Access Notes

“You know that song, time in a bottle?” asks the Zyrtec commercial. Uh-oh, I don’t. Should I know it? Does everyone but me know it? Am I uncool?

I ask around. A mixed response. One guy enthusiastically says, “Yes, I know that song!” Other reactions range from “Yes, I think I’ve heard it” to “That’s a song?”

Evidently the latter group is not in Zyrtec’s target demo. Or they don’t pay attention to ads.

So I YouTube Time in a Bottle.

What d’you know, turns out I have heard Jim Croce sing it. Many times. I was just not cognizant of its title. OK. I’m not that out of it.

But this story illustrates an important point advertising professionals need to keep in mind. Never take it for granted your audience knows what you know. Especially when it’s a 36-year old song.

Even when you’re writing B2B copy for a professional audience, you can’t assume your reader has all the facts at their fingertips and that they can instantly recall said facts.

Agreed, you can’t go around explaining everything, because then you’d end up writing a textbook. But if you’re, say, quoting prior research, it would be wise to take an extra couple of sentences to summarize the research. (I know scientific papers often don’t do this. That’s OK, because they have their own conventions that meet the needs of their audiences.)

Same goes for industry jargon or shorthand. When I come across terms that sound out-of-the-ordinary, I ask the client, “Is this lingo common in the industry? Will every reader understand it?” Often the answer is “Yes,” but sometimes, after a reflective pause, the client will say “No.”

Never assume. Because you know what happens when you do.

Reports of companies making money off blogs are rare. Occasionally, a story like this one in the Washington Post will pop up about how a firm turned a blog into a profit generator. (Warning: you may have to register on the site to view the story). For the most part, however, corporate blogs are cost centers.

But think about it: how many marketing communications vehicles can be readily correlated to revenues? Your brochure? Your TV commercial? Your banner ad, with its 0.05 percent clickthrough? Your awareness-building ad in a magazine?

Fact is, few marcom efforts have measurable results. But that doesn’t stop marketers from using all the channels that reach their customers and prospects. (Or as many efficient channels as they can budget for.)

A blog is simply another advertising medium. It may or may not be suited to your product or market — that’s for you to decide. It may require more employee time than you have available. That’s also for you to decide. But if your analysis shows your audience will be receptive, why not give blogging a try?

At a minimum, a blog will improve your rankings in search engine results. That alone has to be worth something.

Colons and semicolons aren’t seen much in general business correspondence. Colons are mostly relegated to introducing lists, and semicolons are rarer than gold bricks raining on your yard.

Now, thanks to the computer monitor, both these punctuation marks are headed for extinction. Neither can be easily discerned on screens; people just use dashes instead.

As web writing styles infiltrate offline writing, the trend will grow.

Think about it: How many times have you missed a colon or semicolon when reading text on a website or email? But dashes, periods, commas — ah, these you notice instantly. Even when reading at superspeed, which is everyone’s default speed online.

Many senior business executives don’t have much use for Web 2.0 tools. Financial returns are iffy, keeping up takes too much time and the legal territory is largely uncharted.

Besides, there’s the sneaky suspicion that blogs and wikis and Tweeter do nothing but encourage employees to goof off. “Cyber Monday” is driven by people logging in from work, not home.

But still, companies are going ahead with 2.0 initiatives. Some love it, others say “Bah! Humbug.” McKinsey’s August 2008 quarterly newsletter reports on the company’s second annual survey of business use of Web 2.0 technologies. The survey found that as many executives (about one in five) were unsatisfied with returns from Web 2.0 as were happy with the results.

Among the findings of interest: companies were using more Web 2.0 tools than last year, they were using them mostly for internal communications, and the executives who were satisfied said they would use them more intensely in future.

However, 7% of respondents stopped using Web 2.0.

Overall, though, the needle is heading toward greater adoption of 2.0 tools, especially outside the U.S.

For a few months after we moved into our house, we kept getting direct mail addressed to the previous owners. Then the mailers must have cleaned up their lists, because the flow of letters dried up.

Except for mail from GMAC. They were resolute. Their letters for the previous owners continued to arrive, even after I took pity on them and returned one of their envelopes, writing “addressee moved” on it. I didn’t have the intended recipients’ address, or I would have forwarded the missives that GMAC so faithfully dispatched.

About a year or so ago, I noticed that GMAC had stopped mailing us. But at the same time, a whole new set of mailing lists had found the erstwhile owners’ names and married them to our address.

I’m not up on the mechanics of mailing list generation, but seems to me some people are working off old records and not worrying about list accuracy. And a whole lot of advertisers are paying to reach someone who doesn’t live here any more.

The moral of the story is: Before you drop your hard-earned coin on direct mail, be like Santa and check your list twice.

People communicate with one another. So do computers, often when people aren’t looking. As do other living things, like birds and insects and animals and fish. It’s believed that plants talk to their own species too, but that’s still in the realm of speculation, not science.

Now add stars and planets to that list.

