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Tag Archives: writing
Five Musical Facts, Two Musical Opinions, and What This Has To Do With Collaboration
I’m a member of a local Facebook “news” group, and the group just emphatically stated that expression of opinions is NOT allowed in that group.
Because facts are free of bias. (Supposedly. I should address that topic in another post.)
Because this post includes two contentious opinions, it’s no surprise that I will NEVER share this post in that local news group. Their loss.
Actually the post is off-topic for the news group anyway. But as you will see, it is entirely on-topic for Bredemarket. I’ll explain, after I discuss a couple of songs and their singers.
Two Facts and One Opinion About “Girl from the North Country”
“Girl from the North Country” is a Bob Dylan song, which he started writing in 1962 while in England. The song was recorded in New York in 1963 and released that same year on the album “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.”
But I don’t care about THAT version of the song.
I care about Dylan’s cover of his own song, released several years later on the 1969 album “Nashville Skyline.” But Dylan had a special guest on this album: Johnny Cash.
Here are two facts about the 1969 version:
- Bob Dylan has a distinctive voice.
- Johnny Cash has a distinctive voice.
These are facts, not opinions, since I am not casting a value judgement on whether they are any good at singing. For the record, I love Bob Dylan’s solo songs, and I love Johnny Cash’s solo songs.
Now my opinion: the 1969 version of “Girl from the North Country” is an unmitigated disaster, because the distinctive voices do not blend at all.
If you’ve never heard this version of the song, let me provide a play-by-play account.
- The song begins with Dylan and Cash strumming their guitars, accompanied by a backing band of Nashville stars. (Not Starrs.)
- Dylan then sings the first verse, in a lower key than his original version, and the listeners were introduced to the newest version of Bob Dylan. Shed of a rock band, he has not returned to his early folk days, but appears in a new version of a peaceful, satisfied country crooner. More versions of Dylan were to follow.
- Then we get the second verse, in which Johnny Cash picks up the story about the girl. Cash himself appears in a new guise, having moved beyond the Memphis rockabilly sound and the horn-infused “Ring of Fire” sound. Cash now entered a period in which he associated with people such as Dylan who were leap years away from both traditional country and the newer countrypolitan sound. Cash, like Dylan, would continue to travel all over the musical map, gaining fame at the end of his life by covering Nine Inch Nails.
- Back to 1969. After Cash sings the second verse, Dylan returns to sing the third. Everything is going fine so far.
Then (again, in my opinion) all hell breaks loose at the 1:52 mark in the song, because now the two sing together.
Sort of.
Cash starts singing the fourth verse, Dylan joins in a second later, and then they kinda sorta sing the words of the fourth and fifth verses at kinda sorta the same time, with some harmonizing—some intentional, some unintentional when they couldn’t hit the notes. Hear the result on YouTube.
Now I will admit that my negative opinion of the Dylan-Cash duet on “Girl of the North Country” is not universal. A high school friend who shall remain anonymous (just call her “Editor Extraordinaire” and old school Rick Dees fan) thinks this version is charming. I find it amusing in a not-so-good way.
As far as I’m concerned, this collaboration didn’t work.
Which brings us to Christina Aguilera.
Three Facts and One Opinion About “Birds of Prey”
In 2010 Aguilera released her sixth album, “Bionic,” a massive 18-track album featuring a more electronic sound and numerous collaborations with Nicki Minaj, Sia, Linda Perry, and others.
But I don’t care about THAT version of the album.
I care about the Deluxe edition, with an even more massive total of 23 tracks.
One of which was co-written and produced by the (then) four members of the UK band Ladytron. As OC Weekly (R.I.P.) documented at the time, Aguilera was a fan of the quartet:
Ladytron followers were startled to learn that Christina Aguilera was not only a fan, but had also already worked with the band on a variety of songs to be released in the near future.
“We went in with no expectations; the whole thing was a massive surprise,” explains Wu. “But it was incredible. She was so musically talented, a vocalist who really knows her voice. The first takes sounded really amazing, and while we’d made demos, it was only when her voice was on them that it all came to life.
