This ain’t Back to the Future. It’s Top Gun. We’re going time traveling—backwards. You with me? Here we go…

Is that Whitney Houston on the radio? Great song. Crank it. Oh, and did you hear? Mike Tyson’s the youngest heavyweight champ ever and the USSR doesn’t want to fight.

Aviator glasses? Right on. You don’t look quite as slick as “Maverick”  (Tom Cruise in “Top Gun”), but those screaming neon-colored parachute pants and your big hair are just perfect.

We’ve arrived. It’s 1986. Let’s get to work.

We’re in some ad agency’s conference room. Lots of brass. Lots of glass. The chairs are cozy. In class are 12 folks who hope to be transformed into advertising copywriter superstars. We paid over $100 to become David Ogilvy and we’re not leaving until we’re have the chops to dominate the world—or at least the world of advertising.

The teacher is a creative director, a real life Don Draper. Ooh. Aah. To me, the job title sounds more bitchin’ than heavyweight champion of the world. You would think I’d remember this legend’s name. I don’t. I’m actually happy I remember my own.

I do remember the lesson he gave. I always will.

The goal is to cruise Madison Avenue in a Rolls Royce.

Nike has set the bar high in consumer advertising. Rolling Stone is running one of the snappiest B2B print campaigns ever (“Perception/Reality”). Us students want to know how to do stuff like that.

Where do you begin?

Nail down a USP.

The teacher says you begin with a thing called the “unique selling proposition,” or USP. He says every company, product or service must have one. Then he tells us his simple process for getting it down on paper.

He uncaps a pleasant-smelling dry erase marker and writes:

How to ________________________________ .

The benefit goes in the blank.

Pencils down please. We’re not ready to write. First, we need to understand the difference between a feature and a benefit. The teacher reels off a real world example. I remember this one exactly as he said it:

• Feature: McDonald’s has drive-up windows.
• Benefit: You can grab a quick breakfast on the way to work without dragging your ass out of the car.

Because I’m a cagey old ad guy and it’s not really 1986, I’ll toss in my own era-appropriate example.

• Feature: CERTS breath mints have Retsyn (scientific sounding ingredients were very hip at the time, even if they were complete BS.)
• Benefit:  People will want to kiss you.
  

So now we’re going to learn…

How to write a great headline.

“How to write a great headline” is not a great headline. The words I chose there, “great headline,” merely describe a feature. According to the teacher, a great headline reveals a benefit.

So here’s a second stab. How to get people to read your ad/email/article.

Ding. We have a winner.

You try it now. Use your product or service. Notice its features. It might be shiny, powerful, scalable, reliable, user-friendly (always hated that term), 100% natural, made in the U.S.A., grown on a tropical island, cheap to buy or free to try.

All these things might be good news, but they’re not benefits and therefore, not headline material. They’re features.

Features are duller than dull. Your job as a great marketing writer is not to begin the story by telling me about the shoes soft supple leather. I don’t care. Tell me they feel good on my feet. Now I’m listening.

Get out your sharpest pencil now.

Try it….

How to ________________________________ .

Stick a benefit in there, a reason to care.

Well done.

Class is almost over.

I want to thank you again for trekking back in time with me. Now, here’s the lesson I learned on that day in 1986 and share with you just 27 short years later.

Fill in the blank that follows “how to” and you have your unique selling proposition.

And it gets even better. You may have your headline too. Think of how many headlines begin with those two words.

“How to” is the formula of formulas. It’s not a creative or unique headline writing technique, but it’s great bait bound to hook readers. It’s why we read non-fiction. We want to know how to do something. Don’t fight it.

And so then, with media stardom and world domination in mind, you unleash the creative juices. You work on writing a better, more unique headline than “How to (blank). Ideas should come. If they don’t, you have a killer fallback position with “How to (blank). It’ll do the trick.

So it works like this.

Dateline: 2013. In addition to contributing educational (and opinionated) articles like this one to sites like this one, I actually sell my time and talent as a copywriter, creative director and content marketer. As such, I need to help clients cut through the crap and establish a clear USP, and then, bake tasty headlines based on it.

When I ask clients, “what’s your USP?” you might not believe how often the room goes silent.

Know what I do? I head for the whiteboard, uncap the marker and write those two little magic words. I say we’re going to fill in the blank first and then get to the creative part second. No “how to” statement, no go. It’s that simple.

Now, here’s one more interesting little headline writing secret I’ve discovered. If the time-tested “how to” feels worn out and cliché, I offer an easy alternative.

When you’ve filled in the blank with an effective benefit, you can go back and strike the words “how” and “to.” What you’re left with is a headline that starts with a verb.

Check it out…

How to finish your blog post with a memorable last line.

Strike “how to.”

How to finish your blog post with a memorable last line.

Ta-da:

Finish your blog post with a memorable last line.

Works every time.

This will be fun. Treat the comment section below as your whiteboard. Resist the temptation to feature a feature. Leave a comment that is: “How to [benefit of your product].” Thank you for playing.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg is starting an important movement with her book Lean In and online community LeanIn.org The premise is that there is a vast inequality of women in senior positions in the workforce and she is committed to opening the conversation about why. In her Ted talk, Sandberg argues that “women are not making it to the top of any profession anywhere in the world.” In corporate, she mentions C-level jobs held by women are 15-16% and have remained flat since 2002.

Personally, I’ve always struggled with men vs. women debates on equality in the workplace. It always seems to turn into a he vs. she debate that I find to be counterproductive. However, the recent buzz around Sandberg’s book led me to listen to her Ted talk and I’ve since ordered the book. After review, I was presently surprised, but I think there was one critical missing element to her analysis. First, let’s take a look at her key points.

Sit at the Table

Sandberg argues that women aren’t taking their seat at the table. She tells the story of being at a pitch with a large investment group and watching the women sit around the edge of the room. It’s as if women wait for permission to take a chair around the table. Why is that? In another story, Sandberg tells the story of three college students, herself, a female friend, and a young gentleman who all finished an assignment for a class. Both women wished they had done more on the assignment after significant research and analysis, while the young man stated he got the highest grade in the class. She argues that, “women systematically underestimate their own abilities” which may be one factor in their level of achievement. She goes on to say that, “women do not negotiate for themselves in the workforce” citing that “only 7% of women negotiate their starting salary.” When women achieve success they “attribute success to external factors” while “men attribute it to themselves.” It’s relevant to pursue a discussion around why women attribute help from others as the reason for their success, while men readily take credit. This leaves room for the argument that women have a confidence problem. She rounds out the story with an anecdote about a speech she did at Facebook, where a woman told her afterwards that she needs to “keep her hand up”. Sheryl had agreed to take two questions from the audience; after the second question was asked, the woman put her hand down.  Sheryl went on to answer three more questions. Have you ever noticed that women are the first to put their hands down when taking questions after a speech at a conference? I hadn’t, but I’ll be paying attention next time.

