Captivating Captions

I’m bringing captions back (yeurgh).

Now that the slim section of my increasingly slim audience has that JT (not Justin Trudeau but, his majesty, Justin Timberlake) banger in their brains, I’ll make my point.

AI is boring me.

That’s the main bit.

I think a lot of folk feel the same way, and as opinions go, it’s a bit like saying: “isn’t this nice weather we’ve been having…nice?”

We can talk about the creep into naff parody songs, the utterly dire posters for your utterly dire local pub’s next utterly dire event, or the unsettling video ads using AI-generated video (on that, my current targeted one of choice features two army sergeants in a staged podcast, telling me that, with just fifteen minutes of calisthenics a day, I too can look like a perma-tanned, superhuman fridge-freezer).

But one area that seems to have gone under the radar - probably because it often did anyway - is the captions on your posts across Instagram, TikTok, FloobRip (made that last one up to sound on the pulse, worked like a charm). But, as you can hopefully tell by the rambling, raconteur-stylings of this post and by popping sarcastic points in brackets, this is me writing now.

Why am I doing this? It’s taking waaaaaaaay longer than the bizarre little AI-generated ones that your apps can imagineer in an instant. It’s definitely less polished than the cybertone of voice that Claude and ChatGPT would dream up, for just the price of a small koi pond’s worth of water.

But it’s fun. It’s fun for me. If every other element - graphics, imagery, increasingly video - has some kind of pristine polish, why not add some humanity in the way I enjoy, by writing? And it doesn’t take that much longer. If most people are skipping through and just double-tapping that nice shot of the shiny musical instrument I’m promoting, the caption is for the superfans. And I reckon they’d rather read my silliness than something stale and synthetic.

Are there downsides? Yep. I miss longer-form writing, but that’s an uphill battle. And I constantly check myself when using a dash in a sentence - something I always loved to do - as it feels so overused. See.

Time is always an issue, and this is a busy, bustling time for pBone Music. We are shifting around websites, and just set up a new social media channel for UK educators. We’ve got some big events coming up, including lots of filming and content capture. When you’re a one-man-band marketer, taking a little longer on something as simple as a few paragraphs about a recent concert or a new product offer may seem fruitless.

But it’s fun. And making things - music, videos, graphics, bad puns about trumpets - is supposed to be fun. Will I inevitably use AI in my future work? Of course I will, even when I don’t really want to, as those tech tendrils creep all over the software, plugins and devices we use. But in areas where you want your personality to show, why waste an opportunity and make yourself sound like everybody else?

On that. I reckon if you read past the first line, the way I spelt “yeah” is what hooked you. It was unpredictable, it was searingly honest and raw, it was, well, it was genius, wasn’t it? You could overdo this trick - see food influencers deliberately mispronouncing ingredients in recipes - but those restless scrolling thumbs might stop in their tracks at something that sounds like you, instead of something that looks lethargic.

I have zero evidence to back this all up, but as I experiment with doing, you know, the job, as opposed to feeding everything mindlessly into a copy-canning machine, we might see some upturns in SEO. At the very least, on those new education channels, I wager someone would appreciate a real person with a real voice spending five minutes of energy, over someone wasting five reservoirs of water to splutter out some soulless slop. I would research it, but Google’s AI search would undo all that good work with one stat check.

If you’ve got this far, well done to you. If you’d prefer the AI summary, that’s ok. You’re just not as good a person as the rest of us.

If you’d like, I could suggest some more tips for humanising your content. Just say the word and, for just a little bit of freshwater, I’ll give you some more LinkedIn fodder.

A Rubbish Email

Dear Name.

This was how a recent email was addressed to me.

Despite the clunky opening, it grabbed me. This was a newsletter I was subscribed to.

Or was it???

Was it an elaborate hoax? Was it a typo designed to pique my interest? Was I Name? Was Name me? Had I somehow found myself inside the inbox of someone else (someone else called Name)?

Many, many hours later - having done my best Pepe Silvia impression - I scrolled down to read the rest of the email.

I skimmed. I sighed. It was meant for me but it wasn’t for me. I deleted it. The end.

And that’s it, isn’t it? It’s the same sad story for many of us when a new email graces us with its presence.

This is hardly a revolutionary observation:

what’sthedealwithjunkemailsaboutsizepillsformyjunk?

Someone reading an email, probably. And it’s probably crap.

The difference in my case was that this was a newsletter that I had signed up for. I was already interested. But I wanted to be wooed. Wined and dined with words. Made a fuss of. Treated like a person, with a name. Not just Name.