One of the songs was “Birds of Prey.” Not to be confused with “Bird of Prey” or “Sunset (Bird of Prey),” the Aguilera-Ladytron version builds upon the usual Ladytron vocal delivery from Helen Marine and Mira Aroyo by adding Christina Aguilera to the mix.
Which brings me to my three facts about this song:
- Christina Aguilera has a distinctive voice, with a four-octave range that she frequently exercises to the fullest.
- Helen Marnie has a distinctive voice, featured as the light “singing voice” of Ladytron.
- Mira Aroyo has a distinctive voice, whose spoken word delivery blends with Marnie’s in many classic Ladytron songs. (For example, “Seventeen.”)
In my opinion, this vocal collaboration—unlike the Dylan-Cash one mentioned earlier—works out beautifully. Aguilera naturally opens the song (it’s her album after all), but as the song progresses you hear Marnie lightly chiming in and Aroyo whispering, building up to the closing of the song. Hear it here.
Again, this opinion is not universal—Aroyo in particular is an acquired taste—but the combination seems to work.
But what do “Girl from the North Country” and “Birds of Prey” have to do with B2B sales—whoops, I mean collaboration? And Bredemarket?
The art of collaboration
Bredemarket’s services are built upon the principle that I work together with my clients. My process includes a lot of references to “Bredemarket and you,” because we are both involved in every step, from the seven questions I address at the beginning to the iterative drafts and reviews that occur throughout.
In effect, we both co-pilot the content.
But that isn’t the only way to manage a project, as I noted in June 2023. There are two others.
The first approach is to yield all control to the expert. You sit back, relax, and tell your content marketing consultant to do whatever they want. They provide the text, and you pay the consultant with no questions asked. The content marketing consultant is the pilot here.
The second approach is to retain all control yourself. You tell the content marketing consultant exactly what you want, and exactly what words to say to describe your best-of-breed, game-changing, paradigm-shifting, outcome-optimizing solution. (That last sentence was painful to write, but I did it for you.) The content marketing consultant follows your exact commands and produces the copy with the exact words you want. You are the pilot here.
So which of these two methods is the best way to create content?
As far as I’m concerned, neither of them.
So if you are ready to collaborate on content, learn about Bredemarket’s “CPA” (content-proposal-analysis) services.
You can be Christina if you like.
I Was Parenthetically Incorrect
When a Bredemarket client was reviewing my draft, the client asked about my use of parentheses around individual letters.
“what is the purpose of the “()” in the “(L)eading organizations…” and “(G)en AI…“?”
So I explained.
“I would have to confirm, but presumably the original text said “leading” and “gen.” To properly use the quote as a partial quote I capitalized the words, but enclosed them in parentheses to indicate I modified the original text.”
But I thought I’d better check to see if I was right. Which is good, because I wasn’t. Nancy Lewis in Writing Commons:
“When writers insert or alter words in a direct quotation, square brackets—[ ]—are placed around the change. The brackets, always used in pairs, enclose words intended to clarify meaning, provide a brief explanation, or to help integrate the quote into the writer’s sentence. A common error writers make is to use parentheses in place of brackets.”
Well, at least I’m not the only one. Lewis also provided several examples, including this one:
“[D]riving is not as automatic as one might think; in fact, it imposes a heavy procedural workload [visual and motor demands] on cognition that . . . leaves little processing capacity available for other tasks” (Salvucci and Taatgen 107).
I just corrected my client’s piece before publication, and will try to remember to use brackets as needed in all pieces day forward. I’m not going to go back through the hundreds of blog posts here and correct them.
WYSASOA
(Imagen 3)
A few of you may come away puzzled when I use the term “WYSASOA.”
I don’t understand this.
Isn’t it OBVIOUS that “WYSASOA” stands for “Why You Should Always Spell Out Acronyms”?
That’s pretty stupid, John, you’re saying. If you use acronyms and phrases without defining them, your readers are going to be confused and aren’t going to buy from you.
The counter-argument is that if you don’t know what WYSASOA means, then I probably don’t want to do business with you.
To a point, that’s true.
But why make it hard on yourself?