There certainly could be a great discussion about women finally taking their seat at the table.

Make Your Partner a REAL Partner

It is important that we start sharing responsibility in the household equally

The other area Sandberg delves into is equality in the home. She cites a statistic that says, “if a woman and a man work full-time and have a child, the woman does 2x the housework and 3x the child care.” She talks about the benefits of splitting home responsibilities in a variety of areas, perhaps one of the most important being the impact on a healthy sex life and half the divorce rate. Male or female, we are leading busy lives. It is important that we start sharing responsibility in the household equally. Fortunately, my husband is more than an equal partner. In fact, he could likely argue that I’m not doing my 50% as we’ve been building our business. I’ve outsourced housecleaning, yard work and other items as we try to find balance, especially where we have to choose between more time with the children and household duties. We’ve chosen to spend that time with our kids, but we are in a position where we can make that choice. I remember the days when we couldn’t, and it felt like the list of household needs never ended. My stress level rises just thinking about it, so I can imagine the pressure women have when their partner isn’t a REAL partner in the household.

There is certainly room for discussion on how women and men can create an equal partnership at home, too.

Don’t Leave Before You Leave

Women should be putting their foot on the gas pedal of their careers up until the very last day before they leave a company

The last area Sandberg explores is how women plan too early and start making decisions before they need to be made. She talks about how we start planning for when we are going to leave a job far before it’s time to leave. Specific areas she mentions are planning for a pregnancy. Sandberg talks about how women start to “lean back” to make room for a new baby in their lives and possibly sacrifice promotions 2 to 3 years BEFORE they are even pregnant or in one story, before the woman even had a boyfriend. She argues that women should be putting their foot on the gas pedal of their careers up until the very last day before they leave a company. The minute we start “leaning back” we begin the process of sabotaging our future success. We could take that promotion we’ve been working hard to achieve and decide how we want to proceed at the point when we are actually going on maternity leave, not 2 years before.

It’s a valid point and one I’ve definitely seen in the workplace. This is certainly another area worth having a conversation about.

Sandberg states that this inequality is something that is unlikely to change in our generation, but it’s something we can hope to reverse for our children and grandchildren’s generation which is why the work she is doing with Lean In is so important.

Stop Stabbing Each Other in the Back

Success and likeability are strongly correlated for men and negatively correlated for women

There’s one area that Sandberg doesn’t mention that I think is even more important that all of the other three combined; women are their own worst enemies.

I’ve worked with a lot of women in my career. It would be tough to argue that I ever leaned back or didn’t take my seat at the table. I am a career woman and I’ve always stood up for myself in the workplace. In my opinion, I always attempted to handle myself with grace despite my tenacious drive to succeed. I never knowingly stepped on someone else’s success in order to achieve my own. I have always prided myself on viewing the success of others as a testament to my own achievement, rather than taking credit for others success. I owned my own success through the empowerment of others. I befriended people at all levels of the organization. I was the person who was invited to the executive happy hour and the “employee” happy hour. This is something I was immensely proud of. All of that is said, not toot my own horn, but really just to say, I wasn’t a head strong b*tch in the work place.

However, that didn’t stop me from experiencing the negativity from women around me. I watched as women talked behind each other’s backs, told lies about each other to senior management, and would go as far as to discredit each other for the sake of themselves in the eyes of management. It was disgusting. I saw women be catty, overly emotional, two-faced, and manipulative all to tear another woman down and sabotage her success. Women were unbearably jealous of the success of other women. Sandberg alludes to this when she says, “success and likeability are strongly correlated for men and negatively correlated for women.” There were a couple of times I saw similar actions from men in the workplace, but it was far more common amongst my female colleagues.

So I’d argue that before we blame society or men for holding women back, it’s time to take a tough look in the mirror. I’d argue that one of women’s worst enemies in corporate success is other women. If we want to have a meaningful discussion about something that is in our control and something that we CAN impact in our lifetime, let’s talk about letting go of the jealous rage and start supporting each other. Let’s make a conscious decision to be a cheerleader for other women, to stand up and be our greatest advocates, to make a difference TOGETHER, not in spite of one another.

Now that’s a conversation we can have NOW that will have an immediate impact. Let’s talk about the others and make progress for our future generations, but let’s do something that will make a difference today, at the same time.

What do you think? Do you find yourself succumbing to the factors Sandberg mentions? Have you experienced the dismantling wrath of another woman or group of women? What do you think is holding women back from C-level positions in the workplace? Leave a comment and let’s have a healthy conversation.

Related articles

• Meet the Woman Sheryl Sandberg Leans On (forbes.com)
• Sheryl Sandberg advances gender equality (stanforddaily.com)

In the wake of tragedy, the Internet and social media sites can be the most precious resources people can have. But the can also be the most dangerous. There’s not a trained journalist in the world that hasn’t sat, open-mouthed, at the irresponsible and erroneous reporting of speculation and innuendo we’ve seen in the last week. From false reports of arrests to immediate assumptions of one political group or nationality’s involvement.

While I wish the mistakes and short-sightedness was limited to amateur media, much of which is found in today’s blogosphere, the so-called “professionals” mucked it up just as bad. Buzzfeed did a nice run down of that catastrophe, but did so in the URL of a post they originally ran that erroneously reported the news as well. The FBI even lambasted media that messed that up.

Still, there were two faux pas (pas’s ?) I believe have the potential to change social media forever.

Imagine you are Salah Barhoun, a 17-year-old high school student, and your picture is on the cover of the New York post with an article that identifies you as an alleged bagman in the crime. Imagine that 4chan and Buzzfeed are fueling viral posts with pictures of you walking with your backpack around the bombing site before it happened. Imagine you have to rush to the police on Tuesday to clear your name but can’t possibly shake the suspicion of those who see you walking down the street in today’s fractured media world where rumor and assumpion rule.

