Web Contentment

How to use Twitter - Part 1 - Followers

2009-09-03T10:11:00.000-07:00

This is the first part of a series of blog posts intended primarily for Webreality clients who want to make better use of Twitter.

Future posts will cover re-tweeting, Twitter search, mobile Twitter, Twitter tools and creating your Twitter routine.

What’s a follower?

A “follower” is another Twitter user who has chosen to include your tweets in their view of Twitter. So on their Twitter home page your tweets will appear in the stream of tweets they see.

How do I get followers?

You can get new followers by activity in Twitter and things you do elsewhere on the internet.

With a new Twitter account the quickest way to build your following is to get “follow-backs.” This means you follow other Twitter users with the aim of getting them to follow you in return. Most Twitter users have their account set up to send them an email whenever someone new follows them. So every time you follow someone they have the chance to click on a link in the automated notification email and look at your page in Twitter. Many of them will then follow you. This is called a “follow-back”. The secret to getting follow-backs is choosing the people you follow carefully to make sure they are likely to be interested in you.

You will also find that you can build your following by re-tweeting. This means taking a tweet by someone you follow and re-publishing it as a tweet of your own. (My next post in this series will cover re-tweeting etiquette.) Twitter users who track their own tweets being re-tweeted will often follow people who re-tweet them.

It’s also a good idea to engage with the Twitter cultural phenomenon of “Follow Friday” in which users tweet the Twitter names of other users they consider worth following. Again, users who track references to their Twitter name will often at least acknowledge your “Follow Friday” in a tweet, and might also follow you as a result.

Outside of Twitter itself, you should use every online opportunity to invite people to follow you.

Your website should include a “follow me” link to your Twitter page.
If you run a blog, do the same.
If you promote your business in online forums, have a standard sign-off for your contributions which invites people to follow you.
Add a suitable link to your standard email sign-off for business emails.
If you use bulk email marketing include a “follow me” link in every email you send.

Managing your followers

There are so many reasons to be following people on Twitter. Researching your market, keeping ahead in your own area of expertise, learning about social media, learning about Twitter... But, it’s easy to overdose on Twitter. The standard Twitter home page view shows you the 20 most recent tweets by the people you are following. Unless you are staring at your Twitter home page all day, you’re going to miss a lot of other people’s tweets in your standard view. And the more people you follow the more tweets you’ll miss. So my advice is to be very strict with how many people you allow yourself to follow. Assuming that everyone you follow is a relatively active tweeter, my benchmark would be to follow no more than 100 people.

You might need to go way beyond that initially to get the early follow-backs you need, you’ll find that you want to follow new people all the time as you see re-tweets of great people, and you might decide periodically to actively research new people to follow to get fresh insights and new follow-backs. But it’s always worth pruning your own “following” list to remove the people who aren’t active or are no longer relevant or whom you followed early for a follow-back but never followed you!

Here’s a very useful article about managing your Twitter noise:

http://lavrusik.com/2009/08/31/tips-tools-to-keep-your-twits-organized-and-noise-to-a-minimum/

Next time... re-tweeting.

Why it's vital to write with search in mind

2009-05-05T08:52:00.000-07:00

In my world things hunt in packs. I'll get a question from a client one day about a particular topic, something new that I've not needed to brief a client on before, and then within four or five days the same thing will have come up on a couple more occasions with other people.

(As an aside, there are all sorts of theories for this phenomenon. One of them is the Law of Attraction.)

Anyway, the latest one to crop up in almost every conversation I'm having at the moment is the need to write web copy with search in mind. From a technical perspective this plays out in the way you structure the code of your website to make it easy for Google and other search engines to index your site correctly.

But my topic for today is the thought processes involved in ensuring that your copy doesn't try to reinvent the language that people will use when searching for a subject.

Webreality's working on a major project at present with a very big client with a huge team of content editors working on a large number of sites with thousands of content pages. In helping them migrate to a new content strategy where much of the content served will derive dynamically from their new site's search technology, the biggest challenge we will face is coaching their users to think first and foremost about how a piece of content will be found before they even start adding it via the content management system.

