New Wave Marketing 101: Keeping It Above the Fold and Other Stupid Ideas

Just read an article by some crack designer (http://iampaddy.com/lifebelow600/) telling me that it’s no longer  “de rigeur” to worry about keeping web content ‘above the fold.’ People will scroll without a problem; so longer web pages are fine… fine, I tell you.

I’m about to blow a gasket.

For years… years… every tin pot designer and web expert has been SCREAMING about keeping copy above the flippin’ fold. That line was Gospel. I think Jesus said as much at The Sermon on the Mount.

I ask any of you who write copy, how many times have you heard that admonition? How often have you been asked to cut a story or change a paragraph or ruin a good subhead or make the font smaller all so you could keep it above the fold?

Hundreds. Thousands.

And here’s the worst part: we were stupid enough and weak enough to do it… to let a CODER tell us what sells… to change our story to fit a nonsensical idea.

People read books and magazines… and they have no problem turning pages. Case closed. The Internet didn’t change that. Write a good story, something compelling, and people will scroll and turn pages and click mice to follow along.

EVERYONE KNOWS THAT… BUT STILL WE PUT UP WITH A DECADE OF ‘ABOVE THE FOLD’ IDIOCY. (Ooo, it’s so elegant, so intelligent.)

I guess what’s making me sore (aside from thinking of all the unnecessary things I had to do to make things fit) is that the executives (VPs of marketing, supposedly) we worked for were so damned quick to believe… and so eager to trust a CODER. (Excuse me… they had numbers! Unfortunately, marketing and selling can’t be fully quantified with spreadsheets and algorithms.)

Copywriters, how low our stock has sunk. This idea of short, above the fold copy is a big reason why people now think anyone can write. Why pay for long copy and a good story when you don’t need to? No one’s reading more than one screen. Anyone can throw together a couple of sentences!”

Ah, I can hear it now… the sound of CODERS tap dancing around this new information… “Sure, it was good advice at the time but people have changed, blah, blah, blah.”

No, they haven’t. That’s why a good story is still called a ‘page turner.’

(What next? Are you going to tell me that keywording isn’t all it’s cracked up to be?)

New Wave Marketing 101: Overpaying, Over Doing and Over Estimating the Value of Social Media

If you saw the recent article about The State Department paying over $600K to raise its likes from 60,000 to 2,000,000 you should have laughed and then paused to reflect.

Here’s the takeaway: Most companies are over doing social media, over paying for the results and over estimating the value.

Here it is… short and sweet:

1. SM is a given for the vast majority of companies, but the simple basics are all that most need… because it’s expected – like a listing in the Yellow Pages was expected by consumers, even though no one saw results commensurate with cost.
2. CEOs and internal marketing departments in B2C and B2B are enamored of SM and frightened to be left behind, so they let any pretty face come in and sell them on likes and Google+ and tweets and you name it. Like taking candy from a baby… fools chasing numbers that don’t translate into sales.
3. Results are so poor that in any other media we would all run screaming from the field. But Google has us convinced that .75% is a pretty darn good return. I was a magazine editor/publisher for 20 years. If I had to sell that number to advertisers I would have been laughed out of the room.
4. Only two types of products/companies really benefit from the all out SM campaign: small, disruptive companies/products and huge multinationals. That’s it. Why these two?
• The big, big and maybe only significant effect SM has had on marketing is that for the first time consumers are finding you (78% find companies/products, not the other way around) and when they do, they’ve already developed an idea of who you are. You need to affect these preconceptions and this has traditionally been the realm of advertising; and if you can afford it, big ads with frequency still beat SM.
  
  But if you don’t have the bucks, SM allows you to disrupt markets, attack big market leaders and build status and belief with ‘minimal’ cost. This idea works with both B2B companies and consumer products trying to break through or disrupt an established market.
  
  But once you've hit mid-sized, SM is a minor necessity. You’re not disruptive, you have some media budget, you only need a basic presence.

• Then, there are a few, just a few, huge companies that need to present a human face: Wal-Mart, General Electric, GM, etc. -- companies that most people see as cold and faceless. Intelligent SM works well for them as branding, not sales. 

But most companies are not this big and do not need to be humanized. I don't expect Big O tires to show me their human side -- I do expect or at least appreciate a bit of humanity from Blue Cross Blue Shield or Shell Oil, etc.

If you’re not in one of these two categories, then SM is a small part of your marketing efforts these days. The blush is off the rose. For you to expect big results (and for you to pay big bucks to the plethora of SM pundits and overblown, egotistical coders and SEO ‘liars’) from minuscule return rates is just silly.

Look, say hello and thanks to your customers, explain what you do, offer a sale, improve your customer service, attract good people to hire, then get the hell out of SM.

The rest is plain nuts!