by Jim Sweeney | Sep 7, 2022 | Blog
Imagine your boss issues the following email at the end of the day: “I’m bringing in bagels tomorrow morning.”
Yay, bagels! You make a mental note to skip breakfast tomorrow to make room for schmear.
Then your boss emails: “I’m going to prioritize bringing in bagels tomorrow morning.”
OK, a little less definite, but still a high probability of bagels. I mean, it’s a priority, right?
Then, a third email: “I’m going to focus on prioritizing bringing in bagels tomorrow morning.”
Bagels are starting to look iffy.
And, finally, she writes: “I’m beginning the process of focusing on prioritizing bringing in bagels tomorrow morning.”
Does that leave you with any hope of bagels? No, it does not. It’s just going to be you and your Cheerios tomorrow morning.
Your boss might be every bit as sincere in her last statement as in her first, but she won’t be able to convince anyone of that. Her original statement about bringing in bagels has been diluted by the addition of “beginning the process,” “prioritize” and “focus” — vampire words and phrases that drain the vitality out of writing and weaken our communications.
Business writing is a Transylvania full of vampire words that fasten themselves onto perfectly good sentences, suck them dry and leave them limp and bloodless on the page. What should have been a simple memo or email gets cluttered with unnecessary qualifying phrases until sentences collapse of their own ponderousness and lack of clarity.
But this isn’t simply a matter of style. Vampire words also imply a lack of commitment and purpose, even a sense of self-doubt. Compare these two sentences:
Team A will analyze the results and deliver a recommendation.
Team B will focus on analyzing the results and leverage its assets to prioritize delivering a recommendation.
Which team do you trust to deliver a recommendation? The action in Team B —analyzing results and delivering a recommendation — is besieged by vampire words and left sounding uncertain and indefinite.
But there’s good news. According to folklore, vampires can’t come into your house without an invitation. Likewise, vampire words can’t enter your writing without you allowing it.
Since that’s the case, why do we invite the bloodsuckers in?
A lot of it stems from an unmerited distrust of the simple declarative sentence. Remember those grade school sentences about Dick and Jane going out to play? Or the Hemingway you read in high school? That simple, straightforward style works in business writing, as well:
We will deliver the report by the end of the month.
We will conduct an A/B test on the competing headlines and report the results.
The test group liked the blue logo better than the red one.
I know what you’re thinking: Those are short sentences composed of short words. What if people think I don’t know any big words or can’t write long sentences? What if people think I can’t twist incentive into a verb?
Rest easy. Put yourself in the shoes of the recipient of a white paper or report composed of clear, direct language and free of vampire words. Wouldn’t that be refreshing? Wouldn’t it be nice to finish the text without any lingering doubt as to what parts of it meant or whether you peered hard enough between the lines?
Communicating clearly and simply with business associates and clients – with minimal jargon as my colleague Megan Moriarty would say – might astonish them at first, but they’ll come to appreciate it. And, who knows, they might even reciprocate. Think of the misunderstandings and confusion that could be avoided.
So review your business writing and drive stakes through those vampire words. If necessary, hang a string of garlic cloves over your laptop as a reminder.
by Jodi Amendola | Aug 17, 2022 | Blog
I’ve always felt like I was born to be an entrepreneur; leading a company is in my blood because both of my parents started their own businesses.
I was always a “go-getter.” When I was 18, I took a commission-only summer job selling Cutco knives, and within a month I broke all the sales records and was a top producer. At the age of 20, I started my first business, which was a storage company that targeted college students in Boston who needed a place to store their personal items for the summer. About 500 students signed up, and in a few months, we turned a profit of more than $8,000.
After the requisite tour of duty in Corporate America doing public relations, I took a leap of faith and co-founded Amendola Communications with my husband Ted. Within six weeks, I had five retainer clients.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Of course, it hasn’t always been easy. From a shifting media landscape to evolving client expectations to a crippling pandemic, numerous challenges have popped up over the years. To surmount these obstacles, we’ve always been nimble and able to pivot when we need to. Instead of trying to force a square peg into a round hole, we’ve gotten good at shaving the edges off the peg.
Here are five important lessons I’ve learned along the way about leadership and leading a company:
- Hire where the talent is: When I started Amendola, I wanted to build a workforce in Scottsdale. Well, I did it, but I quickly discovered that when you don’t hire seasoned people in your market niche, it shows. The ramp-up time is too long and the quality of the work is sub-par, which means we couldn’t move up to the next level of clients. As I shared in this post, once I took location out of the equation things got much better.
- Don’t try to do it all yourself: I was raised as a PR person, and loved doing pitching, managing accounts, and all the other hands-on pieces of the business. But it didn’t take long to figure out that while I was working on today’s clients, no one was out finding tomorrow’s. That’s a quick way to succeed yourself out of business. So I hired some good people and gave up doing the day-to-day work to focus on business development, which is my superpower. We instantly became more profitable, and I found myself having a lot more fun.
- Know what your company is good at and stick with it: You can’t possibly be all things to all people, nor should you try. Instead of taking on work that doesn’t suit your organization, whether it’s the wrong type of work, or the wrong market, or the wrong size of client, figure out where your niche is and focus your efforts there. If you do get asked to do something that you are not good at, refer the person who asked to someone who can do what they need. It’s a small world, and the odds are the good you do today will come back to you later.
- Hire people you like, that share the same philosophy, and fit in well with your work culture: It’s easy to fall in love with someone’s talent, but if they’re not a good personality fit, it can destroy the culture. And all it takes is one bad apple to turn a great place to work into a bad one. Hire the people who fit what you want your organization to be. Every couple of years we do an all-company retreat to a non-work area. Those are some of the best times because we have such a great staff of people and enjoy working together as well as mingling and socializing with each other. We care about each other and that comes from the top down.
