 Great photo by Grok. Podcasting has exploded. It’s been around so long now that many people don’t even realize that the word “podcast” has its roots in the word “iPod.” Which doesn’t even exist anymore.
But you’re not interested in etymology. You want to build your business and make more money. Sure, you could create and host your own podcast—quite the lift—or you could essentially ride the coat-tails of someone else who already has a big following, and grab a little bit of that love for yourself. If only it were that easy. What are the odds? The sad reality of today’s podcast landscape (“podscape”?) is that the numbers are driven by popularity. Media exposure, once it gets going, can snowball. But it’s hard to get it going. We hate to employ this analogy, but it’s useful nonetheless: If you’re some business wonk, how many people will follow you? How many companies will be lining up for paid sponsorships? Now replace the words “business wonk” with “Kardashian.” Ouch. As we’d said, sad reality. This is not to say that business-related podcasts can’t have influence or big audiences; they can. But before you aim to be a guest on Acquired, for example, set your sights more realistically. You, too, can build momentum and rise up the pecking order. Who are you? (And who cares?) An easy way to approach the I-want-to-be-a-podcast-guest-to-promote-my-business challenge is to look at it through the eyes of the podcast host. Why would they want you? Why would you help them? If you can definitively answer that question, you’re in good shape. Some considerations:
The more of the above boxes you can check, the better. Money can’t buy happiness It wasn’t long ago that we would advise clients to reach out to attractive podcasts on their own—usually in the form of a note from, say, an underling who would say “Hey! I think my boss would be a great guest for your podcast! Here’s why!” And then that underling would rattle off as many of the bullet points we’d listed above, as possible. Dirty little secret: No underlings were harmed in the making of that email. They were actually ghost-penned by—you guessed it—Copel Communications. Looking back, those days were quaint. As we’d said at the outset, podcasting has exploded. There are well over four million podcasts out there today. Not episodes. But actual podcasts. And the good ones—the ones you want to be on—are overwhelmed by entreaties from wanna-be guests, 24/7. So what do you do? There are actually agencies out there, today, which specialize in booking you as a guest on podcasts. No kidding: Google them and you’ll find them. And you’ll quickly see a pattern, too: They’ll often offer tiers of service, for, say, booking you on two podcasts per month. Or four, for a higher fee. But here’s the catch: You can’t simply hire one of these agencies. Throw money at them—it won’t work. Because they need to vet you first. It’s like any talent agent. They can only take your money if they can sell you in the first place. Which brings us back, once again, to all of those bullet points we’d listed above. What do you think those podcast-guest-booking agencies’ applications look like? Yup. Just like our bullet points. We can’t guarantee that we can get you “signed” by a booking firm. But we can help you burnish your credentials and make an honest assessment of your odds. Contact us and let’s talk.
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 Great photo by Grok. Sometimes, the success of your creative marketing hinges on some decidedly un-creative input.
Here’s a true story. We were recently tasked with scripting a video for a client of ours. Granted, we have to cloak this in anonymity, but you’ll get the gist: The client of ours is a consultancy. They had created a breakthrough technical solution for one of their clients. Our job was to script a video, showing the whole world this breakthrough solution—while also anonymizing our client’s client. Follow? On the surface, this is a pretty straightforward assignment. We had to write a script which would show prospective clients (for the consultancy) how amazing this technical solution is. But it quickly became trickier than you might think. Our point of contact at the consultancy was one of the super-sharp technical people who had actually worked on this breakthrough solution. Let’s call him Steve. Steve was our source of input. And so Steve—not terribly shockingly—told us all about this breakthrough solution. Every nut and bolt. Every feature. Every output. Every paradigm-shattering spec. And we couldn’t write the script. Know why? Think about it. Our task was to write a brief—as in, two- to three-minute—video, dramatically showcasing this breakthrough solution. Yet what had Steve, in all his ardent energy, failed to provide us? Of course: Act One. Huh? Two sides to every story (and marketing piece) A video like this—or any marketing piece like this—should follow what we call “a two-act structure.” Steve had given us all of the input for Act Two. That is, the solution. But of course! Now it’s super obvious, isn’t it? A solution solves a problem. What was the problem?? We asked Steve. And he said “Well, our client couldn’t do X.” And yes, he technically answered our question, but he didn’t exactly help us. And here we get to the gist of this article. Steve is not a creative pro. That’s not his job. He excels at plenty of other stuff, and the world is a better place because of it. But he needed a little help, a little nudging, from us, to give us the input we’d craved for Act One of this script. And so we asked him, “Could you tell us more, please? Why couldn’t your client do X? What were all the contributing factors? We want to know, as much as possible, about the sheer chaos they were confronting before your solution came along. We want the ‘Before’ to be horrendous! Inundate us with details! The messier, the better!” You could see the light dawning in Steve’s eyes. Of course! The messier, the better! Because The Great Wonderful Solution isn’t so great or wonderful unless it really clears what appear to be insurmountable hurdles. Once Steve got it, he got it. After all, who would know that client’s “before” situation better than him? He piled on with gory details, and voilà! We were able to pen a truly effective video. Clearly, you can extrapolate a lot from this little story. Marketing and advertising routinely require creativity. And just as routinely, your input sources may not be people who are naturally creative. But they can be coaxed. The information is there. You just need to tease it out. Need help with a creative challenge like this? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help!  Great photo by Fauxels. Here at Copel Communications, we’re huge fans of remote work. We’ve been doing it, exclusively, for nearly three decades now, with clients all over the country (and sometimes, the world).
