B(abble)log
Quite often most businesses have a very rigorous brand policy in place that outlines how their logo can be used, corporate colours, typefaces, etc.
But how many businesses have styleguide in place, or know their brand voice?
The words we chose, our writing style, inflection and even punctuation - all work together to influence our brand voice.
Part of a larger brand identity/vision, brand voice comes from a clearly established brand personality. Why is brand voice so important? Because it encompasses everything from the character of all internal and external collaterals, the way the phone is answered, the way customer service department and sales force interact with customers, and the tone of all advertising.
So what’s your personality?
Here are a few ways to start:
A trick from corporate coach Michael Bungay Stanier is the “This/Not This” exercise that helps compile some words to get you thinking about your brand.
For example:
Bright & vibrant not pastel
Classic Chablis not weird Gerwurztraminer
Non-conformist not thinks-inside-the-box
Uptown not folksy
Many marketers create a list of about 20 human traits. (Youthful, honest, daring, reliable, tough, etc.) Once you have a persona, the voice becomes distinctive.
Another good start is to examine the target consumers’ desires. In other words, what does your target market want in relation to brand personality?
You also need to do a competitive analysis. How are other similar products or companies positioning themselves? Only when you understand that can you differentiate yourself and create customer value.
Are there already inherent connotations or perceptions in your industry? For instance, Virgin Mobile Canada is expected to have a hip and cool attitude, whereas the Royal Bank of Canada is expected to be reliable and more traditional.
Once you’ve established your brand personality, understanding your brand voice is far simpler. Brand voice makes your company distinctive.
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1) PageTrafficBlog reports that Feedburner To Serve Google AdSense Units On RSS Feeds, beginning Feedburner's integration in the Google family. Thanks to Twitter pal @seocopyandstrat for the heads up.
2) What will buying 700,000 links from the same site get you? SEOicide, according to Search Engine Roundtable.
3) Valeria Maltoni gives us How a Blog is Born, an excellent study on how to start a blog.
4) Last week I told you about Iain Tait of Crackunit.com going offline for Mental Detox Week. Here are 10 things he learned from his time away.
5) Thankfully Crackunit.com is back online so that he can bring us design gems like this: Crayon Madness.
6) For deeper thoughts about design, Idris Mootee, co-founder of Idea Couture Inc., a digital innovation and incubation firm, asks in his blog Innovation Playground What Schools Of Design Are You From? What Is A Designer: Objects, Functions, Meanings?
7) Google announced this week that it will let you place ads on TV using the AdWords interface. Mashable and Page Traffic Blog report on how it works and the $2000 rebate that Google is offering.
8) Microsoft Overhauls Live Search Offering extending its service to include branded search. See what they've done with the new Indiana Jones movie using search as a promotion with prizes.
9) Jay Moonah's excellent article in Media Bullseye on Strategic Direction in Social Media is a must read for anyone planning a social media campaign.
10) Regular readers know that I'm a stickler for grammar. Mignon Fogarty
has turned her love of grammar into a popular podcast called Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing. In her most recent episode she tackles Is Yoda speaking "real" English?
FRIDAY FUN:
This brilliant video from comedy sketch group Idiots of Ants acts out Facebook in Reality.
At a web conference in Beijing, Google unveiled its new “VisualRank” technology – a new way of ranking images and improving image search through more relevant results. Currently Google’s image search is based on the text associated with each image.
VisualRank is a blend of image recognition software, techniques for weighing and ranking images that looks similar as well as textual cues.
The New York Times says:
The company said that in its research it had concentrated on the 2000 most popular product queries on Google’s product search, words such as iPod, Xbox and Zune. It then sorted the top 10 images both from its ranking system and the standard Google Image Search results. With a team of 150 Google employees, it created a scoring system for image "relevance." The researchers said the retrieval returned 83% less irrelevant images.
And as always, Danny Sullivan does a top-notch job of describing how VisualRank works.
Search Engine Roundtable says that this could be the beginning of greater software technologies that will "index audio spoken in videos" and podcasts.
Today Kevin Ryan at Search Engine Watch said that we shouldn’t stop labeling our images just yet. But “you’d have to be foolish not to consider this potential change when "amping up" optimization and popularity gaining efforts.”
You can read the research paper here. (PDF)
Is your company participating in the online conversation? Well, the Society for New Communications Research recently conducted a study of 300 consumers who were active Internet users. The report “Exploring the Link Between Customer Care and Brand Reputation in the Age of Social Media,” provides these statistics:
• 59.1% of respondents use social media to “vent” about a customer care experience
• 72.2% of respondents research companies’ customer care online prior to purchasing products and services at least sometimes
• 84% of respondents consider the quality of customer care at least sometimes in their decision to do business with a company
• 74% choose companies/brands based on others’ customer care experiences shared online
• 84% of respondents consider the quality of customer care in their decision to do business with a company at least sometimes
• 81% believe that blogs, online rating systems and discussion forums can give consumers a greater voice regarding customer care, but less than 33% believe that businesses take customers’ opinions seriously
• Search engines are the most valuable online tools for this research, according to respondents. Those rated of no value include micro-blogging sites like Twitter or Pownce (39%), YouTube (27%) and social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace (22%)
Customer care. Communication. Transparency.
Watchwords for the today’s savvy, connected consumer.