For many years, astronomers have known that Earth emits radio waves formed by the same process as the Aurora. (Same phenomenon, different wavelength.) They thought the Auroral Kilometric Radiation, as it is known, traveled out to space in a conical pattern. Check out this site if you want to hear what the AKR sounds like.

Recently, by analyzing AKR data from the European Space Agency’s Cluster program, scientists discovered that the waves propagate in a narrow plane. A plane such as the one shaped by almost closing the barn doors on a Klieg light.

The key fact, to me, is not the direction of propagation, but that Earth has been sending out this radiation for all these billions of years.

I wonder who’s listening. And what they make of it.

It would be tragic if nobody’s listening and nobody’s making sense of it. Because then it isn’t communication. It’s just self-expression.

If someone says “You must sing for your supper,” are they addressing one person or many?

There’s no way to tell. English doesn’t have singular and plural second-person pronouns — just the multipurpose you.

As if that weren’t enough, English also lacks the singular version of the third-person plural pronoun they. And that leads to problems with unsatisfactory solutions.

In everyday speech, it’s acceptable to use they as a singular pronoun. That’s what I did in the first sentence of this post. Go back and reread it, in case you missed it the first time. I paired someone (singular) with they (plural).

This is bad grammar. I should have written he or she instead of they.

But I have no problem being ungrammatical in this instance, because it’s informal writing. If I was writing formal copy, however, I would use the cumbersome he or she instead of they. Also his or her instead of their, and so on.

And I would do so under protest. I think it’s a pointless rule, as they doesn’t harm anything. But there it is.

.com and .org are so, ohhh, June 2008. Soon, says the New York Times, we will be free to choose domain names containing any word we want — or can get — after “dot.”

So if you’re a Britney fan, you might be able to reserve Britney.fan. Or say you love tooling around in your WWII-vintage Supermarine Spitfire. You might get IFly.Spitfire.

The possibilities are endless. The mind reels. Corporations will have to preemptively snap up all kinds of combinations of their company names paired with various words. Think “ABC.products” or “ABC.sucks.”

What do you think — will the new web addresses be popular?

There’s a strong case for answering “no.” People are too used to .com addresses. Besides, look at .biz and .net. They’ve been around for years, yet you’ll be hard pressed to find businesses whose URL’s end in these extensions. Even rarer are addresses with newer top level domains (TLDs) like .info, .mobi and .ws.

In most people’s minds, if you’re a company, your URL ends in .com. Even if you say “dot biz,” they hear “dot com.” Conditioning is hard to overcome. Old habits die hard.

On the other hand, these old habits are only about a dozen years old. Nothing is carved in stone. People will get used to different companies having different TLDs, just like they’re used to them having different phone numbers and street addresses. It’s not that much of a mental leap.

However, there is an “if.” A big if. You see, we ignore .biz and .info and the rest of them only because the .com extension is so ubiquitous. If enough users embrace custom TLDs, dot coms will become less common and we’ll start paying closer attention to web addresses when we see or hear them. We’ll simply accept that every business’s URL doesn’t have to end in .com, and we won’t bat an eye at a name like ABC.products.

My answer to the question above therefore is “yes.” We’re going to see a rush of creative domain names, with clever combinations of TLDs and subdomains. It should be fun.

And as long as web and email servers send our bits and bytes to the right destinations, we’ll move seamlessly into the brave new world.

Let creativity bloom.

Not to put a damper on the party, but it must be said: Even with the new URLs, we’ll still face the old problem of “if you build it, will they come?”

No matter what addresses we give our sites, we’ll still have to publicize the sites, drive traffic, increase conversions, and the rest of it. Some things will never change.

To calm those butterflies in your stomach the next time you get up to speak, just remind yourself:

The audience is on your side. They’re rooting for you to succeed.

Believe it: they’re not eager to watch you stumble. This is true no matter what the occasion of your speech or presentation. If you’re presenting to management or your colleagues, your bosses want you to succeed. OK, maybe one or two in the audience — your rivals — will ache to see you in quicksand. But they’re not your primary audience.

If you’re making a sales pitch, your prospects want you to do well, and show them how you can help them. If they expected you to fail, they wouldn’t be there.

Granted, there may be a few instances where your audience is unfriendly to you. Like if you’re an oil company CEO testifying before a congressional committee. Or if you’re Marc Antony speaking at Julius Ceasar’s funeral.

But 99.9% of the time, the audience is not your enemy. It is your friend.

“Information wants to be free” has become the rallying cry of the free source movement. Which is fine with me. Unfortunately, the phrase has also become the rallying cry of plagiarists.

Stewart Brand, the creator of The Whole Earth Catalog, is widely credited as the source of the expression. According to this article, the originator may actually be Peter Samson, who said it about 25 years before Brand.

In any case, Brand said more than just “Information wants to be free.” Here’s the relevant quote:

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.

The lesson: Create valuable information. Then it won’t want to be free.

One exception would be information that could benefit all of humanity. If I ever produced something like that, I would give it away free.