Behind the scenes, I have been spending the past month examining the services Bredemarket offers, and how my service offerings can best meet my goals for 2022 (including the super-secret goal that I am not publishing). As a result of this examination, I plan to make several changes to Bredemarket’s service offerings, one of which I am announcing today.
Effective immediately, Bredemarket is no longer offering editing services.
Bredemarket presently offers its services to identity/biometrics, technology, and general business firms, as well as to nonprofits. I offer my services to firms in my hometown of Ontario, California, as well as firms in Eastvale, Fontana, Montclair, Rancho Cucamonga, Upland, other cities of the Inland Empire West, and throughout the United States.
This post concentrates on the services that Bredemarket can provide to businesses in my local area. Read on if you own a small, arty business in the Emporia Arts District of Ontario…
…or perhaps a larger, less arty business north of Holt in Ontario, or perhaps even a business in one of the other cities that I mentioned, or one of the ones I didn’t (sorry Narod).
There are a lot of local businesses out there
Even if you don’t count sole proprietors (such as myself) or freelancers, there are somewhere around 7.7 million businesses in the United States. (This figure is from 2016; I’m not sure if it’s gone up or gone down in the last five years.) Now if you include sole proprietors in the total, then you’re talking about 32 million businesses. (This particular number may have actually increased over time.)
Obviously I can’t target them all. Well, I could try, but it would be a little ridiculous.
So what if I took a subset of those 32 million businesses and tried to see if Bredemarket could serve that subset?
The local small business persona
When you want to market to a particular group, you develop a persona that represents that group. You can then develop a profile of that persona: the persona’s needs, aspirations, and expectations; the persona’s underlying goals and values; and perhaps some other elements. The persona may be developed via extensive research, or perhaps via…a little less quantification.
When I initially looked at this topic last September, I concentrated on a particular persona, but my thoughts on this topic have evolved over time. While I will still serve artists as I initially proposed last September, I’m now thinking of other businesses that can best use the type of content that I provide.
For example, the business may be an incorporated business that is based on the Inland Empire West, provides its products or services to customers in the local area, provides excellent service that is loved by its existing customers, and needs to get the word out to new potential customers by creating content that can be downloaded from a company website, shared via a company social media account, or handed out at a trade show or other in-person event.
Regarding the values of this particular persona, you can probably already deduce some of them based upon the customer love for the company.
The business puts the customer first and strives to provide services that satisfy its customers.
However, the business also prioritizes the well-being of its employees.
While the business may not have explicitly articulated a vision, its actions testify to a vision of excellent service, customer satisfaction, and care for employees.
But what does this business need in terms of types of content? For my example, these businesses are ones that need customer-facing content such as the following:
A document (online or printed) that explains the product(s) or service(s) that the business provides, and that discusses the benefits that the product(s)/service(s) offers to the customers. This document may take the form of a product/service description, or it may take the form of a white paper. For example, your business might issue a white paper entitled “Seven Mandatory Requirements for a Green Widget,” and the white paper just might happen to mention at the end that your green widget just happens to meet all seven mandatory requirements. (Coincidence? I think not.)
Portion of the concluding section of a white paper in which Bredemarket provided the text.
A document (online or printed) that tells a story about how an individual customer benefited from the product(s) or service(s) that the business provides. You could call such a document a case study, or you could call it a testimonial. Or you could call it a casetimonial.
These types of documents are more valuable to some businesses than to others. Your average convenience store has little need for a 3,000 word white paper. But perhaps your business has this sort of need.
How many words should your content contain?
When I originally wrote this last September, I started off by discussing my two standard packages, based on word length. But now that I’ve thought about it a bit more, there are some questions that you need to ask BEFORE deciding on the content length. (We’ll get to content length later.)
(Owen Lovejoy) “How long should a man’s legs be in proportion to his body?”
(Abraham Lincoln) “I have not given the matter much consideration, but on first blush I should judge they ought to be long enough to reach from his body to the ground.”
Abraham Lincoln. (Legs not shown.) By Hesler, Alexander, 1823-1895 – This image is available from the United States Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs divisionunder the digital ID cph.3a36988.This tag does not indicate the copyright status of the attached work. A normal copyright tag is still required. See Commons:Licensing for more information., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18705107
So how far away is the ground? Let’s ask some other questions first before we determine the answer to content length.
