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In case you haven’t seen it yet, Budweiser’s Super Bowl ad—slated to run only on the Canadian broadcast of the main event–has gone viral in a big way online.

Here’s the setup.

Two amateur Canadian hockey teams think they’ve been invited to be part of a documentary. Instead they’re treated to a mega flash-mob and get to live out what every kid who plays hockey (or any sport, really) dreams of.

It closes with “Good times are waiting. Why not grab some buds.”

A lot of people have liked it on Facebook, tweeted it and +1’d it on Google+.

You don’t have to enjoy beer or hockey to connect with the message behind the ad.

Okay, not everyone liked it…

The National Post’s Andrew Coyne, for one, was unmoved.

“What exactly is the ad’s point?” he tweeted.

That led to this polite exchange…

Dialogue on the point to the Bud ad. Andrew Coyne is a great guy who isn

I’m not the kind of guy who is going to square off on Twitter with one of Canada’s best-read journalists (I’m a fan, too, Andrew). I’m not that dumb. Plus if you follow Coyne on Twitter, you know that debating the guy on social media can be brutal. Ask Tony Clement about that.

But Coyne raises some interesting points. There are things we all can learn from the obvious success of a beer company’s pre-emptive ad spot.

Advertising is in the selling business.

First, ads are made to sell things. This is obvious.

Many like to pretend that they are immune to selling or that selling is a dirty word. Or that we see through the gimmick.

Here’s what I know as a copywriter and as someone who has been in business for over 10 years.

There are just two kinds of selling.

The kind that works and the kind that doesn’t.

All selling that works shares a common mastery: the ability to be persuasive.

Being persuasive isn’t about being pushy.

Persuasion comes from the Latin word persuas, which means “convinced by reason.”

The curious thing about it is we’ve come to learn through psychology and neuromarketing that persuasion has as much to do with connecting emotionally as it does with reason.

So the meaning has changed from its Latin roots. English is funny that way.

Noted psychologist and author Robert Cialdini says there are six principles of persuasion.

Reciprocity
Commitment
Authority
Scarcity
Social proof and
Liking

Those last two are an important part of what makes the Bud spot so effective.

They’re not pushing beer in the ad. They don’t even show the product (other than the logo).

The ad is about an idea that connects with people on an emotional level.

When people like how they feel about something, they tell others.

You don’t need to advertise.

I know what you’re thinking right now: “What? Are you insane? You’re a copywriter…you can’t say that!”

Of course I can.

Advertising isn’t for everybody.

It’s very powerful if you can afford it and if you find smart people to help you who know the difference between being clever and being effective.

But it’s not for everyone.

That’s why it costs what it does.

Even Budweiser has figured this out.

Their spot isn’t going to run on US channels during the Super Bowl. It doesn’t have to.

By being pre-emptive and by using social media, their message—highly emotional, likeable and memorable, powered by an enormous amount of social proof—is already out there.

It’s why Scott Stratten wisely concluded today that Budweiser just won the Super Bowl and the internet. I agree.

More than products, people are open to ideas.

When you have good ones—ones that you share through the dual channels of reason and emotion—they often stick.

Not always.

But when they do, you know.

About the author: Patrick Gant is a writer & speaker. He owns thinkit creative, a company that specializes in writing and editing digital content for the web. Follow him on twitter here.

CreativeBoost gives you valuable updates about unlocking the power of writing that sells. It's free. Join today.

Who cares that you don’t have the right credentials?

Or that you break rules. Or that you break them because you didn’t know they were rules in the first place.

Or that you’re afraid.

Who cares that you stay up late, or get up early because you’re not happy with something you wrote and you need to fix it?

Who cares that it’s the wrong word and the right one won’t come?

Or that you hate semicolons as much as I do?

You’re the one behind the curtain.

You are in the magic business, friend. And only you knows how to push that idea along.

There is no license for writers. You chose this.

No one is ever going to give you permission to do this.

And you’re often going to find more reasons to stop than to go on.

No one cares if it’s luck or talent that saves you.

No one ever says “I used to be a writer” and means it. You’re in this for life.

The readers and the money are rewards. And good ones at that.