Perhaps someone doesn’t use WYSASOA, but does use EYA.
(pause)
“EYA” is “Explain Your Acronym.”
Do I have to spell out EVERYTHING to you?
Yes I do.
Why Silas Phelps is an Inconsequential Character in “Huckleberry Finn”
My last post included a fake press release with a fake quote from a fake CEO named Silas Phelps.
Some of you may have recognized the name. I’ll explain who Silas Phelps is, why he’s inconsequential, how his story (well, not HIS story) relates to a piece of music I shared in my last post…and what this all means for marketing writers.
A 19th century novel
For the rest of you, Phelps is a character who first appears in Chapter 31 of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” set in the antebellum era.
The title character has been traveling with a runaway slave named Jim, who has disappeared. When Huck went to look for him, he learned that Jim had been captured. Here is Huck in his own voice (he is the narrator of the novel):
Pretty soon I went out on the road, trying to think what I better do, and I run across a boy walking, and asked him if he’d seen a strange [REDACTED] dressed so and so, and he says:
“Yes.”
“Whereabouts?” says I.
“Down to Silas Phelps’ place, two mile below here. He’s a runaway [REDACTED], and they’ve got him.
The reader eventually meets Silas Phelps, and his family, and his extended family. But they are relatively minor in the story, as Huck continues “trying to think what I better do.”
Because Huck knows that in the eyes of society, he is a terrible scoundrel.
And at last, when it hit me all of a sudden that here was the plain hand of Providence slapping me in the face and letting me know my wickedness was being watched all the time from up there in heaven, whilst I was stealing a poor old woman’s [REDACTED] that hadn’t ever done me no harm, and now was showing me there’s One that’s always on the lookout, and ain’t a-going to allow no such miserable doings to go only just so fur and no further, I most dropped in my tracks I was so scared.
Huck knows what he SHOULD do…but he doesn’t. Well, he STARTS to write a letter up north to let Jim’s owner know where he was…but then he looks at the paper.
It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:
“All right, then, I’ll go to hell”—and tore it up.
And this is the end of the book, but not the end of the story.
- Clemens still had to wrap up all the loose ends of the story, and introduce some new ones (when Huck Finn finally meets Silas Phelps, he has to adopt the name “Tom Sawyer”), but it’s all inconsequential.
- I think I can give the ending away after over a century, but it turns out that Jim was already a free man, having been freed in Miss Watson’s will.
- And Huck was also free, because his tormenting father was dead (something Jim knew all along but kept from Huck at the time). Compared to these revelations, Silas Phelps’ story was truly inconsequential.
Huckleberry Finn’s declaration of what is right is central to the novel. While it was written years after the Civil War had ended, in some sense the Civil War has never ended.
To see another view of this pivotal statement in the novel, read this June 19, 2020 (geddit?) Facebook post by Brad Paisley.
A 21st century electronic song
The idea of a story reaching its climax long before its end stuck with me back when I wrote “For a Meaningful Apocryphal Animation” for the 2017 Ontario Emperor album “Drains to Ocean.”
The song, by the way, is about those fake inspirational stories. For example, if someone wrote up the story about the hiring manager who made a bunch of job applicants wait all day and hired the only one who stuck it out. These stories are never attributed to a reliable source, and in most cases they were probably made up. But someone is bound to take the fake story and put it to soothing music and create a video and get a lot of clicks. “For a Meaningful Apocryphal Animation” was meant to go with one of those fake stories, but I haven’t gotten around to writing the story yet.
And there’s also something musically going on.
When I wrote the song, I channeled my inward Samuel Clemens. Because Ontario Emperor is to music what Mark Twain is to literature. (Well, that’s what the marketing flack would say.)
If you examine the piece, it’s four minutes and thirty-five seconds long.
Which is almost two minutes longer than it should be.
By the time you get to the three percussive snaps at about the 2:40 mark, the piece is pretty much done.
Sure, it goes on for nearly two more minutes, and I play around with the melody for a bit, and I include the greatest musical fade in 21st century music (so the marketing flack says), but I’ve said all that I wanted to say.
