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I have a confession. I love to watch men at work. Not just any men, but what were once referred to as workingmen. Now, this post is not intended to denigrate the efforts of corporate managers, lawyers, or top sales professionals. But I feel compelled to pay homage to the guys who work with their hands. They are often invisible to the rest of us citizens and all too often looked down upon.

During the past few months,at a nearby strip mall, I’ve had the opportunity to indulge my predilection for observing working guys in action. For the 10 years I’ve lived in North Central, this little shopping center has looked sooo ‘60s. You know. Permastone facing, globe lighting, and those weird-looking curved roof supports. Then, in November, teams of guys showed up and began the work of creating a shiny new retail paradise.

At least twice a week, I’ve found an excuse to play sidewalk superintendent. It’s been a joy to hear the snap-snap-snap of nail guns and watch the workers as they focus so intently on what they’re doing. There’s so much groovy stuff to see—roofs demolished, electrical cable pulled, lathing and dry wall mounted. Really much more fun than one girl should have. As I see it, they’re creating order out of chaos, which is not unlike the act of writing.

My recommendation? The next time you want to see purposeful activity and smart, hardworking guys, check out the nearest construction site.

Funny, I’ve been posting for nearly a year and am only now getting around to talking about why companies (should) hire copywriters.

A few years ago, I was on a conference call when one of the participants—in my imagination an Ivy League smoothie type—referred to copywriters as the “bottom of the food chain.” I smothered my indignation and consoled myself by visualizing this worthy punctured with little pins like a voodoo doll.

Far from an afterthought, good writing is vital to any marketing effort. Copywriters bring open, curious minds and very special skills to the table. Without us, great products and services might get less than their due.

Here are three good reasons why your company might want to use a professional:

1.       Lack of time – Whether you work in a cube or at home in your fuzzy robe and bunny slippers, you just don’t have enough time to get your job done and write too.

2.       Lack of manpower — Your team is stretched to the max. Who really wants to sit down at 10 pm and crank out a landing page or customer success story?

3.       Lack of inclination — You write well but don’t enjoy it. Or you’re a lousy writer, and you’d rather have a root canal. Either way, you’re just not up for the job. And that’s not a recipe for good copy.

What are your reasons for hiring a copywriter? Or if you’re on the other end of things, how have you persuaded someone to bring on a scribe?

Writers are observers, and we’re generally jazzed by acquiring interesting little tidbits of knowledge, whether or not we ever use them.

Take this one. According to Melissa Lamson, a global business consultant, weddings in parts of Eastern Europe are often held in gas stations. Huh? Well, the wines are high quality, and the restaurants inside them are good. Best of all, gas stations have lots of windows and parking, so everyone gets to see what everyone else is driving. In an area of the world where cars, not houses, are status symbols, people can showcase their prosperity quite handily.

When I first moved to California, one of the first things I noticed was that people drove really great cars and lived in pretty modest places. (Later, of course, I learned that some of those little houses commanded top dollar.) Perhaps Melissa’s observation resonated with me because it was similar to my own experience. California, so many years ago, was like being on another planet where everything was done in a new way. I still remember being open-mouthed at people roller blading to work and young women sporting multiple tattoos. (Gosh, I thought, I guess they’ll never be able to move to Dubuque.)

What experiences with other cultures have shocked or amused you?

I am an unashamed cheapskate, so when I heard about Safeway’s recently launched Just 4 U program, I thought “Great! I love to save money on groceries.”

The details of the program seemed a touch complex, still, I went ahead and signed up. I started getting emails immediately, exhorting me to load up my Safeway card with items I normally buy and to visit the coupon center on the Safeway.com site. There, they said, I would find bargains on a veritable cornucopia of comestibles and household supplies.

Then the fun began. First, my password was rejected, and then a temporary password was rejected, so I called Customer Service,  bailing after 15 minutes on hold. A couple of days later, I tried again and got through to a nice woman who told me my email address wasn’t in the system. Huh? She fixed that problem, walked me through a few tweaks to Firefox, and generated a temporary password. (I tried it 24 hours later, as directed, and it didn’t work.) During our conversation, she confided that there had been quite a few problems with the program.

