“Hi my name is _____ and I am working on a project for my creative strategist class and I was hoping that you could answer these questions please?”

That’s the entire email (sans attachment) that I received from a total stranger at University of Oregon last night. It grieves me to say how common this is.

Here’s another one for reference: “Good morning, David. I am very interested in joining your agency – hence the email!”

I could go on, but I think you can see the problem. There’s no persuasion here whatsoever, no effort taken to earn my attention and no reason for me to care.

Why is this? Are people particularly lazy today? Do people feel entitled? Did we forget to teach people raised on text messaging how to write a letter? Yes to all of the above.

People are also overwhelmed by information, and their mindless conduct shows it. According to a report from the University of California, San Diego, in 28 years — from 1980 to 2008 — our consumption of information increased 350 percent. This is alarming, but it’s high time we adapt to the new reality and learn how best to function in this new info-rich environment.

Writing for Media Shift last month, Aran Levasseur points to recent brain imaging studies that show sections of our brains are highly active during down time. Levasseur goes on to suggest that we teach mindfulness in our schools. That’s a great idea, but let’s begin by practicing mindfulness in our homes (and workplaces).

Howard Rheingold is also interested in mindfulness (or metacognition) as it relates to online behavior. According to Nieman Journalism Lab, “Rheingold says we have to connect our attention to our intention and be more aware of how what we’re actively doing relates (or often doesn’t) to what we need.”

Indeed. If it is a job you need, you’re going to have to work for it, and that means approaching each company, and each person, with the utmost respect. Sending out a one line inquiry says all the wrong things. It says you’re not paying attention to detail, that you can’t be bothered to do basic research and that you have zero clue as to the core elements of persuasion.

Take this site. If any of the job seekers in question simply made time to read a tiny bit of the copy herein, they would have concluded that there are no jobs available. Only projects, which typically go to colleagues that I’ve been working with for more than a decade.

I might add that this problem is much bigger than job seekers taking the fast train to Nowheresville. I’m also consistently pitched by agency search consultants who want me to fill out a Request for Proposal (again, for someone I’ve never met, or heard of), by salespeople selling a wide variety of services and by PR agents who want me to write about their clients.

Unless you can show me that I’m not just another email address on your list, your pitch is nothing to me but noise. Naturally, many brands also suffer from this kind of me-centric behavior. That’s why I am hired to provide an outsider perspective, and help brands find the reason for prospects to care. It’s rarely easy, but it’s the only way forward.

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Patrick Spenner and Karen Freeman are managing directors at Harvard Business Review. Spenner and Freeman came up with something they call the “decision simplicity index,” which measures how easy it is for consumers to gather and understand information about a brand, how much they can trust the information they find, and how readily they can weigh their options. The easier a brand makes the purchase-decision journey, the higher its decision-simplicity score and the more likely it is to be purchased, repurchased and recommended to others.

The authors argue that their findings indicate the need for a profound shift from marketers. If simplifying the purchase-decision journey is the goal, it means brands need to do more than convey product attributes. The order of the day is to also provide specs on competitive products. It may seem counterintuitive, but the prospective buyer is going to seek out that information, with or without the aid of the brand under consideration. By providing an honest assessment of the competition, a brand says to its prospects, “we are not afraid of the facts, and we’re here to help you make the best decision, regardless.”

Clearly this approach will scare many brand managers off, but Spenner and Freeman do provide examples of companies on the edge of the new frontier in radical transparency. They don’t point to any brands doing the kind of comparison shopping online that Progressive Insurance is known for, but they highlight companies where customers share tips and insights with one another. J.C. Penney and American Eagle, for instance, have capitalized on the “haul video” phenomenon by hosting unbiased haulers on their sites and in their digital communications. Neither retailer requires that the haulers show only brands purchased at its store, and the haulers are transparent about their links to the companies (Penney, for instance, gives its star haulers gift cards).

I’m slightly freaked out by the haul video concept, but I’m not a digital native, nor a teen girl. Clearly, making video confessionals is common today, and young ladies want to discuss their purchases. So, who am I to judge?

What about the world of advertising agencies? How can business-to-business buyers of marketing and communications services get the scoop on the agencies being considered for a project, or for AOR status? As far as I know there is no place to get this kind of online peer evaluation for agencies and design shops. I guess Chief Marketing Officers still do it the old-fashioned wat — they call their business school buddies and attempt to get a read on a shop’s reputation and capabilities. Should there be an Angie’s List for professional services like advertising and design? Probably. I did check to see if Yelp had any local returns under “Advertising” and it turns out Yelp does. Both Wieden + Kennedy and Leopold Ketel & Partners are listed, and both have at least one review on their Yelp page.