Remember the pandemic? People asked us how we adjusted. Our answer: The rest of the world merely caught up with us. That said, there are some glorious exceptions. We recently worked on a big project with a geographically-scattered client team with a deadline looming, and we ran the meeting on-site at our client’s headquarters office. Sure, there were disadvantages to this, but there were also some interesting advantages—that you can profit from in your next meeting or on-site. The cons Let’s get these out of the way. Scheduling this event for the numerous attendees was hard. It took lots of emails to send slots and check availabilities. Apps like Calendly might have helped… to an extent. But there were last-minute changes, in which one person’s suddenly-updated schedule impacted everyone’s, and we all had to start again. Then there were the logistics. They had to book the conference room. Order lunch. Set up the big screen for running preso’s in the room. And all of us had to dress up and drive. For a location which was, fortunately, only 30 minutes away, we had to allow a 15-minute cushion for traffic and parking. Not to mention the loading up the laptop and cables and all that junk. So, round trip, there’s, easily, two hours out of the day just gone, with zero work getting accomplished, while adding to the region’s traffic and carbon footprint from the commute. So… this better be one good meeting. Right? The pros After a zillion Zoom calls with this team, it was refreshing to see everyone in person. Everyone had… shoes. It was incredible. Granted, when we got there, after all the hellos and small talk, everyone still had to fire up their respective laptops and log into the local Wi-Fi network and all that. More zero-productive time. But then it was time for us to run this meeting. And of course we arrived prepared. So we shared the agenda, the input materials, the catch-up from the previous Zoom meeting, and started to get things underway. And up to this point, aside from seeing that people wore shoes and being able to physically see who was looking at whom at any given second, it wasn’t any more productive than a Zoom meeting. But there were differences. We’d mentioned that this was basically a fairly stressful gathering, since we were working on a difficult project on a deadline. So it was a little easier to feel the tension in the physical air… and to defuse it as well, with a stretch, a yawn, or a trot over to the snack table. And it was easier to handle the inevitable digressions, too, since we could “read” the room and still watch the clock, and keep the group reined in. But the best, and most un-Zoom-like part of the whole working session was the time spent not working. It was the lunch break. It wasn’t like, “Oh, let’s all log off and log back on in 30 minutes.” It was more like, “Who ordered the turkey club?” and “I thought you were a vegetarian,” and “No, Larry’s the vegetarian,” and then “That’s because my wife got me into it,” and, within short order, the room that had been filled with workers was replaced with a room filled with humans. It was great to simply not work. Hang out. Crack jokes. Our follow-up meeting, after this one, was back on Zoom again. It was infinitely easier, from a logistical standpoint. And it was better. The in-person bonding from the earlier on-site carried over and provided deeper connections going forward. Despite all the remote-lauding we’d done at the beginning of this article, the aforementioned on-site is hardly the only in-person meeting we’ve attended! Typically, we’ll do in-person at the beginning of an engagement, to meet all the players and make connections. That’s probably the best time to do it. But later ain’t too bad, either. Have a virtual-vs.-in-person story to share? Send it our way. We’d love to hear it.  Great photo by Andrea Piacquadio A client of ours recently wanted us to rewrite their team members’ LinkedIn bios, and then their website bios, in that order.
