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Marketing is the ability to tell your story in a compelling and memorable way. Journalists do this every day, and there's something every marketer can learn from their journalistic brethren. It's a simple piece of advice given to every budding young reporter. That advice is: "don't bury your lede."

What's a lede? The lede is the most important part of the story. It's the gem that makes the story worth reading. Great journalists can spot a good lede in the midst of the most muddled story. And good marketers need to be able to do the same.

Here's an example of a great lede from a recent wall street journal article (hattip: Brandon Ducher)

Like most San Franciscans, Charles Pitts is wired. Mr. Pitts, who is 37 years old, has accounts on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. He runs an Internet forum on Yahoo, reads news online and keeps in touch with friends via email. The tough part is managing this digital lifestyle from his residence under a highway bridge.

Notice the lede isn't the fact he uses social networks, nor the fact he's homeless. It's the juxtaposition of the two. The idea that a homeless person has a digital identity is the heart of this story, and the author does a great job engaging you in the narrative with this unexpected angle.

To find the lede you have to sift through the chafe, the details that don't matter, and figure out what is actually worth talking about when it comes to your brand or product. You should grab the lede by it's collar and make it stand up front and center. The lede should lead.

The most common mistake is trying to say too much. You can't have multiple ledes, or you end up with a muddled, un-focused story that loses the reader. A good lede should be simple, concrete and memorable. It should hook the audience and keep the reader going.

Next time you're working on crafting a marketing message, pretend you're an outsider writing a news story. What aspect of the story is worth talking about? What's the most interesting angle? Try to identify the lede, and then give it the spotlight it deserves.

Ever wonder why many large companies have bad websites? The answer isn't: they have bad designers, or low budgets. The real reason is structural. There are cultural, procedural and bureaucratic issues that relegate them to mediocrity. In the parlance of political science, it's a structural issue that requires reform. But, reform requires a commitment most leaders are unable to make. It's much easier to maintain the status quo than to drive forward change.

It's the same reason failing companies languish with bad customer service. Corporate leadership refuses to confront the structural issues that underly their flaws. Instead they make excuses and institute incremental changes that do nothing more than paper over the underlying issue. It's short term fixes at the expense of long term reform.

So what are some of the most common structural issues and how can they be fixed?

1.) Interest Group Politics:

Every large company has numerous business units that compete for limited resources. The core concerns of these business units don't always align with the best interests of the company. Individual goals are often achieved at the detriment of the brand. If you're a manager for a particular business unit, your number one concern is hitting your own numbers. It's not the customer experience. It's keeping your job. This is why so many large companies end up with crowded, unfocused homepages. It's the reason there are 15 banners promoting 15 different business units crammed onto a single page. The corporate leadership conceded so the web team has to make it happen. The worst part is this undermines the customer's experience and sets up the web team for failure. It becomes impossible to design an elegant interface with clear calls to action and focused paths to resolution based on competing corporate priorities.

How to fix it:

Luckily fixing the problem isn't impossible, it merely requires the ability to say "no". The person responsible for the website should be accountable for it's performance as a whole. This person can act as a counterweight to the silo-ed interests of the individual business units. There is only so much real estate on a homepage. If a business unit isn't a top 5 priority then it shouldn't be on the homepage.

2.) Flawed Approval Cycles

Another common issue with enterprise websites is the approval process itself. I've previously addressed the golden rules of giving feedback, but unfortunately these rules aren't often followed by decision makers in the enterprise space. Instead stakeholder feedback tends to focus on exactly the wrong items. Managers look at a review as a chance to put their stamp on the creative. They give opinions, not analysis and the work goes through endless revisions. Often these changes are to it's detriment. Each review/approval is just as likely to make the work worse, as it is to improve it. More approvals don't lead to a better end result. It usually leads to watered down creative that is not only less impactful, but also less effective.

How to fix it:

Limit the number of people involved in the approval process, and limit the types of feedback that will be accepted. Communicate that not all feedback will be acted on. And institute a process for evaluating feedback that weighs the priorities of the brand, with the impact on customer experience. The person responsible for the feedback process needs to be able to differentiate personal preference from actionable feedback.

The Bottom Line

The reason good companies have bad websites is simple. There are structural flaws that make their homepage into a battle of competing interests at the expense of the overall customer experience, and the approval/feedback process is flawed in such a way that feedback becomes more detrimental than helpful. However, fixing these issues requires a commitment from management. It's not enough to just hire good designers, or UX talent. Companies have to reform their structural biases to make success possible. Talent by itself is not enough.

A quick note:

The inspiration for this post was an article in Fast Company on why the American Airlines website is such a disaster.

Your ability to give good feedback can help make or break a project. If you follow these simple rules your projects will go quicker, run smoother and turn out better.

Listen carefully, and ask questions.

The first step to providing good feedback is understanding the rationale behind the decisions that were made. "I don't like the red." isn't good feedback. It's a personal preference disguised as feedback. Focus on giving feedback that is non-opinionated and provides an opportunity for the person that created the work to provide context. A question like, "This color isn't in our brand standards. What's the thinking behind using this particular red?", will help you understand the reason the decisions were made so your input will be more informed and valuable.

Start with the nice.

Try to accentuate the positive in the first part of your communication. If you always go straight into critiques/revisions then the person you're working with will adopt a defensive stance. The result will be a combative conversation in which you'll be attacking and they'll be defending. You're on the same team and should act accordingly.

We end up working with a fair number of B2B clients. It amazes me how often they complain about their services/product being dry and boring. Most of the time they sit down and pound a few meaningless pages of copy, or they work with a mediocre B2B marketing consultant to develop their website content.

The result is almost always the same, boring copy that reads like a laundry list of ultra-generic product benefits. I can recite these by memory: increased ROI, lowered cost, lowered support burden, greater flexibility. Whether they're selling hosting, contract manufacturing, or consulting — the benefits always end up being the same, regardless of what the product actually does.

The reality is that too many B2B companies are scared of actually having a personality. They confuse being interesting with being controversial. They forget that their target audience is made up of ordinary people who desire nothing more than to learn a little bit more about what their company does in as clear and conversational a manner as possible. A website shouldn't try to dazzle customers with bullsh*t and buzzwords.

It's a fair question that deserves to be addressed. How should a company measure the value of design? What is the contribution that design makes to the bottom line?

This is a difficult problem. Sure there are numerous anecdotes that provide evidence that a focus on design leads to success (Apple, Google, Facebook etc). But, anytime you're attempting to isolate and measure a single variable in a complex environment it will be difficult.

A few years ago the British Council of Design commissioned a study that does provide some quantitative evidence. They created a stock index tracking the 61 firms that had won major awards in british design contests. This index fund outperformed its peers by over 200% during the study. This may not prove a causal link, but perhaps it proves at least a correlation between design and performance.