I can’t imagine agencies working to easy the purchase-decision journey for prospective clients by hosting community dialogue on their sites, where current and former clients (and possibly staff) would be encouraged to talk, and perhaps break down what’s right and what’s wrong with the place. Agencies, like all companies, want to protect their image and they don’t want to invite comparison shopping. But it might be time to consider a new way of doing things, because it is impossible to deny that the comparison shopping will go on, particularly for high dollar items. Of course, it is a bit scary to consider, but I believe good things can come from embracing and facilitating the journey prospects actually take.

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In my hunt for work, I have visited over 100 different agencies over the years. Last month I paid my first ever visit to a PR shop — Fleishman Hillard in San Francisco. I’ve also been trying to get a meeting with the content team at Waggener Edstrom in Portland and/or Seattle for months, to no avail. Why? Because I’m a specialist in content marketing and many ad agencies have little clue about the practice. I’m not convinced PR agencies are much better, but I want to see for myself before making that call.

With this in mind, Timothy Kane’s guest piece in Ad Age is interesting to me. Kane works for Makovsky & Company, a PR shop in New York City. He makes some bold claims about PR’s reach, but let’s go with it for the moment.

Instead of trying to encapsulate your brand in a strategic statement, try writing a narrative for your brand. That’s what public relations does.

…They’re not your customers; they’re your constituents. It’s been said often, but it bears repeating: People don’t buy brands. They join them. So modern brands must function like political parties, identifying issues, expressing a coherent world view, staging debates and structuring dialogues.

I like his passion, but the fact is we all deal in brand narrative. How we tell our clients’ stories is what distinguishes one agency from another, and one marketing communications practice from another.

Kane suggests that Apple’s success is a win for PR, not advertising. He also notes that Nike is spending a lot less money on advertising these days. I think it’s pretty evident that Apple’s success is the result of superior product, supported by unrivaled branding. Nike’s success, on the other hand, is all about how their brand story plays out on TV. Maybe they don’t need to spend as much on TV as they once did, but that’s partly due to the rock solid foundation they created for the brand on TV.

I know PR shops, like every other type of agency under the sun, are desperate to tell brand stories on the Web today. There’s a lot of money on the line, and we must convey our expertise to clients so they’ll trust us with their most important tasks. And I’m not here to diminish PR, as I said above I want to learn more about the field. But help me understand, if you will, how firms that traditionally influence journalists are better prepared to reach customers and prospects? Ad agencies speak directly to customers and prospects. Granted, the vehicles they use to do so are a bit rusty, but the fact remains ad pros know how to persuade people to buy things.

I’ll conclude by saying that I spent several years working in so-called marketing services agencies. At the time, I may not have appreciated what a solid grounding in MarCom I was treated to in these environments. Now I see. The bottom line is our ability to establish interest over the long term. The interest is created by brand stories and the stories must be told in a variety of ways — in store, at branded events, online, on TV and radio, in the press and so on. Call it what you will, but to my mind “Relationship Marketing” is the roof over all our heads.

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I read two articles last week that got my attention, but not in a good way. The first was a piece in Wired about how companies are using Klout scores — which purport to rank a person’s online social influence — to provide perks, upgrades and also to determine if a person is right for a particular job.

The other annoying article was a recap of a speech given by Kevin Roberts, CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi.

Let’s start with Roberts. I often wonder if people in his position are totally out of touch with reality, or if they believe in, and enjoy, provoking their audience with inflammatory language. Roberts claimed that strategy is dead, management is dead, marketing is dead and so on. Yes, all in one speech.

“The big idea is dead. There are no more big ideas. Creative leaders should go for getting lots and lots of small ideas out there. Stop beating yourself up searching for the one big idea. Get lots of ideas out there and then let the people you interact with feed those ideas and they will make it big.”

Speed and velocity is everything today. Marketing’s jobs is to create movement and inspire people to join you.

The best approach to this type of loose rhetoric is to laugh it off, or ignore it altogether. Yet, I doubt that’s what members of Roberts’ London audience did. They no doubt listened and some of them may have even believed what they heard.

Of course, the pace of communications in today’s networked world is new, but that doesn’t mean it is good, and it doesn’t mean that we all need to jump on a speeding vehicle that’s dangerously out of control. In fact, my advice is the direct opposite of Roberts’. Slow down, pace yourself and practice on your craft.

