I’ve had an enormously satisfying yet brutally frustrating day. I’m still working on this magazine website I’ve been annoying you with for a week or so. I’m learning to work within my means, which means I’ve been liaising more closely with my big-hearted coding companions more frequently than they, or their bank managers, would like.

I relish advice. Advice is up there with straightforward learning but the personality of empathy is  all the more endearing. Feed, teach, glow.

So I want to impart my thoughts on various things I’ve picked up through the years in today’s Ten.

This is a hell of a long list, so here’s a handy list of links to take you from top to bottom:

1. What does communication mean to your business?
2. Content is king – officially!
3. Advertising on a shoestring.
4. gigadial, the future of podcasting.
5. Copywriting calamity.
6. Roofs, hooves and When SEO Goes Bad.
7. Communication revolution.
8. Newspapers 0, Web 1.
9. Comms ca change.
10. The 21st Century Company.

1. What does communication mean to your  business?

• Announcing price increases?
• The launch of a new product?
• New team structure?
• Sales?

To the majority of businesses, one or more of these elements would be pole position in defining communication.

But we need to be more humanistic.

People want their emotions stirred. They want to be illuminated and taken on a journey.

When I worked in timeshare the sales guys used to work through a process called the discovery with their clients.

It basically meant getting all the info about their prospects’ lives and assembling a viable and attractive proposition tailored to their needs.

By being a great listener, top sales guys were able to craft a believable and tantalising sales pitch. Personalised. Real.

This empathy with your client is needed whatever the industry.

And you need to know enough about your product and your customer, so you can make the two meet in the middle with whatever sales proposition you care to spin.

So master the art of the storytell and you’ll discover a far more effective way of doing business.

2. Content is king – officially!

Us geek writers have known for a considerable time that well-written content on your website trumps absolutely any sponsored advertising/PPC campaigns.

Why? Unique content:

• Drives organic traffic
• Inspires your customers and develops faith in your brand
• Endorses your eCommerce efforts with heightened levels of professionalism

and now we have proof that it

• costs less than PPC!

According to a report published by Travolution:

Frommer’s conducted research among eight of its clients to reveal the content costs about 17p per visitor. This compares to the average cost-per-click in travel search of 33p according to US figures from Efficient Frontier released in the summer.

This is travel, d’accord. But having spent a decade in the travel industry I can tell you outright that travel is a good barometer of the wider marketplace. If anything, the cost of creating content per visitor received would actually be less for non-travel industries where specialist knowledge may not be required.

It’s interesting to see this sort of research carried out. While it’s not by any means empirical, it is statistically significant.

Looking for fantastic content to get your website more visitors? Contact me!

3. Advertising on a shoestring.

It’s no wonder the giants of commerce get the most eyeballs when it comes to marketing and advertising. Their scale and huge budgets dictate where your attention goes.

But today it doesn’t need to – and shouldn’t – be this way.

Ask anyone in the media where they’re prioritising efforts in coming months and they’ll tell you it’s all about ‘hyperlocalisation’.

Hyperlocalisation is all about interacting with individual communities at the community level. It’s a humanistic version of the message conveyed in Chris Anderson’s ‘The Long Tail’, a seminal homage to 21st century micro-marketing.

Hyperlocalisation is about being at the heart of humankind, proacting and reacting at a moment’s notice.

So if we’re focused on the man in your street, who do you think holds the ace card? Hint: it’s not the titan of enterprise.

As a small business, you have competitive advantage for the future. The time is now to perfect your advertising techniques to grasp the opportunities that hyperlocalisation offers.

The best news for you is that local advertising to date has been patchy at best, downright appalling at worst. Follow a few of the following tips to make your advertising sing, and you can be ahead of the pack when it comes to steering your business forward in the public eye:

• Keep it short. When you’re scribing the copy for an advert it’s easy to succumb to temptation and try to tell your audience everything. Don’t. You need to create an eye-catching piece of visual media – not recount the bible.
• Keep it simple. Don’t use trade or technical language (unless you’re selling to a trade or technical user base). Studies say the best adverts are understood and have the capability to sell to a seven year-old kid.
• Use technology. Why wouldn’t you tease your advertising campaign in social media? It’s free, targeted and, therefore, why not. Maybe your advert would translate well on to the Facebook platform. Now’s the time to test Facebook Ads; it’s still relatively cheap and you have so much control over exactly the kind of people you can reach using the website. Which brings us nicely on to…
• Know your customer. Make it your goal to find out more about your best customers, every day. Why do they do business with you? What is it that you do so well that keeps them coming back, time and again?
• Be clear.
• Look for symbiosis: Words and pictures in perfect harmony. This is where it’s great to be a pro ad director – you have the budget, you have the snapper and the copywriter arguing it out for the perfect pitch. But as the company owner/creative starlet, you work within your means. The one golden rule is to make your tagline sing the same tune as the pictures on the page. If you’re playing with a pun or an abstract literary theme, the picture absolutely has to illustrate the service or product in more real terms.
• Be random. Get everyone in the company to input into the advertising campaign with a few words or suggestions about the product or service. Talk to your customers and ask them why they like you. This will provide some critical steer on the things about your company that should be highlighted in ads, and all marketing materials, for that matter. If you haven’t found a killer headline or some really smooth visual content for your ad, ask around and brainstorm til you do. It’s eye candy and a catchy phrase that suckers in the buyer every time. Seriously.
• Create urgency. Action words like ‘now’ work well in convincing your prospective customers to do business with you. Be smart and think which words would work best on you if you were your customer.
• Create intrigue. Trailers for launches of products or services are a potent way of reeling people in. Three or four micro adverts before the big bang are sufficient to stimulate a crazy rush of excitement when you’re ready for the big reveal.
• Know your business inside out. You’re addicted to success, which means you know the inner machinations of your enterprise. If someone asked you 100 questions about what you do, you could answer each one with an thesis worthy of a Masters degree. So when you’re brainstorming your ad, you must draw on this encyclopaedic knowledge to make sure that you don’t miss the most important product or service feature from the proposition.
• Read the copy. Often the seed of a fantastic advert headline is lurking within the ‘body text’, that is, the main chunk of text sitting on the page underneath your main event, the headline.
• Tease the emotions. The cornerstone for any effective advert is sparking a positive feeling (or sometimes negative, if you’re looking for sympathy or support). If you have a lovely chocolate bar you want to evoke a warm, fuzzy emotion; if you’re selling a truck you want youraudience to go ‘roar, I’m a MAN!’ or suchforth. A bit like when you used to play with your Tonka truck. Or the first time you caressed the steering wheel of your flash new car.
• Check and check again. There is nothing worse in the eye of a client than to see you abuse their eyeballs with a grammatical atrocity. If you’re going to write the copy yourself, please be sure to have mastery of punctuation. Read, re-read and re-re-read it once done – and have others do the same before publishing the piece.
• Location, location. Where should you advertise? If you want to sell bricks to builders, find a bus shelter outside a cafe or advertise in the Builder’s Bugle. If you want to sell pedometers to geeks, launch a competition to win a barrowload on Twitter. Be sensitive to the environment in which you merchandise the majority of your products and services and be there. All the time.
• Use free! Aside from the obvious advertising channels don’t lose sight of free press release distribution services like 24-7 Press Release, ClickPress and PR Log where you stand to gain valuable column inches – online and in print – for the price of a session at your keyboard.

4. gigadial, the future of podcasting.

If you haven’t come across this mightily impressive website/service yet, you’re in for a treat. Word And Mouth says it, so it must be true…

Simply, gigadial creates a ‘station’ of your favourite podcasts.

There are six of the best on the my Gigadial channel:

• Cheap Ass Gamer. Loveable guys from the States eulogising – nay, rhapsodising – about their passion for joystick-trembling fun. With a healthy dollop of asides. Last week it condoms with dinosaurs on the packet. Incredible humour considering the niche could be considered geeksville.
• TWiT (This Week in Tech). Leo Laporte, my favourite and arguably among the wealthiest podcaster on the planet, takes a panel of different and respected folks and talks about the tech news of the week. A long listen at about 100 minutes, this stimulating ‘cast is essential for keeping ahead of the curve on what’s happening on the web and beyond.
• Marketing Over Coffee. John Wall knocks up an incredible array of internet marketing-related stuff on this fabulous ‘cast for those in any way attempting to prize the best from the web.
• Answer Me This! I don’t know what it is that makes me love you so, but AMT! is staggeringly funny and absolutely politically incorrect. Perhaps that’s it. A showcase for Helen and Olly, two of the finest unexpected comics in the UK. Superb!
• Freelance Radio. For the indie contractor or freelancer this is an essential guide to ‘getting it right’. Packed with useful advice and inspiration, and comprising a team of established sole traders keen to spread success widely. From the kids at freelanceswitch.com.
• FrequencyCast. A superb guide to all things TV, gadget and gizmo for a UK crowd. In the running for the European Podcast Awards this year, so definitely worth an ear. Driven by feedback from its listeners – as every podcast should be.

