Beware of Digital Marketing Scams

Obinna Ekezie, co-founder and CEO of the African travel agency Wakanow.com, warns his fellow entrepreneurs in Forbes about the growing problem of digital marketing scams.

He hired one marketing agency after another before finding one that delivers results without ripping him off.

Before I hired my current service provider, I dealt with a few that claimed to provide a quality product at a cheap price. A few were outsourced to countries that are known for the proverbial “snake oil.”

[…]

It’s like an SEO company guaranteeing the number one position on Google. This is an impossible guarantee, as are the quality guarantees of $5 hourly web developers and 50,000 Instagram friends for $100 (fake friends, of course).

He offers some good advice, starting with the fact that you must research an agency before signing a contract. It’s always a good idea to Google the name of a company you’re unfamiliar with along with words like “scam,” “fraud,” and “rip off.”

Just as important—and this is something Ekezie didn’t mention—take a look at the agency’s clients. Professional agencies have professional clients. If an agency you’re vetting is cagey about who else they’re working with, run away.

If you’re in the tech industry, look for agencies with clients like Adobe, Microsoft and Amazon. If you’re in the travel business, your best bet is an agency that partners with Travelocity, Kayak, and Hotels.com.

The last thing you should want is one that charges five dollars an hour. That’s barely half the minimum wage in the United States. There is no chance—none—that you will find competent marketing professionals anywhere in the world willing to work for so little.

Would you hire a lawyer for five dollars an hour? Would you buy a car for 50 dollars? How about a house for 1,000?

It’s a cliché to say there’s no such thing as a free lunch, but it’s a cliché for a reason. It’s true. Likewise, there’s no such thing as high quality work for what amounts to slave labor wages. We can promise you that anyone who agrees to work for basically nothing is either incompetent, a scammer, or both no matter which country they live in.

Likewise, be very careful if you hire someone on freelancer websites like Upwork. Some quality freelancers use these sites, to be sure, but so do rank amateurs. Anyone who charges anything in the same time zone as minimum wage will do a terrible job. They may not be fraudsters, but trust us: professionals cringe when we see writers, editors, graphic designers, and marketing “experts” willing to work for so little. We don’t cringe because the amateurs undercut us. Talented folks will always be able to find work. We cringe for the people who think it’s a good idea to hire these amateurs.

You get what you pay for. There is no getting around this. If you want quality work in any field, it’s going to cost you the market rate.

Artificial Intelligence Is About to Plateau

According to the BBC, researchers believe we may be on the cusp of what they call an artificial-intelligence winter, with AI only being able to perform a narrow set of tasks well.

There’s a discernible pattern here. The hype around AI has peaks and valleys. Some describe the peaks as “AI summers” and the valleys as “AI winters.” Those labels only make sense, though, if you’re describing the hype. AI abilities don’t decline during winters the way the outdoor temperatures drop. Only the hype exhibits an objective decline.

When thinking about or describing AI itself, the word “plateau” works much better. And we should expect periodic plateaus in the development of AI abilities. Moore’s Law, which states that the number of transistors in integrated circuits doubles every two years or so, doesn’t apply here. AI simply cannot advance exponentially.

Moore’s Law is strictly limited to circuit development. It can’t apply to AI any more than it can apply to your golf game, your ability to learn how to play the guitar, or the speed at which you can master higher math. Not only is progress in those areas not exponential, it’s not even linear. Ask any golf pro or rock star about their progress, and they’ll tell you that they repeatedly plateaued for a period of time before their next breakthrough, after which they plateaued again for a while.

It looks like that’s exactly what’s happening now with AI. The hype hasn’t quite died down yet, but it’s about to. And it needs to. A decade ago, talk of machines becoming smarter than humans was everywhere, most famously with Ray Kurzweil’s book The Singularity Is Near. Yet machines still can’t even edit a blog post properly let alone run the world. Software like Grammarly and Microsoft Word will destroy a piece of writing if given free rein to make editorial changes. They are both wrong up to 95 percent of the time. You’re better off not using them at all than accepting every suggested edit. You certainly won’t want to upload your consciousness to a computing cloud that can’t properly clean up a sentence.

