If you wanted to keep teens from smoking weed, what message might you communicate?

One health organization, reports Guy Kawasaki in his book Enchantment, used the message that young people who smoked weed were five times more likely to engage in sex.

Have you ever met a 17-year-old football player? For that matter, have you ever met a 58-year-old writing coach?

Many humans — except perhaps for those who work for this one particular health organization — actually enjoy sex. I myself have met several people who feel their lives would be much less interesting without it.

One group tried to cut teen weed use by saying that weed smokers were 5 times more likely to have sex. … Have you ever met a 17-year-old boy?
Click To Tweet

Not to say that the five-times-less-sex message wouldn’t work on a different audience. If you were trying to convince parents, teachers or school board members to campaign against teen weed-smoking, then that data point might be compelling.

For most other audiences, though, the promise of five times more sex might just convince the most sober among us to wake and bake, nod off on the couch during all-day “I Love Lucy” marathons and come to surrounded by empty Cherry Garcia cartons.

And that’s the problem with this message: It has a WIIFM, or a “What’s in it for me?”

It just focuses on the wrong M.

Answer your reader’s No. 1 question.

The first thing your reader wants to know from your message is “What’s in it for me?” Advertising writers long ago shortened this term to WIIFM, pronounced “wiffum.”

So think like your readers:

• Your customer readers don’t care that your organization is putting $100 million more into R&D this year. They want to know whether that means their computer will be faster and easier to use.
• Your employee readers don’t care that your organization is adding $10 million to the profit-sharing coffers. They want to know whether that means they’ll be able to retire early.
• Your media contacts don’t care that your organization has launched a revolutionary new toothpaste. They want to know whether it’s going to reduce their own readers’ dental bills.

So answer the reader’s No. 1 question: “What’s In It For Me?”

But first, you need to know who Me is.

Whatever happened to Step 1B?

You remember Step 1B of the five-step communication planning process. It’s “Target your audience.” It comes right after identifying the business challenge and before setting goals for, developing, implementing and measuring the success of your communication plan.

So whatever happened to Step 1B?

I’ll tell you what happened to Step 1B. The internet happened to Step 1B. All of a sudden, we weren’t targeting our readers — our readers were targeting us.

Which meant that instead of targeting anybody, we were suddenly targeting everybody. (And remember what Mom said about trying to please everyone.)

There is a solution to this problem, and it is to have readers target themselves:

• Offer separate doorways on your website. For a health care site, for instance, you might offer doors for patients and doctors — and never the twain shall meet. Understand that if I stumble onto my doctor’s web pages, I will decide that your site is not for me. And if my doctor finds herself on web pages targeted at my level of medical expertise, she will decide that your site isn’t for her. Target each of us, separately.
• Offer separate social media feeds. A river runs through my city, and 14 bridges connect the east and west sides of town. If my bridge is closed, I want the DOT to tweet urgent updates every five seconds. But if your bridge is closed, I never want to hear about it at all. The solution: Offer separate Twitter streams for each bridge.
• Offer separate news releases, tag intranet articles for certain departments, segment email blasts. That doesn’t mean you need to multiply your work. Just finesse the headline, deck, lead and nut graph of each piece to focus on your targeted audience’s needs.

But every day, I work with communicators who don’t do that. Instead of targeting audience members or helping audience members target themselves, they target everyone.

Their every web page is for all comers. Their all-in Twitter streams drown disparate followers in irrelevant messages. Their e-zines and newsletters go to employees, to customers, to legislators.

Even if the WIIFM that would compel one audience would repel the rest. (Remember: sex.)

We need Step 1B. Help me bring back Step 1B!

Because not all of your Me’s are the same. The rich, for example, are different.

The rich are different.

I’m not just saying this. It’s true: While most parents tend to teach their kids to prioritize the needs of the group over their own needs, wealthier parents tend to teach their kids to succeed on their own.

It shows up in charitable giving: Wealthy adults are less likely to share what they have with others.

So how do you get the wealthy to give? Frame their giving as a personal accomplishment, say three researchers.

They found in one study that wealthier people — those with incomes higher than $90,000 — were way more likely to click “Donate today!” when giving messages stressed individual achievement (“You = Life-Saver”) instead of emphasizing a common goal (“Let’s Save a Life Together”).