5. Copywriting calamity.

I just received a Google News Alert from a fellow copywriter – he of the advertising persuasion – clearly discomfited by the pace of change in today’s marketplace.

He was bemoaning the shortening of people’s attention spans and the subsequent necessity to write for a less focused audience.

Yes, it does change things. Yes, this is perhaps not what you entered the industry to address. But the simple fact of life is that everything moves on.

We move on as workers. Thankfully with change comes challenge. And anyone in the creative industries should be by the very nature of the discipline, in a state of high alert and positively responsive to flux.

I’ve repeated my words of compassion (and a brutal reality check so it’s a balanced response!) below.

Let me know what you think. Are you a classical copywriter with contemporary issues, or have things worked out for you a treat?

Jaded, despondent and disillusioned – the clarion call of a classical copywriter in this modern maelstrom of life.

While I indubitably concur that progress renders much of yesterday’s strategy for copywriting excellence redundant, I find the pace of change incredibly inspiring, challenging and refreshing.

I strive to stretch my creativity and thirst for versatility any which way to sate client and consumer impartially. This ‘evolution’ towards a constant craving for the quick hit sometimes takes me way beyond my comfort zone and into new realms of creativity unmatched by copywriting efforts in days of yore.

Much better to seize the bull’s horns than look back in anger.

6. Roofs, hooves and When SEO Goes Bad.

Apologies if you have a crap RSS reader since you may not have been fortuitous enough to have digested the visual pun. In a nutshell it’s an SEO software vendor spelling ‘website’ wrong which has replicated in its Google search results.

As you’ll now understand, it wasn’t that funny, anyway. More… ironic. I think the world needs a little more irony. And copper – have you seen the prices these days? Bandstands the world over are having to content themselves with a rather putrid but eminently more cost-effective concoction of steel and whelks to refit their roofs.

Someone was asking me the other day why we have this problem with roofs and hooves. You see, if you start with a singular of either, said word ends in an f. But when you duplicate the roof or the hoof, you enter into the murkiest of grey areas uncontestable by even the most erudite of English professors. Roofs and hooves.

I feel a book coming on.

Which reminds me of a short monologue from Lifehacker’s Gina Trapani on one of my favourite podcasts about her new book on Google Wave which you can read in chunks for free. She was eulogising about this ‘organic, living’ model for 21st century educational books espoused by her latest. When you publish on dead wood, you have no way to update. Publish an electronic version that lives (probably in the cloud) and it’s an ever-growing, ever-giving thing of beauty beholden.

I quite agree. I’ll be following the Trapani treatment myself in coming months. I have a great idea, an altruistic statement on behalf of Word And Mouth. It’ll benefit you all. And me. Catharsis for a writer, soup for the business soul.

Amen!

PS for those lucky web denizens who have got this far, consider this quote of epiphany, also carved from the majesty that is TWIT.tv’s This Week in Google: Do what you do best, link to the rest.

7. Communication revolution.

Fascinating bits of news pinged on to my alerty radar today concerning communications and how it’s being used for the benefit of us all. And I was so entranced that I wanted to take time out to share these contemporary changes with you all.

I’ve long since been the biggest fan ™ of aggregating content to give people the best possible news service, when they want it.

• Google News has recently introduced a feature that lets you bring together all your Google Alerts into one ‘stream’ as Custom Content.
• Talking of streams, but bigger ones, CNet now offers a ‘river’ of content mashed from a range of interesting and factual sources. It describes it thus: The CNET River offers a different view on CNET, blending the latest blogs, photo galleries, videos, and tweets from CNET editors. We think of it as a fresh starting point. With your feedback, we plan to add more content streams and other features to the River.
• In actual fact this isn’t ‘new’ news because one of the founding fathers of the ‘river’ concept was actually an advertising company. And not a very big one at that – which just goes to show you don’t need scale to be successful. Let me reference Crispin Porter + Bogusky. I’ve tagged this as one of my mostinspirational sites with Delicious because it’s just the essence of every good thing the web has given us, all rolled up into a lovely neat package. The CP+B site combines Twitter feeds, news channels, YouTube footage and served content to create The World According to Them. Punchy, impactful, incisive webmongery at its best. And I don’t own shares.
  

I’m not even going to go into what Twitter and Facebook sharing their respective firehoses of content could unlock for us all. The grail may be holy, but it’s now accessible as well.

