Texas Book Expository

I’m asked to do book reviews sometimes; I get these notices in my role as a freelance writer. Mostly I don’t do them, but one intrigued me. It was pitched to me as a new political thriller -- “to be a bestseller.” How’s that for confidence?

I’ve mislaid the title, but the plot sets Texas against the rest of us again, this time as the Lone Star State attempts to become even more lone by seceding from the union. In the ensuing conflict, the scariest part for the author is not the constitutional crisis, but comes when the federal government suspends the Second Amendment, threatening Texans’ right to shoot people. Right there you have the book’s viewpoint.

Of course I’m just a name on a list of writers, so the people who send these things don’t know my political leanings one way or the other. I haven’t read it, but this is what a review of a “Texas secedes” book oughta be.

“In _title_, popular opinion in Texas finally boils over and the legislature votes to secede from the union. For reasons not apparent to the rest of the country, the federal government tries to prevent this. In the ensuing conflict, the hero  becomes involved in the political cross-currents generated when the state’s National Guard commander, the devastatingly beautiful heroine, orders the occupation of the state capitol. To the horror  of everyone in the state, the federal government suspends the   Second Amendment, and shooting people threatens to become difficult and sometimes even illegal. It’s a deeply frustrating time; the state has already voted to secede and no one can think of another symbolic act to demonstrate the people’s displeasure. The legislature finally settles on closing the borders and ports to all traffic, and the population, trapped, inbreeds, and an interesting new generation of Texans arises.”

Alright, I made up the part about the National Guard commander.

Voice

For the first time, I’ve seen on line the faces of some people whose voices I’ve been listening to for years. They’re radio announcers -- “DJs” on the local classical music station.

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, but it’s amusing how different the mental picture I’ve formed can be from reality. 

One man I pictured mentally as an academic with a softly rounded face, it turns out, wears a beard and looks like one of those early National Geographic explorers. My impression of another as a somewhat older, business-suited gentleman is reasonably close physically but misses the part about being a scuba instructor and skydiver. I had previously seen a picture of another one and so might be able to pick him out of a crowd, but even there the hair was grayer and the beard thinner than the impression I retained in my mind.

It's made me wonder how that works in reverse. My writing is my voice, and so my identity. To the consternation of the site owners, I don’t publish a picture on my LinkedIn profile page. (Some people think, or profess to think, you may not be a real person if you don’t post a photo. I’m not sure what they suspect: multinational corporation? alien?)

I’ve tried to put some words in the spot where a photo usually appears, to explain why  there's no picture, but I haven’t managed to do it. If I could, there would be a box with the words, “I don’t think my mug shot will win me any business.” 

I might offer that idea, unsolicited, to some other people as well. Look at real estate agents. Even the most untrustworthy-looking puts his or her face in the ad, rather than showing the houses being offered. And you have to suspect that some of those pictures go back to high school yearbooks. How many would do it if, like me, they had only a current picture to show?

In any case, visitors to my profile page (there have been 11 in the three years) will still have to conjecture, if physiognomy is important to them. Those less interested in externals and more occupied with personality traits can have a field day with questions of their own.     

Twitter, Again

Against all my instincts, I’ve joined Twitter. In my defense let me say I only did it because I was forced into it. I was applying for work with a copywriting firm whose application form demanded a Twitter address. I had none, and the dam’ form wasn’t going anywhere without one, no matter how hard I hit the “Submit” button.

It’s still a total mystery to me, and I think I’ll keep it that way. At least I’ll try. I found on opening my new “timeline” that I already was “following” six people or things including a restaurant in Philadelphia (I live in Southern California) and had seven “followers,” one of whom I actually knew and knew wouldn’t be interested in following me on Twitter.

It's like having your mother-in-law decide who your friends are going to be.

As for the idea behind the whole thing:  I gave my critique in a post on this blog on August 24 last year. My point was, and is, if it’s supposed to be communication, why limit yourself so tightly? I’m for brevity, and sure, it needs to be enforced on some people, but is that reason for all of us to abandon everything in our vocabulary over one syllable? Some ideas deserve better. Or are such ideas not expected to make it to Twitter?

I admit I was writing in that earlier post without ever having read any “tweets.” Bad journalism. Well, since actually reading some, I’ve had an epiphany: I knew I’d seen something similar -- that cadence was familiar --  but I couldn’t remember where. Then the light went on: fortune cookies. I’ve seen Twitter compared to haiku, but it’s more fortune cookie. 
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FDR

The New Marketing - 3

Marketing techniques are changing rapidly. According to the Thought Leaders in the field, it’s no longer sufficient to read a story; the audience should now be “immersed” in it. We’re told that individuals now want to be part of  the story.

One possible reaction to this would be the old admonition, “Get a life.” You’ll never be more immersed in anything than the reality you’re living. You can try to change that -- there are chemical compounds that can give you the illusion for some period of time -- but even that’s happening within the larger framework of real life, and unless you’re careless you’ll wake up in it sooner or later.

Immersing oneself in someone else’s experience seems like a an odd proposition, even a scary one, although certain professions might make good use of the technique: guidance counselors and psychics come to mind. But what is the process supposed to be like? Do you retain your own opinions and moral code, or are you expected to take on the views offered in the story?

Reading something, you can retain your power of skepticism. (Ever had the experience of laughing out loud at a bit of writing patently slanted toward someone’s agenda?) At least you’re in your own world, surrounded by familiar things. But immersed in the story, you give that up. Do you now take on the sponsor’s views? This isn’t the old “willing suspension of disbelief.” That would end when you walked out of the movie theater. Marketers today want to get at you at a deeper level. Think Mein Kampf, an early success in which a lot of people immersed themselves, with remarkable results.