Salah Barhoun could potentially sue every website that carried his photograph

Would you potentially think you had a case to sue for libel? I sure would. And no, the word “alleged” doesn’t clear the media from wrongdoing. If he were alive, you could ask Richard Jewell about that. He went from hero to suspect to hero to paydays from CNN and NBC because he was falsely identified as a suspect in the Olympic Park bombing of 1996. No, he wasn’t able to shut either network down due to the heftiness of the fines, but what kind of financial coffers do many of today’s blogs have?

Those were the days when traditional media was all there was. Today, the world is different.

Thursday night and Friday as the manhunt exploded, so did the irresponsibility of media and non-media like. The Today Show’s Facebook stream even featured an individual who named the “white hat” suspect. The only problem? The name was mentioned over a police scanner but was never officially identified as a suspect. NBC, Buzzfeed and others reported the name as well. Then later recounted. But the recounting won’t take back the fact that Sunil Tripathi, if he is in fact not connected to the bombing, may forever have fallout because his name was linked to the act. If he turns out to be one of the bombers, does it make it right that, without facts, people were reporting his name as a suspect, pleading that he be killed?

What we saw last week was what anarchy looks like. No rules. No constraints. No justice. No government. Just the will of the (under-informed) people running amok. Thankfully, it was online in conversations and on in our streets. But that doesn’t make it right. It also doesn’t make it legal.

With a world full of media members — professional and amateur — where the lines blur between, someone is going to step up and test the judicial system’s tolerance for such reporting. If Barhoun, Tripathi or their families decide their peaceful lives, privacy or safety was or is compromised, they could file suit against any website that carried the pictures, the names or the claims. Can you imagine how many websites that entails?

While the laws, burden of proof and standards are quite different in Britain, anyone who retweeted a BBC story that falsely reported Lord Alistair McAlpine was a child molester was subject to a financial penalty and apology, forced by the courts. Kinda makes you wonder what would happen to you if the laws in the U.S. were the same, right? Post a link to that 4chan thread or Buzzfied article and YOU could be subject to penalty for helping drag Barhoun’s face through the mud. Or indicate Tripathi should be arrested, imprisoned, punished or killed.

Of course, every bit of this conversation is conjecture. No lawsuits have been filed, to my knowledge. But the potential is there. It will be the next time blogs and media get hold of an alleged assailant or bombing suspect, too.

At some point, someone will sue the bejeezus out of these websites. And they will win.

Can 4chan sustain millions in legal fees and damages? Buzzfeed? Your blog?

The justice system, at least in the United States, is reactive rather than proactive. As such, it takes the courts years to catch up with cultural shifts, especially in communications. The first lawsuits effecting social media only emerged in the last few years. They’ll keep coming. And soon, they’ll change the way we are able to report, retort and even retweet.

Buckle up.

Daily deadlines. Huge audiences. High expectations. The big marketing blogs attract readerships that rival small newspapers, but with only a fraction of the staff. And there’s one key role inside every great marketing blog: The Editor.

They’re often behind the scenes, in the shadow of a more famous celebrity blogger. They rarely get (or take) much credit. But these people make it happen. They’re the keepers of calendars and the champions of quality.

So let’s get to know our local blog editors. We picked our favorite marketing blogs and emailed a few questions to the current and recent editors. Here’s the lineup…

Sonia Simone

Chief Marketing Officer (and co-founder) of Copyblogger Media and publisher of the Copyblogger blog.

Sean Work

Editor of the KISSmetrics blog.

Georgina Laidlaw

Until recently, Georgina was an editor for ProBlogger. She is also a freelance writer.

Russ Henneberry

Until recently, Russ was the editor of Daily Egg, the Crazy Egg blog.

Jess Ostroff

Editor of Convince & Convert. Also (among many other things) Jess is the Director of Calm at Don’t Panic Management.

Jay Kelly

VP – Operations of SME Digital and Editor of Social Media Explorer

Question 1.

As the editor of a blog, how do you spend most of your time?

SONIA: Planning out content — getting the balance right, working with writers to develop ideas, and keeping an ear to the ground to find out what readers are most interested in. That and cutting extra words.

SEAN: Emailing

GEORGINA: When I was editor atProBlogger, my time was divided between fielding submissions and editing those we’d accepted. We published about 15 pieces a week then, so there was a lot of editing, but also a lot of submission review.

JESS: Vetting guest post ideas, scheduling new content, and editing, editing, editing! You’d be surprised at how unpolished some of our posts are before they get through the system.

RUSS: I used to spend most of my time working with articles that came in and heavily editing them to ensure their success.  I have realized that it is a far better use of my time to find good people and work directly with them to understand the audience, generate article topics and train them on the style and formatting that works well on the blog.

JAY: I am fortunate in that most of our contributors do not require heavy edits, however I do spend a lot of time formatting posts and selecting pull quotes for aesthetic purposes. I also spend a good bit of time researching and reaching out to potential new authors.

Question 2.

What really pisses you off about your job? Anything?

SONIA: Comment spam. If I say one more word about it, I’m going to start to curse.

SEAN: Unnecessarily long emails. I really value “straight to the point” emails because it helps me get through my day faster.

GEORGINA: The thing that always gets to me about editing is that I’m a writer, so while there’s a level of satisfaction involved in editing, it always ended up being outweighed by frustration. This is why I left a regular editing job to be a freelance writer, and why I stopped working on ProBlogger as a freelance editor this year: because ultimately I wanted to focus on writing.

JESS: Dealing with Jay Baer all the time. Just kidding! It pisses me off when people ask to contribute to the site but then ask ME what I want them to post about. I also hate when people don’t read the directions in our guest blogging guidelines and contact forms. Reading directions is a really important skill, and we often ignore submissions that don’t follow our instructions.

RUSS: One word: trolls.

JAY: My biggest pet peeve is when a guest blogger takes the time to prepare a compelling post, then does not monitor or respond to comments.

Question 3.

Guest posting has become super popular.  Any suggestions for guest bloggers on how to pitch a post?

SONIA: Know the blog! *Really* know it. Write for the blogs you love, not the ones you think will be most “strategic.” Because the ones you love are also the ones you’ll get the greatest value from in the long run.

