Thursday, September 25, 2008

30 Power Words that Sell by Hogan

Advantage
Save
Benefit
Security
Comfort
Trust
Results
Value
Exciting
Deserve
Fun
Guarantee
Free
Love
Right
Powerful
Improved
Discovery
Investment
Happy
Joy
Money
Safety
Vital
Proud
Easy
New
Proven
Health
Profit
Truth
You

I forgot to write down the title of the book I copied this from, or I would attribute it. Whenever I'm writing copy but I feel stuck, I check this list. Then I feel the power, too!

What Scheherazade Did

Thanks to my colleagues for visiting my blog. Please leave me a comment and I will tell you what Scheherazade did.

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Edward Tufte and I...(2)

"No!" Edward Tufte snapped. "That's patronizing."

I had just suggested that despite his despite of PowerPoint, it might have its place, in reaching out to the illiterate and dyslexic. Tufte is quite literate himself. Any array of fewer than 100 figures he prefers to lay out in a simple table in Gill Sans, no rules, and let readers find the information they want. He relies on readers to find their information without fancy graphics.

But what if the reader can't read?

"They can read the sports pages, can't they?" Tufte said. I submit that non-readers do not read the sports pages, nor anything else. They consume their sports on television.

I still marvel that I talked to Tufte at all. His courses last Thursday and Friday in New York were sold out. I counted about 500 people on Thursday. He had no time for questions from the floor. Instead, he made himself available during lunch hour, when he surely would have preferred to eat, for "office hours."

I didn't convince Tufte, but my failure did not halt my train of thought. Susan Pinker writes that 8% of all males have dyslexia.

Two out of every three high school dropouts are male, and many of these dropouts
have learning disabilities, of which dyslexia is the most common.


Pinker writes in The Sexual Paradox (Scribner, 2008). This book pulled together subjects I had been musing over for a long time. Why are males more fragile? Why are more of them subject to autism-spectrum disorders? Why do more of them battle with psychosis?

I once worked with blue collar workers--men, to a one. When the rep from the 401(K) program visited to explain our benefits, he read the booklet to us, every word. I know that the men I worked with were intelligent, capable of installing complex systems. But I suspected that some of them could not read.

Tufte, meet Pinker. There may be a place for PowerPoint and speeches, even if literate people can read two or three times faster than they can process spoken speech. Not everyone is literate.

Mea culpa: in my last posting about Tufte I asked who could forget his graphic about Napoleon’s troops retreating from Moscow? I obviously remembered the graphic, but had forgotten that Tufte did not design it. It was laid out by Charles Joseph Minard.

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Diskclean My Brain

Maybe if I can figure out a way to erase useless knowledge and defrag my brain, I can finally actually remember how to take screen shots.

Here is some of the information I will be happy to sacrifice:

slide rules--at one of my first jobs I told a co-worker, only a few years younger than me, that my husband was in the last class at his school that used slide rules. "Katharine," my co-worker said, "what's a slide rule?"

carriage returns--fast forward 20 years. I was explaining to another co-worker how to execute some command. "Hit carriage return," I said. Her blank stare was a bleak reminder of how much of what I learned in my youth is now clogging my brain.

shave and a haircut--yesterday I tried again to explain to yet another co-worker how clever my tag line was, pointing out that her product costs six bits a week. "I don't get it," she said. Okay, I understand that many people do not know that a bit is 12.5 cents, but the well-educated men on whom I have tested the line find it quite droll. So I explained about pieces of eight adding up to a dollar. "I know that, I know that," she said.

Finally, the light dawned. "Have you never heard the song Shave and a Haircut, Two Bits?" I asked. The line depends on the song.

She never had. All I can say is that the loss of a common culture makes life a lot harder for marketers.

Monday, September 15, 2008

Edward Tufte and I...

You know how when the radio station has a contest, no one who has won a contest in the last 30 days is allowed to participate?

I'm pretty sure the statute of limitations has run out on the Wetpaint.com website design contest I won in 2006. Today I learned that I have won an all day course with Edward Tufte, the man who wrote The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.

Although the people at The Hired Guns have never yet found me a job, they do occasionally announce intriguing contests. I won the two above thanks to their email bulletins.