On the weekend I was catching up on some of my blog reading and read colleague David Rosam’s thoughts on SEO copywriting and why it is a discipline unto its own.
It got me thinking. As someone interested in “holistic” optimization – both optimization for people as well as search engines – user experience is a subject that fascinates me.
But, the thing I’ve noticed is that whenever user experience is discussed, it is usually relegated to design-only circles.
Why is that?
Great copywriting is not so much about the client’s product or services as it is about the visitor. Web copy is an equal partner in user experience design.
Just as the design, typography and other visual elements add to a user-centered experience, so do the words that are shared and join us together. The content is the journey. As Mark Bernstein wrote years ago, “We see narrative everywhere. It’s a primitive urge, a way to tie cause to effect, to convert the complexity of our experience to a story that makes sense.”
And when it comes to optimized copywriting, we start, quite simply, with desire. Keyword phrases are a conduit of expressed desire. SEO copywriters conduct keyword research to see what people are looking for.
Writing for the Web is the ultimate act of “social media.” (Has any found a better term yet? Anyone?) Traditional media uses communication as a bullhorn, but when writing for the Web we have the ability (and obligation) to turn it around completely. To paraphrase Danny Sullivan, search engines are reverse broadcast marketing.
Using customer concerns, interests and needs as a starting point for copywriting allows for not only a more participatory approach to writing – but to user-centric design.
1) Can you survive for 24 hours without your computer? That's the premise behind the global experiment called Shutdown Day, happening on May 3.
2) Iain Tait from Crackunit.com is doing one better than Shutdown Day. He's going Luddite by doing without electronics for Mental Detox Week and documenting the ups-and-downs in a very creative way.
3) One of my favourite bloggers threw in the towel this week. Copyranter declared that he's done, saying that the blog takes up too much time.
Five days later, he announced that he was back with his intentions to blog for AnimalNewYork, and restart Copyranter, albeit with a less frequent publishing schedule. And the world is a better place again.
4) Are you a good story teller? Do you know all about customer experience? Like crunching stats? You're in luck, Edelman's Steve Rubel says you may be perfect for one of Three Emerging Digital Careers to Watch.
5) In Language and Mashups, Ike Pigott at Occam's RazR ponders whether the portmanteau (or Frankenword), like Freakonomics, is more pervasive in American English than elsewhere.
6) Speaking of Frankenstein, Collin Douma at RadicalTrust tells us about PETA Crowdsourcing In Vitro Meat offering a $1 million prize to the participant "able to make the first in vitro chicken meat fit to sell to the public."
7) Typesetting as an art has changed radically with the proliferation of digital publishing. While tiny drawers of little letters may be obsolete now, the concepts of how to make text is appealing to the eye remains. SmashingMagazine.com gives us 5 Principles And Ideas Of Setting Type On The Web.
8) Facebook launched its chat application to everyone this week, allowing you to see which of your friends are online and start a conversation. Mashable gives us the highlights.
9) Is it any surprise that Google was named world's No. 1 brand? The Guardian reports on research company Milward Grown's study of the 100 Most Powerful Brands of 2008.
10) If blogger outreach is part of your PR plan, follow-up is essential. Tom Pick from Socialmediatoday.com has some great advice to improve your chances of success.
Friday Fun
You too can sound scholarly with titles like this "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity." Neatorama tells us about the Post Modern Essay Generator.
Happy Earth Day, all! I wanted to share my morning chuckle with you...
As the coffee was finally percolating away, I casually flipped over the coffee package to read the copy. And this is what I found:
1. Marketing Profs tells us how Pop Labs' Charles Lewis, a.k.a. the Poetic Prophet uses a rap video to spread great tips on Web site design coding for prime SEO. I first told you about this back in February, but it's definitely worth the revisit!
2. How can you make the ordinary stand out? Scott Monty from Crayon introduces us to Jim Kosek at AccuWeather.com in From Mundane to Engaging: How One Man Does It. The 6 minute video is worth the watch.
3. Scott Buresh gives us the lowdown on coding your pages for robots in All Search Engines Love Spiders: How Meta Commands Can Help You Love Them Too.
4. While we're on the subject, Copyblogger tells us Why Writing for Spiders is the Least Sticky Strategy of All.
5. Purina is using the long tail (*groan*) to aggregate and rate user-generated content about pets with PetCharts. AdAge has the scoop.
6. On April 12th Andrew Baron, founder of the popular Internet tech show Rocketboom, decided to auction his Twitter account on eBay, complete with more than 1,300 followers. Moments later, Chris Brogan posted Is Your Community For Sale?. The differing viewpoints expressed in the comments show what a hot topic this became. The eBay auction was pulled 3 days later. Mashable has the re-cap.
7. Smashing Magazine brings us Web Form Design: Modern Solutions and Creative Ideas and proves that it is important to provide a good user experience where site visitors provide feedback.
8. What to do when your competitor has a misstep? AdAge reports that Skyy Vodka Capitalizes on Absolut Mess in the debacle over the U.S.-Mexico border.
9. SEOMoz shares the lessons learned from trial and error using Digg in I Submitted to Digg But All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt.
10. SEO is Not Free Traffic from SearchEngineLand.com debunks the claim that there is no cost to SEO.
Friday Fun
Well, maybe not so much fun, even on Fridays, for the kids that have to play in them. Check out these nightmare playgrounds amassed by darkroastedblend.com. Creepy!
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