The Biggest "Don't" in Content Marketing

Don't waste people's time.

That's the big one. People are busy. They're looking for insight. Whatever they read needs to be informative and eye-opening from the opening line.

That means:

• Skip the platitudes.
  Don't tell a hospital security officer that HIPAA is important. She's knows it's important. Tell her something new or genuinely useful about how to avoid a compliance violation. 
• Don't be wordy.
  It's OK to publish long pieces, but they should pack a lot of information. Individual sentences and paragraphs, wherever they appear, must carry their weight. 
• Don't make distracting mistakes.
  Errors in grammar and spelling interrupt reading. Puzzling arguments and poor sentence construction frustrate readers. Don't give readers an excuse to look away.
• Invest in research.
  Know your subject, and know it well enough to tell your audience something they didn't already know. 
• Arm your readers.
  Here's something that absolutely doesn't waste your readers' time: Giving them insights, arguments, and hard numbers they can use to do their jobs even better than before. Help your readers justify a new approach or a new purchase. Help them become heroes at work.

When you're looking for writers, look for people who can:

• Write something original.
• Write concisely.
• Write well and build solid arguments.
• Research a subject and dig up non-obvious data.
• Provide practical and important guidance.

Spend the time to find writers who won't waste your readers' time. Your readers will thank you by turning the page and perhaps eventually making a purchase.

The U.S. Economy: Hanging In There

A good summary from The Economist:

The American economy may have slowed, but remains fundamentally strong, as it is buttressed by a healthy consumer. Personal consumption, adjusted for inflation, is up by 3% in the past year, having surged in April. The University of Michigan's consumer-confidence index . . . grew strong in May. Even before that, confidence exceeded its average during the 2003-2007 boom. According to a recent Fed survey, 69% of Americans say they are "doing okay" or "living comfortably", up from 62% in 2013. What is more, the rise has been most pronounced among those with only a high-school education.

Source: "When barometers go wrong," The Economist, June 11-17, 2016

IT Security Tip: Don't Use Hardware You Find in a Parking Lot

From an Healthcare IT News article on ransomeware attacks on hospitals:

"Department of Homeland Security officials recently conducted a test in which DHS staffers dropped computer disks and flash drives in government buildings and contractor parking lots to see how many would subsequently be used," [Bill Carey, vice president of Marketing at GoodSync] said. "Sixty percent that were picked up were plugged into office computers, and the installation rate rose to 90 percent for disks and drives bearing an official logo. The test revealed a huge security vulnerability."

Security tip: If you find hardware in a parking lot or in the street, don't plug it in.

You probably wouldn't eat a sandwich you find on a park bench. Apply the same caution with IT equipment of unknown provenance.

Movie Review: Spent: Looking for Change, A Film by American Express

This is the second of two blog posts by Madeleine Bennett about the unbanked and underbanked.

Thanks to CFSI, the FDIC, the Federal Reserve, and other organizations, we have access to plenty of statistics about the unbanked and underbanked. Beyond statistics, though, it's a little harder for those of us living "banked" lives to get a sense of the daily struggles facing the unbanked and underbanked.

That's why we're pleased that last year American Express released Spent: Looking for Change, a forty-minute documentary about the unbanked population of America. By showing firsthand the stories of several unbanked households, Spent provides valuable, balanced insight into the lives of these financially challenged and underserved households.

The film opens with a montage of interviews and encounters spliced together, the stories of several households, each struggling to stay afloat in its own way. After the film’s title, the story begins: hard-working people who have never had access to traditional banking services continue not to use them, and families with savings and bank accounts are put in the red by sudden misfortunes such as illness. Instead of traditional banking services, they use check cashing businesses, an available alternative.

But the fees for check-cashing and other alternative financial services add up. "Underserved Americans spend the same percentage of their income on fees and interest as the typical American family spends on groceries," the narrator informs us. On top of the financial loss, one of the subjects compares the work that goes into being unbanked to a part-time job. A mother estimates she uses up a quarter- to a half-tank of gas each payday driving around to pay her bills. A man who uses a prepaid card explains all the fees he is charged to spend his money, sounding frustrated as he checks off a dollar for every purchase.

Next, the film addresses the many pitfalls of credit scoring. One family explains how their lack of credit cards, which helped them avoid debt, made it impossible for them to take out loans. The man with the prepaid card tells how he accrued credit card debt as a teenager struggling to support himself and, with no real options, failed to pay it back. A young artisan who pays her student loan bill every month is still handicapped by her mountain of debt.

