Have a look at your company’s website. Nothing gives the impression that you’re faceless more than using completely neutral third person language across your site.
Instead of using the same old marketing mumbo jumbo to describe your business, how about giving people a bit of the story behind your company?
Why was it started and how did you build it? When you can tell a story in your own voice, it creates a foundation for believability in everything else you do online.
Do you ever forward articles you read online? Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania studied the New York Times list of most-emailed articles. For more than six months they checked it every 15 minutes, analyzing the content of thousands of articles. Their results show people preferred emailing articles with positive themes and they liked to send long articles on intellectually challenging topics.
There are lots of absolutes in life and talking to the hand is one of them. When a communication isn’t relevant or interesting, up goes the hand, off goes the comms-switch and flick — your important message heads to the rubbish-bin.
Too technical, too convoluted, too unbelievable, too much self interest about you and your products or services — these are all absolutes for the hand treatment.
Fortunately, business to business communication rarely gets that bad — but it often gets flicked.
No matter what business you’re in, there’s no stronger recommendation for your offering than word of mouth. We’re all like that – we prefer getting a recommendation from someone when it comes to making a purchase decision. When you think about it, this is equally true whether you’re choosing a car, movie, superannuation fund or computer system. Advertising can point us in a direction, but in the end most of us would like a personal recommendation.
Have a look at the Internet – most sites carry customer reviews or testimonials. They are powerful sales tools.
Are you using word of mouth tactics for your company? We have lots of experience in interviewing business clients about their experience with products and services and then writing it up – either as short and strong statements for website use or as full length case studies. We can help you extract the right information and turn it into compelling testimonials.
To say Apple Computer’s iconic Chiat/Day Superbowl commercial ‘1984’ created attention is an understatement. To this day it remains a watershed event, one of the all-time greats and a masterpiece in advertising. Since then Apple has shown at least two other Superbowl ads that I’m aware of. One in 1985 ‘Lemmings’ and the most recent in 1999 ‘Hal 2000’, at least I think that’s what it was called.
So what, you ask?
For me, the interesting thing about these three commercials is how only one of them is widely remembered. ‘1984’ was the only one with a positive message. It focused on possibility, sold hope and a break from traditional thought and conditioned responses. It sold the opposite to the all pervasive FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) synonymous with the year 2000 bug and beyond.
We write FUD sometimes, but recently I have been wondering about this form of communication. Many of the messages that are winning through today, eg from the likes of Barack Obama and to a similar extent Kevin Rudd, are also a break from tradition. They are ostensibly positive, suggestive of hope and a renewed world view, as opposed to the same-old fear and uncertainty stuff.
There may be a place for FUD, but what seems to be cutting through right now is a more optimistic and upbeat vision of the world. Maybe we’ve all had enough of pessimism and cynicism for a while.
Apple Computer’s iconic Chiat/Day Superbowl commercial ‘1984’
…and who is John Holman? A freelance writer, frustrated wannabe author and resident at the beach geek. He is currently reading ‘Out Stealing Horses’ by Per Petterson and his techo toy of the month is an Asus Eee-PC Netbook running Linux Ubuntu.
