Friday, May 30, 2008

[Copyblogger] The Winners of the Twitter Writing Contest Are…

Copyblogger


The Winners of the Twitter Writing Contest Are…

Twitter

The results are in, and let me tell you… this was tough.

Just to review, the idea behind the Twitter Writing Contest was simple… compose a story in exactly 140 characters and post it on Twitter. I want to thank everyone who participated, because there are a ton of talented writers out there (even at 140 characters)!

Let me introduce the judges real fast before we proceed:

  • Lisa Hoover – Senior Editor at Linux.com and blogger for Weblogs, Inc. and the GigaOM network.
  • Tamar Wienberg – Social media power user and blogger/consultant for Lifehacker, Search Engine Roundtable, and Mashable.
  • Chris Garrett – New media consultant, authority blogging expert, and co-author of Problogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income.
  • Darren Rowse – Some guy in Australia. :-)
  • Oh, and me… some guy not even cool enough to be in Australia.

If there's one thing all the judges agree on, it's that there were way too many great submissions for this to be an easy exercise. Voting was incredibly tight among the top tier of submissions.

We could have easily had 10 or more winners, but instead chose to expand the winner pool to five. So, there remains first, second and third places, plus two honorable mentions that will also receive prizes from late donors.

So hear we go.

First Place:

“Time travel works!” the note read. “However you can only travel to the past and one-way.” I recognized my own handwriting and felt a chill.

Ron Gould

Ron is the lucky winner of the following swag:

Second Place:

Tony was a snitch, so I wasn't surprised when his torso turned up in the river. What did surprise me, though, was where they found his head.

Anthony Juliano

Anthony scores the following stuff for his story:

  • 4 GB iPod Nano courtesy of the Ajax Whois domain name service; plus…
  • $50 Amazon gift card courtesy of Planet Chiropractic; plus…
  • One full year of Business Plan web hosting, one domain name, and one WordPress installation courtesy of eVentureBiz; plus…
  • Better Business Blogging: The Simple 4 Step System to Attract, Sell and Profit through Smart Blogging (includes ebook, audio, transcripts and critiques of 6 business blogs).

Third Place

When Gibson hit that homerun in the fall of eighty-eight, my old man had never been so happy. He hugged me for the first time. I was eleven.

Thelonius Monk

Sorry, no jazz recordings, Thelonius. But we do have these other cool prizes for you:

First Honorable Mention:

Happily sobbing she held the boy, her memory of his violent conception falling away. She had learned to love him, this would be her revenge.

Melissa Pierce

Melissa wins a freshly donated copy of the premium Thesis Theme for WordPress from Chris Pearson.

Second Honorable Mention:

The priest at the funeral home asked if she had been a loving mother. The children all stared at each other. The silence spoke volumes.

Derek

Derek wins a signed copy of Hypnotic Writing from Joe Vitale.

Congratulation once again to all the winners, thanks to everyone who submitted an entry, and special thanks to Lisa, Tamar, Chris and Darren for helping me with this tough (but enjoyable) task.

Winners, please contact me via email for information on collecting your prizes.

P.S. If you want to see a collection of most of the entries, check out the hard work done by Daniel Smith to create slideshows of the submissions.


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Wednesday, May 28, 2008

[Copyblogger] A Cranky, Skeptical Loudmouth Looks at Social Media Marketing

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A Cranky, Skeptical Loudmouth Looks at Social Media Marketing

Skeptical Man

Guest Post by Bob Hoffman

I stand naked before you with the intent of committing heresy (okay, I'm not really naked, but I'm still pretty unsettling to look at.) My heresy is this – I don't think the internet is all that interactive.

If I'm right, this has big ramifications for us in the online marketing world.

What Do We Mean By Interactivity?

Let's start at the beginning.

I know the web is interactive for you, and I know it's interactive for me. But for the vast majority of internet users – the ones who don't have blogs and don't have their own websites – it is mostly another passive medium. And it's getting passiver. If that's a word.

Before you start hyperventilating, let's define our terms. What do we mean by interactivity? I propose the following definition: the ability to interact with the content of the medium, not just the medium.

For example, television. You interact with the medium all the time. You change the channel. You turn the volume up and down. You lighten and darken the picture. But you don't think of it as an interactive medium because you can't interact with the content.

