Marketing Blog: FootPrints

Web vs. Print: 5 Key Writing Differences

2012-02-02T21:36:32Z

The Internet has revolutionized the way we consume content and key messages. That shouldn’t be a surprise – even my mom gets it despite the fact that she can’t tell the difference between a private message and a status update on her Facebook account.

But many executives and internal copy producers still haven’t wrapped their keyboards around the idea that the Internet has also changed the way we create brand content. Styles of writing that have delivered big wins in the print arena don’t automatically translate into online success and in fact, may be completely inappropriate for web audiences.

Whether you’re writing a contributed article for an online journal or posting to the company blog, there are at least five key differences that need to be incorporated into the content you create for online audiences.

Length. Forget what your English teacher said about a three-sentence minimum for paragraphs. Web audiences prefer short, pithy blocks of text and tend to stay longer on web pages that feature concise, one or two sentence paragraphs.
Links. Links are the citation method of the Information Age. But links are also a way to increase the value of your writing by providing opportunities for readers to access additional information on specific topics or engage more deeply with your brand’s other online assets
Tone. Regardless of whether you’re writing for web or print, the tone of your writing needs to be matched to your audience and the purpose of the piece. For example, an online white paper will likely require a much different tone than an internal company newsletter. But in general, print writing tends to be more rigid than web writing since online readers prefer informal writing styles laced with elements of the writer’s personality.
Composition. Studies have shown that nearly four out of five web readers don’t read web content word-for-word. Instead, they scan the page, culling information from headlines, section breaks and bullet points. As an online content creator, it’s important to use that information to your advantage, composing pieces that feature bulleted lists, sub-headings and other web-specific composition strategies.
SEO. Online writers frequently target SEO at the expense of meaningful, high quality content. Although it’s important to include search engines in your online audience, the Golden Rule of content creation is that search engines and other audiences reward great writing – and that means your online efforts should focus on strong writing first and SEO second.

Avoiding the Death Traps of Reverse Auctions and RFPs

2012-01-27T22:54:50Z

We all know that being a commodity is the kiss of death in business.

The second you start to sense that sales prospects are viewing you as a commodity, you’re on the cusp of business failure, unless you immediately embark on the proactive actions that I’m going to prescribe to you below.

The Problem

Before we get to the cure, let’s understand the malady a little better. Commodities are purchased on price and price alone. In commodity markets, much to the dismay of sellers, lowest price always wins. Profit margins erode quickly as competitors race to the bottom.

Buyers love to make you think you are a commodity. If a buyer can get you thinking that you are a commodity, then they’ve got you into a mode that they adore — a mode where you are going to drop price to get their business.

Even if they know you are not a commodity, they may hand you over to Procurement, which is essentially a death sentence for sales people. It’s a cruel mind game played by some buyers: “I know you are not a commodity, but I’m going to treat you like one so that you behave like one. I was going to buy from you anyway, but this way you’ll give me a much better price.”

On a quick tangential but related note, I have a friend who owns a business and he has a VP of Procurement named Steve. On a daily basis, however, they call Steve the “VP of Nobody Makes Money But Us” because that’s essentially what Procurement does. Given a spec, they try to buy for the lowest possible price. They could care less if you make any money, with the exception being that they might throw you a small, barely edible, profit margin bone if they need you to stay in business long enough to fulfill the next order.

In this tough economy, mind you, Procurement departments are busier than ever. Sales are down for many companies and there’s pressure on profits on all fronts, so buyers — your customers — are doing something that is completely logical on its face: in order to improve their margins, they are shuffling purchases over to Procurement and telling them to get it for a lower price.

Whereas you used to be able to wine and dine the head of a business division to get business, you now find yourself talking to some low-level flunkie in Procurement. Even worse, you’re not talking to Procurement, you are interfacing with them. Maybe you’re asked to sign up for their new reverse-auction bidding system and submit your prices, or maybe you’re asked to send in an RFP, without ever being given the chance to meet with any human beings.

This is the predicament. If you are not in it now, it may just be a matter of time. So what should you do to avoid the RFP and reverse-auction death traps?

The Solution

There are three things you can do to avoid playing the reverse-auction game:

#1 Define your differentiation and its value to your customers.

