Eggblogg

Stuff I've read lately: social media search tools, local search prominence and more

I haven't done one of these 'round ups' for a while, but here are some interesting articles I've come across recently, thanks to my Feedly digest...

Social + search:

• Does great content really mean great results? by Pete Young. Nicely argued piece about how SEO practitioners need to distance themselves from the rest and become marketers rather than 'search' specialists.

• A guide to SEO for editorial teams and journalists, by Mark Nunney on the Wordtracker site. A nice, straighforward intro to SEO basics for those who're more interested in content than tech. (Part one of two, I think).

• The Most Important Reason Social Media Is Good For Your Local Business by Jason Falls. Including a short video, this post explains what 'prominence' is as defined by Google for local search purposes, and how to increase yours.

• 60 social media tools and platforms you may have missed by Adam Vincenzini. Less intimidating than it sounds, the tools are in groups of five. As reviewed during the first 3 months of the year. There are so many tools around and new ones being developed every day, so how many of these will last the course who knows. Worth a skim through though.

• 10 Facebook search tips and tools for PR pros - another great post from Adam Vincenzini. A few gems in here worth checking out.

History:

• 38 years ago today the first mobile phone call was made by Brad McCarty. Just love these stories about the comms pioneers, unsung heroes mostly, and of course the pics of 'brick' phones.

Trends:

• When the Curriculum Vitae just isn’t enough: rise of the social CV,  by James Poulter. Those crazy kids will do anything to get a job! James's conclusion: "agencies are after creativity first, credentials second."

Three nice infographics

You can't really avoid infographics these days, they're everywhere. But if you have managed to escape them so far, an infographic is the represention of data in a visually interesting way. They can be surprising, revealing and fun. But they can also be daunting, and sometimes downright confusing.

If you're better at processing visuals (photos, video, exploded diagrams) rather than words or data then the infographic will probably appeal.

Anyway I thought it would be fun to do the occasional round up of interesting infographics I've seen lately. Here's the first.

At Mashable today we've been treated to Which social sites are the best for which marketing outcomes? featuring the CMO's guide to the Social Landscape. A handy grid shows you whether YouTube is good for generating visits to your website, whether a Facebook presence will really affect your search engine rankings, and so forth. Beware: if you shrink to fit A4 and print out, it's a bit tricky to read (small typeface, white text on dark background.)

If you've ever wondered just how much work is getting done by that guy listening to music on his headphones and texting his girlfriend while coding up a newsletter and keeping an eye on Twitter, then your worst fears will be realised by Multitasking: This is your brain on media - a stern warning from Rasmussen College. Whether it will have any effect who knows!

And finally, if you're looking call yourself an online marketer and don't want to do the time, The Noob Guide to Online Marketing could be ideal - just tick everything off and voila, you're done! More a series of visual diagrams rather than a single infographic, but stylish nonetheless.

 

Keep it simple if you want to get your message across

On Saturday I saw an interesting comment in the Guardian from a tutor on a creative writing course. She claimed that to write a commercially successful novel you need to keep your language and structure very simple. Simple enough for an 11 year old to understand, since that's the average reading age of adults in this country.

I've never really understood what 'reading age' meant, but can this really be true? To find the answer I went to the website of the National Literacy Trust, where it's stated that in fact one in six adults in the UK have the reading ability expected of an 11 year old, or less. Still not great. But then I followed a link to the University of Nottingham's SMOG calculator where you can paste in samples of text to see just how readable they are. (SMOG stands for Simplified Measure of Gobbledygook!) As benchmarks, they tell us SMOG scores of newspaper editorials. The Sun scores under 14, the Daily Express under 16 and the Telegraph & the Guardian under 18.

I compared two samples - the first from a letter that a client had asked me to edit/redraft, the second was my redraft. Thankfully, my re-write had reduced the SMOG score from 18.5 to 14.3, although it probably could have been even better.

Vocabulary, sentence length and structure aren't the only things to affect readability. Factors such as the font size and typeface, line spacing, layout and surface finish all play a part. If you're interested in knowing more about how to make written material easy to understand I recommend downloading the (free) Readability leaflet from NIACE.

Don't get me wrong - I don't advocate dumbing down. I believe strongly that the only way to improve confidence and skills in reading and writing is to read good writing, and lots of it. It's OK to start with JK Rowling and Dan Brown, but sooner or later the aim should be to lose the waterwings and start swimming with Peter Carey and Cormac McCarthy.

