Five

Spooky articles

and bone-chilling posts

from MarketingProfs

Are You Scared Yet? It’s Frankenspeak Day!

By Ann Handley

It’s Frankenstein Friday—an event that celebrates the birth of the famous fictional character. I’m co-opting the holiday, which takes place annually the last Friday in October, to talk about my favorite kind of related monster, Frankenspeak.

As I define it, Frankenspeak is convoluted text that doesn’t sound like it was penned

by a human, but instead sounds like it was created in a lab.

Sometimes, it reads like someone bolted on words to create a terrifying string of nonsense (“our mission-critical, scalable, high-performance, unparalleled, game-changing solution”) or bloated bit of buzzwords (“We have assembled surgical and clinical expertise second to none, have a state-of-the-art trauma

center, developed sophisticated minimally invasive techniques, and called on innovative training and technology to ensure the highest level of patient safety and quality of care,” as my friend David Meerman Scott wrote about recently.)Either way, it’s sales-y language and useless marketing hype.

In Content Rules, C.C. Chapman and I wrote about the words and phrases that we’d like to ban from marketing, sales, corporate communications, business schools, blogs and boardrooms. But since today is a day to celebrate the scary,

here are 10 of the most frightening:

1. Impactful. Ugh. This is a truly scary word that many people in business and education like to toss around to describe things that make an impact. But the word does not appear in most dictionaries and, if it does, should be banished. Instead try: “influential” or “substantial.” “Powerful” is good, too.

2. Leverage. This word is the poster child of words that began life as nouns and (perplexingly) find themselves used as verbs. Instead try: (depending on the intended meaning) “influence,” “exploit,” “enhance,” “rely on,” or just plain “use.”

3. Synergy. Also: Synergistic Synergism. Synergize. (And while we are on it, let’s add all most words that end in “-ize” too: “incentivize,” “productize,” “monetize,” “budgetize,” “utilize,” “socialize,” “operationalize,” and (wait for it!) “calenderize,” which I actually heard someone use the other day. And yes, she had a perfectly straight face. Instead try: finding a word that doesn’t sound like it was first uttered by the robot.

4. Revolutionary or Innovative. People often use these terms in business to describe things that really aren’t. Unless you just invented an escalator to Pluto, don’t use them.

5. Email blast. Businesses often use this phrase to describe an offer they’ve emailed to their subscriber list. The problem is that it suggests disrespect. Are you a spammer? Then you’ve “blasted.” Legitimate businesses mailing a

legitimate offer to an opt-in subscriber list? Not so much. Instead try: How about “sent”?

6. Proactive. The opposite of “reactive.” I understand that businesses want to seem like they’re reacting to issues even before they occur. But I think this word just sounds pompous and should be avoided in business. Instead try: depending on the intended meaning, “foresee” or “anticipate.”

7. Solution. Another favorite. Business people often use this word to describe or product or service they can’t otherwise explain. What’s wrong with “product” or “service”?

8. Words that individually are harmless, but mashed together become horrid: Buy-in. Mission-critical. Dial-in. Best-of-breed. End-to-end. Value-add. Next-generation. Game-changing. Face-time. Push-back. Net-net. Win-win. And low-hanging (as it applies to “fruit” when you aren’t talking about an actual tree or orchard).

9. Ridiculous phrases. There are a kajillion of these corporate-speak silly phrases: Run it up the flagpole. Eat your own dogfood. Out of pocket. At the

end of the day. Peel the onion. Peel the grape. Open the kimono. Open the kimono at the end of the day while you are peeling an onion.

10. Finally, here are two more I dislike: “Nazi” when applied to business concepts (as in “brand Nazi”) or “drinking the Kool-Aid” as applied to accepting ideas or concepts (sometimes, without understanding). Since these two phrases are rooted in unfortunate and regrettable events in history, using them seems offensive or (at the very least) in bad taste.

5 Monsters That Suck the Life Out of Your Blog Post

By Verónica Maria Jarski

Scarier than any made-up monster, the following creatures often take hold of blogs and drive away interest (and business). To make sure that your blog hasn’t fallen under their wicked spells, we offer a quick field guide to identifying the creatures and how you can beat them.

1. The Vampire: This monster sucks the life out of your blog and leaves you with dry copy—and a shell of an idea. The signs that this monster is gnawing on your blog are: pale, lackluster writing and a lack of reflection.

Avoid becoming one: Keep your blog posts fresh. Write lively copy. Use active words and crisp descriptions!

2. The Zombie: This blog staggers around like the dead. It has no life within it but wants to feast solely on the work of others. Signs that the zombie is gnawing on your blog are: an enormous amount of links and, oh, so very little content.