But there is only one thing keeping score in this business of stringing together letters and words.

There’s just the work.

About the author: Patrick Gant is a writer & speaker. He owns thinkit creative, a company that specializes in writing and editing digital content for the web. Follow him on twitter here.

CreativeBoost gives you valuable updates about unlocking the power of writing that sells. It's free. Join today.

This post started out as a quick Q&A piece designed to answer the question: what is micropublishing and why should I care about it?

The trouble began when I tried to define it much the way that I might have about seven years ago.

If this were 2005, I’d have said the following…

In many ways, micropublishing works just like conventional publishing business, except it’s a much smaller company doing the printing, done in reduced volume, for a much smaller market.

I can’t entirely stand by that definition anymore. There are a few reasons for that.

To understand micropublishing today, you still have to describe it relative to publishing. So let’s start there.

What does publishing mean anymore, anyway?

Our conventional understanding of what constitutes “publishing” has changed. It had to.

Every industry offers a product or service that solves a problem.

Publishing as an industry no longer solves the problems that it used to.

It used to be the only game in town for choosing a select bunch of good ideas from many bad ones and getting those ideas (usually the good ones) in the hands of many people. Printing was the large-scale industrial process it used to achieve that.

There was a marketing component, too. But the jury’s still out on how effective they’ve been in that department for the past decade or so.

Two big disrupters

None of this is meant to denigrate the work of industry publishers today. There are some very smart people in that business who do (and will continue to do) great work. They just happen to be on the receiving end of not one but two of the biggest disruptive ideas in the history of human communication.

First, the rise of online media. Publishing is a moveable idea now. It’s not just about books and newspapers anymore. In fact, on the scale of who is engaged in the act of publishing today, it has very little to do with books and newspapers anymore.

We are all publishers now. Not just in the sense that we each can publish our ideas on the web though blogs and social media. Publishing now is an act: not an industry.

I like how Seth Godin looks at this interesting problem. Publishing, he says, has “everything to do with creating a platform that enables ideas to spread.”

Ebooks are the second disrupter. And it’s astonishing how quickly they’re hollowing out a centuries-old industry. Granted, they’re not a substitute for the feel of a paper book in your hands. But they solve a very important problem.

Because of the rise of ebook self-publishing as a platform, the time it takes to create and ship a product to market is now measured in days—not months or years under the old way of doing things.

Ebooks also have some unique advantages in terms of pricing. I’ll come back to that in an upcoming post.

Back to my problem with micropublishing

So where does that leave micropublishing? Good question. I still don’t really know how to define it anymore.

It’s still mostly a printing enterprise. It’s still all about being able to print in limited volumes if you want.

The trouble starts when you look at who is doing the printing and the size of the market for the work that’s done there.

When you can write a book or an annual report, design it, upload it to Amazon, distribute it electronically to readers worldwide, plus order and ship a select number of print versions of your book—however many or however few you want—it suggests that micropublishing is an idea that’s suddenly a lot more fluid than it used to be.

There’s not much that’s micro about it. If anything, it’s starting to look a lot more like just-in-time printing.

Publishing has become an idea that has outgrown the industry that created it. Micropublishing—whatever that’s supposed to mean anymore—has helped that along and has also been reshaped in the process.

What’s left and what’s ahead

Distribution is the last freestanding wall controlled by traditional publishing. It’s going to get really interesting when it falls soon.

It’s what’s holding back many entrepreneurs, professional speakers, authors, poets from leaving the traditional publishing model, because they’re looking to sell hard-copy books in high volumes and up until now, publishers still corner that market.

Even prolific fiction writers—people like Dean Wesley Smith, for example—who’ve embraced the new way of doing things make a point of noting that this is still new…even for them. “Traditional publishing,” says Smith, “was still the only real choice just two short years ago.”

Change is coming.

You don’t have to look too hard at the industry to see that it’s only a matter of time. Writer and technology thinker Clay Shirky predicts it might only be a matter of a few years before major booksellers start saying “We can’t afford not to stock this particular book or series from an independent publisher.”

So what does all this mean for anyone with an idea in search of an audience? (That includes you).

