You Punks…Get Off My Ellipses!

The rise of ellipses (…) in Internet-age communications is as fascinating as it is controversial. Some see it as a lazy stand-in for proper punctuation like periods and commas. Others see it as a way to make texts and emails more like speech in an age where what we write is more conversational and subject to immediate back and forth. I think it’s probably both. What I found really interesting, though, is the degree to which millennials reject them. I needed to know more, so I went directly to the source for intel.

“It just makes you sound middle aged,” said one quirky millennial. “Old people use them in weird ways that don’t make sense,” quipped another. “I can always tell someone’s age by their use of ellipses,” piped in a third. One righteous young punctuarian scolds us older folks for using ellipses–in Forbes, no less.

I personally know a teenage girl who always knows when her friend’s mother has been texting on her friend’s behalf: the presence of proper spelling…and the repeated use of ellipses. (Dead giveaway, Mrs. Miller!)

However, millennials feel about them, here’s my defense of our beloved ellipses: when used well, they can have an effect on how the reader hears the written content. It’s designed to be a “and then” or the thought of something leading somewhere, or… a dramatic pause.  We “old people” really care about how the content is received, in addition to how we present it.

I find myself utilizing ellipses in marketing communications such as splash emails, Facebook posts or blogs to direct the reader on how it’s meant to sound, in a very conversational manner. However, I also tend to market to an “older” demographic for my companies as well, so…there’s that…. (ok, fine, so that was a bit of an unnecessary and guilty ellipses usage).

But if it’s true that we oldsters began using our beloved three-dot mark out of a desire to mimic the spoken word, then wouldn’t the same pressures exert themselves on younger people as well? Why do they resist the siren song of the mighty ellipsis? Maybe there’s something else at work here. Maybe they simply say what they mean without dramatic pauses or ‘to be continued’ hesitations.

Here’s the part where I’m supposed to tell you why this age/ellipsis difference exists, or at least provide a plausible theory. But the truth is…I got nothing. At the time of this writing, I remain curious and puzzled.

Oh, mighty ellipsis, just…why…?

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Laura Mitchell Selected as Keynote Speaker for 26th Annual Aging Well Conference

Screen Shot 2016-05-17 at 12.32.10 PMI love speaking at trade shows and other events. I get to speak on a wide range of topics including enabling technologies, the aging population, connected health, guerrilla marketing, selling to the fragmented aging population, etc.  Not only do I get to share my experience and knowledge of the aging & tech industry, but I also get to meet tons of interesting and truly passionate people all over the country.

When the University of Wisconsin-Parkside’s Aging Well Conference asked me to be a keynote speaker for their conference, I was excited to accept.  Not only because the conference agenda looked fantastic, but also because it happens to be right here in my backyard in sunny Wisconsin.  In such a booming industry, it’s typical for me to jump on a plane and fly across the country to slumber and speak. This one is just a short car ride away in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

This is the 26th annual Aging Well Conference. For nearly three decades, this event has been bringing attention to the important issues surrounding gerontology and its best practices. And the event is not just for professional caregivers. It also offers information valuable to family caregivers and older adults themselves. It sounds like a well-rounded conference and I look forward to learning from it.

Case in point: the other featured speakers who will be joining me. Barbara Bendlin, an Associate Professor of Medicine at UW-Madison, and the Principal Investigator at the Wisconsin Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, will be speaking about how to reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s. Jim Vanden Bosch is the founder and Executive Director of Terra Nova Films. He is the producer of several award-winning films on aging issues, and how to successfully communicate and work with people living with dementia. Plus there is an extensive list of breakout sessions and workshop speakers.

If you’re in the Great Lakes region, you should come! It’s happening Friday, June 3rd in Kenosha, WI. Here’s a link with all the details. Obviously, if you do go please stop me and say hi!  See you in Kenosha.

Weak Brand, Weak Sales

One of our favorite services that we provide as a marketing firm is branding. It’s not just creating a logo and establishing a company color palette. It’s also defining the company story. It’s why they make their products and who they’re for. It’s why you should do business with them and not someone else.

Getting to the bottom of all this takes effort. We do research on them, of course. But we also give them homework: questions about who they think their customers are, what their logo makes people feel when they see it, what makes them unique in the marketplace, who their direct and indirect competitors are, and many more. Armed with all of this input, we schedule a meeting—a very long meeting—to hash it all out. A meeting that challenges them to talk and brainstorm.

Sometimes these sessions can be difficult, such as when the company logo, beloved by some, is found to be unpopular with others. Part of our job is to facilitate these issues to resolution. You might be surprised at the degree of unity, among company personnel and consultants alike, by the time we’re done. The process often leaves everyone very excited and with a new clarity of purpose. I mean we’re not singing Kumbaya around the campfire or anything, but it’s close.

We leave these sessions with a lot of notes. We use those notes to write a brand report. It’s more or less a summary of what the team achieved during the long session together. The idea of the report is simple. It tells the story of the company. Everything from what motivates them to do what they do, ideas for strategic marketing campaigns, suggested verbiage, things they would like to change, to what messages will resonate with their target market. Armed with this report, they can go forth and create/redesign a logo, a web site, brochures, sales slide decks, entire marketing and social media campaigns, launch a new product and more. With a solid brand at the core, all of these subsequent efforts will be working in concert, singing the same song in the same key.

