I love words. Always have. And this week, after reading several articles that use words badly I’ve come to understand why.
Words have clearly discernible meaning when used correctly, while finding meaning in life is often very difficult even in the best of circumstances. When used incorrectly, words lose meaning and that makes me feel a little lost and frustrated.
This line of thought began earlier this week when the redoubtable Brian Solis wrote an article on VentureBeat that was headlined “14 Startups That Will Change Our Everyday Life.”
Brian is high on my list of trustworthy people so whenever he posts something or I find he has written something, I generally read it. Don’t need a lot of hyperbole to encourage me. And Brian doesn’t engage much with hyperbole anyway, which is why the headline bothered me at first, but I read it. The article was about 14 companies with interesting products and services for specific market niches, but there was nothing in any of the companies that I found life-changing for me or pretty much anyone I know. It was a good article and I enjoyed reading it, but that headline…
So I asked Brian about it publicly and we took the discussion offline. That’s when I found out that the original article he wrote was titled:
Here are 14 startups you should know about
That was accurate, clear and engaging to me. But the editorial staff at VentureBeat decided it wasn’t enough so they pumped it up beyond all reason. That’s called click-baiting. You see it all the time from disreputable online publications and in print from publications like the National Enquirer. The practice is designed to get people to click on a link to the article and it works. But here’s what else it does:
It destroys trust in the publication and sucks all meaning out of the words.
I’ve stopped reading sites like Buzz Feed, Gawker, Motley Fool and TechCrunch because of their dependency on hyper headlines. The trustworthiness of the content generally drops the more breathless the headline. And now I guess I need to add VentureBeat to that list.
I would read an article under the headline Brian wrote, even if he didn’t write it because I am interested in learning about new startups. I don’t need to be pushed and I don’t need my expectations set high and then dashed. Most people feel that way, which is the reason Google and Facebook are constantly adjusting their algorithms to keep this crap out of our feeds.
H.L. Mencken once said that no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public and that is still true today. Click-bait tends to attract rather stupid people who might actually do business with the company. The intelligent person who is brought in by the headline, generally loses respect and grows distrustful of the source. But it is the former that joins the class action suits.
The question you need to ask yourself is: Do you want stupid people suing you, or intelligent, trusting customers?
This thing about the Uber executive drunkenly suggesting digging up dirt on journalists is an interesting observation point in the evolution of journalism in the 21st century. But rather than get into the issue of ethics and gender issues in the Silicon Valley, I’d like to point out another issue that this brings up.
It is important that companies, now more than ever, get trained and effective communicators on staff. I’m not talking about marketing executives. I’m not talking about engineers who understand how to string a sentence together. I’m not talking about some sweet young publicist (be it male or female) that can charm people at industry events with their dazzling smiles and impeccable fashion sense. I’m talking about people who know how to tell the truth even when it isn’t pretty.
In all this foofarah over Emil Michael’s sexist pseudo threat, and the on-going sexism of the Uber culture, I’m wondering where the chief communication officer is. The answer is: they don’t have one. I also note they have dozens of junior level job openings in which communicating with the public is a PART of what they are supposed to do. So there is no one at the company whose job it is to fix problems like this and none of the senior executives have a clue about how to do it right.
They invest in lobbyists to grease politicians. They invest in advertising. They invest in “community management.” But outside of that… nothing.
It would be completely understandable if Uber was an outlier, but the reality is that they are the norm, and this week, it’s their turn to demonstrate their incompetence in just having a conversation with the public.
Recently I met with a company outside of the "Silly Con Valley" who offers products and services for creating and distributing content over social media, a practice also known as content marketing. But in meeting with the C-staff I learned that not a single member of the team believes in content marketing. They believe their technology is so great that all they have to do is offer it and people will beat a path to their door.
This is why 95 percent of companies are struggling to succeed. They don’t know how to tell a story and when things go bad, they can’t figure out how to right the ship.
Publitek recently released its second annual report on “Who’s winning the social media battle in the Semiconductor industry,” with an expanded list of selected companies. The good news is more companies are getting into the social media game with vigor.
