 Great photo by Andrea Piacquadio. Here we go again! Another year has zipped past… and presented us the opportunity to present you with a compendium of our top articles for consultants from this past year. If you missed any, here’s your chance to catch up. And if you have already seen, and liked, any of these, here’s your opportunity to revisit and brush up. Enjoy!
Have any topics you’d like to see us address next year? Contact us. We’d be delighted to hear from you!
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 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, that’s a confusing title, isn’t it? “How to promote promotion.” What on earth are we talking about? And how will this, to be blunt, help you make more money?
Trust us. We’ve got the answers. This one comes from a recent story with a client of ours. It’s a “teachable moment.” So we thought we’d share it with you. Spilled ink That client of ours had had a turn of good luck. A big company—one of the nation’s largest banks—chose to feature them in an article they published. Sounds great, right? Of course it is. This bank is a household name. Their brand is worth billions. They have a powerful media presence. So just to have them say anything about our client, let alone feature them in an article, is pretty great. Why, then, are we writing about this? What’s “teachable”? Our client, understandably, wanted everyone on earth to know that Huge Bank wrote an article about them. Sure, Huge Bank did publish this article (online). But would it reach our client’s niche audience? Our client wanted to push out a press release, telling their clients and prospects about the Huge Bank article. This still seems really straightforward, doesn’t it? Well here’s where it starts to go off the rails. Our client brought in a writer to pen the release, and gave him the Huge Bank article as input. That might seem logical, but it was a mistake. Because here’s what happened: That writer scoured the Big Bank article, pulled what he thought were the most important points, and drafted a press release around them. And that release, well, sucked. Teachable moment. Mind you, we’re not blaming the writer here. He simply followed his directions, which were insufficient. And here’s why: The article from Huge Bank was all about how our client leaned on Huge Bank for a business line of credit, and how Huge Bank was able to meet their needs. Totally straightforward. Sure, it made mention of what our client does and who they serve, but the big focus—no surprise—was on Huge Bank. It was about how Huge Bank has all kinds of creative lending solutions. And how Huge Bank works extra hard to help its clients. It was a puff piece—no surprise—about Huge Bank. So guess what this press-release writer’s release read like? You guessed it: It read like a promotion for Huge Bank, and not our client. Ooops. We needed to swoop in and rewrite the release from scratch. That’s because there was a time crunch; ordinarily, we’d simply re-direct the original writer. Our new release—which the client loved and immediately approved for publication—was all about our client. In a word, Duh. It talked all about how great our client is, and the kinds of problems they solve for their clients, and that nowadays, they’re so well-known and respected, that they’ve even been featured in a new article by... wait for it... Huge Bank. How much, then, of Huge Bank’s article informed our press release? Hardly any of it. We just wanted to promote the fact that Huge Bank was talking us up. Indeed, our press release was worth more than Huge Bank’s article. Naturally, we included a link to Huge Bank’s article in the release itself, but we couldn’t have cared less if the readers actually clicked it. Tracking it down As we noted above, our client was delighted—indeed, pleasantly surprised—by the quality of the new press release we drafted on such short notice. But this gets to the bigger question, the one you’ve likely been wondering about all this time: Why did this mistake happen in the first place? Why, indeed, is this teachable? Why were we forced to “swoop in” (our own words) to fix this? Why was the original release subpar? (As we mentioned above, we don’t blame the original writer.) Most importantly, how can this be fixed—and avoided—in the future? Oh, you’re smart. You figured out most of this already. By which we mean, “Our client mis-directed the writer.” Which is absolutely true. What we didn’t tell you, however, was that our client had reached out to this writer without telling us, and only informed us after the original press release was written, i.e., a quick “Hey, could you review this before it gets published?” Had we known, from the get-go, that our client was only going to give that writer the Huge Bank article as input, we would have instantly intervened and given him proper direction. That didn’t happen, and so this situation quickly became a fire which required dousing. The go-forward solution? We had to gently admonish our client: “Don’t do that again.” We can certainly appreciate their enthusiasm and excitement at getting some “ink” from Huge Bank, but if we hadn’t intervened, and if they had actually published that original release, it would’ve been a Huge Mistake. Need help “promoting the promotion,” or any other marketing-related challenge? Contact us. We’d be happy to help.  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.  So many marketing topics seem straightforward, until you dive into them. This is one of those.
