Here’s the Telegraph story which was published at 10:40AM BST 16 Oct 2009.  In this story they refer to a comment made by Boris Johnson on his Twitter account.  However, I saw the Boris comment on Twitter just a short time ago.

Here is the link to Boris’ comment which was posted at 11:32AM BST 16 Oct 2009.

Wait a minute there.  Did the Telegraph just guess exactly what Boris was going to say?  Or did they tell Boris what to say?  I don’t know.  It may even have been an update to the Telegraph page, but it doesn’t state that so I am keeping with my conspiracy theory.  They’re much more fun anyway.

Shocking story about the gentleman getting shouted at by the TfL worker.  Please read.

Boris Johnson has just announced that bus fares are to go up by 12.7% and Tube fares will rise by 3.9%. Oyster card pay-as-you-go bus journeys are to rise from £1 to £1.20.

When I moved to London the pay-as-you-go journeys were only 90 pence.  That represents an increase of 33.3% since I moved here.  Is that not disgraceful?  If that happens again over the next 30 months then we will be looking at £1.60 for a single journey, which would represent a 77.7% increase over 5 years.

Read about the TfL price increase

I wonder if these people are actually having sex or making the sex part up.  Surely these people that check their Twitter account more than 10 times a day don’t have time for sex?

See the rest of the results at Retrevo

Anyway, I saw this today and thought it was funny:

Glaswegian Interpreter

A translation company is looking to recruit Glaswegian interpreters to help business clients who are baffled by the local dialect.

Today Translations placed an advert in The Herald newspaper on Tuesday seeking speakers of “Glaswegian English”.

Successful candidates, who could earn up to £140 a day, must understand “vocabulary, accent and nuances”.

The firm said, so far, 30 people had applied for the positions – some of them in Glaswegian.

Today Translations spokesman, Mick Thorburn said: “Over the last few months we’ve had clients asking us for Glaswegian translators.

“After some consideration we’ve decided this is a service we would like to offer.

‘Local dialect’

“Usually, the role would involve translating documents but in this case its more likely to be assisting foreign visitors to the city whose ‘business English’ is not good enough to understand the local dialect.”

Mr Thorburn said successful candidates may have to sit in on business meetings.

He added: “We’re not necessarily looking for people who are particularly skilled in linguistics, just candidates who can help out clients who may struggle with native Glaswegian.”

Today Translations said that depending on the volume of applications, it expected to contact the successful clients in the next few weeks.

Taken from the BBC website

I have wanted do a piece about copywriting for the web, for a while. Not because I read a lot of bad writing online, but because I’m starting to see more and more websites that are getting it right.

“Just drop in the copy from the brochure”

Luckily, smart businesses are starting to realise that this doesn’t wash with their customers. The days of using brochure copy in the website are thankfully coming to an end.

Aside from the terrible laziness of that approach, forcing customers who’ve read the brochure to wade through the same words on the website (or vice versa) is just not good business.

It’s not good business because a website is not the same as a brochure.

So, here are my three reasons why crafting your copy to suit the web makes good business sense.

1.    Hello. Who are you?

It seems sometimes, that online businesses can be wilfully distant from their visitors; a sort of defence against negative customer comment.
Using the internet is an inherently impersonal experience. Confronting visitors with corporate puffery and marketing rhetoric just pushes them further away.

Remember, people buy from people; so you’re losing business if you’re not getting personal. Online, we have found that you need to try even harder to engage on a personal level.

The explosion of social networking and user-generated content facilities have changed the web from an information delivery mechanism into a true communications platform. The result is that people are demanding an ever more honest, personal dialogue more similar to a phone conversation than a brochure. Just think of the number of businesses putting honest customer reviews of their own product on their sites. It’s pretty brave, but it works. Many retailers that have implemented customer reviews on their sites report that products with bad reviews sell better than ones without any reviews.

In this environment, brands must think about the written tone they adopt online. How informal can you get? For example, can you replace the corporate ‘We’ with the personal ‘I’? And how can you engage in an honest, authentic conversation with your customers?

2.    So many webpages so little time

People have become very good at working out whether the webpage they’re looking at contains the information they’re looking for. There are a lot of pages out there after all.

As a result, they only need, on average, 47 seconds (Neilsen/NetRatings May 2008) to work out if it’s what they are looking for.

To determine the relevance of a page, a webuser will spend a few moments scanning the content. If it doesn’t hook them with the words they are looking for, they will leave. It’s as simple as that.

They don’t scan every part of the page; just the bits most likely to give away its purpose. This means titles, subtitles, pull-outs, buttons and the first words of each paragraph are really important. By breaking up the copy into small paragraphs with more subheadings, you can give the scanning visitor more chance of finding something that engages them.

3.    Your reader isn’t reading for the sake of it.

When did you last go online just for the heck of it? I’m hoping the voice in your head just said “Hmmm, not sure… let me think.” The fact is that most people go online with a specific goal in mind. When they arrive on any site they are hoping it will fulfil that goal.

Copy for any given page must therefore be crafted to marry the visitor’s goal with the page’s objective.

If every page has an objective then it must also have a desired action. So if you begin by understanding these three critical factors:

•    Customer goal
•    Page objective
•    Desired action

then you can write copy that engages the visitor and takes them on a journey to the desired action.

If you’ve read this far, then I’ve done my job!

I hope that having read this, you can put some of these thoughts into practice. I know that doing so will make your websites more enjoyable for your visitors and more effective for your business.

On the subject of web copywriting, this is really the tip of the iceberg – I didn’t mention ‘form design’ or ‘managing customer relationships’. But hey, you definitely wouldn’t have read this far if I had. For now, these are the three important things to aim for:

1.    Create an informal personality for your brand and enter an honest, authentic conversation with your customers.
2.    Use titles, subheads, pull-outs, buttons and paragraph starters to make pages easy to scan
3.    Make sure you set an objective and action for every page and craft copy around them.

So let’s burn the brochure and start a new, more personal, more effective conversation.

Thanks to James Jefferson for this excellent post which can also be seen on the Equator site

Storm Molineux at an angle

Storm Molineux frontal with yellow face

So there we are.  I have spotted a new Storm watch which I want.  I wonder if I’ll actually get this one…

I previously had many problems with Next and how they ran their online business, and I still feel that they are missing a huge trick with the site.  Next doesn’t seem to realise how to treat their own customers well.

Please go and read Graham’s post and take a look back at my two as well.

Update to Next Post

Christmas Shopping with Next

Next Fail!

The new shiny offices have been purpose built for us and are more fitting to the needs of a digital agency. 

Therefore, please do get in touch if you have any challenges with your search engine optimisation, pay-per-click, affiliate marketing, email marketing or web design and development.  We are the boys and girls to drive your online presence.

Here is an astonishing fact:

MessageLabs Intelligence released numbers this week that place email spam levels at a staggering 90.4% of all email traffic in June, which makes you really appreciate your spam filter. And the profit margin becomes even more enticing for spammers when they don’t need to use humans to do their dirty work (80% of all spam sent today comes from botnets)

Please read Meghan’s full account of Spam is on the rise