We at Martino Flynn realize that we have been blessed in many ways. So, for this holiday season we have built a special web site that will challenge the mind, nourish the body, and elevate the spirit. We call it a Holistic Holiday; a place where you can test your holiday knowledge, share a favorite recipe, and help a worthy cause.

Please visit our site at http://holiday.martinoflynn.com and pass this link along to your friends and families. We decided that one way to put our holiday spirit into action this year would be to support three special not-for-profit organizations that mean a great deal to us. The “Spirit” section of the site explains how we will contribute to these organizations, and encourages you to support them as well.

On behalf of my partners—Chris and Kevin Flynn—and everyone in the Martino Flynn family, I wish you the happiest of holidays and a healthy and prosperous New Year.

— Ray Martino

1. Neglecting Page Titles
   Every web page has a title, but it’s often overlooked, as it doesn’t appear on a page’s content area. Rather, it appears at the very top of the browser window. It also appears in Google search results, and it carries significant weight in search ranking. Sometimes the title is left out of a web page’s source code altogether. In these cases, usually the name of the browser (“Mozilla Firefox” for example) is displayed at the top of the browser window. Worse, some web design or development applications will put in a default page title such as “Untitled Document.”  Many websites do include page titles, but use the same title for every page. Of course, this saves a lot of time in building pages, but it’s a big missed opportunity. Every page on a site should have a unique title.
2. Flash-Only Sites, Homepages, or Navigation
   I’m surprised to be writing this, because Flash was the first widespread “easy target” for search engine optimization. But we still see these sites. Flash sites or homepages without HTML versions are nearly invisible to search engines. Navigation built in Flash makes a site harder to crawl than HTML-based navigation. Sure, pay-per-click ads and other promotional tactics can drive traffic to all-Flash sites. But, in general they will do poorly in organic search rankings. Flash is an excellent platform on which to build rich content and applications, but if you’re at all interested in SEO, basic web site architecture should be implemented in HTML.
3. Embedding Type in Images
   Unless coded properly, type in images cannot be read by search engines. Many folks are aware of the importance of coding in ‘alt text’ for images, and that’s great. But for certain images it’s not enough. For example, if your site has important headlines rendered in images (for the sake of visual appearance), and coded as simple images (<img />), you’re missing a big opportunity for search rankings. It’s okay to try to break out of the limitations of lowest-common-demoninator typefaces, as long as you use one of several techniques that allow you to code your headlines properly as headlines (<h1>Headline</h1>, for example). This can be done with CSS and background images, or by rendering headlines as images on-the-fly (Cufon), or by using Flash to replace regular text with Flash type (sIFR). Your friends at Google.com can tell you all about these.
4. Ugly URLs
   Even the web address of your pages, the URL (Unique Resource Locator; sadly, I did not have to look this up) can help with search ranking—if you take care to make it clean and easy to read. If it’s easy for you to read, it’s easy for the search engines, too. Which one of the addresses below is easier to read?
   
5. Using “Click Here” Alone in Hyperlinks
   Links in text to other pages or files should be made up of words and phrases that describe the destination. This is an oft-made mistake, because simply making the words “click here” clickable makes sense from a simple user-experience perspective. It’s fine to use the words “click here,” but make sure you include any descriptive words in the link, too. So, instead of  ”click here to learn about integrated marketing communications,” use “click here to learn about integrated marketing communications.” A bonus: More words make for a larger click-target, incrementally improving ease-of-use for your site.

By taking the extra time and care to plan site design and construction, and by using techniques like these and others, you’ll be able to produce the best balance of rich user experience and natural search visibility.

- Frank Piacitelli

Consider the opinion of one blogger who lists seven solid reasons that companies should start a blog:

1.    It helps your SEO (Google loves new content).

2.    You can engage and understand your customers better.

3.    You are seen as an expert in your field, a  “Thought Leader.”

4.    Great content gives people a reason to keep coming back to your site.

5.    Blogs are a much more trusted source than corporate press releases and official company PR.*

6.    It moves customers to a conversion point of trusting and believing enough to buy.

7.    By writing you are learning.

(*I agree with each of these with the exception of #5. When done right, press releases are not fluff pieces. They include facts and represent the latest news from a company or organization. What the blogger may have meant was—as a personal extension of your brand—a blog enables companies to engage with current and prospective customers in a less formal, more conversational way while providing color commentary on a particular topic.)

