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I came across this messaging monster in a costume store recently. Like most trends in messaging, it doesn’t take long before something that began with good intentions becomes, well, just pointless.
Being informed and sensitive about Native American culture past and present is something I think is important. However, if we’re going to just replace the word “Indian” with “Native American,” but continue to stereotype or romanticize people with this cultural identity, then it’s just an empty gesture.
Unless you revise the whole message (which in this case includes the product you’re selling), there’s no sense in making weak, clearly thoughtless, attempts to use language that is sensitive to different cultural identities.
There’s no “dressing up” the fact that “dressing up” like a Native American will always rely on generic characteristics – it will never be something that can be done sensitively. Especially as a Halloween costume. Counter-intuitive as it may be, you’re probably better off leaving the offensive language as it is, at least then you’re being honest.
Being my own devil’s advocate, it’s probably worth considering whether, in fact, it’s the small changes like this that contribute to a larger shift in history. In that sense, maybe seeing “Native American” on a product like this is evidence of the larger awareness people have now.
Either way, it’s a lesson to consider in a thorough and thoughtful way any change in an organization’s messaging that is being done to respond to a change in how people talk about different, typically marginalized cultural groups and identities.
Today we’ll look at why the pacing and timing of your marketing communications is so important.
 How planning land works on a real farm
Planning out land in farming is how farmers think ahead about what crops they’ll grow on specific fields, and at what time of year. This helps them make the most of their resources and to find the largest yield. It’s also a way for making sure that these fields will continue to produce into the next year.
Why it matters to marketing communications
Believe it or not, your messaging (like what a farmer will grow at what time of year) is predictable. Not just yours, but everybody else’s, too. But don’t be offended – it’s actually a good thing. And the sooner you realize this, the better your messaging will be.
Think about it: you know that around the Holidays you are expected to send out cards to valued clients and customers, or that when Spring comes rolling in, you’ll want to tap into the excitement that comes with it. Step back and take a look at all the tweets, the emails, the ads over a year, and every other communication you send out each year and you’ll notice a very definite pattern. The world around your organization – the seasons, the economy, current events – informs your communications. Audiences know this, so you should, too.
“We gotta get that newsletter out…”
Most organizations have a communications policy that someone feels is very important to draw up, one that will surely make it so the messaging train can just go on automatic. This policy often hopes to convince people who are not communications professionals to do things in a specific way. Whether policies work or not, well that’s something for another blog post.
One detail every policy I have come in contact with (most of which are in archive files) includes is a painstakingly precise schedule for emitting eblasts, newsletters, and other timely communications. Of course, things being what they are, sometimes this falls behind and Guilt appears to make everyone feel bad when something falls behind.
But let’s look at this from the other side of the message: there’s a big difference between “Oh, there’s my weekly update from so-and-so again. I’ll read it later.” (Later never happens.) and “Hmm…what’s this from Your Organization – they’ve got some news…wonder what it is?” You want people to see your messages as actual communications, and not as something that just comes in. People see through routine.
In this sense, pacing is a matter of not just sending communications out at regular intervals, it’s about telling people things when there’s actually something interesting to say. So, if it’s time for an e-blast, but it’s has next to nothing unique about it, better to not send it. (Or get someone very creative to see something you don’t about your organizations and write about it.)
Case in Point: Pacing and Social Media
Every year there is a new way to do messaging that takes over online chatter. As part of an organization, you’ll probably find yourself between two extremes when it comes to social media:
- It’s the most amazing thing ever and you are always the first one using the latest app, even when no one else is. You get a smug thrill when everyone else, like your mother, is finally using it a few years later. But by then, you’re onto the next thing.
- You think social media is all a hoax – it can’t be measured, it wastes time, and more often than not just makes you angry. It has no value to your organization’s mission.
Very likely, the pace at which you post to Facebook, tweet, or even check-in on FourSquare will match where you stand in this spectrum. Either you have something to share with your friends and followers every five minutes (1), or you post perhaps once a decade or never at all (2). This is where pacing comes into play. In either scenario, the message behind the specific social media strategy can be lost entirely. Indeed, all your audience sees is a virtual personality that they may not like at all. You want to avoid that risk.
