Four NEW Reasons To Trust Junk Mail

Copywriter Dean Rieck, who wrote about direct mail last week in DM News, made an interesting point. Rieck said, “People are so annoyed and suspicious of unsolicited e-mail, they now consider direct mail to be a relatively trustworthy medium.” Imagine that: trustworthy!

Rieck is right, you know. The Internet has given “Junk mail” new authority. I see four reasons for that.

• Direct mail costs money to deliver, so at the very least we know the contact is coming from a source that’s put up their own money to reach us.
• Direct mail originates exclusively from businesses. We can be pretty sure a mass-produced mail piece hasn’t been cranked out by some guy in a basement.
• Direct mail can’t be “hacked,” or “phished,” and it’s an expensive way to steal somebody’s identity. If it looks exactly like something from our bank, it is from our bank.
• Postage has become so expensive that direct mailers have gotten very serious about who they mail to. By the time we get a marketing message by mail, it’s very likely to be relevant to us. Come to think of it, direct mailers are so good that a peek inside somebody's mailbox discloses a great deal about who they are and what they care about. (Nope. Can’t say that about my in-box, can you?)
  

The Korean Taco Approach To PR

By now, most marketers have heard about the success of the L.A. Korean Taco truck. This popular meals-on-wheels snack won a loyal customer following using Twitter, and garnered attention in Newsweek. The story fascinated everybody and, in my PR business, the term “Korean Taco” crept into our jargon. Very simply, around here, a Korean Taco is a communication with editors that contains a nugget of useful, printable information, as is. So, while the objective may be to place an article with an industry publication, we make sure our email to the editor extracts a salient point – a Korean Taco – that the editor can use even if the full article doesn’t get picked up. Editors seem to like the KT approach. I guess that’s because – as Ben Self, founder of Blue State Digital and genius behind Barack Obama’s online presence in Election 2008, says – “Nobody reads press releases. Even editors don’t read them.”

AdSense Spiders Have Big Brains

A couple of days ago, I blogged about my 25-year love affair with Macintosh computers. I mentioned every Mac I'd ever owned (and there have been many). This morning when I signed on, Google had my AdSense connected to PowerMax, an online retailer of used Mac paraphernalia. Now that is targeted advertising, I thought. When I re-blogged about copy writing, a whole new set of ads came up. This little bot spider crawling around for Apple has a very big brain to keep track of all this. Impressive? Yes, sir: Impressive.

Tweet Smart

Econsultancy Blog has listed 10 copywriting “dos” for Twitter, including: make it personal and relevant, engage your followers with questions and challenges, send along good links, and scoop the crowd. Read the full article here.

This Apple Worries Me

I’ve owned and worked on Macintosh computers since the very first model came out in 1984. I bought the original Mac and immediately upgraded to a “Fat Mac.” Over the years, I’ve owned (and loved) the “wicked fast” MacIIfx, two workhorse G3 beige desktops, a purple “Candy Mac,” the original dual-system titanium “Ti-Book,” the beautiful blue and white G3 Tower (also dual system), two 17-inch G4s, two Intel mini-Macs, and now a 15-inch G4 "glossy." There was a time in the 90s when people made fun of my devotion to Macs, but I never had a breakdown or a hard drive crash (until January 2009) and (knock on wood) I’ve never had a virus. Lately, I’m worried. In late 2007, a gal I work with bought an ibook laptop. She had a fatal hard drive crash eleven months later. A friend in California converted to a Mac laptop 18 months ago. He’s had two hard drive crashes. The first shock came when another devoted Mac user I know bought the little white ibook when it first came out. The keys fell off. When I asked what was going on, she said, “Oh, they all do that.” To an “I-was-there-when” Mac user, this decline in quality startles. Still better than a PC, but scary. Maybe that’s why I now have four huge external hard drives for back-up (they crash, too, but that's another story). My computer is no ipod to me, so why did everything start changing when Apple went into the music business? Surely, there is still a market for quality computers whose real strength is dependability. Apple?

DocuTicker Knows What You're Looking For

Gary Price, founder and director of ResourceShelf, was doing his thing years ago, when Internet research was still "new." Today, Gary has a number of great resources for writers, including DocuTicker, which includes the DocuTicker Grey Guide. Librarians and serious researchers are very familiar with Gary's work, but it's a rich mine for the rest of us, too. DT's free weekly newsletter is a great reminder to check the grey matter. And while you're at it, check out FreePint, " a global network of people who find, use, manage, and share work-related information."

Tyrannosaurus Rexanna Loves Print

I was watching the CBS report “Stop The Presses” that deals with the demise of the American newspaper. So many have gone out of business or are in bankruptcy: The Rocky Mountain News, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Seattle Post. It’s all because of the Internet, say observers, including the free news online. At the end of the video, Gail Shister, who's been with the Philadelphia Inquirer for 30-years, says, “The big downside of [online] speed is that a lot of times you don’t get the quality control, you don’t get enough editing, you don’t get that extra phone call to check something.” But quality control angst is for old people, Shister concludes. “It’s generational. People under 50 don’t know what they are missing because they never had it. And, more importantly, they don’t care. I still get excited when I pick up a new paper and open it for the first time, but I’m a dinosaur -- and I accept that.”

I'm not convinced. Is the decline in newspaper readership really “generational” – or is it pervasive for this medium in particular? After all, newspapers are about news, timeliness, and what’s happening now. Besides, we've been warned for years about the environmental impact of print newspapers. So does a decline in newspaper readership in 2009 really point to a vast movement of readers away from print generally? If so, how to explain the popularity of Real Simple with the under-thirty crowd? Or my 28-year-old daughter’s monthly waiting for Oprah's O to arrive in the mail?

In 1998, Pew noted that, while the television news landscape had been transforming, the audience for print media was stable. Back then, 68 percent of survey respondents reported reading a daily newspaper regularly. Even then, though, Pew found that only 28 percent of those under age 30 read a newspaper “yesterday,” as compared to 69 percent of seniors. Have newspapers always been for the "over-fifty"?

In 2000, Mediaweek reported that magazine readership was on the rise, with increases across the board. Since then, a bunch of magazines have gone “digital too” – Maxim, Elle, MacWorld, BusinessWeek, VIVA, New Beauty, Boating, Popular Mechanics, Esquire, and Playboy, to name a few. How will digital magazines fare? Who knows? It doesn’t cost publishers much to experiment, so the mere presence of a digital version doesn’t signify a real trend or a real investment.

Frankly, the thought of a digital magazine makes me glaze over, so I’m not ready to throw my print magazines out the window yet. I do subscribe to far fewer magazines than I once did, simply because being a writer forces me online. I get most stuff electronically now -- mail, newspapers, advertisements (!), work-related content. Still, I may be a dinosaur, but I’m not ready for an exclusively digital diet. Print smells better, for one thing, plus you can dog-ear and rip the pages. Grrrr.