Commune / Strategic Content Marketing (TM): Content Marketing Blog

Nanocontent: Can You Judge a Site in 11 Characters?

Simon — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 20:53:00 GMT

No, this isn't another joke about "nano-blogging," a parody of micro-blogging plaftorm Twitter. Rather, it's a quick review of new research on nanocontent from Jakob Nielsen on the importance of the first 11 characters in your links and titles.

The term "nanocontent" refers to the snippets of information people usually scan when looking at web pages. Typically, it's the first two words of a sentence. Or approximately (but somewhat arbitrarily) 11 characters.

In the study, Nielsen's group showed people just the first 11 characters of links on about 20 popular websites and asked them to find specific information. The goal was to test the importance of nanocontent. For example, if Nielsen's group asked users to locate information on retrieving voicemail on the iPhone, they'd theoretically be more likely to succeed if a link read "iPhone Voicemail Instructions" than "Instructions for iPhone Voicemail," because the latter buries what they're actually looking for.

Three Tips for Better Links

Nielsen's group found that good nanocontent significantly improves usability, and bad nanocontent can be self-destructive. In fact, for 35% of links, users had absolutely no idea where they went. (Like this one for Chase Bank: "Introducing Chase Exclusives Special Benefits for Checking Customers." Of course, "Introducing Chase" is meaningless on its own.)

Take the study with a nano-grain of salt, because it reviewed just the first 11 characters of each link. But note that it reinforces that you should:

Put information up front
Eliminate jargon
Avoid useless words

And there's more: bad nanocontent probably means your site's content is generally poor, since it doesn't meet the needs of users. So for a quick test of your site's readability, scan the first 11 characters of a few links and see if they make sense in isolation.

Online Video Use Way Less Than You Think

Simon — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 14:34:00 GMT

In internet marketing, it's a cliché that things never stand still. New technologies like Twitter get popular, and everyone rushes to exploit them for sales. Or trends like "viral marketing" and "social media marketing" become buzzwords that then turn into agency sales pitches and pseudo-expert speaking tours. (Which, judging by those past few sentences, apparently makes me bitter.)

That's why it can be useful and clarifying to compare measurable data against the hype. While Facebook has become popular amongst users and grown in interest for marketers, for example, little data supports its use for either branding or direct sales.

A similar discrepancy appears to exist for online video. While it has no doubt proliferated over the past few years, the qualitative impression of this proliferation and use is vastly different from the quantitative reality.

Less Than Two Minutes a Day

At least, so suggests a new study from the Nielsen-funded Council for Research Excellence. Rather than look at what users self-report about their video-viewing habits, the researchers conducted a massive study in which they actually observed users over a period equivalent to 952 days. Here are some of the most interesting findings:

Computer video use is almost nothing compared to traditional television use: Average viewing time per day is just two minutes
TV still gets the most viewing, even among younger demographics: This includes the 18-24 and 25-34 groups
Computer use has, however, supplanted radio as the number-two media activity: Radio is now third and print media is fourth
TV users still watch a lot of ads: About 72 minutes per day on average

This doesn't mean that online video isn't important and won't continue to grow in importance. But it does mean that we should be wary of hype and self-reported stats, particularly when planning marketing budgets.

How to Write Content for Amazon Kindle

Simon — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 20:19:32 GMT

If you plan to port your content to Amazon's popular reader, read this guide to writing for Kindle by Jakob Nielsen.

According to Nielsen, writing for Kindle is a mishmash of writing for print, the web and mobile devices:

Print guidelines for body text
Web guidelines for headlines and summaries
Mobile guidelines for page design and interaction

Linear Body Text and Literal Headlines

If you've read our e-book on writing for the web, you'll have a head start on writing for Kindle.

Unlike writing for the web, however, writing body text for Kindle should be more linear—think novels and magazine articles, which Nielsen says work best on Kindle. Avoid heavily hyperlinked content, as Kindle isn't designed to navigate it well.

While body text should follow print guidelines, headlines should follow web guidelines—keep them literal, and remember that people will often read them out of context.