It means that it’s time to go beyond what publishing used to be and start planning based on what it is now and where it’s going to be.

“It’s time to go beyond what publishing used to be and start planning based on what it is now and where it’s going to be.”
Click to tweet this.

The blockbuster sellers in hard copy aren’t going to go away. But we’re going to be seeing a lot more long-tail projects get into the hands of a lot more people…and in far less time than before. Much of that is going to hinge on micropublishing and self-published ebooks.

It’s time to get serious about embracing Amazon’s publishing model and ebooks as a viable platform for mass audiences.

You’re a publisher now. You can do this.

About the author: Patrick Gant is a writer & speaker. He owns thinkit creative, a company that specializes in writing and editing digital content for the web. Follow him on twitter here.

CreativeBoost gives you valuable updates about unlocking the power of writing that sells. It's free. Join today.

You are a broadcaster (photo by cogdog on flickr)

I’m in the middle of doing some in-depth research for an important project, and I find myself thinking a lot these days about the nearly lost legacy of Charles Herrold.

It’s okay if you have no idea who he was. I hadn’t a clue either until I started reading up on the early history of radio.

Charles Herrold was a radio pioneer.

He coined the terms broadcasting and narrowcasting—possibly as early as 1909, and well before the eventual rise of radio’s golden age in the 1930s and 40s, by which time these were household names.

Like so many great words, broadcasting and narrowcasting were borrowed ideas: terms that were used to describe the farming method of sowing seeds from a container that spun outwards in all directions rather than in neat rows.

In choosing these words to describe the scattering approach of this new medium, Herrold showed that he understood the enormous potential of radio as an all-new way of reaching a lot more people than ever before, all at once.

Not just the select literate few of society, as was the case in the 18th and 19th centuries with book publishing and newspapers. All people. Not just with one program, but many.

Through radio and the way that Herrold (among others) saw its application, message became content.

Content became programming. And eventually, programming found a mass audience.

So why then is Herrold such a lesser-known in broadcasting history?

Most mentions of him indicate that he never made a profit from the industry that he helped pioneer.

Professor Mike Adams of San Jose State University summed up the problem this way: “He was in the right place at the right time…but he had the wrong technology.”

Herrold’s broadcasting was based on what engineers call the arc method, while others opted for a method involving vacuum tubes. I’ll spare you the technical details here.

What’s important to know about the arc method of broadcasting was that it sounded awful.

His audience couldn’t hear him as well as they could have. So they went elsewhere.

According to several public records, Herrold died in relative obscurity. Meanwhile, his radio counterpart, Frank Conrad went on to be celebrated in the New York Times as the “father of radio broadcasting.”

There are valuable lessons in this story that you can apply to your business and marketing efforts today.

First, it’s not enough to have good ideas or even to see the potential of something ahead of others.

Execution is everything.

Second, if you’re in the people business (and odds are very good that you are), you are a broadcaster. You can’t build an audience if people can’t hear you properly.

Let me repeat that…

“If you’re in the people business, you are a broadcaster. You can’t build an audience if people can’t hear you properly.”
Click to tweet this.

Make sure you have the right tools that cut through the noise. And remember: you have less time than you think to capture and maintain your audience’s attention.

Third, create great content just as you would build any other exceptional product in your business. Get it into the hands of your audience in a way that is most convenient for them.

These matter ahead of all things when you’re in the people business.

About the author: Patrick Gant is a writer & speaker. He owns thinkit creative, a company that specializes in writing and editing digital content for the web. Follow him on twitter here.

CreativeBoost gives you valuable updates about unlocking the power of writing that sells. It's free. Join today.

Anyone can be a writer, it’s true. But sometimes—whether you’re writing an article, webcopy, a direct marketing piece or a book—you’re going to get stuck and it can seem as if no amount of rewriting is going to fix your copy.

Don’t wait for that sinking feeling to set in.

Here’s the first thing you must do.

Keep writing.

Don’t give in to that feeling that says you need to walk away.

Giving in is easy. It’s what many people do.

There are cases where you need to shift gears for a bit (and I’ll come back to that). But unless you keep working at your craft and your ideas, you’re going to lose any momentum you started with.