Do you think Apple Computer buys this nonsense about the big idea being dead and the need for lots of litte ideas? Clearly, they do not. Substitute another leading company for Apple and the answer is the same. The only people playing Robert’s game are Facebook, Google and other tech industry firms. And we’ll see how that works out for them in the long run.

Now, on to Klout and what’s wrong with influencer marketing. I don’t want to focus here on what’s wrong with Klout itself (that’s been done). I want to look at how brands are using Klout.

“We want to create powerful brand advocates,” says Tom Norwalk, president and CEO of the Seattle Convention and Visitors Bureau, who arranged a two-day, all-expenses-paid trip for 30 high-Klout visitors. “We hope these folks will tweet and Instagram to their many followers.” Virgin America has offered free flights, Capital One has dispensed bonus loyalty points, and Chevrolet has loaned out its new Sonic subcompact for long weekends.

Here’s a video from one of the Chevy Volt drivers, who was loaned a vehicle for the weekend:

The video, which was posted last September, has just over 1000 views on YouTube. This is what Roberts means by lots of little ideas. But from a marketing communications perspective, I fail to see the point. When shopping for a car, we do listen to and seek advice from our friends and family. We may also read Consumer Reports for expert opinions. What we do not do is hunt through our Facebook and Twitter streams for insights, especially if those insights are being funded by a brand.

The video above has no reach, so even if it was a persuasive piece, no one’s seeing it. A weak commercial, with or without the benefit of celebrity star power, does a whole lot more for a brand than lots of litte ideas.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. We do live in a hyper-networked media environment today, where the “everyman” has a voice. There are plenty of positive aspects to this development, but the impact on marketing is still negligible. Go ahead and experiment with social media marketing and influencer marketing, but don’t put too many eggs in this basket.

Big ideas are always relevant and great new products and services will spread via word of mouth, but there’s still a need for traditional media. Look at Apple again. Apple uses commercials, print ads, out-of-home and email marketing to inform us and prompt us to buy. Apple’s best customers are often evangelists for the company, but Apple wisely does not lean on these super fans to do the hard work of crafting its messaging. They have Lee Clow and company for that, and there’s little doubt that Apple’s consistently great brand advertising is a huge part of the company’s off-the-charts success.

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I’ve been thinking long and hard about blogs and return on investment for the writers, publishers and brands that commit to producing them. Given that blogs in almost every case are free to read, and that online advertising is a joke, you have to wonder what kind of return blogs provide, and why there are so many of them.

As someone who has chosen to go deep and spend nearly a decade pursuing the promise of push button publishing, I have many of my own tales to tell, and I intend to share, but first let’s look at some critical responses to the medium.

Kathleen Taylor is a freelance science writer and researcher affiliated with Oxford University. She stopped blogging on Psychology Today’s site, because the immediacy of it all didn’t fit her needs.

Blogging competes for our overwhelmed attentional resources. What attracts attention? Not slow thought, for sure. Fast responses, short statements, eye-catching titles and images, personal statements, provocative claims and moral judgements.

Yes. If we consider ad blogs for a moment, we’ll see that the sites that cram a bunch of content into their pages each day like Agency Spy and The Denver Egotist, or sites that use snarky commentary like Copyranter and AdScam are considered successful. “Provocative claims and moral judgements” have never much interested me, but I have in the past felt the need to race to complete X number of stories by end of business, a.k.a. bedtime. Thankfully, I no longer feel that pressure to produce. Not because I haven’t succeeded. Rather, because I have succeeded and found the rewards of said success lacking.

I’m pretty sure that I brought unreasonable expectations to the practice, like the ability to profit financially from my industry analysis. I also thought the community around the content would grow exponentially, that readers would stick around and actively engage. You live. You learn.

One thing I haven’t considered is how the format itself may in part be responsible for the things that haven’t quite worked as planned. Earlier today, I read If HTML5 Kills the Blog Format, I Won’t Shed a Tear by Scott M. Fulton. He rejects the limitations of the traditional time-based structure, while extending a degree of hope that HTML5 might help.

Not all articles should be created equal. Blogs are singular conveyor belts of nuggets of text. But a major news story, a feature on how to build a private cloud in your office, an interview with a mobile app developer, and some guy ranting about the stupidity of the blog format, are different beasts with varying life spans. Longer-living articles should be allowed to live longer, rather than being hurled off the conveyor belt into the void of invisibility when more replacements come along. HTML5 offers the possibility of componentized, two-dimensional layout where the Table of Contents can live and breathe again.

