Sacrilicious Marketing

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

-JABBERWOCKY

Lewis Carroll

(from Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, 1872)

Remember reading Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky for the first time? How the words felt foreign but familiar all at once? You immediately made sense of what seemed completely nonsensical.

You hear “slithy” and know it is something between lithe and slimy, “mimsy” is both flimsy and miserable, “galumphing” is galloping while triumphant and “chortling,” is chuckling and snorting at the same time. By simply blending 2 words into a new one, Carrol introduced the world to an entirely new vernacular in Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. We call these blended words portamanteaus… and, today, we create and use them everywhere. Tabloids turn celebrity couples like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie into Brangelina. New technologies birth words like netiquette, sexting and textpectation almost daily. Master chefs push the boundaries of fusion cuisine with frankenfoods. Authors like Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner explain hidden causality in the theory of Freakonomics. Girls cringe when they hear the terms “cankles” and “fugly.” The Red Hot Chili Peppers even injected portamanteau into their music in Californication.

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What do Marion Barry, Anthony Weiner, Charlie Sheen, Lee Iaccoca, Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton have to do with marketing? To find out, give a listen to my interview with Dino White on Blog Talk Radio. We cover everything from celebrity to real estate marketing, reputation management, Facebook campaigns and much more. </p>

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Get This Slick New iFrame Fan Page Template for Only $20 Before June 1.

Sacrilicious would like to thank all our customers who have purchased , subscribed to or downloaded our FBML templates with this exclusive offer. Get our brand new iFrame template that features social plugins, the full FB SDK, an Ajaxed contact form and a bunch of slick Javascript effects for 50% off our retail price if you buy before June 1, 2011.

Offer:
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This iFrame template combines the robust featureset of the Facebook SDK and social plugins with the slickness of Javascript effects. Utilizing the new iFrame protocol for pages, this template is like nothing you have ever seen on Facebook!  Perfect for businesses and consultants that have a need for displaying multimedia on their pages.

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Features:

• Javascripted scrolling effects and a revolving gallery
• Social plugin integration
• FB SDK integration
• Ajax Contact form

Need Help Editing?

Video Tutorials: Tutorials

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It’s all in the tone.

“Hey hommies! Be sure to check out our hot new products getting hotter every day!”

Too casual?

How about,

“Greetings. Please examine our new products, with more becoming available daily.”

Too formal?

The tone of an email is vital to your audience. While email communication can be less formal than business or marketing writing, it is important to write to the tone of your audience. It’s important not to be too formal, nor too familiar, when emailing your customers.

The right tone for an email can vary.  It depends on both the customer being emailed and the topic of the email. For example, an email regarding financial information should be more formal than an email with product updates.  Also, an email apologizing to a customer for poor service should be more formal than your weekly newsletter.

You can absolutely make your email fun and saucy, if this is appropriate for the customer and the moment, but do not be overly casual and risk being disrespectful to your audience with the wrong tone.  The tone should be a direct reflection of how serious the topic is.

Less serious = casual tone.

More serious = formal tone.

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I can remember sitting in my seventh grade English class, listening to a lecture about the importance of “using the active voice.” This is still the case when you are trying to entice people to read your emails. Of the many lesson’s you’ve likely thrown away since then (when was the last time you heard someone use “whom” the proper way anyway?), abolishing the active voice should NOT be one of them.

The most effective way to communicate a message or idea is to use the active voice. The active voice focuses on the subject, rather than how the subject is being acted upon, creating a more powerful image or idea.

Now in case your grammar skills are evading you at the moment, in an active sentence, the subject is doing the action.  A straightforward example is the sentence “Kevin threw the ball.” Kevin is the subject, and he is doing the action: throwing the ball. The ball is the object of the sentence.

In passive voice, the object of the action gets promoted to the subject’s position. Instead of saying, “Kevin threw the ball,” it would say, “The ball was thrown by Kevin.” The subject of the sentence becomes the ball, even though the ball is not doing anything. The focus of the sentence has changed from Kevin to the ball.

While those examples were quite trivial, they do illustrate the point.

Here are some examples of the active and passive voice the might be used in marketing:

Passive

We’re happy to announce that there are now 10 new products on our site. Best of all, more are being added every day.

Active

We’re happy to announce you can now browse 10 new products, and we’re adding more every day!

Passive

You’ve been selected for a special discount on any of the below products.

When using the passive voice this sentence sounds gimmicky.

Active

Buy any of the products below and receive a special discount!

When transferred into the active voice the sentence becomes much more action oriented.

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While I am generally unforgiving of the entire state of Alabama and may have suggested on more than one occasion we solve the current financial crisis by giving Alabama, Texas and a few other choice states to Mexico, I have a long standing rant on social media advice with Alabaman, Ike Pigott.

This week, we had so much to discuss that I thought it might be useful to share some of our thoughts from our most recent discussions.