Bredemarket’s initial questions for you
Before I create a single word, I start by asking you some questions about your content to make sure our project starts on the right foot. (Even though I am left-footed.)
What is the topic of the content?
What is the goal that you want to achieve with the content?
What are the benefits (not features, but benefits) that your end customers can realize by using your product or service?
What is the target audience for the content?
Once I’ve asked you these and other questions (such as a potential outline), we will both have a good idea of how long the final piece needs to be.
The length of the content also dictates the length and complexity of the review process.
Returning to the content length question
Once we have a good idea of the content length, there are three options that we can pursue to actually create the content.
If your content is longer, say 2800 to 3200 words, then I create the content using a similar (but more detailed) process through my Bredemarket 2800 Medium Writing Service.
If your content falls between these two lengths, or is longer than 3200 words, or needs a more rapid delivery time, we’ll talk and come up with a solution.
(And we’ll even come up with a spiffy name if you like)
(Welcome to my A/B test. For the other version of this post, click here.)
As I’ve previously noted, the 2009 NAS report on forensic science has revolutionized fingerprint identification and a number of other forensic disciplines.
One part of this revolution was the Department of Justice 2018 document entitled “UNIFORM LANGUAGE FOR TESTIMONY AND REPORTS FOR THE FORENSIC LATENT PRINT DISCIPLINE.” A PDF version of the report can be found here.
This document applies to Department of Justice examiners who are authorized to prepare reports and provide expert witness testimony regarding the forensic examination of latent print evidence.
Based upon the NAS report and subsequent efforts, Part IV of the DOJ document (“Qualifications and Limitations of Forensic Latent Print Examinations”) sets some clear guidelines about how a latent print examiner should describe his or her findings.
So a pre-2009 latent print examiner who appeared in court and said “I am 100% certain that these two fingerprints belong to the same person, to the exclusion of all other persons, because I have never been wrong in the last 25 years” would fail the 2018 DOJ criteria.
But would a jury know that?
That’s what CSAFE discussed in a recent post, “AAFS 2022 RECAP: UNDERSTANDING JUROR COMPREHENSION OF FORENSIC TESTIMONY: ASSESSING JURORS’ DECISION MAKING AND EVIDENCE EVALUATION.” Feel free to read the entire article, or if you like you can read my “succinct” excerpt from two portions of the article:
Koolmees and her colleagues examined whether jurors could distinguish low-quality testimony from high-quality testimony of forensic experts, using the language guidelines released by the Department of Justice (DOJ) in 2018 as an indicator of quality….
Only when comparing the conditions of zero guideline violations and four and five violations were there any changes in guilty verdicts, signifying jurors may notice a change in the quality of forensic testimony only when the quality is severely low.
So this raises the question of whether the NAS report, for all of its revolutionary effects, will have any true results in courtroom testimony.
Will jurors heed the advice from the DOJ guidelines to accurately consider the testimony of a forensic expert?
Or will the jurors’ “common sense,” based on old Perry Mason and C.S.I. TV shows, prevent jurors from consiering expert testimony in the correct light?
(Welcome to my A/B test. For the other version of this post, click here.)
I feel like Ben Maller, a sports radio broadcaster who likes to take three seemingly unrelated phrases and spin them into a monologue.
For this post, the three phrases are “common sense,” “succinct,” and “expert juror testimony.”
I want to (succinctly) pose the question, “Is ‘common sense’ enough for a jury to consider expert testimony?'”
Common Sense
Mitch Wagner recently shared a New Yorker article by Matthew Hutson that claimed that artificial intelligence was lacking in “common sense.” Here is one of the examples cited in the article:
By definition, common sense is something everyone has; it doesn’t sound like a big deal. But imagine living without it and it comes into clearer focus. Suppose you’re a robot visiting a carnival, and you confront a fun-house mirror; bereft of common sense, you might wonder if your body has suddenly changed.
But is the human ability to discern that one’s body was NOT modified truly “common sense”? I argued otherwise in a comment on Wagner’s LinkedIn post.
