Welcome to National Poetry Month!

Each April, the Academy of American Poets celebrates poetry and its vital place in American culture. The first Poetry Month was inaugurated in 1996 and has caught the attention of numerous government agencies and officials along with educational figures, publishers, artists and (of course) poets.

We’re showing our poetic passion this month by participating in an SEO Poetry Slam contest organized by the editors at SEOBoy.com. The contest invites online marketing practitioners to compose a haiku about Search Engine Optimization. A haiku is a form of Japanese poetry consisting of 17 syllables assembled in three lines of 5-7-5.

Here’s where you come in. We’ll be posting SEO haikus throughout the month on the LoSasso Advertising Facebook Page. At the end of April, we’ll submit the poem that our fans have deemed the best through Likes and Comments. So let us know what you think! And if you catch the poetry bug, feel free to join in by tweeting us, commenting on this post, or posting on the Facebook page.

Here’s our first haiku, just to get the poetic posturing percolating.

Search Engines. Look.
Have you seen my website? It’s great!
Fine, I’ll get more links.

What keeps brand managers awake at night?  I have no idea but my guess is it’s brand integrity and the constant battle against those who would destroy their hard work.  I speak of course of the social media cornucopia that spilleth over with third parties ripping or altering others’ brand messaging.  This is the cost of a democratization of information.

That said, I’m flipping through an advertising magazine and see a full page ad with a blown up faux penciled-in registered symbol {®}. A big eraser has partially erased the symbol and below it Kleenex® has a message for its consumers/those pirating its brand name?  It’s unclear but the text reads, “You may not realize it, but by using the name Kleenex® as a generic term for tissue, you risk erasing our coveted brand name that we’ve worked so hard for all these years.  Kleenex® is a registered trademark and should always be followed by a ® and the words ‘Brand Tissue’. Just pretend it’s in permanent marker.”

As a casual reader, I felt I had just been scolded by Kimberly-Clark Worldwide Inc. for occasionally calling any old facial tissue, a Kleenex.  In the wake of Domino’s and Miracle Whip’s new ad campaign strategies of embracing the negative and flipping the script, Kleenex stands out in stark contrast.  Was that their marketing strategy?  It seems a better approach would be to say, “Our brand has become so synonymous with facial tissue that everyone’s been calling other brands OUR name.  We encourage you to remember who the original Kleenex® is.”  Granted this was an isolated case of an ad and it hasn’t appeared in mass media but what are the ramifications for this type of insuring one’s brand integrity?  For such a large company, probably very little damage will ensue but it begs to be considered — is this the revolution and will it be televised?

As seen in the February 14, 2011 "The Relationship Issue" in Advertising Age Magazine

With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, what better time to write a love note to social media and the mobility of the digital age in 2011?

We Tweet, Skype, IM, FaceBook and StumbleUpon one another creating virtual connections to further our needs.  We have gone MobileMe on every last mode of interaction.  The democratization of information has liberated not only individuals but companies.  In the print world, magazines and newspapers have suffered heavy losses in subscriptions and sales.  Luckily, social media #hashtagged its way to the rescue and physical technologies have adapted to embrace it.  According to Advertising Age, the iPad accelerated Wired Magazine’s sales 28% by featuring the digital and portable version of their print editions.  Tablet technology has spread quickly through the art, health care, print and restaurant industries.  The metalworking industry could be the next frontier with developers creating iPad applications to guide CAD programming.  The use of mobile and wireless devices would turn the image of industry on its head with the bonus of increased security through user control settings.

Dynamic innovation in industry has been a talking point since Henry Ford envisioned the first vertically integrated factory in the River Rouge Plant.  Perhaps this is the occasion for industries across the board to seize a new technology and reinvent themselves once more.  Such technology could increase the lay person’s understanding of an industry or create a greater transparency for prospective clients and consumers.

Here’s to tablet technology and machinery becoming a happy couple in the near future, but probably not before Monday.

Finding the right stock photos, videos and music to express a given concept can be exceedingly tedious. Often, the search functions of stock content sites just don’t cut it, or it’s difficult to put what you’re looking for into words. Other times, the sheer volume of search results is crippling.

Moodstream™, a new tool from Getty may help alleviate these issues—or at least offer some good inspiration for your next concepting session. Communication Arts describes Moodstream as a “random visual generator that syncs imagery with over 50,000 songs licensed by Getty.”

The tool streams photos, illustrations and videos together with songs, all of which match the mood your designated mood. Sliders on the site’s dashboard let you set the mood somewhere between happy and sad; calm and lively; humorous and serious; nostalgic and contemporary; and warm and cold. Other settings allow you to specify even further, and control the speed and nature of the image transitions. The refresh button provides a new set of imagery and music. You can even save the imagery and music you like to your “mood board” with the click of a mouse.