Gerry McGovern has written on this topic and has some excellent real life anecdotes that illustrate the need to write as users think rather in a way that fits the self-image of the publishing organisation. One of his most memorable posts on the subject is here. "Climate change" is the official terminology of most governments, but most people search for "global warming." Airlines used to prefer "low fares" until it became evident from Google's data that customers search for "cheap flights."

And it was one of Gerry's recent posts that brought the topic back into focus in the light of the current swine flu outbreak. The EU have been trying to "re-brand" swine flu as "novel flu virus." Now, we know that bureaucracies tend to expend a lot of energy in trying to change the way people think, but ponder the irresponsibility in the web age of trying to change the name of a virus that threatens the world after the world has universally adopted a particular name for the virus. A good way to prevent your citizens finding the latest information about how to reduce the pandemic risk.

Gerry sums it up with, "Search is the greatest laboratory of human behavior that has ever existed. When words such as "swine flu" go wild on the Web, you must use those words because otherwise you will not be found. If you are not found then you are not useful."

Trash the splash

2009-03-16T05:00:00.000-07:00

You own a shop. You want it to look "cool". So what do you do? It's obvious, isn't it? You hire a big, burly bloke, dress him in a cool outfit, stand him at the door with his arms folded, and tell him that when anyone arrives at the door they have to ask him very nicely if they can come in before he moves aside. Even if it's raining and they're in a hurry.

THAT'S the real world equivalent of the website splash page.

I hoped I'd never have to rant about them again.

Then, last week, I heard a designer (not one of Webreality's...) banging on about how "cool" Flash splash pages are.

Dude, it's 2009! And no-one says "dude" any more! Or uses splash pages.

Does Google have one? Does Amazon have one? Does Ebay have one? Does YouTube have one? Does Facebook have one? Does Twitter have one? (Think I've made the point.)

Great web design is rarely "cool". It just works. Quickly.

Moral of the story - if you want a website that works for your target users, use a web designer. Not a designer who does websites!

Cynthia loves thespiraltree.com

2009-03-14T03:29:00.000-07:00

Message received by Sarah at thespiraltree.com:

"Sarah,

I have to tell you that your site is one of the most beautiful and calming that I have ever visited. The "spirals" of your tree are elegant and yet soothing and your choice of pictures, along with the layout, is just so welcoming. It was fun to just wind around and explore.

Cynthia"

Video poised to permeate the web

2009-03-13T03:15:00.000-07:00

From mediapost.com:

"Video is poised to permeate the Web in a way that goes far beyond YouTube's user-generated clips."

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=98807

Privacy and Google's "behavioural ads"

2009-03-11T05:07:00.000-07:00

Web users are impatient and time is short. Google has always strived for relevance in the search results and ads that it serves in response to a search term. No-one complains when an individual website serves up relevant content when we visit - see youtube.com as a good example. Google's allowing users to see and edit their profiles.

So what's the problem with Google's new behavioural ads?

This is the web at its best - intelligently serving relevant content to users.

Socitm 2009 UK council website review shows "stagnation"

2009-03-11T02:24:00.000-07:00

Thanks to headstar.com for this news update:

""A picture of stagnation" is painted by many of the reviewer comments from this year's 'Better connected 2009' review of UK council websites by the local government Society of IT Management (Socitm), published this month.

Despite finding a steady overall improvement in the quality of UK local authority websites, the review says a range of website management issues must be addressed by councils if sites are to offer fully developed 'self-service' options to citizens.

Self-service will be vital if councils are to become more efficient and save money by reducing telephone and face-to-face service provision in tough economic times, it concludes.

The survey ranks all sites as either 'standard', 'transactional' for more interactive and better-developed sites, and 'excellent' for those that meet high criteria across all areas of review.

Eight councils have achieved an 'excellent' ranking in 2009: Allerdale, Barking and Dagenham, Bristol, East Sussex, North East Derbyshire, Salford, South Tyneside and Surrey.

