When copywriting presses its intended audience’s buttons - it’s brilliant. Things work. The world is a better place. We can all be happy.

But writing good copy for yourself is difficult. It’s easy to get in a pickle with it - mostly because its hard to get into your audience’s shoes and then get a solid objective viewpoint on what your audience need to hear from you.

A massive part of making your copywriting gripping depends on the questions you ask yourself when you’re preparing to write. Here are the golden questions I use - they seem to work without fail, no matter how fancy or complicated the situation is:

The simple version

In the olden days of my copywriting career I started out with Maria Veloso’s golden questions which I adapted from ‘Web copy that sells’:

1. What is the problem you’re trying to solve?
2. Why hasn’t the problem been solved before?
3. What is possible now?
4. What is different now that you’ve come along?
5. What should they do now - book online, make a call?

The deeper waters version

1. Who are you writing for (who are the people you’ve been working with, and want to work with in future)?
2. What problems do you think they have on a daily basis?
3. What would stop them from doing what you want them to do?
4. Why haven’t they come to you before?
5. Paint a pretty picture of how their life looks now that they’ve bought your product/service.
6. What do they need to do as a result?

Some bonus curveballs

We’re getting into the personality of brand now - which is a slightly different kettle of fish - but it might be worth having a go at these questions:

Why is my …. like a tray of warm scones?
Why is my …. like an astronaut?
Why is my …. like a ….?

Try it out. Let me know what happens. Good luck!

* What does great radical creativity in the workplace look like?
* What’s the business case for injecting radical creativity into the workplace?
* How could it be useful and give you return on investment (if that’s the kind of thing you’re after)?
* If you have a business, would it be deeply disconcerting for someone come to your office and shake things up a bit?

Why I’m asking.

The other week, in a workshop with Stuart Delves of Henz Teeth (who works with John Simmons - the guru of using creative language in business) for New Writing South’s ‘Writers at Work’ programme, we spent a very productive day bridging the mental gap between corporate-speak and pulling out all the stops on the use of creative language.

For me, as a copywriter, that was perfect. To others in more corporate environments, I can imagine it’s a highly scary prospect. This scariness is something I want investigate further - I want to read, learn and debate around that, find out why its there, and whether it can be good for businesses to investigate it.

What am I thinking is radical?

So… many of my clients have table football in their board room, they have office dogs and cats, they even have playground slides in their office. My own office has neon beanbags and monkeys hanging from the ceiling…creative environments and great logos and well-designed websites are fantastic - but that’s not what I mean.

I’m talking more about getting under the surface, finding the stories behind the person that sits next to you, honest philosophical debate about your business’s purpose and design, reasoning and argument around who the business is as a brand, and as a character. Its not just the logo any more, its lifting up the shutters on corporate facade, blurring the boundaries between work and human life and finding out what enthuses people…but more on that in another blog post.

Who’s doing it?

Personally, I’ve been fascinated by a few Brighton-based people and groups that come to business with a forthright creative thought-through attitude. Here are a very few random examples:

* New Writing South - Investigating where creativity comes into business language
* Charlie Davies - Used to work with The Wire - does business naming, story building and creative exercises.
* Nathaniel White - Who runs Decision Lab workshops, getting companies to find creative solutions to problems.
* Matt Weston - A business strategist, an advocate of giving businesses the space to think, an co-founder of Likemind.
* Likemind - A space for creatives and businesses to meet and just drink coffee
* Ian Elwick - Co-founder of the Werks(es) and other office spaces in Brighton

…but I want to know more - and read more books, blogs and attend more debates on the matter. So I’m hoping you’re going to help me out here. Email me on ellen(at)thecopyhouse.net if you’re too shy to leave a comment.

At The Skiff. 49 Cheltenham Place, Brighton BN1 4AB.

Not for the faint hearted.

Challenge yourself. This writing workshop will put you on the spot - you have no choice - you have to write a poem or short story for a set amount of time, and you HAVE TO perform it.

We’ll be writing for 20 mins, then 10 mins, then 5 mins, and performing our work at each stage. Yes we’re scared too. Who knows what will happen? Its an exercise in writing with adrenaline and driving out those pesky whiny inner critics for an evening. Join us :)

Sign up by emailing Ellen at ellen@thecopyhouse.net - or just turn up on the day.

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.

At: The Skiff, 49 Cheltenham Place, Brighton, England BN1 4AB

Not a workshop, more of a work-it-out-together.

Who we are:
Ellen de Vries (The Copy House) is concerned with helping people to find clear language to explain their brands, projects and what they do. Charlie Davies (project designer) is dedicated to good work, good strategy, good stories and developing good ideas.

What we’re doing:
Together we’re on a bit of a mission to compile a compendium of tricks, questions and games that can be used to clarify the point of projects; to get to the bottom of finding out how best to get someone to explain what they’re doing (inside and outside the world of business).