There’s an even bigger danger.

Unless you’re in the deadlines business like I am, there is also a good chance that if you put that writing assignment away, you might not come back to it. Ever.

Stop with the Point-A-to-Point-B thinking. Be more abstract.

Ideas and the business of writing them down is not a linear practice. In fact, it’s rare to be struck by a fully formed thought that’s ready to share. That’s just the low-hanging fruit, my friends. The rest takes time to ripen. And often it’s going to take you in directions that may surprise you as much as your reader.

Here are a few methods I use when I get stuck. You can use any of these, too.

The tangential method

Find a good quote about the subject you are writing about. Don’t just slap that quote into your copy.

The writer’s first job is to ask questions. Who is the speaker behind the quote? What did he or she accomplish? Are there any articles posted online about this individual? Book reviews? Praise? Criticism? A few minutes of satisfied curiosity can provide you with an entirely new angle on what you’re writing about.

The switching gears method

I said earlier that you have to keep on writing when you’re stuck. But that doesn’t mean you have to keep bashing your head against the wall and wishing for a different result. Some ideas need to simmer. In the meantime, write something else.

Creativity is a weird visitor. It often walks into your house, puts its feet up on the sofa, grabs pen and paper and tells you it’s working on something. Let it do its job. Just don’t let it switch on the TV.

Switching gears means that you might not be working on the thing you started on in the first place, but you’re still producing. Practice and discipline. These are your best teachers.

The backstory method

This one applies to fiction writing. Having trouble making a character believable? Invent a backstory and write it down. Need help asking the right questions? Go to one of those free online dating sites and look at the questions they ask of people when creating a dating profile. Fill it in. The answers you’re being asked are meant to help other people decide if you’re likeable and compatible. So this is a good resource if you’re stumped.

With a fact-filled backstory (okay, made up facts, but I’m sure you get where I’m going with this), you have new ways to approach your subject and write convincingly. After all, you totally know this guy now.

The undoing method

Some ideas are just not ready for primetime. Some are just crappy ideas. A good way to test yours is to turn them inside out. Play devil’s advocate. Write a short piece arguing the opposing point of view.

One of my business lines is speechwriting. I sometimes use this method when I’m finding the copy isn’t as persuasive as my standards demand. Undo your arguments. You’ll quickly reveal the cut line that separates the facts you know are true from the rest of the points that you simply feel are true.

About the author: Patrick Gant is a writer & speaker. He owns thinkit creative, a company that specializes in writing and editing digital content for the web. Follow him on twitter here.

CreativeBoost gives you valuable updates about unlocking the power of writing that sells. It's free. Join today.

Let me share with you an infographic from those smart guys over at Frugaldad.

The problem in a nutshell: patents are a 19th century solution to 21st century problems. Click to continue

About the author: Patrick Gant is a writer & speaker. He owns thinkit creative, a company that specializes in writing and editing digital content for the web. Follow him on twitter here.

CreativeBoost gives you valuable updates about unlocking the power of writing that sells. It's free. Join today.

The modern-day business card is carry-over from the Industrial Revolution. It once was a tool to communicate status. Later, it became one of very few ways—other than the phone directory—to help people know how to reach you. Things don’t work that way anymore. It’s not hard to find someone’s contact information anymore. What is difficult today is finding the right tools to attract and sustain someone’s attention—to be memorable.

Your business card communicates an experience to your audience.

Some don’t believe in them anymore. I still do. I believe that little things count for a lot.

The information your card contains and how it is presented instantly defines the way your audience perceives you, along with what you have to say and what you are selling.

Even with something as simple as a business card, when you design with your customer in mind, you’re creating a powerful suggestion about how you work and of how you can help people.

Taking the time to ensure your business card delivers a great experience isn’t all that hard to do. Let me share with you what I’ve learned…

Print on the best stock you can find.
This is the number-one thing you must do. Buy the very best paper stock you can. Print in smaller batches if you have to. Good stock looks professional and avoids the frayed, dog-eared look that afflicts so many flimsy cards. Personally, I’m quite happy with the stock they use at moo.com.

