates a digital experience that delivers “Johnny-on-the-spot” information for users. When the user realizes they need something, the digital experience seems to provide the next step almost intuitively.
Separate, but equally involved in delivering an experience.
Design and content strategy can keep their independence while working together and advise other digital partners from their core responsibilities. This way, each is able to advocate and negotiate the balance of content and design to produce that convergence of experience.

In working together, it’s important to realize each’s strength and how they contribute to the whole experience while understanding they will do it differently.
Experience Design’s work is around problem-solving issues of:

Look
Feel
Usability

A full content strategist can advise and support all three components.
Look.
Content design. Microcopy, whether created by designers or content strategy in a writing role can be used along with proto-navigation can do sanity-check on the digital product’s ability to hold content, set a mind map for consumers to find and access content and set modeling for how new or deeper content will be presented and under what content.
Feel.
Voice and tone. Attitude is tone and it’s also brand. If a full exploration of a company digital brand and the personal user engagement have been documented, that should be used in writing or editing content to make sure the content and how content satisfied aligns with the brand.
Usability.
This is where a content strategy skills for structure and information architecture come in.

How do we help users understand what their options are? And when they select and informational option, how do we get users to all the information they seek as intuitively as possible? Also, users often don’t know that they don’t know something. Working together, content strategy and design must be ready when the user suddenly realizes an informational need.

Achieving the deeper parts of content strategy lean towards a tight but independent design and UX collaboration. Helping them complete tasks by solving how to give them in the formation they want.
CONTENT STRATEGY CONSULTING
Content strategy is defining today’s successful business and leaving those too slow behind. Looking for more ideas and strategies around content marketing and delivering satisfying digital experiences for your brand, website or mobile application contact me for a free consultation.

Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the firm.
Not an intern was stirring, not even a squirm.

The card sorts were pinned to the whiteboard with care,
in hopes that customer insights soon would be there.

Way in back, developers sat in their pod,
giving each other high-fives and confident nods.

The director of UX, and I in my cap,
had just settled down to view a customer journey map.

When, from outside, there arose such a clatter,
I turned from my standing desk to see what was the matter.
Away to the window, I flew like a flash,
I tore open the shutters and threw open the sash.

When what to my wondering eyes should appear,
but a miniature sleigh, and eight tiny reindeer.

From the look of the driver, so lively and quick,
this was no client, this must be St Nick!

A sleigh pulled by deer, all attached by their reins.
Santa whistled, and shouted, and called them by name!
“Now Dasher! Now, Dancer! Now, Prancer and Vixen!
On, Comet! On, Cupid! On, Donner and Blitzen!
I didn’t see Rudolph and that was a shame.
Declining celebrity Q-ratings I suspect was to blame.

“St. Nick!” I pointed and yelled.
UX and design came like a flash.
We scurried to the chimney by the end of our dash.

After the roof’s thud of hooves, Santa came down with a bound.
His beard was so bushy, his belly so round.

We all stood gazing and silent, like a bird on a perch.
Todd even stopped his review of an organic search.

St. Nick spoke not a word, but went straight to his work.
He left new user personas for Jamie, a content matrix for Kirk.
Once filling all the stockings; then turned with a jerk.

Looking around at our firm, painted much bright red,
he turned to us gathered and this is what he said…
“Structure content correctly, don’t over design like an abuser.
To stay on my nice list, always remember the user.”

Santa then tapped his finger left of his nose.
Giving a nod, up the chimney he rose!
He sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle,
and away they all flew like the down of a thistle.

Then we all heard him exclaim, as he soared out of sight,
“Merry Christmas to all, and to all a Goodnight!”

As Santa’s overflowing love proved that our hearts were fillable,
the content strategist said, “Hey, is this time billable?”

“Hark! The siren sounds of the ads called out to me. On my quest for a new phone, I journeyed the lengths of the Internet, I met an oracle through the magical portal called YouTube. The oracle gave me the knowledge I desired.