This compares with five excellent councils last year and just one the previous year. However, levels of satisfaction recorded among people visiting council websites are some 10% lower than in 2008, the report finds, detecting just "marginal improvements against most criteria" since the previous year."

A brief review of the top sites cited in this report shows that Jersey and Guernsey's govermental sites have a long way to go to compete at this level. Gauntlet's down - Jersey's on the case!

Usability testing endorsed

2009-03-09T09:05:00.000-07:00

Great de-brief meeting with a Jersey-based client last week who's just completed a programme of usability testing with Webreality's guidance on a web portal and a set of proprietary web applications.

They want to stay anonymous at present, so no direct quotes from them, but our lead contact said he was a "testing convert." The results of the testing produced valuable design and layout changes that dramatically improved first time task completion in the second round of testing. The commercial benefits will be tangible.

Entertainment key to successful "millennial" content strategy

2009-03-08T01:22:00.000-08:00

A month ago Mediapost.com published this:

'According to Deloitte's State of the Media Democracy survey, three-quarters of Millennials (ages 14 to 25) view the computer as more of an entertainment device than their television. Ed Moran, Deloitte director of product innovation, notes that "This (early-adopter) generation of consumers was the first to be raised on the Internet and is united across borders and cultures by their digital media preferences, so the implications for global marketers are unprecedented." '

For businesses and organisations with web strategies targeting younger web users this is crucial information.

The results continued:

'Across five surveyed countries, Millennials are the most active in gaming, music and Internet use for socializing:

80% of Millennials are regularly searching, downloading and listening to music over the Internet
73% are also regularly socializing online (via social networking sites, chat rooms or message boards)
59% of Millennials use their mobile phone as an entertainment device, versus an average of 33% of all consumers.
Millennials are spending one-third less time watching their television than are other generations.'

It's already widely understood that old style "push" marketing, which disseminates messaging in as targeted a way as possible, is being supplanted by "pull" models based on the spontaneous emergence of communities of common interest who pay attention to each other's likes, dislikes and recommendations. Social networking has accelerated this phenomenon, with the natural viral effect of blink-fast and super-easy sharing of content and ideas.

The newest challenge for millennial marketers is how to work entertainment into the brand and its online strategy; how to use pull marketing and entertainment to win more hearts and more eyeballs.

Online holding up well in the downturn

2009-03-07T06:55:00.000-08:00

At Webreality we expected a very slow start to 2009 but so far so very good. There's lots of evidence of businesses looking online to find more cost-effective and measurable marketing tactics, we're seeing new clients who want to put processes online to reduce cost, and there is a surprising amount of new e-commerce business about.

Down to us to keep things as cost-effective as possible.

Webreality is first and foremost a support business, which is why we keep our clients long term, and that philosophy is serving everyone well at the moment.

Parish of St Helier puts services online

2009-01-05T08:04:00.000-08:00

The Parish of St Helier has launched a new website which aims to set a new standard for online parish services in Jersey.

http://www.sthelier.je/ is ground-breaking for Jersey in that it allows parishioners and others to interact with the parish administration online. Users of the website can perform a variety of tasks on the site, including applying for a day nursery place, reporting street and rubbish collection problems, appealing against a parking fine and requesting a check of whether they’re on the electoral register. In addition, the site offers downloads of the most frequently used forms that the law requires citizens to sign.

Constable Simon Crowcroft wanted to turn the St Helier parish website into something genuinely useful to parishioners. In his own words: "We’re changing it from a place that pushed information out to people into a place that parishioners come to do their business with the parish in their own time. We’ve made a great start with things that people can already do online, and there’s more to come as we tackle the legal obstacles to completing certain tasks. I hope other parishes will want to follow the same path.”

The best local authority websites in the UK have moved rapidly in the direction of delivering service online. I was excited when Webreality was asked to build the St Helier website because it presented an opportunity to really advance local government web strategy in Jersey.

Simon and his team have embraced the need to be task-focused online and I’m sure that parishioners will find the new site much more useful and valuable as a result.