Well, at least until the next song on the album, “Climbing.”
The 21st century marketing writer
But let’s return to text. Not novels, but marketing text.
When you write marketing text, you have one key point that you want to make.
- Some marketing “experts” say that you need to make the point in the beginning.
- Other “experts” say you need to save the point until the end.
- None of the “experts” say that your key point should be in the middle.
I don’t really care. If you want to make your point in the middle, using the preceding text to lead up to it, and using the following text to dispose of any other stuff, that’s fine with me.
Just make the point.
AI Articles in Ten (Not Five) Minutes—But I Can’t Tell You Why
More on the “human vs. AI vs. both” debate on content generation, and another alternative—the Scalenut tool.
The five-minute turnaround
I’ve been concerned about my own obsolescence for over a year now.
I haven’t seen a lot of discussion of one aspect of #generativeai:
Its ability to write something in about a minute.
(OK, maybe five minutes if you try a few prompts,)
Now I consider myself capable of cranking out a draft relatively quickly, but even my fastest work takes a lot longer than five minutes to write.
“Who cares, John? No one is demanding a five minute turnaround.”
Not yet.
Because it was never possible before (unless you had proposal automation software, but even that couldn’t create NEW text).
What happens to us writers when a five-minute turnaround becomes the norm?
The five-minute requirement
I returned to the topic in January, with a comment on the quality of generative AI text.
Never mind that the resulting generative AI content was wordy, crappy, and possibly incorrect. For some people the fact that the content was THERE was good enough.
OK, Writer.com (with a private dataset) claims to do a better job, but much of the publicly-available free generative AI tools are substandard.
Then I noted that sometimes I will HAVE to get that content out without proper reflection. I outlined two measures to do this:
- Don’t sleep on the content.
- Let full-grown ideas spring out of your head.
But I still prefer to take my time brewing my content. I’ve spent way more than five minutes on this post alone, and I don’t even know how I’m going to end it yet. And I still haven’t selected the critically important image to accompany the post.
Am I a nut for doing things manually?
You’ve gone from idea to 2500+ word articles in 10 minutes.
Now that I’ve set the context, let’s see what Kieran MacRae (quoted above) has to say about Scalenut. But first, let’s see Kieran’s comments about the state of the industry:
Sure, once upon a time, AI writing tools would write about as well as a 4-year-old.
So what does Scalenut do?
With Scalenut, you will reduce your content creation time by 75% and become a content machine.
The content gets written in your tone of voice, and the only changes I made were adding personal anecdotes and a little Kieran charm.
But…why?
Why is Scalenut better?
Kieran doesn’t say.
And if Scalenut explains WHY its technology is so great, the description is hidden behind an array of features, benefits, and statistics.
Maybe it’s me, but Scalenut could improve its differentiation here, as outlined in my video.
What Scalenut does…and doesn’t do
I should clarify that copyrighting is but one part of Scalenut’s arsenal.
Scalenut is a one-stop-shop AI-powered SEO writing tool that will see you through keyword selection, research, and content production. Plus, you get full access to their copywriting tool, which can create more specific short-form content like product descriptions.
You optimize SEO content by adding NLP keywords, which are the words that Google uses to decide what an article is about.
MacRae cautions that it’s not for “individuals whose writing is their brand,” and Scalenut’s price point means that it’s not for people who only need a few pieces a month.
But if you need a lot of content, and you’re not Stephen King or Dave Barry or John Bredehoft (not in terms of popularity, but of distinctness), then perhaps Scalenut may help you.
I can’t tell you why, though.
(And an apology for those who watch the video; like “The Long Run” album itself, it takes forever to get to the song.)
Who Travels With You?
A fun houseboat is better
than a silent ocean liner.
Some have left my houseboat
or were never on board.
My destination is unknown
but I look forward to landing.
Doing Double Duty (from the biometric product marketing expert)
I’ve previously noted that product marketers sometimes function as de facto content marketers. I oughta know.
For example, during my most recent stint as a product marketing employee at a startup, the firm had no official content marketers, so the product marketers had to create a lot of non-product related content. So we product marketers were the de facto content marketers for the company too. (Sadly, we didn’t get two salaries for filling two roles.)