Avoid glossy finishes, but ensure white space.
There’s a practical reason why you should say no to glossy and yes to generous use of white space. Business cards can be really handy to write on. Don’t underestimate this benefit. A short note jotted down on the back of your card can do amazing things. It’s one of the subtle ways that something mass produced can become personalized. People like things that are made just for them.

Don’t be clever at the expense of being useful.
Look online and you’ll find lots of examples of clever business cards. Some of them are even useful. But many are just wasted expressions of vanity. What am I going to do with an all-steel embossed card that’s impossible to read in low light and that I can’t write on? I mean really.

Be selective.
Most people today are drowning in too much information. Make it easier for them to reach you by being selective about what you include on your card. If phone, email and your website are the top-three places people go to reach you, then include just that. Unless you’re in a business that predominantly uses fax (and you have my sympathies if you are), then cut that from your card. There’s no penalty for leaving some things out. Keep it simple. We’re not living in the 1970s anymore. There are other places people can go to find additional information about you if they need it.

Include a photo, but only pro-grade.
Since all business is personal and so much of marketing today is relationship-based, including a professionally-shot photo of yourself on your card is never a bad idea. But do this only if the photo is a professional headshot.

Short and sweet.
The life of the modern business card is short and sweet. Gone are the days when the cards you give to people would be tucked into a rolodex and used repeatedly when someone wanted to call you. Most people today aren’t going to keep your card for very long: just until they can enter it into their address book or CRM. Keep your card simple, purposeful and memorable: that’s what sells. Complement it with other products to serve as leave-behinds that can deliver substance: free ebooks, guides and reports are just a few examples.

Think about the reader’s experience.
Focus less on what matters to you and instead ask what creates the best experience for the person who receives your card. Remember: the more information you put on that 3.5 x 2 inch piece of paper, the smaller the typeface you’ll need, and the less white space you’ll have.

About the author: Patrick Gant is a writer & speaker. He owns thinkit creative, a company that specializes in writing and editing digital content for the web. Follow him on twitter here.

CreativeBoost gives you valuable updates about unlocking the power of writing that sells. It's free. Join today.

Photo:Adrian_S

We used to call it the Web. Or the Internet. Or even (if you’re old enough to remember this gem of an anachronism) the information superhighway. And like good students of Victorian order, we even had subcategories for things that populated this space: blogosphere, social media, chat room, instant messaging…the list goes on.

Many fretted over the need to define these as places.

Some demanded that these words be treated as proper nouns, requiring capitalization and all the formality that we could muster in our language. We did this for a time because it was new, and out of worry that there might otherwise be what editors sombrely call “ambiguity for readers”…in other words, people just might not understand. Slowly, people most people came to realize that just wasn’t necessary anymore.

That’s all in the past now.

Online is no longer a shelf space or a channel for content. It’s no longer a subset of what was once loosely called mass media.

Online is now the outcome of things.

It’s the record of what we do, of the things that matter to us. Every blog entry. Every tweet. Every comment posted. Every review or testimonial by a customer. Every friend made, or connection reacquainted. Every work sample. Every article written. Every collaboration. Every mashup.

Think about how what you say says everything now.

Today, what you have to say, what you write about and how you say things is all a direct reflection of how people see you.

That includes your clients and prospects.

And you better believe they’re reading what you post.

The number-one thing that people do now when considering doing business with someone is to consult online. Google calls it the zero moment of truth. Others simply call it finding out more right now.

According a US study by Google, 88% of consumers now engage in the “zero moment of truth” prior to making their final decision. As of 2011, they consult more than 10 new media or traditional sources before making the decision to buy—that’s double the sources consulted just the year before.

That good first impression you hope to make on someone? It’s probably already happened whether or not you were ready.

Whether it was successful or not is going to be determined in large part by what you post and how you treat others online.

You are the sum of the choices you make and how you choose to express yourself online. You are what you post.

About the author: Patrick Gant is a writer & speaker. He owns thinkit creative, a company that specializes in writing and editing digital content for the web. Follow him on twitter here.

CreativeBoost gives you valuable updates about unlocking the power of writing that sells. It's free. Join today.