Make sure your organization’s message is the principle and an individual’s personal style secondary. Check that whoever handles your social media isn’t overdoing it, that each action is valuable to people, and that what they are posting, tweeting, or otherwise is in line with your overall messaging strategy.
What’s your take? Does your organization have a unique way of pacing and timing communications? Have any tips you’d like to share?
You don’t need to be a marketing expert to be a successful and happy message farmer. And there’s a kid in you yet who loves using simple, chunky metaphors for seeing the world around you in a fresh, new way.
The Wonderful World of Message Farming is here to help you reimagine your organization’s marketing communications and messaging with simple visualization tips.
So far we’ve looked at how a great messaging strategy starts with:
- good soil choice Effective communications is rooted in the people who create your messages.
- a diversity of crops Make the most of each media channel you use – don’t say the same thing in your print ads as you say in tweets as you say on your website. Those are wasted opportunities, each and everyone!
Next time on The Wonderful World of Message Farming: Tip #4: Locating Messaging Equipment – What you need and where to find it
There’s something about newsletters, even the very mention of the word “newsletter,” that comes dangerously close to saying boooring. That’s not to say that I don’t like them – they’re my bread and butter as communications writer, my favorite kind of project. But I do wonder about the general survival of the newsletter.
That’s why this week’s Wrong Signal Review considers Chipotle’s new customer newsletter. Does it cut the mustard…?
First thing first: Are newsletters going extinct?
The newsletter faces a few challenges today. From my experience working with nonprofit organizations and small businesses, I find that the core audience I am writing to is largely between 40 and 60 years old, and that younger audiences do not regularly read traditional newsletters. This might be explained by a number of reasons; expertise in relation to a niche field (it takes time to get good at something) or financial background (you need extra cash to make big donations) are two possibilities.
However, I do feel that new technologies – social media in particular – are creating new ways for organizations to speak to their members, to their donating base, and to the public at large. Does this signal the end of Long Copy? Why spend 10 minutes reading a full page article – that you know is self-promotional – when you can get it in a millisecond from a tweet?
Then the silver lining
Luckily, my doubts were recently dispelled when I was invited to lunch at a Chipotle Mexican Grill. After ordering tacos, I noticed next to the register a newspaper-style marketing piece. Upon closer inspection and to my surprise, this was a very traditional, very well done, newsletter.
Why Chipotle gets it right
Chipotle’s newsletter piece, titled The Gold Burrito Digest, is pitch perfect. Directed at customers, its offers new light on the messaging value of a newsletter as part of an integrated marketing campaign. Here’s why:
- For one, it shows that it offers an intimacy with their customers that is nearly impossible through digital formats, with so much competing for our attention. Plus, people are reading this at an intimate time: while they eat the very thing they are reading about. I think it’s a very conscious attempt to tap into that part of us that stares at the box while eating a bowl of cereal. And they do this successfully with great copy and visual messaging to elaborate their corporate narrative.
 This piece also works to answer questions specialists might have. In this case, the “specialist” is someone who loves burritos, which is a pretty big field. But it’s not all that different from the newsletter I am currently working on for a local substance addiction agency directed at a particular professional group.
- They even manage to incorporate success stories, another key tool used for effective newsletters.
- Finally, Chipotle easily ties this in with their larger marketing strategy, with call-to-actions to their social media channels, affiliate websites, and viral marketing sites.
The new newsletter
Although this is for restaurant customers, it is a really great case study for thinking about newsletters in a fresh, new way, whatever the organization and audience. If a trendy, forward-thinking business like Chipotle is utilizing newsletters, it must be because they engage people in a unique way that other marketing tools don’t – they’re not going to throw away money on routine communications that don’t produce results.
With a renewed energy, the newsletter will continue to play a key dimension of internal and external communications.
Pollen for Bees
The marketing piece was launched as part of Chipotle’s current “Unlimited Time Only” campaign. It’s designed to celebrate its 18th anniversary by featuring a gold wrapper foil on its burritos. I don’t think it’s real gold, by the way, but the symbolic gold that means “quality.” You can read about it here.
What do you think of newsletters? Do you read them? Does your organization issue them?
What crops will you grow?
You may not be able to see or hold messages, but they are as real as the tomatoes, cukes, and zukes you would sell at the local market. And, likewise, if your messages are limp and full of holes, no one’s going to buy them.
