• Create a Rock-Solid Tagline That Truly Works: Want the next “Just do it?” Try these tips.
• 3 Ways to Appeal to Readers and Skimmers: I think many places go overboard on bolding including this article, but otherwise its tips are on the money.
• Should You Write What You Don’t Know? I think it works well for some situations. In other cases, it could cost you more time (for researching and understanding). But if it’s a topic you’d love to learn about — then it might be worth the tradeoff. [Link: Writing Resource Center]

And for fun because you’re allowed.

• Top 10 amazing chemistry videos.
• Add interaction to videos with Asterpix.
• Photoshop Disasters: Dang good stuff. How the heck do they find so many when I can’t find one?

Ooh pretty brightly-colored laptop desks ($49.95 each). I have a couple of these (not the colored ones, mind you) and they’re wonderful. Keeps the heat off my legs and gives me better access to the keyboard for doin’ lots of writing.

Choices,too. Pick clear or black rubber feet and choose between matte and semi-gloss finish. You can vote on the next design. Tough choices. If the sticker price is a bit much, spend less by sticking with the original gun-metal gray ($29.95).

How often does this scenario happen to you? When you land on a Web site, it doesn’t instantly answer the most important question:

What is the Web site about?

The second question depends on the site.

• For business sites: “What does the business do?”
• For blogs: “What is the topic of the blog?”

My blog is guilty for not making its topic clear. First of all, “meryl’s notes” tells you nothing — not even the fact it’s a blog. However, after seven-plus years of blogging, I’m glad I chose that name as my blog evolved.

So I added a tagline to help clarify the blog’s topic, “Things wordy, geeky, and webby.” It’s still broad, but so is the blog. Successful blogs focus on a specific topic, but I haven’t been able to commit to that.

This site is also my business site. So the home page at www.meryl.net tries to tell visitors what I do and how I do it. Although the how could use more support.

Sites that quickly describe their purpose have one or more of the following:

• Brief statement explaining purpose. It’s easy to find and above the fold – no scrolling required to find it).
• Slogan / tagline that says it all (i.e. Digital Web Magazine is The web designer’s online magazine of choice. getAbstract is Compressed knowledge.
• About that’s easy to find such as in top menu, left menu, or bottom menu (but better to have it above the fold).

Including the slogan or description in the <TITLE> tag helps if it’s brief. Long ones turn into a long and bothersome bookmark. Not everyone edits their bookmarks/favorites.

If you have a popular or well-ranked site and everyone knows who you are, there are still plenty who don’t know who you are. It’s amazing how often a popular or well-ranked sites doesn’t make it obvious why they’re successful, what they’re about, or where to do within the site.

Be careful on how many choices or calls to action appears in the main content. Too many choices or links can scare a visitor away instead of keeping the visitor. The content on the right side of this page is too much. Haven’t found a happy medium.

Related articles

• Pitches: Lessons in what not to do
• Taglines, marketing and branding haikus
• Visions, missions, positioning, and other statements
• What text to link
• About the fold problems and content placement
• About pages

Mission statements, vision statements and goals: Where is it written they have to use fancy words and be a mile long? If they aren’t memorable, how can you expect your employees to implement them and your prospects to understand your objectives?

Most of us struggled to determine which message each company’s CEO pitched. Many of the companies are well known, but we didn’t catch their pitch, which shows that the largest and most successful businesses don’t have an accurate pitch.

Find this hard to believe? Try matching the company with their pitch before you read on. Then learn what NOT to do through their examples — this will help ensure ineffective pitching doesn’t happen to your company.

Aaaaannnnndddd the results!

Two companies received the best results, indicating they have the highest pitch recognition:

Only two more companies received over 50 percent recognition. The rest have pitiful recognition numbers. Four of 17 known companies have recognizable pitches. Sad, unbelievable and pathetic isn’t it?

The bottom of the pile

Let’s review the 17 companies covered in this challenge:

We already know the four that did better than average. So that leaves 13. Which three companies do you think did the worst? Personally, I would vote for AMD, BEA and EMC because I know the least about these companies. Also, the company that uses, “Getting back to customer satisfaction” shouldn’t get a good score, as every company has customers. Nothing about that pitch gives a clue about the company. Ready for the answer?

Cisco, Oracle, Intel

Are you as surprised as I am? Even those who know little about technology are most likely to know these three companies. We conducted this survey with another audience and the same three companies also did the worst. In fact, all three had 0, zero, zip, nada recognition. How can that be? Take a look at their pitches.