SEAN: Don’t just pitch posts for backlinks. Show that you’re an authority on a particular topic – it will go a long way…

GEORGINA: My main piece of advice would be to get to know the blog before you pitch. So many people wasted so much time (theirs and mine) by pitching inappropriate posts to ProBlogger. Also, provide detail in your pitch, so the editor knows exactly what you’ll cover. The more work you put into your pitch, the easier it’ll be to write the post—and make it relevant to the host site’s readership.

JESS: Show me that you’ve actually read the blog and know our audience. If you offer an idea that we JUST wrote about, that is too basic for our readers, or has nothing to do with our preferred topics, you’re doing it wrong. On the other hand, pitching an idea on how you can enhance a specific topic that we frequently write about or offer a creative take on something we haven’t touched upon is always a good way to go.

RUSS: Firstly, understand that most blog editors LOVE guest bloggers… if they are good.  Here’s how to be good at the pitch:

The first thing I am looking for is ANY indication that you have ANY idea what this blog is about.  If the pitch looks like a canned email — I don’t even respond.  Start with something like “I read the article ‘XYZ Article Title’ and really enjoyed it. I think I have an idea for an article that your readers will really love.  Would you be interested in that?”

Also, in the initial email provide links to articles on your own blog or other blogs that you have written that are comparable to what you aim to write for the target blog.

That’s it.  Keep it short and personalized to each individual blog.  If the editor is interested they will reply back that they would like to discuss your article idea. These are the kind of pitches that make blog editors smile.

JAY: Guest bloggers are a great way to get additional perspective on issues.  What I am typically looking for is something that pushes the envelope on thinking.  If you are pitching something like “5 Tips on Using Twitter” or a basic how-to idea, chances are good that I won’t publish it.

Question 4.

Have you ever published something you didn’t agree with?

SONIA: I try hard not to do that. I will say that I’m still not 100% convinced by Sean’s position in this post: There is No ROI in Social Media Marketing.

SEAN: Maybe? Can’t really remember off the top of my head. We do A LOT of publishing over at KISS. Usually, if I think someone is giving incorrect information I will make it correct or I will ask someone who knows more about the topic.

GEORGINA: Yes! As a non-technical editor of brand blogs, I’ve frequently published content I don’t personally agree with, but which represents common or popular practice. I’m not a specialist in all areas of blogging, so at some points you need to trust your writers.

JESS: Honestly, not really. I really believe in the stance that Convince & Convert takes when it comes to no hype marketing and that vision holds true when we’re publishing content from other people as well.

RUSS: I certainly don’t publish articles that I don’t agree with because they are factually inaccurate but I will absolutely publish something I disagree with that is debatable.  I have published marketing advice that I disagree with philosophically, strategically and tactically but there must be proof.  As Edward Deming said “In God we trust; all others must bring data.”

JAY: Fortunately, I have never been in the position where I’ve been faced with publishing something that I have flat out disagreed with.  The beauty of being an editor is that through our contributors, I have the opportunity to expand my knowledge base and see issues from different points of view.

Question 5.

How far in advance to you schedule your content?

SONIA: Typically 2-3 weeks, but there’s always a certain amount of last-minute juggling.

SEAN: Usually a couple of weeks. However there is a constant game of musical chairs being played every week

GEORGINA: At ProBlogger I scheduled between 2 and 4 weeks in advance. That sounds like a lot, but we received a stack of submissions on a constant basis, and my years editing other sites before that one proved to me that a big buffer is a good buffer—especially when you’re the only one working on content. It’s important to have the flexibility to drop things in as you need to, and to remain current, but it’s also important from a professionalism and consistency standpoint to maintain a regular schedule of high quality posts.

JESS: I usually try to have things scheduled the week before they publish, but sometimes it doesn’t happen until the day before depending on when the content is received. For guest posts, we’re often scheduled out anywhere from 3 weeks to 6 weeks in advance, although final formatting doesn’t usually happen until the week before. If I have the time, I’ll get a bunch of them edited and scheduled weeks in advance, but finding that kind of time is a luxury

RUSS: My writers often have ideas in the queue as much as 3 months ahead.  Our blog does not attempt to cover things that are necessarily timely or news oriented (a la Mashable) so we are able to stay away from having to be responsive to the latest newsflash.  Finished (or close to it) content is usually scheduled two weeks ahead.

JAY: I schedule out three months as far as who is responsible for posts on particular days, and begin reviewing ideas.  I request their final drafts the Sunday before the post is scheduled to run.  Typically Sunday evening and Monday morning are spent scheduling posts for the week.

Bonus Question:

How did you land that awesome job?

SONIA: I was incredibly tenacious and I made myself incredibly useful. I’ve found that’s a good combination.

SEAN: Being a henchman for Neil Patel back in the day. I managed his SEO agency while he flew around the world doing deals. I went on to start O.C. Search Consulting  and he came back at me with an “offer I couldn’t refuse”.

GEORGINA: I landed the job through a referral. The Blogging Ninja (Shayne Tilley) was a friend of Darren’s, and when Darren needed an editor, Shayne very kindly recommended me! Darren and I met and discussed the site and his plans, and the rest is history.

JESS: I interned for one of Jay’s interactive agencies back in 2007 when I was still in college. He graciously allowed me to be his virtual assistant at the end of 2009, and my responsibilities have grown ever since! I think proving that I was extremely detail-oriented and somewhat of a grammar snob has served me well.

RUSS: I got this wonderful job by writing and being in the trenches.  I think it’s hard to gain the expertise need to be a true teacher (which is what a lot of bloggers are) without both honing your skills as a writer and doing the grunt work of your industry.  In my case this meant developing, executing and measuring the marketing for real businesses.

JAY: I run the operations side of SME Digital (the agency division of Social Media Explorer) and I fell into this position when Jason accepted a new role with Café Press.  It has been trial by fire for me, but he had established a pretty well-oiled machine that I was able to jump right into.

Wrap It Up

Let’s wrap up this round up with a few observations.

• These people are busy. Don’t waste their time. If you’d like to partner with them, do your homework first.
• They know what they’re doing. They’ve seen it all before. They’re job is to keep quality high. Of course, spammers make them cranky.