If your organization is up to speed with communications today, you are taking advantage of a range of traditional and newer messaging channels. This includes public relations, marketing and advertising activities, as well as how you connect with people through social media tools. However, if you are saying the exact same thing through each of these, you’re losing a number of amazing opportunities to say genuinely interesting things to your audience.
What’s sauce for the goose is NOT sauce for the gander
Your organization might take a simple approach to advertising. For example, a print ad may have a direct reference to your services or mission, with a call to visit your web address below it. If people already know who you are, this might be adequate for that particular environment.
Now, if you applied this same message approach to Twitter, that tweet would look like:
@yourorganization My organization does great things! Go to myorganization.com.
This may look fine if you are looking at Twitter as a series of small static print ads speaking to a largely anonymous audience. But this is not at all what Twitter is.
Twitter is unique because you can know directly who you are speaking to. In fact, you are in a conversation with these people, your audience. So if you treat them like regular old newspaper-reading joes, they could be offended, but they will definitely see your tweet as blatant, empty self-promotion. They will ignore it and you lose one person’s interest.
What would be far more effective would be to create a message that takes advantage of how Twitter connects your organization with real people. One potential solution would be to retweet something a person whose respect you would like to earn:
@yourorganization Nice thinking! RT @potentialcustomer Organizations really need to get their messaging order – like a farm!
The medium is the message
The more you diversify and craft messages to work with each specific communication channel – whether its a press release, an e-blast, a web banner, or any other – the better the advantages and environment of each communication channel, the more you will see successful engagement of your audiences.
Have any questions? Any stories you would like share? Let me know!
Ever since Google made its debut into the advertising world during the 2010 Super Bowl, we’ve all seen billboards, print ads, and other attempts to promote the web giant’s ever-growing services through non-digital formats.
Today I received the direct mailing piece, pictured below, from Google ebooks. And, although it’s Google, I am giving it the Wrong Signal Stamp of Disapproval.
 Google Books direct mailing gets the Wrong Signal Stamp of Disapproval The Intended Message
“Gee, Google ebooks. You really relate to me as a book lover!”
They are using sound marketing logic – I recently bought an e-book from their new site. The taglines they put on each bookmark are meant to speak to me as a hip, modern reader who owns an e-book reader, but who also still loves real books. It’s a good move, since I think this is where many people stand. So, Google ebooks understands me and wants to relate to my experience with digital book formats.
The Actual Message
Like everyone else, I get a lot of junk mail. So when I see something from Google ebooks, I am actually pretty interested to see what it is and I open the plain business envelope with some enthusiasm, ignoring the childish teaser copy (“You love books…and so do we!”).
 "You love books...and so do we!" teaser copy on Google ebooks direct mailing. Unfortunately, my excitement vanishes when I pull the four cheap, thin cardboard bookmarks that were alone loose in the envelope. “That’s it?” I think. There’s no supporting copy or materials. I’m not impressed. Not only do I immediately notice the marks from the pop-out die-cut template, which makes it look hurried, but I also quickly realize that I am never going to use these. It’s like getting a sweater you will never wear from a very nice great aunt. I am sure Google ebooks doesn’t want to be my great aunt, however much I like her.
The worst part is that the marketing is showing a little too much. Each of the four bookmarks (see below) clearly is meant to appeal to at least one target audience. If I say to myself, ‘That’s not me,” even once, the impact of the mailing is lost.
The Diagnosis
Don’t get me wrong. Google ebooks is actually a great service that evades all the traps I have found with other ebook sites. I suppose that’s why I was so disappointed with the messaging in this piece.
This seems like a project that was rushed off someone’s desk and out to the printers. The design and the branding elements work in terms of color and appearance, but the copy seems like regurgitation of that “My other car is a….” line, which is overdone.
I think there is an essential problem here imagining what these bookmarks would be like for the person opening the envelope. I don’t want to connect my real book reading to my e-book usage – there’s no reason to. This may have been a good opportunity for an incentive, such as a discount or coupon tying in a purchase of real books alongside e-books as a package deal on Google marketplaces. This is the strength of this messaging, it is the first I’ve seen of marketing that recognizes that people will always use both book formats. It’s not trying to make me switch completely over.
