Ozdachs

About Ozdachs

San Francisco Internet Marketer and web designer gets you on the Internet in a cost-effective, responsible way.

Don’t Announce Events if You Want People to Come

I just finished reading a press release for a non-profit organization’s conference that went something like:

We’re Holding an Event!

We’re a great group of people trying to do good in the world. Our event will be next month, at this location, and it will focus on talking about these topics. A lot of interesting people will be there. Here are the dates, times, and location.

As announcements go, it wasn’t bad. The basic 4 W’s of journalism were covered: who, what, where, and when were handled.

But, there’s another W: Why.

Why are you telling me about this event? Why should I care?

Many of the articles that are sent in to me as the volunteer editor of my church’s newsletter, The Flame, leave out the critical why. The writers send in the announcements because they want people to show up and join in. But, their write-ups don’t say that. They read like a For Sale ad posted on the bulletin board of a community laundromat.

For Sale. 27-in flat-screen TV 2 years old. 555-1212

Reading the 3×5 card ad at the laundromat, you know that you’re supposed to call the owner if you want to buy the TV. But, with event announcements it’s not so obvious what you’re supposed to do. Make a reservation? Buy a ticket? Are there membership or other prerequisites? Are you talking to me?

Invite Your Audience

As the harried organizer of a non-profit group you know you are eager for people to join to come to your event. That’s why you sent out the announcement, for Pete’s sake!

But, the reader of the announcement may not understand that this message includes people who are not already involved with the activity. Or, they may not understand the logistics of how to become involved, even if all they have to do is show up to be welcomed.

The solution is to avoid announcing your activity. Invite people to it instead.

Put an explicit invitation to join in, participate, or “come on down” in your headline and lead paragraph.

Tell Them HOW to Join the Fun

Along with who, what, where, when, and why, stories about future activities should include an H word: HOW.

Tell your target audience in plain words what they have to do to be included: do they need to call ahead, come to the first meeting, or pay at the door? Especially in these times, cost is an important factor, and you should mention the price of admission for everything, even when it’s $0. You and everyone in your group may know that you’re informal folks and people can casually drop into your free activity. But, the people you’re trying to draw into your circle may not know the details. Make it easy for them by laying it all out in the invitation.

Give your readers a clear road path to becoming involved, and ask them to take that first step.

Include a Compelling Call to Action

In the business world, marketing mavins are told to include a call to action in their sales materials.

Call now!
Register today!

Go ahead. Get down and dirty with all the sales tricks when you’re trying to fill up your event. Make your ~~pitch~~ invitation include a sense of immediacy. Have them sign up right now!

Why not? Why not ask them to commit while they are reading your message. If you give a reader until next month to register, they’ll put off signing up until next month. And, then they’ll forget. If not right now, certainly they should register at coffee hour this Sunday or email you by Friday.

There is a reason that so many commercials have a breathless sense of urgency. It works!

Give it a Whirl

If you want more people to show up at your next event, volunteer to do the “announcements”. Then write a captivating invitation:

Use an action verb to ask people to join in the action
Tell folks exactly how they can feel included and part of your merry band
Create a way for your invitees to commit to attending now, before their attention wanders

Let me know how inviting folks filled your activity with energetic new folks!

By Ozdachs|2011-09-28T15:39:05-07:00September 23rd, 2011|Writing|2 Comments

Ban These 2 Words to Create Successful Events

There are two words which you should never use if you want other sane, busy people to join your activity. They are the two words I keep trying to remove from the weekly church newsletter I edit, The Flame. Yet, they are part of almost every article submitted for that organization and for other non-profits and businesses.

Banned Word #1: Meeting

Face it, no one wants to go some place, sit in a chair, and “meet”. Meetings conjure up the image of school classrooms where you sit and squirm until you’re released to do something more fun.

Except “meetings” are worse than going to class because it’s not just the qualified teacher who is going to lecture you. Meetings carry with them the likelihood that some other member of the audience is going to let loose and share some tangential tidbit from their store of personal biases. Meetings you’ve gone to have lasted twice as long because someone is always going off under the guise of asking a clarifying question or, worse, tagging in with a long story that’s supposed to validate the presenter’s point. Right?

Whatever the details, you know that you don’t want to go to a “meeting.” The vibrant people you want joining your activity don’t want to go to a meeting, either.

So, don’t use the word.

There are a lot of fine, more action-sounding terms to use instead of meeting. These phrases may even better describe what you’re doing. For extra credit, see if you can use a verb instead of a noun when you invite people to join you. Ask them to Rally, March, Gather, Plan, Plot, and Talk!

You can have discussions, seminars, and votes if you need to name the activity with a noun rather than to do it. Just don’t do a “meeting”.

Banned Word #2: Committee

No one wants to join a committee. No one.