1.     Retweet anything anybody you like says if they ask

If you want to maintain some authority and credibility you need to curate the content you produce. That means you don’t re-tweet just anything, no matter who asks. God, Allah, Buddha and Vishnu could ask me to retweet something stupid and I wouldn’t. Your Twitter and Facebook Accounts/Pages are your Smithsonian – you are your own curator. You must maintain your integrity. That means, you don’t post links to articles without reading them first and you don’t retweet things you don’t find genuinely interesting. If you have the expectation that someone would follow your link or advice, you should expect to be held accountable for the info they found there. Does that mean you can’t be fun? Hell, no. I publish things from The Superficial and Cracked all the time because my mind is really only one Ivy League degree away from that of a 14-year-old boy’s. I am currently obsessed with this Charlie Sheen Site (http://livethesheendream.com/) and I am not above asking questions like “Could I have ever learned my ABCs without knowing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star first.” But, I guarantee you, if I publish it I think it, read it and/or find it interesting, educational or entertaining. To maintain any level of credibility and authenticity about the content you publish you need to curate that content based on your thoughts, beliefs, views, experience, sense of humor and education.

2.     Passive aggressively attack others because it’s more politically correct than directly calling someone out or trying to work out a beef privately.

To be fair, this isn’t really advice anyone is giving, it is just something that people are doing. The online community is far more accepting of a passive aggressive attack on one of its members than it is of a direct attack. However, the more passive aggressive the attack, the less likely it is to spark a conversation around a topic that benefits the community as a whole or help the parties come to resolution than it is to create a latent resentment between the parties that grows until it explodes. Basically, it is the practice of really bad social skills and even worse conflict resolution skills and the saddest part is the community as a whole condones it because it is easier to dismiss a passive aggressive attack as a mis-communication than to acknowledge it and deal with it. The most common examples of this are when someone asks a leading, yet general question to the universe like “I wonder if douchebags know they are douchebags?” after they just had a public argument with another user on a social network. Everyone knows that this is just a veiled way of saying, “Hey, @ikepigott is a dbag” but the person who said it can play it off like it was not directed at Ike.

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In email marketing, the most important part of the email is the subject line. It’s the first impression. It single handedly decides if someone wants to open your email or not. Is your email is worth the read?

How to make subject lines effective:

1. Don’t sound spammy!

Look in your spam folder. It is likely filled with $$$ and all capitals as if it is screaming at you to OPEN THIS EMAIL NOW!!!!!!!!!! Add one of these “!!!!” to your subject line and you are sure to get flagged as spam.

2. Keep it short!

Why would keeping the subject line short benefit you? Because according to an Epsilon study, “38 to 47 characters is the average number of characters that show up in the subject line of 57% of all U.S. email recipients’ email programs.” Any more characters and they are getting cut off. Also, most people only read the first few words of a subject line anyway so be sure to get the most important information out first.

3. Be compelling!

What are the main reasons you open emails? It’s important, it’s interesting, or you perceive a benefit. These are the reasons all people open emails. So when writing subject lines let them know it’s something important of interest to them and that they will benefit from reading it.

Effective subject lines include:

1. News- Tell your readers what’s happening.
2. “How to” – How to is a great email subject line if you know a solution to a common problem your readers likely experience.
3. Riddle- There’s a reason pop up ads often say “Want to know how this girl lost 47 lbs in 3 days?” It’s because people are compelled to click it just to find out the answer. It’s our nature to reduce uncertainty so you can bet people will click that email to find out.
4. Deals – People love a good deal. If your email offers a sensational sale let them know in the subject line.

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So, as many of you have noticed, Facebook rolled out their new Fan Page Design today. And, as many of you might have noticed, the width of custom tabs seems to have changed from the expected 520 pixels to an odd 492 pixels. DON’T FREAK OUT. According to Carl Sjogreen, a Product Manager at Facebook, “This is a bug. The size of tabs was not intended to change. We’re investigating.” Facebook has always been forthcoming about announcing width changes to Fan Pages. This is just a temporary glitch which is expected to be corrected soon.

Now, on to all the shiny new things! For those of you that do not like change – you probably don’t love the new layout, but I think you will learn to like it with time. For those of us that do like to move the furniture around a bit, I’m sure you have noticed the changes!

1.     Photos Have a brand New Showcase at The Top of Your Page

I’m loving this! Much like you new profile layout, most recent photos that you post to the Wall of a Page or photos you tag your Page in will appear at the top of your page. This area will not include any photos posted by people who like your Page.

2.     Top Navigational Tabs Have Moved to the Sidebar

This is the one change I think that will receive the most complaints, but honestly, it is better for navigation and leaves enough room for the photo area at the top. The old tabbed top navigation has moved to the sidebar.

3.     Wall Filters

Page admins will be able to view additional filters beyond the “Posts by Page” and “Everyone” and now see “Most Recent” and “Hidden Posts.”

4.     Use Facebook as Your Page

You will be able to receive notifications for your Page, view a News Feed for your Page, and like and post on other Pages as your Page.

5.     Receive Email Notifications When people Post a Comment to your Page

HUGE! As an admin it can be frustrating not get notifications of when someone posts a comment to your page. This solves that issue! You will now be able to opt to receive notifications when people post or comment on your Page.

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