Would you do the same thing? Should you? In that order? In this article, we’ll look at some of the too-easy pitfalls of team bio-writing, and also give you some good, quick, useful tips that can help you look great, and drive more business. Who’s on first? When that client asked us to start with the LinkedIn bios, we suggested otherwise. In this instance, it was better to start with the company’s own website. That’s because it was more free-form, less rigid than LinkedIn. We could do whatever we wanted. We could steal from it, for LinkedIn, later. And that’s what we did. For your business, you want your and your team’s bios to effectively accomplish two things: 1) You want to establish that person’s credibility. Do they know their stuff? Are they the absolute go-to subject matter expert for their field? 2) You want to make them come across as likable. (Not that they aren’t already.) The goal here is for the reader to think, “If I’m gonna be working with this company for the next several months, I’d be happy to work with this person. They seem cool.” Teaser alert: You can actually address both of these goals in order. But we’ll get to that in a minute. Person to person As you surely know, some website bios are written in first person (“I’m in charge of Finance”), whereas others are written in third person (“Jill is in charge of Finance”). Which should you use? (By the way, “Which should you use?” is in second person. But we digress.) Consider the arguments for each:
So this seems easy, right? “First person” carries the day. Not so fast. Think of Goal 1 from above: Establish Credibility. Here, you’ll want to blitz the reader with name-dropping and awards and accolades, so there’s absolutely no ambiguity about how technically superior this person is. Uh-oh. If you write that in first person, it comes across as conceited. Really conceited: “I have won awards for my work with major enterprises worldwide such as Coca-Cola and Amazon, where clients always told me how great I am.” Uggh. Don’t go there. And so, third person it is. More often than not: “Jill has won numerous client-elected awards for her stellar performance working with major enterprises worldwide such as Coca-Cola and Amazon.” The second act As we’d hinted above, the bio follows a two-act structure, in the order of the two goals ("Expertise," and "Fun to Work With"). So after you’ve wowed your reader with all the awards and name-dropping, you can get into just a few interesting, quirky details which are nice setups for conversation-starters when a client first engages you. We recently read the bio of a client we were going to work with, and it noted that she had previously served in an exotic location overseas, so we were curious to ask her about that. Stuck for ideas—or for getting consistent responses from your team—for this Act II assignment? We once helped an ad agency write their team bios, and we worked up a questionnaire which was circulated to the entire team. The initial questions were predictable:
But then, to button it, we made the last question a fill-in-the-blank:
They loved it. The answers were great and off-the-wall, and there was hardly any work required to edit them down to make them website-palatable. Indeed, the ad agency kept the “Questionnaire” format on their website—a good example of when First Person actually is the better way to go. Tying it all up Some basic pointers:
That said, leaders’ bios should generally be longer than team members’ bios. Twice as long is completely fine.
And that’s about it. It sounds simple, but it’s really more straightforward than easy. The more succinct the bio, the better—and the more challenging. Need help? Contact us. We’ve helped lots of teams with tons of bios. And we’d be delighted to help you, too.  Great photo by Pixabay. We have a client that does a lot of blogging—like a lot of our clients.