I would develop a concept that says something to the effect, “Now you can have the best of both worlds.” Google could relieve the pressure to switch, while stressing the benefits of the e-book reader to the majority of people who are still a little leery about them. Plus, they would draw customers to a variety of their marketplace connections.
What do you think?
Have any gems you’d like to submit for the Wrong Signal Stamp of Disapproval? Let me know!
 Presumably this one is for the people who haven’t made the switch. I don't think that this applies to the people on this mailing list, does it?  This bookmark shoots for those people who are reading books on tablets like the iPad. I actually use the Kobo e-reader, so not relevant to me.  Looks like a pitch at students and academics who put reading lists onto their laptops. Not me.  This one speaks to people who read e-books on smartphones. I personally don’t know anyone who does this.
You already know that nothing grows on bad land.
Soil that’s rich in nutrients helps ensure healthy, succulent messages. You also want to make sure that it allows for good drainage, otherwise your messages will get drowned out.
Think of the soil as the talent behind your messaging. Strong, effective messages depend on the people who write them.
You know what you want to say. That’s why you created a detailed messaging strategy as part of your larger marketing and communications plan. However, a message passes through a lot of people in your organization before it becomes words on a screen or paper.
Here is a quick Q & A that will help you think about this gap, learn to close it, and get a better hold on your messaging.
Who manages your social media channels?
Tweets, facebook updates, blog comments, and more besides are connecting your organization to people in new ways every day. Sure, #MM (Music Mondays) are OK – that’s part of the fun of Twitter – but Justin Beiber’s latest hit probably isn’t speaking to the heart of your organization.
It’s a great feature of social media that it is so personal and immediate. However, too much real personality can clutter and eventually degrade your messaging. But don’t worry, there’s a way of doing with character and genuineness, while also consciously shaping an organization’s message, and many people are doing it right now to much success.
Make sure the person who handles this important side of your communications is doing so with an objective awareness of how your brand message involves your online audiences.
How many communications does your organization send out into the world each day?
Though you can’t see it, a message is certainly not invisible or magical in how it works. Cultivating an appreciation for the use of words and images to communicate as a very precise art is the first step towards making your messaging more effective.
Create a spreadsheet for tracking your communications each day. Find the real numbers that answer these questions: How many emails do you or your employees send on average? How often do you or your employees post to social media sites? How regular is your newsletter? Once you have this information, add a column that describes the kind of feedback have you received on these from the outside world.
Once you have a real, tangible understanding of your messaging, then you’ll be much better equipped to really take control of it.
Is a writer behind the proposals you submit, or is it done by someone who already has a lot to do? Is your newsletter just something you “gotta get out”?
Engineers, architects, analysts, and many other professionals are skilled and achieved in their fields. This, however, does not guarantee that they are good writers.
Writing for an organization is always about messaging. That’s why a “good writer” in this sense doesn’t mean perfect spelling and amazing grammar (you learn that in high school); it means having the skills and the ability to see the whole picture of how a message works, from its creation in your head and with your needs through to the person receiving it and their needs. This has to be a standard, whether it’s an email, an annual report, or a proposal.
Very often professionals in a variety of fields assume that the rest of the world should already know what they know or at least be smart enough to figure out on their own why what they are saying is so important. While there are few stellar examples who take this line, the majority of us are often just plain too busy to explain what they mean in “lay” terms – it takes craft and research to build a functional bridge between what an organization wants to say and what an audience wants to hear.
A professional writer understands how to use words to speak to specific audience profiles, how to adjust tone and style, and how to create a narrative that very nearly guarantees that a message authentically relates to someone.
A successful message farmer knows that effective messages are rooted in professional writing skills and experience.
Last Friday morning, I had the pleasure to attend the Community Arts Grants Award Ceremony held at the Arts & Cultural Council for Greater Rochester.
I was there to receive the grant awarded to the Reel Mind Series on behalf of Ruth Cowing and Herb Katz, who founded the Series in 2009 and continue to provide the important vision and direction behind it. The bi-annual event uses film as a vehicle for addressing the stigma surrounding mental health issues in a creative, open setting.
The Arts & Cultural Council partners with the Rochester Area Community Foundation and the New York State Council on the Arts to award funding to Rochester artists and nonprofit cultural and arts organizations.
