What is true is that we’ve just been selected to create an identity and establish a Web presence for Ann Arbor / Ypsilanti-born biotech startup, DeNovo Sciences. (Now that’s our skill set.)

DeNovo Sciences has been getting a lot attention recently because they’re on the path towards being able to detect and capture cancer cells in the bloodstream before they find a landing site in the body and metastasize. As they say it:

We hope that this would one day lead to the holy grail of detecting cancer even before the discovery of  primary tumors.

Pretty cool, huh?

So is the fact that this local startup company is hiring a local company (us) to develop their brand with funding provided through Ann Arbor SPARK.

And this isn’t an isolated incident. It’s part of a movement.

There’s a whole lot of high tech entrepreneurship going on with support places like SPARK, Tech Transfer, and in labs, basements and small businesses around town. We think a flood of good news for the region is about to break.

And, even though Hile Design will never be the source of a life-changing medical or technological breakthrough, we think it’s pretty cool that we get to shine a spotlight on the folks that do.

In Don’t Make Me Think, Steve Krug gives a spot-on guide to website usability— all that stuff that helps visitors to your site find what they’re looking for. What Krug’s book doesn’t touch on is the relationship between usability and search engine optimization (SEO) —how visitors actually find your site in the first place.

I really don’t fault Krug for this (too much) since it’s not his area of primary expertise, and there’s plenty written elsewhere on SEO. Still, a nod to SEO might have been nice since some principles of usability that Krug advocates can appear to be in conflict with best practices in SEO.

If you’ve read Krug’s book along with a few guides to SEO, you probably know what I mean.

The current maxim for SEO is “content is king” with textual content sitting high atop the searchability throne. If you want search engines to find your site, you need good copy. A picture may say a thousand words to most of us, but to bat-blind Web crawlers, a picture only whispers whatever you can squeeze into its alt tag.

In contrast, to make sites more user-friendly, Krug suggests you “Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what’s left.” (Cue hearty shouts of approval from graphic designers everywhere.)

When less is more and when less is just less

In my first fresh-out-of-a-college writing job, I was confronted with a harsh reality: the 12 pages of brilliant verbosity in my college essays as an English major was not necessarily going to be rewarded in the business world. I’d just written my first article for the agency magazine, and I proudly passed it on to the graphic designer. It was promptly returned with “You need to cut at least 500 words to fit the page” written on top. How could I cut 500 words from perfection? And for what? “White space”?

Left with no alternative, I began the painful task of cutting my precious copy. I cut and reworded and cut and rephrased. When I was done, something miraculous happened: the fluorescent light above my cube glowed a little brighter as I realized my article was actually better, not worse. I hadn’t amputated any limbs — I’d performed lyposcution and lost the excess fat.

I think what Krug is advocating for is simply good writing. Unfortunately, the Web isn’t always the place to find this. With the lack of physical limitations like paper size, and the speed with which content is generated, the time and motivation to write tight-skinned copy is in short supply. Couple this with a sloppy understanding of SEO and “more” can feel like value added when, in fact, more is mess.

What’s a writer to do? Know thy audience(s)!

Fortunately, most of the principles of writing well apply to both SEO and usability. The key is to remember who you’re writing to. Every good writer knows that “identifying the audience” is step one. For writing on the Web, you have two audiences: the visitors who will use your site and the search engines who will drive them there. Do your due diligence on both. By researching what terms people actually use to find your products/services, you can make educated decisions about what terms are key (avoiding less is less) and what are superfluous (avoiding more is mess).

Consider the following examples of copy for RickySticky Widgets, a small company that helps users improve the performance of their Quicky Stickets:

Example 1:

In order to improve and enhance the quality of the performance, efficiency and speed of your Quicky Stickets, try our newly redesigned and highly innovative RickySticky Widgets which are the trusted and proven source to provide the perfect cutting-edge solution to resolve your Quicky Stickets’ performance issues. Buy your RickySticky Wickets Today!

Problem: the writer is making SEO the enemy of usability by cramming in every searchable keyword he can think of including many that are likely low-value. He loses clarity, and readers, in the process.

Example 2:

Buy our new RickySticky Widgets.

Problem: This is quite usable for a visitor who knows exactly what they’re looking for (and many will), but, with the important search term “Quicky Stickets” omitted, how many visitors searching for “Quicky Stickets” will never reach the page?