I have admired Tufte's work ever since my ex asked for it after seeing it advertised in Scientific American. Who could forget Tufte's eloquent graph of Napoleon's troops dying en route back from Russia?

I look forward to learning how to present my own information more compellingly. Please look for more information over the weekend.

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Trusted Internet

I hate to tell this story. It dates me.

When I returned to college after a year off I went to the Comp Sci department and asked if I could, pretty please, have an account on the internet.

“No!” the administrator objected, horrified. “The internet isn’t for civilians!”

I am so old that when I was in college every cable company, telephone company and public library was not offering hot and cold running internet access. You couldn’t duck into Starbucks and Twitter with your latte. Yes, there was an internet, but to get on it you had to go through channels.

In those days the people used the internet because they needed it to communicate about their real jobs. Their real jobs were not about defrauding people, or even day trading. These people had posters of Unix shells on their office walls, and more technical knowledge than I will ever have. They all achieved internet access by passing a gatekeeper.

In those days I did not receive emails offering to enlarge or decrease my body parts. No one in Africa sent me blessings nor offered to share their trust funds with me. In those days the gatekeeper of whatever tiny community granted the internet access would have yanked their privileges.

Now the internet is so vast that there could never be enough gatekeepers to supervise its traffic. Instead of human administrators we rely on secure socket layers to keep our information safe, and to assure us that our interlocutors have been vetted by someone. But as Melih Abdulhayoglu points out, the internet is rife with fraudsters. His dream is for everyone on the internet to have an SSL certificate. Businesses should have extended validation certificates, showing their bona fides, like officers carrying their commissions into battle, to prove that they were who they said their were.

I just need to point out that secure sockets are great, but we still need to use our heads.

In 1984 Larry Pournelle sent a spam on the baby internet, something about a science fiction book. He entered a command wrong, and I received 100 copies of that email. So did all the programmers in Birkenstocks, who universally derided him. They did not want their meager bandwidth clogged by spam, however inadvertent.

Yesterday I read that United’s stock had taken a bath because someone with a short attention span had posted a story about United Bankruptcy filing to Bloomberg News. The people who read it must have had short attention spans, too, because instead of reading the dateline, they started issuing “sell” orders. Had they read the dateline they would have realized that the story was six years old.

The internet magnifies. Mistakes and fraud both travel swiftly and widely. I’m all in favor of enhancing internet security, but we must accompany that security with critical faculties. Even if we trust, we still have to verify.

Saturday, September 6, 2008

Website Intimacy

I write this as I wait for the Liquid Paper on my day planner to dry.

The many organizational books I read say to put all your dates onto one calendar and use only that one. This is great in theory, but I really do not want to lug a calendar to church reminding me that I need to send a press release to PCWorld two months hence.

I have not yet found the perfect calendar, but I am happy to share with you my comments on two I really like, grid calendars and day planners.

Grid Calendars, not just for families and more
I used to take my grid calendar to the park and fill it out during football practice. Parents would stop and say, "I need something like that! Where did you get it?"

The beauty of the grid calendar is that the dates run along the y-axis, and along the x-axis. It has four or five columns, one for each family member. Each person reading the calendar has a special personal column, showing his or her appointments.

Workman
The Sandra Boynton version from Workman is widely available. One flaw: the first column is labeled "Mom." The problem with that is, what if I want to use the calendar in the office? The second is that although last year I resolved to stop giving calendars to my ex, I still do. Even if I still wanted to emasculate him, I would not do it by giving him a calendar that called him "Mom."

Portal
I prefer Portal's grid calendars to Workman's because Portal's grids are larger and their design is subtler. The calendar hangs on my wall after all. I don't want my guests to see dancing hippos. I prefer the muted flowers on the 2002 Portal calendar, the latest version I have. Portal calendars are harder to find in stores. I’m not quite sure they still sell them because you cannot see them online unless you log in to Portal's site?? More on that in a moment.

Day Planners
The Franklin Covey people suggest color coding your day planner to get the best use out of it. Umm....

