Literacy Leaving the Country

by | Sep 4, 2012 | Random

In a recent discussion on LinkedIn, in the marketing communications group I think it was, several people were opining on the issue of an unsettling trend toward devaluing copywriting. Pretty much like for everything else one makes, compensation is being squeezed. Editorial and writing skills are often considered a commodity, and outsourced to other english-speaking countries, like India.  Or, even worse, companies distribute writing tasks amongst their various managers, without training them in editorial/writing guidelines.

But what I think is fundamentally happening is that most people are not reading.  And college-graduates, who may include the marketing and product managers that copywriters service, are becoming less proficient.  And those who are proficient readers (and naturally writers), may have trouble comprehending this fact.

So when the account person at the ad agency says about your beautifully written copy, “dumb it down”, they do know what they’re talking about.

Here’s some interesting statistics about how much Americans read:

In 2004, a National Endowment for the Arts report titled “Reading at Risk” found only 57 percent of American adults had read a book in 2002. Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20381678/ns/us_news-life/t/poll-one-four-adults-read-no-books-last-year/

    •    44 percent of American 4th grade students cannot read fluently, even when they read grade-level stories aloud under supportive testing conditions. (ref. National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Pinnell et al., 1995)
    •    50 percent of American adults are unable to read an eighth grade level book (ref. Illiterate America, Jonathan Kozol)
    •    According to the Journal of American Medical Association, 46% of American adults cannot understand the label on their prescription medicine.
Source: http://kristimaloney.hubpages.com/hub/How-to-Get-Your-Elementary-School-Kids-Reading-Reading-Practice-Reading-Program-Beyond-Grade-Level

So,  if you’ve understood this much…read on and hope you are in the minority of proficient readers.  The situation is getting worse.

The National Center for Education Statstics tested 19000 adults to measurse how well they comprehend basic instructions and tasks through reading — such as computing costs per ounce of food items, comparing viewpoints on two editorials and reading prescription labels.

  • Only 41 percent of graduate students tested in 2003 could be classified as “proficient” in prose — reading and understanding information in short texts — down 10 percentage points since 1992. 
  • Of college graduates, only 31 percent were classified as proficient — compared with 40 percent in 1992.  

Source:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/24/AR2005122400701.html

Keeping up with the news you can use.

by | Oct 8, 2011 | Random

Need to know of what’s hot, but don’t have time to cruise the web.  Value journalism? Not just the buzz, but a thoughtfully edited compilation, organized by your business interest?  Then check out SmartBrief. For example, here are the top five most-clicked links in SmartBrief on Social Media:

The Lost 1984 Video: young Steve Jobs introduces the Macintosh

by | Oct 7, 2011 | Random

Steve Job’s baby was totally awesome. Not to date myself (as much as I enjoy that), but my dad had one of these: a Macintosh 512 K. It may not have been the first Apple personal computer (the Lisa came before it), but it was the first PC to have WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) and a GUI (graphical user interface) if I recall correctly.  The programs it ran are still the bones of today’s robust graphics programs, like MacPaint.  And not only did it talk, but you could choose different voices.

Search-Engine-Friendly Design and Development Basics[1]

by | Sep 30, 2011 | Random

Sometimes it’s a good idea to review the basics — whether it’s SEO or watercolor painting.  I remember when I was finishing up my art school courses at School of Visual Arts, and decided to take a drawing class at my local night school. I learned as much there as I had in college.  Below, you’ll see what I’ve condensed from SEO authority, Seomoz.  And whether you’re an SEO pro or new to the whole idea of search engine optimization, I hope you’ll either learn from or get refreshed by these handy guidelines.
Indexing
HTML is good. Flash is bad.
By using tools like Google’s
cache, SEO-browser.com, the MozBar or Yellowpipe you can see what elements of
your content are visible and indexable to the engines.
According to Seomoz, they
have “a nifty tool called ‘Term Extractor’ that will display words and
phrases ordered by frequency.”
Keyword Density and Page
Optimization
Contrary to popular belief,
keyword usage and targeting are only a small part of the search engines’
ranking algorithms according to SEOMOZ. 
However, they recommend that you:
·     
Place your keyword close
to the beginning of text.
·     
Use the keyword at least
once in the
o    
Title tag
o    
H1 header tag of the
page
o    
alt attribute of an
image
o    
meta description tag
o    
URL
·     
In the body copy, use it
at least 3X, bold it at least once.

