What would you say if you had only two minutes of your customer’s time?

What would you show if your sales presentation could only be three minutes long?

What would you talk about if the big new customer you’ve just spent weeks getting in to see refused to sit through your PowerPoint presentation? What if she said you have three minutes to convince her?

Answer those questions and you start to develop your core message. As I’ve explained before, effective business communication begins by answering two simple questions:

• What are you trying to say? (The answer should take only a sentence or two.)
• What do you want your prospect to do after you tell them?

Don’t make your marketing message into a mystery novel. Say it clearly, concisely. Don’t beat around the bush — they’re just as busy and distracted as you are. Stop thinking about yourself. Put yourself in your customer’s place.

What do you think?

Many spelling misteaks, er, mistakes, are caught by your spell checker. But a spell checker is no help for typos or word usage errors. Think: Did you mean “to,” “too,” or “two?” Should it be “it’s” or “its?”

There’s nothing worse (or more embarrassing) than getting 5,000 copies of your shiny new brochure back from the printer — and discovering (too late) that your phone number has two numbers transposed. Ouch!

Lori, the self-described “Grand Poobah” of Better at English talks about her “pubic” humilation when an embarrassing typo crept into one of her projects.

“Typos can make you look careless at best, ignorant at worst. Modern spell checkers are useful tools, of course, but they don’t catch everything. My spell checker didn’t save me from the unfortunate “pubic incident” because… pubic is a perfectly good word, just incorrectly wielded in this context.”

Lori offers two good suggestions for catching those naughty little typos or word usage errors that creep into everyone’s writing (or typing) now and then. 1) Have someone read your copy slowly, out loud, while you review it for errors. 2) Use text-to-speech software to read it aloud while you review a hard copy. Link.

Here’s another solution I’ve used that can be very effective for certain kinds of errors: read your text backwards. That extracts the spelling of the words from their meaning. That way, your brain is less likely to subconsciously “correct” the typo for you.

What’s your favorite method of finding typos in your work?

“Blogs don’t have to be badly written. It’s just that most are.”

That’s the mournful cry from Tony Long, copy chief at Wired News. He’s written a curmudgeon-like response to those who claim the Internet has improved the quality of writing in general.

It’s called “You, To, Can Right Like a Blogger.”

If advertising is so effective, why don’t ad agencies advertise? That’s the question Simon Sinek poses in a recent issue of BrandWeek. After all, ad agencies recommend clients spend 10% their revenues on marketing. But do they practice what they preach? Sinek points out:

“According to Nielsen Monitor-Plus, Interpublic, Omnicom, Publicis and WPP spent a total of $3.7 million to promote themselves in the U.S. in 2005, down 15% from the $4.4 million they spent in 2004.”

That’s a paltry .01% of their combined $29.3 billion in global revenue. He says that’s proof that advertising doesn’t work, and that the agencies know it. But does it? Let’s dig a little deeper.

First, it’s a well-written article. I especially loved his crack about agencies’ “Faustian resistance” to using their own product. Great line. I also agree with his argument that most advertising, like the media they run on, have been commoditized. Nothing stands out. He says:

“In truth, it’s what’s IN the advertising that is not working. Ad agencies are doing a poor job creating messages that affect long-term value for their clients.”

Agreed. Here’s part of the problem, IMHO. We’re all overwhelmed. Our work and lives demand we juggle a flood of data, and we’re constantly blitzed by additional stuff like advertising “impressions,” sp@m, pop-ups and other annoyances.

And the media are willing accomplices. Cable news channels blitz us with multiple images: 2-3 lines of text crawling across the bottom, windows with the weather forecast in El Paso popping up next to the anchor who’s delivering the news. Are they deliberately trying to distract us from the news they’re reporting? (No wonder ADD is epidemic in the USA.)

But I digress. Sinek is right: Too many ads suck, and so do most of the shows they’re aired on. Too many stink of sameness, lameness and slickness. I’m no defender of ad agencies, but I have to disagree with his basic thesis. Agencies have a very good reason for not advertising their services. It’s simply not appropriate to reach the audience they’re targeting.

Here’s why.

Every marketer begins by thinking about WHO they’re trying to reach. If you’re selling Chevys, there’s a couple hundred million potential buyers. Selling Porsches? Maybe a few million. But if you’re selling advertising services to the S&P 500, for example, your target audience numbers around, uh, 500. There are far more effective ways to get your message to an elite niche like that.

Using mass media to reach a market of 500 is expensive and wasteful. That’s true whether you’re a B2B or B2C business, by the way. Until you have a mass audience, stay away from mass media. You’ll go broke before you break through.