Meanwhile, a whole swath of the general public, steeped in sinister dystopias like The Matrix and The Terminator, fear that artificial intelligence may well wipe out humanity entirely at some point. Less pessimistic scenarios have robots destroying nearly every job imaginable, menial and professional alike, leaving us to live like demoralized, unemployed house pets in the best-case scenario.

With the hype gearing up to go into remission, doomsday fantasies will hopefully follow.

Taking More Downtime Improves Productivity

Americans take less vacation time than anyone else in the Western world. In the United States, we like to say that an overworked person “works like a dog.” In Europe, they say an overworked person “works like an American.” It’s even worse in Japan. They have a word there, karoshi, that means “death from overwork.” In the U.S., we have suicide hotlines. Japan has karoshi hotlines and even protesters in the streets demanding “No more karoshi!”

The American middle class is somewhat more prosperous than many of its European counterparts, so we do get something for our efforts, but that doesn’t mean we’re doing everything right, even if you think the tradeoff is worth it.

Ohio University found that the most productive 10 percent of employees don’t work a full eight-hour work day. On average, they take 15-20-minute breaks every 52 minutes. And it found that nurses who work six hours a day are 64 percent more productive (and 20 percent happier) than nurses who work eight hours a day.

This shouldn’t really be all that surprising. We all know from our own experience that we’re less productive when we’re tired.

Our minds and bodies need to recharge. If you’re almost out of juice but keep working anyway, your energy, motivation, engagement, and creativity will crash. They might not crash to zero—you’ll still be able to sit in front of your laptop and produce something—but you won’t be able to produce very much, and what you do manage to knock out may take you twice as long and only be half as good.

Individually, we know this, but our culture steadfastly refuses to recognize it. The American work ethic is a wonderful thing, and it’s critical to our prosperity, but it leaves us with this blind spot. Overwork is something we don’t talk about much except at home and among our friends. It’s hardly ever mentioned in the workplace. Most businesses are obsessed with productivity, as they should be, and yet they fail to take this obvious and empirically proven fact into account, that additional rest time boosts productivity.

There are things every one of us can do about this even if we can’t reduce our work hours, starting with recognizing the difference between productive downtime and wasted downtime. Eating bon bons on the couch while watching Dr. Phil reruns is wasted downtime. It allows you to rest, but it doesn’t recharge you. You’re also wasting downtime if you beat up on yourself for not working. Remind yourself that you will get more done if you take some quality time off.

But you can’t take a single weekend and call it good for the rest of the year or even the rest of the month. You have to build it into your life in order for it to work properly. Start here:

Wake up early but don’t start work early. Spend that time existing in a quiet state by yourself. Make a cup of coffee and sit on the patio, or go for a walk in the park or just around the neighborhood. Don’t read the news on your phone, and for goodness’ sake don’t check your work email. Nobody expects you to be productive during this time; nobody who doesn’t live with you even knows you’re awake.
Spend your lunch hour the same way—which means not at your desk, even if you stop working while eating. Eat in a restaurant, in a park, or at home if you can. Even the break room is better than at your desk.
Spend entire days doing nothing at all when you can. Most exhausted people find they can spend all day at the beach watching the waves without getting bored if they can just give themselves permission to do so without guilt-tripping themselves. An entire day lounging in a hammock with a compelling novel is like charging your cell phone all night.

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:

Develop a social care team that can address all areas of social information efficiently and effectively. Identify policies and software systems needed for implementation.

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.

Assign specific employees from each department to social media tasks. Set up social media accounts and give employees access to social media systems.

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.

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.

