Saranne Rothberg is the Founder and CEO of The ComedyCures Foundation. Her blossoming non-profit brings laughter and therapeutic humor programs to children and adults living with illness, trauma and disabilities through large and small-scale comedy events.

She founded the organization from her chemo therapy chair in 1999 (she is a stage-4 breast cancer survivor) as a manifestation of her own experience with the healing power of laughter. Since then she has been featured on Good Morning America, Oprah, and most every other major news media you can imagine.

Her awards are too numerous to list, but Oprah has featured her as her “Hero” in her book, Live Your Best Life.

Her events are booked out for years.

We met for the first time by phone last week to discuss the possibility of aligning her foundation with a breast cancer related initiative I’m working on. She was in the familiar position of selling the power of her organization. And she did it remarkably well.

Here’s how she described her events.

“Take the spirituality of Deepak Chopra, the motivational energy of Anthony Robins, and the comedy and music of Saturday Night Live. Put it in a blender. And serve it with a stage-4 breast cancer miracle as the cherry on top. That’s a ComedyCures event.”

What a beautiful description. In a few quick sentences you’ve got it… lodged in your brain… no need for repetition.

I wrote a post a while back on the power of being concrete in your communication. What a great illustration. I was reminded yet again that we don’t have to use business-speak to be compelling when we describe our businesses, products and services.

Communicating like this… is it any wonder that this one woman has managed to touch hundreds of thousands of people?

How long can you hold your audience’s attention with a message that starts out with ambiguity? This is a question for TV and radio advertisers, copy writers, and public speakers alike, and getting it wrong can be embarrassing – or worse…

Sometimes a mysterious opening can be powerful and have great impact upon resolution. Other times it flops. Not unlike humor in advertising, people tend to respond with either love or hate – rarely neutrality.

Here’s an exercise for you. Watch this advertisement. I guarantee you haven’t seen one like it before. Show it to a few folks around your office, and watch the varied responses that you get.

Then, see if you can piece together a pattern of reactions among the people you show it to such that you can predict who will like it and who won’t. Herein lies the litmus test for when to steer clear of ambiguous, mysterious openers in your communications.
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I had the pleasure again this year of speaking at the annual Virginia Retail Merchants Expo. To no one’s surprise, I offered my latest thinking and a few related anecdotes on the topic of web marketing for small and mid-sized businesses.

One of the ideas that I presented this year drew particular interest from the audience, and I have subsequently received enough enthusiastic communication from attendees and others that I thought it would be worthwhile to explore the subject here in more depth.

We are all aware of the power of the ever-expanding blogosphere. Thousands of new blogs are launched every day addressing every imaginable topic and reaching an audience of darn near everyone – including your potential customers.

Aside from being an interesting social phenomenon, blogs hold great potential to influence the world of marketing in both obvious and subtle ways.
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Brian Korte is an artist pioneering a new and fun medium. He builds mosaics – big pictures – out of LEGOs.

I can remember the time he told me he was working on his first one – a portrait of two of his friends who had recently married. With limited expectations, I took a look, and WOW! pretty darn cool!

What’s really interesting about his LEGO art, is that once you understand HOW he does it, unlike other forms of art that so often require freakish talent, most anyone could do this with his level of precision.

He has leveraged this sense of attainability to create a following of enthusiasts. Kids can (and do) actually help him complete his work.

Now he has built a growing business called Brickworkz out of this form of LEGO art, and by all indications, he’s doing quite well. You should have a look. He’s being commissioned to build his mosaics for individuals and businesses around the country, and he’s creating a growing buzz.

I mention this for two reasons. First, he’s a creative inspiration, and he’s succeeding at breaking into the crowded art community in a new and exciting way. It’s worth watching.

Second, and more to the point of this post, he wrote something recently that highlighted a phenomenon that has intrigued me for several years now as a marketer. It is a counter intuitive quirk of human nature that many of us marketers should recognize and exploit.
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