Huge thanks to the blog editors who participated. You guys deserve more credit. I really believe that. And by the way, the answers you provided required no editing at all. Not a comma out of place, naturally…

Google is about to augment your reality. Google Glass adds an overlay of rich data to your real-time sensory experience. You can visually index your surroundings, conduct Google searches, capture and share pictures and videos, and even translate your voice into another language.

Amazing? Absolutely. Dangerous? Potentially.

Consider this: you have no right to privacy in terms of where you travel on the public streets. Would you want someone wearing one of these headsets snapping a photo of you entering an adult store? What if someone captures a couple’s romantic moment on a bridge, and it turns out they’re engaged in an extramarital affair?

To be sure, such things happen already, with the advent of smartphones, but Google Glass enhances the AR experience with features including facial recognition. If the amorous couple you photograph using the service is online (and who isn’t nowadays?), they could be exposed publically (pardon the pun) when you share the picture using social media.

The Google Glass user could potentially be called as a witness in court to lay the foundation for the photo’s admissibility. No one has time to become involved in potentially limitless third-party litigation.

Some people refer to Google Glass and similar technology as “Terminator vision,” referring to the way cyborgs from the famous movie franchise see relevant data points pop up about whatever is in their line of vision. I think of it as “stalker vision.”

Smartphones already make it possible for creeps to surreptitiously snap pictures of people, but the facial recognition component affords an immediate and potentially dangerous level of access to information that, even now, can’t be accessed instantaneously.

The facial recognition component affords an immediate and potentially dangerous level of access to information

I liken it to the not so distant past in which mortgages were kept on file at the Registry of Deeds. Your home address, how much you purchased your home for, and how much you borrowed from the mortgage lender was all public information (and still is), but one had to know where to look, and physically go to the Registry of Deeds to find that information. Now, it’s easily accessible via an online search.

Imagine if someone were to see you on a train, scan you with Google Glass, find your name via your public social media presence, then index that name and your current location against public property information. In less time than it takes to get a mocha latte, that person could have enough information about you to stalk you (or worse).

Check your settings on your social networks and disable suggested photo tags, facial recognition, and anything similar. This won’t insulate you from risk, but it’s a good first step.

A somewhat less sensational aspect of potential risk arises in terms of intellectual property. The companies that own copyright in popular films, music and other commodities have been known to sue for incidental capture of copyrighted material that people use in films or post online. In most instances, the copyright owner issues a takedown notice, the offending video or post is removed by YouTube (or Facebook, or Twitter, etc.), and that’s the end of it, but it doesn’t have to be.

The company could sue you for posting allegedly infringing content. Even if you ultimately win (and you just might), the cost of defending a copyright infringement lawsuit is more than the average person can afford, and they settle to avoid the time and money it would take to defend the suit.

Google Glass technology could potentially be used to surreptitiously capture trade secrets

Similarly, Google Glass technology could potentially be used to surreptitiously capture trade secrets or other confidential information. Consider waiting in line at the doctor’s office or at the bank. How much sensitive information do you necessarily reveal in those situations? The safest assumption is that, if you see a Google Glass headset, it’s operational and recording. You may be wrong, but behave as though you’re right. You’ll be glad you did.

These days, it’s nearly impossible to “live off the grid,” even if you wanted to. Many share legitimate privacy concerns, and technology like Google Glass is developing much more quickly than legislation can evolve to address potential misuse.

Short of renting your home and deleting your social media presence, however, the best you can do is to police your settings, disable facial recognition whenever possible, and look up from your own smartphone now and then to see if anyone’s Googling you. If they are, Google them back. At least then you’ll know who you’re dealing with.

Note: I wrote the following for Watch.tv. It’s republished here with permission. 

If your business has been on the World Wide Web for more than about 12 minutes, you understand that the most powerful and proven way to attract customers online is through search. That’s so much the case that an entire industry evolved to help businesses optimize for Google, Bing, Yahoo and friends. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a powerful driver of traffic. Since the two primary ways to make money online are to increase traffic or increase conversions, well … it’s important.

But social media has thrown SEO for a bit of a loop. Now, instead of bouncing around the Internet from website to website, perhaps stopping on the occasional message board or forum, people are spending time on social networks. And when they’re on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and the like, they’re doing something they didn’t do before: They’re leaving content in their wake. The search engines know this, and know this content — in the form of Tweets, Facebook posts and even YouTube comments — is perhaps more valuable to consider in search algorithms since it comes from actual consumers having conversations.

Thus, the term and practice of “Social Search,” has emerged. Now, in addition to traffic, links and directory listings, your web content’s search engine rankings can also be affected by “Like”s, ReTweets, +1s on and so on. These social signals add a layer of human verification that a link or piece of content are worth seeing. The more social proof a given piece of content has, the better chance it has of ranking higher than competing content, provided all other entires in the algorithm for each are the same.

Like written content, video can be optimized for search. But it can also be optimized for social. While the two tactics are similar, there are some subtle differences, too. To understand them, we first need to understand the two audiences you’re optimizing for.

Spiders And Spies

Optimizing your content — video or otherwise — in the context of search engines means you’re optimizing it for two audiences. I call them Spiders and Spies. Spiders — the Web bots that crawl and index websites — are the ones that most SEO professionals focus on. If Google’s spiders index your site and it is set up to give those spiders strong, optimized information for the keywords for which you wish to rank well, you have a good chance of doing just that. Certainly, there are other factors involved — traffic, in-bound links, age of site and so on — but feeding clear information to Google, Bing, Yahoo and other web indexes so they know how and what to rank your site for is the main execution.

Spies, in my labeling, implies people who are viewing your content. You have to optimize for human beings too. Not only does your content have to be readable, you have to remember that you can rank No. 1 for a given search term, but if the No. 2 ranked item has a sexier headline, it may get more clicks. Once the search engine result page (SERP) is presented, bots no longer matter. It’s people that actually click.

Similarly, bots don’t share your content on social networks. People do. And it’s these people and their sharing, liking, thumb-upping (Is that a word?) and so on — sends the all-important social signals to search engines about your content. Those social signals help produce more relevant results for the searcher.

This video will further explain:

The One Key To Optimization

There are thousands of articles and blogs and even entire companies founded upon teaching people how to optimize their website and online content for search. You probably can’t navigate through less than five random pages from any handful of websites in the world without seeing an ad, a blog post or some other enticement to show you how to optimize your online presence. And knowing and understanding SEO and all of its intricacies can certainly help your business.

