Q. Is it correct to use parenthesis to indicate the possibility of a noun as singular or plural? Example: Child(ren).
A. I wouldn’t. It’s not so much an issue of correctness as of ickiness.

I love Jeff Sexton like a brother. But sometimes I feel like a mildly slow, older brother. We have very interesting Skype chats where he uses some awfully big words.  I often find that I’m forced to just play along and occasionally grunt in monosyllabic agreement as he expounds on some exacting detail of this, my only language. Glib, I am. (I actually had to look up the word “glib” when someone in an online forum used it to describe my writing.) In high school, my teacher gave up on ever getting me to successfully conjugate the verb “to be”.

As a zen-like Master of Glib, my natural inclination for drafting this post was to simply write, “Heh, heh. Cool. Check it out.” But, you’d probably think I was trying to Rickroll you.

So, I was thrilled to read some of these priceless questions and answers without actually having to fork over $30 to get access to the real meat and potatoes of the style guide. Behold! You can subscribe to all of the newest questions at the low, low price of FREE!

If you’re not careful, you might learn something that will keep “ickiness” at bay in your writing.

Have a look at the Q & A section. What’s your favorite?

A friend recently sent me a link to “The Breakup” on Geert’s blog, where I discovered that they released the sequel just a couple of days ago. Check it out for yourself: “Inspiration, anyone?”

I still have to ask how this ties into Microsoft Digital Advertising. Don’t get me wrong. I love the sequel. I love the message. I’ve watched it a dozen times already.

Sure, most of us can connect the proverbial dots, so long as they reside on the same page. But if you watch this video out of context (which is how we watch most viral videos), what is your next step? Sure, they tell me where to go at the end of the film, but how about a few more clues? What should I expect when I get there? The minimalist approach to messaging might work for some, but folks with money to spend need a bit more incentive than just a trail of clever breadcrumbs, don’t you think?

. .

UPDATE: Jeff Sexton explains 3 Things Viral Videos Must Do to Make Money.

Well, your website isn’t much different. Each day, visitors come to your site, hoping to find someone they can trust. The strange thing is that people tend to think that the words they use online are somehow different than the words they use face-to-face. They’re not. But online, you need to be even more careful about how you relate to would-be customers. They’ve got less to go on. Looking you in the eye isn’t an option, and talk remains cheap — even if it’s in the form of web copy. So, it’s your job to change that around; an especially difficult thing for smaller and/or local brands.

Today, I’m going to show you how one of my clients, Roof Life of Oregon (www.rooflife-oregon.com), used Persuasion Architecture™ to replace their own, virtual roof. I’ll show you how each page uses trust-building elements to create persuasive momentum with the customer to make them feel at home.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Have you used any of these techniques before? Are there any websites you like to visit that inspire confidence? Ones that need fixing?

If you have questions about how to build trust online, please share them in the comments.

As we look at how Cabelas.com and BassProShops.com prepare to catch the Early Bird customer, consider the following:

• Relevance — If they’re not ready yet, don’t get carried away. (Is your website proposing marriage on the first date?)
• Screen Space — Early Birds need to know that they’re welcome, right from the homepage. Give them enough space, and combine relevance with scent to lead them in the right direction. (Use the battleship grid to protect the Early Bird from winding up in irrelevant worm holes.)
• Scent Trails — Not even the brightest of basset hounds can help you with this one, but creating the right scent for the customer to follow is key; particularly when they’re early in the buying process, and may not even have the vocabulary to know what they should be asking. If they come in with the wrong questions, and don’t buy, they should at least leave with the right ones. Help them find their way.
• AIDAS — Awareness. Interest. Desire. Action. Satisfaction. If customers aren’t aware of you, there’s no place to move forward. If you haven’t grabbed their interest, forget it. If there’s no emotional desire to lure them in, they won’t bite. If it’s difficult for them to take action, they’ll run away. And if they’re not satisfied, they won’t return.
• Inside-the-Bottle Syndrome (the other “IBS”) — “When you’re inside the bottle, you can’t read the label.” This is the biggest challenge marketers face. They know too much about their own products, too much about their own companies. It’s the “Curse of Knowledge” and you must overcome it to persuade.

Once again, it’s time to go huntin’ for Early Birds…

(If you’re viewing this in an RSS reader, click here for video.)

If you have a moment, share one of your early-stage buying experiences with us in the comments. Which sites have done a particularly good job of persuading you to buy, or turning you off, when you were only pecking around?