I never would have considered these three for the bottom of the pile. But when you put their names with the pitch, it’s understandable. Those pitches don’t match the keywords that would come to mind when thinking of these companies.

Does their success mean that pitches are pointless and don’t impact the bottom line? Not necessarily. Imagine how much more business they would have if their pitches were more in line with their business. Could these companies’ large size make it impossible to come up with a single slogan to represent them? This theory is shot when you see Dell and eBay getting the most recognition.

One of the first things a company wants to do is differentiate itself from the competition. The best way to do that is to use its USP (unique selling proposition) to create the company’s pitch. Pitches communicate the company’s value and what it does.

Trading pitches

Two companies received over 50 percent recognition under another company’s pitch. In other words, the other company’s pitch better suited these two companies. AMD’s “To provide the world’s best semiconductor solutions based on customer-centric innovation,” is a better match for Intel.

Novell’s “Connecting anyone to anything digital, simply and reliably and at a low cost,” sounds more like Cisco, doesn’t it? Novell wasn’t recognized at all. Looks like it needs to revisit its pitch and match it to what the company does.

More results …

Can you name another company that manufactures chips like Intel? Neither can I. Intel’s success largely comes from having little competition. If another company could compete against Intel and communicate its purpose better, how would it impact Intel’s success?

Connecting with the customer

Robin Weidner, principal with Robin Weidner Copywriting & Consulting, has an excellent pitch, “Smart copywriting that connects you with your customers.” She says, “I often write taglines, sales campaigns and other communications, working with businesses ranging from start-ups to companies running national sales campaigns. It’s interesting to me how companies build verbiage that makes them feel good about themselves, but may do little to connect them with their customers. As far as the exercise [goes, it's] very interesting. I only knew about seven of these and looked up the others, curious to see if their verbiage would lead me to their companies.”

Simon Young, managing director with SimonYoungWriters, whose pitch is “I listen to the stories businesses have, then tell them in a compelling way,” says, “This exercise confirmed for me what I already believed—big corporations don’t often know what it is they do, because they’re too busy doing it. Time to reflect is a precious, very necessary commodity.”

Gordon Graham, partner with Gordon and Gordon, pitches, “I help technology firms tell their stories using facts, not hype.” He says, “Even though I’ve worked in high-tech for 25 years, I couldn’t always tell which pitch was for which company. It’s amazing how much ‘pahooey’ some companies put out! This has some good examples I can use in my workshops on how to write positioning statements that are crisp, clean and clear.”

Virginia Avery, president of Avery Communications, gives a pitch that explains exactly what her company does, “You are only a day away from more profitable business presentations!” She says, “The ‘pitches,’ by and large, are written for others within the industry and are not customer-focused.”

Thanks to the Perfect Pitch, this article came to life.

A person or a business can do everything right and still struggle to move to the next level simply because it doesn’t stand out from the crowd. Sam Horn opens with a great example of this from American Idol. Judge Simon Cowell told an eliminated contestant, “You have a good voice and you’re a nice guy. You just didn’t do the one thing necessary to go through to the next round. You didn’t stand out from the crowd.”

How does an average, hard-working person stand out? POP! answers that question with plenty of approaches to help a person be purposeful, original and pithy (notice this makes up POP?). This means whatever you use needs to accomplish its purpose, be different and short yet meaningful.

The challenge of a how to book is to teach the reader a new skill and help the reader apply and remember that new skill. Not an easy task. Horn’s conversational writing style coupled with real-life examples and exercises for each covered technique drills the message in the reader’s head for better use and retention.

The book’s organization makes it possible to try different techniques and move on when one doesn’t work. I didn’t feel pressure to read the book in order. The book succeeds for those who want to skip around and those who must start on page 1 and finish on page 256.

Bold headers divide the book’s sections for easier scanning and reading. The busiest professional can read one section to learn something new and then read another section the next time five minutes open up.

I’ve read many articles and tips on how to come up with names, slogans and other wordy things. Horn introduces a few more creative ways to brainstorm names that I hadn’t considered before. One strategy to try is Onomatopoeia. Words like “quack,” “bang” and “click” are Onomatopoeic words. “Yahoo!” too, but that’s not how the founders came up with its name. They used another technique as explained in the book.

We can use these strategies almost anywhere in our personal and professional lives — from making presentations and naming products, companies and books to marketing and phrases. Seriously, just about anyone can get a bang from this poppin’ book.

Title: POP! Stand out in Any Crowd
Author: Sam Horn
Publisher: Perigee Trade
ISBN: 0399532765
Date: September 2006
Format: Hardcover
Pages: 256
Cover Price: USD: $22.95 Amazon: $16.29