What is that you have that the guy who might underbid you doesn’t have? List out all your points of differentiation and assess their value to your customers (ideally based on customer and prospect input). In order for you to avoid being viewed as a commodity, your incremental value, relative to the competition, has to exceed the money your customer would save if they went with a low bidder. In other words, you can’t just say your offering is not a commodity. You have to prove that the non-price attributes of your product are worth paying a premium for. As simple as it sounds, many companies struggle with this exercise. Get help if you need it.

#2 Inoculate yourself against the procurement curse.

If you are lucky enough not to yet be viewed as a commodity, you need to invest in protecting that edge. If you believe you are not a commodity based on your differentiation, then it’s really a marketing exercise to convey that to prospects. If you know it, it doesn’t matter. The world has to know it. Whatever it is that makes you not a commodity has to be driven home in the minds of the prospect as something that they cannot live without. The usual marketing tools apply: case studies, testimonials, sell sheets, PR placements and product reviews in the media, and relationship selling with face-to-face discussions. The messaging has to make the case that there is more to your offering than price. Moreover, get the message out that if a prospect just purchases based on price alone, they will likely suffer some significant pain of some kind.

#3 Call their bluff.

If it’s late in the game and you’ve been complacent, you may already be viewed as a commodity by buyers. In this case, you need to try to convince Procurement that, with respect to buying your product, they need to be more thoughtful than they are being. In a subtle way, you need to make them realize that they will fail if they proceed with their current plan of buying based only on price. They will get fired, the business will fail or have a crisis of some kind, or profits will be down, for example. Raise enough credible pain scenarios to make them double-think the reverse auction approach to buying.

To have this discussion, you can go to Procurement directly to try to get an audience or you can work with the business line contacts to get them to influence Procurement. There are pros and cons to either approach. The best case is to have Procurement and your line-of-business contacts all in the same room. If there’s an RFP or bid process, you don’t want to just respond to the bid; you’d want to contact Procurement and the ultimate consumers of the process, and say “We’d like to schedule a meeting to ask a few questions about the bid process and the requirements.” If you can get that meeting, that’s your chance to make as strong a case as you can that they’ve written the specs wrong — i.e. they’ve forgotten the features you have that competitors don’t — and making it painfully clear to them that if they just go with the lowest bid, there will be hell to pay in the future.

Key Lessons

There’s a reason our Chicago marketing consultants spend a lot of time helping clients to define their value proposition and their competitive differentiation. In markets that are nowhere near being commoditized, it provides an edge over the competition. But in markets that have the potential to be commoditized (and you may be closer than you think to that unenviable fate), defining differentiation that is highly valuable to customers is not just essential to win business — it’s critical to ensure long-term survival.

“Walker Sands University” Formalizes Professional Development

2012-01-25T16:20:58Z

In the last two years Walker Sands has more than doubled, causing us to completely rethink employee professional development.

Account Executive Julie Walsh launched the program in October with a personality assessment. Since then the company has met every month to tackle a new challenge. So far our sessions have covered:

- Understanding One Another: MBTI – Communication is critical, so we started with a Myers Briggs assessment to determine the different personality types at the agency. Today the matrix of everyone’s communication style hangs on many people’s bulletin boards. Take the test yourself at http://bit.ly/RYWA9.

- Setting S.M.A.R.T. Goals – Important for both our clients and our personal lives, Julie took us through a session to define Specific, Measureable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely goals.

- The Attributes & Enemies of Good Writing – Ken Gaebler, CEO, led an interactive session that covered a number of key writing strategies as well as basic topics like the pyramid approach.

During meetings, participants also discuss the Walker Sands’ Challenge. This program challenges Walker Sands’ employees to come up with a solution to a problem they see within our firm. It could be as simple as a new conference room decoration or as complex as restructuring our SEO services.

So far, response has been phenomenal, with great idea sharing occurring during each session. Upcoming sessions include Managing High Touch Clients, How to Present like Steve Jobs, and The New Business Process. If you are interested in learning more, Julie is sporadically blogging about the topics on this blog so come back to check out her posts.

Got another idea for sessions that a firm like ours should cover? Leave them in the comments.