Similarly, there are thousands of blogs and advice-givers in the world of social media. And they can help you understand what social media is, how content is used there and how you can optimize social media for your business.

But at the end of the day, I’ve found that only one real tactic matters in winning search — both via bot and person — and the all-important battle of share with your online content. The one thing you need to do every time you post, Tweet, publish a video and more is to simply create compelling content.

If your content is such that your audience reads, sees or watches it and says, “Holy Smokes!” then you’ve won. They might say, “Holy Smokes! That’s awesome!” or “Holy Smokes! That’s Interesting!” or sad, funny, informative, entertaining and so on. But if you can elicit an emotional response (i.e. — making them say, “Holy Smokes!”) then everything else takes care of itself. Why? Because when the content is “Holy Smokes” content, people link to it, share it, plus-one it and the like.

The Rest Of The Optimizing Story

The absolute worst thing you can do as a business, then, is produce boring content. This applies to your video content as well, even more so. Think about it: How many times have you hit “Play” on a YouTube video, only to quickly stop, jump to a different one or navigate away altogether? If the first few seconds don’t grab your attention and don’t make you perhaps anticipate a little, “Holy Smokes,” you’ll bail.

So the first step in optimizing your video content is making sure the content itself is awesome. You do this by thinking of your target audience, putting yourself in their shoes and asking, “What can we put in this video — script, action or otherwise — that will make me say, ‘Holy Smokes?’” If the video isn’t compelling to Spies … not Spiders … it won’t be shared, or perhaps even watched more than a few times, in the first place.

You also want to ensure the video title and description are clear in conveying to the human viewer what the video is about and perhaps entices them to view it. “Arachnid Copulatory Practices In South American Rain Forests,” is not quite as compelling as a title like, “Watch Brazilian Spiders Have Sex!” … depending upon your target audience, of course. We’ll call this the “People” headline. It also helps to keep the gist of the video in the first 50 characters of the title. That’s all that will show in a main Google search result page.

The next step is making sure the video is also compelling to the Spiders … the bots, not the Brazilian ones. You do this in a few ways:

• Make sure your title contains the primary keyword for which you wish to rank.
• Make sure your video META data (the video description and tags) include the primary and perhaps even some complimentary or secondary keywords you’re targeting.
• Where relevant, add the date and location of the video. Search engines reward recency and if you’re a local business, local searchers will find you in priority over non-local businesses.
• If you post or embed your videos to a website, as well as YouTube or similar video sharing sites, look into creating (or have your web developer create) a video site map to submit to the search engines. If you use Google Webmaster Tools, you can find instructions on how to do this in their help area.
• After your video has run for a few weeks, or even a month or two, return to it and edit your “People” headline to be more search engine friendly. The initial unveiling of the video will attract more views because of social shares. After they’ve died down, your primary traffic driver will be the search engines. Make it more bot friendly after the sizzle has worn off.

Now you’re ready to post, but your optimization job isn’t done! Remember those social signals that also feed the search algorithm? Well, they won’t manufacture themselves. Certainly, if you have a big online audience already subscribed to your YouTube channel or blog, you’re way ahead of the game, but most content needs promotional help as well. My friend and author Jay Baer likes to say, “You have to market your marketing!”

Promote your video (or the blog post or page where it is embedded) on your social channels. If you have a group of loyal customers or fans, email them and ask them to share the video with their networks (if they like it, of course). And, quite frankly, if you really want to boost the traction of your web videos, you can also budget some dollars for Facebook or Pay-Per-Click advertising to the page as well.

(INSIDER TIP: Most of the “Viral” videos on YouTube are either promoted by celebrities or views are paid for to get the view count over 100,000 or more. It’s black-hat/unethical in many people’s minds, but that’s the big secret to “virality.” The content has to be good, but you also often have to pay for it.)

The more people you get your video in front of, the more social traction you’ll get. The more social traction you get, the more people will see it, the better it will rank in search and the more long-tail traffic you’ll see on the video as a result.

Don’t Forget The One Key To Optimization

Regardless of the minutia of keyword-ing this and back-linking that, the one true key to optimizing any Web content is making sure the content itself rocks. Keep that “Holy Smokes!” rule in mind when you’re creating your videos, Tweeting, blogging or even writing copy for your Web redesign or landing page and, in general, you’ll be successful.

If you don’t know the newspaper business is broken by now, I’m sorry about your decade-old coma. No, I’m not one to proclaim print media to be dead. But we are certainly planted squarely in the midst of a massive shift in how news is disseminated, who receives it and how reliable it is.

I fear that more and more newspapers and other online versions of trusted media outlets moving to paid subscription models is ultimately an assault on literacy. As you may know, I serve on the board of directors for the National Center for Family Literacy. This subject is close to my heart. I don’t speak for the NCFL here, only offer my own opinions, but I don’t come to this conclusion lightly.

Forcing the general population to pay for news of the day content is turning them away from requisite knowledge for day-to-day economic, social, professional and personal success. And media outlets everywhere are clamoring to slap a “for less than the cost of a cup of coffee per day” paywall on that requisite knowledge.

Gating news prevents functional literacy in the populace.

Gating news prevents functional literacy in the populous.

So, Gannett (owner of over 80 daily newspapers including mine, The Courier-Journal), the New York Times, the Washington Post and others are inadvertently setting the United States up for a crippling void in the population’s basic ability and knowledge to function in our world.

Certainly, there will be cries of blasphemy here. “You couldn’t get the printed publication for free before the Internet! How can you make such claims?! “

Well, you could get the publication for free before. At your local library. The way paywalls and systems are set up for Internet-based, subscription services, there’s no free access to anyone. Passing that financial burden along to local libraries isn’t yet, but should soon be, criminal.

A person could also benefit from the knowledge of the local newspaper or magazine via pass-along reading. One person subscribes or buys, then leaves it at the barber shop or doctor’s office. Another picks it up. Broadcast media has always been free to passers by. You can hear the radio in department stores or see televisions in public lobbies and restaurants.

But on the Internet, these media outlets are building not just paywalls, but brick walls between ordinary citizens and critical, life-anchoring information.