The power of optimism

2009-01-02T05:37:00.000-08:00

There's plenty of doom and gloom about, but I wanted to share a great story published today on the BBC news site.

"Pessimism is the most serious cause for the global economic tsunami," says Sir David Tang, entrepreneur and founder of the Shanghai Tang clothing chain.

"What we all need to do is to sit down and calm down and go back to basics."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7785564.stm

I think he's got it right. In 2009 people will be seeking out optimism and positivity and the money and market share will flow in the direction of those who deliver great value with a smile.

Happy new year. Let's get on with it!

How to spend your website budget in tough times

2008-12-03T09:20:00.000-08:00

Attended a useful presentation at the Jersey Chamber of Commerce monthly lunch meeting today.

It was given by Paul Say, Head of Marketing and Communications at HSBC Bank International and previously Head of Digital marketing in the UK for all HSBC brands.

Paul gave a great jargon-free overview of the priorities for anyone doing business online. In conversation with him after the seminar I asked him the question, "If you had £1000 to spend on your website in the current climate, how would you split it between search engine optimisation (SEO), pay per click advertising (PPC) and usability improvement?"

His answer surprised me, because he had made much in his presentation of the importance of getting high quality traffic to your site, and talked about the effectiveness of both SEO work and PPC for HSBC. He told me that 40% of his notional £1000 would be spent on SEO work, 40% on usability work and 20% on pay per click. I think his analysis is good. SEO is a longer term investment than PPC, and both are important for a trading site. (My friends at Webdiverseon can help you with both!)

The interesting bit for me is to hear an eminent online marketer supporting my contention that now's the time to be investing in improving what you've got with a strong focus on usability testing and improvement.

The online winners in the downturn will be the ones who keep investing in getting traffic to their site and invest in making it as easy as possible for people to transact when they get there.

New charity sites from Webreality

2008-11-28T01:23:00.000-08:00

This week has been an auspicious one for Webreality with new sites for two Jersey charities going live.

First live was www.acet.je, for Jersey's branch of the international AIDS/HIV charity, and I'm writing about it on World Aids Day. The site was designed by our friends at Advertising International and launched Thursday 27 November with a presentation by Executive Director Rosemary Ruddy at the St Pauls Centre in St Helier. We were very pleased to be involved with this project which should help protect Jersey people from the continuing threat of HIV spread. It's easy to forget about long-standing global issues like HIV/AIDS at a time when so many other challenges are on our minds.

Also going live today is www.jerseyhospicecare.com. This has been a charitable donation by Webreality because we've regarded Hospice as our first choice charity for some years. We've been running the Hospice site at no charge for a long time, and the new site moves them forward a long way with the ability to accept direct donations online and sell goods and services on the website. It will also allow people to sign up directly for Hospice's fund-raising events and sponsor participants. It's been a privilege and pleasure to work with the fantastic Hospice team on this project and we wish them well with the new site in the hope that it makes a substantial contribution to their continuous fund-raising efforts.

Recession wisdom

2008-11-27T02:51:00.000-08:00

“Consumers don’t stop spending when economies go through down cycles. They look harder for value.”

Kevin Roberts, Saatchi and Saatchi

Down to businesses to find ways of delivering more value!

At Webreality we're looking hard at ways to deliver added value, especially to our existing loyal clients who've supported us in recent years. We have some great new ideas and we'll do everything we can to help our clients get maximum value from their web strategies as times get tougher. Please get in touch if you want to know more about our emerging plans - 01534 488888.

Make your website work harder in tougher times

2008-11-26T09:42:00.000-08:00

You don’t need me to tell you that the next 12 months (and maybe beyond) are looking challenging. I’m no economist, but I am a business owner and I know the pressures that many are facing, especially in the small business sector.

So what advice can I offer? If you have a website you probably have a sunk investment in it and some ongoing costs. Now’s the time to make your website work harder for you.

Many businesses own websites that, in happier times, were built and maintained for the wrong reasons.