And, like a lot of our clients, they hire us to write—make that ghost-write—a lot of those blogs. Also, like a lot of our clients, they also use an SEO firm to create other, SEO-focused blogs for them. A two-pronged approach. So far, so good. But what are “production blogs”? And why does this client hate them so much? Production blogs vs. thought-leadership blogs First off, you can’t really Google “production blogs.” It’s a term we made up. Production blogs can be defined as blogs that are written for a business, using pre-existing web-based materials for their background research, and used primarily to drive up SEO (search-engine optimization) numbers, i.e., search results on Google. You, as a consumer, likely encounter these blogs all the time. That’s your clue that they work: You searched for some information on Google, and up popped one of these articles in the list of hits. Again, so far, so good. But then—and consider how common and familiar this is—once you click on the article, you’re quickly disappointed. It sure contains your exact question or query, probably about a dozen times, in different phrasing, but doesn’t give you much hard information that you’d craved. It feels very regurgitated. It reads like a mashup of other online articles, 1) carefully reworded to avoid copyright/plagiarism conflicts, and 2) like it was written by someone who’s, well, not the greatest writer. Trust your Spidey Sense on this one. You’re exactly right on all counts. Whatever site that blog resided on, just boosted its SEO numbers when you clicked to it. Did you feel satisfied? Did you get the info you needed? Naah. Not really. Importantly—sometimes hugely importantly—you didn’t get one whiff of a professional, well-informed opinion. Which segues, nicely, to the other kind of blogs: Thought-leadership blogs Just like “production blogs,” this is a term that we here at Copel Communications invented. But the name—“thought-leadership blogs”—gives away what they are. In stark contrast to production blogs, these are not written by scouring a lot of pre-existing material online. To the contrary, they’re written by interviewing a really well-informed SME or subject-matter expert. We enjoy writing these. We enjoy doing the interviews. In the best ones, our subjects get pretty adamant, even riled. That’s what we want. We want them to rely on their professional opinion, expertise, and years of experience to dismantle incorrect and ill-informed preconceived notions, and set the record straight. It's arguably an uphill battle: The search-structured web is effectively an echo chamber, where bad information gets reused and elevated to the status of “trusted source,” when it’s actually anything but. So our same SME client, who rages against the search machine, is justifiably mad at the production blogs they’re forced to proofread prior to publication. Why? Lots of reasons. For one, they’re rife with factual errors. While they assiduously don’t break any copyright laws, they do proliferate bad information that’s breeding online. This client of ours also operates in a highly-regulated industry, so the information found by the writer simply might not apply, because what’s legal and permissible in one U.S. state, isn’t in our client’s state. Also, production blogs are generally just hard to read. They have all the appeal of a Wikipedia entry. No hook, no drama, no story, no voice, no personality, no iconoclasm, no payoff. We know. We’re also tasked with proofing these things, and they take us forever. And we’re paid to read them! Two for one Knowing all this, why does our client still do both? For a very good reason. This is a basic tenet of marketing known as the media mix. You can’t achieve everything with either one of these blogs; using both is prudent and smart. The production blogs are better at finding people who are simply Googling at the top of the sales funnel. The thought-leadership blogs are better at converting visitors into believers—and thus prospects—deeper down in the funnel. It’s like mixing paid and earned media: a basic, smart mix. Our client recently asked us, somewhat rhetorically, “How come we can proofread your blogs in about two minutes, with almost no changes, while these other blogs take us hours and tons of aggravating work?” The answer is simple. As we’d noted above, we base our thought-leadership blogs off the SME interviews we conduct, where we take detailed, careful notes. So the SME’s knowledge is reflected in the final product. Credit where it’s due. If you need production blogs, there are plenty of good sources out there. If you need thought-leadership blogs, the field rapidly narrows. Contact us and let us help you advance your business’ mission—and passion—to the world.  Photo by Amador Loureiro This sentence is in English. You understand it perfectly. And you take all of that for granted.
Stuff like this goes out the window when your client’s first language isn’t English. It certainly makes things harder for you. And for them. In this article, we’ll give you some pointers, based on our experience, for making life easier for you and your clients whose English isn't as good as yours. Bash the bias Here at Copel Communications, we’re native/first-language English speakers. We’ve had additional schooling in English. We speak, think, and dream in English. It all comes very natural. (Or would that be “naturally”?) (LOL!) The “bias” we’d mentioned above is kind of a knee-jerk reaction that you might have when you first encounter someone whose English isn’t very good. They’ll struggle with common phrases and idioms; we have one client who, when they give us input, will typically say, “Let me know how you think.” It’s cute. It’s kind of funny. And it invites a brutal bias. Because, face it, who else talks like this? Little kids. Little kids who are also struggling to learn English for the first time. So their brains aren’t entirely formed, they’re not as smart or experienced as we adults. And that’s the bias that rears its ugly head when you first hear, “Let me know how you think.” That particular client of ours is Korean (we have lots of Korean clients; more on that in a minute). Know how much Korean we speak? Try “zero.” So on the one hand, this puts us in an advantageous position for non-English-native clients who need to communicate to their prospects in flawless English; they can count on us. On the other hand, however, it obscures the fact that their English is better than our Korean, any day of the week. That’s the conundrum: Someone who sounds less intelligent than you is actually more intelligent than