Why? Because all that committees do … wait for it… is have meetings. We already know that no one wants to go to a meeting, and sane folk certainly don’t want to belong to a group whose purpose is to hold them.

Committees are even set up by governments to kill interest in a public issue by holding meetings.

(Oddly, when you find yourself inexplicably trapped on a committee, your first reaction is to recruit other bright and energetic people just like you to join the committee. It’s a tough sell, because the other intelligent people feel just like you about committees. They run when they see you coming with your committee sign-up clipboard.)

There may be some bylaw or structural reason that your group has a formal name of The XXX Committee. Just, don’t ever admit to your legal name in public!

Here’s what you do. Advertise your group by its true active purpose. In fact, I love the word “activist” as a replacement for most “committees”.

The Art Committee becomes the Artists or Art Curators or Art Activists…
The Ecology Committee becomes the Eco Theorists or Green Activists…
The Education Committee becomes the Education Explorers or Education Advocates, or Education Activists…
The Justice Committee becomes the Justice Witnesses or Justice Creators or Justice Activists…

Try Out Your New Words

I know that making light of the words “meeting” and “committee” is fun. The need to avoid these deadening words is too obvious to any adult who has ever gone to church, joined a community group, or gone to work in a company.

However, changing the terminology for your group and its events is more than simply amusing. Use different phrasing and you will get more volunteers eager to come to your events and to join your band of lively activists.

Try it out. Get your most recent “Committee Meeting Announcement”. Re-write it without once employing the banned words. Don’t tell people about the committee meeting as if you were daring them to attend. Invite them to join with other activists saving the world.

By Ozdachs|2011-10-10T15:32:03-07:00September 12th, 2011|Writing|6 Comments

Wells Fargo ATM 9-11 Memorial Message

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Corporate Person:

I seriously do not need any commerical mention of September 11th. Really.

Try as you might, I don’t think there is any way you can tastefully sneak in a reference to 9-11 in your business messages and not seem like you’re jumping aboard an emotional bandwagon for your crass commerical purpose.

Businesses large and small: I want you to leave 9-11 out of your sales and client communications, okay?

I have first-hand evidence that you’re having trouble steering clear of tying your business with the 9-11 anniversary. You’ve made me personally witness your weakness for cheap group hugs.

As I was rushing around yesterday morning between two appointments I hustled up to a Wells Fargo ATM for a quick hit of cash. It was a normal take-the-money-and-run transaction until I’d made my selection and started the 10-second wait for the system to validate my account and spit the $20 bills at me.

The ATM screen displayed a special “holiday” message as I waited for the money. It told me it was a time for reflection and wanted me to know that Wells Fargo honors the people who died on 9-11. The bank has apparently decided that it is perfectly appropriate to use the 9-11 anniversary as a way to show their corporate good-guy Americanism.

The ATM message struck me as simply wrong. On so many levels. Stop it!

First, the 10-second interval while I wait for the cash to dispense is not enough time to reflect on anything serious. Certainly it’s not enough time to consider something as deep and complex as 9-11. Besides, I don’t really think that Wells wanted me to start a 9-11 reflection right then. Wells was really bragging about their own reflections on 9-11, when, frankly, they can reflect to their hearts content in private.

My ATM mind is not in reflective mode, anyway. I am rushing around in my petty little errand mode. Shoving 9-11 in my face is an unwelcome intrusion. I cannot do the topic justice, and I don’t expect my ATM to be my meditation guide in any event.

At best, Wells is playing on my emotions and somehow getting me to bond with Wells, as if the company were a fellow 9-11 trauma victim. Or, something more complex, subtle, or whatever. But, it boils down to Wells using 9-11 for its commerical purpose. I don’t like it.

True, the message was simple and about as low-key as it could get. There was no direct attempt to monetize the 9-11 anniversary with a commemorative purchase.

But, I am not ready for 9-11 to be transformed into a seasonal slogan on an ATM screen. I am not ready for it to be used by any business for any purpose. Sometimes in marketing events are too raw to try to employ them for your business. September 11th is still one of those un-commercializable events.

On the 10th anniversary of the attacks, businesses do not need to tell us to reflect. Nor should they tout how much they themselves honor the dead. Some activities are best left to flesh-and-blood humans.

By Ozdachs|2011-09-10T12:27:17-07:00September 10th, 2011|Marketing|1 Comment

Are Your Yelps Muzzled?

If you’re a Yelper and write a review for a businesses you patronized, you expect that your comments are going to show up on the business’ page and affect the star-ratings. Maybe they will, but maybe they won’t.

While I was researching the Yelp filtering of reviews for an auto repair shop I started looking at the profiles of people whose positive comments were not appearing on the business’ page. The list of reviews and the count of reviews on the people’s profile pages showed the filtered reviews. There was no indication when looking at the person’s page that Yelp distrusted their comments.