Finally, Nielsen recommends that if you're trying to sell a book through Kindle, consider front-loading your best material into the first chapter, because you can then give it away as a preview to encourage sales.

More comprehensive Kindle content guidelines should no doubt become available soon. But with growing adoption of new mobile devices (such as iPhones and netbooks), the most important guideline to remember is this: always write for the medium.

As Nielsen admonishes: "For Kindle, it's certainly unacceptable to simply repurpose print content. But you can't repurpose website content, either. For good Kindle usability, you have to design for the Kindle."

How Content Marketing "Renews the Contract" Between Advertisers and Consumers

Simon — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 21:24:00 GMT

It's no secret that over the past few decades, advertisers and consumers have had a strained relationship.

As a recent episode of the excellent Age of Persuasion describes, the unwritten contract between advertisers and consumers has long been this: advertisers support valuable content with sales messages, and in exchange consumers let those messages—commercials—into their eyes, ears, hearts and minds.

This contract was largely created by Albert Lasker, who some consider the father of advertising. Lasker creatively determined that advertising could support the creation of original programming. He's credited with inventing soap operas.

Today, Lasker's contract seems quaint. Advertisers and consumers are in a battle for attention. But "content marketing," a new approach that builds off established principles, promises to renew the contract while both improving consumers' lives and advertisers' sales.

Online, Valuable Content Is Your Strongest Collateral

By the end of the 20th century, Lasker's contract had unravelled.

Advertisers pummeled consumers with ad formats that provided nothing in return, like posters over urinals and automated telemarketing calls. Meanwhile, consumers responded with tools like TiVo that let them consume original content while ignoring sales pitches. It was all-out memetic warfare: the more consumers ditched and filtered traditional media, the more advertisers looked to interrupt their everyday life in ways that were harder to screen.

In the midst of this war, a new battlefield emerged: the internet. Advertisers' early reaction to the internet was massive interruption warfare. And so they filled websites with annoying banners and popup ads. This proved to be a bad idea, because the internet (a) was traditionally uncommercial and (b) put more control than ever into the hands of consumers. Hence popup- and banner-blocking software proliferated, and the battle shifted decidedly in favor of consumers.

Which brings us to today.

Most traditional advertisers still haven't figured out the internet. And so they continue to throw huge budgets at "building their brand" online and experimenting with the latest fads, from viral marketing to social media.

Yet in the trenches, a few smart marketers have been making money online from day one.

Why? Because they realized a truth that's only now percolating out: on the internet, your most important marketing collateral is valuable content.

Consumers Don't Want to Be Sold, They Want to Be Helped

The old contract stated that consumers would accept advertising that supported valuable content. But with consumers having more control than ever over what they consume, that contract's no longer valid.

The new contract states that if marketers provide consumers with valuable branded content that addresses a pain or provides pleasure, they'll consume it and use their now finely honed media savvy to filter out the hype.

While this model has been around for awhile (known by such terms as "custom content," "custom publishing," "branded content" and "branded entertainment"), the key difference online is transparency.

Whereas companies might have previously hidden behind a thin veneer of editorial credibility (with magazines like "Harry" for clothier Harry Rosen), today they must remove that veneer in order to get closer to customers with content like relationship-building blog posts.

In short, advertisers used to support publications and broadcast shows in order to benefit from their credibility and relationship with consumers. If consumers liked Johnny Carson, for example, perhaps they'd also like the orange juice advertised between segments of the show. Similarly with ads in magazines and newspapers: advertisers hope to gain credibility by association.

Not so much anymore.

Today, consumers can and want to go directly to the source. They like and trust journalists only slightly more than advertisers (and that's debatable), see stars constantly undermined by scandal, and go straight to blogs for news and YouTube for entertainment.

Similarly, they want to go straight to a brand for help with a particular problem. But they don't want to be sold. Rather, they want to be helped with informative content, and want to develop a long-term, trusting relationship with the people providing the products and services they consume.

To renew the contract, marketers must think like publishers and broadcasters, and strive to provide the value and credibility for which they used to turn to publications and shows. They need to deliver valuable content transparently, establish a one-to-one, permission-based relationship with consumers, and stop assaulting them with unwelcome interruptions.