In another ReadWriteWeb piece Fulton argues that “news must be bundled with a service.” To which I say, absolutely. On AdPulp, the news we produce or reproduce is the “sugar coating” and the services offered for sale are copywriting, design, coding and so on. Yet, we’ve failed to make that perfectly clear. People see us as an industry news site, not a site run by ad guys available for hire. That’s a problem in need of a solution. Yet, there is no easy solve for this riddle, primarily because readers don’t visit AdPulp to be pitched, they visit for our unique take on the industry. Only rarely do readers connect the dots and say to themselves, these guys know their shit; hence, I want them on my next project or on my staff.

What I must reckon with, as co-founder and editor of AdPulp, is what if any marketplace value our unique take has. The site has always made a small amount of money each year, so there’s that. AdPulp also opens doors, but there’s a catch. The doors open so we can report on the host’s doings, not because they want to meet the guys behind AdPulp and work with us. As a professional brand builder, I can no longer tolerate that kind of marketplace confusion. While it’s easy for me to see that I’m an ad guy first, and an ad critic second, that’s asking a lot of other people.

Here, on this particular Web page the necessary balance, and clarity, is built in. This isn’t an ad blog, it’s a company Web site with a blog that covers important developments in content and marketing. Here, you know what’s behind the curtain — you know that the “news” is a loss leader, and that we’re sharing it with you to showcase our thinking, which can be rented by the hour/day/week. In other words, blogging makes sense here. I can’t say the same for AdPulp, and that pains me to some degree, but I’ve also had 7.5 years to adjust myself to the idea, so it’s not too painful.

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Intel, the largest private employer in the state of Oregon, is “sponsoring tomorrow.” As such, the technology company is busy spending millions of dollars to create avante garde experiential marketing events that live up to that bold claim.

Tom Foremski, the journalist who coined the oft-repeated term, “every company is a media company,” recently attended The Creators Project in San Francisco, a free art and music event from Intel and Vice Media.

Foremski notes that “It could have easily been re-named ‘The Curators Project’ because of the superb collection of bands, artists, installations, and even food trucks — all carefully selected by a small team of curators.”

Foremski spoke with David Haroldsen, Intel’s Creative Director for the project. Haroldsen said Intel considers the project to be very successful in meeting its goals and that Intel loves the co-branding and its partnership with Vice (a media company charging head first into marketing services).

I make mention of the campaign, now in its third year, because event marketing and content marketing are two strong siblings, growing bigger by the day. Both fall, as so many things do now, under the larger banner of Relationship Marketing, and both offer people an immersive journey into media. The San Francisco Creators Project attracted more than 45,000 people over two days. I’m sure many of the attendees didn’t think of it as a branded event, meant to make a lasting and positive impression. It was just something fun to do, brought to you by Intel and Vice.

Maybe your firm doesn’t have Intel’s deep pockets. Not many do. But it is still possible to find shared points of interest between your brand and what’s meaningful to your prospects and customers.

Intel is weaving arts and technology together, and providing a platform to explore both. Ask yourself what kind of event would make your customers or prospects happy. Or if you prefer ask me, and we’ll find the answer together.

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Vivian Schiller, NBC News’ Chief Digital Officer, is an orthodox minister in the House of Content.

The concept of “platform agnosticism,” the notion that legacy media companies must have their content on all digital outlets is “completely wrong,” she preaches.

Schiller says, “it’s critical for news organizations to succeed to be platform orthodox. To think about the actual platform itself, how people use it, and create an experience around your brand that is native to that platform.”

Of course, ad agencies also like to claim that they’re platform agnostic, even when they’re clearly a TV shop, or a direct shop, and so on. It’s the new “integrated marketing” this platform agnosticism, and we know how that promise worked out.

Schiller adds, “Brand is not just the quality of my news report…It’s important to think about usability, the way that the audience interacts with your brand, rather than purely about the content itself.”

In other words, the consumer doesn’t own your brand, as some have claimed, but how consumers react to it in various media defines your brand.

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I recently learned a hard lesson about the need to pre-qualify prospective new clients that come knocking. Our natural response as “people in business” is to welcome the knocks and listen intently, hoping to identify the challenge that we can efficiently and elegantly solve. But we must also listen to the warning signs that are often plainly evident from the beginning, or trouble is likely to ensue.

In the great majority of cases, when client and agent are not on the same page, the result is no more work for the agent following the completion of the open project. Sometimes however, the client or agent can’t wait for a peaceful resolution. They must end it now. When a firing in either direction happens, you lean on the contract to determine the kill fee and move on. If there is no contract in place, both parties are at a serious disadvantage and the chance of an equitable resolution is scant.