Avoid becoming one: Choose your links carefully. Create fresh content in various formats when possible, such as videos, infographics, podcasts, etc.

3. The Werewolf: This monster howls at the latest and greatest trends then chases them down without purpose. It never takes the time to develop an understanding of any trend in depth, but just goes scurrying from fad to fad. Signs that the werewolf is on the loose on your blog are: lack of focus or purpose on your blog, lack of discerning what is valuable to your readers (and what’s a waste of time) and rambling prose that goes nowhere.

Avoid becoming one: Blog with a purpose. Know what you want the blog to be about. Playing around with different ideas is fine, but you don’t want your blog to run wild in a pointless path.

4. The Mummy: The wrappings look intriguing enough, but there’s no life there. Signs that your blog has become a mummy: a lovely design but no new content; widgets like counters that never get used; comboxes that never get comments; and lots of silence in social media, too.

Avoid becoming one: Keep your blog active by posting regularly. Create an editorial calendar to help you keep track of ideas. Share your content by tweeting about it, linking to your post through other social media channels, etc. Recruit a guest blogger now and then to keep things interesting.

5. The Ghost: This blog bears some resemblance to the mummy, however it’s far worse. It’s the blog that someone set up and even made look nice. But you never did anything else with it. Ghostly and pale, this blog has links that go nowhere, instructions from the template still on it, fake text, etc. Signs that your blog is a ghost: You completely forgot about that blog until you read this description … and now you’re thinking, “Whatever happened to that blog I started?”

Avoid becoming one: Make a commitment to your blogging efforts. Set a time table for it. And then stick to it. Just make sure you have enough time to nurture readers and develop it.

The Scariest Traits a Marketer Can Possess

By Corey O'Loughlin

Marketing is a challenging profession, one that requires us to be fully engaged and involved in the changes to our brand—and also in our industry. Marketers must stay up to speed on all new developments or they will quickly risk obsolescence.

That being said, plenty of marketers possess a few very scary traits that impact their brands and their

effectiveness. Here are three deadly traits to avoid.

Narcissism—Let’s face it. Most of us aren’t “experts.” Most of us haven’t been published, aren’t keynote-caliber speakers, and haven’t made serious advances in our marketing niche. That doesn’t mean we aren’t good marketers; we

certainly are. But lately it seems that most marketers are asserting themselves as experts—and this is a very slippery slope.

When the narcissism trait sneaks into your marketing team, you quickly lose the ability to work well with others, adapt to changes, and value outside feedback. Avoid this trait, stay humble, keep learning, and listen to the feedback of others!

Apathy—We’ve all seen it, and we all know how toxic it can be. A marketer cannot become apathetic. The drive we have as marketers to be constantly searching for innovative ideas and creative solutions is what keeps our brands performing. If you are becoming apathetic in your current role, it’s time to find another job!

Marketers need to actively seek inspiration and new ideas. That’s why you are reading the MarketingProfs blog after all, isn’t it? Also, marketers need to be sure they are constantly reflecting on the data and acting on facts, not assumptions.

Procrastination—Time management is an essential skill for marketers. With our to-do lists growing, putting tasks off is simply not an option. Setting SMART goals and developing a plan to achieve those goals can help keep your efforts on track, but beyond that, marketers need to be dedicated to the cause and eager to achieve in order to resist the urge to procrastinate.

After all, you know what they say about procrastination: It’s not good. (OK, that’s not really what they say, but I’ll keep it clean.)

5 Content Writing Lessons from Bone-Chilling Tales

By Verónica Maria Jarski

Love them or hate them, scary stories are part of the human experience. In the United States, we celebrate Halloween today, but every other country has version of their own spooky traditions. And part of the experience is the sharing of stories.

So, what elements have made those stories last so long? And what can marketers learn from

them? Here are five main reasons that the stories have stayed with us—and ideas for how we, too, can create long-lasting content.

1. Write with rich detail. It’s not just a horseman. It’s the Headless Horseman. It’s not just a Snowman, it’s the Abominable Snowman. The details and the emotion-inspiring words, harrowing, spine-tingling, dripping, thumping, screeching, blood-red, raven-black, etc. make the story come to life for us.

What you can do: Writing content rich in details does not mean writing a tome. It means using words carefully—like a poet—with each word meaning something. Think of the writing greats like Ernest Hemingway who said much with little. Use your words well.

2. Use a character that inspires strong emotion. Whether you find him intriguing or vain, Dr. Frankenstein doesn’t leave readers feeling indifferently towards him. Something draws us to him and his fiendish creation. So, whether readers are entranced by Count Dracula or cheering on vampire hunter Van Helsing, the important fact is that the reader is reacting.