Additional advantages I’d like to suggest: blogs enable companies to gain insight and feedback directly from the end users of their product or service. What is gleaned about customers’ needs and interests can be used to make business decisions.  Blogs are also inexpensive to start.

If you want to develop a business blog but limited staffing is your concern, you can recruit people from key departments within the company to contribute posts on a rotational frequency, or lean on a PR agency to research and ghostwrite posts on your behalf. Remember, you don’t have to plunge into the blogosphere or social media; however, it is becoming a lot harder to ignore the elephant in the room.

I’m curious to hear if anyone has thoughts or apprehensions about starting a business blog?

–Sharon Harper

Fortunately, thanks to the magic of the Internet, I was shortly able to prove I was right (again). But that experience did remind me of an important initiative designed to address just this type of issue.

“Save The Words” lets you adopt words in danger of being dropped from the dictionary (and the site is actually a creation of Oxford Dictionaries). Take a look and you might just find yourself making a little room in your vocabulary for “impigrity” (velocity) or “sturionic” (pertaining to the sturgeon). Of course, this is a serious commitment not to be taken lightly. There’s even a pledge: “I hereby promise to use this word, in conversation and correspondence, as frequently as possible to the best of my ability.”

I plan on doing my part. At the moment I’m particularly fond of “lardlet” (a small piece of bacon used to enrich meat). Of course, though I may be a writer, I am a servant of our clients. So I’ve yet to find a compelling reason to use some of the “uncommon” words I already enjoy. For instance, it’s not as easy as you might think to work “cattywampus” into, say, a brochure for CooperVision contact lenses. But I’ll keep trying. After all, it’s the little literary lardlets that make the tastiest reading.

— Brad Garratt

So how can cleaning closets possibly have anything to do with our profession?

We, as marketers, rely on the fact that people will always want more stuff. Even better, they will always believe they need more stuff. And we are excellent at serving up all that stuff in the form of products or services that satisfy that want or fulfill that need. For marketing folks, the blurring of Need and Want in the minds of consumers works in our favor. We use tricks of the trade: leveraging the power of peer pressure, getting to be the first on your block, needing to keep up with the Joneses, the esteem of being labeled an early adopter, and the list goes on. So how do we, as marketers, succeed when Needing and Wanting, or more specifically, having, become far less important than being? When the pursuit of “self-actualization” comes into play (as much more eloquently described by David Wolf than by my closet cleaning metaphor) and the marketing equation becomes far more complicated? When the aforementioned tricks of the trade don’t work so well–or not at all? This is precisely the challenge we face when our clients’ prospective customers are seniors.

Older consumers have always presented a challenge to marketers because their purchase behaviors are more complex—from how they assess value to how they choose brands or products they want to experience. Now add to that equation a difficult economy. Everyone feels some fear and uncertainty, but seniors—many of whom are retired or approaching retirement—feel it most of all.

“What to do? Who to trust? What do I really need?” These questions are more pressing than ever.

Through our work with clients, (such as MetLife Bank, MetLife Home Loans, MetLife Retirement Strategies Group, National Council on Aging, Ace Brands, Senekot, and Tommy Armor Golf) we help senior audiences discover products and solutions and evaluate whether they might be right for them. Our approach to message creation is holistic, anticipating the full spectrum of factors that play into the decision-making process so we can better address concerns and ease the emotional journey from before-purchase anxiety to after-purchase peace of mind. In short, less is left to the imagination. A prospective buyer can more easily access whether the brand or product will contribute to becoming his or her desired self. And while the aforementioned tricks of the trade offer little hope of success when marketing to older audiences, there are some tried and true techniques that do (let me know if you’re interested in these). For now, just remember that your senior audiences have done a lot of closet cleaning over the years—both literally or metaphorically. They have a well-defined sense of self and a compass for what’s truly important. Assume they will instinctively use the golden rules of closet cleaning to evaluate your advertising messages—along with almost everything else in life: “Is it important? Do I need it? Does it belong in the life I desire? Is it ‘me’?”