But is there really a difference between “common sense” and the data acquisition that AI engines perform?
Take the fun-house mirror example in the article. When I first encountered a fun-house mirror, I would either (a) think like a robot and wonder if my body had changed, or (b) draw upon a vast reservoir of past experiences with mirrors and bent objects to deduce that this particular mirror had properties that would display my body in a different way. A person who had never encountered a mirror or a bent object would not have the “common sense” to realize how a fun-house mirror operates.
Perhaps I’m wrong, but it seems that everyone takes cues from their past experiences (touching a hot stove, or watching “Perry Mason” or “C.S.I.” on TV), and that helps form our “common sense.”
Succinct
If you read my original comment on Wagner’s post, you’ll notice that I only reproduced the first part here, since the other parts weren’t relevant to this post.
Concise writing is something that Becca Phengvath of Robin Writers reminded us about in a recent post. She started by telling a story about a meeting with one of her college English teachers to review a writing assignment.
“This is good,” she said. But I felt her preparing to say more.
“But look what happens when you remove ‘able to’,” she added, pointing to several spots where I wrote the phrase. “It’s never really needed, see?”
She read a few of my sentences with “able to” omitted and I was shocked at how it immediately strengthened my writing. Since then, I have very very rarely used that phrase in my writing thanks to her.
I liked this post so much that I shared in on various social accounts, with the following comment:
I really need to do this more often.
I should do this more.
Expert Juror Testimony
Now let’s get to the meat of the post. (I could have left the first two parts of the post out, I guess, but I wanted to provide some background.)
As I’ve previously noted, the 2009 NAS report on forensic science has revolutionized fingerprint identification and a number of other forensic disciplines.
One part of this revolution was the Department of Justice 2018 document entitled “UNIFORM LANGUAGE FOR TESTIMONY AND REPORTS FOR THE FORENSIC LATENT PRINT DISCIPLINE.” A PDF version of the report can be found here.
This document applies to Department of Justice examiners who are authorized to prepare reports and provide expert witness testimony regarding the forensic examination of latent print evidence.
Based upon the NAS report and subsequent efforts, Part IV of the DOJ document (“Qualifications and Limitations of Forensic Latent Print Examinations”) sets some clear guidelines about how a latent print examiner should describe his or her findings.
So a pre-2009 latent print examiner who appeared in court and said “I am 100% certain that these two fingerprints belong to the same person, to the exclusion of all other persons, because I have never been wrong in the last 25 years” would fail the 2018 DOJ criteria.
(Remember that even experienced examiners have been wrong before, as was shown in the Brandon Mayfield case.)
But would a jury know that?
That’s what CSAFE discussed in a recent post, “AAFS 2022 RECAP: UNDERSTANDING JUROR COMPREHENSION OF FORENSIC TESTIMONY: ASSESSING JURORS’ DECISION MAKING AND EVIDENCE EVALUATION.” Feel free to read the entire article, or if you like you can read my “succinct” excerpt from two portions of the article:
Koolmees and her colleagues examined whether jurors could distinguish low-quality testimony from high-quality testimony of forensic experts, using the language guidelines released by the Department of Justice (DOJ) in 2018 as an indicator of quality….
Only when comparing the conditions of zero guideline violations and four and five violations were there any changes in guilty verdicts, signifying jurors may notice a change in the quality of forensic testimony only when the quality is severely low.
Think about it. While forensic and criminal justice professionals, who have been immersed in forensic science testimony debates for over a decade, would be unimpressed by someone testifying that two fingerprints are a “100% match,” there’s a good chance that a jury would be very impressed with an “expert” who provided such convincing testimony.
So this raises the question of whether the NAS report, for all of its revolutionary effects, will have any true results in courtroom testimony.
Will jurors heed the advice from the DOJ guidelines to accurately consider the testimony of a forensic expert?
Or will the jurors’ “common sense,” based on old Perry Mason and C.S.I. TV shows, prevent jurors from consiering expert testimony in the correct light?
(Thanks to Route 66 News for sharing the links to the California Historical Route 66 Association/Beth Murray Facebook post and the Bono’s Restaurant and Deli Wikipedia link that I cite below.)
