• Scratching a niche: smaller audiences, larger markets

What? Some people like reading about miniature donkeys.

I was in the doctor’s office today. Nothing serious — I just suffer from a fatal disease called Life.

But that’s not the point. The point is, while sitting in the waiting room I came across BP Magazine, a magazine for those suffering from bipolar disorder. It’s a glossy, professional, and remarkably interesting publication with such articles as Bipolar in the Media, which explores the growing recognition of bipolar disorder in movies and television shows.

But what caught my attention wasn’t the content of the magazine so much as its specialised nature: if you don’t have a bipolar disorder, or know someone who does, it’s not likely you’re going to have a copy of BP sitting on your living room coffee table.

• The hidden truth behind consultants

A word of warning about consultants: a great many of them are clinically insane.

Not all, of course. Many of them are merely idiots.

But the big ones, the ones that make the big bucks — they’re generally completely loopy.

It’s inevitable, really. Who’s going to put out tens of thousands of dollars in return for sane, reasonable ideas?

Consider the great Toronto Transit Commission map debacle of 1992.

• Adventures in advertising: This is a recording

I should come clean and admit that this post is appearing in both Ad Nauseam and Editor’s Sidebar since it deals with both advertising and editing. 

Hey, why waste a good post?

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Many years ago, I worked at a small start-up magazine. The owner and publisher, Peter, was adamant about the need for advertisers if we wanted to grow our business.   

Of course, back then we didn’t actually say, “grow our business.” We might “increase our business,” or our business might grow. But the idea of “growing” a business hadn’t made its way into the vernacular yet. However, if it had, Peter would have said it. I’ve never liked the expression, although I’m hard pressed to explain why. You “grow” corn. You “grow” turnips. But damn it, you don’t “grow the farm.” Likewise, your children “grow,” but you don’t “grow your children.”

Nodding heads

I follow a number of marketing blogs (currently The Ad Contrarian is one of my favourites, but that’s a different story). On Jonathan Trenn’s Digital Street Journal he makes a point I think we all too often overlook when complaining that this or that person or group “just doesn’t get it.”

He writes of attending a conference in San Francisco during which he realized that the crowd of 400 “energetic people who are on the forefront of marketing communications and the technology that will make it possible” were all remarkably the same. In other words, “overly diverse” is not a phrase likely to be found in any news report of the event.

With that realization he goes on to say:

It’s imperative that we in social media seek to understand the diverse world that we’ll be looking to engage. It’s imperative that we realize that many of those that we see as “not getting it” will end up “getting it” on their own terms and in ways that will reflect their own cultural experiences. And it’s all the more important if we’re correct in our assertions that this is how we’ll be receiving our marketing messages, our news…the information that we need to live by. (“My Age of Conversation Post,” Digital Street Journal, November 15, 2008.)

While Trenn is essentially speaking about two cultures (the targeted marketing audience, and the promoters/designers of the new media), there are actually three cultures involved with the whole marketing activity.

1. Category One: The targeted marketing audience: These, of course, are the people already using the media whom the marketers are hoping to engage in their marketing strategy. And woe unto the new media marketer who enters the fray without knowing the shibboleths and secret handshakes of the in crowd. To make matters worse, the culture of one in crowd can be radically different from the culture of another.

2. Category Two: The promoters and designers of the new media: These are the people who are probably most represented at a site like ThinkBalm. They are definitely “plugged-in,” “with it,” and “on the cutting edge.” They are smart, inventive, and most of all enthused. They are also, however, the people who come up with the names and terms used in these applications.

3. Category Three: The targeted financing audience: These are the people that Category Two people are trying to convince to put money into the new media. They are, by and large, not part of the in crowd. They may not be technophobes, but they probably don’t spend much time Twittering, keeping up a page on Facebook or MySpace, and have likely not even heard of Second Life, unless there’s been a particularly juicy scandal about it in the news recently.

When Category Two people try talking to Category Three people, the results often make about as much sense as a Dane speaking Swahili with a heavy Martian accent.

“You see sir, after you join up you can myrl an entry and…”

“Myrl?”

“Yes sir, it’s kind of like spriging something in Sprigit, but it’s called a myrl here.”

“Spryl?”

“Um, no. Myrl. Or Sprig. It depends on what you mean.”

“Problem is, I don’t know what I mean. Let’s just put the money in a damned television spot like always!”

The point I’m trying to make, of course, is that all too often when we complain some old fogey “just doesn’t get it,” the reason is that we haven’t really tried to give it to him. And the applications themselves don’t help. It was something I noticed years ago when I had one foot in the world of the programmers, and the other foot in the world of the users. While programmers were happily coming up with their own terms, many of which came from the heavily technical end while others consisted of in-jokes, the users were unhappily trying to figure out how to put a “string” in a computer and why there was a button called “query” when they weren’t asking a question.

Second Life is a good case study, as I pointed out in a previous article (“When Boojums attack,” Metaverse Messenger, September 23). The “Debug Settings” have to be among the most offensively cryptic settings in Second Life. Not only does the term “debug” send most non-geek users running in the opposite direction, but their names seem to consist of ultra-technical terms combined with some kind of running in-jokes. As for their descriptions, they do little more than reiterate the names. CheesyBeacon, for instance, enables “cheesy beacon effects,” while the FlycamAxisDeadZone1 is described simply as “Flycam axis 1 dead zone.”

The support features are of limited help. To start with there are several, and most seem to wallow in a labyrinth of jargon. When faced with enough of this incomprehensibility, most users simply decide to go somewhere else. (15,000,000 registered users versus a few hundred thousand active residents — that’s a lot of dissatisfaction).

