Let’s make this quick.
You know those times when you’re driving and listening to something SO GOOD that, when you arrive home, you pull up into the driveway and sit there. Waiting for it to finish. Waiting. Listening. Enjoying.
That’s called a “Driveway Moment.” NPR may have created the term, but even if they haven’t the term has become theirs, signifying a story or program that is so riveting it can’t be turned off.
We need more of them.
Specifically, we need them on our websites. And, ultimately, isn’t that what we as content strategists are asked to do? To create narratives and stories and communication that people can’t rip themselves away from?
Think of THAT the next time you’re presented with a mile of weasel words. Make them better. Write something worthwhile and readable and awesome. Create some driveway moments.
(Originally posted at Black Marks on Wood Pulp)
Twitter is not an RSS feed. Facebook is not a list of promotions. Your Web site isn’t a board-driven portal for internal documents and buzz words.
Content isn’t simply the conduit with which you disseminate press releases. Yet, some of you continue to treat it that way.
Oh. No. I get it. You’re trying hard. Some of you are, at least. Some of you have taken great pains to manufacture an online strategy steeped in clickthrough rates and SEO and ROI and, you know, that’s great.
But what you haven’t done is create a reason to engage. You haven’t created a genuine personality.
By personality, I mean a common voice that works across every platform. One based in honesty and legitimate concern. You aim for the stats, but stuffing links and keywords doesn’t earn trust. It doesn’t make your site usable. It sure as hell doesn’t gain brand value or synergy, etc.
Content strategy gets pegged as a stat-based word puzzle. That’s part of it, to be sure. That’s not the WHOLE thing, though.
You aren’t talking to a robot. You aren’t talking to a site crawler, or an RSS feed. You aren’t even talking to an audience, whatever that means.
You’re talking to a real person. Every time.
Site crawlers, RSS feeds, analytics reports, and audiences don’t buy things. People do.
So when you start a Twitter page, do it with purpose. Provide real content to your users. Celebrate your voice, with aplomb, as if you were talking with someone over coffee, joyously relating the real benefits of your product/organization/whatever, and not as if you were serving dictation to a shopping news ad.
Ultimately, we need to remember a basic fact of communications and how it relates to relationships: we don’t connect to articles and stats and certifications, but to original thought and personality.
I thought we had been through this all already. But by the looks of some of you guys, it hasn’t quite set in yet.
Why not?
(Originally posted at Black Marks on Wood Pulp.)
This is Abraham Lincoln’s hat.
It’s unadorned. “It’s just a hat,” you’d think, if you saw it in the wild.
If you saw it in a museum, surrounded by other items, you might think it was just another dead person’s hat. You’d be okay in thinking that. It’s no different from that Monopoly guy’s hat. Or the hat of any businessman from the late 1800s.
Even if it was labeled “Abraham Lincoln’s Hat,” you’d probably only give it a passing glance. Your eyes, distracted by everything else, would fail to grasp the importance.
But it IS important. This is Abraham Lincoln’s hat. Abraham Lincoln. Yes. THAT Abraham Lincoln.
You place it on a pedestal. It begins to stand out.
You devote the hallway leading up to it to spelling out the importance of Abraham Lincoln. It begins to gain context.
You show images of Abraham Lincoln wearing the hat. It begins to develop its own history.
Finally, you light it, dramatically, handing out a lasting image to whoever walks by.
It goes from being just a hat to being Abraham Lincoln’s Hat. Capitalized. Important. Worth Looking At.
And, in that time, nothing has changed outside of how you presented it. You took something ordinary – because, let’s be honest, it’s still just a hat, though most certainly a hat worn by a famous President – and provided the context, visual cues and legend that can only be assigned to something worth remembering.
Taking the ordinary and making it beautiful. That’s why storytelling is important. Why graphic design is important. Why creativity is important.
“It’s just a hat.”
No. This is Abraham Lincoln’s hat. Pretty impressive, huh?
(Originally posted at Black Marks on Wood Pulp.)
A project is made up of smaller parts. Each smaller part is developed on its own. The success of the project depends on the smaller parts, working together, doing their smaller part thing and being of general use to everyone involved.
A Web site or a marketing campaign or a book or anything creative – they’re all created using some combination of strategy and action and implementation, and within each of these stages is a billion more pieces, and after those pieces are thrown together there’s another round of revision and .. seriously.
What a lot of work, right?
It’s no wonder we often let little mistakes slide. We go through a lot to get it close to a final project, and we fall in love with our mistakes because they came from us. They’re part of us. They make it us.
So we ignore them. And we chalk it up to seeing The Big Picture.
The Big Picture Screws You Up
I’m the kind of person who looks at the complete picture. That’s important. That’s what you’re supposed to do. That’s what it says in all of those fancy marketing books, and that’s what you learn in college and, so, you know, it’s got to be true, amen.