Those of us who live here know three things about California’s Inland Empire:
The Inland Empire has been heavily influenced by the citrus industry.
The Inland Empire has been heavily influenced by Route 66.
On occasion, those influences merged together.
One of these “get your citrus kicks” Inland Empire mergers of the citrus industry and Route 66 occurred in 1936. In that year, Bob DeVries built a huge fruit stand that looked like an orange and placed it near Fontana, California. Because that’s what people did on Route 66.
“We squeezed oranges for 14 to 18 hours daily. We worked until 9 to 10 p.m. each day to make enough juice to see the next day. We would put it in gallon bottles and put them into Coca-Cola cases with ice. We picked the fruit and also got some at the citrus plant on Mango Avenue (still there). They paid $2 a trailer load.
“This was not the only thing sold at the stand. The large black olives and the pimento stuffed green olives were the first seen by the easterners. We made $20 a week, which was considered good in those days. The olives sold for 98 cents a gallon. Honey was from Colton, dates from Indio, and the Cherry Anne drink was sold by the gallon (or glass for a dime).”
Hey, twenty dollars a week wasn’t bad in the late 1930s.
But time passed, and the orange stand in Fontana, as well as similar orange stands throughout California, began to decline in the same way that Route 66 itself declined.
After the 1950’s the stands began to decline as roads were converted to higher speed freeways which made it more difficult to easily pull over and stop for a glass of orange juice. This combined with the emergence of air conditioning in cars, began the decline of the giant orange juice stands.
The Giant Orange ended up with the Fontana Historical Society, who gifted the orange to Joe Bono.
Perhaps you’ve heard of Joe Bono’s (claimed) cousin (I couldn’t substantiate the Wikipedia claim; Sonny was born in Detroit and moved to Los Angeles as a child, but to my knowledge never lived in Fontana—although of course he lived in Palm Springs later).
Coincidentally, the Bono family was a long-time competitor of the DeVries family, and had its own orange back in the day.
Anyway, Joe Bono placed the DeVries-built Giant Orange in front of his restaurant and promptly put his name on the orange. Eventually the restaurant closed, was reopened, and closed again.
According to Murray, the Fontana Historical Society reclaimed the Giant Orange, which is now in the parking lot of Fontana Public Works.
There are plans to restore the orange to its original 1936 glory. But the restored orange will not have Bono’s name on it. Apparently the “Bono’s” on the orange has been a point of contention for years.
THERE IS something of importance that needs to be corrected in the information in newspapers. The Orange (was in 2013) at Bono’s Restaurant and has the name “Bono’s” on it. This is incorrect. The Fontana Historical Society loaned it to him when it had to be moved from the Wal-Mart store. The Society cannot give it to an individual, only to another historical non-profit. The name on it should be “Fontana Historical Society Orange Stand.” The lady who donated the Orange has been very angry about the name situation.
A little postscript: if you own a giant orange, restaurant, or other Fontana business and need some help promoting it, you might want to contact the Fontana, California content marketing expert, Bredemarket.
And for those like me who now have an ear worm in their head, here’s a song from Joe’s purported cousin and his then-wife.
And even if you’re NOT asked to address risk, it’s a good idea to do so. Claiming that your solution implementation has NO risk shows that you don’t know what you’re talking about.
FAR 39.102 addresses “Management of risk” for federal projects, and helpfully includes a list of nine types of risk:
(b) Types of risk may include schedule risk, risk of technical obsolescence, cost risk, risk implicit in a particular contract type, technical feasibility, dependencies between a new project and other projects or systems, the number of simultaneous high risk projects to be monitored, funding availability, and program management risk.
If it’s easier to read this way, here is a numbered list of the nine types of risk cataloged in FAR 39.102(b).
schedule risk
risk of technical obsolescence
cost risk
risk implicit in a particular contract type
technical feasibility
dependencies between a new project and other projects or systems
the number of simultaneous high risk projects to be monitored
funding availability
program management risk
So if you’re uncertain of the types of risks that your project may encounter, you can use the list in FAR 39.102(b) as a starting point.
You can use this list even if you’re not responding to a federal procurement…or even if you’re not responding to any procurement at all and just want to identify the types of risks in your project.