What you can do: If you’re writing a case study, make sure the reader can identify with the company or the person you are writing about. Make the reader care. If you are sharing a customer success story, make sure the reader believes

this is really a person, not a flimsy cardboard cut-out representation of a person.

3. Sentences do something. The raven quoth, the telltale heart is thumping. Witches fly in the sky. Werewolves howl at the moon. Sentences in spooky stories are active. They don’t passively describe what is happening, but movement is described.

What you can do: Use active sentences in your content. Passive sentences have their place, of course, but active ones should rule the day.

4. Wordplay underlines the story. One of the most famous scenes from “Macbeth” features the three witches over a cauldron, murmuring, “Double, double, toil and trouble. Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.” It’s the rhyme and rhythm that stays in our mind long after the play is done. The same with Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven.” It’s the repetitive word “nevermore” that begins to drive the reader a little nutty just as the raven is doing the same to the narrator.

What you can do: Know your literary terms, such as personification, alliteration, metaphors, and analogies. By becoming familiar with these terms, your writing can employ these when necessary. It’s not as complicated as it sounds. You don’t need to write a classic poem or story, but use these writing tools to add texture to your content.

5. The story takes you somewhere. A good writer carries you along a journey. You follow down the corridors in search for the cask of Amontillado in one Poe short story. In another, you can hear the narrator fall into madness as he hears the tell-tale heart beating ever louder.

What you can do: Take your reader on a journey. In Nancy Duarte’s Take 10, she discusses the highlights in carrying your audience, as the hero, through a journey from what was to what can be. Your destination isn’t the same as one in a spooky story, but the important part is to have a destination for your visitor.

BONUS: A lesson is learned. In a film class I took, the instructor told us that lessons can be learned even in

horror movies: Don’t separate yourself from a group when camping. Don’t go smooching when you need to be helping out. Don’t go into the basement when the light bulb isn’t working. Don’t leave your tent without a flashlight. And don’t ever, ever pick on someone because they’ll come back and get you.

What you can do: Whether a big lesson or small lesson, leave the reader with something new to ponder.

A Marketer's Halloween: Eight Monsters That Scare Us [Infodoodle]

By Verónica Maria Jarski

Hockey-mask wearing villains? Things that go bump in the night? Clowns? Boring. What really scares us are neglected websites, frankenspeak, and projects that suck the life right out of you.

On this Halloween day, we're sharing an infodoodle of what a marketer's Halloween really looks like.In the infodoodle below, you see what turns our hair white with fear and what makes us bite our fingernails down to the quick.

1. Just-once customers. Customers who do fly-bys horrify marketers. They check out your website and never return. They buy your product and never buy another one. They listen to your talk and never come back.

2. Neglected Websites or Blogs. Straight out of the 1990s, sites that feature too many animated GIFs, music, anything that blinks (or quite frankly, moves) strikes terror into our hearts. Nothing says you don't give a flying bat like creating your online space and neglecting it.

3. Ghosts of Failed Marketing Campaigns. Failure happens---but failure can be transformed into a learning experience. (Yes, it sounds hokey and like what a losing team murmurs to itself in consolation, but it's true. Failure gets the best out of you when you stay haunted by the failure. Best to just face it, see why it failed, and then learn from it. Don't let past failures ruin future successes.

4. Vampire of Life-draining Projects. We all have projects that suck the life out of us. Either they go on too long or they have grown fangs that bite into you and bleed you dry. Beware of projects that last too long, seem endless, or sound more beneficial than they really are.

5. Frankenspeak. Smarty-pants language seldom is intelligent. Frankenspeak, as Ann Handley dubbed it, is "is convoluted text that doesn’t sound like it was penned by a human, but instead sounds like it was created in a lab." And if you've watched horror films, you know that anything haphazardly slapped together in a lab will create havoc and destruction in its wake. Scary!

6. Stale, Mummified Content. Some companies create a piece of content and practically embalm it. Unchanged and underwraps, the content is dead but

only has the form of a human. What scares us is content that is presented by a company on every social channel in the exact same way.

7. Lean Budgets. You can't write about scary things without discussing budgets. Marketers often ask how they can do this or that on their shoestring budgets. You can do a lot with a lean budget---but that doesn't mean you don't hold your breath, cross your fingers, and worry.

8. Great Pumpkins of Unanalyzed Data. Sometimes, too much data can be overwhelming. Like pumpkins, they are heavy, hard to carry, and awkward to handle. Don't let yourself be crushed by too much data.

See the infodoodle on the next page for a visual about marketer's fears.