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It’s the Chef, Stupid, Not the Food or the Decor

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The latest Forbes Special Issue devotes an entire page to restaurant reviews:

  • “Lively French bistro with Austrian overtones in menu and decor, epitomized by its sensational schnitzel Viennoise.”
  • “Magnificent Middle Eastern meals, especially the breads and spreads.”
  • “Blonde wood room effectively fuses two of the world’s greatest cuisines: Japanese and Peruvian.”

As a person who appreciates both good food and good content, I couldn’t help thinking that, of the 25 different descriptions of sumptuous eateries, all highly complimentary, there was only one that stood out above the rest:

“Iconic chef Marcus Samuelson’s new restaurant reflects the fusion of his birthplace Ethiopia and his adoptive home of Sweden, where he was raised. The blending of the two influences is astonishingly successful in one delectable dish after another.”

In another Forbes article, one published more than ten years ago, “5 Keys to Successful Small Business Marketing”, Ty Kiisel wrote, “Because business is personal, sharing a little of yourself makes you more accessible. People like doing business with other people. Over the years,” Kiisel revealed, “my readers have gotten to know me because I share with them some of the details of my life.”

The Forbes restaurant reviewer, by sharing information about the chef,  not only about the food, made me feel that I was meeting a person, not merely being presented with a product.

In content marketing, we teach at Say It For You,  stories that “humanize” the owners and workers, even stories about past mistakes and struggles, tend to generate feelings of admiration for –  and trust in – the entrepreneurs or professional practitioners who overcame both outside obstacles and the  effects of their own early mis-steps.

It comes down to storytelling – Why did those owners choose to do what they do? Where did they come from? What are they most passionate about? What are they trying to add to – or change – about their industry?

It’s the chef, (stupid), not the food or the decor.

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In Marketing, Punctuation Matters — a Lot!

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The best punctuation goes entirely unnoticed, even if it means breaking some rules, Sigl Creative reminds writers of marketing copy. The site offers a birds-eye view:

  • Periods, exclamation points, and question marks symbols mark the end of a complete thought. Periods are used the most, and readers will barely notice them.
  • Questions are great, drawing in the readers, posing a problem the reader wants solved.
  • Exclamation points, not used in formal writing, are appropriate for copywriting. You’re excited about your business, and you want the reader to be, too. (Don’t use too many, and never two in a row.)
  • Fragments (“Just. Like. This.”) break up the flow of words.
  • Em dashes (which interrupt a sentence with an idea) can be visually exciting.
  • Ellipses (a series of three periods) add informality, mimicking human speech.

But do these details matter?  Oh, yes! “You don’t want to distract your readers from the message you’re trying to send,” Jessica Perkins of Agility PR Solutions writes. Without proper punctuation, you can produce run-on sentences, dangling modifiers, or sentence fragments.

It’s not hard to find websites listing funny examples of how punctuation can lead to total misunderstanding, as I pointed out five years ago in this Say It For You blog:

  • A woman without her man is nothing.
    A woman: without her, man is nothing.
  • Let’s eat Grandma.
    Let’s eat, Grandma!
  • I have only twenty-five dollar bills.
    I have only twenty five-dollar bills.
  • I’m sorry I love you.
    I’m sorry; I love you.
  • The author finds inspiration in cooking her family and her dog.
    The author finds inspiration in cooking, her family, and her dog.

Anything that puzzles readers interferes with their interest and engagement, defeating the purpose of the content. In today’s competitive business world, content writing is a tool for “getting personal” and earning trust. As writers, we need to help our business owners express who and what they are, so that they come across as “real”. Being real, though, doesn’t mean being sloppy.

In marketing, punctuation matters – a lot!

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Grounding Yourself in Purpose

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“Some ideas just stick,” Laura Spence-Ash tells writers in Poets & Writers magazine. It’s important for writers to pay attention and find patterns and concepts that they themselves find pleasing, using those patterns to “find a way forward” in expressing ideas to their readers, the author explains.

“Sticky” ideas are important in content marketing, because they help the different elements – social media posts, blog posts, web pages and newsletters – “fit together” as components in an ongoing strategy. At Say It For You, we use the musical term leitmotifs. “The leitmotif is heard whenever the composer (of, say, an opera) wants the idea of a certain character, place, or concept to come across,” Chloe Rhodes explains in A Certain “Je Ne Sais Quoi.

In planning content marketing strategy for your business or professional practice, one important step, we explain to our clients, is to select four or five themes that are important to your point of view. As their marketing consultants, we will then make sure those themes appear and reappear in all their marketing communications.