There are three categories for awards: Capacity Building Grants, Education Through the Arts Grants, and Decentralization Grants for Individuals and for Organizations. Each category recognizes different activities and monetary needs.
As a highlight to the important role these grants play in the cultural life of Rochester, Friday’s event included a violin performance of Bach’s “Partita No. 2 – Allemande” by Yorgos Kouritas from the Brighton Symphony Orchestra, a showing of the short film You Belong With Me, which won a prize at last year’s ImageOut Film Festival, as well as a performance by Sue Cotroneo of “Chi il bel sogno di Doretta” from the opera La Rondine by Giacomo Puccini.
The Reel Mind will utilize the DEC grant to fund a Spring and Fall series of films this year.
Pollen for Bees:
Presenters included New York State Assemblymembers Harry Bronson and Sean Hanna, New York State Senator Joe Robach, Carla Palumbo, Board Chair, and Ted Boucher, Board Member, of the Arts & Cultural Council, Jennifer Leonard, President and Executive Director of the Rochester Area Community Foundation, Margaret Reek, President of the Genesee Valley Quilt Club, and Sarah E. Lentini, President and CEO of the Arts & Cultural Council.
I’ll be honest. Sometimes (i.e. every February) I feel that life as a freelance marketing writer is more trouble than it’s worth. 
When this happens, I start daydreaming about other occupations.
One I always come back to is farming. You know, getting a little piece of land and working it myself. Making what I do something in and of itself, and escaping from the shadowy world of marketing and advertising….
Of course, when I really start considering the practicalities of it (I have a little experience of working on a small family farm) I soon realize that many of the challenges of running my own business – like getting myself out there, making contacts, creating leads to new work, paying the bills every month – would still be there in some shape or form alongside whole new ones.
This year it got me thinking. On a farm, I would grow crops or raise animals to sell to consumers who want fresh, local food, and who want to know that it’s the product of a thoughtful, quality process. In many ways that’s not different from what I do now as a messaging writer: I develop and write messages that are organic and unique to each organization I work with.
Since I have a weakness for sweeping analogies, I quickly found a fresh perspective on messaging. Why not look at your messaging strategy as though you were actually in the business of farming messages?
With Spring at our doorstep, I’ll be posting useful tips and insights into messaging that will help you plan for a real cash crop of messages this year.
Parents of children with disabilities and the professionals who work with them were invited to attend a community forum last Wednesday at the Monroe Country Club in Pittsford, entitled “Living with Disabilities: How to Cope, Plan and Live.”
 This served as an opportunity for the event’s hosts, Easter Seals New York and Financial Architects-MassMutual, to share with the public the key findings of a recent national study they performed jointly, “Living with Disabilities.”
Easter Seals “Living with Disabilities” Study Findings Unveiled
The study looked at the different issues currently facing individuals with disabilities and their families. The session began with a webcast roundtable talk that outlined the purpose, expectations and final outcomes of the study. Award-winning TV actor Joe Mantagna was even part of the discussion, sharing his experiences and concerns as the father of a daughter with autism.
Following the video, those attending were invited to take part in a panel discussion with Bonnie Kaplan, who works with the Diagnostic and Treatment Center at Easter Seals New York, Erin Murphy, Coordinator of Community Based Services at Easter Seals, and James Traylor, Director of Financial Architect-MassMutual’s SpecialCare Program.
A key theme dominated: children with disabilities are out-growing the support services they are required to receive in schools and at home by law. What happens to the adult with disabilities? And even more pressing: what happens when their parents are no longer around?
Pathways to a More Secure Future
The SpecialCare Program offers one practical solution to this challenge. James Traylor works with families of varying financial needs to plan and prepare for their child’s fiscal independence once they are not able to care for them actively.
Bonnie Kaplan and Erin Murphy provided powerful, frontline insight into the realities of care service today. They expressed the often challenging reality of coordinating service programs, while also providing inspiration to the idea of an approach to housing for people with disabilities who want and deserve the independence of adulthood.
While no simple solution emerged, it’s open talks like the “Living with Disabilities” forum that bring together advocates, funding sources, organizers, and the families of individuals with disabilities that put the potential for change into an environment for solutions.
