Contagion on Purpose Through Blogging

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In recent months, the word “contagious” has certainly taken on frightening meaning.  But in his book Contagious, Jonah Berger explores ways to create contagion around good ideas, products, and services. “Regardless of how plain or boring a product or idea may seem,” Berger says, “there are ways to make it contagious.”

Every one of Berger’s ideas for achieving contagion, I found, is directly applicable to blog marketing:

1.  Find inner remarkability (break from what people expect from the experience of using the product or service). For every fact about the company or about one of its products or services, a blog post addresses unspoken questions such as “So, is that different?”, “So, is that good for me?”  

2.  Leverage game mechanics (use elements of a game to keep people engaged, motivated and wanting more. A core mechanic is the essential play activity players perform again and again in a game. Each business blog post should impart one new idea or call for a single action. 

3.  Make people feel like insiders (scarcity and exclusivity drives desirability). Hitting precisely the right “advertorial” note is the big challenge in corporate blog writing. Exclusivity is one of the five “key copy drivers” which business content writers should use to enhance audience response.

4.  Use “triggers” to keep ideas and products fresh in the minds of consumers, associating your product or service with some familiar aspect of life. In your blog content, link your products and services to prevalent trends.

5.  Use emotional content to evoke feelings that drive people to share and to act. Evoking emotion creates a feeling in your audience of being connected with you and the people in your business or practice.

6.  Provide practical information that helps others save time, energy, and resources. Chunking, or breaking down information into bite-sized pieces , allows readers to digest and more easily use new information.
7.  Embed your ideas in stories that people want to hear and retell. Let stories about people tell the story of your company, your products, and of the services you provide.

When it comes to spreading ideas through blogging for business, the word contagious can be a very good thing indeed!
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Let’s Be Designerly in Our Blogging

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DORIS Research, I learned in the Indianapolis Business Journal, uses design thinking to organize workplaces. As a blog content writer and trainer, I particularly liked two suggestions DORIS founder Samantha Julka offers for being “more designerly”

1.  “Spend time thinking about people. Think about how they would react or feel about the action you are making or the thing you are creating.”
This statement reminds me of a statement I found in a West Bend Insurance promotional piece: “Much like beauty, ‘value’ is in the eye of the beholder.” Because of that truth, success in blog marketing is knowing your particular audience and thinking about how they (not the average person, but specifically “they*) would probably react or feel about your approach to the subject.at hand.

For example, while you may point out that your product or service can do something your competitors can’t, that particular “advantage” may or may not be what your audience is likely to value. Are you the cheapest (is that likely to appeal to your audience?) or the most expensive (is your audience on that prizes exclusivity?)
2.  “Simple is smart.  Making something simple for other people is actually much harder than making something complex…When it feels effortless to them, you’ve done your job.”
There is actually a Simplicity Score for writers, based on the idea that average sentence length is a good indicator of text difficulty. In preparing blog content, simple can be the smarter choice.  There’s a caveat, though, we maintain at Say it For You. Given the limited attention spans of online readers, we may need to compromise between interesting and simple.
On the keeping-it-simple side, content writers can dump qualifiers (extraneous adverbs and adjectives), while at the same time, using repetition of key phrases to build “blog muscle”.

To be effective, let’s try to be more designerly in our blogging!

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Look-Ahead Words of Wisdom for Blog Content Writers – Part B

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This week, with an eye to the year to come, I’m sharing more words of wisdom from ”my bookshelves”, along with the links to the authors and book descriptions…

Sketch out an outline of events leading to a typical client needing you.
Choose a client from a typical demographic you serve, suggests Paul Smith in The Ten Stories Great Leaders Tell. Your sales story, Smith explains, relates what you did for one of your customers that is so impressive, other people will want to buy what you’re selling as well.

Build a blog post or two around a customer success story. Say you’re a realtor, and today you’re blogging about how important “curb appeal” can be when you’re marketing a client’s home to potential buyers. Rather than just offering advice, you can tell the story of how you guided Sam and Susie towards a successful sale by encouraging them to plant colorful flowers and painting their front door an attractive red. As a final touch for your blog, you can link back to the full version of Sam and Susie’s testimonial which is already part of your website. Customer success stories boost your credibility with new prospects, helping them decide to do business with you.

Our core values are… We pride ourselves on… We commit to… We encourage and reward…
The right phrases have the power to engage and develop employees, Laura Poole explains in Perfect Phrases for Coaching Employee Performance. Language has the power to establish personal connections, develop and reinforce strengths, provide constructive feedback, and encourage commitment to the company’s goals.

The best website content and the best blogs give readers insight into a company’s core beliefs in addition to information about products and services that company offers, I teach at Say it For You. Just as it’s important to tell readers what you have, what you know, and what you know how to do, it’s even more important to explain what you believe. Why have you chose to pursue this field or industry? Why do you choose to do business or conduct your practice in certain ways?

