This morning I received an email with this subject line:
“I woke up with this insane idea…”
It seems today is the final day for some killer deal being offered by that company.
Not a solo business. A medium-sized company. A big campaign.
And this morning’s email wasn’t a quick, personal note, dashed off at the last moment. It was a long promotional email, with tons of details and formatting, and a carefully constructed final offer.
This is a Guest Post by Drayton Bird. If you know who Drayton is, dive in. If you haven’t yet had the pleasure, scroll to the end of this post right now and read the “About Drayton Bird” part. Then come back here and start reading.
You may consider that first question – about moving your lips – insulting. You probably think I’m referring to folks who aren’t too smart.
If you’re thin-skinned you may even think it’s a crude way of implying YOU’RE not the brightest bulb in the chandelier.
But if you write copy – or content, as people have begun calling it – it really matters.
For decades we’ve used military jargon as part and parcel of how we talk about our craft as copywriters.
Consider some of the language we use with our colleagues and clients.
Target audience. Overcoming resistance. Finding the right triggers. Killing the competition. Guerilla marketing.
Language matters. It makes a difference to how we think about our work. It makes a difference to how we think about the consumers we “target” with our writing.
There’s a them and us mentality. It’s still there. Copywriters on one side and consumers on the other.
As I wrote in a previous post, the Internet was conversational before the web as we know it even existed.
Since then many writers, myself included, have worked hard to persuade companies and organizations that writing for the web should, above all else, be conversational in tone.
Have we been successful in turning the tide against old-school promotional copywriting, and boring, stiff corporate writing?
I’d say our success rate has been spotty at best.
If you remember the Internet from way back in the 1980s and 90s, you’ll doubtless recall there was no buying or selling stuff online back then.
No web browsers. No web.
But a lot of text-only discussion lists and bulletin boards.
That’s where we all got into conversation. Lots of conversations.
That why I say conversation is the native language of the web.
If you ever do any public speaking, or give presentations for work, you probably obsess a little over getting rid of all those Ums, Ers and other “fillers” that creep into your language.
Speaking coaches will train you to avoid them when speaking live. And audio engineers will edit them out when producing recorded speeches, presentations or training products.
But… it turns out that Ums and Ers actually have an important function.