"Innovate". "Pleased to". "Unique". "Focused on". And of course, "Leading Provider".
Keeping content fresh, exciting, straight forward and engaging isn't always easy, and reversion to clichéd terms under the illusion that that's the job, that it's the way, is an easy trap to fall into.
Which is why I like David Meerman Scott's Gobbledygook analysis. Now in its second year, it does what David wants it to do... makes you think about everything you write.
See, now I'm wondering about my use of the word "engaging" before. Is that hackneyed? Is that a marketer talking to marketers leaning lazily on an industry-word-of-the-decade? Hey, just doing a quick check on dictionary.com tells me it doesn't even mean what I thought it did; apparently it means attractive, charming, winning, and not, as I'd assumed, the potential to compel someone to engage with whatever.
Keeping content fresh, exciting, straight forward and so good it makes the target want to respond in a useful way isn't always easy, and reversion to clichéd terms under the illusion that that's the job, that's the way, is an easy trap to fall into.
:-)
Best regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.
an almost perfect mobile campaign
by Andrew Grill of Gigafone
A few weeks ago I came across a mobile anti-knife campaign from the Central Office of Information (COI) here in the UK called “it doesn’t have to happen” (IDHTH). You can see the campaign at idhth.mobi (looks best on your mobile).
The campaign is being seeded across mobile sites - you can see the call to action (admob ad) on the left here as shown on one of my mobile sites. The campaign is well thought out - simple website (and a .mobi) to go to and once there, the campaign (directly aimed at youth) allows you to download a “pocket beats java soundboard”. More...
9 out of 10 Marketers Are Using Social Media. Are You?
by David Knowles of
For the last week people have been bookmarking, blogging and Tweeting like mad about a new report on social media marketing. Put together by popular blogger and white paper specialist Michael Stelzner, the report features responses from 700 marketers on how they’re using social media to boost their exposure. The report indicates that whilst marketers are enthusiastically joining the ‘social media gold rush’, few know where to start looking or how to unearth its riches.
Here are a few of the report’s nuggets: More...
Bloggers in handcuffs? U.S. FTC proposes legislation on product testimonials
by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is working on regulations covering blogs and social networking sites.
The revised guidelines on so-called "endorsements and testimonials" that the FTC is looking at could hold companies liable for false claims and statements made by bloggers and people who post reviews and comments on social networking sites, when the person commenting received product samples. And the people doing the posting may also be held liable.
Bloggers in handcuffs
While I am not a lawyer and I have not read through the proposed wording, stories out there such as this one from Iain Thomson of VNU suggest this is an important potential worry for people who talk about products that have been provided to them by a company. More...
Make Money Online - Through Social Media?
by Mindy Gofton of I-COM International
I love of a bit of Twitter spam on a Monday morning!
There's nothing quite so entertaining as to logging into email to receive three notifications that "internetmarketer" is now following us on Twitter. I dutifully clicked on all three - to rule out that they weren't real people with interesting Twitter feeds - and discovered that two were shell accounts promoting a blog with one post about "Robert Allen Wealth Program" and one was a suspeneded account.
The first account sports a picture of a dead ringer for Google's Matt Cutts, and offers 3 tweets all promoting the same splog: More...
The Decline of Newspaper Revenue and the Promise of the Human Network
by Brian Solis of PR 2.0
It's not news that newspaper revenue derived from advertising and subscriptions is rapidly eroding. While Madison Avenue worries about the recession and its impact on advertising in general, numbers recently published by the Newspaper Association of America indicate online advertising only continues to rise.
Perhaps most interesting is the impending intersection between the decline of a 200 year old institution and a new medium competing for the same precious ad dollars for only the last 15 years. More...
Blogging is a massive waste of time
by Graham Jones of Internet Psychology
Bloggers are wasting millions of hours of productivity around the world - and it's getting worse. Just over two blog postings are made every second of every day - and that's only for the regularly active blogs. According to the latest figures from blogwatcher, Technorati, around 3m blogs are updated regularly and there are over 180m people who have started a blog. With 40% of bloggers claiming to spend 10 hours a week on blogging you can begin to see that there are billions of hours of time that is now taken up blogging, which would have previously been spent doing something else - such as working...!