Take hunting, for instance. While an experienced hunter may know exactly what she’s looking for in terms finding the right gear, a novice hunter might be more worried about his friends laughing at him for not knowing the first thing about it.

As we look at how Cabelas.com and BassProShops.com prepare to catch the Early Bird customer, consider some of these finer points:

• Scent Trails — Not even the brightest of basset hounds can help you with this one, but creating scent for the customer to follow is key; particularly when they’re early in the buying process, and may not even have the vocabulary to know what they should be asking. If they come in with the wrong questions, and don’t buy, they should at least leave with the right ones. Help them find their way.
• AIDAS — Awareness. Interest. Desire. Action. Satisfaction. If customers aren’t aware of you, there’s no place to move forward. If you haven’t grabbed their interest, forget it. If there’s no emotional desire to lure them in, they won’t bite. If it’s difficult for them to take action, they’ll run away. And if they’re not satisfied, they won’t return.
• Inside-the-Bottle Syndrome (the other “IBS”) — “When you’re inside the bottle, you can’t read the label.” This is the biggest challenge marketers face. They know too much about their own products, too much about their own companies. It’s the “Curse of Knowledge” and you must overcome it to persuade.

Once again, it’s time to go hunting for persuasion…

(If you’re viewing this in an RSS reader, click here for video.)

Check out Part 3 to learn how to catch the Early Bird before the competition does.

In the meantime, share one of your early-stage buying experiences with us in the comments. Which sites have done a particularly good job of persuading you to buy, or turning you off, when you were just trying to educate yourself?

But that’s where the analogy ends. When marketers don’t give early-stage buyers the confidence they need to move forward, it’s they who look like deer in headlights (usually around the time they look at their cart abandonment rates).

So, with hunting season upon us, we figured it was time to give Cabelas and Bass Pro Shops a try. Offline, Cabelas in particular is known as a destination spot, a must-see experience for hunters. Can they live up to that experience online? You’ll see what exactly what happens in Part 2. But first, let’s go over a few key points about persuading early-stage buyers to take action by starting out with a question: “How early is early?”

• AIDAS — Awareness. Interest. Desire. Action. Satisfaction. If customers aren’t aware of you, there’s no place to move forward. If you haven’t grabbed their interest, forget it. If there’s no emotional desire to lure them in, they won’t bite. If it’s difficult for them to take action, they’ll run away. And if they’re not satisfied, they won’t return.
• Inside-the-Bottle Syndrome (the other “IBS”) — “When you’re inside the bottle, you can’t read the label.” This is the biggest challenge marketers face. They know too much about their own products, too much about their own companies. It’s the “Curse of Knowledge” and you must overcome it to persuade.

So, without further ado, let’s go huntin’ (for persuasion)…

(If you’re viewing this in an RSS reader, click here for video.)

We’ll update you once Part 2 is up. In the meantime, if you haven’t seen it, watch as Anthony Garcia shares his early-stage buying process as he looks for car insurance for his teenage daughter. It’s an eye-opener.

Also, don’t hesitate to share your early-stage buying experiences with us in the comments. Any hunters out there who plan to buy gear online this season?

Here’s the inevitable Mash-up: Imagine taking all those photos and linking them up to every photo in Flickr that has the same subject or tag. This video from the TED conference will blow your mind when you think about how it will eventually interface with maps, books and every piece of information imaginable. The video is almost 8 minutes in length. Be sure you watch through the 2nd half. If you want to see more, there are some interesting links in the comments on the TED site.

Do you see any implications for e-commerce? Can products be linked to a brick and mortar store? Will we be able to gauge the popularity of fashions by indexing them in photo streams? Where is this going?

In the past week, I’ve read a couple of stories about the commoditization of copywriting and the outsourcing of journalism. I’ve also seen a company decide to write their copy in-house after interviewing a top-notch writer (a colleague of mine). Surely, these notions must make the publicly traded “management by quarter” crowd jubilant. We’re Saving Money!

Roy’s point with the weather report is that you should always negotiate the price of hard goods, but take great caution in negotiating the price of services. Your very existence could depend on the results.

Let’s say you saved over $2,000 on your copy, but your copywriter couldn’t connect with even 20% of your visitors. Have you really saved money?

So, how have you been saving money this quarter? What’s the true cost of your savings?