The web, on the other hand, allows you to post a comment about what an idiot I am, and it will appear on the screen almost instantaneously. So, rightly, you consider the internet more interactive than tv.

But how much more interactive? It is my contention that web interactivity is continuing to grow for most every function except marketing. It is my further contention that marketing on the web is evolving very much as marketing on tv evolved – people with stuff yelling at people with money.

The Electric Library Card

There are three major ways that marketing is manifest on the web: search, display, and social marketing. The most frequent use of the web in marketing has been search. Search is worrisome because it does not really fit our definition of interactivity.

Search is interactive in only the most mechanical sense. It is really just a very smart library card that allows us to access the stacks quickly and (sometimes) easily. We do not contribute to the content.

Two In A Thousand

Display is also worrisome. It's hard to imagine a medium that could be more intrusive, wasteful, and inefficient than direct mail. But display is it.

The latest best figures I can find show that the response (click-through) rates on display ads on the web are less than two in a thousand. This is ridiculously small. It is almost 10 times smaller than direct mail. And remember, with direct mail in order to interact you have to tear off a post card, find a pen, fill out a card, walk to the mailbox and drop it in. With display ads, all you need to do is move your finger.

How can it be that display ads are so ineffective? Simple. We all trained our eyes to ignore banners ten years ago. Just like we trained our eyes to ignore small space newspaper ads.

When it became evident that display was a lousy response medium, those selling it to us changed their tune. Now it's a branding medium. To this I can only say – yeah, right.

Marketing To Ourselves

So the best hope for the web as a truly interactive marketing medium is the conversation, i.e. social marketing. I am sure there are wonderful examples of marketers building valuable and profitable social networks. But please, don't post comments with anecdotes of the wonderful social network this or that company has built. For every success you post, I can post a hundred failures. Let's make that a thousand.

I don't care what the conversation advocates say, the average consumer simply does not have the time or the inclination to have conversations with marketers. Most of them, wisely, don't have conversations with their husbands. Why in the world would they want to have conversations with us?

You and I are web geeks. We spend way more time than we should looking at computer screens. We are not normal. Especially you. The biggest mistake any marketer can make is marketing to himself, i.e. assuming his customer is just like him. They're not and they never will be.

The Age Old Problem

When it comes to marketing, the average person uses his computer much as he uses his television — in passive mode. He sits back and looks at what's on the screen and when he's tired of what's on the screen he clicks to change the channel, uh, page.

Don't kid yourself. As an online marketer, you are facing the same challenge that every marketer since the beginning of commerce has faced: How do you attract the attention of people who are actively trying to avoid you? The methods currently in our arsenal just aren't good enough.

It would be lovely if the "social network/conversationalist" crowd were right and interactivity between marketer and marketee would evolve as a caring, loving relationship.

I'm officially skeptical.

About the Author: Bob Hoffman is CEO of Hoffman/Lewis advertising in San Francisco and St Louis. He is author of the book The Ad Contrarian and The Ad Contrarian blog.


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Tuesday, May 27, 2008

[Copyblogger] The Creative Accident: Are You Looking for the Unexpected?

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The Creative Accident: Are You Looking for the Unexpected?

Detour

Editor’s Note: We’re delighted that creativity expert and best-selling author Michael Michalko has submitted this guest article on finding unexpected gems in creative pursuits.

Whenever we attempt to do something and fail, we end up doing something else. As simplistic as this statement may seem, it is the first principle of creative accident. We may ask ourselves why we have failed to do what we intended, and this is the reasonable, expected thing to do.

But the creative accident provokes a different question: What have we done? Answering that question in a novel, unexpected way is the essential creative act. It is not luck, but rather creative insight of the highest order.

Even when people set out to act purposefully and rationally to do something, they wind up doing things they did not intend. John Wesley Hyatt, an Albany printer and mechanic, worked long and hard trying to find a substitute for billiard-ball ivory, then coming into short supply. He invented, instead, celluloid— the first commercially successful plastic.

B.F. Skinner advised people that when you are working on something and find something interesting, drop everything else and study it. In fact, he emphasized this as a first principle of scientific methodology.