This reminds me of a client I had years ago. She insisted that we advertise on the market’s top-rated rock radio station, and only in the most expensive daypart, morning drive. But we were trying to reach a very narrow, high-level I.T. audience, looking for advanced technology training.

The campaign cost beaucoup bucks, and was a dismal failure. Why? The biggest reason: only about 1-2% of the audience were potential buyers of her services. 1-2%! The same money spent on a targeted direct mail campaign would probably have been much more successful.

You CAN do two things at one, as long as you don’t care about quality. I’ve long preached that the secret of good writing is not trying to write and edit at the same time. Write first, edit later. And that goes whether you’re writing advertising copy or code. Your brain has to get in the zone.

Juggling multiple client projects never used to bother me. But as I get older (and hopefully a little wiser) I find that I really prefer to start one project and see it through to the end before tackling another. It just seems to go faster and work better.

Well, it’s not just me. A study published in the Journal of Neuroscience confirmed what many of us suspected. It takes your brain four times longer to get re-focused, back in the zone, when it’s switching back and forth between tasks. Makes sense.

Organizing and productivity guru Julie Morgenstern talked about it in her most recent e-newsletter:

“Once thought to be a critical time management skill, multi-tasking has been scientifically proven to impair memory, increase stress, and make us LESS productive…

“Multi-tasking does not bring out our best selves. Instead, it leaves us feeling exhausted, ineffective, and ultimately, deeply unsatisfied.”

Morgenstern goes on to suggest making a time map — basically just a simplified schedule — so you have a certain time to do this, and another time to do that. She says it eliminates your need to multi-task, and puts you back in control of your days.

“It’s a tool I’ve been teaching for years—but which used to generate mixed reactions in audiences. Lately, everyone LOVES the concept—the Time Map is a tool whose time has clearly come.” Julie Morgenstern

What about you? Do you prefer doing many things at once? Or having a one-track mind? Which way is most productive for you? Leave your thoughts in the comments.

It’s easy to get free publicity. Want your face on the front page or the TV news? Just get busted doing something dastardly and illegal. Your handcuffed “perp walk” will get you LOTS of media attention — and bring smiles to your competitors’ faces.

There are better ways to do it, of course.

Even if you haven’t done anything newsworthy lately, you can often piggyback your way into the spotlight. Hitch your wagon to something that’s already there.

Look for news, trends and other newsworthy content. Then show reporters, editors and TV producers the connection between what’s in the news and what you do.

Write it up in a well-crafted and targeted news release. Guy Kawasaki gave a great example in his blog the other day.

A research company did a survey of white-collar workers, and found that 81% believed that casual dress improved morale. 47% believed it increased productivity. About the same number considered casual dress an attraction, a reason to go to work for a certain company.

Now ask yourself: What kind of company could benefit from making sure everybody heard about this study? If you guessed the makers of business casual clothing, you are correct. As the Apple evangelist and author of The Art of the Start explained:

“When Levi Strauss (makers of Dockers) found out about the study, it let thousands of publications know about it. The company also even put in a toll-free hotline to help companies implement a casual dress standard.”

A small effort, relatively speaking, for a potentially huge payback.

The lesson: You don’t always have to be the one making headlines yourself to get your (or your company’s) name in the media. Reporters are hungry for good content. Keep your eyes peeled, especially in your industry’s trade journals and other less-read publications, for news, trends or surveys that you can piggyback to get your name in the news.

Want to lose an intelligent, discerning, afffluent audience? Just indulge in hype. Overblown claims, breathless tone, unsupported superlatives, hyperbolic adjectives. These are approaches you’d never see in Internet marketing materials, ads, Web site content, and the like from well-known and prominent companies. Why not?

All of them are telltale signs of hype, explains copywriter and marketing consultant Marcia Yudkin. “If you use these tactics, many educated shoppers cringe and go elsewhere,” she says. Sure, hype may sell, especially in a one-time-sale situation, she says. But it can cost you big in other areas, like your company’s reputation:

“Use (hype) and you can expect snickering rather than respect from established journalists, academics, Fortune 500 companies, most people with postgraduate degrees and colleagues who use any of those groups as their benchmark of respectability…”

Runaway hype can also scare off potential partners and JV opportunities. “If you’re aiming at joint ventures with banks, universities, community organizations, trade associations and the like, hype counts very heavily against you.”

I agree. Hype makes most people want to take a shower. As Marcia points out, it’s possible to use a hard-hitting, dramatic direct marketing style, but in an entirely truthful and completely respectable way.

“Hype does sell,” she concludes. “But that’s far from settling the issue of whether or not you should use it.”

Read Marcia’s entire article here.