A. Have a cool name

B. Have a hook

C. Have a fearless leader

Rock and Roll is full of bands with memorable names: Black Sabbath, The Velvet Underground and Earth, Wind and Fire. It is also full of individuals with memorable names: Iggy Pop, Jimi Hendrix, Rod Stewart and Madonna.

Have you given your business, magazine, URL or department a superstar name, or a forgettable one?

All content—video, audio, editorial and mobile—depends on a hook. Sometimes it’s the overall concept, sometimes it’s a memorable tagline. And sometimes, at its lamest, most obvious and most successful—it’s a scantily clad brunette and a giant logo.

But what about first impressions? What about the name attributed to the brand? If We Rock Hard was a rock band, you could probably take a good guess what they would sound like. But would you have any inkling what Sigur Ros sounded like? Naming content departments, your business and even a band are all very important decisions. Select a great name and the world is yours. Select a name that doesn’t have a hook and doesn’t brand well and get used to a lot of explaining and the spending of precious marketing/advertising dollars. (And your product better kick ass.) So, are you selecting a name that will generate interest or one that is giving people exactly what they expect?

Which of the three naming convention camps have you bought into?

1) Selecting a safe name that inspires confidence in your industry or very clearly identifies what you do:
Food Supply/Rage Against the Machine

or

2) Selecting a more creative name that you grow into and will uniquely identify you and only you:

37signals/violent femmes

or

3) Riding on the confidence the founder inspires:

Deutsch/John Mayer

Design is the silent ambassador of your brand. — Paul Rand

What subconscious message is your design delivering to the public?

Porsche?

Or Pinto?

— Jonathan

If you’re a freelance writer, don’t make these mistakes.

As ad budgets come and go and staff writing jobs continue to evaporate, freelance content marketing is a viable way to earn a living (and buy you some time to work on that screenplay or novel). Avoid these mistakes; make your editor happy; get more work; keep the good life going.

1)    Don’t understand the primary tool of your trade—the computer. As a staffer, you worked on a six-year old version of Microsoft Office, your IT team set up your email account and no one used IM because they loved sitting in unproductive meetings all day. So when you launch your freelance business, you buy a no-name computer from a friend loaded with software you don’t know how to use. You use webmail as your primary email source because you can’t figure out how to use a real email program. And you broadcast your outdated ways to the world by using an AOL or Hotmail email address.

Bottom line: Learn the technology of your industry. It’s your job. And get a Gmail account, already. Or better yet, buy your own domain.

2)    Take full advantage of the fact that you work from home and you’re your own boss. Go out of pocket for blocks of time during the day so that when your editor has a question about a piece that’s hours away from going to press, there’s no way to reach you. Consistently take several hours—or even up to a day or more—to reply to simple email queries, thus holding your editor hostage and unable to shuttle your piece along.

Bottom line: Just because you work for yourself doesn’t mean you shouldn’t keep normal office hours. If you’re committed to shopping at the mall on Wednesday afternoons, then get a Blackberry or iPhone. Make yourself available like a professional person.

3)    Refuse to learn your editor’s style guide. Submit a 3,000-word story full of dashes or space-dash-dash-spaces instead of proper em-dashes—and if your editor is kind enough to explain to you how to create a proper em- or en-dash using the Mac shortcuts and you’re on a PC, don’t bother to do a simple Google search to figure out the PC equivalent. Editors LOVE combing through 15-page documents to convert your lazy dash-dashes to proper em-dashes.

Bottom line: Pay attention to the line edits you get back from your clients. Ask for a copy of their style guide. Keep a Post-it by your computer listing which clients use the serial comma and which don’t. Even though these are simple fixes we’re talking about, wouldn’t you rather have your editors focus on the content of your work rather than the mechanics?

4)    Fill your word count criteria with lazy metaphors, throwaway quotes and “narrative resume” material. Hey, no one wants to read an actual story, right? Just take a look at a source’s resume and write it out in a series of paragraphs. That should do the trick.

Bottom line: If you’re bored by your writing, you can bet your readers will be, too. It’s your job to dig deeper in your research, get better material out of your interviewees and work an idea until you get an interesting angle or twist.

5)    Your editor has spellcheck and proofreaders, so don’t bother printing out your work and reading it over before shooting it off. Spell your sources names two or even three different ways throughout your story. Forget a period here and there. Ignore the squiggly red line Word offers to help you identify typos throughout your work. And definitely don’t take time to proof for the things spellcheck wouldn’t catch, such as typing “if” instead of “it” or “an” instead of “and.”

Bottom line: You’re not just a writer; you’re an editor and proofreader, too. Read your own work.

