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.”
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Tim Conway (Sr.), as repeatedly played during Jim Healy’s old radio show. Sourced from the Jim Healy Tribute Site.
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.
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.
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.
Differentiation, by Bredemarket.
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.)
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.
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’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?
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 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.
Leftover pizza is the best pizza. Preparation credit: Pizza N Such, Claremont, California. Can I earn free pizza as a powerful influencer? Probably not, but I’ll disclose on the 0.00001% chance that I do.
Now that it’s time to write the “separate post,” I really don’t want to get into the mechanics of how posts that attract prospects (hungry people, target audience) increase awareness and help you convert prospects for your products and services.
So forget that. I’m going to tell a story instead about two executives at a fictional company that has a real problem. The executives’ names are Jones and Smith.
The story
Jones was troubled. Sales weren’t increasing, prospects weren’t appearing, and if this malaise continued the company would have to conduct a second round of layoffs. Jones knew that “rightsizing” would be disastrous, so the company needed another solution.
So Jones videoconferenced Smith and asked, “How can we make 2024 better than 2023?”
Smith replied, “Increasing sales calls could help, and ads could help, but there’s another way to increase our awareness with our prospects. We could create content on our website and on our social channels that spreads knowledge of our products and services.”
Jones exclaimed, “That’s great! We could get generative AI to create content for us!”
“No, not that!” Smith replied. “Generative AI text sounds like a bot wrote it, and makes us sound boring, just like everyone else using generative AI text. Do we want to sound like that and put our prospects to sleep?”
“So we need a human writer,” Jones realized, “one who can describe all of the features of our products.”
“Absolutely not,” Smith emphasized. “Customers don’t care about our features. They care about the benefits we can provide to them. If we just list a bunch of features, they’ll say, ‘So what?'”
“OK, we’ll go with benefits,” said Jones. “But why is content so important?”
“Take blogging,” replied Smith. “The average company that blogs generates 55% more website visitors. B2B marketers that use blogs get 67% more leads than those who do not. Marketers who have prioritized blogging are 13x more likely to enjoy positive ROI. And 92% of companies who blog multiple times per day have acquired a customer from their blog.”
“Wow.” Jones was silent for a moment. “How do you know all of this stuff, Smith?”
“Because of the content that I’ve read online from a marketing and writing services company called Bredemarket. The company creates content to urge others to create content. Bredemarket eats its own wildebeest food.”
I’ve been using the word “wildebeest” more often lately. In the Bredemarket blog, on Bredemarket’s LinkedIn pages, on my own LinkedIn page, and even in a job application cover letter.
For those who don’t know why I’m so hot on wildebeest, let me explain.
It all started with the dogs
When I started Bredemarket as a marketing and writing service firm, it stood to reason that I would have to market and write about Bredemarket itself.
There’s a common phrase for this practice: “eating your own dog food.”
It’s important to differentiate yourself from the competition. Trust me on this.
So I stopped talking about eating my own dog food, and when I set my initial goals for 2021 in December 2020, one of my goals was “eat my own iguana food.”
You’ve heard the saying about eating your own dog food. That statement bored me, so I started talking about eating your own iguana food. Eventually I tired of iguanas and pivoted to wildebeests.
And for over 2 1/2 years I’ve continued to focus on the majestic wildebeest, both singly and in confusion (the correct term for a group of wildebeest). Let’s face it: how many other marketing and writing experts are talking about wildebeest? It’s my own little distinctive thingie.
The problem with wildebeest
But now I’m asking myself whether this is a GOOD distinction. After all, the common definition of “confusion” is NOT a positive one. Unless you’re a New Order fan.
So perhaps I’ll retire the wildebeest for something new that more closely reflects Bredemarket’s differentiators:
I help firms win by explaining why the firm serves its customers, focusing on customer needs, and highlighting benefits.
Yes, those are the same differentiators that I currently include in my personal LinkedIn profile. But after all, Bredemarket is a one-person operation.
Bredemarket 