In another study, alumni from an elite business school gave $150 more on average when asked to “Come forward and take individual action” than when they were asked to join their community to “support a common goal.”

That’s their WIIFM.

That message won’t work for everyone. And that’s OK. It doesn’t have to. You can use the common-goal message with your less wealthy givers.

But do target your audience members and focus on what’s in it for them. That’s how you put the M in WIIFM.

___

Sources: Guy Kawasaki, Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions, Penguin Group (USA) LLC, March 8, 2011

Ashley V. Whillans, Elizabeth W. Dunn and Eugene M. Caruso; “How to Get the Wealthy to Donate”; The New York Times; May 12, 2017

Ashley V. Whillans, Eugene M. Caruso, Elizabeth W. Dunna; “Both selfishness and selflessness start with the self: How wealth shapes responses to charitable appeals”; Journal of Experimental Social Psychology; volume 70, May 2017, pp. 242-250

The post Use WIIFM marketing to persuade appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..

Have you seen the piece about the orphan baby kangaroo and wombat who become BFFs? They also have a baby wallaby friend. Because of course they do.

Awwwww.

It’s obvious why these bundles of joey are making the rounds on Facebook. But how can you use the same approaches to make your content marketing messages travel the world, while others just languish on the couch?

Write a blog post that’s positive and emotional, suggest Jonah Berger and Katherine L. Milkman, two professors at the University of Pennsylvania.

Make messages positive, emotional.

Together, Berger and Milkman reviewed some 7,000 articles that appeared in The New York Times to determine what distinguished pieces that made the most-mailed list.

After controlling for placement, timing, author popularity and gender, and story length and complexity, they found that two features determined an article’s success:

• How positive its message was. Positive messages are more viral than negative ones.
• How much emotion it incites. The more extreme the emotion, the more likely it is to move people to act. Messages that make people angry, for instance, are more likely to be shared than those that make people sad.

Articles that evoked emotion — “Baby Polar Bear’s Feeder Dies” — got shared much more on social media than those that did not, such as “Teams Prepare for the Courtship of LeBron James.”

And happy emotions (“Wide-Eyed New Arrivals Falling in Love with the City”) outperformed sad ones (“Maimed on 9/11, Trying to Be Whole Again.”)

Spread the word

What characteristics make online messages go viral?

Characteristics that go viral

Increase your chances of going viral by increasing these characteristics of your blog post:

Anger

This emotion is 34% more likely to go viral. That’s equivalent to spending an additional 2.9 hours as the lead story on NYTimes.com. And that’s nearly four times the average number of hours articles spend in that position.

Sample headline:

What Red Ink? Wall Street Paid Hefty Bonuses

That makes anger the No. 1 technique for getting your target audience to read your blog posts and pass them on. Show how your organization solves the problems that make readers angry with these techniques:

• Don’t be afraid of fear appeals.
• Make ’em sick, make ’em well.

Awe

This emotion is 30% more likely to go viral:

Rare Treatment Is Reported to Cure AIDS Patient

The Promise and Power of RNA

That makes awe the No. 2 emotion we can tap to make messages go viral (after only anger) is awe. Call it The Awwwww Factor.

So how can you make your messages as awe-inspiring as little orphan animal stories?

• Write about animals. Do you have a Ben the Bear story in your organization?
• Write about people. Try human-interest stories.
• Tell stories. Storytelling is the most effective way to add positive emotion to your content.

Practical value

This emotion is 30% more likely to go viral:

Voter Resources

It Comes in Beige or Black, but You Make It Green

Write how-to stories, tipsheets and news readers can use to live their lives better.

Interest

This emotion is 25% more likely to go viral:

Love, Sex and the Changing Landscape of Infidelity

Anxiety

This emotion is 21% more likely to go viral:

For Stocks, Worst Single-Day Drop in Two Decades

Emotionality

This characteristic is 18% more likely to go viral:

Redefining Depression as Mere Sadness

When All Else Fails, Blaming the Patient Often Comes Next

Surprise

This characteristic is 14% more likely to go viral:

Passion for Food Adjusts to Fit Passion for Running

Pecking, but No Order, on Streets of East Harlem

Positivity

This characteristic is 13% more likely to go viral:

Wide-Eyed New Arrivals Falling in Love with the City

Tony Award for Philanthropy

HubSpot viral marketing scientist Dan Zarrella found similar results from his research.