Happy New Year!

- Robbie Magee

Here in Adland, we use them quite frequently for email blasts and letters, where personalization is necessary, or for other applications to indicate that a particular line is TBD.

The risk you run with using placeholders, however, is that there’s always a chance that something could fall through the cracks and not be filled before the file is released.

Take this for example:

Just the other day, I checked my hotmail account (off work hours, of course) and found that I had this email from JetBlue. They wanted to remind me that I haven’t flown their airline in a while and tell me how much they missed my money. Looks innocent enough, but check out who it is addressed to: “Dear Mr. Soandso.”

Now, of course, I quickly received a follow-up apology email from JetBlue, letting me know that there had been an “error in their database,” but the damage was done. I had already sent it to all my friends and wrote a blog post for the whole world to see.

So, go ahead and continue to use your placeholders—but please remember to fill them in properly.

Yours truly,
<YOUR NAME GOES HERE>

This little phrase may have surfaced on one of your emails in the past or this may be your first time seeing it. In either event, most of you reading this blog could probably decipher the context of it. If not, here’s what it intended to read:

According to a researcher at Cambridge University, it doesn’t matter in what order the letters in a word are, the only important thing is that the first and last letter be at the right place. The rest can be a total mess and you can still read it without problem. This is because the human mind does not read every letter by itself but the word as a whole.

This way of thinking would probably explain the spelling error on this road sign in Colorado:

This type of sign typically costs approximately $1,000 to construct. Needless to say, a second one with the correct spelling of “Mountain” was built–not a cheap re-do.

The “Cmabrigde” or Cambridge statement and theory, however, isn’t entirely true. For example, can you decipher this:

Do not bviele eniheyrtvg you raed, as it cloud be dsllacirty irrccenot or just pilan slliy.

Some words here may seem to be recognizable, but a few of them might make you scratch your head a little bit in an attempt to comprehend them. In case you couldn’t entirely decipher this sentence, here is what those jumbled letters tried to convey:

Do not believe everything you read, as it could be drastically incorrect or just plain silly.

As you read this next blurb, please make a mental note of how many times the letter “f” is used.

Finished files are the result of years of scientific study combined with the experience of years.

How many did you count? Three? Actually, there are six. The reason that some of you may have come up with a number less than six is that the brain also interprets words phonetically. In this example, the word “of” isn’t generally thought of as the letters “o” and “f” but instead, it is probably more likely to be interpreted as “o” and “v”.

Since the brain comprehends words phonetically, the following poem by James Knisley (despite many of the words being misused in relation to the context of the poem) should be fairly easily read and understood by almost any literate individual.

Eye halve a spelling chequer

It came with my pea sea

It plainly marques for my revue

Miss steaks eye knot sea…

Eye have run this poem threw it

I am shore your pleased two no

Its letter perfect awl the weigh

My chequer tolled me sew

This poem may help to prove the point that we often do read things phonetically, but it also helps to expose the major flaw of spell check (but that’s an entirely different blog and I won’t get into that right now).

The third and lastly known (to my knowledge) way that the human brain processes words is cognitively or by remembering.

Please briefly read the text in the following image to your right.

What did you read, “A BIRD IN THE BUSH”? Or, did you see, “A BIRD IN THE THE BUSH”? If you said the latter, then you’re right. The second “THE” would often be missed by a casual reader not expecting to be tricked (some of you have probably caught on to my brain teasers in this blog and may have been more focused on reading this example, thus allowing you to catch the error in it). This is because certain words and phrases become ingrained in one’s mind and, therefore, aren’t altered when one begins to read a commonly used word or pattern of words. Your mind isn’t taught to think that any sentence should be constructed with two back-to-back uses of the word “THE”. Therefore, it may be easily overlooked. It’s possible that the triangle design may also distract the brain from focusing solely on the words as well.

To sum things up, the brain uses three methods for reading and comprehending words. Sometimes it can interpret words or sentences by using only one or two of the methods (usually this is when mistakes could occur) but by using all three methods together, the brain is more apt to correctly identify and properly understand a word’s or sentence’s intended meaning. By no means do I consider myself an expert on the brain’s functioning, but the next time that you see something spelled wrong; please don’t blame me, blame my brain.