Even better news is the amount of primary engagement (likes and follows) obliterates the belief that engineers don’t use social media with more than 30 million Facebook likes of posts in one month for the top five companies alone. You could discount as much as half of that as bogus traffic from clip farms and even a significant number of corporate hacks boosting their numbers, but that means millions still are attributed to customers.
The bad news of that last point is companies are still, by and large, ignoring that potential channel of conversation with the customer. One company was able to gather more than 1000 likes on Facebook and doesn’t even have a Facebook page.
The even worse news is that the industry is still measuring the wrong data.
The report measured six channels this year: Blogs, Facebook, Google+, Linkedin, Twitter and Youtube. So far, so good. Next, it expanded its list from the top 25 semiconductor companies to 39 semiconductor companies and one EDA company. Not exactly sure what the selection criteria were, but it was good for the one EDA participant, Cadence Design, who ended up third overall. The report looked at only a single month, August 2014, to gather its data, which is also a little suspect. Most companies in the sector effective shut down over the summer which could depress the numbers significantly.
Publitek based it’s ranking on the numerical size of their audience (likes, followers, etc.) multiplied by the engagement the company had with comments (it was a bit more detailed than that but that’s essentially the criteria) and I’m not sure how valuable those metrics are. Recent studies show that people who like and share content are unlikely to have actually consumed the content and the numbers can be easily fudged, as I mentioned earlier.
Footwasher Media did its own study earlier this year. Data was gathered over 8 months (November 2013 to July 2014, ignoring activity during December 2013) from a selection of 95 Semiconductor, EDA and Embedded software companies. Half the companies were selected from the top public companies according to industry reports and half from nonpublic companies who were within the top five of Google searches using the terms Private semiconductor, EDA, and Embedded software. Rather than look at whether a company respond to comments, we measured the average number of comments from customers, subtracting comments from company employees. And rather than measure the sheer volume of connections over all channels, we looked for companies with a documented strategy for using communication channels as the multiplier.
The results for our survey were so disappointing we never published them. What we discovered was that only two companies had strategies beyond a list of tactical channels: Intel and Qualcomm, and less than half of the companies had significant engagement from their customer base. Almost all comments and interaction came from employees or business partners of the companies. Moreover, all embedded and EDA companies landed in the bottom quartile.
The two surveys demonstrate the rather large gulf that exists between the semiconductor industry and the new-media-savvy world. To be fair, more than 95 percent of US industry has yet to truly embrace “best practices” of social media and are still measuring success with outdated SEO standards involving sheer volume of statistics. Likes, followers, the number of posts and even shares are less likely to produce an ROI. More valuable is the time spent, on average, consuming the content; time spent on the site; and conversion to sales or qualified leads
But there is good news over all. What both surveys demonstrate is that no company in the semiconductor sector is doing modern marketing right. They still don’t understand content, engagement or their audience. That means if one company finally decides to go strategic, it will dominate not only their niche, but will be come the de facto thought leader. Won’t take much but a little willpower.
There are lots of lists that identify words, phrases or concepts you should avoid using in your content, but I've had a list of nine for several years that I've never seen included in those lists. Joe Basques and I went over a few of these in a Hangout (that you can see here). The full list follows.
Leader/leading
There's an old Afghan saying. “If you think your are leading, turn around. If there is no one there, you are just taking a walk.”
Everyone who claims to be a leader in this world is really following after someone else. They’re probably far behind the pack and everyone knows it. If you want to know who the leader is, look for the company that never uses the term to describe itself. Leaders don’t have to say it.
Key
This actuality means “of crucial importance” but if it really was important, anyone who doesn’t have it will fail, and since many have succeeded before you, they know your stuff isn't "key." It is so overused that it has lost all meaning and can be replace with “Blah.”
First/only
Lots of companies say they are “the first” to do or provide something and they are usually wrong. A VC once said in a meeting with a client, “If you are the first/only company to do something that either means no one thinks it is worth doing or you have not done proper market research.” Then there are those companies that actually were the first to do something but no one remembers because someone came along and did it better. GO was the first company to come out with a tablet PC. But they are gone with the dinosaurs now.
