stickycontent-blog

Choose your words carefully

As I was going home late from work the other night on the tube I got wound up by a simple announcement from London Underground. I was told there was "a good service running on all lines". But I knew very well that there wasn't. Because despite the fact that it was nearly 9pm, a Central Line train arrived that was too full for everyone to get on – including me.

I had to wait for the next train. So I stood on the platform muttering about them telling lies – good isn't a train I can't get on – what was happening was normal service.

Here are some tips for making sure you don't wind up your users and customers in a similar way.

Don't promise what you can't deliver
Don't use superlatives or marketing speak
Don't tell them something will be easy when it isn't
Don't tell them what to think about a product – let them make up their own minds

It’s not hard to make your customers happy and treat them properly using words that are accurate, helpful and usable.

Write in a specific way – for example, “it will take 6 minutes to complete this form”
Use plain and appropriate language
Be realistic and truthful
Explain the benefits and avoid the adjectives

Remember little words count – here, for me, it was the difference between good and normal which led to my getting cross. Don't describe something as good when it isn't. It devalues the meaning of good.

Check your site – have any of you got those kinds of words in the wrong place?

(And apologies to anyone who feels this post is a bit metro-centric. The theory applies equally everywhere.)

Not sure where to start? Email us now.

Customer service emails – are you missing a brand-building opportunity?

It’s a given that how you communicate with your customers speaks volumes about your brand, right? Well, the customer experience doesn’t stop when someone makes a purchase on your website. It carries on right up until they get their order, go to the concert or drive their hire car.

Good communication builds your brand. That’s why it’s worth taking a careful look at the emails your company sends – both automated emails, such as order confirmations, and personalised emails responding to customer queries.

Every email should be written in your brand’s online tone of voice, but without compromising clarity. Customer service emails are primarily functional after all.

Automated email

It’s not rocket science to get automated emails right. When it comes to order confirmations, delivery notifications and password reminders, most brands go down the formulaic and tired “thanks for your order” route, demonstrated here by Dell:

“This e-mail is an acknowledgement of receipt of your Dell Order”.

But brands like ASOS have it spot on with their order confirmation email which praises my purchase selection with the cheeky line:

“Good choice. Who said money can’t buy you style?”

How’s that for alleviating any post-purchase credit-crunch guilt and making me excited about my new togs?

Personalised email from the customer services team

When it comes to replies to enquires from customers and potential customers, the same level of care is needed. Training your customer service team in writing for email could pay dividends and avoid shockers like this (real) example from a seaside hotel:

“We are very busy and with the greatest of respect our email of 7th May already answered the questions raised. Should therefore you have any further questions then please telephone rather than email – it is so much quicker for all concerned!”

Unfortunately for this disgruntled hotelier, email is an increasingly popular way to make pre-purchase enquiries – and many people see it as quicker and more convenient than a phone call.

Start with a review of your automated emails, including registration emails and password reminders, and work from there until you’re confident that all your email communication is putting the right message across.

Want more help writing for email?

Get in touch with us

Book a place on our email marketing course

Content marketing by numbers: new from Content confidential

Content confidential is a monthly thought-leadership piece from Sticky Content. To get it delivered to your inbox, subscribe here.

This month, we take a look at content marketing by numbers. With 10 per cent annual growth predicted in the UK for this £880m market, the stats speak for themselves...

44% Percentage of b2b marketers who consider content marketing the most important element of their online marketing strategy.

9/10 That’s how many b2b organisations say they make use of content marketing.

44% The percentage of respondents agreeing with the statement: “Content marketing is more important than advertising”.

$3m The amount of revenue Fifth Third Bank attributed to the first 9 months of a new content marketing push.

Content 2020 The name of a new Coca-Cola marketing mission statement, which focuses the global giant’s marketing activity on content marketing.

0% bounce Google’s Panda update is designed to give quality content a higher search profile. Google uses quantifiable metrics to determine the quality of a page, especially bounce rates and the length of time a user spends on a page. The better the content, the longer someone stays – and the more likely they are to share it socially.

70% Number of b2b buyers who begin the process by using a search engine, with 75% clicking on organic search results. Better give them something good to read when they get there...

$2.5m Total sales which software company Eloqua puts down to clients downloading its content in the second half of 2010 alone.

1 in 3 Number of marketers who say “lack of time” is their biggest social media challenge, followed by “creating original content” (28%). Devising efficient content formats and editorial forward-planning might give you that competitive advantage.

$324k Average amount US companies now spend on outsourcing their content marketing – the highest yet.

10% Growth in content marketing predicted in 2012, for a market already worth £880million.

Sources: LinkedIn B2B Marketing Group survey, Vertical Leap; APA/Menzies Digital Marketing/Mintel; Custom Content Council/ContentWise study; Econsultancy/Adobe Quarterly Digital Intelligence Briefing, July 2011; Content Marketing Institute; Red Rocket Media

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What do you think? Add your comments below or get in touch with us to discuss marketing with content.