The germ of this story came from a client assignment we were handed recently. Our client was going to be presenting at a prestigious webinar, and wanted us to write a blog article about the event. So the question became: When should this article run? Before the event? After the event? Which would be better? The answer, incidentally, depended on the answers to a few other questions. Think ahead As always, we wanted to know who the audience would be. Again, not so simple! Because there are two audiences at play here: 1) the audience our client would be presenting to, in the webinar, and 2) the audience for the blog article. You can’t assume they’re the same. Indeed, they weren’t. By the way, we’ve been saying “blog article,” because that’s what this client asked us to write. But it could just as easily have been “press release,” “e-blast,” or “social campaign.” They’re all different flavors of the same assignment. So here are the answers we got to the who-the-audiences-are question: 1) The audience at the webinar would be professional peers within an internal-services vertical that our speaker represented, within the client’s business. 2) The audience for the blog post was to be wholly different: Prospective clients of our client’s business—and not other internal-services professionals. In other words, this was a prestige play. Our client was to be showing off their thought leadership to a distinguished audience of professional peers, and they wanted the rest of the world to know that they were thought leaders, top-to-bottom, even in internal-service functions that prospective clients wouldn’t experience firsthand. Follow? Do the two replies above help to answer the “timing” question? Not on their own. But they’re essential input for creating the blog. Who owns who? (Or what?) The next question we asked was: “Who’s hosting this webinar? Is it you? Or someone else?” Answer: “Someone else.” Aha. That’s the big one. Because if our client were hosting this upcoming webinar, the obvious follow-up question is, “Would you like to boost registrations and attendance?” The obvious answer to that would be “Of course.” And then the obvious answer to “When should this get posted?” would be “In advance. Naturally.” But that wasn’t the case here. Some other entity—in this case, an industry trade group—was hosting the webinar. They were doing all the promoting and attendance-building. That was their problem. At the same time, they had a whole slate of featured speakers to promote; our client was just one of them. So our client would get lost in the sauce of the trade group’s promotional efforts. Which is why they wanted their own self-promoting blog. Which is why they turned to us. Again: Follow? So now we had enough information to discuss with our client, and come to a mutual agreement on, the timing. They certainly could have promoted it in advance: “We will be proud to be presenting at the ABC Webinar next month!” That would show that we’d been selected to join this prestigious group of presenters, so that’s not bad. Side note: There isn’t “the right” answer to the timing question. It’s more like “the best” answer to the timing question. You need to weigh different factors. Working with the client, we chose to promote this after-the-fact. Because it would still show that we’d been selected to join this prestigious group of presenters, so no loss there. We’d have the benefit of final attendance info to bolster our blog (“Over 10,000 attendees from more than 15 countries!” “Keynote speakers included Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, both of whom made last-second commitments!” That kind of stuff.) We could quote the rave reviews our client-speaker received. And, unlike the trade group, we had zero vested interest in boosting attendance in advance. See? “Best answer.” Not “the right” answer. Rules of thumb You might not have noticed this, but all the advertising for a big Hollywood movie always appears before the movie opens. The idea is to build as much hype and excitement as possible in order to have the biggest-possible opening weekend. Once the movie opens, the advertising virtually vanishes. You might not have noticed this before, but watch for it next time—even as theaters are shuttered and “openings” become more firmly cemented online. This is Hollywood’s approach. Is it the best approach? That’s the topic of a different blog. Is your opening-weekend box office the most important thing anymore? Highly debatable. Similarly, you’ll see hype about politicians unveiling their latest initiative... after they do it. They generally won’t tell you, in advance, “We’re working on some new thing.” Sure, you could find that info if you dig, but it’s not what they choose to hype. Their reasoning? They want massed glory and constituent approval, all at the same time. Our point here is that there are pre-existing conventions for the timing of different hype-able events, and you can learn, and draw your own conclusions, from how they are similar, or dissimilar, to your situation. Have a promotional-timing issue you’d like to discuss? Contact us. We dive into these thorny weeds with our clients all the time.  Boy the year goes by fast. It doesn’t seem like it’s really been that long since we wrote a year-end roundup, but the calendar doesn’t lie.
Sure, we at Copel Communications would love it if you read every single one of our blog posts the minute it came out. But we also know you’re busy, so here, in convenient compendium form, is an overview of our posts for consultants from the year. (We alternate between posts for consultants and what we call our “creative clients,” i.e., ad agencies and others that directly contract us for creative services. So we annually do separate year-end posts, both in December, for each audience.) Each summary/tease below has a link to the full article, so feel free to binge away!
