I’ve just had another very busy few months. Recent work has included:
As we move into August and September I’m planning more training events in conjunction with a number of partners. Watch this space for more information!
Work has been so busy it’s been difficult to do much blogging over the past few months, but here’s a quick update on some of the recent projects I’ve been working on:
I’ve also been working hard on the sales of my recent book, How To Really Play The Piano, which, six months after launch, are really gathering pace.
I’ve got several interesting projects in the pipeline, including more work on the PR side with Cision. Later this month I’m addressing a local business conference at Glasdir on the benefits of Twitter and other social media for business, and it looks like I’ll soon be starting work on a new book for publication in 2011. More on that soon!
Just a quick post to keep everyone updated on what I’m up to!
First off, I’ve had a very busy few months writing and preparing my brand new book - How To Really Play The Piano. It was published a couple of weeks ago, and there’s going to be a full-welly marketing campaign after Christmas, by which time I might have caught up with all the other stuff I have to do. In the meantime, there’s a blog post about it (and an opportunity to buy at a discount) here.
Secondly, I’m doing a lot of work with Nic Cooper-Abbs of All Words, a brill copywriting business based in Manchester. Nic is off to have another baby soon, and I’ll be doing her maternity cover. That means you can reach me through this site OR through the All Words website.
More postings to come ASAP, just as soon as I’ve crossed the 90th job off my whiteboard….
No, I haven’t dropped dead - I just haven’t had much time for blogging recently.
On top of my copywriting work, I’m involved in two major projects. The first, Creative Partners, is a print, digital media and business development agency put together by me, Mike Pywell (with whom I wrote my last book) and some friends and colleagues of ours. Feel free to have a look at the site - it’s not finalised yet, as we’re already busy with client work and pitching on some big projects.
The second is another book that I’m writing. It’s due out in November (so I’d better start writing it…) and is on a rather different topic from the last one.
As usual, I’m still available for copywriting work, so feel free to give me a shout if you need anything doing!
Winding down? Putting the kettle on? Getting stuck into a Friday afternoon wedge of cake? Here are half a dozen random copywriting tips to chew over as you chew your Victoria sponge. Watch out for crumbs, now…
1. Be plain and upfront in your headline. One of the highest-pulling pieces of sales copy I know was written for a printing firm. It’s a single headline that says ‘Flyers - from £37′. Why does it work so well? Because it ‘does what it says on the tin’. Readers know exactly what’s being pitched at them and what it’s going to cost.
2. Don’t get it right - get it written! If you’re struggling to be creative on your first draft, just dive in head first and scribble down any old rubbish. Chances are there’ll be the makings of some decent copy in there, and at least you won’t have to stare at a blank screen, which just drains the creative juice right out of you. Writing is all about rewriting. Once you’ve got something - anything - to chip away at you’re halfway to a great piece of copywriting.
3. Short is hard. Thinking of crisp headlines, company names, domains and all the rest is tough, and demands that inspiration strike. Sometimes you need to set aside as much time to write three words as 3,000.
4. What’s your key benefit? You know you have to focus on benefits rather than features, right? Well, when you’re writing about a really cool product it can be easy to spread yourself too thin by trying to give equal weight to all the benefits it offers. Mention them all if you must (and if there’s room) but build your copy around one, or at most two, major benefits.
5. Know your eyeballs, web copy ninja! You’ll write better online copy if you understand how visitors read websites - it’s very different from the way they read print copy. Tons of useful information is available from the Poynter Eyetrack studies and useit.com.
Confused? Angry? Wondering why, since this is a site about ‘copywriting’, I don’t spend my days sat in a basement stamping books with © symbols? Leave a comment or get in touch!
In a display of terrible etiquette I’ve just written a comment on this post by Stephen Waddington that’s almost as long as the original post itself.
Why? Because the subject - the way we’re talking ourselves into a recession that’s more severe than it has to be - really gets my goat.
If you take the time to read it, be sure to have a nosey round the rest of Wadds’ blog. He’s just been appointed the MD of Speed Communications, a brand new top 50 PR and communications agency created by a series of mergers. Definitely worth a look.
Despite what I’ve been saying in the last few posts, I haven’t been spending all my time over the past few days tweaking HTML tags. I’ve also improved the copywriting training page and included a couple of sample bits and pieces. One of those is the copywriting checklist I give to training clients to run through after they’ve drafted assignments. It’s not too long, and jam-packed with copywriting tips. If you’d like to download and use it, you’re more than welcome.
Any feedback, give me a shout!
Just a quick note to say that I’ve been making a few changes to the site’s static pages, especially the home page. While I’ve been doing this I’ve noticed the really horrific number of HTML validation errors I’m getting - mainly, I think, as a result of the site being built up over a number of years rather than planned in a final form.
I’ve spent most of the past couple of days faffing about with the code - including sorting out all the little fixes and twiddles I’ve been meaning to do for a while to get everything XHTML 1.1 compliant. 95% of the pages, including the home page, are now sorted, though the Twitter widget (below, on the right) is causing me all sorts of grief because it calls non-compliant code that I’ve got no control over. So if you happen to run any of the blog pages through the w3.org validator and find mistakes, they’re not my fault, they’re Twitter’s, OK?