While something tells me this isn’t the ideal tool for finding stock related to industrial metalworking (an elusive stock-photo search topic we here at LoSasso know all too well), it’s still pretty fun to play around with. Listening to the music while watching the images float by at a controlled speed should definitely get the creative juices flowing.

What tricks do you have for finding stock content? Any online tools that inspire your creative brainstorming sessions? We’d love to hear about them in the comments section.

There’s nothing worse than a journalist or copywriter who gets on her high horse at the slightest mention of passive voice, meaningless business jargon or split infinitives. So forgive me in advance for this post.

Here are my top tips to take your copy up a notch:

1. Write drunk, edit sober. I stole this from Copyblogger.com. Figuratively speaking, it makes a lot of sense. While I don’t advocate spiking your morning coffee, I agree with the sentiment that first drafts should come from a place of uninhibited honesty and passion. Be real and enthusiastic, and give your copy some personality. You can always reel it in during the editing process.

2. Cut. Edit. Refine. Repeat. There’s a reason they call it word economy: If every word you kept cost you, you’d rethink your use of the phrase “innovative and cost-effective solutions.” And remember: Even the best writers need a really great editor/creative director to tell them when they’ve crossed over into wordy self-indulgence.

3. Simplify, de-jargonize. Come to think of it, get rid of anything with “ize.” You know what I’m talking about: utilize, incentivize, monetize, etc. Simpler synonyms are just as worthy. When it comes to leaning on other self-important business jargon, I’m as guilty as the next person; but I make a conscious effort to avoid it as much as possible, and you should too. Admitting you have a problem is the first step to lazy-sales-speak recovery.

4. Be active. Lots of people have trouble with passive voice, but chances are, most can tell which sentence is stronger:

• “The areas of practice served by the firm’s 75 attorneys include …”
• “The firm’s 75 attorneys serve several practice areas, including …”

The first sentence is passive voice, the second is active voice. Avoid the former at all costs.

5. Get to the point already. When it came to meeting those ridiculous length requirements for high school and college papers, no one filled up four double-spaced pages with fluff and repetition like I did. Old habits die hard—but it’s time to kill this one once and for all. With marketing copy, less is more, and the days of bloated, meandering paragraphs are long gone. Your new M.O.? Short, sweet and to the point.

There’s plenty more where that came from, but if you follow those tips, you’ll be well on your way to better copy. And for good measure, here are a couple sites that offer great writing tips:

• Grammar Girl
• Copyblogger

Only a few days into the new year and there are already many things to look forward to in the world of social media and public relations.  More and more brands are abandoning traditional promotional outlets in favor of more social ones. With companies like Pepsi forking over $20m to step into the online arena, measuring a campaign’s success in the social media realm is more relevant than ever before. Assessing audience “engagement” will undoubtedly be a hot topic in 2010.

Traditionally, PR agencies have relied on ad equivalency rates to put a value on the coverage received for their clients.  While the accuracy of this method is highly debatable, it has provided a way to quantitatively assess the impact of a campaign and track its progress.  Agencies that solely rely on these metrics will have to start monitoring and evaluating social media efforts. It no longer matters how many people see a communication about your brand, it’s only important if you are part of the conversation. Consumers now demand direct contact with their favorite brands via social media outlets. Engagement is what needs to be measured, and the next year will likely bring further debate on how a consumer’s relationship with a brand can be assessed.

How does one measure engagement? Is an audience engaged when they comment on a brand’s fan page on Facebook, interact with them on Twitter, respond to a blog entry or watch a YouTube video? How many times do they have to interact with a brand in order to be considered “engaged”? Brands like Pepsi have hopefully asked themselves similar questions. The company is generating lots of buzz after they announced their decision to forgo traditional Super Bowl ads to focus on the launch of a new social media campaign, “The Pepsi Refresh Project.” The campaign is a huge move for the company. With all this money at stake and the world watching, it will be necessary to evaluate the level of engagement their audience has with their communication efforts.

Since the success of any marketing campaign has to be compared to its unique goals and objectives, do not expect to see a formulaic method for measuring social media activity; it is impossible to have a “one-size-fits-all” philosophy when it comes to consumer engagement. However, 2010 should bring advancements in evaluating a brand’s social media efforts.  Keep a look out for how major brands like Pepsi address this issue in the next year.

At this point, most of us have done the coffee house business meeting. If it’s not a regular occurance, at least an occasional one. The neutral meeting place could be convenient for a number of reasons: its location, free wireless access, or proximity to your next appointment. Just don’t forget your ettiquette.

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The financial crisis and resulting bailout is a sad state of affairs no matter how you slice it, but this will help explain the mess, and at least make you laugh a bit.