Title Tags

Experts agree that the title
tag is the most important place to use keywords to achieve high rankings
(afterall, it is the summary of the site that comes up in search).
Keep your most important copy to 70 characters or less, as
that is all that shows on the page.

Meta Tags

The meta description tag serves the function of advertising
copy, drawing readers to your site from the results and thus, is an extremely
important part of search marketing. Crafting a readable, compelling description
using important keywords (notice how Google “bolds” the searched
keywords in the description) can draw a much higher click-through rate of
searchers to your page.

Redundancy confuses search engines

Give each page unique copy. If that’s not possible, say you
have text and a PDF download of that text on the same page,  you can use a “301” redirect
in the PDF’s URL. Alternatively, you can do a “Canonical URL tag” in
the HTML description of the page.  You’ll have to look up what canonical means for yourself 🙂


[1]http://seomoz.org.  “The Basics of Search Engine Friendly Design and
Development” . http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/basics-of-search-engine-friendly-design-and-development.
Accessed 9/22/11

Optimize search by speaking like a person, not a corporation.

by | Sep 28, 2011 | Random

You can write for people and search engines, too.

Recently I wanted to test my instincts and show the client how well I was writing copy for search-friendliness.
Writers have a natural tendency to make up terms like the one I just used. But when writing online, you need to think quite literally: keeping the intelligence level of your search engine robots…not not to mention the 6th-grade level literacy of your readers… in mind.  That doesn’t mean you have to publish the same copy over and over again (in fact, duplicate content on different pages will confuse the search engines) or dumb everything down. But you do need to think what is the person looking for and what would they type into the search engine.  In this case, I was appealing to high-level managers to attend a marketing course.

Since this course costs more for 4 days than I make in the month, I figured I’d appeal to a 10th grade reading level.  Then I tried to instill some emotion into the writing, as I usally do. What I tested (using google search) and found, was that a colloquial terms outranked the business terminology.  See below (in bold) how the marketing term “customer-centric”  performed compared to “give the customer what they want”, outranking it by about 500 to 1.

Here’s how some of the terms used stacked up. 

  • customer-centric marketing 1,360,000 
  • customer engagement
    marketing 5,530 M
  • customer engagement
    7,610,000 results
  • customer centered marketing
    2,130,000
  • customer experience
    82,400,000 results
  • marketing innovation 102,000
    M
  • what the customer wants
    196,000,000 results
  • giving the customer what
    they want 106,000,000
  • give
    the customer what they want 
    521,000,000 results 

The Mad Men Account by Daniel Mendelsohn | The New York Review of Books

by | Sep 22, 2011 | Random

I just started watching the Mad Men series via the Wii and Netflix. I’d tried watching it when it first aired. But I couldn’t stomach it.  It was just too depressing. I had believed in the “Golden Age of Advertising.” You could be creative and make lots of money!  But by 1980 that era had passed. We’d entered the age of feminism, and unlike Peg, it didn’t occur to me what a lethal combination it was to be both a young woman and a lousy secretary!
 
I had the nerve, as I sat behind my selectric, of telling one of the older print rep guys that my name was not “honey.” I had the silly nerve to suggest to the alcoholic production chief process improvements after only a year of typing.

In Mad Men, we see the emptiness of the early ’60’s zeitgeist, through a glass darkly. These characters are as plastic and fantastic and self-serving as a slick ad. Even though not everyone in the early ’60’s—even in advertising—was a racist, misogynist, bigot, chain-smoking sex and alcohol addict.  Unlike the reviewer, I think this show is filmed, acted and directed brilliantly. The characters walk stiffly like headless mannequins through their blank lives, consumed with image over substance.

When I was a little girl, my older sister’s Barbie had heavy blue-lidded eyes and a big bald spot on the top of her skull when you took out out her pony tail.  She would make out with the Lone Ranger.  I couldn’t abide by this so I lynched her over the upstairs railing.  I still remember feeling remorse for that. I knew I was being “bad” …But now I am glad I did.