As a content strategist and a Bostonian, one thing that drives me absolutely nuts — NUTS I tell you — is when I see Boston-targeted content that’s poorly localized.
In other words, lazy content that relies on outdated stereotypes of this city.
The classic mistake? Calling Boston “Beantown.”
Guys. Everyone. Let’s talk about this for a sec. Nobody who has lived in Boston for any respectable amount of time calls this city “Beantown.”
And if you use that name in how you address me, a potential customer in Boston, you stand out for all the wrong reasons. “Beantown” is about as noobie a mistake as calling San Francisco “SanFran” or, eegads, “Frisco.”
Why? Because those terms are for tourists. They are never what a native (or long-term resident, at least) calls their home city.
So if you want to reach that audience, you don’t use that language, simply because it makes you sound like:
1) You could not care less about the culture and language used in your target market.
2) You never bothered to ask a resident what’s actually authentic language. (Because then you’d know that nobody says “wicked pissa” around here anymore, either.)
3) A tourist. Which is arguably the worst of these three.
When I see an email, landing page or some kind of campaign calling Boston “Beantown”? It’s not cute, it’s cloying. It’s embarrassing for the company sending it. It makes me think that you aren’t even trying.
And at a time when authenticity in customer relationships is de rigueur, remember that localization isn’t just a term that applies to how you deploy foreign languages. If you provide products or services in specific geographic locations, do your diligence in how you shape and localize your content. Speak your customers’ language, use the words that ring true for them.
Because it’s really, really obvious when you don’t.
How to keep going when the ceiling comes down on you
Last Thursday at 6 a.m., my boyfriend and I awoke to the sound of a building-wide fire alarm. After the fire department came, did their inspection, and turned off the fire alarm, we went back upstairs to the cozy, warm condo we’d left only a half hour before to find water pouring from the ceiling into the walls and floors right outside our unit—and inevitably inside our condo, too.
I took this video an hour after the water started coming down outside our unit. The water kept coming down like this for several hours, and yes, the ceiling eventually gave out.
After the indoor-raining stopped many hours later, the final take was that the damage to our condo wasn’t too serious. But having the quiet and safety of my home, my space, ruined so unexpectedly was very upsetting, to say nothing of the needed administrative and maintenance work that followed.
Fate is never convenient of course, and this condo flood was no exception. I was in the thick of several important assignments at work, and those deadlines could only hold off so long.
I admit that I had a hard time getting my head back in “work mode” when I sat in my chair the following Monday. We’ve all been there, days where your mind is a million miles away. I needed the proverbial kick in the butt to get my mind going, especially since I had so many deadlines looming.
If you’re in similar straits (though I hope your home is safe and dry), these are the productivity tenets I followed to get me back on track:
That’s it. Nothing terribly complex: Get started, get going, get it done. But it’s easy to forget, especially when the walls (or ceiling) seem to be coming down around you.
How about you—what do you do to get yourself going when you’re up against a deadline?