Please click the link at left to visit the new home of Writer Way at WriterWay.com.

Saturday, January 5, 2008

Off pitch

The excellent email newsletter Get to the Po!nt showcased a couple of marketers who pitched their story to the media via a handwritten note—more specifically, a digital photo of a handwritten note.

Clever idea, I thought. But when I clicked to read the note introducing Getting to First Base, a Social Media Marketing Playbook, I was less than impressed with their execution.

There are better ways to get to first base than on a grammatical/spelling error.

4 comments:

  1. Thanks for the linkage. I said this over on David's site, but I'll say it here, too. We made a bunch of these, so we're liable to make an error here or there.

    The more important lesson, however, is that grammar and spelling matter much less than we writers would like to think. We got the result, after all--David blogged about the letter, and we sold some books.

    I used to work as a technical writer, writing software manuals. They always shipped with a bunch of typographical errors--there was never bandwidth to fix them all. And yet, people still managed to use our software.

    ReplyDelete
  2. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  3. We got the result, after all

    You got a result. In my case that result was to show me that you're bad at details, and you don't care.

    Making a mistake is not a crime, it happens to the best of us. How you deal with that mistake makes all the difference though, and I'm not impressed with how you're dealing with this.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Our goal was to get David to blog about the book. So, I'm comfortable calling that "the result".

    I'm sorry you're unimpressed. If you want to see a minor error in our marketing campaign as a synecdoche for the entire book, feel free. I'd be happy to send you a free copy to check out--just shoot me an email at ebook [at] capulet [dot] com.

    ReplyDelete