Ellen de Vries: Freelance copywriter, Brighton

On Monday August 31st from 5.30 until 6.30 @theskiff

A safe space for professional writers, copywriters, journalists, scriptwriters, marketers, language enthusiasts and bloggers to sit down together, have a cup of tea or a bottle of something, moan, marvel, share their tricks and chat about their working methods.

Feel free to come even if you’re not a writer, but you’re interested in what kind of bees writers keep in their bonnets.

There will be a short opportunity to say who you are, what you do and ask questions of the group, but after that it’s a free discussion for all.

On the beanbags in the basement @theskiff, .

Email me if you’d like to come on ellen@ellendevries.co.uk

See you on Monday August 31st from 5.30 until 6.30.

How can nonsense naming for companies and products be good for business on the web?

I’ve seen really fine examples and really bad ones out there – so I’ve put together some guidelines, and ideas. Let’s start with a checklist for the pitfalls.

How to get it wrong - a checklist.
Perhaps we’ve been driven to nonsense because all the other domain names are gone. But be careful when you’re choosing a name. Here are some ways to get it wrong:

1. Your name might just sound like plain nonsense (perhaps try the power of evocation instead).
2. Nonsense doesn’t mean casual – be careful and make sure you keep a consistent tone across your marketing. Make sure you still get your message across as professionally as possible. You don’t want people thinking you’re a joke.
3. You might get the evocative sound of it wrong - if you’re selling power tools like drills you don’t want to sound flimsy like ‘Lillidrilli’.
4. Your audience can’t be enticed by curiosity and quirkiness alone. Its not bad as a hook, but you have to follow up with some tasty looking bait.
5. Don’t make the name too long – and it should be easy to spell and pronounce.
6. Think about your audience. If you’re marketing to lawyers or niche audiences in stiffer collared industries, it might also not be the best way to go. Equally, you might want to consider it as the perfect antidote to a long tradition of bland marketing disease of ‘We are leveraging [fill in boring thing] to provide you with [boring] solution’.
7. Make sure you look up all aspects of your name - it could end up meaning something horrific you didn’t know about.

Do you agree? I’d love to hear what you think.

The ‘that’s too ridiculous’ factor
Sometimes this can work in your favour. Something negative or scary is often highly memorable.
For example, if I were to market a new lawnmower, I might want to think of something slightly beyond belief to be memorable like …errr….The Big Chomper. You might think its ridiculous, but it sticks. If you’re interested in this theory of negative naming (like ‘Virgin’ for a transport industry or ‘Orange’ for a mobile phone) check out the Igor naming process ‘Theory of Negativity’ blog post.

3 examples of clever marketing with nonsense.
Example 1
Normally I don’t read adverts that appear along the top of my gmail, but in this case it was the phrase “4 Teraflops on your Desk” that caught my eye. Just this once I thought ‘do I need to know what that is? Maybe I do’…so I clicked.

What did it? It was playing on my curiosity and my information gathering instinct. The word was close enough to a real one to spark my intrigue.

Example 2
I was looking for a good deal on printer cartridges. There are loads out there – all of which have sensible names and I thought – ‘how do you choose which one to click on?’ I chose Stinkyink.co.uk and Cartridgemonkey.com to click on first. Can you guess why? I’m a basic human. (Actually, I ended up buying locally).

What did it? Differentiation and the feel-good/endearing factor. I’m sometimes guilty of giving my custom to the site with the best copywriting because they feel more human, and often I feel better buying from humans who have a sense of humour rather than warehouses (is that just me?).

Example 3
To me, the best example of friendly metaphors and the power of evocation is the name Twitter: a whole community of friendly little birds sitting in the trees tweeting at each other as a social media community. Simple genius.

What did it? The power of evocation and metaphor – like Google and Flickr too.

Your thoughts?
Now it’s over to you. I’m looking forward to seeing what works for you and what doesn’t – feel free to leave examples from your own webby experience.

(Thanks for the Flickr picture Chiacomo )

What do you reckon is the best way to get people to absorb information?

There’s a huge ‘can’t-believe-I-never-saw-it-before’ link between successful marketing and this lovely theory called ‘Andragogy’ (coined by Alexander Kapp and expanded by a guy called Malcom Shepherd Knowles).

If you do have anything to do with marketing on the web, you probably spend a lot of your time thinking about how to:
A) get people to absorb information
B) get people motivated to take action
C) get people to think you’re talking sense
D) get them to take action based on the information they’ve absorbed

Knowles spent alot of his time thinking about these ideas from an education perspective when he created his theories on Andragogy; a study of the psychology of adult learning. As a word it’s just a basic progression on the on the term ‘Pedagogy’. Knowles put forward a series of principles that he found to be the key defining conditions for adults when they come to learn or absorb information…and I’m thinking why not apply this to marketing too?

Here are 5 of the key principles behind learning design and adult learner motivation. I’ve bolded the concepts that should set off alarm bells for those of us in new media marketing, especially when it comes to structuring our words and information:

1. Self-concept: As a person matures his self concept moves from one of being a dependent personality toward one of being a self-directed human being

2. Experience: As a person matures he accumulates a growing reservoir of experience that becomes an increasing resource for learning.

3. Readiness to learn. As a person matures his readiness to learn becomes oriented increasingly to the developmental tasks of his social roles.

4. Orientation to learning. As a person matures his time perspective changes from one of postponed application of knowledge to immediacy of application, and accordingly his orientation toward learning shifts from one of subject-centeredness to one of problem centredness.

5. Motivation to learn: As a person matures the motivation to learn is internal
(Knowles 1984:12)

As a result of thinking about these concepts, using them in my own writing for both e-learning and marketing media purposes, there’s a sort of checklist that emerges when coming to developing campaigns:

The checklist
1. Make sure the learner/user knows why they’re learning/using it
2. Make sure that self-directed learning and investigation is encouraged, they should also be responsible for their own decision making before being encouraged in any particular direction
3. Encourage them to draw on previous experiences as a rich resource of successfully adopted knowledge
4. Their motivation should come from inside, in order to perform tasks in their life situations

(Adapted to fit my ideas about marketing from The Adult Learner: The Definitive Classic in Adult Education and Human Resource Development By Malcolm Shepherd Knowles, Ed Holton, Elwood F. Holton, Richard A. Swanson Published by Butterworth-Heinemann, 2005)

If you want to see how some of this might be put into practice on a practical level (without the heavy academic emphasis) - then come to ‘The Presentations Workshop (that gets people sitting on the edge of their seats)‘ at the Werks on the 30th of October 2008 at 7.00pm.

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