The Book Title You Liked

It was a close race between two titles. The winner was Clout: The Art & Science of Influential Web Content. But what really convinced me to use it was comments like these. The other titles didn’t draw many comments.

‘Clout’ is an interesting title and catches my attention (the other titles don’t). ‘The Art and Science of Influential Web Content’ is an excellent way to put the title ‘Clout’ in context. I like this combination. A lot.

Catchy + explanatory.

I like this title because its unique. I’ve seen many books about the Power of Persuasion and Persuasive content.

Memorable, intriguing, catchy.

It sounds like new thinking. The others sound boring.

It’s punchy and intriguing, but the subtitle makes it clear.

A Few Concerns About Influence

Some of your comments expressed some understandable apprehensions. I say understandable because I share them, too.

I realize that we’re all trying to persuade with our web content, but something about it just feels kind of icky—like we’re using underhanded means to control what people do. Again, I know that’s not the intent or (generally) the reality, but that’s my gut reaction.

I’m still uncomfortable with “influencing what people think & do” because that sounds coercive to me…

The Topics and Types You Want

Practical ones! You most want to see examples, applied principles, models, and how to evaluate content influence.

Again, THANKS for taking time to contribute your thoughts. They’ve informed much more than the title. I’m working hard to ensure this book delivers for you.

“Rhetoric is the study of misunderstandings and their remedies.”
I.A. Richards, Literary critic and rhetorician, Founder of New Criticism, Unfortunately dead

Rhetoric is “that which creates an informed appetition [desire] for the good.”
Richard Weaver, Literary critic and scholar, Also dead

“Rhetoric is a form of reasoning about probabilities, based on assumptions people share as members of a commununity.”
Erika Lindemanne, Professor at UNC Chapel Hill, Fortunately alive

“Rhetoric is a mode of altering reality…by the creation of discourse which changes reality through the mediation of thought and action.”
Lloyd Bitzer, Professor at U of Wisconsin-Madison, Invented the rhetorical situation, Also alive

“Rhetoric is the art, practice, and study of human communication.”
Andrea Lunsford, Professor at Stanford University, Featured in Wired, Happily alive

For more definitions, check out Andrea Lunsford’s list.

Audience, Relevance, and Search

I Like

• Putting SEO (search engine optimization) in the hands of writers and editors.
• Focusing on some of my favorite concepts—context and relevance.
• Practical advice about SEO from a writer’s perspective.

I’m Not Crazy About

• The argument that search engines read like people do, so we should write mainly for search engines.
• Getting my Ong on, especially when Steven Pinker recently offered a conflicting concept of how we process information.

Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior

I Like

• A modern look at what influences our decisions and behavior—it’s more than logic.
• The creative presentation that gives a “sway” feeling.
• Current examples.

I’m Not Crazy About

• The lack of practical advice or “so what” factor, though that wasn’t the book’s goal. (Check out How We Decide and Nudge for some practical application.)

All in all, these books were worth my time. Consider adding them to your bookshelf—or digital library.

WHAT’S WRONG: The Popularity Contest

Brian Solis, author of Engage, succinctly states that “influence is not popularity.” On a guest post for Solis, Damien Basille explains his take on why measuring individual popularity will be fairly useless:

It’s a shallow and very specific ploy rooted in misdirection and vilified through the opaque pandering of votes. Asking your social networks to click on a link is measuring their ability to click on a link. Nothing more. It doesn’t measure the type of influence brands need to know about for their brand, product or industry vertical.

WHAT’S RIGHT: Learning from Influencers

While there’s a lot wrong with a popularity contest, I like the idea of better understanding influencers. I’m convinced that often the best influencers are not celebrities. Why?

One reason is identification, a concept from rhetoric and psychology. Simply put, identification is whether people relate to you and how that affects being persuaded by you. Marketers, in my opinion, tend to apply it on a surface level. White women ages 40-55 will attract white women ages 40-55, for example. What’s more important is identifying on a deeper level, such as relating to a person’s situation, personality, interests, or point of view. Even more important for an organization is for people to identify with your brand’s personality or character. In fact, identification is a main goal of branding, but sometimes that gets lost in marketing speak.

As customer experience expert Valeria Maltoni says (emphasis mine)

True influence flows from drawing together people with shared interests. It’s a process of identifying areas of relevancy among your customers and prospects, community building, and allowing others to amplify your influence as you meet their needs.

We could stand to learn more about how people identify with influencers online and what organizations or brands can should do about it. Will the FastCompany project help us learn more? I’m skeptical so far.

WHAT’S MISSING: Influence & Quality Content

Sure, influential people are important to influence on the web. But, like many content strategists, I think quality content is as important, and connected to, social networking. (I’m a little surprised FastCompany, a media property, has left content out of the influence equation. Perhaps they’re so close to content, they take its influence for granted?)

Shannon Paul, a social media manager for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, hints at the relationship between influence and content in a recent post (emphasis mine):

It doesn’t matter how much influence someone wields if the message is irrelevant to their audience…[individual] influence may be able to create short-term buzz, but a relevant message can spark a movement.

For the Influence Project, if someone’s social network isn’t interested in Fast Company, asking the network to click on a link to it won’t fly. People either won’t click or won’t stick around after clicking.

To complicate matters, as social networks grow, they involve less and less commitment. But, content can deepen the commitment. Organizations can tell an appropriate message through a personality, but they’ll have to show and expand it through quality content over time. In fact, I think this need to grow interesting, fun, LONG relationships with people through web content is partly driving the mashup of media and e-commerce.

And, I think that’s closer to what real online clout is about.

Vinh walked through the tranformation of New York Times Style Magazine from a stylized Flash site to a clean, blog-inspired site. Along the way, he noted what was lost—and gained.

Lost: Art Direction

Those evocative, carefully art directed print spreads couldn’t be the same. Releasing the tight grip that art direction affords is hard, but it leads to many benefits.

Gained: Efficiency, Flexibility—and New Opportunity

Reproducing a gorgeous print publication in Flash was expensive and slow. The blog-inspired T magazine is much faster and easier to produce. The content is more nimble (as Rachel Lovinger might say) and therefore easier to find through search, feeds, social networking, and more. And, through it all, Vinh found new design opportunity in grids. Sometimes, constraints lead to more, not less, creativity.

Vinh’s upcoming book, Ordering Disorder, will focus more on using and implementing grids, but more people need to hear about his journey to embracing them—and the content that fills them. It’s a journey sure to inspire anyone who cares about strategy for interactive design and content.

The New York Times embraced a flexible, efficient format for its style magazine.

I say that after a terrific roundtable about content at The Business of WordPress 3.0, a conference focused on WordPress as a CMS for small-to-medium businesses. I work mostly with large businesses, so I was curious about how smaller businesses handle the pressure to publish. Not surprisingly, these businesses are hard-pressed for people and time to create good content. Curation was suggested as a timely shortcut.

I hate bursting a bubble, but I had to point out that curation still takes a lot of work. (See this article by Erin Scime.) The goal of curation from a business standpoint is to share useful content while building your credibility. That takes a lot of thought. And, depending on how you curate, you will still have to create captions and maintain links or content. Our roundtable then had a deeper discussion about these business’ content challenges.

So, consider curation for your content strategy, but don’t expect it to be a panacea. Think about your specific content goals and how best to reach them.