Remarkable Content by Dee

New idea for a reality show.  Replace the snack machines in a corporate lunchroom with ones that take only SEO words instead of bills and coins. Then, let the cameras roll and see what happens next.

Oh, wait. We’ve already seen that one.

We’ve all seen plenty of websites loaded down with words like solution, leading edge and award winning, and plenty of frustrated people who just don’t get why these words fail to produce anything.

These words mean nothing. If you don’t believe me, I dare you to define leading edge without getting out your dictionary. Even with a dictionary, you won’t come up with anything more meaningful than a geometric shape, for whatever good that is. And that’s if you even think about the word at all. Most times, we just skip over words like this in order to sink our chops into something….meaningful.

All the more frustrating then if the next word to follow happens to be solution. Seriously? Leading edge solution?  What does that mean?

These words don’t work for the same reason sticking $100 bills into a vending machine doesn’t work. They don’t fit. No one is going to key leading edge solution into a Google search for computers or office furniture or kitchen cookware or anything, really.

If you’ve invested thousands of dollars for a website design but totally ignored the words on the page, you’ve wasted your time and your capital.

So, go for words that have meaning. Show us why your company and products matter with real words that your real customers would really use. If you’re selling kitchen cookware, say that. Better yet, tell us what kind of kitchen cookware you sell and how it stacks up against everyone else’s. And, if your cookware happens to carry the Good Housekeeping seal of approval, tell us that, too.

These are the words that mean something, to your customers and to the search engines that factor in keyword activity giving websites their rank. With the right keywords, you can start to build up enough SEO credits to produce something worthwhile you can sink your chops into.

Today I was contemplating how my writing has changed.  I am thinking things through more, and putting out straight research less.  Opinions suddenly matter. It’s not enough to jot down facts. There needs to be some connecting of the dots to make those facts matter.  And not just for writers. For everyone.

Think about it. When was the last time you set out to do a project without knowing why?  Or, better yet, when was the last time you didn’t have an opinion about something, anything?

More so than any other time, we are required to think about what we’re doing.  I mean, really think about what we’re doing.  We all know people who think too much and do too little, or do too much and think too little. They may have survived, even thrived, in pre-recession days, when there seemed to be a clearer division between the thinkers and the doers.  When the thinkers thought up all the ways to get ahead in business, and the doers went ahead and did it.

But nowadays, each and every one of us is required to do more and think more. From a strictly business perspective, putting the “thinking” and “doing” roles into one just makes sense.  Where else on the org chart can we possibly squeeze out any more productivity?

Besides, it’s not like we aren’t getting a little help from our friend, the internet.  We can discern so much more now that we can Google it, blog about it to our friends, and get a YouTube experience of it.  I have yet to see a study on it, but my guess is that the internet is forming some rather remarkable gray matter between the ears.

That’s just my opinion, though. What do you think?

For someone who proclaims to know a thing or two about content marketing, I sure have been wrong about Twitter.  It’s taken me a long time to accept it at the table of new ideas because, well, it reminds me of lasagna. Don’t get me wrong. I love lasagna. It’s one of my favorites, especially since they came out with those new bake noodles that make it so easy to make. But, here’s the thing: Twitter isn’t Facebook in the same way that lasagna is not spaghetti.  

Let me explain. Like a lot of kids, I practically grew up on spaghetti. Then, sometime in my early years I got my first taste of lasagna. I liked it enough, but it had all those familiar ingredients and I quickly declared it a poor imitation of my beloved spaghetti.  I spurned it for years.  Nothing could get me to touch the stuff, until I met someone very important in my life who loved lasagna: my husband.

Today, lasagna is welcomed at my table any time.  So, too, is Twitter.  Just because I grew up (social media-wise) on Facebook, that doesn’t mean Twitter isn’t useful in its own right. Whereas Facebook is a way to communicate ideas and thoughts, Twitter is a way to redistribute information and connect it to people and customers in ways that social networks like Facebook can’t come close to doing. That 140-character limitation that I couldn’t quite get over about Twitter is, in fact, the extra ingredient that makes it so appealing – kind of like the cheese in lasagna.

Now, if I can just get myself to apply that same thinking to all those other spaghetti wannabes.

I’ll be the first to decry the effectiveness of meetings. I can remember a townhall meeting that I sat in on years ago. Half the hour was spent discussing the items raised at the last meeting, and the other half was spent setting the agenda for the one to come. 

I have little patience and even less time for meetings. I’d much rather spend my days moving letters around on an oversized computer screen, accompanied only by the occasional artwork.

So, meeting up with a group of writers the other day wasn’t my idea of a productive morning. It was at least Hemingway-like, having coffee with a group of impassioned writers. The muffins helped, too. Looking around the table at the faces before me, I saw writers from all walks of life: journalists, romance writers, web developers. Some I had just met. Others I had known for a while, one even before the invention of the Internet.

We were all drawn out of our darkened offices and away from our continual letter-moving for the same reason. We sensed a change in the word trade like a groundhog senses a change in the weather, and we had all poked our heads up out of our respective holes long enough to see if anyone else had noticed, too. We had. We all had. In fact, with the exception of one or two of us, we had all responded to a Facebook invite.

It’s a new world out there and I know of at least a half-dozen writers who are boldly going forth into it.

 Two recent events have forever changed my perception of media relations.

 First, I happen to have a good friend who is writing a screen play, which is to say that I am being continually drawn into discussions on conflict resolution, characterization and storylines.

 It’s all-consuming, this business of friendship and screenplays.

 So, too, is that other, albeit more public, event: the untimely death of Michael Jackson and media coverage thereof.  Just when I’m pretty sure how the story is moving along, yet another plot point unfolds and I’m left wondering about protagonists and antagonists yet again.

 It is obvious to me that media coverage is as much about conflict and resolution as it is about reporting, right down to a compelling storyline.

 Which is precisely my point.

 I’m more convinced than ever that effective public relations is about storytelling.  How else but through stories can the media, and their sponsors, grab and keep audiences? In fact, my best written work as a PR flack resembles a screenplay. A well-crafted press release is, after all, nothing more than a form of storytelling, complete with a hero, one form of conflict or another, and a resolution to that conflict.