Fast forward a few hours and the three of us are having dinner at Estancia, a new Austin Churrascaria (Brazilian Barbecue). I mention that if they had wild game on the menu, you could start one of these in my little town of 6,200 people because the Cabela’s boys would keep it very busy. We share a laugh, which is then cut short by the Gaucho waiter bringing more leg of lamb past the table. Mmmmm. A nice hint of mint.

Done with dinner, we’ve beached our stuffed selves onto the furniture at the hotel and Bryan says, “You’ve got to see this YouTube video on subliminal advertising.” What brought that up? I hand him my MacBook and he quickly finds the video. Pretty cool. It all makes sense now.

I have some questions for you after you watch it.

What unspoken positive messages are you giving your customers? (on your website or in your store).

What unspoken negative messages are your customers taking from your place?

Are you giving them the ammunition they need to create positive word of mouth or negative word of mouth?

I have an old friend who is a twirler. Mostly pencils, but I’ve seen him twirl knives, forks, plates, food, even sofa cushions. He’s the kind of guy who would walk across a college campus twirling a textbook on his knuckles. Manipulating poker chips is certainly a related skill.

I’ve always felt that twirlers and the poker chip twiddlers were sending the same message: “I’ve been doing this for a long time, and I’m good at it.” The chip shuffling may intimidate other poker players. The pencil twirling just draws the attention of the rest of the people sitting around the conference table.

Most of us are twirl challenged. I never learned to twirl. I quit trying after about age 23. I don’t play poker, so chip juggling is not a skill set for me either. (Maybe I should take up Twitter.) My observation is that these people twirl things because they can.

So, what’s my point?

Take a look at the execution of your navigational elements on your web site. Are they twirling? I mean, are they distracting, or do they convey helpful information without forcing some kind of hovering activity on my end? Are the relevant sub-nav links visible?

Apple does a good job with their tab structure and grouping. Amazon even customizes the tabs if you’re signed in. It’s nice and it’s contextual. On the other end of the spectrum, here’s a site that uses some fancy stuff PLUS sound! It’s hard to read the tabs when you’re having so much fun strumming the menu like a musical instrument. It gets in the way of the visitor’s purpose.
Just because you CAN execute fancy navigational menus doesn’t mean you SHOULD.

The research has been done. The results are in. It’s conclusive.

If the purpose of your site is to get people to engage in your technology, by all means put the gadgetry front and center.

If the purpose of your site is to help people navigate a buying process, then get your pencil-twirling self out of their way and help them find the cash register instead.

A local coin dealer in Dover, Delaware pulled off a publicity stunt that got him some pretty good national attention. He "spent" a penny worth $500 and announced it to the world, or at least to Dover. The world was listening however and he got more publicity than he probably imagined. A great investment of only $500, right?

This could be the end of the story, but I wanted to know more.

I found the guy’s web site. First thing I clicked on was the Contact Us page. Wow. Closed. Your ‘contact us’ page on your web site is closed? What the heck? Clicked on Inventory…closed. Wantlist…closed. Some of them opened into new browser sessions with no other Nav and no chance to use the back button. There was content on some of the pages, but nothing on some of the key pages. (read more about the importance of the contact and about pages by following the links to Bryan Eisenberg’s ClickZ articles in this story).

OK, I finally spotted a navigation link to the tale of the $500 penny. The link was the 2nd to last on the left-nav list. Somebody found the penny today and they will be splitting the $500 reward with friends. Cool. Why wasn’t it on the home page? I can’t give you a link to the exact page because the site doesn’t work that way. Whatever I click on, I just get the main url.

We tell our clients to make sure ALL of their messaging is aligned. Don’t run a campaign (advertising or public relations, or even a publicity stunt) to drive people to your web site without making sure your web site is in order. Make sure people FIND what they are expecting to find. The real-world equivalent would be to have an residential open house and leave dirty clothes and pizza boxes lying about in the living room.

The internal message must be, “Our guests will be arriving soon…let’s clean up around here!”

My evaluation of the terrific $500 publicity stunt is that it generated much more than $500 in lost sales because of reduced confidence in the business. The business owner will think it was a success because some people mentioned it and his friends thought it was cool to get all that free publicity. Serious coin collectors left the site shaking their heads. He’ll never be able to measure those results.

There’s a great chapter in Call to Action about the use of color on your site and Jeffrey and Bryan are always talking about people using the wrong color for the right message. For example, which of the following statements delivers conflicting information because of the color and which delivers confirming information?