Pollen for Bees
- Speakers included Bill Costello, General Agent for Financial Architects, Bonnie Kaplan, who works with the Diagnostic and Treatment Center at Easter Seals New York, Erin Murphy, Coordinator of Community Based Services at Easter Seals, James Traylor, Director of MassMutual-Financial Architect’s SpecialCare Program, and Lori Vanderhoof, Regional Director of Easter Seal New York for Western New York.
- You can download the entire study from the Easter Seals website (here).
- Learn more about the MassMutual SpecialCare Program here.
A new word for a new year
One day it just made perfect sense: messaging.
“I do messaging” sounds a lot neater than “I help small businesses and nonprofits organize and develop communications for marketing and pr purposes.” I’m introducing a simple sentence to create a dialogue. I’m fairly certain – unless my audience is entirely uninterested in speaking to me – that this person will then ask, “Messaging? What’s that?” Then I can describe more exactly my services.
That’s useful, but this word “messaging” is more than a hook for my elevator speech.
Message in a bottle in a sea change
Messaging is a concept that describes how people want to consume content today.
“Marketing,” “advertising,” “publicity,” “copywriting,” “brand management,” and all the vast amount of jargon surrounding each seem unable to full convey exactly what I think they should be doing. And I think the reason for this is that the habitat in which they live has changed so drastically.
On account of new technologies and an increased participation by the public in content and media, the expectations of how an organization speaks to its different audiences has experienced a real sea change. And these audiences are more and more real people whose behaviors resist the statistics afforded by traditional market research.
The bigger picture
For the past 15 years, distinguishing marketing in the “real world” and online has been a given. Print media is different than digital media: someone holding a direct mail piece in their hands has a very different experience from receiving an e-blast, though both can be sent straight to the recycling bin. Likewise creating digital and print communications demand different skills and strategies.
But, as you might guess, as soon as it’s possible to neatly sum things up, it’s probably because the situation has changed.
The distinction between print and digital, static and moving, word and image has never been so fluid, as interchangeable, as it is today. Whether it’s the growing number of mobile devices more and more people have – it wasn’t long ago when a web-connected, touch screen phone seemed extravagant to average joes – or it’s the amount of information and content people regularly access on the internet that includes text, video and graphic elements, people all over the world are engaging with media content in a new way.
“Have you seen our new, expanded menu?”
 Our ancestors had a much simpler diet of messaging. Anthropologists who study prehistoric human societies look at the type of foods they ate. Imagine we looked at media consumption throughout history in this same way.
We know that, for obvious reasons, neolithic people had a very simple diet. Sure, it’s possible certain of the cave-dwellers had more of a knack for foraging treats than others, but it’s a fact that their way of life had no room for a master chef, a connoisseur of fine delicacies.
Today, our diet of messages – the ones we read, see, interpret, repeat, ignore, “like” on Facebook, tweet about, and so on – is far more sophisticated. Not that I think this necessarily makes us “better” than our ancestors (I’m not sure what flint even looks like….), but it certainly means our competence with all the nuances of communication, from reading between the lines to saying exactly what we mean, is much more developed.
Online media allows us to incorporate media into our lives in entirely new ways. We don’t have to pick something off the menu anymore; we can make up our own dishes and serve them up to millions of people around the world.
Whether people like it, well, that’s something that’s never changed. However, with a considered approach to all the rhetorical devices an organization engages in every single minute of every single day, it’s certainly possible to have better control over it.
This is messaging.
Messaging is a concept that incorporates the many dimensions of how an organization speaks to people, how it appears, and how it responds to the world. It is a fresh look at the increasingly (and needlessly) convoluted language describing marketing communications, whether that refers to a pr campaign strategy, an idea for a brochure, or guiding vision for social media outlets.
A messaging specialist would be multi-dimensional, too. They would be able to conceive a brand, write copy to it, see the images and know how to use the latest software competently enough to work collaboratively with a graphic designer. But most important of all, a messaging specialist sees the big picture at each instance, like a film director, and has the skills to make message a reality.
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Welcome Messages are flying around us all the time. Some we see, some we don’t.
From advertising and marketing to the arts to groups of people together to plain old storytelling - how people communicate with words and images fascinates me.
Learn more about my work at thewritesignal.com.
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