- Try before you buy: If writing is important to your business, as it is in mine, don’t take people’s word for it that they are good writers. I think 80% of the country thinks they can write, but only maybe 20% can, at least to the level we need. Test every potential writer with a writing test, even if you love their samples. You never know if what you’re reading is their work or whether what they did was propped up by a great editor. It’s like the old saw says: trust but verify.
Leading a company will always have its challenges, but I have found that following these valuable lessons has helped pave the road to long-term success.
by Janet Mordecai | Jul 27, 2022 | Blog
A value proposition is a simple statement that tells your customers and prospects why you are in business. At its core, it’s the promise your company gives customers about what it will deliver and why they should choose your product.
Value propositions form the foundation of marketing campaigns and sales pitches, so they can’t be vague or too general. The stronger the statement, the easier it will be to sell your product or services.
Putting in the pre-work to build a rock-solid value proposition is well worth the effort and will help you include precise results that benefit customers. By following these three steps, you can create a value statement that sells:
STEP 1: Define your target market and ideal customers
Start by defining the most likely buyer of your product or services. You can conduct formal research using a third-party vendor or informal research on the internet. Narrow down your target by asking answering the following questions:
- Is your target a person or a business?
- Where are they located?
- What do they think or know about your current brand?
- If a person, how old are they? What gender? What is their socio-economic background?
- Who else is competing for their loyalty in your market space?
- Where does your target go to find information, e.g., Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter?
- What are their pain points?
- What do they value?
STEP 2: Identify the problem you are trying to solve
How will you know if customers will buy your product or service? The answer is you must identify the problem(s) you are trying to solve. Otherwise, your solution won’t resonate with the customers you specified above.
To clearly articulate the problem, think of your customer pain points as unmet needs. Then, answer the question, “How will your product or service specifically meet those needs?”
Examples of customer pain points include:
- Inconsistent customer experiences
- Poor quality of service or products
- Complicated buying process
- Not available on a preferred channel
- Too expensive for what it delivers
STEP 3: Identify your unique market differentiators
To outperform competitors, you must identify distinguishing characteristics that only your company can own. These should be unique. If potential customers believe all available offerings deliver the same value, they will buy whatever’s available at the lowest price.
Ask questions that identify what benefits customers will gain from working with you. Examples of market advantages include:
- Reputation – Employees, customers, partners, and the public hold positive opinions about your organization.
- Innovation – The capability to develop new approaches using new or proprietary technology.
- Customer Satisfaction – Processes and approaches consistently pleasing customers and resolving issues quickly.
- A unique geographic location – Easier access to services for customer convenience.
- Recognition – A logo and Brand image are quickly recognized and associated with quality.
Need more help? You can find free value proposition templates on marketing sites like Hubspot or check out this post from the Amendola blog.
by Brandon Glenn | May 25, 2022 | Blog
The Oxford comma represents the rare example of a debate among grammar nerds that has spilled over into pop culture – at least a little bit.
From Vampire Weekend beginning a song with the pressing question of “Who gives a f— about an Oxford comma?” to a court case whose outcome hinged on the lack of an Oxford comma, few questions of grammar have captured the popular imagination like the debate over the appropriate usage (or lack thereof) of this one little punctuation mark.
First, let’s examine exactly what the Oxford comma – also called the Harvard comma and serial comma – is, which is more confusing to explain than understand through an example. The debate over the Oxford comma revolves around whether to include a comma before a coordinating conjunction such as “and” or “or” in a list of three or more items.
Here’s an easier way of thinking about it: Does the last comma belong in the following sentence? “The fruit bowl included apples, bananas, and oranges.” Oxford comma supporters would say that it does.
Adding to the debate, some of the top “authorities” on writing offer differing opinions on the Oxford comma, with the Chicago Manual of Style recommending it, and AP Style generally opposing it, except for cases in which omitting it would lead to confusion or misinterpretation.
And that is what really gets us to the crux of this debate. Grammar is about clarity, not memorizing seemingly arbitrary rules to separate “right” from “wrong” in writing. Here, the often cited “Ayn Rand example“ can be instructive.
Consider the sentence: “This book is dedicated to my parents, Ayn Rand and God.”
In this case, the lack of Oxford comma seems to indicate that the writer’s parents are (somehow) Ayn Rand and God, while inclusion of the Oxford comma would more clearly illustrate that the writer is referring to three distinct entities.
To me, this seems to be the most compelling argument for the Oxford comma, while most arguments against it claim that it is often “unnecessary and pointless.” Indeed, in some cases the Oxford comma may be unnecessary, but because it doesn’t detract from the quality of writing or its clarity, I advocate for its usage.
Ultimately, what’s more important than deciding whether to use the Oxford comma is consistency in application. The worst Oxford comma-related outcome is when the same piece of content sometimes uses it, and sometimes doesn’t.
Unfortunately, in the end it’s somewhat of an unsatisfying answer, but it is also the one that makes the most sense when it comes to the Oxford comma: Decide whatever you like but make a choice and stick with it.
by Grace Vinton | Apr 27, 2022 | Blog
The HIMSS Global Conference and Exhibition is a well-established healthcare innovation industry conference that Amendola has attended with our clients since the company’s inception. Members of our team were onsite at the 2022 event this year to support our participating clients.
Check out insights on this year’s tradeshow from one of our Media Specialists Grace Vinton on Healthcare NOW Radio’s, “What’s My Tagline.”
by Grace Vinton | Apr 6, 2022 | Blog
ViVE is an exciting new healthcare innovation industry conference and this year Amendola was onsite to support our clients attending the event. Check out insight on the tradeshow this year from one of our Media Specialists Grace Vinton on Healthcare NOW Radio’s “What’s My Tagline.”
