Maine Creative Services

It’s easy to get free publicity. Want your face on the front page or the TV news? Just get busted doing something dastardly and illegal. Your handcuffed “perp walk” will get you LOTS of media attention — and bring smiles to your competitors’ faces.

There are better ways to do it, of course.

Even if you haven’t done anything newsworthy lately, you can often piggyback your way into the spotlight. Hitch your wagon to something that’s already there.

Look for news, trends and other newsworthy content. Then show reporters, editors and TV producers the connection between what’s in the news and what you do.

Write it up in a well-crafted and targeted news release. Guy Kawasaki gave a great example in his blog the other day.

A research company did a survey of white-collar workers, and found that 81% believed that casual dress improved morale. 47% believed it increased productivity. About the same number considered casual dress an attraction, a reason to go to work for a certain company.

Now ask yourself: What kind of company could benefit from making sure everybody heard about this study? If you guessed the makers of business casual clothing, you are correct. As the Apple evangelist and author of The Art of the Start explained:

“When Levi Strauss (makers of Dockers) found out about the study, it let thousands of publications know about it. The company also even put in a toll-free hotline to help companies implement a casual dress standard.”

A small effort, relatively speaking, for a potentially huge payback.

The lesson: You don’t always have to be the one making headlines yourself to get your (or your company’s) name in the media. Reporters are hungry for good content. Keep your eyes peeled, especially in your industry’s trade journals and other less-read publications, for news, trends or surveys that you can piggyback to get your name in the news.

Want to lose an intelligent, discerning, afffluent audience? Just indulge in hype. Overblown claims, breathless tone, unsupported superlatives, hyperbolic adjectives. These are approaches you’d never see in Internet marketing materials, ads, Web site content, and the like from well-known and prominent companies. Why not?

All of them are telltale signs of hype, explains copywriter and marketing consultant Marcia Yudkin. “If you use these tactics, many educated shoppers cringe and go elsewhere,” she says. Sure, hype may sell, especially in a one-time-sale situation, she says. But it can cost you big in other areas, like your company’s reputation:

“Use (hype) and you can expect snickering rather than respect from established journalists, academics, Fortune 500 companies, most people with postgraduate degrees and colleagues who use any of those groups as their benchmark of respectability…”

Runaway hype can also scare off potential partners and JV opportunities. “If you’re aiming at joint ventures with banks, universities, community organizations, trade associations and the like, hype counts very heavily against you.”

I agree. Hype makes most people want to take a shower. As Marcia points out, it’s possible to use a hard-hitting, dramatic direct marketing style, but in an entirely truthful and completely respectable way.

“Hype does sell,” she concludes. “But that’s far from settling the issue of whether or not you should use it.”

Read Marcia’s entire article here.

Copywriter John Forde recently wrote an article called “11 Things You Can Do Right Now to ‘Fix’ a Business Website.”

I’ll take the liberty of paraphrasing a few of his best points:

• Define your site’s purpose in five words or less. (What are you trying to accomplish? Keep it simple.)
• Put a great headline at the top of the first page, something with a powerful emotional “hook.” (A big problem, a shocking statement, a huge benefit.)
• Get a big benefit “above the fold” (before the visitor has to start scrolling down the page).
• If you’re building a mailing list, get your signup box “above the fold.”
• Strip away pointless graphics, photos and Flash animation.
• Make sure your subheads are so compelling, they force the visitor to keep reading.
• Read your copy out loud. It helps you zero in — and eliminate — the stuff that’s boring, unclear, or unnecessary.

Gay Talese’s long-awaited memoir, A Writer’s Life, comes out this week. A pioneer of the New Journalism, Talese has his roots “deep in the old-fashioned, no-nonsense ground of the newsroom, where he spent the early part of his career,” according to a NY Times preview.

The author of The Kingdom and the Power and Honor thy Father is as brilliant and obsessive about details as the most meticulous reporter. So he’s, um, not very prolific. This book took a staggering 14 years to write.

“Talese, who has compared writing both to passing a kidney stone and to ‘driving a truck at night without headlights, losing your way along the road and spending a decade in a ditch’ is a painfully slow worker — a tinkerer and reviser, an obsessive typer and re-typer.”