In some cases, the profile pages showed that the person had written several reviews, and they looked like a valued Yelper. But, when you clicked on any of the person’s reviews to the business’ page, the reviews were not there. Yelp had filtered all of that person’s comments.

If you were the Yelper, you’d have no clue that whatever you were writing on Yelp was not being seen by the community. Your profile page shows that you’ve posted 9 or 35 Yelps.

The only way you can check to see if Yelp is displaying your carefully crafted reviews is if you click through on each review on your profile page to see if it is also showing up on the business’ page. That’s time consuming, and there’s nothing you can do about being filtered anyway.

Yelp Profile Information for GalenW

My own Yelp profile shows that I have 29 Yelp friends and have written 133 reviews. But, at least one of those reviews doesn’t show up for the business. I rated a real experience I’d had, but somehow the review isn’t showing up. I don’t know why, and there seems to be no way for me to tell Yelp that their filtering system screwed up.

That’s the point in my earlier post, too. Yelp’s filtering system has flaws, and it doesn’t allow feedback. There’s no mechanism for the Yelp programmers to learn from their mistakes or for reviewers to learn what Yelp thinks they are doing wrong.

Yelp, please open up your filtering process, let us communicate with the Goddess of Reviews, and let legitimate Yelpers participate in improving the site.

By Ozdachs|2011-08-22T12:17:10-07:00August 22nd, 2011|Social Media, Yelp|1 Comment

Are Your Business’ Happy Yelps Being Muzzled?

This month I received a phone call from an automobile repair shop owner whose business is taking a beating because of its bad showing on Yelp. There are 7 reviews for his shop online, and 6 of them gave the service 1 star.

The owner told me that awhile ago he was approached by Yelp to buy ads on the site. At that time he had a lot of positive reviews. He said that after he declined to advertize, he noticed that his positive reviews started disappearing from the site. They were being removed by Yelp’s filter.

Yelp lets you see the reviews it has removed from active rankings. When I checked, the repair place had 22 filtered reviews, and those had an average rating of 4.22 stars.

Yelp Review Matrix -- Filtered vs. Unfiltered

I dug around some to see if I could quickly discover a reason — either benign or evil — for Yelp’s filtering. I couldn’t. Maybe you can discover a pattern or suggest more review characteristics to check. (Click on the table above to download a PDF of my research.)

I noticed that many of the five-star reviews might be suspicious because they’re from people without profile photographs and from people who had written one review on Yelp, the filtered one for the auto shop.

Many of the filtered reviews were from reviewers whose other reviews are also being filtered by Yelp. I checked their profiles and clicked on the links to their reviews to see if those reviews showed up. It looked like that Yelp — for some reason — distrusted everything that these people wrote.

On the other hand, some of the filtered reviews came from people whose comments on other businesses are being displayed, and one of the visible one-star reviews was written by a person without a profile photo who had only reviewed this business.

In addition, when I read the positive reviews, there was no obvious pattern in what was said or the length of the review. None of the 5-star raves sounded fake to my human ear.

So, why has Yelp decided to show 7 reviews averaging 1.57 stars instead of displaying all 29 with an average of 3.58 stars? Is it revenge against a non-advertiser?

Yelp is deliberately unhelpful. They say:

We intentionally make the filter difficult to reverse engineer — otherwise, we would be overrun by reviews written by people hoping to game the system. So while it may be tough to decipher how the filter works, the rules are actually the same for every business and every review.

I understand why Yelp wants to show only real-person penned, non-financially-motivated reviews. We all want to know that the rave we are reading is an honest report from a customer and that it was not written by friends, relatives, or the owner himself.

Still, Yelp’s software seems — at best — arbitrary. Its decisions don’t conform to obvious logic, and many — if not most or ALL — of the filtered reviews sure sound like they’re legitimate.

Worse, there is no obvious way to contact Yelp for support. I could not locate a phone number to call or appeal process for the business owner to follow. So, the business owner has to live with a rant-filled 1.5 online profile that kills his business.

I’ve heard Len Tillum, a lawyer with a radio show on KGO, tell anguished business owners that there’s nothing they can do legally about perceived unfair filtering on Yelp. He’s said that a web site owner, like Yelp, can decide what content they want on their site for whatever reason.

However, for those of us to rely on Yelp and Yelp ourselves, more transparency would be appreciated. I want to know that the 1-star business is truly a place I should avoid and not that its owner just decided he couldn’t afford to advertize at Yelp.

Do you see a pattern in the filtering that I’ve missed? Let me know your insights by posting here or email me (if you email, please answer the spam challenge!).

By Ozdachs|2011-08-22T09:15:21-07:00August 21st, 2011|Social Media, Yelp|3 Comments

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