I was talking to a new friend the other day and she mentioned to me how she perceived another agency in town through the lens of the agency’s website. She felt that they had an inflated sense of themselves, largely based on the artsy portraits of staff that feature prominently.

I asked her what she saw in Bonehook.com and she said, “I see a straight forward approach.”

Maybe she was being nice, I don’t know. Let me ask you, what do you see here? Is it crystal clear what the offering is? Because it has to be crystal clear, for this site to be an effective part of the Bonehook brand strategy. For the record, the offering is two-fold: “we” build brands for small businesses and “I” write copy for agencies and brands.

According to Google Analytics, a fair bit of traffic to this site comes from Bonehook’s listing on Portland Creative List. From that listing a number of people inquire about jobs, which we do not presently offer. Bonehook is me (a copywriter/creative director/brand strategist) and the perfect mix of contractors for any given project. Or it’s just me, writing copy for you. You decide.

Portland Creative List also serves up unsolicited Requests for Proposals. And direct mail from printers, cold calls from various service providers, and so on. You hang a shingle, people knock on the door.

Last fall’s Adweek article about strange agency names — Bonehook’s first major earned media score — continues to deliver a number of curious clickers too. Gotta love evergreen content.

Wherever visitors migrate from, or soon bounce to, I hope they pause long enough to consider these offerings of text. Words. Copy. Content. I’m a writer and I like to put the product on display. I also have faith in the the form. By reading these words, you get to know me a bit better, and after a while you may come to trust me and my advise more.

In addition, I see Bonehook as a journey and and a journey is something to joyfully share. A lot of agencies are too busy or too scared to open up and showcase their process, or total lack of process, as the case may be. Instead, they rely on tightly packaged case studies, white papers and/or instructional pieces on the agency blog meant to showcase expertise. I understand the need for that kind of formality, but I also believe there’s a need to loosen up when it comes to one’s own narrative. Therefore, I’m making an effort to expose our practices here, our victories and our stumbles. I don’t know if I can make the mundane interesting, but that’s the goal.

Content marketing. Everyone wants some.

But David Spark of Spark Media Solutions cautions that few of the agencies busy peddling their “content marketing” expertise have the necessary chops to make that claim.

Yes, ad agencies and PR firms without a seasoned editorial staff can physically create media, but it’s like hiring a general practitioner when you need a specialist.

I’m sure I’ll get a lot of heat for this comment as many ad agencies and PR firms are basing a lot of their new business on content marketing. I’m all for that, just as long as they have an experienced staff to do it. That requires hiring people who have worked in traditional journalistic media, not just giving new responsibilities to staffers who don’t have the experience or training. Traditional media is very different from creating ad copy.

I agree that writing ad copy and producing brand-sponsored content require different approaches, and that a background in journalism is helpful to content producers on the agency dime. However, speaking from my own experience, the two practices can be performed by the same person, or team. Just like a gifted guitar player can pick up the banjo and/or mandolin and sound great, a writer grounded in both advertising and content can weave a story in both venues, and move from one to the other without a hitch.

For me, it’s about intent. Great advertising reveals a core truth about the product or service in a fresh, “why didn’t I think of that?” fashion. Through strategic and repeated media placements, the new idea gets adopted by prospects and brand value is created. Brand-sponsored content, on the other hand, often has a very loose connection, or no connection at all, to the product or service in question. Content’s intent is to inform or entertain. When it’s done right, content is a gift.

Direct and brand advertising come with an ask; therefore, advertising is often an unwelcome intrusion, not a gift. Once you understand the difference, and you have real world experience creating both ads and content for brands, there’s no reason both services can’t live under one roof (as they do at Bonehook).

By the way, here I am getting the News pages together at The College Reporter in Lancaster, PA, circa 1984:

“If we are any good at what we do, we believe, then we should not have to talk people into hiring us.” -Blair Enns, author of Win Without Pitching

It’s a new year and from a business perspective a time to make annual assessments and projections. I’ve been doing what we all do, looking at income from last year, how many clients we served (ten!) and what clients were most profitable.