This is the promise of content marketing. Advertisers ignore it at their peril.

How a Funny Email Can Increase Sales 15%

Simon — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 20:01:00 GMT

Summary: Copywriters and content marketers often avoid humor for fear of offending readers or undermining sales. A new study suggests, however, that starting some communications with humor can increase trust and rapport, improve negotiations and increase sales. If you're going to use humor, test to ensure that your audience will find what you're saying funny—and test more straightforward approaches to see if comedy's truly the best approach.

Some purist copywriters might take issue. But according to a recent study, humor can increase sales and shift negotiations in your favor.

Ever since Claude Hopkins dictated that "people don't buy from clowns," humor has been controversial in advertising—and particularly suspect in direct response copywriting.

The latest issue of Inside Influence Report, however, suggests that while people might not buy from clowns, they will buy more from someone who uses humor to generate trust and rapport.

Humor Improves Returns

The study was conducted by Dr. Terri Kurtzberg from Rutgers University, Charles E. Naquin from DePaul University and Liuba Belkin from Lehigh University.

The researchers wanted to know how humor in the early stages of negotiation might affect the outcome.

So they had participants negotiate a complex contract by email.

Half the group started negotiations by sending a funny, inoffensive Dilbert cartoon to their negotiating partner. The other half didn't.

Result? The group that started with a cartoon generated higher levels of trust, resulting in a 15% bigger return and increased satisfaction levels on both sides.

The cartoon also made negotiating partners less extreme when making their first offer, and made negotiations more efficient.

The researchers explain the results by saying that "having some sense of 'the other side' as a real person and not just an e-mail address seems to help negotiators build trust and rapport, and thus create better agreements with each other."

Test Your Comedy

So what are copywriters and content marketers to make of the study?

In my opinion, one important fact is that the researchers tested the cartoon before using it.

By showing it to other businesspeople before using it in the study, they knew it was considered funny and inoffensive by their target demographic.

This is important because not everyone has the same sense of humor.

So it's probably safe to use humor in marketing content. But always be sure that your target market will actually find your communication funny.

And, as Claude Hopkins would no doubt say, always test to see whether humor really outperforms something more straightforward.

Basic Steps to Strong Headlines

Simon — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 16:15:00 GMT

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Summary: Learn the basic rules of writing strong headlines in this video featuring Commune Content Specialist Sara Chappel. Discover why you need to appeal to people's self interest, appeal to people's love of news and novelty, engage your prospects' curiosity and include keywords in your headlines. To start optimizing your content's headlines, watch the video or download a transcript (PDF) now.

Does Spelling Matter? Special K Thinks Not

Simon — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 16:21:00 GMT

Will a spelling mistake lose you customers?

Let's look at a real case.

Today, browsing my email, I saw an ad for Special K in Gmail that read (see image here):

HDL Cholesterol
Summer's On It's Way
Get Back on Track With Special K
www.Specialk.ca

Did you catch the error? Here it is:

HDL Cholesterol
Summer's On It's Way
Get Back on Track With Special K
www.Specialk.ca

With a writing background, being focused on content, I find an error like that makes me less likely to click. If it were a less-known brand, it would make me think the company was unprofessional. (In this case, I just think it was sloppy.)

But what do you think? Do spelling and grammar errors undermine your confidence in a company or an offering? How much do they affect your perception of the company or offering's credibility?

How Swear Words Might Improve Your Marketing

Simon — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 02:38:00 GMT

Summary: Research suggests that a few obscenities can make you (and presumably your marketing and website content) more persuasive. But be careful: experiment first in material that reaches an audience already on your side.

Damn it. Here I've been working to swear less.

Meanwhile, it turns out that swear words might make you more persuasive.

So reports Noah Goldstein in the latest Inside Influence report (a free and worthwhile subscription if you're interested in marketing and copywriting).

Just One Minor Swear Word Can Make the Difference

Apparently, research shows that—at least for speakers delivering presentations—obscenities can increase the perception of passion and enthusiasm.