Why We Need Twitter to Join the SOPA Blackout Protest

2012-02-02T21:38:20Z

Tomorrow several websites including Reddit, Wikipedia, WordPress and TwitPic will participate in a 24-hour blackout to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act. A small community of around 30 websites will temporarily shut down to demonstrate how radically different the Internet could look without their presence. Though rumors circulated that Twitter would also participate in the protest, earlier this week officials stated that the site will remain up and running.

For those who may be unfamiliar the story behind tomorrow’s blackout, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is a proposed bill that would drastically change the way people use the Internet. In a nutshell, SOPA seeks to remove copyright-infringing material from the Internet; this could include restricting links to offending sites in search engines, and the removal of certain sites altogether. Its main objective is to protect intellectual property, but many fear that SOPA is blurring the line between upholding copyrights and censoring free speech.

Yesterday Twitter chief executive Dick Costolo reported that Twitter, an outspoken opponent of SOPA, will not be joining the online blackout along with the aforementioned sites. He tweeted: “Not shutting down a service doesn’t equal not taking the proper stance on an issue. We’ve been very clear about our stance.”

Be that as it may, Twitter’s participation in the blackout would certainly carry much more weight than several of the contributing smaller sites. In recent history, Twitter has played an integral role in freedom of speech and enacting or disabling policies worldwide; events ranging from the retraction of Bank of America’s $5 user fee to the Arab Spring have been attributed, at least in part, to protests over Twitter.

The social media giant’s participation in the anti-SOPA blackout is almost necessary to the cause of the protest. More than any other participating site, Twitter has the potential to set off a chain of events that could stop SOPA from being enacted, chiefly because Twitter has proven its ability to wield influence among its millions of users worldwide. Disabling the site for 24 hours would educate people trying to access it about their cause. It might be inconvenient for a day, but in the long run it would mean spreading knowledge of a potentially damaging piece of legislation to hundreds of millions of Twitter users. And as they say, knowledge is power.

With a bill such as SOPA threatening to change the way we use the Internet so significantly, we need the social media giant to flex its muscles, show its strength, and oust the threat of SOPA for good. What do you think? Be sure to leave your opinion in the comments below.

4 Reasons Why the PR Team Should Be in Charge of Social Media

2012-01-13T16:33:08Z

Social media use among Fortune 500 companies has plateaued, according to recent data . This hardly means these organizations have adopted social media en masse (62 percent have an active corporate Twitter account, while only 58 percent maintain a Facebook page), and it presents an opportunity for those without a social presence or those who remain inactive in those channels.

This prompts an important question for the laggards: Who should be in charge of running these things, anyway?

If the headline is any indication, the answer is the PR team. Here’s why:

The PR agency or team is best equipped to respond to inbound media requests.

When a reporter reaches out to the brand via social media, your organization must be prepared to respond promptly. If the reporter doesn’t get a quick response, he or she will move on to find another source.

The PR team already handles inbound media requests, so they are prepared to coordinate interviews and provide the journalist with any background information for the story. The PR team also has a better grasp on which journalists have already been in communication with the organization or have written previous stories, and social media provide additional channels through which the PR practitioner and journalist can communicate.

PR understands the organizational messaging.

Whether it’s the typical “say this, not that” that stems from the corporate legal department or subtle messaging tied to the product or service, the PR team is already adept at communicating in the organization’s style.

Social media accounts are often run in a particular voice (Think of Twitter accounts or Facebook brand pages that refer to the organization in the collective “we.”), and the PR department is best equipped to incorporate the unique tone of social media into the organization’s many other communications channels.

The PR team is trained in reputation management.

It’s no secret that customers use Twitter as a sounding board for issues they encounter in dealing with your brand. The PR team knows that an organization’s many audiences – consumers, partners, investors, stockholders, media – should be treated differently, but all with an eye on the big picture.

This said, the PR department should have close ties to other departments with a horse in the race (read: everyone). If complaints come flooding in about a landing page on the site crashing, don’t you think the Web team would like to know? Similarly, the PR team should alert customer service or sales if people mention difficulty redeeming coupons or processing a transaction.

PR strategy, in part, dictates social media strategy.

You have a comprehensive public relations plan for your organization (if you don’t, you should probably get on that). Use it. A social media strategy that’s in lockstep with a PR strategy amplifies results on both fronts.

What did I miss? Do you disagree? Sound off in the comments below.

A version of this post originally appeared on PR Daily, where the author is a contributor.