We We or You You?

You'll have heard marketing people like me banging on about the importance of communicating with customers on their own terms. Often, this involves decisions about how and when you choose to communicate with them. The web has delivered a well-documented paradigm shift (do I win a prize for saying "paradigm shift"?) in marketing communications. Customers can consume marketing messages when and where they wish to consume them. But you control the message they receive.

So you need to keep a firm grip on the bit of the process you can control, and in that respect you should treat web communications no differently from any other type. And that includes the need to write in a way that engages the customer's interest. I'll write another day on wider considerations of style for web copy. But today's message is all about "you." It's a very simple message, actually. When a potential customer is reading about your business or any of your competitors with a possible purchase in mind, they have a single all-important question in their mind: "What's in it for me?"

In marketing it's so easy to fall into the trap of telling people all about how wonderful your products and services are.

"We are Birmingham's leading provider of carbon fibre sewing machine needles."
"We offer the finest quality fishing tackle in the UK market."
"We have bigger cojones than any other cojones supplier in the galaxy..."

What the buyer wants to know is whether your products and services will be wonderful for them. "You" is a magic word. It forces you to describe your offering in terms that relate to the buyer.

If you're worried that your current website copy doesn't engage buyers as it should, Future Now's We We Monitor is a useful, slightly tongue in cheek tool to help you check:

http://futurenowinc.com/wewe.htm

Simply type in the URL of the page you want to check and it'll tell you whether your content is we we or you you!

Here's the result for Webreality's Services page at www.webreality.co.uk:

For the url: http://www.webreality.co.uk/section/3/index.html

Your Customer Focus Rate: 65.22%
You have 15 instances of customer-focused words.

Your Self Focus Rate: 34.78%
You have 7 instances of self-focused words.
You have 1 instances of the Company Name.

You speak about your customers approximately 0,002 times as often as you speak about yourself.
Excellent!


Not bad at all... and better than some other pages on our site. I'm off to purge the we we...

Sorry, but content really IS king!

I've been planning to start my blog on web content for some time, but what it took to get me started was an article I read at the weekend:

http://www.searchengineguide.com/degeyter/010785.html

Do you ever get the impression that commentators sometimes comment for the sake of getting a reaction? Stoney deGeyter argues that content is dead and community is the new king. I'm glad that there have already been a number of well-argued comments refuting Stoney's position.

I agree with the premise that community is THE great new force in defining the evolving role of the web in our lives, but it isn't the heart of the matter. Content is. No website can exist without content. Community follows content, and content will adapt to (or be defined by) community. But no web community has yet emerged without a pre-existing shared interest in content of one flavour or another.

Youtube - "I come here because I want to share videos."
Flickr - "I come here because I want to share images."
Facebook - "I come here because I want to share myself."

I don't pretend to be able to see beyond the "community era" to what great strategic development will follow it, but I do know this for certain - neither community nor its successor will replace content as the reason for the web's existence. Isn't it nice to have at least some certainty in the wild world of the web?!