Of course, to a small proportion of bloggers it is work; More...
Riding the Rave #3: In Search of the Fifth P
by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott
Here is the third installment of my three part video series Riding the Rave.
My friends Tim Washer, Scott Teems, and I put together the three part video series to show the absurdity of working with others.
Have you ever been in a discussion where the idea becomes more important than the goal? The conversation goes down a rat hole very quickly.
If you haven't seen parts one and two, you may want to check them out first.
Riding the Rave #1: David's New Manager
Riding the Rave #2: More...
Browsing the Mobile Web: Anyone Out There?
by Vero Pepperrell of Vero Pepperrell
Earlier this week, I published a post on the Taptu blog looking at the challenges of creating and selling mobile applications outside of the iPhone bubble, in particular at how developer Jan Ole Suhr released a Twitter client for S60, causing a stir around the pricing. You know me, I love nothing more than a good ol’ rumble around the web, so when I came across some more tasty stats that didn’t agree with each other, I had to bite. Bango and AdMob both released recent figures for their top 20 handsets and there’s a Grand Canyon of difference in the top 3. More...
Google's halo is slipping - have you checked yours lately
by Graham Jones of Internet Psychology
Increasingly vocal criticisms of Google suggest that its halo is slipping. In psychological terms, it is teetering on the edge of falling victim to the "reverse halo effect".
The "halo effect" itself is whereby we judge a brand, a company, or a person based on just one fact we know about them. For instance, if we find a politician is warm and friendly, we tend to think they have good policies. If we think the customer service of a particular company is good, we tend to think they are good employers. More...
Top Gobbledygook phrases used in 2008 and how to avoid them
by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott
Boston, MA - April 8, 2009 - David Meerman Scott is pleased to announce a partnership with Dow Jones and HubSpot to leverage and focus on innovative solutions for new and improved, next generation, cost effective, world class, high performance, value added outcomes. Does the sentence above suck or what??
That's how so many PR people write — using gobbledygook-laden phrases that are so overused to have become meaningless.
I have just completed an analysis of all 711,123 press releases distributed by North American companies in 2008 through Business Wire, Marketwire, GlobeNewswire, and PR Newswire. More...
PR via e-mail: the worst that can happen
by Andrew Smith of escherman
Mark Brownlow’s excellent E-Mail Marketing Reports blog has a great post today called “E-Mail Marketing: the worst that can happen”. Given my recent post about what PR can learn from e-mail marketing best practice, I thought Mark’s post was very timely. It is well worth reading the whole post - and if you simply replace the words “e-mail marketing” with PR, the same principles apply.
With respect to Mark’s original post, here are the “PR via e-mail” More...
Twitter Traffic Surges to 10 Million: The Demographics Driving the Growth
by Brian Solis of PR 2.0
Twitter continues to defy all those who question its relevance. Exploding from 6 million visitors at the beginning of the year, ComScore released its latest numbers that portray an almost vertical ascent through the end of February 2009, hitting an astonishing 10 million worldwide.
Perhaps more interestingly, is the demographics that are fueling the groundswell. According to ComScore, the majority of visitors around the world were 35 years old or older, which match Nielsen's assessment of those groups representing the majority of Facebook's user base. More...
Social norms versus market norms: implications for social media and online PR
by Andrew Smith of escherman
Dan Ariely’s book Predictably Irrational is a fascinating look at why human beings systematically behave in an irrational fashion. Ariely is a behavioural economist - he goes a long way to exploding the traditional rational expectation theory of economics. The subject titles of the chapters in the book immediately give you a flavour of the non-intuitive findings of his research. For example: The Cost of Zero Cost - why we often pay too much when we pay nothing
In one experiment, a group of people were offered the choice of receiving a $10 Amazon voucher for free - or paying $7 for a $20 voucher. More...