I battled the persistent sales person in Best Buy trying to sell me a TV on sale on my path to reach the mobile phone section. I faced my deepest fears of emptying my wallet to obtain the iPhone. And now, with my thirst to use Snapchat on mobile vanquished, I return home a changed and more powerful man.”
In terms of marketing or content marketing, I just described what’s called a customer journey (sure, if Thor was making it) to buying a smartphone. But I also described something else. The Hero’s Journey.
The Hero’s Journey.
The Hero’s Journey is a story template that is very similar to the path customers take (the customer journey) to buying a product. Understanding The Hero’s Journey can aid a UX professional, content strategist or marketer in being able understand how to deliver experiences and content on the right way and right time to help the “hero” on the path to completing their journey towards making a satisfying purchase.
What is The Hero’s Journey?

Commonly associated with Professor of Literature Joesph Campbell (building off the work of others), Campbell developed The Hero Journey’s story template by analyzing the stories and myths told by various cultures over time. From there, he came up with a set of sequential events that seemed to be common to most of the stories. This came to be called The Hero’s Journey. It’s also referred to as the Monomyth (the one standard that applies to all myths and stories).

The overriding story arch involves a hero (which pronouns unfairly seem to point towards males) who goes on an adventure. Faced with a decisive crisis along the way, they win a victory and then return home changed or transformed.

Or as Joseph Campbell put it…
“A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”
This journey has been told, again and again, in modern-day story telling. Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, Spider-Man, Wizard of Oz and my trip to NYC to find really good bagels are examples. Like those examples and the path of the average consumer purchase, the journey will have the following phases…
Departure.
The hero or protagonist lives in the ordinary world and receives a call to go on an adventure. The hero is reluctant to follow the call, but is helped by a mentor figure.
Initiation.
A spiritual initiation, the hero then makes a journey of return, bringing these gifts of insight back to the larger community.
Return.
Once the hero’s transformation is complete, he or she returns to the ordinary world with the elixir, a great treasure or a new understanding to share.

Campbell notes that “love” is one of the most powerful and popular of elixirs. In terms of the customer journey, that love is more likely love of product or positive experience with the product.
Mapping The Hero’s Journey to the customer journey.
Using the smaller steps listed with those three phases, let’s see how The Hero’s Journey tracks with a customer buying journey. And because Campbell’s Monomyth employs masculine pronouns a lot, our hero mapping this journey will be a heroine in the adventure of…
Jane and the Quest for Headphones. The Hero’s Journey.