Of course, identifying the risks is only the beginning. You have to mitigate the risks, and you have to communicate how you are mitigating the risks. Baptist addressed those topics also.
You should have been there.
But even if you weren’t there, Baptist has written an article entitled “How to Win with Risk” that you may find helpful.
(And if you attended the meeting, you will see that Baptist repurposed parts of his article in today’s presentation. Repurposing is good.)
I’ve been trying to add more local (Inland Empire West) content to the Bredemarket blog. Obviously I’m attempting to promote Bredemarket’s services to local businesses by writing local-area content such as thesetwo recent posts centered on Upland.
Back in the old days, I might have done optimized for my local audience by going to the bottom of relevant pages on the Bredemarket website and inserting hundreds of words in very small gray text that cite every single Inland Empire West community (yes, even Narod) and every single service that Bredemarket provides. In the old days, the rationale was that this additional text would positively affect search engine optimization (SEO), so that the next person searching for “case study writer in Narod, California” would automatically go to the page with all of the small gray text.
I use more acceptable forms of SEO. For example, I’ve devoted significant effort to make sure that the two phrases biometric content marketing expert and biometric proposal writing expert direct searchers to the relevant pages on this website. (Provided, of course, that someone is actually searching for a biometric content marketing expert or a biometric proposal writing expert.)
(As an aside, I commonly distinguish between “important” stuff and “very important” stuff. And you also have to distinguish between importance and urgency; see the Eisenhower matrix.)
What is very very important (VVI)? Human readable format (HRF).
The two audiences: the bots, and the real humans
And SEO-optimized content may differ from human-readable content because of their different audiences. SEO text is written for machines, not people. In extreme cases, SEO-optimized text is unreadable by humans, and human readable format cannot be interepreted by machine-based web crawlers.
Here’s another example of how SEO-optimized text and human readable format sometimes diverge. I mentioned this example in a recent LinkedIn article:
I recently updated my proposal resume to include the headline “John E. Bredehoft, CF APMP,” under the assumption that this headline would impress proposal professionals. However, when I ran my resume through an ATS (applicant tracking system) simulator, it was unable to find my name because of its non-standard format. Because of this, there was a chance that a proposal professional would never even see my resume. I adjusted accordingly.
In this case, I had to cater to two separate audiences:
The computerized applicant tracking systems that read resumes and decide which resumes to pass on to human beings.
The human beings that read resumes, often after the applicant tracking systems have pre-selected the resumes to read.
I was able to come up with a workaround to satisfy both audiences, therefore ensuring that (a) my resume would get past the ATS, and (b) a human that viewed my ATS-approved resume could actually read it. It’s a clumsy workaround, but it works.
While that particular example is complicated by the gate-keeping ubiquity of applicant tracking systems in the employment industry, it is not unique. All industries are depending more on artificial intelligence, and almost all human beings are turning to Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and the like to find stuff.
These are our users (who use search engines for EVERYTHING)
There’s an old example of how dependent we are on search engines. In a famous case over a decade ago, people used the Google search engine to get to the Facebook login page, and were confused when a non-Facebook page made its way to the top of the search results. The original article that prompted the brouhaha is gone, but Jake Kuramoto’s summary still remains. TL;DR:
The post became the top result for the keywords “facebook login”.
People using Google to find their way to Facebook were misdirected to the post.
The comments on the post were littered with unhappy people, unable to login to Facebook.
There are more than 300 comments on this post, the majority of them from confused Facebook users.
Despite the fact that RWW added bold text to the post, directing users to Facebook, and the fact that the post is no longer the top result for “facebook login”, people continue to arrive there by accident, looking for Facebook.
What if we can only optimize for one of the two audiences?
So people who create content have to simultaneously satisfy the bots and the real people. But what if they couldn’t satisfy both? If you were forced to choose between optimizing text for a search engine, and optimizing text for a human, what would you choose?
If it were up to Google and the other search engine providers, you wouldn’t have to choose. The ultimate goal of Google Search (and other searches) is to mimic the way that real humans would search for things if they had all of the computing resources that the search engine providers have. It’s only because of our imperfect application of artificial intelligence that there is any divergence between search engines and human searches.
But until AI gets a lot better than it is now, there will continue to be a divergence.