“We’ve paid for a brochure. We should turn it into a website.”
“All our competitors have them.”
“The boss said we have to have one.”
“It’s 2007, for heaven’s sake! We’ve got to have a website!”
“It would have felt wrong not to have one.”

I’ve heard all of these in the past, and my normal approach is to try to stop the client spending any money unless I can uncover a more valid need to invest.

People generally use the web to do something, not as a way of passing the time. It’s a shock to some businesses when their website usage statistics show that people aren’t hanging out at their website to browse their image galleries or press release archives over a sandwich and latte at lunchtime.

Whatever the nature of your website, it needs to let people do things, complete tasks, however simple they are, or it’s not really fit for much.

And web users are impatient. That’s just the way we are when we want to check our bank balance or buy a DVD or even just get a phone number. We’re often doing it between other jobs. We expect things to work well and quickly and we get annoyed if they don’t. And if we want to spend money and the website frustrates us, the back button’s only a mouse swoop away.

So what to do if you have a website that needs to deliver more to your business? The answer is to review and test your site’s usability.

By focusing on the tasks your target web users are most likely to want to complete at your site, and continuously improving the way they work, you’re making an investment on which you should get a real return.

The place to start is to identify the right tasks. I would go so far as to say that your business website should not exist unless it facilitates the completion of tasks that ultimately lead to the retention of customers, the creation of new ones or the generation of new sales from existing ones.

Of course, the right tasks will vary from business to business, and they could range from full completion of sales online through to simply finding out your phone number or address. (You’d be surprised how many websites fall down in this most simple of tasks.) Some of the answers will come from inside your business, others are best found in the minds of your customers and other website users.

Once you have identified the top tasks for your site, test the ones that are already available on the site. This means writing a test plan and getting people who represent your target audience to complete the tasks for you in a controlled situation under observation and - ideally - with the use of recording technology so you can review and learn from their behaviour and feedback.

You don’t need lots of testers. In fact, one is a disproportionately valuable start. And two testers are 100% better than one!

I guarantee they’ll spring some surprises on you. You know and probably love your website. You know exactly where to find things and how it all works. Someone who’s new to the site will come with no love for it and an open mind as to its effectiveness. They will see it in a completely different light.

The sort of things that they will point out will be inconsistent navigation, poor text copy, bad layout, confusing processes, unwelcome jargon, over-long click paths... and much more. They will miss things that are obvious to you and point out things you’ve never noticed.

“Oh, I didn’t notice that link.” “That button wasn’t there on the home page.” “What does “[insert technical word] mean?” “Why can’t I do that on the home page?”

So once you have the feedback, you act on it, as long as it’s credible. This means that it’s come from enough testers and they are sufficiently representative of your target user group. Brief your web developer to make the changes, and if you’ve got it right your return from your website should improve dramatically.

If there are new tasks to be added, the major development work should be done before you engage your testers and the testers should be asked to test the tasks on a development version of the site so that you are in a position to make final changes before going live.

After that? Nothing stands still for long on the web, so plan to repeat the process when your top tasks change, your target user group changes, or at the very least once a year to take account of web user expectations which evolve continuously driven by the technology they experience on big budget cutting edge sites.

You don’t need to buy a new website - you need a better website, and the one you already have is the best place to start.

Chrome shines in early weeks

2008-11-03T05:18:00.001-08:00

Chrome is Google's new web browser. But you knew that, right?!

It's been publicly available for just a few weeks, and at Webreality we found these stats recently at the excellent and free W3Schools.com site.

3.1% adoption in the first month! Now, even taken with a small pinch of salt for the fact that these stats are derived primarily from W3's user base which will be early-adopter heavy, that's an incredible achievement for Chrome. Especially since it's currently only available for Windows.

A voice from the past

2008-11-03T04:20:00.000-08:00

I like George Orwell. Always have. Maybe it's to do with the fact that my father was apparently reading Lord of the Flies as he paced around outside the delivery room on the day in 196? when I was delivered into the world.