As for smaller debt, Spent touches on the topic of the payday loan, a relatively small loan taken out with the expectation that it will be paid back on the consumer's next payday. The title loan is a similar service, but taken out with the consumer's car as collateral and with an amount supposedly proportionate to the car's value. These loans may seem like a logical way to get people through a rough patch, but, like many other Americans, the subjects of Spent testify to the cyclical nature of payday and title loans.

Toward the end of the film, we see households going into crisis. A single mother's car is towed, a young couple is unable to find a house that will accept their credit score, and a family with an autistic child is forced to pawn their beloved possessions. The film's tone changes when it introduces new ideas for financial services, such as new microfinance operations in San Francisco and New York, one for group lending and another that lends to small entrepreneurs. The film concludes with a plea to "Share this film, lend your voice."

Spent does an excellent job of illustrating how hard-working people can slip through the cracks of the American banking system and get stuck in spirals of debt and bad credit. It spends much less time on potential solutions. Unless the viewer visits the movie’s Web site, he or she is left more or less in the dark about what can be done to help.

On the Web site, though, a section entitled "Take Action" offers six options, from the promotion of financial literacy for young people to hosting a screening of Spent and discussing it. These seem to offer a range of solutions to the question that the viewer is left asking at the end of the film: "What can I do about this?"

Perhaps, however, the question should be asked not of typical online movie-watchers, but of financial institutions themselves.

CFSI Takes a Good Look at the Unbanked and Underbanked Markets

This is the first of several posts about innovation in the financial services market. Today's post was written by Madeleine Bennett.

Last week, an unusual sort of banking conference took place in Los Angeles: the EMERGE CFSI conference, presented by the Center for Financial Services Innovation (CFSI) and American Banker. The conference provides those who do business with the unbanked and underbanked populations of America with a venue to meet, to exchange ideas, and to attend panels addressing the needs, challenges, and opportunities of this largely untapped market. The forum has attracted a range of people involved in this market, including investors, retailers, executives, and consumer advocates.

As defined by the FDIC, "unbanked" refers to households with no checking or savings account, and "underbanked" to those with one of those types of account but who mostly use alternative financial services, (AFS) such as payroll cards, non-bank check cashing, and pawn shops to manage their finances.

The title "EMERGE," adopted at last year's forum, reflects CFSI's view that the term "underbanked" "no longer adequately reflects the scope and dynamics of this market." As CFSI explains on the event Web site, this is a rapidly expanding and diversifying market. Traditional banking services per se are no longer the sole concern of the financially underserved market. The forum site highlights the urgency of the need that exists for financial services tailored to the underserved.

Up to 28% of the American population is either unbanked or underbanked, according to the Batten Institute at the University of Virginia. In a recent blog post on Forbes, the institute's Gosia Glinska describes the disturbing trend of service vendors that target the underbanked charging exorbitant rates for their services. This practice essentially keeps poor customers poor by sending them into never-ending cycles of debt and borrowing. The article estimates that the average underbanked family spends around 10% of total household income on fees and interest charged by these predatory institutions.

The time is ripe for change. According to a 2012 CFSI market-sizing study, the underbanked market is growing by 8% annually, and larger banking institutions are beginning to take notice, as several recent announcements show.

In April of this year, the FDIC released a white paper on the potential of mobile financial services, (MFS) to impact the lives of the underbanked. They concluded that mobile banking could be an important tool in the maintenance of customer-bank relationships, but that the relevant technology was not well established in the marketplace. Still, mobile banking is a crucial component of the global microfinance market, used by such international pioneers as Grameen Bank. MFS has already proved itself in many a foreign market and may yet make it in the U.S. Some American companies, however, are already approaching the market from a different angle.
On May 29, JPMorgan Chase and Co. announced their partnership with CFSI on the Financial Solutions Lab, a $30 million project with a five-year plan for holding competitions in which social entrepreneurs "build products and services that will help consumers with their financial health." The project will focus on behavioral insights that will help consumers overcome the obstacles to better financial behavior and health.

On June 3, the day before this year’s EMERGE forum began, Visa announced a new prepaid designation, applicable to cards and other services, that they developed along with CFSI and the Pew Charitable Trusts. Visa Inc. President Ryan McInerey explained Visa's motivation: "We felt it was important to go beyond current marketplace regulatory requirements and bring transparency to this growing product area so that consumers better understand the fees, protections and benefits associated with cards." The new designation entails a host of features to ensure consumer protections as well as fee simplification and disclosures.