Example 3:

Newly redesigned for 5x greater efficiency, our second generation RickySticky Widgets are guaranteed to optimize Quicky Widget performance.  Shop online

Much better: This includes a few high-quality search terms but doesn’t overwhelm hurried shoppers with so much text that it obscures the action (i.e., “shop online”).

The good news is nearly all principles used to optimize a Web site for usability (alt tags, titles, clear navigation, etc.) are also things search engines reward. Which audience your site copy is most heavily weighted for (visitors or search engines) will depend on how well established your site and brand already is. And, if you want to have a bit more freedom in how much you write and a place to be a little freer with keywords, start a blog like this one. If I’d written the above advice on a page of the Hile Design site, it’d probably of kept it to 50 words or less. (Hint: notice how many keywords related to good Web design are included in this post.)

Poetry and fiction may be more personal works, thus requiring seclusion from the distraction of others. But agency copywriting is a different ball game altogether.

Marketing writing is a form of communication that is constantly evolving, and to be successful copywriters need to be actively involved with others. I have learned a few things from my experience in writing copy for Hile:

1. Swallow your pride. As a young writer in the advertising world I had to learn very quickly that not everything my creative little fingers typed out was gold. Writing copy for a website or a script for a video is not your personal memoir, so take a dose of humility and make adjustments, edits, and rewrites where the client wants them.
2. Respect the input of others. An advertising agency is a diverse community; there are designers, programmers, project managers, copywriters, etc. When your writing is under review (and it will be) don’t discount the critique of the web programmer just because he took fewer English courses than you in college.
3. The more perspectives the better. Think of the workplace as a microcosm for the larger, diverse communities of people that will eventually read your writing. So, send your copy to more than just your boss for review. This doesn’t mean you need to adhere to every single suggestion that you get back, but it will give you a better idea of how your work will be read by the public and the client.
4. Designers are your friends. Marketing materials are composed of both images and words, and the best kind happen when words and images are married to form a happy union that we dub “advertising.” As the writer, it is crucial that you work with the designer rather than simply expect him or her to create images that conform to your writing.
5. Don’t always expect a high-five. Writing is a personal endeavor because it is a form of intimate creation. It is also a measuring stick of your intelligence and creativity. But, just because the copy you wrote for that coffee company brochure is riddled with metaphor and alliteration, don’t always anticipate getting a pat on the back. Writing for the media is a job, and while it’s nice for good work to be recognized, don’t take every project as a personal appraisal of your worth as a writer.

In the words of the poet Richard Tillinghast, “humility is naturally rare, particularly among young writers, for whom the value of doing something remarkable is vastly increased when they can say it only took them fifteen minutes.”

Writing for the media is not about sitting down at your computer and producing a masterpiece of copy in “fifteen minutes.” In fact, no type of writing should be about quick and easy creation. Working in an advertising agency is a good way to learn that the best copywriting comes from collaborating with the people around you, whether through requesting editing and revision, a wider range of perspectives, or a simple dose of inspiration.

Maggie Tibus is the Copywriting Intern at Hile Design.

Imagine you’re a client eagerly about to review Hile’s proposed design for a new website. You click on the link we’ve given you and there on your screen you see a mocked-up web page featuring clean, stylish design, a just-right photo for your banner image and … wait a minute. What the heck? In place of where the copy should go you see this:

Where you thought you’d see words somehow related to your company’s industry or purpose, there in its place is what appears to be a long, lost Romance language. You rack your brain trying to decipher what is now taking the place of the expected text. Of course, the words (if you can call them that) are there to show you how the page will look with copy and, unfortunately, hold as much meaning as a baby’s babble.

What Lorem Ipsum basically comes down to is designing and organizing a website, brochure, etc. that visually looks like the finished product. It doesn’t distract the viewer with actual copy, and the letters are spaced out well enough so that it appears on the page just as intelligible English would. 

If Lorem Ipsum is simply a way to take up space, why not use something less cryptic? Wouldn’t a series of “blah blah blahs” do the same job? Not really. And let’s face it, seeing “content here, content here” all over a design comp (short for “composite,” advertising jargon for a preview or mock-up) can be about as boring as the drone of a person who gets up to the microphone and repeats ”check 1, 2, 3.”

Besides, why alter a dummy text that has survived for over five centuries and made the jump from standard printing to electronic typesetting*? Let’s show Lorem Ipsum a little respect here.

