By Leo Valiquette
Here we are, a few days from the Canada Day long weekend, with Independence Day in the United States not far behind. For many of us, it marks the beginning of a two-month stretch of general slacking as many workplaces downshift in response to mass vacation taking.
Or … maybe not.
I am heading into what promises to be one of the busiest two-month periods I have ever had as several clients ramp up various public relations and marketing efforts. Why? Because these clients understand that, while business may slow over the summer months, it certainly never stops.
It’s a disconnection between perception and reality that we haven’t focused on in a while, but I think always warrants a revisit this time of year.
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By Leo Valiquette
“True trumps clever any day of the week … It’s far more important to tell a true story even if it’s not perfect in all the details than to make up a clever lie.”
Character actor and memoirist Stephen Tobolowsky spoke these words during a September 2012 interview with National Public Radio. MarketingProfs contributor Jay Pinkert quoted Tobolowsky last week in an article about the value of using honest customer stories to create truly powerful content marketing material.
I’ve written more than once about the power of endorsements willingly provided by those precious entities who validate your existence by giving you money for your product or service. I’ve also emphasized the value of truth and sincerity in advertising, where real people sharing their real stories is far more potent than some paid actor posing as a happy customer, working from a script that has been derived from a variety of customer experiences.
But that article by Pinkert and that quote from Tobolowsky got me thinking about something else, a discharge of clever verbiage that can distort, distend and otherwise bloat marketing copy until it has a poor chance of hooking its intended audience.
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By Leo Valiquette
Every Friday, we round up some of the best articles we’ve come across in the past week and share them with our readers. Front and centre this time around are MarketingProfs, Ventureburn, Search Engine Journal, Fast Company and Convince and Convert.
Make content marketing authentic: The case of customer stories
Although many see content marketing as just that — marketing — smart marketers know that what they’re delivering is a great story. At the heart of that is truth, education, and personality — however imperfect it all may be. Jay Pinkert talks about the power of the customer story.
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By Leo Valiquette
I recently worked on a client’s blog post that discussed how an IT project can easily stray far from its original problem statement as it moves through an RFP process and the creation of a statement of work to the point where it finally reaches the implementation stage. What seemed obvious at the outset sometimes gets lost in process and procedure and in the desire of any external vendor to protect its own interests.
Does this sound familiar?
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By Leo Valiquette
I remember as a boy the time one of my uncle’s chickens laid an egg shaped like a squat bowling pin. It was quite the thing — it got him a picture and a cutline in the local paper. My mother still has that worn and yellowed clipping in a photo album.
Of course, the question is whether that one-off bit of media attention would have brought new business to the door if my uncle had been a commercial egg farmer trying to grow his market share. There is seldom a downside when serendipitous events entice the media to come knocking with little or no effort on your part. But when you are undertaking a formal PR program that requires an investment of resources, time and money, a stack of media clippings are of little value if they didn’t put your story in front of an audience with the potential to grow your business.
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