This is what William Shockley and a multi-discipline Bell labs team did. They were formed to invent the MOS transistor and ended up instead with the junction transistor and the new science of semiconductor physics. These developments eventually led to the MOS transistor and then to the integrated circuit and to new breakthroughs in electronics and computers. William Shockley described it as a process of "creative failure methodology."

Richard Feynman, a Nobel Laureate physicist, had an interesting practical test that he applied when reaching a judgment about a new idea: Did it explain something unrelated to the original problem? In other words,

  • What can you explain that you didn't set out to explain?
  • What did you discover that you didn't set out to discover?

In 1938, 27 year old Roy Plunkett set out to invent a new refrigerant. Instead, he created a glob of white waxy material that conducted heat and did not stick to surfaces. Fascinated by this "unexpected" material, he abandoned his original line of research and experimented with this interesting material, which eventually became known by its household name, "Teflon."

In principle, the unexpected event that gives rise to a creative invention is not all that different from the unexpected automobile breakdown that forces us to spend a night in a new and interesting town, the book sent to us in error that excites our imagination, or the closed restaurant that forces us to explore a different cuisine. But when looking for ideas or creative solutions, many of us ignore the unexpected and, consequently, lose the opportunity to turn chance into a creative opportunity.

About the Author: Michael Michalko is one of the most highly-acclaimed creativity experts in the world and author of the best-seller Thinkertoys (A Handbook of Business Creativity), ThinkPak (A Brainstorming Card Deck), and Cracking Creativity (The Secrets of Creative Genius).


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Friday, May 23, 2008

[Copyblogger] Why Targeting Selective Perception Captures Immediate Attention

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Why Targeting Selective Perception Captures Immediate Attention

Perception

People are unique, and everyone sees the world differently.

Present two people with identical items and you’ll get two different perceptions about the packaging and material.

One man sees Pledge, an outstanding furniture polish, and the other man sees a can of spray no different from any other furniture polish. One woman sees a luxurious Gucci purse, and the other sees an overpriced bag to hold keys and makeup.

Selective perception is what makes consumers process stimuli most relevant to their needs and evaluation. And we each do this continually in a process called perceptual vigilance.

In short, we watch out for what matters most to us.

We use perception vigilance continually. We see what we want to see – usually the stimuli that relates to our lives or that reinforces our beliefs. We filter out the rest; we already have enough to deal with.

Then we experience an event that triggers a change.

Wow, Where’d All These Come From?

Have you ever bought a car? You brought the car home, drove it around for a day or two, and you suddenly noticed how many other people own cars just like yours.

How about a baby? Women who become pregnant suddenly realize how many other women are pregnant. Then the baby arrives, and new fathers find themselves seeing other new fathers with babies everywhere they go.

In the market for a new computer? You might be noticing advertisements for computers all over the place.

We never noticed these similarities before. Now we do. Where did all those cars and pregnant women and babies come from?

They were always there. We just didn’t see them, because our selective perception filtered them out. A trigger event woke us up, changing our perception and we suddenly notice what we never saw before.

The Awakening and Your Marketing

Trigger events are important to marketing because they are opportunity. Salespeople, copywriters and marketing pros can all tap into the power of triggers.

Focus marketing on a target group who has recently experienced a trigger event, and watch what happens.

Right now, just after a trigger event, the group’s selective perception is noticing similarities. People are realizing, “Hey! That’s just like me!”

They’re paying attention. Don’t miss your chance.

Use words, images or concepts that directly relate to the trigger event of this group. It makes everything pop. If the stimuli relates to their lives just after a trigger event, these people are more likely to become customers, too.

So capture their attention while you have it. Shout out the similarities. Address their newfound perception and tap into the window of opportunity you have.

Eventually, of course, people move on. They acknowledge the similarity and start to see it as commonplace, not new and exciting. They begin to filter the stimuli out. The new car isn’t anything special. The pregnancy passes. The baby gets absorbed into the family.

That’s okay. They aren’t your target audience anymore.

About the Author: For more tips from James Chartrand on hitting the target with the right words to trigger a reaction, shoot over to Men With Pens, where he’ll teach you pro writing techniques Better yet, go marksman, and get the Men with Pens feed.


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