you, because they’re not only getting across difficult concepts, but they’re doing it in a second language. Holy mackerel! It’s humbling. So always bear that in mind in situations like this. Even when all those cute phrases keep popping up. Ways to work better with non-English-speaking clients We have clients with lots of different first languages. As we’d mentioned above, we have lots of Korean clients. But we have others whose first language is German. Japanese. Spanish. Mind you, we don’t speak any of those languages. But we have successful ongoing relationships with these clients, sometimes for decades. (This gets back to the Korean clients of ours. Once we establish a relationship at one client company, they all know us there. Then, invariably, someone from that company joins another company, and essentially brings us along. This gets so convoluted that we recently got a project for a major Korean enterprise based in Seoul, from their in-house agency in London. They told us they got our name from So-And-So at Such-And-Such Company. Thing is, we’d never even heard of So-And-So or Such-And-Such!) So how do you do it? Here are some pointers:
Get help We can offer you all of this advice because, as we’ve mentioned, we’ve toiled in these trenches for years and years, and we actually enjoy the assignments. There’s a huge degree of faith at work here: If we, say, employ wordplay or distinctly American cultural references in our work, our clients simply have to trust us to get the right message across. But they find out, soon enough, whether our deliverables score or not: they’ll get firsthand customer response. Which only helps to bolster the faith, and cement the relationship. Need help crafting messaging for a client whose English isn’t perfect? Contact us. We’d be happy to discuss your needs with you.  Okay. We’ll admit that the title of this blog—“ SME-based articles for non-SME audiences”—is a mouthful. But it’s also a good, important topic when it comes to business development for your consultancy or professional-services firm. And it speaks to assignments we work on a lot, to our clients’ benefit.
This story starts with a story. We were tasked with writing a highly technical blog article for a high-tech client. So far, so logical. But the intended audience was non-technical. Aha. Who’s pulling the purse-strings? Let’s keep one thing clear here: Our mission, at Copel Communications, is to help our clients make more money. Period. All of the deliverables we produce, whether they’re websites or video scripts or blog articles like the one we’re describing here, are designed to soften the beachhead of prospects, and ease them further down the funnel into buyers. Taking a customer-back approach to the challenge of this article, we asked our client: “Who is this aimed at?” More specifically, “Who would be buying what we’re selling?” This is where it gets interesting. Our client makes high-tech equipment for use in a variety of scientific applications. And there are lab technicians who use this equipment. For them, a highly technical article would be appropriate, with no need for dumbing down any of the nerdy details. But these lab technicians, although they are users of the equipment, are not the buyers of the equipment. Oooh. Let’s repeat that: These lab technicians, although they are users of the equipment, are not the buyers of the equipment. And this is where the lessons of this story apply to what is likely a ton of scenarios for your business. Two different audiences The lab technicians’ bosses certainly have technical know-how, given their career path up the corporate ladder. But they don’t need to read an article on the nuts-and-bolts of this technical equipment. They’d rather know the business case for buying one (which often involves replacing an aging or lesser version of the exact same thing). More importantly, a big, albeit secondary, chunk of the intended audience was relative newbies in the field: People just starting their careers who, despite their schooling, need to quickly get up to speed in the real world to get ahead. For those people, they’d be Googling topics of interest to learn more. And thus this article was seeded with the types of keywords they’d be searching on; think of it as a “101”-type intro article on the broad applications of this piece of equipment. Now, why would you want to educate this latter audience, if they’re not doing the purchasing? Let’s make this easier by re-phrasing the above question: Why would you want to educate this latter audience, if they’re not doing the purchasing today? Right. Given their ambition and hunger for information, they’ll likely be purchasers of this equipment tomorrow. Time moves fast in business. And they’ll be the ones who will thank this company (our client) for giving them the free knowledge they’d craved to get up to speed in their new careers. Not only that, but said company also proved to be a reliable source of expertise, which burnishes its brand and reputation. Why wouldn’t you go with that brand of equipment when the time comes? Un-SME-ing the SME So we knew all of what we described above, about the target-audience landscape, when it came time for us to interview the subject matter expert (SME) assigned to us for the article. Not only that, we explained this situation, upfront, to the SME. So she understood what our intention was, and what we needed to do. She was very generous with her expertise, but also helped us to explain the why’s and what-for’s of each nugget of information, so it would be more than just a litany of facts; it would be a basis for working knowledge in the lab. And thus the article. In fact, we did a couple of these; they’re peppered in among the company’s more-technical offerings, which is a smart approach unto itself: Never assume your target audience is homogenous, especially when it comes to their level of experience or expertise. So the next time you feel inclined to push out technical promotional material to the world, (re)consider your audience. You certainly don’t want to swamp or intimidate the very people who might make formidable future allies—or customers. Need assistance with this kind of complex communication challenge? Contact us. We help our clients with assignments like this all the time, and would be delighted to help you, too.  We’ve mentioned, in these articles, how we do a lot of ghost writing for our clients. Usually the client is a consultancy, and we’ll be ghost writing in the voice of either the business owner or a subject-matter expert, and the audience is often C-level executives.