And if I ever had to choose, I’d write for humans rather than bots.
After all, a human is going to have to read the text at some point. Might as well make the human comfortable, since the bots aren’t making final binding decisions. (Yet.)
A lot has happened since I first wrote this description of Bredemarket’s local marketing services on September 1, 2021. Time for a content refresh.
The refresh begins with the reprint of the relevant text on my home page, which was just updated this week.
Bredemarket presently offers its services to identity/biometrics, technology, and general business firms, as well as to nonprofits. I offer my services to firms in my hometown of Ontario, California, as well as firms in Eastvale, Fontana, Montclair, Rancho Cucamonga, Upland, other cities of the Inland Empire West, and throughout the United States.
This post concentrates on the services that Bredemarket can provide to businesses in my local area. Read on if you own a small, arty business in the Emporia Arts District of Ontario…
…or perhaps a larger, less arty business north of Holt in Ontario, or perhaps even a business in one of the other cities that I mentioned, or one of the ones I didn’t (sorry Narod).
There are a lot of local businesses out there
Even if you don’t count sole proprietors (such as myself) or freelancers, there are somewhere around 7.7 million businesses in the United States. (This figure is from 2016; I’m not sure if it’s gone up or gone down in the last five years.) Now if you include sole proprietors in the total, then you’re talking about 32 million businesses. (This particular number may have actually increased over time.)
Obviously I can’t target them all. Well, I could try, but it would be a little ridiculous.
So what if I took a subset of those 32 million businesses and tried to see if Bredemarket could serve that subset?
The local small business persona
When you want to market to a particular group, you develop a persona that represents that group. You can then develop a profile of that persona: the persona’s needs, aspirations, and expectations; the persona’s underlying goals and values; and perhaps some other elements. The persona may be developed via extensive research, or perhaps via…a little less quantification.
When I initially looked at this topic last September, I concentrated on a particular persona, but my thoughts on this topic have evolved over time. While I will still serve artists as I initially proposed last September, I’m now thinking of other businesses that can best use the type of content that I provide.
For example, the business may be an incorporated business that is based on the Inland Empire West, provides its products or services to customers in the local area, provides excellent service that is loved by its existing customers, and needs to get the word out to new potential customers by creating content that can be downloaded from a company website, shared via a company social media account, or handed out at a trade show or other in-person event.
Regarding the values of this particular persona, you can probably already deduce some of them based upon the customer love for the company.
The business puts the customer first and strives to provide services that satisfy its customers.
However, the business also prioritizes the well-being of its employees.
While the business may not have explicitly articulated a vision, its actions testify to a vision of excellent service, customer satisfaction, and care for employees.
But what does this business need in terms of types of content? For my example, these businesses are ones that need customer-facing content such as the following:
A document (online or printed) that explains the product(s) or service(s) that the business provides, and that discusses the benefits that the product(s)/service(s) offers to the customers. This document may take the form of a product/service description, or it may take the form of a white paper. For example, your business might issue a white paper entitled “Seven Mandatory Requirements for a Green Widget,” and the white paper just might happen to mention at the end that your green widget just happens to meet all seven mandatory requirements. (Coincidence? I think not.)
Portion of the concluding section of a white paper in which Bredemarket provided the text.
A document (online or printed) that tells a story about how an individual customer benefited from the product(s) or service(s) that the business provides. You could call such a document a case study, or you could call it a testimonial. Or you could call it a casetimonial.
These types of documents are more valuable to some businesses than to others. Your average convenience store has little need for a 3,000 word white paper. But perhaps your business has this sort of need.
How many words should your content contain?
When I originally wrote this last September, I started off by discussing my two standard packages, based on word length. But now that I’ve thought about it a bit more, there are some questions that you need to ask BEFORE deciding on the content length. (We’ll get to content length later.)
(Owen Lovejoy) “How long should a man’s legs be in proportion to his body?”
(Abraham Lincoln) “I have not given the matter much consideration, but on first blush I should judge they ought to be long enough to reach from his body to the ground.”
