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It’s amaz­ing how often I hear some­thing to the effect of “No one reads copy these days.” Now, of course, being a pro­fes­sional B2B copy­writer by trade, you might expect me to have a hang up about copy. I also encounter the related belief that we are all writ­ers. I write. You write. It’s stuff we all learnt at school. How hard can it be?

Today, it’s all about the pictures

We are a more visual cul­ture than ever before. Each of us spends seri­ous qual­ity time in front of one screen or another every sin­gle day. Over the years, adver­tis­ing has become more visual and less wordy. Online video is still grow­ing expo­nen­tially. And mil­lions of peo­ple restrict their thoughts to bursts of 140 char­ac­ters or less.

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Per­sonas – the fic­tional char­ac­ters cre­ated to help bring tar­get cus­tomers to life – are now pretty much ubiq­ui­tous in mar­ket­ing depart­ments and their agen­cies. They are used to more accu­rately depict var­i­ous cus­tomer seg­ments, giv­ing a firmer foun­da­tion on which to address customers.

You can see why. Where at one time our tar­get might be described as:

• IT direc­tor in an enterprise-sized business
• Located in EMEA with mul­ti­ple offices
• Cur­rently using tra­di­tional tele­phony across all sites
• Their cur­rent con­tract is due to expire in the next 12 months
• Etc

Now we have:

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The impend­ing Tube Strike didn’t deter a record num­ber of tech­nol­ogy mar­keters com­ing to the Ban­ner offices to take part in this year’s Social Media Hud­dle. And, look­ing at the feed­back, the con­tent of the day was rated at 4.2 out of 5.

So first of all, a big thank you to our speak­ers and work­shop mod­er­a­tor for mak­ing the hud­dle such a suc­cess and pre­sent­ing such com­pelling con­tent — Ioanna Sta­gia (CNN Inter­na­tional), Henry Clifford-Jones (LinkedIn Europe), Jackie Hewitt (Autodesk), Xabier Ormaz­a­bal (Salesforce.com) and Zoe Sands (Juniper).

There were a num­ber of com­mon strands to the day:

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Recently, whilst look­ing through a LinkedIn group on Face­book and Twit­ter for busi­ness, I came across a ques­tion that asked: Is it ok to have mul­ti­ple Face­book and Twit­ter accounts for your business?

It depends…

The answer (at least it seems this way to me) is self-evident: it depends. What I said, was this:

I think it all comes down to defin­ing exactly what you want to achieve and exe­cut­ing the pro­gramme in a way that’s con­sis­tent with the brand.

There are sit­u­a­tions (espe­cially with smaller organ­i­sa­tions) where a sin­gle account would be suf­fi­cient; you need a cer­tain ‘crit­i­cal mass’ to gain enough inter­est­ing con­tent and wouldn’t nec­es­sar­ily want to dilute this.

 In medium and large enter­prises, though, I can see it being ben­e­fi­cial to have mul­ti­ple accounts for var­i­ous rea­sons:

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Over the last cou­ple of weeks, we’ve been work­ing to pro­duce an at-a-glance map out­lin­ing some of the main options B2B mar­keters face in using social media to engage their audiences.

And now, cue fan­fare, it’s ready. Woo-hoo!

You can down­load a groovy hyper­linked PDF ver­sion here. Feel free to share it too.

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If many in our indus­try are to be believed, copy is some­what of a optional extra when it comes to mar­coms. Or maybe a nec­es­sary evil. To be tol­er­ated as long as it doesn’t exceed 30 words or so. Of course you see this most in adver­tis­ing which has become increas­ingly image-led over the years. Direct mail still resists, bol­stered by the moun­tains of evi­dence that copy dri­ves response. And then there’s web.

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