Solution
This means either how a problem was solved or a stable amalgamation of multiple components. But most companies describe neither the problem, nor the components so no one knows really what they are talking about. An engineer once told me that whenever a scientist designates something as a “field” it means they know something is there, but they don’t know what, why, or how it exists; only that it exists. (Electric fields, magnetic fields, etc.) Complete mysteries. A solution is the same thing in marketing. It would be more interesting and accurate to call it a Felgergarb. (No, that isn't a word, but it would create more intereste than "solution.")
Seamless
This is as useless a term as saying “I breath air.” Every technology should interact seamlessly with other related technologies. No one is going to say their product doesn’t interact with anything else, even if it doesn’t. Someone out there is going to find the seam and call you out on it, and then you will be in CYA mode.
Working closely
This is a synonym for seamless. The opposite of the term is, we really don’t work well with those folks, but that’s your problem. No one is going to say that, either, but it is probably what your customers believe because all marketers are lying rat-bastards, you know. Why stir up bad thoughts.
Easy to use
Speaking of lying… You should never EVER say this. You should let a customer say it. And if you can’t find one that will, then you aren’t.
Powerful
This is often used as a qualifier for “solution.” What you mean is that it actually accomplishes a task that you said it would accomplish within the parameters you define. More simply: Hey, this thing actually works! That reality, in itself is a major accomplishment, but, then, most customers don’t believe you when you say it. So, again, it’s something a customer should say.
Exciting
An earthquake is exciting. A walk-off home run is exciting. Shakira doing a belly dance while singing is exciting. Your “powerful, easy-to-use, seamless solution” is not exciting. Neither is your recent partnership with a “leading” company. No one but your CEO is excited about this. And no one cares that he is excited about it, nor that he is “pleased” about it. In fact, unless he is a hatchet-wielding maniac, no one cares about his mental state.
Avoid these words at all costs. And if you discover that by removing them your content ceases to be interesting to you, imagine how little it means to your customer.
Every company is unique. Every company has something that sets them apart from all the others. Products and services have been developed with care and dedication. But almost every company describes themselves to the customer base almost exactly the same way. The same phrases, same buzzwords, same claims, same features, same keywords. Customers are left to make up their own minds and without any differentiation they make the same choices: the one they know that costs the least.
The companies believe their products and services are their differentiators, and they would be right… from their perspective. The customers, however, have no idea what it is that sets those products apart because they are described the same.
A company may decide to invest in marketing and technology to grab the attention of a significant portion of the market, raising their visibility to the level of the market leaders, but they will still fill that communication pipeline with the same phrases, same buzzwords, same claims, same features, same keywords as those leaders. The customers have only the option of price to differentiate.
How do you break the cycle?
First, find an uncrowded, interactive communication pipeline to grab attention. For example, everyone uses Youtube, or Vimeo or Brightcove to disseminate video, but all of the most used video platforms are crowded, minimally interactive, and filled with a lot of repetitive information. They deliver basic information about viewers, but very little, truly valuable information… like who the heck are these people and how can you contact them. There are technologies that will give you significant information about each viewer and their preferences; allow you to create a conversation with your most likely customer and find out what they need to know that sets you apart from the crowd, demonstrate your true value and minimize popularity and cost from the decision process.
Second, find out what makes you different… AND THEN SAY IT! Here’s how you figure that out:
Your customers don’t care about your technology and that you adhere to the same standards as everyone else. Knowing your technology doesn’t help them. What makes you different is that you solve their problem. Show that you actually understand their problem because you spent some time listening to them. When you find them, ask them questions. Get a clear idea what they are facing. Remember, everyone is different, so offering them a solution based on what you assume is everyone’s problem says you don’t think they are unique. In fact, they may not be, but you have to make them think they are. What comes out of that conversation will be a story that will resonate will many potential customers; customers who will say, “Hey, this company gets it. Let’s find out more.”
That is the AHA! moment you need, the thing that differentiates you and makes you into the rarest of all companies: The customer-focused company.
More to come.
(Are you ready to create the moment for your customers. Ask for a free consultation here.)
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