How do you define your clout?

If you are active at all in the social media (and there’s a strong chance you are if you are reading this), you must have a fair idea about what you are doing. But how do you rate your time spent on, say, Twitter? When it appeared, Klout struck me as a fun gimmick. It gave some metrics to what was then a very fuzzy domain.

But there is a very strong danger that it becomes a goal in itself. The very human temptation is to play the badge game, amassing thousands of followers and sending out a dizzy number of Tweets and RTs to boost the ratings.  And then? What do you do with a following with which you have no meaningful connection? Is there not a better way to measure clout?

Keeping up with the Joneses

If you have to use it as a measure of success in the social sphere, you are on very thin ice. What is the practical difference between a Klout of 61 and 63 in absolute terms? The only practical use I can think of for Klout is as a relative yardstick. At the very most, I would present a rating in the context of your three closest competitors. Here’s where we are compared to X, Y and Z. And if everyone actually went down, a drop on your side is not unusual.

On a practical level, it strikes me that a review of Klout’s rating system was not out of order, given the massive changes in the social world since it started. But hopefully you are also using more precise data-driven metrics such as those available from Hootsuite or others.

Allowing yourself to receive

To answer my own question, I can think of a good handful of strong contacts made on Twitter, almost daily exposure to sensational data and comment and an overall healthy rate of RTs across the various accounts I am involved with. Thinking that I have “clout” demonstrates the wrong mindset, as social media is not a macho thing. As has often been pointed out, it’s the two-way flow of data and comment that is important.

Instead of asking how much I have pumped into the Infobahn today, it might be an idea to ask how much I have allowed myself to receive. The ability to spot trends, understand comment or analysis and pick up leads is, for me, a key element of social media – ones that feeds the other parts of my work.

Why choose between SEO and copywriting when you can do both?

If you’re writing for a website, 95% of the time you are thinking about attracting and keeping readers on the page long enough to do something. Unless your client has very large budgets to play with, attracting readers will inevitably mean being spotted in search engines.

I love good SEO. It’s not my specialty, so I won’t presume to talk about it here. But if you are an SEO writer, here are a few tips you can use to bring your website’s pages one step further through a more marketing-minded approach to the copywriting:

* make the process specific to your customer. Don’t talk about the benefits of widgets. It’s Your Customer’s widgets that do the trick. We don’t need another generic description of a service or technology. The web is full of content farms and scraped texts stuffed with keywords. Put your customer’s name out front!
* be more specific in subheads. A subhead that says “Benefits for everyone” is useless for two reasons. It doesn’t help diagonal reading and doesn’t help with SEO. Subheads are h2 or h3. So make them useful: “Your Customer’s laser technology provides benefits for patients and doctors”. “Visitors to Brussels benefit from enhanced travel services”. This brings me to another point:
* add local information where appropriate to help SEO. If your customer only has one or two offices, use that to localize the SEO. “Patients in Paris and Amsterdam appreciate integrated service”.

Now that you’ve run over the text and made it that bit more effective, I have one last copywriting tip:

* make it personal. Go back and read the text as if it was you that was going to book that flight, nose-job or insurance plan. Make the text a little warmer, more real, more from the inside. How? Well, use all the information you received in the brief concerning demographics, the competition and above all motivation.

These simple copywriting guidelines can already significantly improve the SEO copywriting of any website. If you have any further tips, I’d certainly love to hear them in the comment section below!

CV authentication

Interesting to see that our customer CVTrust has picked up an award as “entrepreneur of the year” from the Belgian organisation Enterprize. We were called in to work on the website before it was launched. The service enables job seekers to authenticate their CVs once and for all in one place. Recruiters save time and money by dealing with CVs that are already  approved and therefore more trustworthy. Another win-win situation.

We could have gotten pretty in-depth on this, as it is an innovative concept. But the client – and needless to say The Write Stuff – were anxious to keep the copywriting as concise and effective as possible. So it was a case of working hard to make it easy to read and use.

Incidentally, if you’re not looking for a job the site can also be used to validate customer quotes.

Copywriters love carrots. They’re good for the eyes and we think that readers will always jump at them. So when developing a headline, body copy or e-mail shot, we’re always looking for exciting carrots to dangle in front of the readers’ eyes.

E-commerce is not a carrot any more. It means nothing. Whereas once the very idea of enabling e-commerce was supposed to start a drool of anticipation, it now gets blank looks. Why? Because it’s a fake promise, a hollow tube that leads somewhere else. Holiday destinations don’t try and sell you the excitement of air travel. That’s just the way to get there. They sell you a relaxing sunset dinner with a view of the bay. They sell the most exhilarating peak experience of your life. Or the most enjoyable time with your family.