I’ve also been looking at how to accelerate the company in 2012 and what kind of advanced learning opportunities are available to me. While I already know that sales is service and success in sales is dependent on relationships, Blair Enns, a business development consultant to creative firms, is helping me to see what else selling is and how to best practice it today.

Proper selling can be distilled into three steps, based on the client’s place in the buying cycle. These three steps replace the art of persuasion.

To sell is to:

1. Help the unaware

2. Inspire the interested

3. Reassure those who have formed intent

In other words, new business development isn’t something persuaders do. It’s something educators and motivators do.

Enns is also a big believer in using thought leadership to establish one’s expertise. When you’re clearly the one person, or one firm that’s right for the job, a.k.a the clear expert, you win without pitching.

Of course, it’s not always possible to win without pitching. That’s why other more traditional sales gurus advise Biz Dev pros to “tie your solution to a pending regulation or other impending event” or “align the solution to a strategic objective.”

Speaking of aligning the solution to a strategic objective, I recently started using the free version of Capsule CRM, and am happy to report that it’s a nifty piece of software that helps me see what’s in the sales pipeline and how much revenue is on the line. If you need a similar Salesforce-like tool, give it a spin.

One of the things I get excited about is hiring friends to help me tell a brand’s story. I’m currently working with two friends on a web refresh project. One of these friends, Scott Baker, is a high school history teacher by day and a photographer by night. He also loves soccer, so he was the ideal person to call when Portland Indoor Soccer needed some new images.

These two shots (and dozens more) will be featured on the newly reconstructed PDXIndoorSoccer.com when it launches this month.

Should your brand be active on Twitter? It’s a common question today and one that will be answered affirmatively by marketing services providers eager to bill for the incremental time.

But let’s take additional billings out of the equation for a minute. If you’re asking someone who is a deep believer in the power of social media, you will no doubt hear about Twitter’s ability to bolster customer service, how it’s all about listening now and how this new channel provides unprecedented transparency and changes the voice of the brand from something prepackaged and contrived to something authentic and real time. In other words, Twitter is powerful stuff and only a fool would stay away from it.

My own Twitter habits are well established. I maintain three accounts: @davidburn, @bonehook and @adpulp. Unlike Facebook, where I dip in and out, Twitter is always on when I have a browser window open and it is generally the first iPhone app I call up (unless I am about to take a photo). In other words, Twitter is powerful stuff and only a fool would stay away from it.

I am being facetious. It’s not all good in the neighborhood. Let’s examine this short exchange from 24 hours ago:

I am grateful to Cory O’Brien for participating in this quick chat, because it would have been sad to have this chat alone. Yet, that’s precisely what I have come to expect. A monologue, not a dialogue. The lack or real banter is frustrating. It also leads us down a path where “no response” is acceptable behavior, if not the norm in our culture.

As Fast Company and Tom Peters told us 14 years ago, we are all brands now. Brands equipped with powerful communications tools that are easy to use and practically free of cost. Given that we go to Twitter intent on building our brands, it is no wonder that no one’s listening or responding.

While many on Twitter do show up to blow their self-promotional horns, there are plenty of others seeking genuine dialogue. Brands who have been advised to “join the conversation” are definitely seeking conversations with prospects and customers. Yet, those conversations are in short supply. And they’re not really conversations. Twitter is a sea of fragments moving fast toward the digital ocean. Something resembling a one-to-one conversation can happen in the middle of Twitter, but is a rushing stream of “look at me” fragments and hyperlinks really the best place for it?

Of course, Twitter is not the only place where people and brands are talking at people, not with them. Facebook, LinkedIn and many blogs all suffer from the same problem, which is caused in part by the growing attention deficit epidemic. Many of us simply do not have time to engage with our real life friends on the phone or our digital acquaintances online, much less brands.

In the ad business, there’s an old adage about the need for the work to “break through the clutter.” The saying no longer applies. The clutter today is at a level we’ve never before experienced. The clutter has taken over completely. Ergo, there’s no breaking through the clutter. Instead, one needs to set themselves, or their brand, apart from the clutter. How? By not adding to it.