Safeway, like a lot of smart companies, wants to build and maintain brand loyalty. And its execs probably thought that Just 4 U would help the organization stay closer to customers. It seems that they may have rushed it into production prematurely, though.

Will this stumble do lasting damage to the Safeway brand? Of course not. But I tend to agree with the person the Customer Service rep told me about—the one who said, “This is really not simple at all. Why don’t you guys just reduce prices across the board and be done with it?”

Recently, I got one of those emailed questions from a LinkedIn group I’m a member of.

The person posting the question wanted to know the marketing words or terms people found most annoying or overused. I had a pleasant little exchange with a gentleman from the UK who’s not too jazzed about “quality.” The point he makes—a good one, I think—is that most products these days are pretty reasonable quality. “Quality” gets a company out the gate, and trumpeting it doesn’t add much to a marketing message.

I’m not too crazy about the word “utilize,” which I see frequently in marketing collateral, because it’s got that fussy, over-elaborated feel. (Engineers seem to love it, though.) I also find myself annoyed by “business driver,” “proactive,” “solution,” and “value-add.”

Last Friday, my colleague Dale Riehart and I talked about marketing lingo over a great lunch at La Corneta in downtown Burlingame. Dale’s approach is to ask if a specific term is one his client’s prospects and customers use. If it is, he uses it. That’s the smart and reasonable way to do things. As copywriters, we need meet to the market where it is—though I believe our job is also to suggest better-sounding alternatives.

Now then, which overused and annoying marketing expressions get your vote?

In response to my recent post Who vs. That, a reader noted that she still struggles a bit with which and that.

Now even ace copywriters like moi are sometimes unsure about when to use which and when to use that. In the end, I bet some of us wing it, hoping that no one will pick up on our flubs.

So here’s the skinny.

Emeritus Professor Paul Brians of Washington State University “confesses” that he does not always observe the distinction between the two and doesn’t believe that many “careful writers of English” do either.

His rule, designed to “pacify” a “small but impassioned group of authorities”—don’t you love how this guy writes?—is this: If you’re calling something out by distinguishing it from a larger group, use “that.” If you’re not, use “which” and precede your clause with a comma. His example? “He made an iceberg Caesar Salad, which didn’t taste quite right.”

I love Professor Brians’ faint tone of scholarly irascibility, and I heartily recommend checking out his web page, “Common Errors in English.”

Now, on to my other all-time favorite grammar authority, Patricia T. O’Conner, author of Woe is I, The Grammarphobe’s Guide to Better English in Plain English.

Ms. O’Conner exhorts us not to avoid using “that” out of a misplaced sense of elegance. Use that, she says, when you can’t drop the clause it precedes and still retain the meaning of the sentence. Her example? “The dog that won the best in show was Buster’s bulldog.” Take out “that won the best in show,” and your sentence has no reason to exist.

OK. Everybody clear? Go forth and prosper.

As some of you know, I think about branding frequently. Concerns about branding and how to do it right seem ubiquitous in the circles I travel in. Some of my copywriting clients are building a brand identity. Some, like Cisco, are actively involved in preserving, extending, and reinforcing one. And, so far, my projects with Taproot Foundation have been all about branding and messaging.

I love thinking and writing about branding at the local level. Here’s an example.

A few weeks ago, as I was driving past a neighborhood hardware store, I noticed it had become part of the Ace Hardware system. Would the change would be good? As a girl, I don’t spend a lot of time in hardware stores, but I love Wisnom’s . The people who work there answer dumb questions—and give great advice—with a smile. Thanks to Wisnom’s, I’ve gotten rid of cat pee odor, experienced superlatively sharpened kitchen knives, bought the right size sink stopper, and so on.

I drove by a few days later and noticed that signage had been repositioned to accommodate the Ace logo. The building’s façade looked pretty bad, what with the outlines of the old signage showing clearly. Could this be it, I wondered? Would it stay like this permanently? Oh me of little faith. I should have thought better of Wisnom’s. In less than a week, painters had completely covered the marks—and the rest of the building—with a fresh coat of cream-colored paint and repainted the harvest-red stripe that bands the top of the building.