Way More Than a Placeholder

While Lorem Ipsum is not a language itself, most clients are not far off in assuming that it is. While it would be fun to say that we just bang on the keyboard and call it Lorem Ipsum, the placeholder text actually comes from The Extremes of Good and Evil, a book written in Latin by Cicero in 45 BC*. So the next time you’re on a website that sells toilet seat covers or the like, remember that Lorem Ipsum, that shout-out to one of the greatest Roman philosophers, held the place where the description of the latest cartoon soft seat now sits.

Lorem Ipsum has come a long way since the pages of Cicero, though. Today it is even built into most publishing software and can be found online through numerous text generators. If people are going to use dummy text they want the good stuff.

For those familiar with Lorem Ipsum, it has become a sort of inside joke, spawning numerous text generators that morph Lorem Ipsum into humorous, thematic dummy texts. These include Gangsta Ipsum, Pseudo German Ipsum, Marketing Ipsum, plenty of food-oriented placeholder texts, and, our favorite, Hipster Ipsum, Who wouldn’t want a dummy text that uses words like “sustainable,” “cardigan,” and “banksy?”

Lorem Ipsum Generator Sites to Tickle Your Fancy

• hipsteripsum.me
• tlipsum.appspot.com (Yorkshire Ipsum)
• www.lorizzle.nl/ (Lorizzle my dizzle fo shizzle)
• www.duckisland.com/GreekMachine.asp (We like the “Psuedo-German” and “Marketing”)

Apparently food Ipsums are popular:

• baconipsum.com
• tunaipsum.com
• veggieipsum.com
• beeripsum.com

Alternative to latin-ish Ipsums:

• www.cameroncreative.com/filler-text.html (Check out the “Terms & Conditions”)
• chrisvalleskey.com/fillerama (Monty Python filler? Yes please.)
• www.fillerati.com
• slipsum.com/lite.html

With that, I will leave you with these kind words: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Cras imperdiet. (Let’s pretend that means “So long, have a good day. Thanks for reading.”)

* Fact and figures according to www.lipsum.com

My 3-day a week treadmill regimen lasted 2 years.

Yup! I was a statistic. (Lest you think I’m a total slackard, I was exercising sporadically, but not on our expensive treadmill.)

Two and a half years ago when I decided to launch our company blog I had the same noble intentions as my early exercise aspirations. I promised myself I’d write two fresh posts a week, including compelling interviews with industry leaders, and that my entries would be GOOD. By my fifteenth post I realized that all those great ideas I’d had when I decided to become Mr. Social Media had run out. Uh oh. All of a sudden it got harder to be clever and meaningful. My blogging had ceased being a lark and had become work. This was especially problematic since I was counseling several of our clients to start blogging. After encouraging them about the benefits of writing online as a way to engage with their customers I always ended by warning them, “…and you know you have to stay with it since there is nothing sadder than an unblogged blog.”

A few years ago there was the belief that blogging several times a week was optimal or you’d risk losing the interest of your followers. That often led to people posting… how should I put it?… less than thoughtful content. As I followed the blogosphere and read more articles stating that producing compelling content was much more important than churning out posts for quantity sake I was somewhat relieved. Like a good portfolio, a few good articles are better than a few good articles along with a bunch of uninteresting ones.

But the fact remains that for a while my writing regimen got pretty sparse by anybody’s standards, so I am recommitting to making the time to write regularly. It’s challenging because I am the president of my company and I manage all the duties associated with my title. We’re also in the process of developing a new company website for which I am writing the content, so my time is even more limited than usual (Could that be why I am writing this at 7:45 pm?). But you will be my judges. I don’t have any excuses left for not writing regularly after this post goes live, so hold me to it!

P.S. A year and a half ago my wife and I adopted a dog from a shelter and it’s now my job to walk our pup Ellie every night for about 45 minutes come rain, snow, sleet or tsunami. I DO get my exercise since I need to walk her briskly, because she barks and lurches energetically at anything on 2 or 4 legs, which embarrasses me in front of my neighbors. Good for me!

To make a point, I’ve turned my subject matter on its head. So instead of entitling this post “10 Tips Toward Business Success” (I know I wouldn’t read an article with that tired cliché of a title), I’ve written one with a more engaging name (and hopefully more meaty content as well).

