SAM 'n ELLA'S HOMESTYLE RESTAURANT - better known as: EFFECTIVE USE OF HUMOR IN YOUR MARKETING MATERIALS

Call me crazy but if I were to open a trendy restaurant I think that I would use this article's top title as my moniker. It would certainly create some chatter about the newest spot in town. The SAM 'n ELLA'S sign would be hung months in advance of its doors being opened just to start the buzz. I might complete the theme and really "go for it" with an emergency room décor with wait staff in nurses uniforms serving up soup-in-a-bedpan. Beware, any would-be restaurant franchisers out there, this article is published and I had the idea first!:-)And so it should be with your marketing materials. Laughter and smiling, like music, are among the few universal languages where we all share the same dialect. Humor equals warmth and friendliness. Which equates to the kind of person your prospects will want to do business with.I'm not suggesting that every piece of promo should produce gut-wrenching hysterical laughter but subtle injections of personable humor can score big points with would-be customers. Let me cite a few examples.Jim Wilson of VirtualPromote effectively injects his personality into the lead page of his website (http://www.virtualpromote.com/promotea.html ). This is a long tutorial that eloquently expouses the 'there-are-no-experts' tactics of website promotion. Could get boring pretty quickly, but not with Jim. There is a short prologue, then an introduction and just where a reader's attention may begin to wonder, Jim puts forth these two paragraphs: "The final reality to materialize was: I was hooked. This Internet publishing stuff is addicting. Something new to learn every hour. Sleep became a thing of the past. My phone is always tied up and my family gave up on my attending things like movies and meals.If all this sounds familiar: you are an addict. Especially if you are reading this at 2:00 A.M. But there is hope. You can get the traffic. You can debug the cgi and HTML. Java can be learned. Forms really do work, eventually. You can add more phone lines. Sorry, can't help with the family problems. Let me know if you figure that one out." And Jim proceeds to make you feel right at home with him throughout his impressive website with flashes of his friendly and witty personality. This was my introduction to Jim and I liked him before I even began communicating with him. Important stuff in the oft cold binary world of the Web!Another example of effective use of humor (of the non-belly laugh nature) I especially like appears in the LinkOMatic website: http://www.linkomatic.com . One line - their slogan, "Quite simply, the laziest way to promote your website". Catchy, friendly and right up front. A bonus for them, their support people are indeed very friendly to deal with.Here's my favorite. Robert Woodhead, of SelfPromotion.com cracked me up with his informative but hilarious website at: http://selfpromotion.com . My kind of people. Beauty is, this guy's got a great web-based search engine submission program that he lets you use and you only pay him what you feel it's worth if you're satisfied. Who says there's no integrity on the Net? Visit Robert's website and see if you're not smiling by the time you're through the first page.Humor can be especially effective in salesletters. The purpose of a salesletter is of course to produce sales, not chuckles, but a warm smile can go a long way towards opening a door and closing a sale. Press releases are almost always staid and my first line of offense is to, wherever possible, warm it up with at least a semi-quaver of a polite smile. Kinda like electroshock when someone is in his-or-her-reading-boring-press-releases trance. A fluorescent orange tie on gray suit day.Try it. You'll like it. Humor!!..... not the tie! And so will your prospects and customers. Projecting your "warm side" is not a weakness, as some experts might have you believe. It is strength in its purest form that we as human beings naturally gravitate to. The Internet is rather faceless so it is the perfect place to put your best face on. I'd much rather 'feel' personality in a website than see flashy java-laden fireworks. But more important, I'd be much more inclined to do business with a real person, a warm human being that I'm 'introduced to' right up-front, than a non-descript entity in some technomarvellous website. If humor is one of your best character features, use it in your marketing materials!They say it's a small world and the Internet is making it even smaller. But you know what? ... I'd still hate to hafta paint it!