Goldstein reports that social psychologists Cory Scherer and Brad Sagarin had participants watch a taped five-minute speech.

For half the audience, the speaker uttered the phrase "damn it!"—once. For the other half, the presentation was kid-television friendly.

The result? Participants found the speaker more passionate about the topic and more persuasive when uttering the obscenity.

Experiment (Carefully) with Tame Obscenities in Your Content

Does that mean your website content should read like a Chris Rock monologue?

Not necessarily. Goldstein notes two important factors: the swear word was tame, and it worked best for people who already agreed somewhat with the speaker.

The takeaway?

Experiment first with minor swear words (like "damn" and "hell") to people with whom you already have a relationship (like those on your mailing list).

Otherwise, you might find yourself swearing up a storm when sensitive prospects and customers give you the finger.

So, think you'll give swear words a try in your marketing?

Soda or Pop? Language Choice Essential to Content Optimization

Sara — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 21:59:00 GMT

Summary: Language is a sensitive issue that carries loads of cultural baggage— something as simple as the spelling of color/colour or choosing "soda" over "pop" can create serious friction for your users. Know your audience and optimize your content by choosing spelling and terminology that won't make them stop in their tracks and say "huh?"

Colour or color? Recognise or recognize? Pop or soda?

Does it matter?

If you think the answer's no, then you've never engaged in an argument about the relative merits of "cotton candy" versus "candy floss." Or "couch," "sofa" and "chesterfield."

English is so variable that academics at East Central University in Oklahoma have produced a map of the US that shows the distribution of generic names for soft drinks.

(For the record, I say "pop." My Buffalo relatives say "soda." It turns into a heated debate over Christmas.)

Language Is More Than Spelling and Grammar

See, people are sensitive about language.

Variations in spelling, phrases and slang are really symbols of a greater cultural identity.

Canadians, for example, can be squirrelly about the whole language question.

Ever seen Joe Canadian and heard his rant?

"I speak English and French, not American … and it is pronounced zed. Not zee! ZED!"

It's a perfect illustration of the potential pitfalls of choosing an appropriate language for your website.

Use the wrong one, and you cause friction for your users—which means you could end up losing customers.

How to Optimize Content for Language

Luckily, this very subject was the topic of Jakob Nielsen's December 1st Alertbox posting, "American English vs. British English for Web Content."

Nielsen's excellent points all boil down to the marketer's mantra: "Know thy audience."

Not only that, but know them well enough to predict what language variants will cause them the least amount of friction.

Here are some points to remember, drawn from Nielsen and from our own experiences with our clients:

Choose the right language for your offering
If you're trying to emphasize the local-ness of your product, for example, use your local variant. If you sell butter tarts from a bakery in Arthur, Ontario, and your audience is mostly Canadian, you might as well be as Canadian as possible. Colour, neighbour and centre out the wazoo.
Get used to the idea of American English
If you're only targeting prospects in Canada, the UK or Australia, then by all means, use those forms of English. But if you're like us—an online business, with clients on both sides of the border and beyond—keep in mind that the lingua franca of the internet is American English. Sorry, Canucks. Too bad, Brits. That's the way it is. If your business is mainly online, and you hope to appeal to a wide international client base, get accustomed to -ize and -er endings on words.
Be consistent
No matter which English you choose, use it consistently. Spelling a word differently on the same page is distracting to your readers, which means more friction—and less attention paid to the awesomeness of your offering.
Become familiar with your local variants
Don't take for granted that the English terms you know and love mean the same thing to everyone. Phrases whose meanings seem crystal clear to us are met with quizzical looks—or blushes— elsewhere in the world. In the UK, a play that's a "bomb" is a huge success, "STD" stands for "subscriber trunk dialing" (and means direct-dial long distance) and "fanny"—well, let's just say the term is a lot more vulgar in the UK than it is here. (Curious about other terms? Check out more British/American phrases.)
For videos, podcasts and other spoken media, keep it neutral
Here's where Canadians get to shine. ESL students throughout the world prefer Canadian English teachers because their accent is, aside from some regional variations in pronunciation, neutral. Same goes for English speakers from the Midwest and Northeast US. Regional accents can carry strong positive and negative connotations—so if you're smart, you won't use voice talent with a Texan accent if you're trying to appeal to Democrats. And if you sell used cars, the Queen's English just doesn't fit. Know your audience when you pick your voice talent.