There is always a risk that when trying to find the right carrot – the promise that will get readers excited – we don’t dig far enough. What is e-commerce? It’s a way of doing business. What’s really interesting is either the money it brings in, or the new avenues it opens up. So go for that as a carrot. “This gizmo enables e-commerce” is a debatable fact. “Try the gizmo that drives sales while you sleep” is a headline (not a very good one, but you get the point).

There are lots of fake carrots out there. “Followers” and “friends” are two that spring to mind. How deeply did you research your latest marketing communication?

On the one hand, it’s patently obvious that many of the ideas being thrown about are going to fall flat. Statistics and the laws of gravity have a way of getting the upper hand every so often. But this burst of creativity and optimism is precious in that it provides great momentum. Advertisers might look at this a little askance. Don’t. It’s a fantastic lab for not just creating funky sites and applications. It’s also a real-time experiment in creating buzz and hopefully a little revenue.

It’s a fantastic lab for not just creating funky sites and applications. It’s also a real-time experiment in creating buzz and hopefully a little revenue.

Will there be tears on the road of the creative gold rush? More than likely. But unlike the dotcom boom, this one seems to be built more on fun and is solidly anchored in the social networks that will be its distribution channel. And I think most people are going into it with more realistic expectations than was the case in the nineties.

In the meantime, a bunch of creative people are hooking up with techies and creating things – and this optimism and application can’t be a bad thing.

It will come as no surprise that branding at this level follows a well-trodden path for marketers. There’s a product with a USP and a potential market. The trick is to bring the product under the noses of the right market and let the combination of product and image work its magic. So far, so good. But the product in this case is an actual person (at least at the early stages, afterwards it might become a team).

The trick is to bring the product under the noses of the right market and let the combination of product and image work its magic.

So the image being portrayed is on the front line 24 hours a day, and the person will have to live up to certain expectations on a daily basis. I’m reminded of John Cleese telling the story of when he entered a shop to buy a box of matches. On the way out, he heard the shopkeeper whisper to another client, “Not very funny, is he?”

Be useful

The root issue is that no matter how fab you are deep down as a person, you still have to be useful to others. You have to deliver. So the branding cannot allow itself to become too wrapped up in the aura of the subject. Sure, it has to be personal inasmuch as it is dealing with a person, but shouting “me-me-me” will not cut it. Not even if you shout it louder, or prettier. The branding still has to bear in mind the fundamental question facing marketers: what will this product/person do for their market? What’s in it for them?

For Gerry Murray – who takes a very practical approach to coaching (ie, the coachee has to work hard) – the branding we developed with Guy Stevens of Pix&Com is based around the phrase, “Take That Step with Gerry Murray”. He makes people do things, brings them on a journey of sorts, helps them take a step in the right direction. So the copywriting and soon-to-come website reflect this (check the layouts here). Rather than turning inwards, they have to keep the audience very much in mind. So in this respect, personal branding is not like a personal computer; it really does have to be shared – with the people it’s targetted at.

Gerry Murray will be conducting a weekend seminar called “Reset Your Compass for 2010″ in Leuven, Belgium on January 16 & 17. Follow his writing on Thinking Differently or follow the website at GerryMurray.com

The traditional role of a trade fair was to enable companies to showcase products and services and meet people. So the operators were basically companies that sold square meters to other companies. With the web, something as mobile as music has no problem finding showcases that are faster and cheaper. And if you’re looking for contacts in the music biz, LinkedIn has literally thousands of people willing to meet you.

Better ways to connect

So what could  a trade fair possibly have to offer? This is the challenge facing the developers of the new website  and indeed Midem globally. The answer is quite simple: better ways to connect and the very latest market information. Although it seems like an easy conclusion, turning this into real customer benefits and an effective website is another matter.

I won’t go into the changes on the trade fair site,which are quite extensive. But on the website, the new direction is reflected by offering lots of ways to engage  with visitors through newsletters, Twitter and a very informative blog. They are also putting their noted conference sessions online throughout the year (hint: these involve monetisation of websites – you might want to check them out). Ultimately, the principle being applied is that you have to stay relevant to your target’s business, both in what you do and in how you offer it.

The Write Stuff provided the copywriting for the new site and brochure through Consor, and we’re currently working on the newsletters.

Their business is attractions and theme parks, a sector that is growing. The explanation for this growth seems to be that people are travelling less far on holidays and will therefore be spending more time at theme parks, museums, attractions and attractions. Check the EAS 2009 site.