Enough with the Clickbait Already

Clickbait is everywhere, in advertising and journalism alike.

You’ve seen the headlines. “He Thought It Was Bigfoot’s Skull, but Experts Told Him THIS.” Turns out, the guy found a rock.

“Gut Doctor Begs America, ‘Throw Out This Vegetable.’” You may have seen that ad in the “Sponsored Content” section of various news sites. What vegetable are we supposed to throw out? Nobody knows. The company that produced these adds sells probiotic capsules but won’t tell you what vegetable you’re supposed to stop eating.

Headlines are supposed to grab a reader’s attention. A good headline is designed to pique interest and curiosity, but clickbait is manipulative, dishonest, sensationalist, or all three. Sometimes the content on the other side of the link is a shaggy-dog story (a long, trivial narrative culminating in an anticlimax). Other times, the headline-content combo is a blatant bait-and-switch operation, a form of advertising fraud that long precedes the Internet.

The problems with clickbait are threefold. First, everyone who clicks your link will be annoyed. Second, they won’t want to click on any more of your links. If your entire purpose is getting a click and nothing else, well, but good luck getting anywhere with that strategy. You certainly won’t grow a business that way. Third, clickbait makes the general pubic suspicious of advertisers and journalists in general. If they think an ad looks clickbaity, they may resist clicking on it when they otherwise might have.

The Onion launched a satirical website called Clickhole that mocks clickbait in the media business. Its team uploaded a video to YouTube with the following headline: “This Stick Of Butter Is Left Out At Room Temperature; You Won’t Believe What Happens Next.” Spoiler alert: the butter slowly softens over a three-hour period.

Web browsers now have clickbait-detection apps, and Twitter actively filters this kind of content. The Facebook group “Stop Clickbait” has an ingenious solution. It closes the curiosity gap by having its users read clickbait articles so you don’t have to and answering the question asked in the headline. The results are often amusing.

Not every headline designed to get a reader to click counts as clickbait, of course. If your content delivers on your headline, you’re good. But if you’re an advertiser or journalist who deliberately engages in this sort of behavior, expect to be hated, mocked, and resisted.

The Six Worst Copywriting Mistakes

Any literate person can write marketing copy. Nobody needs a license to write, nor are there any gatekeepers to say that you can’t. Landing a job at an agency takes dedication and work, but if you own your own business, all you need is a laptop.

The vast majority of small-business owners write their own copy, and in-house marketing teams are often made up of people with little if any formal training in writing. Even veteran agency copywriters make mistakes, especially if there are no in-house copyeditors. Errors abound. Many of the largest enterprises publish marketing copy that’s rife with misplaced commas and typos.

If your business or agency doesn’t have editors on staff or on retainer, you’d be well advised to make a diligent effort to ensure your copy is as sparkling and clean as you can make it so you don’t embarrass yourself or your clients.

Misusing Punctuation

We all learned how to punctuate sentences in grade school, but virtually nobody—not even professional writers—gets it right every time. Even senior copyeditors need to consult The Chicago Manual of Style once in a while.

Most readers won’t notice if you misplace a comma, but they will laugh at you if you don’t know how to use quotation marks or apostrophes properly. If you’re promoting a bank, don’t offer “free” checking. And if you’re selling bananas for two dollars a pound, remember that you’re selling bananas, not banana’s. (That last mistake is so common in supermarkets that it has a name: the grocer’s apostrophe.)

If you don’t know how and when to use a semi-colon or a colon without looking it up, you shouldn’t use either.

Corporate Gobbledygook

You simply must use the kinds of words your customers use rather than your own internal jargon. If they don’t know what you’re talking about, they’ll leave. Health insurance companies use the word “provider” when they mean “doctor,” but patients don’t. And if you use a phrase like “foot solutions” when you’re writing about shoes, customers will think you’re ridiculous.

So start by writing in English.

Spelling and Grammar

Spelling mistakes are the easiest to correct, but they’re also the easiest for your customers to spot. Spell-checking software can help you, but it can’t save you. (It has no idea that you typed “to” when you meant to type “too.”)

The fact that everybody misspells words once in a while does not give you permission to call it good because Microsoft Word says your copy is clean. If clients or customers spot several misspellings on your corporate or small-business website, they’ll wonder if sloppiness is pervasive throughout your entire company—and they’ll be especially worried if you sell software or food.

Keyword Stuffing

Readers may or may not know what keyword stuffing is, but they’ll know something is off if you do it. You are not going to get away with using the same words over and over again so that Google will find you. Professional copyeditors won’t let you get away with using even an innocuous word twice on a page because readers notice the word echo.

So balance your need to use keywords with your need to write naturally and organically.

Using Twelve Words When Seven Will Do

Copyediting is like poetry in at least one way: you need to ruthlessly search and destroy words you don’t need. You have precious little real estate to begin with, but even if you were writing a novel, bloated sentences are awkward and kludgy. Put them on a diet.

Ignoring the “Return” Key

For goodness’ sake, don’t drop gigantic blocks of text large enough to kill a human being on your readers. Break everything up into snack-sized pieces whenever you can, and remember to press the “Return” key when you can’t. Walls of text look like a chore to read, and they usually are.