Remember: friction—any friction—distracts your prospects from your message.

So it's worth paying attention to all these little details—because your audience certainly is.

Have you had language issues with your website? Leave a comment and let us know. Start a debate. Join the discussion!

Can Free Content Really Increase Sales?

Dwayne — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 03:14:00 GMT

Summary: Giving away free content—like reports and e-books—is a long-held internet marketing tradition. But does it really boost sales? And if so, why? A new study suggests that the powerful influence of reciprocity is partly responsible, working equally well online when nobody's looking as offline when social pressure mounts.

If you've ever sold face-to-face, you know that relationships are essential—even if they extend no further than a smile and a friendly "hello."

Establishing such relationships is infinitely easier when interactions are face-to-face. But if you're selling online, you may never meet your customers in person.

So how do you build enough rapport to make a sale when you can't smile at someone or shake their hand?

One technique that direct-mail copywriters and subsequently internet marketers have used for decades is to give away valuable free content.

It eliminates barriers to response, demonstrates your expertise and starts a relationship on a firm footing.

And, as a new study shows, it lets you powerfully engage the rule of reciprocity.

Why You Should Give to Get

Ever find yourself smiling back at a complete stranger, just because they smiled at you first?

Ever accepted a follow-up appointment with a door-to-door salesperson for a product you didn't want in the first place?

Blame the rule of reciprocity.

In his book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, social psychologist Robert Cialdini explains that we're hard-wired to repay someone when we receive a gift.

Study after study has shown that this works in face-to-face interactions, which has obvious implications for marketing and sales.

But does it also work online, when nobody's looking? For example, if someone downloads free content that you created (like our Instant Content Optimization e-book) or takes you up on a free offer (like our Free Content Optimization Analysis), are they equally obliged?

Researcher Jerry Burger and his colleagues from the Department of Psychology at Santa Clara University have shown that the answer is yes.

We'll even repay a gift when we believe our response is anonymous.

It Works When Nobody's Watching

As recently reported, Burger asked participants to take part in a "personality and perception skills" test—a cover for the actual study testing the powers of reciprocity.

During the study, one of the research assistants, acting as a fellow study participant, gave certain participants an unexpected gift—a bottle of water.

In another instance, the research assistant didn't hand out bottles of water to anyone.

At the end of test, Burger asked half the participants to complete a survey and return it a few days later. He also told them that the gift-giving participant would be present on that day.

The remaining half of participants were asked to leave the survey anonymously in a drop-off box.

The result? Hugely significant (especially to marketers).

Many more people who were given a bottle of water completed and returned the survey compared to the group that was not given a bottle of water (30% vs 5%).

And importantly, the people who believed their response would be anonymous were just as likely to return the survey as those who believed that their act of repayment would be witnessed.

How to Use Reciprocity Online

So, how do you put these findings into practice?

Here's how you can turn a free, valuable gift into an ongoing relationship and, ultimately, sales:

Offer prospects a gift that has value. If you're selling car audio systems online, for example, offer a free e-book that reviews the top 10 products for the year.
Ask for your prospect's name and email address in exchange for the gift. Because of reciprocity, they'll be much more willing to give you their information. (Just remember to let them know they're giving you permission to contact them in the future.)
Send your prospect a follow-up email to further establish rapport. Introduce yourself, use your prospect's first name and write your message in a warm, friendly tone.
Continue to engage reciprocity and cement your relationship with your prospect by giving away tips, tools and advice.
Offer your prospect your product or service. Because you've established a relationship and engaged reciprocity, your prospect is more likely to become a happy customer.
Practice good content optimization and constantly test and tweak to improve your results.

And let us know: have you ever used reciprocity in your campaigns?

Leave a comment and tell us how well it worked!