language

Want to make your next book a best-seller?

The debate among copywriters about verbs vs. adjectives rages on. While the general consensus is that verbs make better sales copy and adjectives serve mainly to slow down the reader, there’s also research that shows properly used adjectives can increase product appeal.

Two weeks without checking my RSS-feeds and my brain is experiencing a creative spring. It seems the cyclical sameness of intellectual entertainment, disguised as (RSS/Blog) inspiration does nothing more than keep our brains occupied coping with the share volume of stuff to be updated on – instead of letting our mind rest for a second and make its own creative connections.

I'll likely get flamed for this but I'm not convinced that this is such a great idea. Setting up a walled off space with copious screens showing visualisations of data streamed from social media monitoring systems seems to be the new new thing. I have no doubt that the objectives behind it - listening and paying attention to customers - are laudable ones. But do you need a room to do it? If I'm honest, the thing that bothers me is (once again) the choice of language.

Do you think one short sentence at the end of your ad could cause a major increase in the level of trust customers place in you? Believe it or not, it’s true. Researchers found that placing the following statement at the end of an ad for a auto service firm caused their trust scores to jump as much as 33%!

Every time I dare to talk about race or class and MySpace & Facebook in the same breath, a public explosion happens. This is the current state of things. Unfortunately, most folks who enter the fray prefer to reject the notion that race/class shape social media or that social media reflects bigoted attitudes than seriously address what’s at stake.

One of the most fun aspects of blogging has been re-immersing myself in language. At work, language is just something you use; you don’t scrutinize it. Yet, the (mis)use of language has a lot to do with effectiveness at work or in any collaborative context.

The word “tsunami” was used a lot in the past to describe a trend or momentum in a market.

Then a real tsunami hit in December 2004. Hundreds of thousands died and more than 1 million people lost their homes. Suddenly we didn’t throw that term around as much anymore (well, except for some people: “[Jim] Cramer…called the latest baseball tech breakthrough a ‘tsunami’ and the ’single best example of the Mobile Internet.’”)

by: Alain Thys

Which would you consider to be the minimum acceptable level of education for your customers? Primary? High-School? University? Post-Grad?

If you think this is a non-sensical question, think again. At SAP or Samsung it looks like you need at least a university degree before they want to talk to you. Microsoft, Disney (!?) and Starbucks even require a post-graduate.

by: Roger Dooley

One of the more intriguing concepts in neuromarketing is priming, i.e., influencing an individual’s behavior by the introduction of various subtle cues.