Mu point is that Wisnom’s and many other businesses in my little town take the time to do things right. Of course, you could argue that Wisnom’s was merely acting on instructions from Ace HQ. I disagree. Owned by Ace or not, Wisnom’s would have made the fixes, because of the kind of organization it has always been. No wonder customers keep coming back. (“Fantastic hardware store! Forget Home Depot.”)

How often do you actually write something by hand, other than a grocery list—some well-organized souls have been known to use Outlook Tasks for that purpose—or a sticky note?

I was meditating on the power of the (hand) written word the other day, as I finished a letter to my stepmother in Virginia. And whaddya know, the cool women at High Tech Connect have been thinking about the same thing.

As they note, it’s getting harder and harder to find the occasion hand-write anything, given the ubiquity of email and texting, but nothing has greater impact than a hand-written, and therefore truly personal, communication. My sister-in-law just sent me a thank-you for her birthday check and took the time to indulge in a little epistolary chat about how she would spend the money. A client recently mailed a lovely note thanking me for my help and saying how much she had enjoyed working together. No doubt an email from her would also have felt great, but her note was like the maraschino cherry garnishing the whipped cream on top of an Irish Coffee.

No matter how lousy or crabbed your handwriting is, and mine wins no prizes, there are some communications for which there is NO substitute for seizing a pen and getting down to work. In the words of Sound Bytes, the High Tech Connect newsletter, “Want to make a real impression on someone today? WRITE them a note.”

For some reason, hearing a person referred to as “that” sorta sets my teeth on edge. As in, “John is the guy that won the apple pie-eating and St. Pauli Girl-drinking contest.” It just doesn’t sound right, though I can’t exactly say why. Perhaps my uneasiness has something to do with Miss Thompson’s 10^th grade English class, but dredging the depths of memory doesn’t bring up any specific prohibitions. Darn. Don’t you hate when that happens?

In fact, Patricia O’Conner, author of Woe is I: The Grammarphobe’s Guide to Better English in Plain English doesn’t have a problem with using “that” instead of “who.” As she notes, if “the girl that married dear old dad” sounds o.k., it’s because it is. Well, I have tremendous respect for Ms. O’Conner, and I know she must be right. Her little guide is the one I run to when I’ve got a quickie grammar question, and she’s never failed me. She makes the rules of grammar sing or at least hum a merry tune.

Still, I intend to persist stubbornly in referring to people as “who” rather than “that” What’s your take?

First, a confession. I’m not a PR person. Far from it. I practiced the art, and the operative word is “practiced,” a number of years ago at a couple of small Silicon Valley firms. That experience left me with enormous respect for the men and women who do media relations. The best of them are honest, hard working, persistent, and skillful. And their journalist counterparts are honest, hard working, and hungry for good stories—though not always the most patient of souls.

This post, though, is really about what’s up in the world of crisis PR—think BP, Tiger Woods, and Al Gore—and it summarizes a recent post by Matthew DeBord on Slate’s “The Big Money.” Mr. DeBord’s piece is worth reading for the quality of the writing alone, but if you don’t get around to it, here are the high points:

• Crisis PR, which DeBord refers to as “PR’s evil twin,” has always relied on a meat-eating, aggressive approach that “beat down” the forces of negativity.
• Today, companies that screw up are in big trouble, because the social media can overwhelm “even the most crafted battle crisis plan.”
• According to Ira Kalb, professor of marketing at USC, once a company has lost trust, it’s lost everything, and heaven help it if it’s caught spinning the news.
• Also according to Professor Kalb, crisis PR can still work, but…

So, how can crisis PR resuscitate itself? Well, it appears that counseling clients to propose solutions to a crisis, rather than resorting to the mea culpa approach is a good way to go. The other biggie is to bring the social media into its service by “maintaining numerous online angles of attack on The Big Bad Story.” In my view, that approach is a lot like herding cats, but greater strategic thinkers than I will undoubtedly figure it out.