Anyway, there's an extract from Orwell's 1946 essay, "Politics and the English Language" that I particularly value. I think it's a good set of basic rules for anyone who writes English for a living - and, let's face it, that's a lot of us.

Can't say I always stick faithfully to these rules when I write. But my reason for reproducing theme here is that I think they offer a (largely) useful set of guidelines for writing for the web.

Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
Never us a long word where a short one will do.
If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
Never use the passive where you can use the active.
Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Usability in content comes from being concise, user-focused, to the point and action orientated. Orwell's rules steer us in the right direction, especially 2, 3 and 5. Although I agree broadly with 4 for the web, I hesitate a little because there can be good reasons to use the passive, notably in headings (see Jakob Nielsen on the subject here). 1 has suffered a little with time, but the principle holds. And you can't argue with 6!

Fifty years on, and still relevant. Not bad!

Word blindness - a usability lesson

2008-02-12T02:53:00.000-08:00

Here's an interesting usability lesson that we're learning at Webreality at the moment. We run the website of the Jersey branch of the Chartered Institute of Marketing. The site's been in existence for a couple of years at the URL www.cim.je and it's a content-rich resource for Jersey-resident CIM members.

Like all Webreality sites, cim.je was built with search engine visibility in mind, and it has performed well in Google. Here's the result of a search on "CIM" in google.co.uk on 12 Feb 2008:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=cim&btnG=Search&meta=

A great result on a pretty generic three letter acronym. The resultant traffic amounted to 2608 referrals on the search term "CIM" from Google to cim.je between 1 Oct 07 and 12 Feb 08. Trouble is, the high visibility of the site has started to cause local branch committee members an unforeseen problem: the site is attracting general membership enquiries from non-Jersey residents who should be enquiring through the main CIM site, www.cim.co.uk.

In a recent redesign, the site was given a high profile "JERSEY BRANCH" flag just below the CIM logo in a bid to alert those who bump into it in error. The international enquiries continued. So we made some pretty drastic content updates to the content page, with references to Jersey everywhere. The international enquiries are still coming, albeit less frequently.

What's the lesson for site designers and webmasters? I think you should never assume anything about how a typical reader of your site will see the content. It's our responsibility to ensure that the sites we build and manage deliver the information or process the site reader needs, and with minimum effort on their part. And that includes wasting as little time as possible for people who stumble into the site accidentally when they really need to be elsewhere.

If it's not obvious enough that the CIM Jersey site is only for Jersey members, we'll keep tuning it until it is!

Content new year!

2008-01-03T14:42:00.000-08:00

A happy and successful new year to everyone who looks after websites!

Here's a lovely story. My friend Garner Quain, owner of the highly rated Flex Mussels restaurants in Prince Edward Island, Canada, has recently seen his website awarded one of the most interesting content-related awards I've ever heard of. Read the full story here.

Warms the cockles! And mussels. Nice one Garner! Must get over to see you and try those fantastic slow-growing mussels one of these years...

Splash trash

2007-11-29T00:47:00.000-08:00

At Webreality one of our most unfavourite requests from clients when specifying their new website is the so-called "splash page". You know the sort of thing - a 15 second example of the web designer gratuitously showing off his or her Flash animation expertise... while you wait... to get... to the... home... page... where you can finally perform the task you need to perform. Most splash page designers thoughtfully provide a "skip" option... which begs the question why have it in the first place? By the time it's finished, the user could have hit the back button, gone to Amazon, found their product there and be checking out!

I'd love to point you to some examples, but we've all seen them and they don't need the extra traffic!

Splash pages are all about image and brand, but increasingly, the web is a place where people come to get things done. Our best advice is always to avoid putting things in the way of allowing your site user to get the job done. That means simple navigation, limited use of imagery, concise and well-formatted text, and no splash pages! We've not always succeeded in dissuading our clients from having splash pages, so you will see them on a few of our sites, but not very many. Jakob Nielsen takes the view that a splash page "always says to me that this is a site that cares more about image than usability."

If you're really thinking about what matters to your site user, rather than about your own priorities, don't splash!

Dale blogs!