This item is in stock and is ready to ship!

This item is in stock and is ready to ship!

What other inconsistent or downright conflicting messages have you found on your own site? Those are the easiest to fix and not fixing them could be costing you a lot of money.

The basic secret is to find out WHO will be on the committee interviewing you and to know WHAT they will want to hear in the way of answers to their questions.

“This is John Williams (not his real name).  John tends to ask many data related questions.  He likes brevity.  Keep your answers short to him.  Make your point and be quiet.”  She pointed to the next circle.  “This is Mary Thomas, she’s very child-oriented.  She’s very warm and friendly and loves to talk.  Answer her questions and orient your answers to how children are affected.  Talk a lot with her; elaborate all your points.  She’s warm and fuzzy, so use many personal anecdotes.”  She continued around the table and when finished, it was like I had the playbook of an opposing football team.  I knew the type of questions they would ask.  I learned the type of answer each interviewer liked to hear.

This is Persuasion Architecture applied in a job interview setting. Our usual application is for your web site not your job interview. If you know who will be coming to your site and the types of questions you’ll need to answer, you can create a site that will talk to all of them in their preferred style and give them satisfactory answers to their buying questions.

In a job interview, you must satisfy everyone in the room…at least to the point of persuading them to hire you. If you can only convince one member of the committee, you probably won’t get the job.

On your site, you must be able to persuade/convert more than one type of customer or you’ll be stuck in the land of low single digit conversion rates. It isn’t easy, but it is very effective.

Company B sells one product (just one) through their web site. They are driving traffic to their site via targeted network radio. Virtually ALL of their traffic is coming directly as a result of this offline radio campaign. These visitors heard about the product, entered the url directly and have come to the site seeking more information. (Don’t you wish all of your traffic was this motivated?) Not surprisingly, Company B does quite a bit better than the industry average of 2.6% conversion. Yes, they convert around 4% of their traffic and they’re making money. A 4% conversion rate pays the bills (including close to $100k/month on radio) and puts some money in the owners’ pockets as well. It doesn’t take a math genius to figure out that each percentage increase in conversion would be worth nearly 6 figures of additional income.

Now, let’s apply some Persuasion Architecture Probability Analysis Sooper Dooper Number Crunching.

FACT 1. The probability of a visitor buying the product is 24:1 Against. (4% conversion rate).

FACT 2. If I owned a brick and mortar store and I only stocked ONE simple, inexpensive product, and 24 out of 25 potential customers (who came to my store because they already knew what they wanted) left empty handed, I would be mathematically proven to be a poor shopkeeper. AND, the ONE person who managed to buy, was probably desperate and made the purchase in spite of my worst efforts.

OK, FACT 2 is laden with opinion and isn’t much of a fact. I’ll try to be more factual from here on out.

Here’s the Persuasion Architecture Persona Probability based on the Keirsey Temperament sorter statistics: The estimated distribution of temperaments of US general population are 40-45% Guardian (we Persuasion Architects call them Methodicals), 35-40% Artisan (Spontaneous), 5-10% Idealist (Humanistic), 5-10% Rational (Competitive).

Let’s assume that the visitors to Company B’s web site are a normal cross-section of the general population. We have no reason to believe otherwise without analyzing the radio campaign.

Looking at the same visitors through the lens of a Personality Temperament Sorter tells us that these visitors are NOT all alike. In fact, if Company B were to redesign their site to speak directly to the desires of just the two biggest groups, I think we could throw away the math. If 25 Methodicals came to the site and found that the designers and writers had anticipated their every need and answered their many questions in the logical and linear manner that they prefer, there’s no doubt in my mind that quite a few more than ONE would buy the product. Math and probability be damned…I know they would sell to more of these people!

What if we did the same thing for the Spontaneous folks? Made it easy for them to get in, pay, download, install and go on their merry way in search of their next experience? Do you think more than 1 in 25 would buy? Me too.

That accounts for up to 85% of the population and we still have some other types of people out there who would like us to accommodate their needs as well. No problem.

This is what Persuasion Architecture does. The biggest misunderstanding people have is when they see PA as a technological solution when it’s really a psychological solution.

What’s the math now? No way to know for sure, because Company B can still drop the ball in quite a few ways, but I’ll bet you a new Vault Zero that the conversion rate would be higher than 4%. What do you think?