Apparently, I don't get the best possible use out of my day planner, but I do rely on it. And every year about now I ask myself, "Do I want to spend $25-40 on new planner inserts, or is there a better calendar for me?"

This year when I had to replace my cell phone I tried ordering a BlackBerry, but my carrier would not give me a BlackBerry unless I upgraded my plan to the mobile internet. All I wanted was the darned calendar, but I didn't want it that badly.

I had waited long enough, though. 2009 dates dangled over my head. Yesterday was a rough day and I deserved a treat. So at lunchtime I bought what the office supply store had in stock: the 2009 Day-Timers planner inserts. Woo-hoo, Katharine! Live large!

Now I'm sorry I passed over the $40 Franklin Covey inserts when I first saw them. Franklin Covey is better than Day-timers for two reasons:

Franklin Covey pages are 1/2 inch wider than Day-Timers. You hold the inserts in 6-ring binders. The closer the hand moves to the binder rings, the harder it is to write neatly, so you miss the sacrificed 1/2 inch. (And no, I am not so tidy that I would take the page out of the binder so I can write “Sue-sewing machine” on the task list.)

The Day-Timer pages are infinitesimally thicker. The binder can only fit so many pages, so if I can’t fit in as many pages, I can’t plan so far ahead.

One reason the Day-Timer inserts are cheaper than the Franklin Covey is that the Franklin Covey ones include month-at-a-glance pages with tabs. I happened to have a spare set of Franklin Covey undated month-at-a-glance pages. I decided to use those.

Is there some reason Franklin Covey offers undated pages? I can buy them really cheaply on eBay. I would buy them, if only I didn’t dislike dating my own calendar. I suspect that the reason Franklin Covey sells them has something to do with the fact that Franklin Covey is based in Salt Lake City.

I understand that the LDS are supposed to keep a year’s supply of provisions on hand, for what cataclysm I don’t know. But if there should be a cataclysm, and if no one knows the day or hour, then the survivors will be very glad to have a calendar next to their year’s supply of modest underwear and paper towels.

Since I already had the month-at-glance calendar and I am not saving it up for the end times, I decided to date it myself and use it. Unfortunately, in an undercaffeinated state I copied the dates for April 2009 into the May spread. (Obviously, were I a Mormon, this would not have been a problem.)

Hence the Liquid Paper.

At last, the coffee
I rely on my daily planner, and I rely on my daily coffee.

Yesterday, though, I had a problem with the coffee. I tried to open a new bag, but the adhesive was stronger than the bag. The glue held; I ripped the bag in two places; coffee beans flew all over.

I like Eight-o-clock coffee. It smells good, and it reminds me of grocery shopping with my mother as a girl. I thought the folks at A&P might want to know that consumers were having a problem with their packaging.

I visited the Eight-o-clock Coffee site (the URL was right on the bag.) I clicked on “contact.” And here’s where I started to get peeved. They required me to enter my name and address. They required me to double-enter my email address, just so I could send them a heads-up.

A&P already has too much information about me thanks to my loyal shopper card. I was not about to enter myself into yet another database.

So I cut the product information off the bottom of the bag and mailed it to them with an anonymous note.

Here is where I think A&P and Portal misuse the internet: the internet is great at putting information into customer’s hands right when they want it.

When I opened my coffee bag it was 5 a.m. I doubt that if I had been motivated to call, anyone would have been there to answer. Maybe in the old days I would have written them a letter, but probably not (no full address on the bag). So they would never have known about this potential problem.

Before the internet, I might have called or written to Portal, asking them for their calendar catalog. They would have paid to print and mail it. And by the time I received it I might have lost interest in this subject, and tossed it in the recycling.

As it was, I found both sites right away. I was ready to interact with them on the spot. In Portal’s case, I would have put a link from the blog right to their calendars. They both lost me by “requiring” too much information. I can’t be the only person around who would rather use a .42 stamp than include themselves on one more database.

At least, I hope not.

Monday, September 1, 2008

Bob Parsons' Comments

Picking domain names is so much fun, all for less than the price of a new pair of shoes.

I just enjoyed watching Bob Parsons' video blog about Top 10 Tips for Picking a Domain Name. I think you will enjoy it, too.