That’s not the case in the story we’re about to describe. This one was a consumer play. The client was an ad agency. And the person we were “ghosting” for was an internationally-known celebrity. Background action First things first. We’re not going to tell you who this celebrity is. We’re not allowed to; we’re under strict NDA for this client. That said, we can say some general things that pertain to the assignment—and thus this article’s topic—about how do you go about writing for a celebrity? The assignment had two parts. The first was a TV commercial. The second was a longer-form video, which was kind of a behind-the-scenes interview, in which our star was asked about the shoot for the commercial itself. We were tasked with helping to script both. Again, we’ve got to be delicate here, but “helping to script” is different than “asked to script.” Remember we’d said that this was an international assignment. We were brought in because we’re native-born English-speaking. Connect the dots yourself. Original input Initially, we were provided with rough drafts of both the TV spot and interview. And in case you’re wondering, the interview was to be tightly scripted—even though it wouldn’t look that way in the finished product. More about that in a minute. But what we weren’t given—and which we immediately requested—was more info about this star. Regardless of how well-known this person is, we needed more information on background, context, and so forth. We asked. We got. This wasn’t a hard request for the client to fulfill; they quickly sent us a few links: Websites, TV coverage, news stories. Now we could start on the project. Voice lessons The main product here was the TV spot. So we had to learn not only what was being sold to the viewer, but how our celebrity fit into it. That was the main thing. How did this person’s career, and renown, mesh with what was being sold? How could we help it to look as if there really was no “selling” going on at all? That is, how do you make it seem as though this celeb just naturally loves and lives this product, without it feeling forced? The same challenge applied to the behind-the-scenes video. The celeb was to be asked about the shoot, and to talk all about how fun and fulfilling it was, while also, still, selling the product. In case you were curious, the scripting included both the interviewer's questions and the celeb’s replies. The solution to both of these challenges was the same: It resided in the background materials we’d requested. The job was to “climb inside this celeb’s head” and figure out what kinds of things they would say, and how they would react, given 1) what was being sold, and 2) what they’re known for. This, by the way, is different from “what they’re really like.” Every celebrity has a public persona; this one was no different. Honestly, we really don’t know what they’re like, personally. We were writing for the public. We were scripting for their public persona. Layer cake No, we weren’t selling baked goods. We’re referring to the the layers of handlers on this assignment. We worked for the ad agency. The ad agency had their corporate client (whose goods we sought to sell). The celebrity had an agent and PR team. Suffice to say, everyone scrutinized every single word we penned. Of course there were revisions. And of course—we saw this one coming from a mile away—all attempts at humor, which were included in the original input materials, were tricky. That’s because of the language barrier. American-style idioms and even British-style wordplay may well work and be ha-ha funny, but they’ll never make it to the screen unless all of these international clients and handlers and agents can understand that these jokes are 1) genuinely funny, and 2) make their celebrity look great. So that helped to set the guide-rails here. We weren’t going for “Saturday Night Live” style humor; we just wanted some cute, self-effacing lines that make our mega-star come across as humble, approachable, and even a tad vulnerable, in an endearing way. Lights, camera, action The client was happy with the materials we supplied. And then they use them as they see fit. That’s their job. We simply want to make their lives easier. In that regard, writing for a celeb is no different than the work we do for everyone else. And that’s a good takeaway for all you other creatives out there: It shouldn’t be any different for you, either. Need help with that next creative assignment? We’d love to pitch in. Contact us today for a no-obligation consultation.  It’s that time of year again. Time for our annual wrap-up of business-building posts for consultants from Copel Communications. If you missed any, here’s your chance to catch up; if you had some faves, here’s an easy place to revisit them.
We hope you had a good year, and that 2021 was better than 2020... and that 2022 will be even better than that. Meantime, enjoy the biz-building reading below!
