What your business can learn from another roadside attraction

On the Trans-Canada Highway in New Brunswick just shy of Nova Scotia, there's a tourist attraction called Magnetic Hill. It gained fame in the 1800s as a place where your horse cart would appear to roll uphill, though today it's arguably better known as an amusement park/water slide/zoo complex that also holds rock concerts for long-in-the-tooth headliners like AC/DC. There are enough "gravity hills" in the world that Wikipedia has an entry for the phenomenon, though the one from which this particular site takes its name is pretty well an afterthought at this point.

Like so many roadside attractions, Magnetic Hill is, alas, a tad underwhelming. You pay your five bucks, get your instructions from the hill attendant (a frontrunner for Boringest Jobs in North America), and drive to the appointed marker a hundred meters or so in the distance. Put the car in neutral, crane yourself around so you can see out the rear window, let off the brake and, voila, your brain thinks you're coasting uphill. The illusion isn't terribly convincing--as my teenage son put it, "I think it's more like Momentum Hill."

So, the business angle. You always hear experts say that you should never overpromise and underdeliver, but that's the business plan of just about any roadside attraction, isn't it? Their marketing abilities deserve the utmost respect, surviving on no more than an endless tease of billboards and quarter-page ads in local tourista publications. Because they're dependent on a fool-me-once clientele, the "underdeliver" part doesn't really matter. Repeat customers, on the other hand, require reliability and trust. The lesson in here for freelancers, or for that matter any type of businessperson, really comes down to promising and delivering. Say what you're going to do, then do it, and you'll have a good chance to do it until you don't want to anymore.

Then again, you could argue that our family has derived far more than our $5 worth of laughs since being lured off the highway on that fateful summer afternoon. Unforgettable experiences come in a variety of packages, eh?

5 conversation killers in a first-client meeting

Driving through the mountains east of Pittsburgh yesterday, I caught a fuzzy radio broadcast with a great tease: "After the break...the 7 worst types of small talk."

Alas, the actual segment wasn't as juicy as I'd hoped--the guest's verboten topics were the things you could probably guess if you've ever been to a cocktail party: Don't talk about your golf game (no one cares, even other golfers), wine (unless you're sure the other person is a oenophile), what route you took to the party (ZZZZ), kids (no one cares, even other parents), dreams (unless you want to be flagged as a flake), and stocks (you're probably either bragging or whining). The signal faded out before the final one, but I'm guessing it was religion, politics or sex.

But it did strike me that there's an analogy for freelancers headed into a meeting with a prospective client, when the inevitable lull in conversation comes around but the sale hasn't closed. The nervousness and excitement can cause us to blurt, blab or otherwise inject nonsense in ways that can be every bit as deadly as the items above:

• Talking about how slow business has been (smells like eau de desperation)
  
• Talking about being super busy (it's a fine line between being highly sought and overwhelmed)
  
• Recounting a tale of bad or unruly clients (risky, though you might be able to get away with something that's funny and has a happy ending)
  
• Penalty fees/rules/restrictions (e.g., number of rounds of revisions)
  
• Talking too much, period (even if it's positive and upbeat stuff)
  

You need to know yourself and how you react under the pressure of the first meeting. Better to be armed with a bunch of good questions that can drive the conversation where you want it to go. Ask the client if it's OK to record the conversation, and then listen to it afterward to identify the weak points of your presentation. And for the love of all that's holy...please don't talk about the weather.

Minds thinking alike

Direct-mail legend Denny Hatch is right on target with his musing today: "What authors can learn from the great copywriters." He takes several newspaper columnists to task for sloppy prose, with scathing examples.

In his little diatribe, he echoes the technique I described in my Friday post about the best writing advice I'd ever received:

Journalists and authors, please take note of the dictum by freelance direct response copywriter Pat Friesen: “Normally, the best lead paragraph is buried somewhere in the middle of your first draft copy.”

Anyway, it's worth reading the whole thing--Denny says it much better than I could summarize it. While you're at his site, I highly recommend signing up for his free "Business Common Sense" email newsletter, too. I don't always agree with him, particularly when he injects politics, but he always makes me think.

Do you hear what they hear?

I'm far from the first to report on this phenomenon, but as the old NBC sitcom summer re-run promos pointed out, "If it's new to you, it's new."

Last night, my kids were goofing around with my wife's iPhone. My 13-year-old son would press a button, and ask us, "Can you hear that?", and then he and my 11-year-old daughter would laugh hysterically when we responded "No." The process repeated several times, until finally we heard a piercing high-pitch sound. More laughter.

As any middle school kid can tell you, they were playing the "mosquito ring tone" or "teen buzz." I won't belabor the science, which you can Google or read about in this New York Times article, but the basics are that it's a high-frequency tone that can't be heard by most adults over the age of 20 or so--thus, the perfect ringtone for surreptitious texting in a classroom that's banned cellphone use. My wife and I couldn't hear any of the mosquito tones that a teenager could hear, only the one for fortysomethings. (Perfect for sneaky texting in an assisted living facility, I guess.)

Ironically enough, the tone was originally developed by a British scientist seeking to disperse loitering mallrats. I couldn't find any citation about the enterprising yoot who turned the annoying tone into a grownup-proof communication tool.