Customers want personalized solutions for their unique needs and preferences.
Driven by tighter budgets and dwindling natural resources, companies are now seeking new ways to appeal to their customers, Navi Radjou, author of Frugal Innovation posits. Products and services can be “co-created”, he says, with empowered consumers and external partners.

Try this highly useful exercise – make a list of ways your business individualizes and personalizes services to customers and clients. Drill down, I’d say to everyone offering blog writing services, to actual cases of clients’ personalized customer service, recalling times when unusual problems got solved, and when standard procedures were put aside to get the job done for that one customer..

By now you should have become a convert to the “reading around” habit. Over the past two weeks we’ve sampled a dozen precious gems that can motivate content writers and infuse blog posts with sparkle and meaning. But these represent just a sampling – blogging gems are all around, just waiting for each of us to add our own unique twist!

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Blog Content Writing is Our Knowledge Test

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Up until a year and a half ago, I had been unaware that, in order to become a certified taxi operator in London, drivers must study up for what is considered to be the world’s most challenging exam, involving detailed recall of tens of thousands of streets, along with the locations of clubs, hospitals, hotels, parks, theaters, schools, restaurants, government buildings and churches. The “10 Things About Britain” article in Mental Floss Magazine was making the point that “Cabbies are smarter than Google Maps.”

At the time, I remember reflecting that online visitors searching for a product or a service typically have no idea what it takes for you as a business owner or professional practitioner to do what you do until you make them aware through your blog content.  Without your blog, those readers won’t realize how much effort went into acquiring all the expertise you’re now offering to use for their benefit.

In today’s click-it-yourself, do-it-yourself world, I observed, your blog content needs to demonstrate to online searchers that, in your field, you are smarter than Google Maps, or eHow, or Wikipedia.  What’s more, your corporate blogging for business must make clear, you’re a lot more caring of your customers!

Now, more than a year later, I’ve come upon another article about the “Knowledge Schools” where the cabbies train,  usually for four years or more. Author Barclay Bram was interested in “why, in the age of Uber and Google Maps, people would still put themselves through this process, and what it’s like to do so.” In fact, Bram points out, the Knowledge has been getting harder, as new railways stations, hotels, and restaurants are being built.

As a blog content writer and trainer at Say It For You, the most interesting fact I gleaned from the Bram article is this: Researchers have used MRI scans to show that the hippocampus of people who pass the Knowledge grows by more than 25%! “Retired black cabbies have one of the lowest rates of Alzheimer’s on Earth!” Yes, there is an infinite amount of knowledge which exists apart from us in a device, Bram muses, but shouldn’t we value having knowledge we have earned and which has become inextricably a part of us?

When you blog, you verbalize the positive aspects of your business in a way that people can understand. You put your recent accomplishments down in words. You review the benefits of your products and services and keep them fresh in your mind. In other words, you are constantly providing yourself with training about how to talk effectively about your business.

For bloggers, content writing is like preparing for our own knowledge test!

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Acing Your Next Blog “Interview”

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blog posts as interviews
“Want to ace your next interview and land that open job you’ve been seeking? experisjobsus asks job seekers. Go in prepared with five key selling points, along with examples of how you used those skills in real world situations.

At Say It For You, I’ve often remarked that business blogs are nothing more than extended interviews. Searchers are evaluating your content to judge whether your know-how, products, and services are a good fit for their needs.

The overriding message a successful interviewee wants to convey to a prospective employer has three elements:

  1. I understand the challenges of the job.
  2. I have the experience and expertise to take those on.
  3. I would like to start doing this important work.

While all the “data” about the candidate is to be found on the resume, what interviewers are trying do is understand what makes that person “tick” and decide if he or she will “fit in’ with the company culture. Often interviewers will ask candidates to “describe themselves”. Behavioral interviewers don’t focus on facts about the candidates at all. Instead, the purpose is to reveal the person behind the resume.

For that very reason, we encourage Say It For You clients to include “Who’s Who in our business/our office/our industry” blog posts. Apart from the typical “Our Team” landing page on your website, which introduces people by name with a brief bio, the blog might offer close-up views of the functions each person serves. And, if you’ve kept in touch with your “alumni”, I advise content writers, it would be a great thing to let your readers know you’ve kept in touch with them and their doings.

One important thing to remember is that, while a website presents the company’s or the practice’s “big picture”, in business blogging, each post is like one question at an interview. With many blog readers tending to be scanners, they need to find very targeted content showing they’re come to the right place to get precisely the information, products, and services they were seeking.

“Acing” your next blog interview can depend on showing you’re ready, willing, and able to start doing “this important work!”

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