What’s going to happen:

You bring a trick a game or a question
(something you might use to improve someone else’s project ideas)

Everybody brings a project
(something you could do with improving)

Everybody takes it in turns
(testing their tricks on people’s projects, having their projects improved by other people’s tricks)

This might be especially useful for:
People into branding, business strategists, marketers, project making enthusiasts, UX designers (but in no way exclusively).

It costs nothing and it can only be good for you.

Email me on ellen(at)ellendevries.co.uk if you fancy coming along.

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 )

Carl Jeffrey from Fellow (a ‘creative midwife’ who delivers creative ideas) and I have recently spent a good chunk of time on two emerging brands; my project being The Copy House and Carl’s being The Sustainable Widget. As we were working together, this quote from Nabokov sprung to mind as the perfect way to show the massive importance of this kind of collaboration (and for that matter any collaboration in new media):

“Does there not exist a high ridge where the mountainside of ’scientific’ knowledge joins the opposite slope of ‘artistic’ imagination?” Nabokov, Audubon’s Butterflies, Moths and Other. Review for New York Times December 28, 1952.

In this case the collaboration is the bridge between the designer’s imagination and language that’s needed to brief the designer. Its where design and language meet to collaborate on a brand.

So that might also help you formulate an idea of the ‘lesser-spotted brand language consultant’. My latest venture with VGroup was also a highly interesting and visual journey that they’ve kindly documented in their latest newsletter (I came into the picture after the completion of the visual branding, slogan/strapline development and product design phases).

If you’d like to know more about brand language development, you know where I am. Thanks for all your help Carl!

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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What tricks are the Women in Media using?
The eye-opening highlight of the Women in Media conference was when ladies from both the TV and Music industries were talking about their uses of social media. From the speakers I heard in the afternoon I got an encouraging sense that they were;

a) excited about the possibilities social media offers
b) recognising how essential social media is for the industry
c) a little apprehensive about social media practices
d) starting to embrace the change
e) looking for collaboration and training opportunities with social media makers and experts

Kerry Harvey-Piper from the Red Grape Music label said “We encourage all our artists to blog…” and went on to talk about some of the challenges that this presented; who wants to blog when they don’t understand the value of it? what if they haven’t got the time? and what would they say anyway?

That was food for thought. I imagine that across-the-board there’s a massive need for :
1) Blogging encouragement and creative guidance on how to develop a community enthusiastically
2) Careful thinking and creative brainstorming sessions for those that manage their own brand language and communications. (In the case of Hafdis Huld she’s already video blogging about elf watching in Iceland)

Nrain food at the Head Conference.

‘Head’ is a conference that’s held entirely on the web, and I’m between sessions as I write this blog. Somehow, oddly, it feels like I’m right in the global midst of a cloud of technical brains and social media experts. Its very intense and deeply thrilling.

Why am I here as a web copywriter? Its not just about words. No Sir. Under the bonnet I work with function, formulae, user experience designs & philosophy, information architecture and other random media bits. When I write, I marry all of my understanding of these with business strategy, creative direction and message…more on this another day..

At Pedro Custodio’s session on the Social Web, he said this great thing which inspired me to get these thoughts down in blog format quick-smart: ‘The more interesting you are, the more people will want to engage with you.’

As a copywriter (and someone who offers guidance in DIY Copywriting) this is really exciting - in order to be ‘interesting’ on the web you’re going to need to:
1)think about what you have a sustained passion for
2)think about where you’d like distribute your ideas (and stay on top of new technologies)
3)find your conversations and join them with appropriate and helpful information
4)think about how it involves other people’s interests
5)think about where you need to go to get the most out of conversations

In my opinion, the role of the web copywriter is to understand these changes from the inside out and the outside in, and help companies to make the transition without losing the passion.
But what do you think about the roles of writers in social media? I’d really love to know.

Do you have difficulty making presentations?
How do you engage people, or get them to understand you?

This is a useful hands-on workshop to help you build successful presentations. The main idea is to give you presentation techniques, magical formulas and tips to get your audience 1) interested in what you’re saying 2) to absorb the information you’re putting out there.

Here’s what you’ll take away:
• Proven techniques for getting people to absorb information
• Tried-and-tested structures for engaging presentations
• A bank of techniques to prevent your audience from getting totally distracted
• A ‘Doh! checklist’ of common mistakes that you could be making
• Personal feedback
• Free biscuits

(Sorry, we won’t be working on pretty Powerpoint designs or voice projection – it’s all about the content, how its ordered and how you communicate your stuff)

When? Thursday the 30th of October. Don’t leave it too late to sign up!
Where? The Werks
What time? 7.00pm to 9pm
How much? £20 per person, or £15 for Werkers at The Werks.
Sign up now