Doomsday scenario? Perhaps. One would like to think there will always be a loophole for free content. I lamented last week that my local daily paper and its new, online subscription model, had lapsed on me. Its 30-day, free-access cookie expired on my various computers and devices and, thus, I couldn’t access the entirety of its site without first paying.

I’ve since learned that there are various loopholes … everyone gets 20 free stories a month … links from social networks don’t block you, etc. … but still. They’re blocking my consumption of the news to a degree. If I choose not, or can’t afford to pay the subscription fee, I’m going to be kept from content, some of which could be critical news I need to be successful in life. (And to avoid the lamentations of the anal retentive, I use the pronoun “I” to apply generally to anyone, including the poor, homeless, etc., not just me — Jason Falls.)

Don’t misunderstand! I would never argue that journalism and journalists are not worth paying for. It takes salaries, benefits, resources, supplies, travel and the like to fund someone to create the content that is news for these outlets. In the past, it has always been advertising — and perhaps some degree of subscription-based or audience purchase — that has paid for the content. But that model then and now is broken. Something new needs to happen.

But that something new should not prevent the young, the old; the rich, the poor; the left, the right; the educated and the not from accessing the most precious commodity on Earth: Knowledge.

Disclaimer #1: I love The Beatles. I’ve worn out every album.
Disclaimer #2: I love the Stones too. I’ve worn out the first 75 albums or so.

If you sent me to a desert island with only one of these bands’ platters, I’d pack The Beatles discography (and my luggage fees would surely be lower).

Love is all you need

The Beatles: Good Day Sunshine… Sun King… Here Comes the Sun… “Take a sad song and make it better.” Peace. Love. The Beatles may have alluded to darker themes every now and then, but you have to admit they had a fairly sunny disposition.

The Stones: Paint it Black… Sympathy for the Devil… Their Satanic Majesties Request… “Yeah, a storm is threatening my very life today.” Rape. Murder. A few tender love songs may have sneaked into the Stones’ sets, but it would be fair to say the band painted with darker brush strokes.

War children, it’s just a shot away

You’re probably not paying close attention to The Stones anymore, but their new hit is called “Doom and Gloom.” Lovely.

Eight Days a Week…

I’m online reading headlines, searching for advice, inspiration, and success stories. And I find them. The sunny side is up and online in millions of articles and papers, and books, and videos, and interviews and… zzzzzzzz.

Ooh. Sorry. I must have dozed off on you. I was starting to bore myself. Happens all the time.

But I can’t get no… no satisfaction

I try and I try and I try.

Here’s the deal. I’m a professional marketing writer. I get happy when I’ve written some abrasive, ironic, devilish headline because I know it will stop readers in their tracks. It’ll get them to read. That’s my job description.

But my clients sometimes make my job harder. It’s seems when I’m going “na-na-na, I nailed it” they’re going “no-no-no, you missed. “It sounds negative.”

It seems my clients flush at fiery. They want friendly.

They want to compromise my statement, neutralize my stance and sanitize my dirty tricks. They want to make sure we don’t turn anyone off. I say, but if we do that we won’t turn anyone on either.

It’s positively boring to be positive all the time

I called Mick and Keith to corroborate my story, but they were at the bank cashing checks. So I did the next best thing. I went to one of the websites I read (and write for) and reviewed their top five stories of the past month as measured by page views.

Guess what I found? One Beatle. Four Stones. Check out phrases lifted from four of the top five stories:

• “The Social Media Marketing Honeymoon is Over”
• “The Engagement Disconnect Between Consumes and Brands Rages On”
• “Is Small Business Social Media a Waste of Time”
• “Is Facebook Becoming Irrelevant?”

(Gasp.) These are very compelling headlines, but the list oozes negativity. And however engaging they may be, far too often clients shy away from these types of approaches. Safe feels better.

“Can you give it a positive spin?”

If I had a dime for every time my client asked me this question.

Here’s a slice of my day today (and most of my days). Short version:

My client’s hosting a “hackathon.” That is, internally, their mostly technically inclined workforce will be invited to blow off work for a day and participate in a free-form brainstorm, a think tank sort of thing. Google made this mainstream and gearheads everywhere (in California) are going gaga.

Anyhoooooooow… My task was to write a teaser email not to spill all the beans, but to plant a little seed, apparently a harmless one.

I wrote (as a subject line, mind you): “A Big Storm is Coming.”

When you open the email, which you will because [1] it’s from your boss and [2] you want to know what the the email is about, you learn this big storm is actually a company wide brainstorm session. Brilliant, I know.

It seems the marketing director doesn’t agree. I get this: “That ‘storm’ thing could be interpreted as negative.

My response: “Yep. That’s good. Everyone will read the email.”

Client counters: “Nope. It’s bad. We want everyone to be positive about the event. Could you give it a positive spin?”

My response (mentalized, but not verbalized): Spin this.

Tomorrow will be a nice day

Did you like that subhead? It’s very pleasant, I know. It’s no wonder you’re still reading (he said sarcastically). Ugh. You got me. It’s the lamest sentence I’ve ever written.

Tomorrow a crap storm shall strike

I guess that one sounds kind of negative. Why do I love it so much? We both know everyone will keep reading. So tell me, do the only good lines comprise good news? Is being upbeat the only way to get readership up?

Stop. Being. So. Positive. Or at least stop being so negative about not being positive.

I get to pick the last tune

The jukebox has two tunes in it. Never heard either. One’s called “Let it Be.” The other one is only different by a few letters. It sounds kind of dark and quite possibly negative. I can’t listen to both. I have just one quarter.

I’ve got to make a choice. I choose “Let it Bleed.”

Whaddaya’ say?  Are you ready to cut through the clutter and stop being so positive?

I’m a writer. The day I figured out that was the best way to describe the essence of what I do, my craft, my calling … life made more sense.

Sure, I can blog. I can write a book. I can write silly emails to friends (and sometimes do for fun). It manifests itself in multitudes of ways, but regardless of what other labels people want to put on it, I’m best described as a writer.

As a creative type, though, I’m also quirky, often disorganized and overburdened with things I’ve said, “yes,” to. Finding the time to write, even when therapeutically the action is needed to keep me from going bonkers, is sometimes a challenge. Fortunately, I have people around me like Kat who can see when I need a kick in the pants.

She brought me Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art recently and told me I should read it. When Kat tells me I should read something, I should. So I did. And now I’m recommending it to you should you be a creative sort of any kind — writing, music, art.