So here are my tips in no particular order:

1. Be passionless. Look at your business as just a way to make a living and nothing more. That will assure you take the easiest path to any challenge, and will expedite your company’s demise.
2. Nurture your ego. Make sure you view yourself as the supreme expert in every situation. And while you’re at it, make sure everybody else knows it too. If you look to surround yourself with people more talented than you in their areas of expertise, and give them the freedom to exercise their gifts, you run the risk of losing power even if you end up ultimately being more successful.
3. Don’t define your brand. Every company has a brand. It’s simply a matter of whether you build your brand with intent and purpose or whether the brand is vague and accidental. So avoid defining your company’s core purpose, and its value promise to its customers, and you’ll keep your customers (and staff) guessing who you are and just why they should do business with you.
4. Make sure you’re resistant to change. Hunker down and do things the same way over and over again. And while you’re at it, notice that your industry is changing due to economical factors as well as your customers’ buying habits, but do nothing to respond to the changes. Yup, embrace solid downward spiraling.
5. Put your needs before those of your customers. Better yet, instill an adversarial approach toward your customers: “I know you are going to rake me over the coals if I let you, so I’ll rake you over the coals first.” Can’t you almost smell those Chapter 11 documents?
6. Embrace the illusion that the business world should always be fair. That’s right, when you have a difficult customer to deal with, take it personally. Nurturing those perceived slights and inequities will almost certainly lead to bridge-burning and as we all know, retaining customers is much easier than continually winning new accounts. So, tolerance and compromise should be avoided at all costs.
7. View marketing as an expense with no return. That will ensure that you never allocate enough budget, time, and resources towards promoting your company to see meaningful results. In turn, this will support your belief that marketing doesn’t pay for itself. Hey, you’ve just saved money … that you’ll need when you go out of business.
8. Make sure your management style is dour and humorless. This will ensure that top recruits won’t want to work in your corporate culture, or at least will have the energy sapped from them soon after they come on board. Research shows that employees’ work-a-day experience and peer relationships are bigger drivers than pay, so you’ll want to avoid a relaxed culture with flexible hours. Not getting the most talented people on your team will go far to assure a short lifespan for your business.
9. Positive feedback to your employees is a no-no. They will just take advantage of you. And of course you should never apologize to an employee because you aren’t ever going to be in the wrong. Enough said.
10. Don’t give back. Doing work pro bono or at reduced rates for non-profits is to be viewed as an expense you just can’t afford. All this talk about how today’s customers care about the values of the businesses they patronize is just a bunch of hogwash.

That pretty much sums up how to expertly run your business into the ground. You may decide to really focus on one point, which can be quite effective, but combining several of the points above will be your quickest path to a dysfunctional and doomed company.

IPPES, an acronym for Intellectual Property Protection and Enforcement Specialists, offers a federally registered proprietary service program, IPPES ProtectEnforce, which allows companies to protect and enforce their most valuable assets: their identities or “brands.” This includes brand clearance, with comprehensive legal availability and conflict searches, as well as enhanced protection for brands, trademarks, Internet domain names, and copyrights. IPPES uniquely blends the industries of law and business to effectively offer its services to companies of all types and sizes.

Businesses, including startups and those introducing new brands or re-branding themselves, are currently facing cease-and-desist demand letters and lawsuits for unknowingly creating brand names and logos that are already in use or their competitors believe are too close to their brands. Moreover, as the Internet gets more and more populated, the amount of available domain names decrease. The problem becomes worse due to the existence of cyber-squatters—people and companies that register domain names and then charge exorbitant prices to sell them to companies that should have rightfully owned them in the first place. Along with brand development, design, and web development services, Hile Design is now offering a unique way to overcome these challenges.

By partnering with IPPES, Hile Design will offer clients what other advertising agencies do not—a way to not only create a brand but to legally own and protect it. Hile Design is always looking to add more value to their services and this new partnership with IPPES will provide additional industry-leading services and “peace of mind” for present and future clients.

As I peruse LinkedIn, Twitter and Google+ as well as other professional social sites I see marketing people describing themselves as Visionaries, Gurus, Luminaries and Pioneers. There are enough people out there labeling themselves as such that I can’t help but think, “C’mon, all these people can’t be Visionaries!” Besides, “Visionary” and “Guru” are such subjective titles—especially when ascribed to oneself. And for whatever reason, most of the people describing themselves with these monikers seem to be involved in the social media arena, which seems ironic.