Not to be confused with “keyword phrases”, themes express desirable outcomes resulting from successful use of a product, a service, or a methodology. For example, a residential air conditioning firm might use keywords such as “air conditioning”, “HVAC”, and “air conditioning repair”. The recurring themes, in contrast, might be “comfort” and “a healthy home environment”.

When owners express doubt about their ability to keep generating new content, I often remind them of late CEO of Apple Computer, Steve Jobs. Biographer Walter Isaccson noted that Jobs owned more than a hundred black turtlenecks.  Not only was this convenient, but it conveyed Jobs’ signature style. For much the same reason, defining “sticky” concepts about your industry, your products, and your services, helps, not only in keeping content focused and targeted,  but keeping it going! 

“Grounding yourself in purpose” means focusing on the ideas and the phrases that you find “stick in your mind”, on principles so valuable to you that you feel compelled to share them with your audience.  Use those “sticky” word patterns and concepts to “find the way forward”, feeling compelled to share those ideas with readers.

 

 

 

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Watch Your Tone of Content Creation

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“Sometimes we have no choice but to implement rules,” my speaker friend Todd Hunt admits, but we may have a choice as to how we present those rules. While one hotel at which Hunt stayed posted a notice reading “Breakfast buffet food not allowed beyond breakfast area”, another facility took a different approach, saying “We request our guests to have breakfast only in the lobby area to maintain the food safety standards on our property.”

“Tone of voice plays a crucial role in effective communication. It allows us to express emotions, convey meaning, establish rapport, and influence others’ perceptions,” everydayspeech.com explains. “One element of communication stands out — tone,” Tracy Brower, PhD, writing in Forbes, agrees, citing data from Grammarly and the Harris poll showing that working remotely increases the need to be a better communicator.

Tone and language are tricky to deal with when it comes to written communication, universalclass.com explains. A speaker’s body language, voice, intonations, eye contact, and general demeanor  offer essential clues about what the speaker is feeling; with print content, this instant give-and-take of nonverbal signals is not possible.”  Still, written messages can take a conversational, a cajoling, or an apologetic tone.

In the case of the two hotel signs Todd Hunt saw, the second message had a more positive tone in that it explained “the why” (the reason guests were to keep all food within the breakfast area). In content marketing, calls to action (CTAs) often use imperative verbs to provoke readers to take positive action, from requesting further information to actually signing up for a newsletter, to actually making a purchase.  But online visitors who’ve found themselves at your blog want to know why they ought to keep reading and why they should follow your advice. Why the urgency about the specific solution you’ve proposed?  Why this price point?

Even couched in a polite, rather than bossy tone, it’s simply not enough for content creators to provide information to online searchers who’ve landed on our client’s corporate blog. The facts need to be “translated” into relational, emotional terms that compel reaction – and action – in readers.

For positive marketing results, pay close attention to the “tone” of your content!

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Content Creation By –and For — Humans

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AI algorithms can produce thousands of words quickly without needing a human to do research or writing. What’s more, “most AI-generated content will be grammatically correct,” itseeze.com authors concede. AI tools are certainly cost-effective in terms of time-saving, but “there are also risks that you need to be aware of.” As a blog post content creator for so many years, I was interested in  itseeze.com’s list of specific disadvantages of using AI for blogging:

  • Inaccuracies (the more AI content generated in the public space, the more likely it is that inaccuracies will increase, as the algorithm searches its own content).
  • Plagiarism (by “stitching and combining” content, as well as “parroting’ existing content), AI tools can easily fall into plagiaris.
  • Devaluing of content (AI is capable of mimicking humans, but lacks personalization and the ability to generate new ideas).
  • Lacking in personalization (because AI relies on already existing content, it is not identifying the user’s intent and “common sense behavior”).

Wow! Talk about food for thought for us content marketers…Revisiting our own Say It For You mission statement, we note our devotion to creating content based on understanding  each client’s unique ways of doing business. Our policy of one-client-per-market is designed to avoid conflicts of interest, so that we can give our best work to each business or practice owner, based on coming to understand and then helping express their personal values and priorities.  What’s more, as per our Say It For You client agreement, all rights to the content we’ve created are assigned to the client.

As to the potential devaluing of content through using AI, in surveys, it was discovered that the main reasons people share online content is that they enjoy bringing value to others, but also as a way to define themselves to others, coschedule.com explains. In practical terms, that means adding value (not devaluing), helping business owners and practitioners express their own new and original ideas, and their “take’ on current happenings in the community they share with their target readers.

“Human writers play a crucial role in content creation. They bring creativity, emotions, and empathy that are difficult to replicate by machines. They also have the ability to understand nuances of language, context, and cultural subtexts that are often lost in machine-generated content,” aicontentfy.com  opines. “AI does not have emotions.”

At Say It For You, content creation will continue to be generated by human writers, meant for our very human readers!

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