Social Media is Bigger Than Marketing

The following headline in the Harvard Business Review no doubt left social media marketers clutching their pearls: “Social Media Is Too Important to Be Left to the Marketing Department.”

Obviously marketing departments run a business’s social media channels. Who else would do it? Engineering? Accounting?

It’s a different story, of course, if you run a small business and don’t even have a marketing department. You won’t have any departments, and you’ll probably manage your social media channels yourself—if you even have any.

But if you manage the social media channels at a large business, odds are good that you could use a little assistance from people in other departments, even if you don’t realize it or don’t want to admit it. Because the vast majority of messages that customers send to business through social media channels go unanswered. The majority!

Imagine if your customer service team answered only 1 in 8 emails right away, waited more than 3 days to get back with an answer or just flat out failed to pick up the phone 88% of the time. Unacceptable, right? Despite significant gains in the perception and value of social media, many brands remain unmoved in the quest to institute a fully functioning social communication strategy.

Not every message needs to be answered, of course. A Facebook comment isn’t always the social media equivalent of a help-desk ticket. Nor is every comment a complaint that needs to be dealt with. Some customers just want to say they love your latest widget release. Still, almost half of customer messages do require some kind of response, so if the vast majority end up in the bit bucket, you’re doing it wrong.

Then again, markers aren’t in customer service. They’re marketers. They have a different skillset and a different job description. Handling customer complaints isn’t what they signed up for, and it’s not what anyone really expects them to do.

Rather than fobbing off social media to customer service, marketers would be well advised instead to bring customer service and sales representatives in. Make the effort collaborative.

Here’s Harvard’s advice for creating a cross-functional team:

1. Develop a social care team that can address all areas of social information efficiently and effectively. Identify policies and software systems needed for implementation.
2. Organize departmental responsibilities in the social care team. Clearly define roles and responsibilities among marketing, customer service, public relations, sales, corporate communication, human resources, etc.
3. Assign specific employees from each department to social media tasks. Set up social media accounts and give employees access to social media systems.
4. Create brand guidelines for standards, tone, and style of social media communication. Ask legal and human resources to provide a list of do’s and don’ts for real-time consumer engagement.
5. Define specific goals based on key performance indicators such as response time, sentiment analysis, engagement, views and shares, and other important metrics.

It’s a bit of an exaggeration to say that social media is too important to be left to the marketing department, but it is too important to be left to the marketing department alone.

How to Unlock Your Own Creative Genius in Thirty Minutes

If you’re feeling stuck creatively and can’t seem to come up with anything fresh, don’t worry. There’s a process for getting unstuck.

You know you’re supposed to brainstorm ideas. That’s obvious. But most people don’t know how to deep brainstorm and use creative persistence to punch through the creative blocks in their path.

Here’s how it works:

Start by brainstorm ten new ideas. It’s fine if you hate all of them. If you’re doing it right, you won’t use anything at of them on your list for your next project. This is a list of your weak ideas, the proverbial low-hanging fruit, the ones that aren’t likely to inspire you or anyone else.

Now brainstorm ten more ideas and write them down on a separate sheet of paper or in a different file. This list is probably better than the first. You probably had to stretch yourself a bit. You’re less likely to add clichés to this list since you’ve gotten those out of the way. Chances are that at least one idea on your second list beats every single thing on your first list.

Now it’s time to set this list aside and create a third, and this time there’s no upper limit. Write down everything you can think of until your well is totally dry. Now you have a decent brainstorm list that you can work from, and it’s probably better than anything you thought you could come up with.

Feel free to stop at this point. By going through three iterations, you’ve probably unblocked yourself. But if you’re feeling ambitious, if you want to come up with something truly original that no one else in the world might have thought of yet, stretch yourself and create a fourth separate list.

That fourth list is where your creative genius will appear.

“Giving up is the enemy of creativity,” Brian Lucas and Loran Nordgren wrote in the Harvard Business Review.

They know because they ran some experiments on students and proved that their test subjects drastically underestimated how many ideas they could think of. The students’ assignment seemed straightforward and easy. All they had to do was spend ten minutes writing down every Thanksgiving dish they could think of in ten minutes. Then they were asked how many more dishes they thought they could think of it they were given an additional ten minutes.

The average student assumed they’d be able to think of ten additional dishes—one per minute—but they actually thought of fifteen more. Researchers had similar results when they asked comedians how many punch lines they could come up with.

But there’s more to this story than the well-known fact that people tend to underestimate themselves.

After each study we asked a separate group of people to rate the creativity of the participants’ ideas. Across the majority of our studies we found that ideas generated while persisting were, on average, rated to be more creative than ideas generated initially. Not only did participants underestimate their ability to generate ideas while persisting, they underestimated their ability to generate their most creative ideas.

So don’t stop just when you think you’ve unblocked yourself and have a good enough working list of ideas. That’s precisely the moment when you really ought to keep digging. Genius lurks in your subconscious. Go forth and find it.