© Richard Pelletier
All across the financial world, there’s a mad scramble to get so-called “toxic assets” off the books. Toxic assets are usually described in obtuse, hard to understand language. Credit default swaps and derivatives are just two examples, and if you can explain either one of them to me, I’ll come to your house and make you a terrific braised lamb dish.
Toxic assets, as we are finding out, have the potential to drag down even the most enduring, stable institutions, not to mention the whole global financial system. Talk about weapons of mass destruction.
Today, I want to broaden the definition of toxic assets to include the words your company uses in marketing and promotion. Yes, it’s true. Words can be toxic to your business. Poorly chosen words can cost you business in the short term, and, can cause you a great deal of harm in the long run. Simple carelessness is usually the main culprit.
Slipping & Sliding into the Twittershpere
Recently, a West Coast based business had an intriguing idea to help launch a new product. They decided to use Twitter – the white-hot micro-blogging service. They set up a feature to automatically “tweet” a hugely popular blogger and Social Media Consultant about how cool their new product is.
This blogger has — are you ready for this? — over 40,000 followers on Twitter, which made him an irresistible target. (Lot’s of people reading this know exactly who I’m talking about. The rest of you are going to have get on The Google.)
It appears the thinking went like this. “We will tweet this guy about our new product and hope that he immediately tweets all his 40,000 followers on the wonders of it all.” Fingers crossed.
Things didn’t turn out so well.
“Do not do this. Just don’t do this, okay?” Those testy words were posted at the bloggers’ widely read blog under this headline, “How Not To Market on Twitter.”
Whoops!
The problem was in the approach, but more precisely, the problem was in the words that were used: “Have you tried our product? It’s cool, check it out.” Not exactly a capital offense, you say. Sure, BUT they had numerous people showing up in this person’s Twitter stream, like so many robots, saying EXACTLY the same words. “Have you tried our product? It’s cool, check it out.” “Have you tried our product? It’s cool, check it out.” “Have you….?” And on and on it went.
Quickly realizing that the gambit had blown up, the CEO behind the product launch did an excellent job of turning things around quickly. Both parties came to a friendly, polite understanding. The offended blogger even endorsed the product! All this happened — in public — in an hour or two. But remember, the audience for this little drama was forty thousand plus.
New Communication Tools, New Communities
This company’s near death experience could have been avoided had the words been different. Different how? Different as in sincere. The moment and the media have changed – fundamentally and dramatically. Great new tools like Twitter exist to communicate with your community of customers, vendors, prospects and admirers. But these new tools – both in form and in content – are changing the game in a big, big way. We can sum it up in a word: community.
The Risk of Being Risk Averse
Every company uses words to sell itself. There are countless examples of companies that do this well. Apple uses words really well. Google, too. A juice company in the UK, Innocent Drinks, uses words in a very fresh and original way. There are many others too numerous to name here.
But many thousands of companies don’t use words well at all. Problems with words or language arise from a lack of appreciation about the value of words, a misunderstanding of context and too many cooks stirring the broth. Everybody can write at some level, so everyone feels they have an opening to take a whack at the copy, often with disastrous results.
Most organizations are extremely risk averse and they fear what words can do. So the mind set becomes, “We better just stick to the script and not say anything that can come back and bite us.” So they say insipid things like “Have you tried our product? It’s cool. Check it out.”
The Audience
Next up is context. It’s critically important to understand WHERE your words are going to live. TV or radio? A splashy New York Times Sunday Magazine ad, a website for a non-profit, a sales letter to retirees? In the Twittersphere? Understanding where your words are going — unfortunately known as your target market, rather than as your audience — is extremely important and shapes the decisions that the marketing team and the writer will make around word choice.
In my work as a copywriter, one of the biggest challenges I have is to “see” the words I’m writing in context. If I can see my work on the actual web page, or laid out within a strong design, I can tell whether the choices I’ve made are working or not. (I’m actually writing this article on my Facebook business page (http://companies.to/lucidcontent/) so I can “see” my words in the context of a web page.)
In the Twitter story I just mentioned, everything would have changed if someone had said, “This is Twitter. This is a place for a back and forth human conversation and helpful advice and links to useful information. Maybe we should test this idea within our own small network to see how it flies.”
We don’t know if they tested first, but we can guess can’t we?
In this case, true disaster was averted, but I’m thinking that someone ordered the world’s biggest martini that night with dinner.
Cultural Context
You already know that we’re living in an upside down, year from hell kind of moment. Life is extremely difficult for all kinds of people and it is deeply serious.
This means that nearly everything has changed and not very many people are buying things. So how you talk to your customers, how you use words to sell has to change also.
How people interact with your company, with one another, with brands, with information, with opportunity, with life – it’s all changing. The words that a business uses these days have to be authentic and relevant and true. It’s the 21st century, and the companies that swear off toxic BS and marketing speak will win.
To rid your business of toxic words, I leave you with three words to keep in mind. Authentic, relevant, fresh.