Abraham Lincoln. (Legs not shown.) By Hesler, Alexander, 1823-1895 – This image is available from the United States Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs divisionunder the digital ID cph.3a36988.This tag does not indicate the copyright status of the attached work. A normal copyright tag is still required. See Commons:Licensing for more information., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18705107
So how far away is the ground? Let’s ask some other questions first before we determine the answer to content length.
Bredemarket’s initial questions for you
Before I create a single word, I start by asking you some questions about your content to make sure our project starts on the right foot. (Even though I am left-footed.)
What is the topic of the content?
What is the goal that you want to achieve with the content?
What are the benefits (not features, but benefits) that your end customers can realize by using your product or service?
What is the target audience for the content?
Once I’ve asked you these and other questions (such as a potential outline), we will both have a good idea of how long the final piece needs to be.
The length of the content also dictates the length and complexity of the review process.
Returning to the content length question
Once we have a good idea of the content length, there are three options that we can pursue to actually create the content.
If your content is longer, say 2800 to 3200 words, then I create the content using a similar (but more detailed) process through my Bredemarket 2800 Medium Writing Service.
If your content falls between these two lengths, or is longer than 3200 words, or needs a more rapid delivery time, we’ll talk and come up with a solution.
(And we’ll even come up with a spiffy name if you like)
On March 23, I wrote a post entitled “In marketing, move quickly” (while noting that I didn’t move all that quickly in posting it). After citing stories from a local (unnamed) company, my own time as a product manager, an (again unnamed) international bank, and a (named) car manufacturer, I concluded as follows:
And if you can speed up production of a car, you can speed up production of marketing content and start putting your messaging on your Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube accounts, as well as your website immediately so that your customers can get your message.
And if you think that the idea of moving quickly in marketing was an idea that I completely originated myself, you REALLY need to get out a bit more.
This post collects a few things that others have said about moving quickly.
Empower your employees (Jim McGinnis of Intuit)
In 2015, Forbes quoted Intuit’s Jim McGinnis, who had previously worked at technology company Activision and non-technology companies Pepsi and Procter & Gamble. He left Intuit in 2017 and has since worked at two other firms, including MyCase.
A more effective strategy to engage your audience is to communicate directly with them often and through multiple touch points. At Intuit, we empower all 8,000 employees to use social media and tweet regularly, but to do so in a smart and effective way that minimizes risk. We do this by instituting principle-based management and guidelines that everybody operates within. We also have a very strong and enduring values-based organization, with the first and most important value being “Integrity without Compromise.”
McGinnis believed that with the Intuit organization, his people were empowered to communicate quickly without waiting for multiple layers of approval (as is required in a “command and control” organization).
That same year (2015), Forbes competitor Inc. ran a piece written by Adam Fridman of Mabbly, a digital marketing agency. Fridman noted that competitors are not the only ones watching how quickly a company moves.
People simply aren’t satisfied with the status quo; they want something more and they want it now. Companies must work quickly to satiate their appetites because audiences will have no qualms about moving to another product or service.
Don’t forget your vendors and partners (Isaiah Bollinger of Trellis)
Isaiah Bollinger, co-founder and CEO of Trellis, reiterated the points others made about competitors and customers in a 2018 piece, but he added two other stakeholders.
If you are a slow moving business vendors will (stop) putting effort into the relationship because they can find better customers….
Partners don’t want to work with a slow moving business that can’t innovate. They want fast growing innovators that will bring big impact to their bottom line.
Incidentally, Bollinger may have moved a little TOO quickly. You see where I inserted the parenthetical comment “(stop)” in the first paragraph above? That’s not what he (or his copywriter) wrote. But we all know what he meant. Check the video.
So there are a number of benefits, and relatively little downside, to moving quickly. And even if you do fail, several of the people quoted above emphasize that you fail quickly, can correct just as quickly, and learn important lessons quickly.
And maybe I’m learning. I didn’t wait two days to post this.
When I established the Bredemarket Yelp account, I sadly had to inform two inquirers that my services (what I do) did not include resume writing services.
But I just discovered that if you are near Upland, California, you can obtain resume writing services for free.
Today (March 29) and every Tuesday at 4:00 pm, the Upland Library hosts a resume writing workshop, “Resume Runners.” And unlike Bredemarket’s services, Upland Library services are free.
Bredemarket 