Right now there are smart people, people in marketing, using Twitter to blast out their daily monologues. There’s no need to name them, you can find them easily enough. It may seem counter intuitive, but as the noise increases the best response is not louder shouts or Tweets of your own. The need for high quality thinking, writing and sharing is dire (to say nothing of the need for some restraint). Provide it and you give people a reason to pause and consider, and possibly to act.

My friend Reggie Wideman at tenfour needed a new smartphone, as many of us do from time to time. But before going to the store to buy one, he decided to let voters in an online poll choose his phone for him.

Voters in the poll picked the iPhone 4S by a wide margin over the HTC Titan (running Windows) and the Samsung Galaxy (running Android).

Reggie describes the differences in metaphorical terms:

The iPhone is like a pristine, planned community with credit and background checks just to get a visitor’s pass. Android is like, well, it’s like New York City: everything all the time, just the way you want it, but also dirty, confusing and sometimes it just doesn’t work as expected. As for Windows Phone OS, I’m not even sure yet. It’s feeling like something in the middle—maybe downtown Chicago.

I left this comment on Reggie’s post:

I like how open to new things you are Reggie. I want to be like you, so I opted for something different this week–the HTC Inspire running Google’s Android mobile OS. At first, I was WOWed by the speed of the 4G network and the phone’s processor, but now I’m starting to waver along with the device’s battery, every few hours. I want to break Apple’s spell, but doing so is troublesome. The Apple fanboy thing is annoying, but there is a very solid reason for it. Exceptional design that lifts spirits.

I went to the AT&T store today and almost dumped the new HTC I bought at Costco for a new phone I know I will love, the iPhone 4 or 4S. But I didn’t. First, I want to see if the Advanced Task Killer app I installed (at the recommendation of the AT&T sales person) will preserve the battery. Right now, a full charge is only good for three or four hours max, which makes me wonder how a phone like this is ever released in the first place.

I am pleased that I can nearly replicate the iPhone experience with an Android smartphone, but it’s the little things that count and forgetting the horrendous battery problem for a second, Apple’s user interface is simply cleaner and more intuitive.

Just because I want there to be a more affordable alternative to Apple does not mean that there is one. Not yet, anyway.

On the whole, I’d say this “trying on” period is somewhat trying. I’m thinking about phones when I don’t want to. A smartphone and the operating system it runs on ought to be an afterthought. When the expensive devices we put at the center of our day are hard to figure out or use, we might like what they can do but we won’t bring ourselves to love them.

In related news, this Fortune article suggests that nearly half a million of the estimated 3.9 million Kindles to be shipped this quarter will be returned to Amazon.

Meanwhile, the satisfaction ratings for iPads are simply off the charts.

With all the digital this and digital that on our plates, it’s easy to lose touch with your roots in this business.

Thankfully, there’s still a need for print advertising, because making a new two-page spread for a client is the kind of assignment that brings you back — to Earth, and to the reasons you got into advertising in the first place.

Our client Danville Development Corp. of Salt Lake City manages 15 well cared for properties for low income seniors and people with disabilities. The Danville team also helps people navigate the HUD application process and find a comfortable home for their retirement years. Therefore, we chose to step away from the typical product features approach you see in ads in this category and focus instead on the brand benefits.

As for the choice to run print, Danville’s prospects use the web like everyone else (and this ad drives people to the web), but the media buy here recognizes that searching Google is not the end all and be all for every product or service, nor for every audience.

The new ad will run in Seniors Blue Book, a pub that reaches 150,000 people via its printed Utah edition.

Raf Stevens, author of the newly published book, No Story, No Fans, has an important message for those of us busy developing content for our clients.

What helps great content to spread is how compelling and inspiring the message is, not how it slants toward positioning your company as the only one to buy from. Content should make connections. I’ll go even further than that. Content follows connection. First, you need to engage, build rapport, and make your audience trust you. Pure information or marketing messages do not make that happen. If you communicate in facts and figures, you are communicating “brain to brain.” To be a successful storyteller, you need to communicate human to human, heart to heart, and emotion to emotion.

Interestingly, the best ads also reach people at an emotional level. Yet, clients who pony up big bucks to create and place an ad or to improve their website are acting rationally. They want more business and are willing to do what is necessary to make the register ring. The take away here is that it is imperative to move from the rational to the emotional when appealing to prospects and customers.