But sometimes, looking at the big picture can distract from the details.
Sorry. Did I say sometimes? I meant all the time.
The Big Picture blurs the details. It allows us to forget the mistakes. It projects success to areas it may not belong, creating a net effect not unlike an optical illusion, our mind filling in the holes with what we assume should be there. It’s an effective way to plan, but an awful way to execute.
See, here’s the reason the Big Picture sucks sometimes: every detail matters, and when you’re working Big Picture, you have a habit of forgetting the frames therein. There’s a balance, dude. A balance.
A Real World Example: The Albums of Pink Floyd.
Yeah. I’m going there.
In the annals of Rock Stardom, Pink Floyd is often pushed into the top 10, especially by those who grew up in the 60s and 70s. They were innovative and wrote some great albums and opened up the airwaves to weird experimental stuff.
Growing up, I loved Pink Floyd. Could not find a single item of fault, from The Piper at the Gates of Dawn to The Division Bell, I was utterly in love. They could do no wrong.
Essentially, it was a Big Picture fandom. At the time, I didn’t possess the filter that allowed me to love a band while simultaneously hating an album FROM that band. I couldn’t do it. So while there were certain albums I’d never listen to – because, you know, I didn’t really like them – I couldn’t transfer it to the band as a whole.
There’s a reason Pink Floyd isn’t mentioned in the same breath as The Beatles. Outside their stretch of five albums in the 70s, in which no one could touch them (Meddle, Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals, The Wall), they put out a lot of crap.
Big Picture, they’re a classic band. Look at the details, and you’ve got The Final Cut. And that album is an absolute piece of shit.
Which Brings Us To…
Okay, so here’s the awful truth: changing our process from campaign-driven to detail-driven is impossible.
Well, hey. It’s POSSIBLE. But it’s not RECOMMENDED.
Because, when it comes down to it, we need the Big Picture. Without it, we have no direction.
But we need to change our mindset, understanding that the overarching strategy and plan is a roadmap toward a final product, not the final product itself. And, we need to understand that the Big Picture may change as we wade through the details, and we need all parties on the same page, realizing that the Devil’s in those details, and the Devil never wants to make things easy.
The Devil would just as soon you not notice him at all.
(Originally posted at Black Marks on Wood Pulp.)
Resolution: BMOWP 03-2010 – Declaring This Day and Every Day: “Make Awesome Content Your Goal Day.”
Whereas: our Web sites are no longer cluttered with clanky weasel words and business-ese, instead replaced with real language that real customers might use in real situations. You know, because those customers want to talk to a person, not a damned search engine.
Whereas: our blogs begin dealing in insight and entertainment, rather than bullet pointed lists of what we did last night. Funny, profound or filled with poop jokes: the only requirement is that it appeals to someone other than our mothers.
Whereas: we only post video if it’s edited, we only provide data when it’s relevant, we only post music if it’s awesome, we only recommend books that will hold up years from now, and we understand that our recommendations are worth more than anything we could ever write, so we’d better not lead people astray because they will take notice and stop taking stock in our opinions.
Whereas: we use Twitter as an outlet for short-form creativity and worthwhile findings, using its advantages to OUR advantage, refraining from talking about the traffic and the weather and Lost and instead providing a blistering 140-character manifesto that says “FOR FUCK’S SAKE EVEN THOUGH IT’S ONLY TWITTER WE STILL TAKE OUR MESSAGES SERIOUSLY.”
Whereas: we give a reason for someone to read that e-mail we’re about to send.
Whereas: we stop for a second and consider how many words flow through our lives and, of those words, how many stick, and how important those words must be; whereas we pledge to provide the world with a slice of real emotion, thereby forcing a sudden swell of humanity into a communications system that has become so clogged with noise that we can barely distinguish the great from the good.
Whereas: everything we write – from a sexy escort service text message to a post-it note – is written in a way that gives back to the reader; whereas every word is a “thank you” to those people, who’ve graciously taken the time to read those words.
Whereas: we create things that make others jealous and driven to do better, which in turn leads them to create things that make us jealous and driven to do better.
Whereas: our content really matters; whereas it is really worthwhile; whereas we go forward without wasting our time.
Whereas: the curating of great ideas takes back the spotlight it once garnered, and creativity is rewarded with the attention of the world.
NOW, THEREFORE, the editorial WE at THE INTERNET WEBLOG Black Marks on Wood Pulp do hereby proclaim: This is Make Awesome Content Your Goal Day.
Dated this day, March 24, 2010. And every day.
So let’s make the promise to each other. And then, let’s try our damndest to live up to it.
(Originally posted at Black Marks on Wood Pulp.)