Why did the product marketers end up as content marketers? It turns out that it makes sense—after all, people who write about your product in the lower funnel stages can also write about your product in the upper funnel stages, and also can certainly write about OTHER things, such as company descriptions, speaker submissions, and speaker biographies.
From https://bredemarket.com/2023/08/28/the-22-or-more-types-of-content-that-product-marketers-create/.
That’s from my post describing the 22 (or more) types of content that product marketers create. Or the types that one product marketer in particular has created.
So it stands to reason that I am not only the biometric content marketing expert, but also the biometric product marketing expert.
I just wanted to put that on the record.
And in case you were wondering what the 22 types of content are, here is the external content:
- Articles
- Blog Posts (500+, including this one)
- Briefs/Data/Literature Sheets
- Case Studies (12+)
- Proposals (100+)
- Scientific Book Chapters
- Smartphone Application Content
- Social Media (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Threads, TikTok, Twitter)
- Web Page Content
- White Papers and E-Books
And here is the internal content:
- Battlecards (80+)
- Competitive Analyses
- Event/Conference/Trade Show Demonstration Scripts
- Plans
- Playbooks
- Proposal Templates
- Quality Improvement Documents
- Requirements
- Strategic Analyses
And here is the content that can be external or internal on any given day:
- Email Newsletters (200+)
- FAQs
- Presentations
So if you need someone who can create this content for your identity/biometrics product, you know where to find me.
You Can’t Make a Silk Purse Out of an AI-generated Sow’s Ear
I’m sure that you’ve heard the saying that “you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.” Alternative phrases are “putting lipstick on a pig” or “polishing a turd.”
In other words, if something is crappy, you can’t completely transform it into something worthwhile.
Yet we persist on starting with crappy stuff anyway…such as surrendering our writing to generative AI and then trying to fix the resulting crap later.
Which is why I’ve said that a human should ALWAYS write the first draft.
The questionable job description
Mike Harris found a job post asking for a human copyeditor to rework AI-generated content. See the details here.
I’m sure that the unnamed company thought it was a great idea to have AI generate the content…until they saw what AI generated.
Rather than fix the source of the problem, the company has apparently elected to hire someone to rework the stuff.
A human should always write the first draft
Why not have a human write the stuff in the first place..as I recommended last June? Let me borrow what I said before…
I’m going to stick with the old fashioned method of writing the first draft myself. And I suggest that you do the same. Doing this lets me:
- Satisfy my inflated ego. I’ve been writing for years and take pride in my ability to outline and compose a piece of text. I’ve created thousands upon thousands of pieces of content over my lifetime, so I feel I know what I’m doing.
- Iterate on my work to make it better. Yes, your favorite generative AI tool can crank out a block of text in a minute. But when I’m using my own hands on a keyboard to write something, I can zoom up and down throughout the text, tweaking things, adding stuff, removing stuff, and sometimes copying everything to a brand new draft and hacking half of it away. It takes a lot longer, but in my view all of this iterative activity makes the first draft much better, which makes the final version even better still.
- Control the tone of my writing. One current drawback of generative AI is that, unless properly prompted, it often delivers bland, boring text. Creating and iterating the text myself lets me dictate the tone of voice. Do I want to present the content as coming from a knowledgeable Sage? Does the text need the tone of a Revolutionary? I want to get that into the first draft, rather than having to rewrite the whole thing later to change it.
I made a couple of other points in that original LinkedIn article, but I’m…um…iterating. I predict that there’s a time when I WON’T be able to sleep on my text any more, and these days the “generated text” flag has been replaced by HUMAN detection of stuff that was obviously written by a bot.
And that’s more dangerous than any flag.
But if you insist on going the cheap route and outsourcing your writing to a bot…you get what you pay for.
If you want your text to be right the FIRST time…
Five Reasons Why 17X Certified Resume Writer Pitches Fail
Are you a 17X Certified Resume Writer?
Do you seek your prospects by searching for LinkedIn profiles with green #OpenToWork banners?
Do you find that your prospects resist your pitches?
