Springtime is here – even in the Canadian prairies. It makes a big difference, waking up to sunshine rather than chilly darkness. This morning my alarm went off at 7:30 and I was glad to see that it was already full daylight outside. I lay in bed for a while and thought about the word “sunrise”.

The sun doesn’t really rise. It stays where it is, and the rotation of the earth causes us to fall out of shadow and into the sun’s light. The word “sunrise” reflects an ancient, intuitive, pre-Copernican conception of how the universe works. But it’s the perfect word. You couldn’t possibly do better.

Let’s say you’re in marketing and your boss asks you to develop a pitch for a new feature. “People on our side of the planet are tired of this constant darkness,” your boss might say. “Electricity bills are through the roof. Plants aren’t growing. We’re always bumping into things. So we’ve decided to rotate the earth once every 24 hours, so that for 12 hours out of every 24, this side of the planet will get direct sunlight.”

“What a great idea!” you say. “What are we calling it?”

“Well,” says your boss, “that’s where you come in.”

So you sit there spinning your globe, trying to come up with a good, concise, marketable description of this new feature.

Hemispheric illumination shift?

Rotational shadow escape?

Sunward earth turning?

Ugh. A PR campaign can probably be built around sunward earth turning to convince people of its benefits. But who’s going to get up at 5 AM to watch it happen?

There are two components to marketing. First, you need to make a complicated new thing seem straightforward and familiar to an audience that probably isn’t paying much attention.

Second, you need to make it – for want of a better word – beautiful.

I’ve been trying, in the Spokesmonster cartoons and on this blog, to get across the benefits of a service that offers a lot of great features – some of them hard to explain in ten words or less. Hopefully I’ve been making a bit of progress. But I still haven’t come across that magic phrase that makes everything clear and beautiful.

Nothing to do but keep trying. Meanwhile, I’m convinced that, like sunrise, StepRep sells itself – once people experience it for themselves.

Over at the StepRep blog, Jeff has a link to an interesting news item: Twitter has made a small change to its profile pages which might make a big difference in future Google results.

I should start by saying: I don’t really “get” Twitter. I suppose I might come around. I’m one of those cats who won’t eat his food when it’s served in a new bowl. I resisted joining Facebook for almost a year, to the exasperation of my friends. Then I joined, and now I…well, I still don’t really “get” Facebook, actually. I think it’s clunky and poorly organised. And I really didn’t need to reconnect with that old high school acquaintance who now spends his days SuperPoking everyone he ever met. But thanks to Facebook, I have enjoyed some rousing games of online Scrabble, and at least my friends don’t crack jokes about what an old man I am any more.

It’s funny. Twitter is getting a reputation as a place where loud-mouthed narcissists blab about watching TV and cutting their toenails. As you’ll recall, when blogging first emerged as a fad a couple years ago, it got the same rap. But in spite of all the bad press, I embraced blogging easily while I’ve resisted Twitter.

Why? It’s simple. Twitter demands brevity. I’m a windy writer. I exhale in complete paragraphs. If I have something to say, it probably can’t be said using less than five hundred words. A hundred and forty characters? What can you say in a hundred and forty characters? It takes me a hundred and forty characters just to furrow my brow in preparation for writing.

Trying to sell me on Twitter is like trying to sell a fat guy a Smart Car. He might be able to squeeze himself behind the steering wheel, but he’ll never be comfortable. He needs a minivan or an SUV – something that leaves room for him to fan out his flab.

I need a blog to fan out my flab.

I’m not dissing Twitter, any more than I’m dissing Smart Cars. If you’re comfortable with that 140-character limit, great. If you can find ways to be interesting within that limit, better still: you’re a far more disciplined writer than I am. As Blaise Pascal said, apologising for the length of one of his letters: “I would not have made this so long except that I do not have the leisure to make it shorter.”

Perhaps I could compress this blog post to 140 characters. But I’m too busy.

There’s an old saying and I don’t know where it came from and I’ll probably quote it wrong. It’s a piece of advice about how to structure speeches. It goes something like this:

First, tell them what you’re going to tell them.
Then, tell them.
Then, tell them what you’ve told them.

You could paraphrase the above as: always assume your audience isn’t paying attention.

I think it’s pretty good advice, whether you’re giving a speech or marketing a product. Even when they’re looking right at you, people’s thoughts are often far, far away – as far away as Mars is from Earth. If you send out just one probe, it might get lost in space, or burn up in the atmosphere, or crash in the mountains. Better to send out two or three probes and hope one makes it to the surface safely.

Sadly, a marketing career based on repetition, repetition, and more repetition can get a little…well, repetitive. As one of those fancy-schmancy tea-drinking corduroy-wearing “creative” types, I get bored with writing assignments that merely require me to rearrange last week’s sales pitch. Haven’t I explained StepRep often enough? Can’t I move on to something different?

This week I’ve had a few “rearrangement” assignments sitting on my desk, and I’ve been having a hard time getting into them. I’ve been trying to come up with a different angle. A friend of mine called up and left me a voicemail where he outlined an analogy he thought I could use. I’ve paraphrased him quite a bit, but here’s what my friend had to say:

Remember the popular girl in high school? It didn’t matter what she did – it didn’t matter how boring her life was – people couldn’t stop talking about her. Maybe she broke up with her boyfriend, or crashed her car. Maybe she just chipped a nail. Somehow, whatever she did, no matter how mundane, word got around. She was at the center of the conversation. People flocked around her.

Meanwhile, the uncool kids wandered the corridors, feeling invisible and isolated. Their tastes were a little more obscure – they were into opera, or poetry, or model trains. Without hangers-on to gossip about them and spread the word about what they were doing, it was difficult for the opera buffs and the poets and the model train enthusiasts to connect with one another.

What the popular girl had, what the unpopular kids lacked, was brand name recognition. In effect, gossip did for the popular girl what billboards and TV ads do for Coke: made her ubiquitous. If you’ve got an appetite for a soft drink, the word Coke is never far from the front of your mind. Maybe if you stopped to think about it, you’d decide that you’d much prefer a bottle of Boot Hill Sassparilla. But you don’t stop think about it. The waitress asks you what you’d like, and you name the first drink that comes to mind, and Coke is it.

Now, ubiquity is not something that can be acquired on the cheap. Coca-Cola spends a fortune keeping its brand in the public eye. But you probably don’t want to be Coca-Cola. You’re content to be Boot Hill Sassparilla – provided that the people who like sarsaparilla know where to find you.

StepRep can’t make sarsaparilla as famous as Coca-Cola. But if you’re a sarsaparilla maker, you can use StepRep to help ensure that people see your brand when they’re searching for sarsaparilla.

StepRep can’t make poets as popular as cheerleaders. But if you’re a high school poet, you can use StepRep to help build your brand name recognition within that small circle of high school poetry fans.

There! That’s a pitch I haven’t tried before.

I feel refreshed.

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PS. I tried Boot Hill Sassparilla on a visit to Santa Fe a few years back, and thought it was pretty good. I think it’s local to the southwest – you can’t get it where I live. I hope they’re still making the stuff.