Do you have a topic you’d like us to cover? Or a marketing challenge you’d like us to help you with? Contact us today. We’d be delighted to hear from you.  Getting media exposure for your company is like solving a crossword puzzle. It can be tricky. It takes patience. A method for proceeding certainly helps. But here’s the key part of the analogy that will really make you sit up and take notice:
The puzzle taker and the puzzle creator share the exact same goal: They both want the puzzle taker to solve the puzzle. Kudos to New York Times puzzle editor Will Shortz for that insight. It’s counterintuitive, but it’s true. Some puzzles are hard, so you might think that the puzzle creator doesn’t want you to solve it. That’s not true. If you fail, they fail. Now substitute “crossword puzzle” with “news story about your company.” Your company and the reporter share the exact same goal: They both want to publish big news about your company. Betcha never thought of it that way, did you? Taking the proper approach We didn’t say this is easy; neither is a Saturday crossword. (In case you’re not a puzzle nut, know that the easiest ones are on Monday, and they get harder each day as the week progresses, with the hardest one on Saturday. [The Sunday puzzle only looks intimidating. It’s big, but not hard.]) The key is to understand the needs of that reporter (or “editor”) out there, and work backward. So step back for a minute. Put yourself in his or her shoes. What’s your job for the day? Better yet, what’s your dream job for the day? What would be the greatest day of your professional life? You don’t need a journalism degree to answer this question. You only need to watch old episodes of Superman. Or any old movie that features a reporter in it. Put this way: What does Lois Lane want? That’s easy. She wants a scoop. A big, front-page story. One that no other reporter got to, before her. One that takes America by surprise and by storm—and sells a ton of Daily Planet’s in the process. Fast-forward from comic books and printed newspapers to social media and viral videos, and the needs are identical. With apologies to Marshall McLuhan, the medium has changed, but not the message. Importantly, the motivation is identical. What reporter doesn’t want to be a star? And if not to all of America, at least to their boss? The daily grind Now try and picture a typical day in a modern Lois Lane’s life. She still needs “a nose for news,” but her way of “sniffing” is updated. Sure, she can scour the internet, but most of what she’ll find (just like you will) is stuff that’s already been reported. It’s other people’s scoops. So much for secondary sources. To find truly breaking news, you—or Lois—have got to get it from the source, as it happens. When it breaks. How do you do that? Your local six o’clock news team has a police radio scanner. When they hear a hot call, they roll. They send up the chopper. That’s great for criminal activity, but it doesn’t apply to your challenge. So think of venues where breakthroughs either occur, or are first announced. Now you’re getting warmer. This is places like:
In a word, Bingo. This is exactly the stuff that today’s reporters follow. Think about that. It’s not as sexy as it’s portrayed in the movies. There are reporters, right this minute, who are slogging through Journal of Nanoparticle Chemistry (we made that up), squinting through arcane scientific jargon, trying to find the story. Many of them succeed. Many others need help. Which leads to the One Big Thing we’ve purposely avoided mentioning until now: The press release. The press release, at face value, saves the day. It’s the magic matchmaker that connects puzzle-taker and puzzle-creator. It succinctly encapsulates that latest newsworthy breakthrough, before it’s become news, and spoon-feeds it to that hungry reporter. It provides all the basic facts, the angle, supporting photos and video as appropriate, and direct contact info for a straight-from-the-horse’s-mouth interview. The dilemma Why, then have we spent more than 600 words on this topic before we mentioned the press release? Why even have an article like this at all, when there are press releases out there, saving the day daily? It’s because they’re not. It may well be that the world’s first press release—or maybe even the first thousand—were a major, earth-shattering success. Can you imagine how excited Lois Lane would be to see a memo “From the desk of Albert Einstein”? But now, it’s not a help. It’s a glut. Rather than spending her day scouring the internet, Modern Lois spends her day, in dread, wading through mountains (“swamps”?) of press releases and packages, sent to her by email, postal mail, social links, FedEx, you name it. It’s disheartening. The problem, aside from the sheer volume, is the sheer volume of, well, crap that she gets each day. “ABC Company, creator of the XYZ Widget, releases XYZ Widget 2.0! It’s fully ten percent more widgety than Version 1!” Uggh. Putting it all together Now that you have a feel for Lois’ life, let’s take it back to your challenge. You want coverage about your company. Lois needs to break news. So help her. Here are some guidelines:
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