Departure: The call to adventure.
CAMPBELL’S DEFINITION: The hero begins from a since of normality. Information is received that acts as a call to head off into the unknown.
JANE’S QUEST: Our story begins with Jane. Who enjoys listening to music on her wired headphones. Her friends tell her that her current headphones are “old, tired and embarrassing” and should think about getting wireless headphones.
Departure: Refusal of the call.
CAMPBELL’S DEFINITION: When the call is given, the future hero first refuses to heed it. This may be from a sense of duty or obligation, fear, insecurity, a sense of inadequacy, or any of a range of reasons that work to hold the person in his current circumstances.
JANE’S QUEST: Jane doesn’t see a problem with her wired headphones. They work just fine. One day, her wired headphones keep coming out of her ears as her arms catch the cord while she’s running at the gym. As it happens again, and again, she becomes frustrated. One day, she accidentally catches the headphone cords in such a way, it shorts the connection in the left headphone. She’s mad…and suffers without her uplifting motivation music.
Departure: Supernatural aid/meeting the mentor.
CAMPBELL’S DEFINITION: Once the hero has committed to the quest, consciously or unconsciously, his guide and magical helper appears or becomes known. More often than not, this supernatural mentor will present the hero with one or more talismans or artifacts that will aid him later in his quest. Meeting the person that can help them in their journey.
JANE’S QUEST: Jane starts looking for information about headphones from influencers on YouTube. From there, she learns about tools and information in which to evaluate wireless headphones on her journey.
Departure: Crossing the threshold.
CAMPBELL’S DEFINITION: This is the point where the hero actually crosses into the field of adventure, leaving the known limits of his world and venturing into an unknown and dangerous realm where the rules and limits are unknown.
JANE’S QUEST: Jane has decided and put money aside for headphones. She starts checking websites for more content and options about wireless headphones.
Departure: Belly of the whale.
CAMPBELL’S DEFINITION: This represents the final separation from the hero’s known world and self. By entering this stage, the person shows willingness to undergo a metamorphosis. When first entering the stage the hero may encounter a minor danger or set back.
JANE’S QUEST: Jane checks out more specific videos about wireless headphones. During her search she runs into a video with a grief-stricken video host that warns her, “Why you shouldn’t buy wireless headphones! The warning makes her hesitate for a moment about buying wireless headphones at all.
Initiation: The road of trials.
CAMPBELL’S DEFINITION: A series of tests that the hero must undergo to begin the transformation. Often the hero fails one or more of these tests. Eventually the hero will overcome these trials and move on to the next step.
JANE’S QUEST: Jane keeps looking at headphone options. She likes a set, but it’s too much money. She looks at another, it’s not right. Another she’s considering is not in stock.
Initiation: The meeting with the goddess.
CAMPBELL’S DEFINITION: This is where the hero gains items given to him that will help him in the future.
JANE’S QUEST: Jane encounters the goddess of the internet known as Google. Google search results lead Jane to a landing page. She gives the site her email address and gets access to resources that allow her to review an amazing collected set of audio guides and audio equipment reviews, including cool wireless headphones.
Initiation: Woman as temptress.
CAMPBELL’S DEFINITION: In this step, the hero faces those temptations, often of a physical or pleasurable nature, that may lead him to abandon or stray from his quest, which does not necessarily have to be represented by a woman. Woman is a metaphor for the physical or material temptations of life, since the hero-knight was often tempted by lust from his spiritual journey.
JANE’S QUEST: Jane tells her boyfriend she’s looking for headphones. Her boyfriend thinks he might have an extra pair of wireless headphones for free. He’s not sure if he can find them, but if Jane is willing to wait for him to find out, they’re hers. Wireless headphones, for free? Jane feels that’s hard to resist.
Initiation: Atonement with the father.
CAMPBELL’S DEFINITION: The hero must confront and be initiated by whatever holds the ultimate power in his life.
JANE’S QUEST: Should she wait for the headphones her boyfriend may have? Should she move forward on her own search? After soul searching, Jane feels simply waiting is keeping her from an experience that will make her and her workout routine more satisfying. And she wants them before her workout tomorrow. With that in mind, Jane lets go of her procrastination and decides to continue her search.
Initiation: Apotheosis.
CAMPBELL’S DEFINITION: This is the point of realization in which a greater understanding is achieved. Armed with this new knowledge and perception, the hero is resolved and ready for the more difficult part of the adventure.
JANE’S QUEST: She goes to the store.
Initiation: The ultimate boon.
CAMPBELL’S DEFINITION: The ultimate boon is the achievement of the goal of the quest. It is what the hero went on the journey to get. All the previous steps serve to prepare and purify the hero for this step, since in many myths the boon is something transcendent like the elixir of life itself, or a plant that supplies immortality, or the holy grail.
JANE’S QUEST: She buys the headphones.
Return: Refusal of the return.
CAMPBELL’S DEFINITION: Having found bliss and enlightenment in the other world, the hero may not want to return to the ordinary world to bestow the boon onto his fellow man.

JANE’S QUEST: Jane loves her headphones. She can’t imagine not having them.

The return goes in to deeper parts. Which to align to the customer journey would be post sale. And a story we will address in a future post. ‘Till then. I wish Jane well on her continued journey.
Why a content strategist or UX professional needs to understand The Hero’s Journey.
Like the Hero’s Journey, We develop a customer journey for people like Jane to understand what it takes for her to find satisfaction and meet her needs.

To help a potential customer like Jane on her hero’s journey, we must understand the steps and challenges she faces and how to be of assistance.

As the content marketer or UX or content strategist, we can be there as the “supernatural” force to help guide them on their journey.

For example, a content strategist can provide “supernatural” help in the form of:

SEO. Optimizing content find-ability to Jane can find the headphone content she’s looking for
Blogs and video. To give Jane the knowledge and tools to complete her quest
Display ads and (social ads). The “sirens” that call Jane to under take the adventure for new headphones

Obviously there are more areas of “divine intervention” through content that can be used depending on what your customer/hero’s journey is.

No matter what you choose, remember your hero (or heroine) is seeking satisfaction. By understanding the hero journey and creating your role their customer journey effectively, you can help them find success at the end.
CONTENT STRATEGY CONSULTING
Content strategy is defining today’s successful business and leaving those too slow behind. Looking for more ideas and strategies around content marketing and delivering satisfying digital experiences for your brand, website or mobile application contact me for a free consultation.