As far as I know Albert Einstein never described himself as a genius. He left that to others. Albert Schweitzer, one of the greatest humanitarians in history, never considered himself such. In the arts Marlon Brando pretty much singlehandedly redefined acting, delivering a realism that forever changed the industry. But in interviews he described himself just a working actor, and nothing more. The great writer Ernest Hemmingway…. uh, wait a minute. He was a brilliant writer, but a braggart and a lout. My point is that we who are involved in marketing and social media consistently remind our clients that they need to be authentic, and not make subjective claims. As marketing Guru (my assigned term for) Marty Neumeier so eloquently states in his insightful book Zag, “Your personal reputation, like a company’s brand, lies outside your control. It’s not who you say it is­–it’s what THEY say it is.”

So, what attracts us to a company’s brand, or a person for that matter? How about honesty, authenticity and (dare I say) humility? Imagine if I saw you in a café and wanted to get to know you better professionally. Perhaps I knew that you were in charge of marketing for your company and in need of creative services. My best opening line might be something like, “Hi, I’m Dave Hile and I’ve heard a lot of great things about what you’ve been doing with your company XYZ. If you are ever looking for a creative firm to work with, please consider Hile Design. We would love to come in and meet with you. Some of our clients within your industry include…” Now compare that line to, “Hi, I am Dave Hile and I’m a marketing GURU! My pioneering efforts…blah, blah, blah.” OK, my example was a bit over the top, but I am making a point. Shouldn’t we use the same etiquette defining ourselves on professional social sites that we do when meeting someone face to face? I believe corporate and personal humility is a virtue that others are drawn to. So when I meet with prospective new clients I usually mention that I can arrange to have them speak with three or four of the existing clients we serve. I will leave it to our clients to define the value of working with us. (I know—when I talk about humility and hand out advice, I run the risk of not sounding humble!)

To clarify, I am not defining humility as a sappy, self-deprecating, fake modesty. If I weren’t totally convinced that my company and I weren’t providing significant expertise to move our clients forward and increase their sales, I ought to get out of the business. My point is that I can say whatever I want about our expertise, but in the end others will be the ones who will define my company’s talents and effectiveness.

Finally, the value of humility, whether corporate or personal, leads to the ability to continue learning. Have you ever been to a Twitter page, whether for a company or an individual, that has thousands of followers but chooses to follow only a few others? Whether true or not, it conveys that they want to speak and be heard, but they aren’t particularly interested in hearing what others have to say. I’ve been in the ad business for nearly 30 years and I am still (happily) learning every day, and often from people decades younger than me. Beyond listening to and learning from others, humility makes good business sense. In Jim Collins’ landmark book, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t, his main definer of what separates truly great companies from so-so companies or companies that don’t stand the test of time is corporate humility, from top management on down.

I apologize to any of my industry peers, whom I may have offended with this blog post. You may indeed be a Guru. But I definitely am not—unless you say I am.

I’d like to think that the expenses of this trip paid for more than college credit and that what I learned while across the pond may be applied to the work I’m doing here at Hile.

So, besides finally being able to define a “crumpet,” what have I learned? My literature courses revolved around legendary writers such as Jane Austen, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and Lewis Carroll. But, at Hile I’m not writing about ill-fated courtships or magical rings. Now that I’m out of the classroom and back in the office I feel like I’ve taken a tumble through a rabbit hole to land on my head in the world of advertising.

However, my job here can really be boiled down to one thing: words. Constructing, organizing, manipulating, sometimes even creating words is really what my job as an assistant copywriter comes down to. And what were Tolkien and Austen really doing but stringing together words to fashion a plot and characters? I realize it’s a simplification, but the realm of words is where literature and advertising live before they each evolve into something greater.

Now that I’m working on websites and press releases again, I’ve found the extensive reading and essay writing that I did in Oxford does not end with a letter grade. Words are constantly transforming as we apply them to different mediums and the work I’m doing now is part of that future growth. In Oxford I was able to see a glimpse of where these words have already been and studying that literary history makes me better equipped to use them today.

Besides bragging rights for studying in the same library where they filmed Harry Potter, my time in Oxford has shown me how a degree in English Writing may be applied to careers beyond being a teacher or a starving poet. Give me a job in advertising, a cup of tea and a warm scone and I’ll be happy. Note to Dave: feel free to make those last two a part of my pay.

Llamasoft is a leading supply chain software firm and an active investor in technology development. Just in the past year, Llamasoft has doubled its workforce and expanded its client base to a global scale, taking on clients such as Ford, General Electric, Target and Intell. Llamasoft’s software enables clients to manage supply chain costs as a whole instead of in individual pieces.