Somewhere back in the 1950s or 60s there was a flurry of excitement in the marketing world about “subliminal advertising.” Companies were supposedly going to be able to influence consumers by flashing messages to them as  they looked at movie and television screens. The message to get up and buy the product would  appear and disappear too quickly to register consciously, but would lodge in the brain, presumably in the part that controls buying, anesthetizing the caveatus emptoris nerve. The marketing industry was immersed in that for a while, but it, too, turned out to be a fraud.  

My SEO Blog Post

I need to do a blog post about search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is a writing knack in demand currently among marketing people, so I need to demonstrate that I can do it, and this blog is my medium.

A few years ago the blog didn’t exist for me, and SEO didn’t either, before search engines took over the formerly human job of researching information. The advantage is that computers can be programmed to infallibly pick up particular words and ignore everything else. This is hard for humans to do; something interesting but irrelevant can distract us. I don’t think you can do that to a computer.

Boiled down, SEO amounts to inserting certain words that are important to you into something you’re writing. The art of it is injecting those key words into the flow of the text without seeming to be injecting key words into the text. I guess in the early days it may have been easy to fool the search engines into selecting you by stuffing the text full of those words. You have to show some finesse today, though, because the search engine people have figured out how not to be fooled.

I haven’t (before this) applied SEO techniques to this blog, but     I have done it in other contexts. It’s not that difficult, although a kind of mystique has grown up around it. You simply reverse a good practice you would ordinarily follow: instead of finding other ways of saying things that might get repetitious, you keep repeating them. 

Not being acquainted with search engines when I started the blog I wasn’t aware that it could be located by searching on the web.   If someone had told me “Your blog will be available to several hundred million people” I’d have laughed. But I tried it myself just to see, and sure enough, putting my name in the title turns out to have been inadvertent SEO. I just have to hope not all those people Google me at once, because I don’t think the website can handle it.

As I said, I haven’t practiced SEO in my own blog before, but when you look for work writing for other people’s blogs they expect SEO to be part of the deal. This week’s post is solely to demonstrate that I can do it if someone wants to pay me for it.     If you count the number of times the word “blog” appears before this one in the 420-word passage and title above, you’ll have the result of the exercise.   

Conversation

 I was joined on “my” bench on one of my outings by another resident of the retirement community. Benches are of course public facilities, so asking “May I join you?” is purely pro forma, but we do it anyway, knowing the answer will be “Of course. Lots of room.”

The problem this time, however, was that my new benchmate’s hearing was even worse than mine, and we found quickly that conversation was going to be more trouble than it would be worth, since it was bound to be centered on nothing more important than an exchange of views about the weather.

I have no trouble sitting silently in the presence of another; my  philosophy since childhood has been to try to talk only when I have something to say, not just small talk. This makes me extremely dull company most of the time, but if you have to choose between very little idle conversation and a whole lot, which way would you go? You know my answer.

I’ve known people who could and would rattle on about things important to them without realizing their listener(s) might not see it the same way. Being polite (something else I grew up with) perpetuates the problem. What to do?

You can suffer in silence, or you can use verbal jiu-jitsu -- turn it back on your tormentor, asking a disconcertingly perceptive question, if you’ve been listening, or the opposite tack, asking a non-sequitur. Either of these can sometimes confuse the speaker enough to derail his/her train of thought.

For those special occasions when the speaker is trying to impress, there’s the tried-and-true one-upmanship ploy of over-extension. The speaker says, “You’ll never guess how many inches I took off my waist,” to which you volunteer an obviously over-exaggerated “Fourteen?” The narrator is now forced to backpedal: ”Good grief no: four,” and the thread is broken. Had the Wedding Guest had the presence of mind to use some variation of this, the Ancient Mariner might have been stopped before passing the kirk.

It doesn’t work if they can’t hear, though.  

The Old Marketing

  

Ran across my old copy of “Scientific Advertising,” written by one of the pioneers of the business, Claude Hopkins. The author had passed on, but the flyleaf has the autographs of three other advertising icons of the time of this re-issue (mid-1950s).  The instructor of one of my advertising courses had used his connections to invite an industry executive to address the class, and to bring copies of the book.

It had originally been written in 1923, so it contains the mailorder strategy advice “a two-cent [postage] letter gets no more attention than a one-cent letter” and some other lines we see as inadvertent humor 90 years on. There’s the reference to “soulless corporations,” for example. How could the author have anticipated that one day corporations would be people? (Whether that also imbues them with souls I haven’t seen debated yet, but if it should be judged in the future to be advantageous to increasing profits  -- why not?)

HOWEVER -- some of the book’s advice is timeless.

The premise is (1) marketing is about sales and nothing but sales; (2) one of its techniques, advertising, can be tested and the results measured; and (3) any marketing effort that can’t be measured in terms of sales is, in the author’s word, “folly.”

I’ve railed loudly and often, here and in Internet debate, against “content marketing” and its “storytelling” and “agnostic” content, but here’s support from beyond the grave. Page 60: “This is all in the line of general publicity so popular long ago. Casting bread upon the waters and hoping for its return. Most advertising was of that sort twenty years ago.”

He’s discussing general display materials, whose characteristics can be compared reasonably to today’s “content,” and it’s dismissed as already twenty years out of date. I remind us, the author was writing in 1923. That’s just five years after we defeated the Kaiser. I rest my case.