Generations Are Not Marketing Segments

For decades, large companies have been advertising and marketing to their customers based on age group. “Young people” were perceived, or at least treated, as a monolith, as were senior citizens. Chief marketing officers obsessed over how to market to Millennials—as if 83 million Americans were more or less interchangeable and mostly wanted the same things.

None of this makes any sense any more, especially not in the era of targeted ads. Even the smallest businesses can take advantage of microtargeting. A self-published author of a science-fiction trilogy can advertise books to Star Wars and Star Trek fans, for example, regardless of the fans’ age, gender, or location. A vegan restaurant in Minneapolis, a boutique coffeeshop in Seattle, and a microbrewery in Portland can likewise microtarget its potential customer base.

The world is more culturally diverse than ever, with myriad “tribes” of athletes, hipsters, vegans, the religiously devout, bookworms, audiophiles, nature lovers, car guys, gym rats, running enthusiasts, wine connoisseurs—you name it. A single city block can include one of each type of person. Each member of each “tribe” has something meaningfully (not just commercially) in common with other members of their tribe on the other side of the world—including those who are decades older and of the opposite gender—that they don’t have in common with the person living next door.

Marketing to microsegments wasn’t possible decades ago and was only faintly possible until recently until the Internet simultaneously fragmented and (in different ways) brought people together.

So unless you’re selling school supplies or condos in retirement communities, forget marketing to strictly to age groups like Generation Z or Baby Boomers. Forget marketing to Millennials. What a Millennial, anyway? Someone who graduated from high school between the year 2000 and now. Sure, these folks have some things in common with each other that they don’t have with older and younger generations—bonds forged by shared experiences at a certain age during a certain moment in history—but a young twenty-something finance professional in Manhattan has little else in common with someone the same age born and raised by farmers in North Dakota.

Splitting your marketing segments into tribes is about more than just microtargeting your social media ads. Netflix, for instance, curates content for what it calls “taste communities.” And Netflix has identified more than a thousand of them. Obviously, with such a large number, the company is dividing its audience into more granular segments than those who like comedies versus those who like crime dramas. Netflix can actually determine if you’re the type of viewer who would enjoy American Horror Story with the latest Adam Sandler comedy as a chaser.

Businesses need to spend a lot more time thinking about how to market to people who like the same things and have a similar mindset. Easier said than done, of course, but you don’t want your business to be the last one on the bandwagon.

Nine Reasons Your Business Needs a Copy Editor

Every writer in the world needs a copy editor. Best-selling novelists, newspaper columnists, corporate communications pros—everybody. Even editors need a second set of professional eyes on their work.

Copy editing involves much more than fixing typos at the last minute. That’s the proofreader’s job, though proofreading can be rolled into copy editing. In addition to correcting spelling, punctuation, and grammar mistakes, copy editors improve the style and clarity of language, clean up awkward phrasing, remove redundant material, ask for additional details as needed, and improve the overall flow. They ensure your material is logical, consistent, and persuasive, and that one thing naturally follows another. In short, they ensure that what you’ve produced is as professional as it possibly can be.

Although every newspaper, magazine, and publishing company in the United States employs in-house or freelance copy editors, many businesses think they don’t have to—even though copy editing adds relatively little to the marketing and communications budget.

Here are nine reasons why businesses should reconsider:

Your content isn’t ready yet. Skipping the editorial process and pressing publish too soon is the communications equivalent of flying an airplane without a safety inspection. Every error reduces customer confidence in your business, and glaring errors can shatter it.
You need a professional pair of eyes. No writer on earth can edit their own work—including your staff writers. Since you wouldn’t ask someone who isn’t an accountant to double-check your taxes, or someone who isn’t a lawyer to look over your legal brief for mistakes, it’s best to hire a professional who is trained to spot errors and knows how to fix them.
You need an objective, unbiased perspective. Colleagues won’t hesitate to point out a missing comma or misspelled word (if they’re sharp enough to spot them), but they may be too shy to say an entire paragraph needs to be rewritten from scratch.
You need an external viewpoint. Someone who is unfamiliar with your business, or at least less familiar than those who work there every day, will know right away if you aren’t explaining yourself properly to people outside your organization.
You need a technical and corporate translator. All businesses need someone who can convert technical and corporate jargon into standard English that their customers can easily understand and relate to.
You’re too close to your own work. You know what you’re trying to say. That doesn’t mean everyone else will.
You can’t afford to embarrass yourself. You can only make one first impression, and you don’t want to embarrass yourself by publishing errors that a professional can easily fix.
You deserve the best possible product. A professional editor will do more than just fix your mistakes; he or she can dramatically improve the content of your writing, raising the quality of your entire organization’s output.
Your writers will improve. Regular editorial feedback is akin to ongoing professional development. Your writers will never stop needing an editor, but they’ll produce better and better content over time.

The editorial staff at reddbug have helped clients like Adobe, Microsoft, and Amazon take their content to the next level. Contact us if you’d like our help. We can even provide a free sample edit. We hope to hear from you soon.

The Long Road Toward Mastery

“Mastery is not a function of genius or talent, it is a function of time and intense focus applied to a particular field of knowledge.” – Robert Greene

Those of us in creative professions—writers, graphic designers, computer programmers, artists of every variety—often feel like we’re not good enough. We compare our work to others’ and to the chimerical notions of perfection we have in our heads.

The more we learn, the more skills we develop, the more we realize what we don’t know and how far we still have to go.

It’s okay. It’s part of the package, and the feeling never truly goes away unless we give up.

In his book, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell argues that it takes roughly 10,000 hours of dedicated practice to achieve proficiency in a difficult skill such as playing a musical instrument. That’s the equivalent of working 40 hours a week for five years.

Raymond Chandler used to tell young writers that they had to write a million words of crap before they’d ever get anything published. That’s the equivalent of ten or more books.

Legendary animation director Chuck Jones went even further. To artists he said, “you’ve got a million bad drawings inside you and the sooner you get them out, the better.”

If it takes such an extraordinary amount of time and effort to reach even a basic level of competence, how long does it take to actually master this stuff?

As it turns out, true mastery of the most difficult crafts is impossible.

In his book, Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment, George Leonard describes three types of people who take on long-term endeavors and fail—the Dabbler, the Obsessive and the Hacker.

The Dabbler begins with tremendous enthusiasm and is thrilled with his first burst of progress, yet he soon finds himself on a plateau where there is no apparent improvement. He soon moves on to something else.

The Obsessive wants results, and she wants them fast. She usually gets them fast, too, because she’s willing to pull out all the stops. Unlike her friend the Dabbler, when she finds herself on the plateau without any apparent improvement, she doubles down on her efforts. Her intense energy helps her persevere for a while, and she may rise a level or even two beyond the first plateau, but a leveling-off followed by a painful decline is all but inevitable in her future, and probably sooner rather than later.

Meanwhile, the Hacker doesn’t mind the plateau. He’s perfectly content coasting along indefinitely without even trying to improve as long as he performs well enough to make a living and without getting fired.

Then there is a fourth kind of person, the kind who willingly walks and vows to stay on an infinite road. She grinds it out day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year and decade after decade for the whole of her life. She spends nearly all her time on one plateau or another, but she improves by increments, and at times by leaps and bounds, with each plateau rising higher than the last. She never reaches the top—there is no top—but she produces a body of work over a lifetime that seemed unimaginable when she started.

Walking an infinite road can be intimidating at times, but ultimately it is liberating. You don’t have to keep asking yourself when you will finally get there because no final destination exists. The road toward mastery is longer than a human lifespan. No matter how far we walk or paddle or drive, the horizon remains in the distance.

“To love the plateau is to love the eternal now,” Leonard writes, “to enjoy the inevitable spurts of progress and the fruits of accomplishment, then serenely to accept the new plateau that waits just beyond them.”

Enjoy the journey.