Marketing Musings

Hand It Over: What to Do Before Your Document Heads Off to Editing

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Marketing Musings

Writing deadlines can be stressful. Editors know this as well as anyone. Often, it’s difficult to know when your document is ready to hand over for editing. It doesn’t matter if the content is a case study, a press release, an article, or a blog; a typical editorial approach doesn’t change wildly by type.

Here, then, are some practical, definitive tips from real, live editors—easy steps to take before you turn work in. While we can’t guarantee that by following them you’ll avoid the red pen entirely, you will likely feel more confident about what you’ve forked over.

Read your work aloud at least once. Avoid optical illusions and read through your content out loud. Your voice won’t be able to ignore issues the way your eyes sometimes will. Listening instead of just reading also helps you to gauge whether your written words captured the pace and dynamics intended.

Run your document through a spell check program. A good practice not just to find and correct typos and other errors, spell checker can also offer a peek at your document through a different lens, and an opportunity to rework if necessary.

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Weekly Roundup: 4/6/12

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Marketing Musings

Welcome to the Projectline Weekly Roundup. We know that the week can move pretty fast. Since Fridays sometimes offer a chance for a breather, we wanted to share links to some of the articles we liked this week. As always, we’d love to get your take, so feel free to leave a comment or chat us up on Twitter. Happy reading and have a great weekend!

Weekly Roundup

Content Strategy
Is Email Marketing Still Sexy? —This post from the folks at Sysmos, a social media monitoring company, gives some reasons why you might not want to ditch your newsletter just yet. Will the newsletter become like Old Faithful? Read on to find out more.

Social Media
The 6 Pillars of Social Commerce —This is a great post from Brian Solis. He’s a well-known social media business consultant and he has some interesting thoughts about what engagement means in social media. If you only read one thing from this list, I’d read this.

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The Validation Stipulation: Why Social Media and Customer Evidence Should Go Hand in Hand

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Marketing Musings

It feels good to be back and writing for the Projectline blog! My last post was around a year ago now—on customer communities and how managing your brand image through them is similar to raising children. That post was inspired by my imminent adventure in (twin) parenthood. So you can guess why I’ve been away….

Now that I’m back, I’m going to skip forward several years and think about why your brand’s social media presence could be like that of a teenager—and how you can help it grow up.

The Guardian recently featured the results of a study that matched US students’ social media activity with the Narcissistic Personality Inventory. The researchers charted social media activity against two narcissistic tendencies: grandiose exhibitionism (GE) and entitlement/exploitativeness (EE).

The study found that GE scores correlated with larger numbers of friends, and that “those scoring highly on EE and GE were also more likely to accept friend requests from strangers and seek social support, but less likely to provide it.”

The findings seem pretty shocking, especially when linked to a developing body of evidence that young people are becoming increasingly narcissistic, entitled, and self-serving. There are hot potatoes here. Are teenagers really getting more narcissistic, or are they just being more honest? Is social media driving this trend or simply exposing it?

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Playing in Our Own Sand Box

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Content Strategy, Marketing Musings

Crazy-low budgets, tight deadlines, and scope creep. These three specters haunt many projects large and small, but they are a given when it comes to one of the most challenging projects of all. I’m talking here about the inside job: refreshing the company website.

But taking a busman’s holiday can also provide an opportunity to try new approaches and take risks. So when we set out to refresh the Projectline website, we decided to test-drive some new practices. Here’s what we sampled and tried—and what we found out along the way.

Messaging Architecture Really Works. We wanted our new website to showcase all that Projectline has to offer, but before we could tell a cohesive story, we needed to get on the same page—literally. Taking a cue from Margot Bloomstein’s Confab 2011 presentation about messaging architecture, “Message Matters,” Projectline stakeholders participated in a card-sorting exercise that led us to identify and prioritize five key values. We then used this list of principles as a litmus test at every critical juncture, from first draft and wireframe to final editorial and design decisions, to ensure we were all headed in the same direction.

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Weekly Roundup: 3/30/12

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Marketing Musings

Welcome to the Projectline Weekly Roundup. We know that the week can move pretty fast. Since Fridays sometimes offer a chance for a breather, we wanted to share links to some of the articles we liked this week. As always, we’d love to get your take, so feel free to leave a comment or chat us up on Twitter. Happy reading and have a great weekend!

Weekly Roundup

Content Strategy
Video Marketing, The Future?—Videos are powerful vehicles for content. This article, from the Marketing Donut site, talks about some of the discrete benefits of videos. I don’t agree with everything, but differences of opinion are good.

Content Strategy on a Budget—This post gives some great tips for implementing a content strategy initiative on a tight budget. I think most companies are in this boat.

Marketing
B2B Sales and Marketing Tools—This is an interesting look at some of the challenges with B2B selling and marketing in today’s internet world. If this is your domain, take a look at this.

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MarketMix 2012: Keeping the Conversation Going

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Marketing Musings

This year marked my fourth consecutive year at MarketMix, and I have to say: it just keeps getting better! For readers who might not be aware, MarketMix is an annual event sponsored the Puget Sound chapter of the American Marketing Association (PSAMA). I arrived this year confident that I would leave at the end of the day with renewed eagerness to pursue what we as marketers all strive to accomplish—making a difference for our clients. And I wasn’t disappointed.

It’s amazing to see our community of local marketers sharing in, and yes, amplifying the enthusiasm year after year. For the second consecutive year, PSAMA representatives said that #MarketMix was the top-trending hashtag for Seattle that day. It was great to see fellow Projectliners joining the conversation online, including @projectline (thanks @CaptainChunk) and @SandraSullivan.

This year’s theme—“Thriving in a Conversation Economy”—was sprinkled throughout the keynote speeches and breakout sessions. But I thought that Ted Rubin, who gave the opening keynote, best articulated this idea. Rubin is the Chief Social Marketing Officer at Collective Bias and Social Media Strategist for MARS Advertising. Among other notable accomplishments, he’s known for popularizing the phrase “Return on Relationships” (ROR). And he had the audience riveted, not only by his approach (including the fancy socks and vest he was wearing, which he said are part of his personal brand!) but by what he had to say on this topic. He asserted that, although customer relationships have long been the currency of business, social media tools provide dynamic new ways for building and strengthening these relationships—if we use them well.

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Target in Trouble for Targeting?

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Marketing Musings

Recently, I read a fascinating (at least, to me) article about how Target is using data analysis to, well, target their marketing efforts. I won’t recap the entire story, but the gist is that Target used sophisticated data mining techniques in order to predict which women were most likely to be pregnant—based on their purchasing history. Target then sent coupons for pregnancy-related products to these customers.

One father got upset when his teenaged daughter received these coupons in the mail. Turns out, she had yet to tell her parents the news. Enter current brouhaha.

I found out about this story via Twitter (nearly my only source for news these days), and the commentary that accompanied it used a variety of inflammatory words, including: “creepy marketing,” “gross,” or―my personal favorite—“creeptastic.” Meanwhile, I found myself feeling a bit awestruck by how ingenious Target’s approach was.

I understand that the pregnancy thing is what makes this example stand out and seem a bit “creepy” to some readers. But, it seems to me, the real story here is just how powerful data has become for marketers. This story highlights the fact that you can learn a lot about a customer with the large amounts of data at your disposal, and marketers are going to do everything they can with it. Do marketers have a responsibility to use the data appropriately?

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