However, as marketers and communicators we're not writing great literature. We have no choice but to reduce complexity, respect readibility factors and keep it simple if we want to get our messages across.

Banning cliches from business: a thankless task

I was watching the Mary Portas show recently in which she persuaded a firm of estate agents to better serve house buyers, principally by being honest in their product descriptions and preparing properly for viewings. I like Portas's approach, and of course it's good TV, but I wasn't sure about how she tackled the issue of misleading product descriptions, by banning estate-agent-speak.

It has always astounded me how estate agents' particulars are so mired in cliché. Even the word particulars is itself part of the problem.

Phrases such as 'well appointed', 'deceptively spacious' or 'in our opinion, the property affords easy access to town centre amenities' can be annoying, and smack of laziness.

But because this kind of language is so widespread, almost expected, isn't it the case that everyone knows how to read it (cosy = small, in our opinion = you probably won't think so)?  In fact, Portas did a little voxpop that confirmed this. In which case, what has estate-agent-speak to do with dishonesty, or even a lack of transparency?

The business world is full of cliches - however much we complain about them, they are a shorthand that everyone in that world buys into (sic). There's a homely sort of reassurance when conversing in business-speak - the feeling of speaking the other person's language, of forming your own club. And where would news reporting be without tired cliches - 'shocked onlookers', 'car crash horror', 'heartless thieves' and so forth. People have 'fights with cancer' and traffic wardens have 'a thankless task'. We are forced to consume this kind of tired language, understanding it implicitly to be a lazy shorthand which paints a rough picture -  we're not supposed to take literally.

I'm all for saying no to lazy writing - in business, in journalism - but I don't think it's necessarily a symptom of deception or dishonesty. On the other hand, if there is dishonesty it’s not going to be eliminated by banning cliches.

 

Image credit: http://www.adliterate.com/

Customer magazines - delivering a one-way message?

 
Are customer magazines an anachronism from a pre-digital age or valuable engagement tool?

Something in Marketing Magazine's 'Customer Publishing' supplement this week got me thinking about this again. I say 'again' because I've always been ambivalent about customer magazines. As a marketer, to me they instinctively feel right. They look like *real* magazines but they are utterly under the control of the brand-as-publisher. Yay!

But as a customer, I feel differently. There are few customer magazines that I would take the time to skim through meaningfully, let alone read. Significantly, the only ones that spring to mind are those you either have to pay for, such as Waitrose's magazine, or those that have you as a captive audience, like the airline magazines you get on a plane. To unsubscribe from a customer magazine is time consuming and in some cases impossible.

So the comment that interested me was from Toby Smeeton of Sunday Publishing. His point was that 'so much digital communication is fast, and feels disposable' and was 'far from satisfactory when it comes to engaging the most important audience - existing customers.' On the other hand...'customer magazines are highly portable and loved by consumers. They deliver a richer, more considered, more meaningful brand experience.'

Naturally, as someone who has spent the last 8 or so years attempting to create 'meaningful' customer relationships for clients through the medium of email newsletters, I take issue with the opinion that email isn't up to the job. Yes, it's disposable, as indeed are Tweets, Facebook updates and the like. But the idea that customer magazines are not seems odd. The very fact that such magazines usually arrive in the post in polythene wrappers is in itself an annoyance as it means having to remove the wrapper before I can put the magazine in the recycling.

More importantly, relegating email newsletters to the 'direct marketing in digital format' pile hardly does justice to the format. The best email newsletters include a healthy mix of editorial and promotion, encourage customers to contribute content in return, ask for feedback, respond readily and openly to comment and change content readily according to reader preferences. Maybe the problem with Smeeton's assertion lies in the very vocabulary he uses - there's a lot of talk of delivering. Delivering a brand experience. Delivering salience.

To deliver something is a one-way process. One-way marketing = 20th century marketing. My feeling is that it's time to get over the one-way thinking. Customer magazines have a place, but to suggest they are an enduring medium in their present format, and offer something more engaging than digital communication, is to ignore the social revolution and to see digital as it was ten years ago.

What do you think? Do customer magazines do it for you? Do they engage at a more meaningful and lasting level than digital communications?

Images from http://apa.customerpublishing.org/