Have a topic you’d like us to weigh in on next year? Let us know. We’d love to hear from you.  How to find and hire a ghost writer—or do it yourself
Halloween it still over a week away, but since it’s October, what better time to address the topic of ghost writing? People always seem to be impressed when we tell them that we do a lot of ghost writing. Maybe there’s some connotation to the term, implying that it’s being done for, say, a celebrity or politician. That’s not the case, in our case. Still, we do tons of ghost writing. You could almost argue that, aside from blog articles like this one, it’s all we do. Put it this way: Whenever you write something that’s ostensibly written by someone else, you’re “ghosting.” But does that mean you’re putting your words into someone else’s mouth? Dispelling the myths The answer to the above question is: “You’d better not be!” The whole idea of ghost writing is to help your “author” express their ideas, only better/faster/more efficiently than they could on their own. Every word should read as if it were written by them. This, incidentally, is why we tag ourselves as a “secret weapon” on our website. By reading this article, you know what we do. But most of the readers of the material we create don’t even know that we exist. And that’s the way it should be. Another myth about ghost writing is that it’s glamorous. We’ll admit that it’s fun, and intellectually stimulating, but “remaining anonymous in the shadows” isn’t exactly a red-carpet activity. It’s a job to be done. And done right, it’s all about helping your “author” to shine. In our case, “shine” means “drive in more business.” This isn’t some touchy-feely branding exercise. This is about helping time-constrained business leaders to get their thought-leading ideas, views, and sales pitches out to their intended audiences, for maximum impact and ROI. So, in case you hadn’t thought about it, our ghost writing encompasses virtually every kind of written communication medium. It could be a thought-leadership article. It could be a book. It could be a sales presentation or video script. It could be—and often is—an email, addressed to, perhaps a C-level prospect. Think about it: Do you honestly believe that our clients—these incredibly smart and busy people—want to spend the time organizing their arguments, let alone word-smithing the copy? They’ve got far bigger fish to fry. Hence the need for ghost writers. Finding the voice Here’s a neat story. We have a client—let’s call her Sue (not her real name)—who, like most of our clients, is downright brilliant. She’s also shy and soft-spoken. Yet we needed to create a piece for her, in her voice, that would sell. There was a mismatch of tone. But after speaking with her at length, and asking her about a certain topic she’s passionate about, that passion started to come through. Indeed, when we probed about specifics, she got even more heated and enthusiastic. And we realized: That’s the voice we need. It’s “Sue, Pissed Off.” So, interviewing her, we got all the facts we needed for this piece. And that’s a job unto itself. It’s important to respect her time and let her go down any rabbit-holes she likes, so long as they’re at least tangentially relevant, and take great notes. It’s not her job, incidentally, to organize these thoughts, or think about the end product’s structure. She just needs to “spout.” Our job—which isn’t easy—afterward is twofold: 1) We need to organize all of those random thoughts, and find the thread which aligns them into the most compelling possible argument. 2) We then need to make that argument in the “Sue, Pissed Off” voice. Is this “putting words into Sue’s mouth”? Hardly! Finding the fit Now let’s turn the tables. Let’s say you need to hire a ghost writer for, say, that upcoming marketing outreach piece that will have your byline at the top of it, or your signature at the bottom of it. What do you do? Well, you can find your list of candidates by whatever means you see fit, whether it’s a LinkedIn search, or through a site such as Upwork, or whatever. But this is not about just finding someone who can write well and will work within your budget. This is all about finding the proper fit. Can that person interview you well and tease out the information that’s needed for the piece and its tactical intent? Do you feel comfortable chatting—indeed, venting—to that person at length? And most importantly, can they empathize? Can they find, and “speak” in, the right voice that you want to project to the world, which will 1) best present your argument, while 2) ringing true as “you”? This is the crucial yet subtle compatibility factor that you really need to weigh, first and foremost, into your hiring decision. Staying on-message Unfortunately, after the interview is over, your work—as the putative “author”—isn’t done. You’ll need to review the draft your ghost writer submits, and check it not only for accuracy but for tone. Does it ring true? Does it “sound” like you wrote it? If you don’t feel comfortable, you’ll need to kick it back. Lest we remind you: Your name, not the ghost writer’s, will be on this thing. It’s personal. This is “you,” to the world. You shouldn’t feel uncomfortable about the product. To the contrary: You should be delighted. When you get a great ghost-written piece, you should be downright elated. We have clients who share our pieces with family and friends, they’re so excited by how they’ve come out. So that’s the bar you want to reach. Have a project you need ghost written? We can help with that. Simply contact us for a no-obligation consultation today. |