The three nearly fatal mistakes we made at ActiveWords....Volume I

Earlier today I was telling a story about the three nearly fatal mistakes we made at ActiveWords, and I resolved that I would blog them, so that others might learn from our stupidity.

The first was to fail to realize that we needed a professional technology writer on our team. We didn't need the writer to work with us on a daily basis, but when we thought we had something, we needed that writer to meet with us, listen to what we were talking and thinking about, and then take the geek-speak and turn it into a story that we could tell that real people would easily understand.

Early on, we decided that the term "trigger an ActiveWords" was critical to our product and to our message. The phrase got tattooed into everything we did. The net effect was that whenever we could talk someone into listening to our pitch, this phrase was used, and the person we were pitching would look at us as if we were talking a language that really required consecutive translation, like they do at the United Nations.

We would note the glaze over the user's eyes, and then realize that we had lost them, and that we had to digress and start over to explain why ActiveWords was so cool.(We have never had a bad review!)

As someone once wrote, "you only get one chance to make a first impression" ...and at that point we had lost ours. There are times when I wonder if we have ever recovered from this error, as people sometimes look at our stuff, look at our web-site and wonder exactly what it is we do.

I find myself telling them that ActiveWords solves a problem that they don't know they have until they see it, and then when they do, the "aha" factor kicks in, they get it, and once they start using ActiveWords they never go away.

The other day a blog post from my friend Shel Israel popped up in my news aggregator, stating that he was a blogger for hire.  I have gotten to know Shel well. He writes brilliantly, he knows how tell your story.

I wonder how many other little companies will die because they couldn't figure out how to tell their story, when all they had to do was hire Shel, let him translate their story into something that resonated, and get back to building better products and selling them.

The idea of hiring a smart pro like Shel to write the story is such a simple idea, and one that is so often missed by most of the companies I encounter. At Demo, it is sometimes shocking to see all the energy that goes into building a product, and then when the person telling the story about why it is a gotta have technology gets up on the stage, the failure to have simple compelling message results in the company cascading into free fall.

As I wrote before, "Shel writes well"...and if he is willing to be a blogger for hire, then write Shel, and hire him before your competition does!

I tell everyone that will listen that there are days when 50% of our downloads come because of blogs. Not having a thoughtful and clever blogging strategy today is another way of committing the same nearly fatal mistake that we made. We recovered through an incredible amount of hard work.

Why endure the pain if you don't need to?

Write Shel and hire him before your competition does.