Here are five reasons why your pitches may not be resonating.
- You don’t say WHY you exist.
- You don’t say HOW you’ll make me a lot of money.
- You don’t say WHAT you will emphasize in my resume…because you never read my profile.
- You’re a “me too” resume writer.
- You say nothing about product marketing, identity, biometrics, or technology.
If you’re a 17x Certified Resume Writer with generic failing pitches, Bredemarket can’t fix your issues, but maybe someone else can.
The five reasons
Reason One: You don’t say WHY you exist
Let’s face it. 99% of the 17X Certified Resume Writer pitches read “You have an #OpenToWork banner, and I write resumes, so you should buy my services.”
This tells me NOTHING about you, or why you do what you do.
- Was there a childhood experience that propelled you into the resume writing field?
- Or did a simple tweak to your own resume propel you forward?
- Or are you just doing this because it beats delivery driving?
Who are you? Why should I care?
Maybe you should do something like this. For example, here’s why my consulting firm Bredemarket exists:
I am John E. Bredehoft, and I have enjoyed writing for a while now….I guess I’m a “you can pry my keyboard out of my cold dead hands” type.
From https://bredemarket.com/who-i-am/.
Reason Two: You don’t say HOW you’ll make me a lot of money
Remember that I don’t care about your service. I care about how I’m going to get a company to hire me and pay me billions of dollars every year. (More or less.)
So, how will you do this? Do you have a process that results in stellar resumes? Or do you just type stuff at random and hope it comes out OK?
For example, here’s Bredemarket’s process. Did you see that my first two reasons in this particular post were “Why” and “How”? Now you know where I got those terms. And guess what comes next.
Reason Three: You don’t say WHAT you will emphasize in my resume…because you never read my profile
Be honest. When I see these pitches, I draw one of two conclusions:
- You saw my #OpenToWork banner and immediately fired off a generic pitch without looking at my LinkedIn profile, in which case I have no reason to work with you.
- You DID read my LinkedIn profile, but you’re such a poor communicator that you didn’t bother to say what you saw in my LinkedIn profile, in which case I have no reason to work with you.
Reason Four: You’re a “me too” resume writer
You may not realize this, but you are not the only 17X Certified Resume Writer out there. At the same time that you are sending your “You have an #OpenToWork banner, and I write resumes, so you should buy my services” pitch, other people are sending THEIR “You have an #OpenToWork banner, and I write resumes, so you should buy my services” pitch.
Your pitch doesn’t say why I should pick YOU. Or why you are great and why everyone else sucks. You all look the same to me.
As I look at your undifferentiated “me too” pitch and all of their undifferentiated “me too” pitches, none of which cover the “why,” “how,” or “what” of your 17X Certified Resume Writer services. When everyone says “me too” without differentiation, no one stands out.
As I said earlier: “If the 17x certified resume writers are unable to convey THEIR OWN unique value, why should I believe that they can convey MINE?”
Reason Five: You say nothing about product marketing, identity, biometrics, or technology
I end up shaking my head at the pitches that use the following introductory question to send me through their sequence:
I’m curious about which specific role you intend to apply for?
(I had to edit that pitch quote because the original version I received had a space between “for” and the question mark. I am in the United States. Punctuate accordingly.)
If you had actually read my profile (see reason 3 above), you’d know that I self-describe (at least this week, pending future edits) as a “Senior Product Marketing Manager experienced in identity and technology.” You’d also know that I talk about #identity, #biometrics, #facialrecognition, and #productmarketingmanager. You’d also know that my advertised top skills are Product Marketing, Content Marketing, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Competitive Intelligence.
That’s a wealth of information right there, even without looking at my work history, my skills, or my posts.
Too bad you didn’t use it in your pitch.
Time to fix it
I’ll grant that an introductory pitch doesn’t have a lot of real estate, but you should be able to rework your pitch to accommodate all five gaps in your current marketing.
Unfortunately, the word count for your pitch will be well below 400 words, the minimum word count that Bredemarket supports.
But you should be able to find someone.
Just avoid the people with the generic pitch.
Bredemarket 