The War of Art is an instructional manual for those needing to overcome Resistance. It is the force that keeps us from not only sitting down to commence work, but believing in our work, delivering it to an audience and putting that craft in its proper place — above most all else in our lives — to empower us to be more productive, fulfilled and successful.

I’ll leave the finer points to your reading, but here’s what I learned from The War of Art:

• I am a writer first and foremost. I knew this, but the reaffirmation was nice.
• Resistance is not just procrastination, but self-doubt, busy-ness, family needs, personal care and more. Anything that keeps you from practicing your craft and producing your art is Resistance. You have to fight it, always.
• You can prescribe, schedule and force creativity. It’s all about developing the habit of doing so, which can’t be forced instantly. It takes time to build the habit. Once the habit is there, the creativity shortly follows.
• Your writing doesn’t define you. You define it. The other way around and you’ll be miserable painted in that box.
• It’s perfectly fine to spend hours, days, weeks, even months crafting something that doesn’t sell, succeed or even get consumed by another human, so long as it satisfies your need to create.
• Success is measured best in the journey, not the destination. For the destination (sales, royalties, speaking engagements, etc.) will probably change, setting you on different journeys.

There’s a damn good chance that you have some project hanging over you. Maybe it’s professional — like the 2013 plan or that RFP for a new web design — but it could be personal — a touching short story you want to write about your mother or finally sitting down to sculpt the outline if your first novel. The only thing stopping you is Resistance.

Read The War of Art and you’ll not only understand, you’ll overcome.

Long before there was a somewhat successful business side of me, there was a modestly successful funny side. Falls, off the Rocker began as a newspaper column, became a blog when the paper fired me for not liking my sense of humor, and I explored several other avenues of trying to be funny. (I did say the success was modest, right?)

One of my writing pursuits took me to The Daily Idea, which was a neat video magazine concept created by Todd Earwood and Rob May in 2007. Todd, now the CEO of TryItLocal, and Rob, now the CEO of Backupify, would probably prefer me not remind people in the business world they once paid me to write borderline dirty jokes for a fledgling Internet TV show, but that’s one of the awesome powers of blogs — I can screw with them forever. Heh.

At any rate, one of our more popular episodes was my man-on-the-street interviews about Thanksgiving. I drudge it up every now and again here to simply give you something fun to watch and say thank you for reading. I’m thankful for you. All of us at SME are. So enjoy this and have a wonderful holiday.

You will know you’ve graduated beyond the superficiality of social media marketing when you shed the “social media” label from your thinking. Certainly, I’ve built a nice reputation by talking a lot about social media in the last few years. But social media is a small part of what will drive customers to buy or try, think or say.

In our book, No Bullshit Social Media, Erik Deckers and I playfully talk about the hippies and tree-huggers — the social media purists — who think social media success is best measured by how warm and fuzzy your warm and fuzzies are, and how many times you get to sing “Kumbaya” with your customers. Granted, there’s nothing wrong with warm and fuzzy or “Kumbaya,” but neither make social media marketing successful.

Another thing the purists are married to is an unrealistic ethical positioning. For instance, instead of embracing advertising as an integral part of a marketing plan, they tend to insult it as if ads are not effective at all. They call email marketers spammers and look down their noses at people who still spend money on Pay-Per-Click and online media campaigns.

And god forbid you actually take out an ad on Facebook?! Sacrilege.

At the Word of Mouth Marketing Association’s conference in Las Vegas last week, B.J. Mendelson, author of Social Media is Bullshit, and Dave Kerpen, author of Likable Socia Media, had a debate over whether or not social media was, indeed, bullshit. In the discussion it surfaced that some authors, including Kerpen, had achieved New York Times Bestseller status by paying a public relations firm to buy the book in bulk and accordance with known data points for the list, effectively gaming the system to get their respective books featured.

The purists were aghast, I’m sure. The notion that a book made the list through means other than honest promotion, sales and public response will turn a lovely, placid social media purist into a vehement, spite-spitting monster faster than you can hit a “Like” button.

But let’s level-set here: While it may not be something people yell to their neighbors, it is generally known among authors of business books that the NYT Bestseller list is game-able. There are PR firms that openly sell the service of engineering such feats. There are concentrated, generally week-long, promotions upon launch that hopefully coincide with Amazon’s pre-orders posting to BookScan, add in some strategic bulk purchases in various markets and tah-da! Best-seller.

While not something some authors want to participate in from either a cost or ethics perspective, it’s there, it happens and while it may not be 100% fair, I dare you to find a list anywhere that is. If an algorithm goes into producing it, it can and will be gamed, particularly if someone’s income or ego depends on said lists.

The only tragedies exist in knowing the publishers themselves never invested the time or energy to figure out how to game the system to their advantage, and the New York Times doesn’t better police the practice.

Sure, there’s an ethical question at play for the author. You’d better be transparent about the activity (to my knowledge, Kerpen has been) but some will discredit you for trying it in the first place. Others will take the high road, but if someone approached you tomorrow and said, “For $12,000, I can create data points that will drive a 15% increase in sales to your business,” you’d pull out the check book if the math was right. A book on the best-seller list means higher speaking fees, more book sales, higher advances for the next book and the like.

We’re in the business of making our products look good. Gaming that list makes the product (book or author) look good. From a marketing perspective, it’s a no-brainer.

Mendelson takes advantage of this in his argument. If gaming the system gets your book on the best-seller list, then you didn’t sell it using social media like you claim. And if there are any such authors out there fooling themselves or their audiences into thinking that social media is the only way they built themselves and their business, then Mendelson is right to call them out.

But I don’t think we should get hung up on whether or not social media contributed X or Y percent to an author’s sales, a business’s profits or the growth of a brand. We are marketers, not social media marketers. If it takes a direct mail piece, an ad campaign or a public relations push to get eyeballs on our product, service or marketing; if it takes something not defined as social media to help our social media work; then it is responsible for us to pursue it.

We are not serving our brands or businesses by making our social media work. We are serving our brands and businesses by making our marketing work.

And that often takes more than one tactic or channel.

Note: I have never participated in gaming any system, that I know of, including trying to engineer either of my books to any best-seller list. Just a personal choice to date. It’s certainly something I might consider down the road, however.