Zarrella used TweetPsych to analyze more than 100,000 accounts. He found that negative remarks — references to sadness and aggression, negative emotions and feelings, and morbid comments — correlate with fewer followers. (What a shock!)

“As it turns out, nobody likes to follow a Debbie Downer,” Zarrella writes. “Accounts with lots of followers don’t tend to make many negative remarks. If you want more followers, cheer up!”

Sadness

This characteristic is 16% less likely to go viral:

Web Rumors Tied to Korean Actress’s Suicide

Germany: Baby Polar Bear’s Feeder Dies

Maimed on 9/11, Trying to Be Whole Again

___

Source: Jonah Berger and Katherine l. Milkman, “What Makes Online Content Viral?” (PDF) Journal of Marketing Research, April 2012, pp. 192-205

The post How to write positive, emotional content marketing pieces appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..

When William Faulkner couldn’t figure out how to structure A Fable, he wrote a simple outline — directly onto the wall of his writing sanctuary.

A Fable won the 1955 Pulitzer Prize. Hmmmm … maybe Faulkner was on to something.

You needn’t write on the walls. But you do need to outline. Mind mapping works. Even bullet points on the back of an envelope can help you resolve structural flaws, avoid awkward transitions and write to your word count. (I call this editing before you write.)

“In order to write something big, it really helps me to think of the constituent parts. What are the basic units or elements? What are the chapters? That helps with my research — filling up my chapter files. And it helps with my drafting — writing one chapter at a time.”

— Roy Peter Clark, author, How to Write Short

Whether you’re a fiction writer producing creative writing, a short story writer responding to writing prompts or a corporate communicator cranking out a news release or intranet article, you’re going to need to organize writing projects.

Here’s how five other writers have figured out what goes where — a key step of the writing process:

1. Tom Wolfe outlined.

“I make a very tight outline of everything I write before I write it,” said the author of The Right Stuff.

“By writing an outline you really are writing in a way, because you’re creating the structure of what you’re going to do. Once I really know what I’m going to write, I don’t find the actual writing takes all that long.”

2. Chip Scanlan “collages.”

“Don’t get stuck in linearity,” writes the affiliate faculty member of The Poynter Institute. Instead, he writes in segments, then “collages” the paragraphs and pages together into a whole.

3. Donald M. Murray used Post-its.

“I use a yellow highlighter and Post-it notes,” wrote the Pulitzer prize-winning journalist.

“Since I’m not comfortable using split screens and electronic files to write from, I make a printout of every interview, staple the pages, and spread them out on my desk. I separate the stacks with Post-it notes: pro sources, anti sources, the experts, etcetera.”

4. Vladimir Nabokov used index cards.

Nabokov wrote most of his novels on 3-by-5 cards, keeping blank cards under his pillow for whenever inspiration struck.

5. Ann Wylie uses buckets.

Once you’ve researched your story, it’s time to organize your notes. Here’s how I do it, step-by-step.

“Organization is what you do before you do it, so when you do it, it’s not all messed up.”

— Winnie The Pooh

1. Put your info in buckets. As you gather and organize information, think of your material as “buckets” of like information. Depending on the scope of the project, your buckets might be physical file folders, files on your laptop, Word documents, even bookmarked sections within a Word doc.

For a marketing brochure, for instance, you might have buckets on how the product helps customers:

• Save money
• Make money
• Save time

Each bucket becomes its own section in the body of the piece.

2. Write a ‘lead’ for each bucket. Master writers craft mini feature structures for each section, giving each section its own “lead.”

3. Label your buckets. Make each section easy to find by placing a meaningful subhead before:

• Each section of the body
• The conclusion

If you have three points, you’ll have four subheads — one for each section of the body, and one to divide the body from the conclusion.

That will help you make your thinking visual and your structure clear.

How to organize writing projects

“Prose is architecture. It’s not interior design.”

— Ernest Hemingway, Nobel Prize-winning novelist

Whether you’re writing on the walls or using Google Drive, a lot of times, organizing your writing projects is the hardest part of the writing process. Use these techniques to make the process better, easier and faster.

