I live in Boulder, CO. It’s my adopted hometown, and I like it. I enjoy the active culture, and the access to outdoor activities. I enjoy the attractive people, and the attractive places they congregate. I enjoy the hot tech scene, and the group of friends I’ve developed through it. I enjoy the sunshine.
It’s no surprise these attributes have caught people’s eye, and it’s no surprise that with people like Andrew Hyde repping the town so fervently, that it’s grown a significant following of its own. Megan Soto’s recent blog post and the comments therein are but the latest example. Just Summize ‘Boulder’ and you’ll get another.
My point here is not to discourage Megan - she’s a friend - nor to discourage others who dream of living in Boulder some day. In fact, I encourage them to come visit, live, and enjoy what we have to offer.
Rather, my point is to try and paint a more realistic picture of the city. Because frankly, while Boulder is nice, it’s no paradise.
There are dirty people here. There are too many bikes, and they run too many stop signs. There are mountain lions, and they eat humans. There are college students, and they don’t act like humans. There are 12,00 foot peaks, but they’re far away. And fuck, there’s not much water here. Or nice trees.
Minor quips aside, the bigger point is that in imitating paradise, Boulder misses out on the one thing I think makes a place divine: reality. There’s an undeniable lack of real-ness here in Boulder. Therefore the city is pleasant, but only for a little while, and only in small doses. To me, it’s rarely fulfilling, or truly life-enriching.
In fact, after an extended piece of time here, I’m readily willing to trade its comforts for everything a less comfortable place has to offer. On a Friday night lately, I’m more apt to go bowling in Longmont with all my toothless brethren than I am to sip $7 drinks in one of Boulder’s bars.
I could just be one reality-starved country boy stuck in a city that’s getting old. Or I could be highlighting an important reason why a city full of promises will fail to deliver on all of them.
Which one is it?
You tell me.
This is my user-experience story with Text Link Ads, relayed here not to bash the company, but to provide insight into an important aspect of company messaging. It would be fun if the Text Link Ads people showed up, and even better if they took steps to fix the problems I’m highlighting. But this isn’t a post to inspire a customer service crisis, or to demand better service.
The story starts with my redesign of this blog a couple months ago. I thought the blog looked better afterward, I thought it was presenting a better image, and I saw it was attracting better traffic. I figured, too, that it was time to put some ads up and take advantage of some of that traffic. I had heard of Text Link Ads before, and had heard good things. They’re supposedly strong in the startup community, and are doing cool new things with a tired old medium. That was important to me, so I checked them out.
When I got to the site, a lot of my excitement over the product seemed to be confirmed. There was a promotional video featuring influential bloggers I respect, telling viewers they recommend the product. The website was well-designed, with many of the backend features I expected. The messaging was good too, encouraging me to take a few simple steps to start making money on my blog, without cheapening the look or selling my soul. I had seen enough, so I signed up, started the process, and prepared myself for a positive user experience.
You can then probably imagine my disappointment a couple days later, when I received an email telling me I had been rejected for the service. The letter read:
Unfortunately, at this time we feel that your site http://www.brianlburns.com, does not meet our internal requirements to be accepted into the InLinks publishing program. We recommend that you continue marketing your website and generate a significant more amount of traffic to your site.
By itself, there’s nothing wrong with the message here. It’s perfectly reasonable for them to display their ads only on the sites they want, dependent on traffic, design, influence, or whatever else. What’s wrong here, was that this was the first time I was aware that my website was being judged for its eligibility. Nowhere in their original messaging does it indicate that a site has to meet certain requirements, and nowhere does it mention their criteria for rejection or acceptance. In other words, I didn’t know I was taking a test until I failed it. They set me up for rejection from high expectations, without giving me ample notice or time to prepare.
To me, this is a messaging FAIL. It indicates an overemphasis on the sale, where their copy promises whatever it takes to get you to the next step in the process. Their process, though, cannot uphold the promises of their copy, and thus, the process inevitably leads to a disappointing deadend at some point. When it does, neither side is well served - Text Link Ads has to spend time rejecting me when I could have otherwise self selected myself out of the process, and I go away from the interaction with a negative experience.
I believe Text Link Ads would be much better served to construct a more candid and realistic message about their selection process. I think they should promise less, and deliver more. Even if their numbers would seem to dip at first, their brand would grow better, and their longterm numbers would grow along with it.
The same goes for any such company committing the same messaging FAIL. I suggest you give up a little now to be honest, and gain a lot later from your honesty. Build your community now, and reap the rewards later.
Takeaway Question: Is your messaging accurately representing your company, or are you setting you and your customers up for inevitable disappointment? Also, are you doing everything possible to ensure your copy not only improves sales, but improves customer relationships and builds your community?
As a writer, I believe I’m guilty of overusing parentheses. I also believe many writers are guilty of underusing them. Given the discrepancy, I thought it would be helpful to write down some quick rules here… my guidelines on when (and when not) to use them. Keep in mind that I’m not going strictly by the book here, and that these are just my rules that I’ve found work best for my style. I encourage you to develop your own, in accordance to your own style.
To start, I prefer to think of grammar not in terms of what I can’t do, but in terms of what I can do. For example, I prefer not to think “when do rules forbid me from using parentheses?” But rather, “how and when can I use parentheses to enhance my writing?” In accordance with that approach, here are the two main cases in which I use parentheses to make my writing better:
- I use them for adding information that I want to include, but that I don’t want people to read in the context of a certain sentence. This is the classic creative use, and comes in handy for sentences like “I bought a movie ticket for Jenny (to a bad romantic comedy) because I was hoping to get some action in the back of the theater.” More to the point of business copy, it comes in handy for sentences like “Our new product release (set for June 3rd) will feature a new iphone app, and contextual advertising opportunities.”
- I use them to add the proper intonation and proper flow. This one is less traditional, but comes from my belief that good writing reads like we speak - that’s how people are used to consuming information, and I still think that’s how they consume it best. And if you do you listen to people talk, we say many things below our breath - not everything is spoken with the same power. In short, I use parentheses (just like this), to imitate that kind of speech. It’s not like a set of commas, which emphasizes what lies between them, and it’s not like a hyphen - those strongly mark a new point. It’s just like a set of parentheses (so nice, yet simple), and I think it works.
Obviously I omitted a couple arcane uses of parentheses here, like enclosing numbers in a list, or enclosing monetary figures on a sheet. But I think I covered the two big ones, that you can keep an eye out for using (and using well). As always, though, too much of a good thing is not good at all. That’s especially the case for parentheses because they’re visually demanding, and take up a good deal of physical space. So as much as you keep an eye out for utilizing parentheses in these instances, keep an eye out for cutting them in other instances.
Your Input: did I miss any obvious uses here? are there any you like, that I didn’t touch on here? any here that you dislike (and would like removed)? did you catch what I did, in the last sentence of list-item 2? eh, eh?