2007-10-19T02:48:00.001-07:00

New Webreality team blog kicked off today! Dale Broadhead blogging on software development - right at the heart of what Webreality's all about. Go Dale...

Hail the content visionaries!

2007-10-17T09:16:00.000-07:00

Just a quicky. If content is king, then every website needs its king maker.

Our experience here at Webreality is that the best sites tend to result from the single-minded pursuit of a content vision which is usually the product of one individual's mind. A website should ideally speak to its user with a compelling single voice throughout. So many corporate sites feel like the product of a content committee - and I guess that's probably because they are, in fact, the product of a content committee. Nothing wrong with that approach, I say, as long as a trusted individual is given the scope to filter everything into a coherent whole.

Some examples of Webreality sites that hit the spot:

- Little Green Rock: two content visionaries, Debbie and Buter Buterbaugh, but somehow they seem to speak with one groovy voice! And Debbie's artwork is stunning.
- Channel Island Executive Coaching: Tracey Turmel's passion for coaching shining through in her web copy.
- French Imports: Julie Rombaut's boundless enthusiasm for wine - and for her wine expert husband Eric! - translates into energetic language that makes you want to taste and buy.
- Spiral Tree: Anyone who's met Sarah Spiral Tree will testify to her intense belief in the power of meditation and focused relaxation. It makes for a compelling web experience!

I'm not naive enough to imagine that large b2b businesses can transform the tone and style of their content overnight. But, at the very least, the biggest b2cs can make a massive impression on their markets by learning from content visionaries and adopting a tone that recognises that people tend to buy most willingly from businesses they like. Making people like you starts with the way you communicate with them - Apple and Orange are good corporate examples of success in this respect. The web offers the greatest opportunity businesses have ever had to transform the tone and style of their comms for the better. And every business needs a content visionary.

More bullfighters

2007-10-17T09:07:00.000-07:00

Delighted to see that my friends at salterbaxter in London are dedicated to fighting the bull too. They publish "bull of the month" at their site. Click "words" from their home page.

Trust Mourant

2007-10-11T07:17:00.000-07:00

Mourant has just launched a first in the offshore legal profession - you can go to their website (built by Webreality) and buy trust precedent documents.

This might seem an unremarkable development, but most lawyers remain very sniffy about even acknowledging that aspects of their work might become commoditised. Mourant operates in the rarified world of corporates and high net worth individuals. It's not unusual to find "high street" legal services available now online - wills, leases and even divorce documentation can be bought and downloaded in the UK. But in Mourant’s markets "consumer" approaches to service delivery are much slower to take hold. So hats off to Mourant for blazing a trail in the very specialised offshore trust market. I hope it pays them back handsomely.

From a content point of view, the story here is obvious. Lawyers trade in time and knowledge. Knowledge x time = content. Most law firms worldwide have yet to grasp that client expectations are changing, driven not least by the web's ability to deliver information, knowledge and answers quickly and 24/7. Lawyers who recognise that early in their markets, and deliver high value content how and when clients need it, will achieve big market share wins.

Do you write bull?

2007-10-08T05:00:00.000-07:00

Back in 2003 Deloitte Consulting came up with a brilliant little software application that analyses text to find meaningless business jargon. Three of the Deloitte consultants involved then set up on their own, with the kind assistance of Deloittes who let them take this fabulous invention with them.

Download it to your PC here: http://www.fightthebull.com/bullfighter.asp.

Buy the book here...

Or you can be a little bit mischievous with the Mystery Matador. Paste up to 20,000 characters from a particularly jargon-laden website into this page of their site and send the site owner an anonymous bull-busting e-mail with the results!

I love this. It's hardly news, but it's as important and valuable now as it was then. In fact, it's even more important on the web where there's so little time to catch a reader's attention and make a sale. There's no room for space-filling guff!

There are still too many people on the web thinking out of the box and pushing the envelope. Keep fighting the bull.

We We or You You?

2007-09-24T07:32:00.000-07:00

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!

2007-09-24T06:39:00.000-07:00

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?!