How do you organize your writing projects?

The post How to organize writing projects appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..

Anger and anxiety are the No. 1 attribute of messages that get shared, found Jonah Berger and Katherine L. Milkman, two professors at the University of Pennsylvania.

They reviewed some 7,000 articles that appeared in The New York Times to determine what distinguished pieces that made the most-mailed list.

They found that anger is 34% more likely to go viral. That’s equivalent to spending an additional 2.9 hours as the lead story on NYTimes.com. And that’s nearly four times the average number of hours articles spend in that position.

That makes anger the No. 1 technique for getting your target audience to read your blog posts and pass them on.

Tap the anger advantage.

So how can you use that?

Use a marketing technique called “Make ’em sick, make ’em well.” That is, lead with the problem that’s making your target audience angry, follow up with your solution to their problem.

As ad man David Ogilvy counseled, “When you advertise fire extinguishers, open with the flames.”

Communicators are often too eager to rush in with the product, service or idea. After all, that’s what we’re selling. But first, show your audience members how bad life can get without your product, service or idea.

Here’s how it works, from a financial services campaign:

Make ’em sick

Make ’em well

Lead with the problem.

Remember: Fire first, fire extinguisher second.

The post How to appeal to fear appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..

Why metaphor?

Metaphor is a literary device that helps readers understand, pay attention, remember and act on messages. Metaphor is a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable: Lips are volcanoes, for instance.

What is the purpose of a metaphor? Use metaphor, says James Geary, author of The Secret Life of Metaphor, because:

1. Metaphor is around us daily.

“Metaphor lives a secret life all around us,” he says. “We utter about six metaphors a minute. Metaphorical thinking is essential to how we understand ourselves and others, how we communicate, learn, discover and invent. But metaphor is a way of thought before it is a way with words.”

2. Metaphor makes messages vivid.

William Shakespeare used metaphor. So did Elvis Presley.

“Now, ‘All Shook Up’ is a great love song,” Geary says. “It’s also a great example of how whenever we deal with anything abstract — ideas, emotions, feelings, concepts, thoughts — we inevitably resort to metaphor.

“In ‘All Shook Up,’ a touch is not a touch, but a chill. Lips are not lips, but volcanoes. She is not she, but a buttercup. And love is not love, but being all shook up.”

3. Metaphor creates expectations.

“Pay careful attention the next time you read the financial news,” Geary says. “Agent metaphors describe price movements as the deliberate action of a living thing, as in, ‘The NASDAQ climbed higher.’ Object metaphors describe price movements as non-living things, as in, ‘The Dow fell like a brick.’

“Researchers asked a group of people to read a clutch of market commentaries, and then predict the next day’s price trend. Those exposed to agent metaphors had higher expectations that price trends would continue. And they had those expectations because agent metaphors imply the deliberate action of a living thing pursuing a goal.”

Would agent or object metaphors best help you set the right expectations?

4. Metaphor influences decisions.

“A group of students was told that a small democratic country had been invaded and had asked the U.S. for help,” Geary says. “And they had to make a decision. What should they do? Intervene, appeal to the U.N., or do nothing?

“They were each then given one of three descriptions of this hypothetical crisis. Each of which was designed to trigger a different historical analogy: World War II, Vietnam, and the third was historically neutral.

“Those exposed to the World War II scenario made more interventionist recommendations than the others. Just as we cannot ignore the literal meaning of words, we cannot ignore the analogies that are triggered by metaphor.”

5. Metaphor opens the door to discovery.

“Einstein described his scientific method as ‘combinatory play,’” Geary says. “He famously used thought experiments, which are essentially elaborate analogies, to come up with some of his greatest discoveries. By bringing together what we know and what we don’t know through analogy, metaphorical thinking strikes the spark that ignites discovery.”

6. Metaphor shakes things up.

“Metaphor shakes things up, giving us everything from Shakespeare to scientific discovery in the process,” Geary says. “The mind is a plastic snow dome, the most beautiful, most interesting, and most itself, when, as Elvis put it, it’s all shook up. And metaphor keeps the mind shaking, rattling and rolling, long after Elvis has left the building.”

___

Source: James Geary, “Metaphorically Speaking,” TedTalks, July 2009

The post What is the purpose of a metaphor? appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..