6)    Don’t bother to read the assignment letter detailing minor points like word count, where to send your draft, and when (and how) to submit your invoice. While your at it, go a few hundred words over the word count—that way the editor has plenty to work with, right? Send everything directly to your editor instead of their story inbox or accounting department—he or she will handle it for you, right? Shoot off an informal invoice in the body of your email instead of creating a proper Word doc or PDF—they’ll figure it out, right? Wrong, wrong and wrong.

Bottom line: Pay attention to the job details. Not following the guidelines your editor took the time to explain is no different from going to a restaurant and the waiter bringing you a “top shelf” margarita with Jose Cuervo tequila instead of Patron.

7)    And the always popular—let deadlines come and go without alerting your editor in advance. Let the editor wake up in the middle of the night to realize your story didn’t come in. That’s a great way to build a relationship and get more work.

Bottom line: If you’re a week out from a deadline and still haven’t heard back from a key source, let your editor know right away. He may have an alternate source for you, or he may give you an extension. A week out from a deadline means there are still possibilities. A missed deadline means your editor is left scrambling to fill the hole left by your lack of a story.

-Britta

The phrase has made a startling resurgence in the last few months after coming from the mouth of Barack Obama (talking about John McCain’s seeming fondness for Bush-Rove dirty politics). But I prefer the phrase as a descriptor for deceptive marketing.

You’ve probably seen the commercials on TV lately that are pushing high-fructose corn syrup as some delightful sweetener handed down from the Lord like manna from heaven. Wholesome images of attractive young couples lounging in the park and eating popsicles sweetened with HFCS are meant to evoke the essential goodness of the product. The ads come off like a bad East German propaganda film from the ‘70s, which would have been fine if they’d been trying to be ironic, but since they were striving for earnest, they struck a painfully discordant note.

Still you can’t blame the Corn Refiners Association for trying.

I don’t know about you, but when I’m jotting down attributes I’d like my food to have, “created in a refinery” and “not to be found in nature” aren’t high on the list. Here in South Florida, you can go to any farmer’s market and buy raw sugar cane. Peel it, take a bite and you get the unmistakable flavor of sugar. You’ll have to travel a lot further to find the raw ingredient for HFCS. Wait, what? Doesn’t it come from corn? Yes, but not the kind you can buy at the supermarket. The corn that eventually begets HFCS is an industrial commodity that’s also used to make plastic and ethanol, neither of which you’ll be consuming anytime soon.

And what does this saccharine brawl have to do with content marketing?

Three things: honesty, transparency and authenticity.

The HFCS ads have been relentlessly mocked by late night comedians and amateur filmmakers on YouTube. The ads flopped because they were not honest, they obfuscated the truth and, ultimately, failed the litmus test of public authentication.

It’s one thing to have a content marketing strategy, but without genuine, accurate and compelling content, it’s all for naught. The public is too smart and media has become too democratized.

— Jonathan

Stakeboring v:— The act of watering down a compelling message by uninvolved stakeholders.

Manage-a-trough /meɪˈnɑʒ ɑ ˈtrwɑ; Fr. meɪnaʒ a ˈtrwɑ/ Pronunciation Key – Show Spelled Pronunciation[mey-nahzh ah troth] n:— The management of content producers by multiple editors without the use of a project management system, CMS or editorial calendar.

Frightspace n:— The fear of any whitespace in print or web publications.

Invisibully n:— A person who publicly tears apart a company to promote their own.

Ctrl C-Ctrl V Speakers n: — Successful marketing authors who charge ridiculous fees to repeat what is in their books on stage.

This weekend (Friday night at 8pm) I was contacted by a “content marketing” firm from California. After a litany of fast-talking hubbub (I thought fast-talking hubbub was passé) and admittance by the CEO of being a “pain in the ass,” I was asked if our writers could drop links on his client’s blogs for a fee. Really? I’d collect cans before I would have our writers post insincere, irrelevant links on blogs. In my mind it goes against everything wonderful and democratic about the web.

I’m going to do this company the incredible favor of not mentioning their name. But the part that saddens me is their client list seemed impressive and their sales numbers looked good.

I believe that branding and content marketing are about providing relevant content first and tuning SEO and technology second. But moments like Friday night give the impression that messages like 100% FREE and spamming are the way to go. Someone bring me back to the light.

This newsletter from Steve Baldwin, editor-in-chief at Didit, just popped in my inbox and gives hope:

“The onus is on us at SEM agencies to prove our case, realistically, free of jargon, hype, and especially over-promising. We need to start acting less like salespeople, and more like serious business consultants. If we can’t be honest and forthcoming about what we can — and can’t — do for our clients, and can’t find a way to make all the complicated moving parts of search comprehensible to plain people who don’t know or care who Danny Sullivan is, we shouldn’t be surprised when these people slam the door in our faces.”

When results come up empty or stale then I’ll really, really worry—until then companies need relevant content.