But knowing how the web has evolved from dishing out pages to become a real-time stream of information courtesy of social tools like Twitter, it comes as little surprise to hear from across the pond that within 5 years television and radio will be webiquitous. I just manufactured that word but I think it resonates with us all. Especially podcasting types like myself.

I declare a very firm interest in this one – and so should you. As a small business the opportunities to generate a very unique and exciting message about your company are already manifest, but the relative costs are going to fall like the Lehman Brothers.

Time indeed to be harnessed to the wonders of the world wide web.

8. Newspapers 0, Web 1.

I’m always looking for new ways to hone my trade in communications, be it classical or technological. I sometimes take my queue from the true masters, aka the British broadsheets.

I have decided to forever close the door on my respect for one of these bastions of journalism and clever communications. Here’s why:

I was taken by an advert in the G2 section of yesterday’s Guardian. It talked about an SEO class in their Media Academy.

So I punched the URL into my HTC Magic phone and got this:

[/caption]

Don’t want to face you with facts, Guardian people, but three things are already at play here conspiring to destroy your newspaper:

1. It’s been 15 years since you saw a commercial web browser coming. Yet you have been insistent in your denial of web hacking down the monopoly of traditional media.
2. The New York Times recently reported a circulation dip below 1 million – that’s a first since it, um, went above 1 million, which happened around the birth of Christ. So now newspapers have got the apocalyptic masterstroke of lost revenue and lost circulation to contend with.
3. Hyperlocalisation will probably kill you first. Everyone’s a journalist. Fort Hood aside, citizen reporting is ace. It’s targeted, can be effectively advertising-driven (since revenue-hungry suppliers know how relevant/long tail their merchandising can be/will be) and is happening, right now, in the US. And it won’t be done badly in the UK forever. It’s coming. metblogs.com and cityzombie.com are replicable over this side of the pond in fine style.

And since I am a writer not a counter…

4. Your ignorance of mobile device powerplay is deceitful to your objectives. You want to teach me how to do things on the web? Let me use it first.

In this day and age, it is simply an unacceptable practice to feature content that is inaccessible on the move. Perhaps the citizens of the Grauniad need to go back to school – any courses coming up at the Media Academy on website usability? Jakob Nielsen may be able to give you some pointers…

9. Comms ca change.

Apologies first to them French folk for the tilde bereavement. Or whatever you call that excerpted ’5′ is you put underneath the c in ca.

In the past 24 hours we have heard Microsoft may launch an audacious bid for exclusive access to NewsCorp content, potentially gaining untold advantage over Google. In the same session, BNET broke the story about iRascible iPhone developers defecting to other platforms.

Taken independently these revelations mean little to the web user. In conjunction, they represent a seismic shift in the way web content and services could be dished out, at first uniquely and latterly, omnidirectionally.

It’s an exceptional news day; but these are exceptional times.

• In SuperTweets (viz Robert Scoble), Twitter may finally have discovered a way to monetise its content aside from loaning its firehose to titans such as Bing and Google.
• Facebook has broken even, for the first time in its history.
• Both Google and Firefox, in Wave and Raindrop respectively, may have developed a successor to email.

What’s next for your business?

Are you ready for the Next Big Thing? Or will you be like the newspaper industry, finally pondering how to wake from its self-induced coma?

Like it or not, change is inevitable. And you need to be ahead of the curve if you are to survive and succeed, big or small.

10. The 21st Century Company.

Apologies first to them French folk for the tilde bereavement. Or whatever you call that excerpted ’5′ is you put underneath the c in ca.

In the past 24 hours we have heard Microsoft may launch an audacious bid for exclusive access to NewsCorp content, potentially gaining untold advantage over Google. In the same session, BNET broke the story about iRascible iPhone developers defecting to other platforms.

Taken independently these revelations mean little to the web user. In conjunction, they represent a seismic shift in the way web content and services could be dished out, at first uniquely and latterly, omnidirectionally.

It’s an exceptional news day; but these are exceptional times.

• In SuperTweets (viz Robert Scoble), Twitter may finally have discovered a way to monetise its content aside from loaning its firehose to titans such as Bing and Google.
• Facebook has broken even, for the first time in its history.
• Both Google and Firefox, in Wave and Raindrop respectively, may have developed a successor to email.

What’s next for your business?

Are you ready for the Next Big Thing? Or will you be like the newspaper industry, finally pondering how to wake from its self-induced coma?

Like it or not, change is inevitable. And you need to be ahead of the curve if you are to survive and succeed, big or small.