Now imagine trying to explain any of that to a client who is looking into the use of the immersive Internet for his company. “The challenge before us,” says Trenn at the end of his blog post, “is not only to overcome the barriers of those who seek to resist the changes we are embracing; it is also to develop a deeper understanding of the diverse peoples that are becoming users of social media.”

This also includes the users on both ends — not just those already in Facebook, MySpace, Second Life and the rest, but those trying to use these platforms as business tools.

“If we fail to do that,” Trenn concludes, “we’ll simply be a bunch of nodding heads mistakenly thinking that we are the future of communication.”

And most nodding heads happily sit looking out the back window of cars with no clue what’s coming up.

When Boojums attack!

In the midst of the word he was trying to say
In the midst of his laughter and glee
He had softly and silently vanished away
For the snark was a boojum, you see.
— Lewis Carroll, “The Hunting of the Snark“

Recently I suggested that a client change the name of his product (a platform for virtual tradeshows) and completely revamp his website. Not only was the name meaningless to the average prospect, but his website seemed to be talking about something entirely different.

Names are important. They’re the first thing most people ever know about a product or service and should convey something about its nature. All too often, however, names appear to be chosen as an afterthought.

Truly bad names can be avoided with a bit of thought. Whoever came up with “Poolife” for a pool cleaning service obviously wasn’t completely clear-headed at the time. Other times the name itself may be fine, but as a URL new and unwanted meanings emerge. As an example, “John,” of the Bad Product Names blog, tells the following (possibly apocryphal) story.

An employee at a software company was fired for visiting a particular website. Which site was it? Experts Exchange. But why? It seems like a legitimate site that one would go to in order to find help on various topics.

The answer, of course, was its URL: expertsexchange.com. Other famous problematic URLs include Who Represents (whorepresents.com), Therapist Finder (therapistfinder.com), and the classic Pen Island (penisland.com) — although the last is actually a sophisticated joke.

Most often, however, the problem isn’t a bad name (such as “Crooks Accounting”), but a name that fails to give any real information, and the technology industry is the worst culprit. Matthew Stibbe, of the Bad Language blog, calls technology product names “a rich vein of terrible writing”:

For example, what are the following products from one well-known manufacturer: dv8000z, PSC 2350, vp6300? One is a printer, one is a laptop computer and one is a projector. How can you tell? How can you differentiate one product in a given range from another? The answer is, quite simply, that you can’t. (Matthew Stibbe: Bad Language.)

This is essentially what I faced with the creator of the virtual trade show platform. He was first and foremost a programmer and engineer with a stunning amount of expertise (bluntly put, he’s something of a bloody genius), but when it came to describing his service he could only speak to fellow programmers. With the change of a name, however, and a bit of guidance on articulating the purpose of his service, he was able to create a new website which showcased his product in an intelligent and engaging manner.

But names aren’t the only culprits, and sometimes even the worst of them can be overcome with good products. “Bowel Buddy” is a popular brand of cookie in certain regions, and Fluke Trucking actually capitalized on its rather unfortunate name with a clever tagline: “If it’s on time, it’s a Fluke.”

What’s worse is when bad instructions and “help” features drive away existing clients.

The people who chose “Second Life” did themselves proud. Not only is it understandable, it describes the service in two concise words. It’s just too bad the name was the extent of their communicative talents.

One of the most common complaints against Second Life is its difficulty — but why? Learning to move your avatar and interact with things really isn’t hard, and while camera movements require a bit more time, surely most people have mastered it in under an hour.

So what makes Second Life “difficult”?

I would have to lay the blame on its almost aggressively incomprehensible jargon. I used to be a programmer (many, many years ago) and the one thing I would never think of doing is playing with another programmer’s debug settings. Yet in SL the Debug Settings are precisely where we have to go if we want to enhance our in-world experience.

And then, when new residents finally discover the value of Debug Settings, they’re faced with the almost offensively cryptic nature of the options. What, for instance, does AutoMimeDiscovery do — check the surrounding area for unspeaking, white-faced avatars trapped in invisible boxes? And what about CheesyBeacon, DisplayAvatarAgentTarget and FlycamAxisDeadZone1? The descriptions accompanying them are little more than a reiteration of the names. CheesyBeacon, for instance, enables “cheesy beacon effects,” while the FlycamAxisDeadZone1 is described simply as “Flycam axis 1 dead zone.”

Yep. That helps.

Residents are often encouraged to use the available support features, but many find the explanations to be a labyrinth of jargon. When a new resident (read “new customer”) is faced with enough unfathomable jargon, the natural reaction is to simply go away — a problem with which Second Life is quite familiar (15,000,000 registered users versus a few hundred thousand active residents).

Part of marketing your product or service occurs up front with things like names and advertising campaigns. The rest takes place behind the scenes. If you’ve succeeded in acquiring new customers, don’t chase them away with incomprehensible instructions. Bad names, bad URLs, and bad customer features can all add up to some pretty nasty Boojums which, if not dealt with quickly, can lead to your customer base “softly and silently” vanishing away.

• You too can be a Fluke

Fluke Transport -- Wait until you see their tag line

When Bobby Fluke inherited his father’s business, he decided the company needed a good tag line.

But what can you do with Fluke Transportation?

What Bobby did, it turns out, was to create one of the most memorable advertising slogans in trucking history.

Tag lines are an extremely effective means of promoting recognition of your product or service. “Melt in your mouth, not in your hand.” “Just do it.” “The quicker picker-upper.” “You deserve a break today.” For most people, these phrases are synonymous with their brands: M&Ms, Nike, Bounty, and McDonald’s.