It’s a skill because our attention spans are so short. I mean, if you made it past that long bit in italics then good for you.

Or…good for me.

Because whatever you’re writing - emails, blogs, that first message in “the big group chat” to a bunch of strangers that have no frame of reference beyond your picture, which happens to be a blurry image of you in a rubber ring on a lazy river in a Greek water-park, and that must mean you’re either a freewheeling entrepreneur who owns a chain of amusement parks across the Mediterranean, trying to appear humble or a bit of a prat - it has to be interesting.

In fact, let’s stick true to form and stretch out that water-park metaphor.

You want your writing to take your reader on a journey.

In emails, a lazy river might not be the best method given the deluge of competition for our eyeballs.

But hold on - there’s a ride called THE DOMIN8R that’s higher than Olympus and promises to send you searing into the water below in record time. Could that be the way to go?

The first result in an image library for ‘waterslide’ or a visual representation of a crap email? You decide.

Well, maybe. Or maybe the email equivalent of that would be a subject title that’s packed with emojis and says “CONGRADULASHUNS”. In other words, likely to fall foul of the savvy reader’s risk assessment.

Your content needs to be guided by your reader.

It applies to all of your content but in those precious moments where a corporate entity reaches out to the wider world and says ‘hey’, it really matters to have a coherent strategy and a consistent tone of voice.

Some people will want a lazy river, some will want a thrill ride, and most will probably want something between these two extremes.

Surprise, interest, intrigue.

These elements are easy to generate but harder to kindle and maintain. Heck, I found ‘Dear Name’ jarring enough that it made me read on, but then I stopped, deleted, and continued to thrive.

Email marketing is a crucial touchpoint for your business. If you bombard your customers with words they don’t want to read, then you’re wasting time and money and potentially damaging your brand. If you don’t say anything, you’re missing out on all the fun (see image below).

This person is enjoying their email so much that they are taking a picture of it to share with loved ones! Now that’s an email.

If you made it this far down the page and want me to write something just as gripping for you, let’s talk.

Your faithful wordsmith,

Name.

How To Sound Like You Know What You’re Talking About

You are an engineer offering a unique solution to a problem the world doesn’t even know existed.

You are a fitness instructor that I should almost certainly get in touch with.

You are an ice cream maker and you call it gelato and that’s fine.

You are an EdTech entrepreneur. You have developed an AI learning system that will ensure that future generations don’t waste their teenage years in a band called The Fuglies. At least I think that’s what we were called.

You get the idea. Or do you?

An engineer, a fitness instructor, an ice cream maker and an entrepreneur. They all walk into a bar and, after deciding that there was one too many of them for a decent joke, agree that they are experts in their respective fields. Their consumers, however, are probably not.

Your idea might be brilliant. It might challenge the norm and be on course to disrupt your industry of choice, it might kickstart a meteoric rise to world domination. Or it might get lost along the way.

Why?

Because you might be an expert in your field, but you might not be an expert communicator.

So much of the hard work has been done - the lost hours to endless product testing, the money thrown at merchandise, the stress and strain of building a business…but that doesn’t always mean you know how to spell it out. You fool.

We’ve seen what Dragon’s Den can do to the darers and the dreamers. We’ve seen forehead sweat glisten in glorious 4K.

Some people are great at communicating their ideas. That elevator pitch? A cinch. They know their product, they know who wants it and they know how they want it to be heard.

But even those confident few cannot always put their point across on the page.

It’s a different, delicate process that requires the same careful balance as the flavours in one of those tasty tubs of artisan ice cream.

You don’t want to come across as vanilla if you’re trying to excite and invigorate your potential new customers.

You also don’t want to throw a (Mc)flurry of toppings that confuse your consumers.

Now we all know where this is leading. You need an expert, someone good with words. You need impactful copy for your website, you needed newsletters written yesterday, you would literally crawl over broken glass for…hang on a minute, I’m still reading this brilliant blog, maybe this is the person I need.

Here’s the twist:

I’m not an expert. Yet.

I’m getting there, the same way that many of you folk might not be quite the finished article.

[That’s right, it’s the classic selling technique: forcing someone to listen to you for ages, pulling the rug from under their feet and then ending with an insult. The ol’ triple threat.]

Besides how to stumble over making a point, here’s what I do know.

I do know how to make you sound like you know what you’re talking about. And I do know how how to get your point across in the way that’s right for you and your brand. Especially if there’s ice cream for motivation.

Get in touch if you think that we can grow older and wiser together.