His book, he admits, is in part a record of failure, of leads that don’t quite pan out. That’s something most writers can relate to. Personally, I think writing — both fiction and nonfiction –is a lot like major league hitting. The best are .300 hitters, which means they whiff a lot more often than they score. Sometimes the best you can do is hit a little squib out to right field, and you get thrown out at first.

But Talese won’t settle for that. He’ll wait and wait — for 14 years if necessary — until he gets his pitch. Then he swings for the fences. The result is a string of best sellers that frequently tiptoe up to literature.

“There really isn’t a story,” Talese said about his newest book. “The story of pursuing the story is the story.” Then he adds:

“In a way I’ve been writing the same book all my life. They’re collections of short stories that use real names and have a real narrator and that don’t make anything up.”

He doesn’t make anything up? What a concept. Will somebody please send a copy to James Frey?

From New York Times

Lisa Belkin, in the NY Times, has more great new geek words — something we blogged about the other day.

Belkin quotes Eve Fox, an electronic campaign guru in Washington, DC, who suggests a whole new language she calls ‘Blang,’ as in ‘Web language.’

“Blang is spoken by ‘Web wraiths’ — Tolkienesque creatures (i.e., most of us) who feel chained to their computers day and night.

Some Blang entries that tickled my funny bone:

Cybermoment — Confusion that arises when one person closes an instant-messaging window and the other person keeps ‘talking.’

Cylences — The long gaps in phone conversation that occur when a person is reading e-mail or cybershopping at the same time. (Ooh, nasty pun.)

Schoogle — A popular pastime, consisting of Googling the names of old classmates. (Ouch, another!)

Google-icious — The self-absorbed pride people feel when Googling themselves.

Reverberon: the kind of e-mail which has been forwarded endlessly and everywhere, by people known as regurgimailers.

Check out Lisa’s post here.

Often I get emails from people asking for help with their Internet marketing. Or they’re starting a home based business and they want me to write and/or design their business card, brochure and Web site.

But today I got an email from Jim, a West Point grad, former airborne infantryman, with a Bronze Star from Desert Storm. Jim’s spent a total of 25 years serving his country, both on active duty and as a civilian employee of the Army.

He wants to become a copywriter.

Tom:

Where has this site been all my life?

I see that you’re a professional copywriter…Help me make it happen for me! I’ve been toying with the idea of getting out of the rut I’ve been in since 1980 and making the break as a writer that helps break the communication gaps where engineers, techies, and business “suits” can’t seem to get their points across.

Here’s my reply:

Hi Jim,

Nice to meet you, and good luck on becoming a copywriter. Just what I need — more competition! ;^)

No, seriously, come on in, Jim, The (business) world desperately needs more people who can communicate. And from your email it’s clear you’ve got the right stuff. You write well and even let the “person” show through. That’s pretty rare in Corporate America.

Let me start by offering you two invaluable resources right off the bat, that really helped me get my business going.

First is Peter Bowerman’s book, The Well Fed Writer. It not only helped me find the courage to make the leap (heh heh, a little airborne humor) and start my business, but it offered lots of valuable practical (i.e. business-related) guidance along the way.

Get it and read it ASAP. It’s about BUSINESS writing, i.e., writing the kind of material that businesses need (which also pays pretty well, by the way.) It’s NOT about writing and selling magazine articles, short stories, screenplays or poetry.

Peter even tells you exactly how to go about getting your first clients…

The other is Bob Bly’s The Copywriter’s Handbook, which focuses more on how to do the actual writing. It explains what each type of “collateral” is for (brochures, ads, etc.) and how to write them. Actually, anything by Bly is pretty helpful.

As soon as you get those two under your belt, you’ll be on your way, Jim. Keep in touch and let me know how it’s going, too. If I can, I’ll be glad to help.

Want to improve your writing? Check out those two excellent books.

As if viewers didn’t resent commercials enough already…

Phillips is working on a way to actually prevent you from changing the channel during commercial breaks, or fast-forwarding through them on programs you’ve recorded.

In their patent application, the company admits that their gizmo may be “greatly resented by viewers.” Gee, you think so? If it’s ever installed, expect the number of viewers shooting their televisions to soar…

What’s next? A couch that refuses to let you stand up and leave the room during commercials? A robot arm that pins your eyes open, a la Clockwork Orange?

New Scientist via GMSV.