This year’s EMERGE conference has had an impact on some already, such as the reporters who were taken into low-income neighborhoods to participate in the same kind of transactions the underbanked do as a matter of course. Ronald Brownstein, in his article for The Atlantic described the discrepancy between the way his group was guided through high-fee AFS transactions and the total lack of information about financial health or security they were provided along the way as "like looking through a one-way glass." Too often, unbanked and underbanked customers lack critical information about fees, choices, and useful habits. In the future, through innovative products and perhaps new mobile apps, that one-way glass has the potential to become much more transparent.

Why Capitalize the Word Web?

Because it's a proper noun. It's the shortened form of the name World Wide Web. This is not simply any network or web of computers; it's the network that we connect to for sites like eBay.com, NYTimes.com, Google.com, and so on.

What about compound nouns like "Web site" and "Web protocols?" Just as we capitalize other proper nouns when they appear as part of compound nouns (e.g, "California beaches"), so we should capitalize the word Web in these compound nouns.

Here's another example of the same rule. The World Series isn't just any world-renowned series of games. It's the official name for the annual championship series for professional baseball teams in the U.S. We always capitalize World Series, even when it appears as part of other compound nouns:

World Series
World Series tickets
World Series paraphernalia

Thus:

Web
Web site
Web protocol

The word "Internet," another proper noun, gets the same treatment.

Internet
Internet security
Internet marketing

You might have noticed that the New York Times and other organizations with formal style guides capitalize Web and Internet. Now you know why.

Microsoft Surface, BYOD, and Laptops vs. Tablets

There's been lots of good coverage of Microsoft's announcement yesterday of Microsoft Surface, a line of Windows 8 tablets that will be available in the fall. (For a summary of analyst reactions, check out this article in the Guardian.)

Here are a few thoughts of my own.

Why Show the World Alpha-Quality Technology?
When Apple announces a new product, it's typically available within days or weeks.

Microsoft took a different tack yesterday, announcing a tablet that won't be available until some time in the Fall. Judging from the way Microsoft employees guarded access to the devices at yesterday's event (e.g., see this tweet of Danny Sullivan's), one can safely assume that the software and hardware are still in a pretty raw state. Why not wait until the device was ready to announce it?

Part of the answer, I expect, is a four-letter word:  BYOD.  About 70% of large organizations have adopted Bring Your Own Device to work policies, compelling IT departments to find ways to integrate consumer-class devices such as iPhones and iPads into the company's IT infrastructure without sacrificing security. The results have been mixed, but the BYOD juggernaut seems unstoppable. And now more businesses are re-thinking their IT purchases and wondering just how many users really need PCs or at least laptops when perhaps a $500 iPad will meet their needs for remote access. Even businesses that tend to be IT laggards--businesses like law firms, for example--are beginning to formally roll out tablet solutions built, typically, on the iPad. Users love the devices, so why not?

But now that businesses know that a Windows 8 tablet  is coming in the fall, I'm guessing that a lot of those internal iPad initiatives will be put on hold. Many IT organizations will consider it rash to move ahead with bulk orders of iPads until they've had least had a chance to give Microsoft's own offering a try. The Microsoft offering promises to be more familiar (unless the Windows 8 UI team creates an albatross like Vista) and will probably be easier to integrate with Microsoft business solutions like SharePoint.

My guess is a lot of iPad orders were just put on hold.

And the same goes for Ultrabook orders. Hardware vendors like HP are racing to develop new, ultra lightweight Windows laptops to compete with MacBook Air. But those buyers, too, will probably want to see how Surface turns out. Maybe a tablet is the best mobile solution, after all, if what you're after is an ultra-portable Windows platform.

And vendors like Acer and HP developing Windows 8 tablets of their own? Their coffee's probably tasting pretty bitter this morning.

This Isn't about Microsoft Office
Microsoft is reportedly preparing a version of Office for iPad that will be ready in the Fall. Which makes sense:  right now, there are tens of millions of potential users that don't have the option of buying the Microsoft programs they use most. And that's tens of millions of users who are getting used to alternatives like Pages and Google Docs.

Better stop that bleeding, too.

Will a Windows 8 Tablet Behave Like a Tablet?
That is, will it be fast and easy to use? Or will it simply be a Windows laptop in a different format?

I think the difference is important.

I have a decently powerful Windows 7 laptop. Lately I've had access to a low-end iPad.

If I want to sit down and check mail and such, I often need to wait 2-5 minutes for the Windows systems to collect itself and become fully responsive, even if it hasn't been put to sleep. The iPad, on the other hand, is always responsive immediately. Guess which device I find myself using more when I simply want to check email or headlines?

Substitute "Windows 8 tablet" for "Windows 7 laptop" in the passage above, and you see the problem.

All the Windows laptops I've owned have exhibited this same sluggishness. Will a Windows 8 tablet be different?

As with so much about this new platform, we'll just have to wait and see.