by Laura Connell on September 1, 2010
When women write, they write about relationships so it makes sense that women want to feel a connection with the material they read online.
Connecting emotionally
A survey commissioned by Yahoo and Starcom Mediavest Group (PDF) found that 96 percent of women say that they frequently feel positive emotions while online. If your marketing doesn’t elicit a positive emotional reaction, then you’re missing an opportunity.
Women don’t consume media in a vacuum
Women actively use the internet as they perform other tasks and as they view other media. Marketers can exploit this by ensuring that online marketing enhances your TV or print marketing – after all, your female audience is already viewing them side-by-side.
“Female-friendly” websites are a myth
The online content most popular with women includes news, weather, finance and games – items not found in most popular “women’s magazines”. Even though you are more likely to find horoscopes than football in Grazia magazine, more women visit sports sites than astrology sites when online.
“Surching”
Women are constantly “surching,” a hybrid of surfing and searching that focuses on a number of their favourite sites.
Women even “surch” when they go online to find something specific or are looking for an answer a question. The message to marketers is simple: it takes more than just search marketing or a great website to reach “the Surcher”. The key is smart, widely distributed internet advertising and a consistent presence in the places that your female audience visits.
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by Matthew Stibbe on August 24, 2010
There’s a great article in this week’s Economist about how to detect lies in conference calls. Here are some clues:
- References to general knowledge (“as you know…”)
- Overstatement (“fantastic” not “good”)
- Avoid the word ‘I’, using the third person instead
- Fewer hesitations
- Use of swear words (remember Jeff Skilling? I do – I saw Enron a couple of weeks ago in London.)
(The original research paper: Detecting Deceptive Discussions in Conference Calls (PDF) is also worth reading.)
These ‘tells’ are also attributes of a lot of bad marketing copy. So, if you want to increase the truthiness of your copy, the lessons are clear: be specific, don’t treat the reader as an idiot, be modestly understated and use the first person. And don’t swear.
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by Laura Connell on August 13, 2010
This is another great guest post from my intern, Laura Connell.
According to The Gender Genie, a free online tool that analyses your writing for feminine and masculine keywords, a man has written seven of my eleven Bad Language posts – this post is especially manly.
The Gender Genie uses a simplified version of an algorithm developed by a team of Israeli scientists who study the effects of gender of linguistic expression. To investigate how gender influences writing Argamon, Koppel, Fine and Shimoni studied 604 documents including non-fiction and fiction writing from both men and women in a wide range of genres- 25 million words were analysed in total.
The research confirms popular perceptions about gender differences in writing:
Male writing style
- More determiners (a, the, that, these) and quantifiers (one, two, more, some)
- Male writers use more factual references, such as place, time and numbers
Female writing style
- More pronouns (he, she, herself, myself, we, our)
- Female writers choose grammatical terms that apply to personal relationships, such as "for" and "with," more frequently than men do
I’m a lady!
Moshe Koppel, one of the authors of the project, concluded that women are comfortable thinking about people and relationships, whereas men prefer thinking about things.
I suspect that my maths background has trained me to write about things as opposed to relationships, which is why my posts contain more determiners than pronouns.
When writing about people, Eye tracking and what it means for writers, I write like a woman. When writing about things and ideas, Gender Genie concludes that I am a man – the same is true for female writers at the Guardian newspaper.
I won’t be making a conscious effort to make my writing more ladylike, after all it’s just my inner maths geek that writes like a man.
Intentional literary gender bending
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by Matthew Stibbe on August 12, 2010
I’m writing a new blog for Hewlett-Packard. Called Business Answers, it contains useful stuff at the intersection of business and IT. There is also a Business Answers Twitter feed. Recent posts include:
On the main Business Answers site, there are some useful resources for growing businesses:
I’ve been involved with HP Business Answers for more than a year and so if you enjoy Bad Language, you’ll find a similar approach and style with more business advice and IT content.
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by Laura Connell on August 11, 2010
Research has identified two types of people, those whose left-brain is dominant and those were the right-brain dominates. The dominant left-brain is ‘content’ oriented, while someone with right-brain dominance will be ‘process’ oriented.
Left brain dominance:
- Logical
- Sequential
- Rational
- Analytical
- Objective
- Looks at parts
Right brain dominance:
- Random
- Intuitive
- Holistic
- Synthesising
- Subjective
- Looks at wholes
Muse on the right, the critic on the left
The right side of your brain is responsible for intuition and creative thinking and the left is responsible for that annoying inner critic. Shutting off your left-brain entirely would leave you unable to write —the left-brain produces language – but quieting your internal editor is the only way to get into the zone.
Writing flow
Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi coined the term “flow” as another way of referring to “creative dissociation”. Csikszentmihalyi describes flow as that perfect balance between challenge and ability.
According to Csikszentmihalyi, “You can’t make flow happen. All you can do is learn to remove obstacles in its way.”
Alice Flaherty argues that creativity is due to a balance of your left and right brain. To make “flow” happen you don’t need to get out of your left-brain and into your right, but boost your creativity, concentrate on writing and shush your inner critic.
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by Laura Connell on August 6, 2010
People make buying decisions based on rational and emotional motivations. When structuring your writing you need to identify how you can appeal to both.
In “Confessions of an Advertising Man” David Ogilvy listed the 20 most persuasive words in advertising:
- suddenly
- now
- announcing
- introducing
- improvement
- amazing
- sensational
- remarkable
- revolutionary
- startling
- miracle
- magic
- offer
- quick
- easy
- wanted
- challenge
- compare
- bargain
- hurry
Persuasive words strike the fine balance between being rational and emotive whereas powerless words lack purpose and undermine the credibility of your writing.
Words to avoid
- But
- Try
- Don’t
- Should
- Need to
- Have to
- Could
- Maybe
- Perhaps
- Might
- Possibly
- Potentially
- Think
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When women write, they write about relationships so it makes sense that women want to feel a connection with the material they read online.
Zachary Overline
Chris
hell