Twitter is great because it’s a genuine community. As m’learned colleague Stephen Waddington of Rainier PR puts it:
Twitter is a truly democratic network in which an individual must earn the respect of another user in order to engage in conversation and become a part of their network. Users that don’t follow these basic principles simply are ignored, aren’t followed or are blocked.
The only aspect of Wadds’ view I’d slightly disagree with is the notion that Twitter is ‘democratic’. It seems to me that it’s a lot closer to being anarchic: a confederacy of individuals. The Twitter ’society’ is governed by a minimalist ’state’ that confines its activities to providing the platform and policing the worst spammers. Twitterers form loose, informal groupings or syndicates within the larger community. Social ties are reinforced by
- engaging in conversations;
- contributing useful, interesting or entertaining tweets;
- retweeting when appropriate and
- helping others to form rewarding relationships.
The more you put into Twitter, the more you get out of it. That’s fantastic. It’s social networking come of age. It’s Web 3.0. It’s the bee’s knees.
But Twitter faces two threats:
1. Subversion for profit. There will always be those who seek to abuse the community for their own ends. There are few ways to do anything about this, short of the Twitter management strengthening its governing role in the system, which might have the unwelcome side-effect of stifling some valuable aspects of the free community.
I spent a lot of time last week tweeting and retweeting attacks on the founder of one particular Twitter scam - Tweetergetter - discussed in my last post. Plenty of other people did the same, while others took the reasonable view that making a fuss only helped the scammers promote themselves. Notable in the third group was The Guardian’s Charles Arthur, who suggested that ‘…name and shame doesn’t shame enough, [and] only adds publicity.’ Another journalist, the editor of a major regional paper, made the point that although he found such schemes ‘odious’, our best bet was to let them die quietly.
These guys are very experienced in media matters, and we can’t ignore their opinions. However, I’d suggest that the only way of minimising subversion of Twitter without reducing its usefulness is for users to fight back. In a community without a strong ’state’ it’s up to the ‘citizens’ themselves to maintain the community’s integrity and to be seen to do so. If that integrity is allowed to slide, everything will eventually fall apart.
2. Too much focus on hierarchies. Last week I coined a couple of vaguely risqué Twitterisms: twellatio and twatronage. Both were cheap jokes around the interesting subject of how a Twitterer’s status is assessed in terms of number of followers and/or real world fame. One of the great unspokens of Twitter is that perceived rank really does matter. If it didn’t, ’services’ like Tweetergetter would never get off the ground.
You can see the fight for status in action in the way follower acquisition seems to accelerate. While part of that must be down to the greater exposure increased follower numbers bring, it’s also reasonable to suggest that as you acquire larger numbers of followers your status increases, with the result that more people want to follow you and be noticed by you. The only situation in which this general rule seems not to apply is if you’ve visibly gained a large number of followers by following lots of people who have reciprocated.
Of course, this is all explainable in terms of human natural history. We - men especially - have undergone millennia of natural and sexual selection that have conditioned us to seek high status. But is status competition good for Twitter? If it drives people to contribute more and better content, then yes. If achieving rank and/or reaching as wide an audience as possible become the dominant drives in the community, then no. Anything that causes the structure of Twitter’s anarchic ’society’ to move away from the get-out-what-you-put-in, society of equals ideal can only be corrosive in the long term.
How the community can be persuaded to stick to a set of ideals about how it should work is a different question. What turns Twitterers into Twitizens? A statement of twethics? A twanifesto or Twagna Twarta? A Twonstitution, drafted by Twames Twaddison and Twomas Twefferson? Who knows?
UPDATE
Phil Whitehouse has had a go, with his Twitter Ten Commandments. Not sure I agree with some of these, but it’s a start!
Anyone who happens to follow me on Twitter may have noticed that I’ve worked myself into a slavering rage about this bloke and his pyramid scam, www dot tweetergetter dot com.
Briefly, dodgy geezer Gary McCaffrey had written a script that automates Twitter follows based on a pyramid system. When you sign up, you automatically follow McCaffrey and the person who recommended you to the system, plus a fixed number of “levels” below that individual. An automatic Tweet is then published to your feed, publicising the system so that further suckers can sign up and follow you, your referrers and - of course - McCaffrey himself. The hype around the system initially suggested that it can help you build up a following of more than 19,000, a figure that has subsequently been revised down to match the 15,000-odd that McCaffrey, and McCaffrey alone, has gained as a result of the system.
Of course, like all pyramid scams, it relies on its victims not understanding the limitations of exponential growth in a non-regular, finite system. On the levels immediately below McCaffrey himself, a few early adopters have picked up a handful of new followers, seemingly in the order of tens or hundreds rather than the thousands the site’s headline seems to promise. A few got blocked by other users. The only real winner was McCaffrey - who currently has thousands of new followers as a result of his trickery.
He’s claiming that sceptics like me are simply jealous of his follower numbers. Nope: I’d rather have 15 followers who are really interested in what I had to say than 15,000 who don’t give a monkeys and only follow me because I’m abusing the community with a system that automates the process. More thoughts on this in a later post…