Yesterday at a Portland Ad Fed luncheon, a principal of another Portland agency told me that content marketing is just writing. No. It is writing and/or video created on a client’s behalf, but there’s no direct sell packaged up in the message, rather there’s entertainment or utility worth seeking out and sharing courtesy of the sponsoring brand.

Let’s take a look at this new content offering from Patagonia, a master of the form:

Six and a half minutes of video from an outdoor clothing company, and no mention or even a hint of product marketing. There’s no need for it, because Patagonia knows what matters to its customers — in this case environmental damage being done to a wild place.

That’s the model in a nutshell. Find the shared points of interest between the company and its customers and focus there. Perfectly executed content marketing like Patagonia’s doesn’t do away with salesmanship. In many cases, traditional marketing is still needed to induce transactions. Content doesn’t replace advertising, it lives side-by-side with it.

One of the best things about social media marketing for small business is the fact that small businesses, unlike some corporate monoliths, are actually social in real life. In a small business there is a real face and a voice behind the brand; thus, participating in online social channels is typically a good fit.

According to a new survey from Constant Contact, 60% of small business owners/managers (or their agents) engage with customers and prospects who post comments on social media platforms, whether those posts are positive or negative.

Susan Payton, President of Egg Marketing & Communications, suggests that the 40% of small businesses not currently responding to customers and prospects get busy.

Consumers are rapidly becoming their own radio stations, and people are always listening. If they’re saying something good about you, you can reap the rewards. If they’re tweeting their frustrations about your company, your silence could cost you more customers. Brands who are stepping up to take blame and apologize are finding consumers more willing to forgive, and the damage doesn’t spread so far.

On the other hand, if people are saying great things about you, that’s all the more reason to interact! A Google + mention of how a customer loves your brand gives you the unique opportunity to build a relationship with that person. Social media users are loyal customers, especially when they’re treated right.

In other small business news…speaker, consultant and author Barry Moltz argues that, “Success in business is really about building the best distribution and marketing for the product. This is where so many business owners forget to focus.”

It would be nice if the best product or service consistently won the attention and admiration of customers and that’s all there was to it. But that’s not the case.

The good news is participating in social channels is a means to connect with people, gather consumer insights, provide customer service and manage your firm’s reputation. These are the marketing wheels that help drive a business forward today.

If you want some help “getting behind the wheel” as it were, let me know. Social media strategy and activation is one part of what we offer here — it ladders well with content and relationship marketing which are at the heart of our practice.

Are you able to articulate what your business is all about in the time it takes to go from the first to the 30th floor? If you’re running a startup that’s looking for investors you do. It’s your elevator speech and you’ve been polishing it for months if not years.

But in the entertainment industry an elevator speech is much too cumbersome. In Hollywood, you sell your ideas with a logline, which is a very brief summary of the script. As in “no more than one sentence” brief.

According to producer, writer and actor, Christopher Lockhart, a logline must present:

• Who the story is about (protagonist)
• What he strives for (goal)
• What stands in his way (antagonistic force).

Like so: After a twister transports a lonely Kansas farm girl to a magical land, she sets out on a dangerous journey to find a wizard with the power to send her home.

Tom Grasty, an entrepreneurial digital and media strategist, believes business owners can benefit by taking a page from the screenwriter’s notebook and condensing their pitch to one sentence.

The next time someone asks why you are so feverishly committed to doing what it is you’re doing, don’t fall into the trap of responding with an elaborate description of your business. Tell them a story. Because at the end of the day, you’re mapping out a journey, and you want whomever will listen to take that journey with you — or at least you want them to understand why you have just boarded the occupational equivalent of “Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride.”

It’s not easy. Packing one sentence full of meaning is hard for writers to do, and even harder for those not practiced at whittling away excess language. Here, I’ll give it a go…

Startup helps brands put content into play, earning the company first-mover advantage and a solid foothold even while the howling winds of a scary economy blow.

Actually, I’ll go again…

A musical in its first act. The story is about a writer of brand narratives and the various challenges involved in “hanging a shingle.”

Okay, now you try.