In my recent off-the-rails experience, I heard the signals on the first call with the client, but brushed them under the rug, thinking I was premature or possibly wrong in my initial judgment. I wasn’t. What I heard on the phone that day from was enough for me decline the project, but I didn’t do that and I didn’t present a contract. Two massive mistakes that I don’t intend to make again.

Now to the tough part…how do I pre-qualify a client? It has to be a process that makes prospects feel more secure about working with me, and more excited to work with me. If, on the other hand, prospects head for the hills in a rapid about face, that too is effective.

I think a quick series of rather innocent questions will aid in the process:

1) Are you hiring for a tactical piece of communications, or are you looking to make an investment in your brand?

4) How do you spend your Saturdays?

The first question addresses the nature of a client-agent relationship. Great work comes from long term partnerships where there’s a lot of trust. It does not result from one-offs.

The second question addresses money head-on to help determine if there’s a match. But it’s more than that, because when the answer is, “no, we don’t have a marketing budget,” or, “we have one, but it’s very small,” the chances are the client wants a tactical piece of communications and a vendor, not a partner, to create it.

The third question is bald, and some might recoil from its shiny top. But it’s a good question nonetheless. When you hire a copywriter, or a creative team, you’re asking us to dig into the heart of your operation. To see what is special there, that might then be presented in a memorable way to prospects and customers. More times than not, the brand and its managers, need and receive a realignment during this body check. But that’s not always comforting news, even though it feels good in the end.

The last question is there to encourage a personal story, in hopes that a real human connection can be made. A transaction of services for money is good, but long term partnerships are the ideal, and that’s what I’m aiming for.

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Recovering MBA and founder of Shibumi Creative, Matthew E. May, reminds, “If you can sell to the man in the chair, you can sell to anyone!”

McGraw-Hill’s man in the chair, is of course, skeptical about what you might be selling. Because he doesn’t know who you are, what you do, what you’re made of, or why he should take time to listen what you have to say.

May spoke to Joe Webb, a small business consultant who focuses on B2B marketing trends about the classic ad from 1958.

“These questions are timeless, not just for B2B marketing, but for all marketing, and all communicators. Here it is, more than fifty years after the appearance of this ad, and it’s still very useful for outlining a comprehensive communications campaign, and it is all the more powerful because of digital and social media. It remains a clear outline of fundamental sales and marketing questions every business must answer, and they are only intensified today.”

I think the fourth challenge in the ad, “I don’t know what your company stands for” is crucial. It’s married to the reputation challenge, and in today’s information-rich, always-on culture, a consumer can cover the basics of an introduction very quickly, but establishing a high ground for the brand is something that takes an investment of time, human resources and money.

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I write copy. Hopefully, this fact is evident in all that we do. That’s my intention; hence, the company name, the tagline and this site where industry-specific content is freely and consistently given.

Perhaps you are asking what difference a fact like this makes. After all, lots of writers start agencies of one sort or another. For the buyer of marketing services it makes a huge difference, because writers are expert at wading through a sea of (often meaningless) data points to find that one foundational nugget that an entire campaign can rest upon. Yes, strategists do this work too, but it comes natural to writers.

For me personally, saying that Bonehook is a writer-run business helps me stay on track. I could easily steer Bonehook down the non-specialized path, where we use our abilities and connections to solve a wide variety of marketing problems for clients. That’s the standard route, and a path I know well. But it’s not why I am in business.

My goal is to get paid well to write well, and to help other writers get paid well to write well. Plain and simple. Thankfully, there’s a market for what I do, and with the rise of content marketing the market is expanding.

Would you rather see this post in a list? I can do that for you.

Five Reasons to Hire Bonehook as Your Content Marketing Team

1) We are fundamentally sound — therefore, we will focus our efforts on mining the shared points of interest between your customers and your brand.

2) We are proven — few writers have as many balls in the air as I do, and few creative directors have experience launching and running a multi-million dollar content marketing department (something I did prior to starting Bonehook).

3) We care about the right things — we care about your company, and the people who buy and use your products and services (sadly, too many of our competitors only care about industry award shows and other exercises in extreme vanity).

4) We celebrate the power of narrative — in our efforts to inform and entertain your best prospects and current customers, we will weave a thread today and another tomorrow and so on, ultimately creating a beautiful branded tapestry.

5) We believe in good times — making money is serious business, but no one’s going to pay attention to your incessant pitches all day, every day (please see point #1 above).

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