Occasionally there are some harsh truths in the report. These are usually just calling out something everyone already knows: your existing marketing collateral isn’t conveying the right message.

How’s your brand looking? You grab some firewood and we’ll bring the guitar.

Quality Content Is King In Latest Facebook Algorithm Change

Earlier last week, social marketeers heard those dreaded five words that invariably send them scurrying to their fainting couches: “Facebook changes news feed algorithm.” It’s true that multi-million dollar businesses live or die by the whims of Facebook (see Zynga and LiveSocial), but if you simply use the social aspects to market your business, there’s no need to hyperventilate. Understanding the secret algorithm sauce can empower you and ensure your marketing efforts won’t stumble after the latest Facebook algorithm change.

What is the the algorithm? And why does it keep changing?

When a user views their Facebook feed, they see a collection of recent posts from their friends, groups, and liked pages. For very active users, this can quickly become upwards of thousands of posts. Rather than simply display this massive list to the user (as Twitter does), Facebook applies it’s magic algorithm and shows the user only the top posts it thinks will be interesting to the user. It makes sense — Facebook wants you to like using Facebook. A rather large number of factors play into how the posts get ranked, including the actual content of the post, the number of engagements a post has, how often the user has engaged in posts like this one, who made the post, and more.

Here’s a great video directly from Facebook’s F8 conference on how the news feed works:

But what exactly are the factors used to determine if an article shows up? Well, no one really knows. The exact inner workings of Facebook’s algorithm is a closely guarded secret within the company. Since offering paid promotion into the top posts for users is the center of Facebook’s business model, it is not really in the company’s best interest to let marketers easily peek into the algorithm and game the system on the cheap. Facebook tweaks the algorithm every so often to either quash any gaming of the system or to promote a new feature. For example, when Facebook introduced and started heavily promoting native video, they tweaked the algorithm to strongly prefer this video over links to external sites like YouTube. Marketers who noticed that their video posts were reaching more users than other posts responded by promoting a ton of video content to provide awareness for their brands.

[pullquote align=”right” color=”#69AE22″]The exact inner workings of Facebook’s algorithm is a closely guarded secret within the company.[/pullquote]

As a marketer, why should I care?

In the eyes of the almighty algorithm, not all posts are created equal. And unless you are planning on sponsoring all your posts in Facebook, you need to know what will and won’t get past the Facebook filters to reach your potential market. In order to ensure your marketing efforts aren’t in vain, you need to keep the algorithm in mind as you are posting.  

What is in the latest Facebook algorithm change?

According to Facebook, the latest changes call out two specific topics: how long a user spends interacting with the topic of a post, and post diversity.

Did you notice how when you click a link within the Facebook on your mobile device that the article pops up in a “Facebook browser”, and not in your mobile device’s browser? This is Facebook’s way of measuring how long you spend interacting with the article. This amount of time will now be factored into where a post gets ranked.

The second change has to do with the diversity of posts. Facebook users complained that they don’t like seeing several posts in a row from the same source. So Facebook tweaked the news feed to introduce more “diversity”. This most likely means that frequency of posting may be marked against a post’s rank in a user’s news feed. Lots of posts don’t necessarily result in lots of views.

What does this mean for our social media strategy?

[pullquote align=”left” color=”#69AE22″]As a marketer, these changes mean you need to start thinking hard about quality instead of quantity.[/pullquote]

Ultimately these Facebook algorithm changes are a way of dealing with “clickbait” content — those gimmicky posts that lead to awful, ad-ridden sites that a user closes as quickly as they opened it. The company has spent significant time and resources courting quality content providers, and letting this content get buried beneath a mountain of spam would hurt these initiatives and kill the user experience. You can be sure that Facebook has a cautious eye on the slow collapse of Twitter as they make these changes.

As a marketer, these changes mean you need to start thinking hard about quality instead of quantity. If you are not creating compelling, interesting content (and instead posting BUY! BUY! BUY! 17 times a day) Facebook will simply ignore your posts. Good original content is favored for organic visibility over tons of little, uninteresting posts. There’s also an emphasis on variety — if you only post links to your own blog, for example, Facebook will penalize your posts for being too “samey”. Change the content of your posts frequently, switching between pictures, videos, links, and (as much as it may pain you) the occasional picture of kittens.

How can I tell what is working or not working for my audience?

Unfortunately, there is no quick and easy way to know.

At LMC, we do a weekly review of the organic reach of our posts using Facebook’s Insights feature. We check what has reached and engaged the most users and what has not. Based on those results, we adapt our strategy. If a certain type of post frequently receives poor marks, we give it a hard look, tweak it, and try something different. We also take a close look at the number of posts we have made versus their reach and engagement. There is a definite “over-posting” effect, and finding that golden number of posts per week can take some time.

Constantly evolving and refining your social media strategy is a surefire path to success and will insulate you future Facebook algorithm changes.