Author: joediorio1

Writer, editor, proofreader. Making it one word at a time. Let's write carefully out there, people.

Dull writing = bad marketing

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By Joe Diorio

Dull writing, in an age when we seem to spend less and less time looking at the written word, is the proverbial kiss of death for marketing communication professionals trying to carve out a niche for their companies or clients.

Almost a decade ago Nicholas Carr asked the question in The Atlantic magazine, “Is Google making us stupid?” He discussed the scan and graze nature of reading in the age of instant information. “[The] Net seems to be […] chipping away at my capacity for concentration and contemplation,” he wrote.

In the ensuing years social media seems to have done to prose what Google may have done to reading. The demand for quick and up-to-the-nanosecond communication is leaving good writing in its wake. A quick scan of my news feeds on Twitter and LinkedIn shows the text in each post possesses the same banal monotony.

  • “We are so proud …”
  • “Today I had the chance to …”
  • “This is super interesting …”
  • “Humbled by my introduction to …”
  • “Excited to announce …”

People, people, please stop! We can do better.

OK, so writing and grammar are ever evolving. Fans of William Safire’s “On Language” columns in the Sunday edition of The New York Times understand this. Also, there is a lot of pressure to produce content. Jayson DeMers writes in Forbes, “The growth of the internet means that everyone is publishing more content than ever […] the sheer volume of social media posts, articles, blog posts, images, videos, and more means that there’s that much more potential for error.”

Still, we need good writing when people spend less time reading. Is there a solution? Yep. “Omit needless words” advises The Elements of Style. Each of those introductory lines cited above can and should be axed. We know you’re proud, excited, and humbled. Tell us WHY you are that way.

Ted Sorensen, who I had the privilege of meeting in 2009, gives the same advice, but with more style than I can muster. (I’ll shorten his advice since we’re all reading this online.)

He said a salesman was setting up shop to sell seafood. First pass at a sign: “Fresh Seafood, Fish for Sale.” Well, the salesman thought, who would sell stale fish? He shortened the sign to “Seafood, Fish for Sale.” Heck, fish are seafood, so the word “fish” was dropped. But if I’m selling seafood in a store why say it’s for sale? The final sign outside his store read, simply, “Seafood.”

And, by the way, I’m confident he was proud, excited, and humbled by the chance to open his store.

Let’s write carefully out there, folks.

Joe Diorio is a writer living in Nashville, Tennessee. You should tell your friends and colleagues about him.

BONUS: Hootsuite offers a list of Twitter feeds exemplifying good writing.

Call for networking! Because you really don’t know who knows who.

               Networking2

Above, left, an impeller for the engine of an M-1 tank (Dad designed the tooling to mass manufacture that). Above right, the Philip Morris bellhop.

My father, a career tool-and-die maker who never moved far from his hometown of Bridgeport, Connecticut, and an advertising icon from Philip Morris, taught me the value of business networking. Their lessons are spurring me on again.

I retired from full-time work recently, and decided to keep myself busy by offering my services as a copy editor and proofreader. (I successfully freelanced from 1991 to 2000.)

One-by-one I am writing to all my LinkedIn connections. Yep, all 2,000 of them. Each person is getting a short email saying (1) what I am now doing, (2) stressing that I am NOT pressuring them for work, and (3) instead, asking if there is anyone they think I should introduce myself to.

Granted, not all my LinkedIn contacts are active. Some don’t know me very well. And I already know some will wonder why I am writing to them. “We’re in the same business,” one freelancer wrote back. “I couldn’t really recommend you to anyone.”

Contacting so many people is a huge undertaking, but I do it for one simple reason: You don’t know who knows who.

When I first left a full-time job to become a freelance advertising copywriter, I was explaining to my father what I’d be doing for a living. My wife and I were expecting our first child and leaving full-time work at that moment didn’t strike Dad as the smartest move.

But after explaining what an advertising copywriter does, Dad offered one suggestion: “Would you like me to introduce you to Johnny Roventini?”

You are probably thinking the same thing I was. “Who is Johnny Roventini?” Turns out he was an advertising icon. Beginning in the 1930s, Roventini worked for the Philip Morris company, appearing in a series of movie house commercials. He’d be dressed as a bellhop, walking through the lobby rhythmically shouting the phrase “Call for Philip Morris!”

This was an exceptionally successful advertising campaign. Roventini appeared in many commercials and in his later years he worked as a good will ambassador for Philip Morris. He was, in effect, the precursor to the Maytag repairman.

He also knew my Dad.

I never personally met Roventini, nor did I do any work for Philip Morris. But after Dad “referred” me to him Roventini did pass my name long to people with the Madison Avenue advertising agencies that worked with Philip Morris, and sooner than I would have thought I had freelance writing assignments from them for consumer electronic products.

So I don’t fret when one of my notes gets a “why are you writing to me?” response. Even that freelancer who wondered why I was writing to her DID suggest a few places I could go and introduce myself (and none of them involved jumping in a lake). You never know who knows who.

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