Checklists: a matter of life and death?

We’ve all seen movies with the captain and co-pilot of a plane or spaceship going through their checklists before take-off to make sure the craft is airworthy. But why do checklists work so well – and how can we use them to improve our web content?

In 2001, one Peter Pronovost, a doctor looking after patients in intensive care at Johns Hopkins hospital in the USA, began thinking about how checklists could improve service levels.

He started small, looking at the problem of avoiding infections when a line is being put in. He devised a 5-point checklist – starting with doctors washing their hands with soap and ending with a sterile dressing. He got the nurses to monitor what the doctors were doing and discovered that around a third tried to skip a step. Then he made sure that the nurses were authorised make sure the doctors followed procedure.

Once the system was in place the infection rate went down from 11% to 0%. In the next year or so they had only two infections. The hospital calculated it had prevented 43 infections, 8 deaths and saved £2m in costs, all thanks to Pronovost’s checklists.

This success prompted the hospital to introduce checklists for pain medication and mechanical ventilation. These too provided great benefits – 21 fewer patients died than in the year before in intensive care.

Pronovost took his ideas to other hospitals. Infection rates dropped and a group of hospitals in Michigan saved an estimated $175m and 1,500 lives in the first 18 months. He continues to spread the message.

Benefits of checklists

Pronovost worked out that checklists provide 2 main benefits:

1. Checklists help with memory recall – especially the small things that are easy to miss when dealing with a crisis – so, for example, when a patient is having fits it might be hard to remember to make sure their bed is at the right angle to prevent saliva going into the windpipe and potentially giving rise to pneumonia.

2 Checklists spell out the minimum standard expected. By making sure all steps are followed, the standard baseline performance is improved.

Why checklists work

Surgeon and journalist Atul Gawande has also pioneered the use of checklists in medicine. He designed and implemented checklists for a World Health Organisation project designed to cut down on deaths from surgery. He then went on to write The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right <http://gawande.com/the-checklist-manifesto>.

Gawande thinks checklists work because some of our systems have now become so complicated they are difficult for our brains to master. He set a target that no step would take more than 60 seconds, and in routine situations the whole process should take no longer than 2 minutes. One hospital reduced operating times because the teams prepared better.

We are all human. We all make mistakes. The trick is to learn how to minimise them. So Gawande suggests we assume that individuals will fail but put in a system that will catch the mistakes – the checklist.

Checklists also work because they break down the task into simple steps. Having completed one step, you can then concentrate on the next. No-one gets frightened or paralysed by the scale of the whole task and the bigger picture. You just move on to the next step and then the next.

Two kinds of checklists

Daniel Boorman of Boeing, who was consulted by Gawande, identifies 2 kinds of checklist:

• Read-Do: you read each step of the task, and then perform them in order, checking them off as you go, like following a recipe.

• Do-Confirm: you go through steps of the task from memory until you reach a defined pause point, when you go through the checklist and confirm that each step has been completed.

Gawande recommends no more than 10 items on a checklist – if it takes too long, people ignore it. But no more than 7 is ideal, as that’s the about the limit for most people’s short-term memory. If you need longer checklists, then break the tasks down even further and have a checklist for each part of the task.

How you can use checklists on your website

Checklists can be a way of making complex copy scannable and user-friendly, simplifying and distilling down what is needed.

Think about where you can be helpful to your customers or your users by providing them with printable checklists that are relevant to their needs – for a DIY job, a holiday packing list, things to check on your car before setting off on a long journey, what you can and can’t carry on as hand-luggage, how to make a complaint, organising an event or moving home.

With online forms, checklists can be useful for helping users to understand what they need to have ready before they dive into the full process. For example:

What you need before you start:

Before you start this application, make sure you have the following documents to hand.

 your bank account number

 passport number

 name, address and email address

 contact details of your referee

Checklist for great web copy

If you don’t have one already, putting in place a checklist to follow before putting your copy live on the web will raise the general standard of content on your site. If you go through all these steps and think your content passes all these tests with flying colours then publish. If not, spend time rewriting until it does...

1. Is your content well planned? Do you know the purpose of the content and the audience for it? Are you sure the content is mapped to your website and business goals?

2. Easy to navigate? Does the content have clear signposts, helpfully worded, keyword-rich links, and sensible suggestions for where the user might go next?

3. Scannable? Can the pages be easily understood at a glance through the use of sub-headings, bullets, bold text, short sentences and consistent structures?

4. Everyday English? Is the focus of the content on user needs and priorities? Is it written in the active voice, in everyday language? Does it use lots of personal pronouns (“we” and especially “you”)?

5. Optimised for search? Are the right keywords that users search for in the title tag, subheads and body copy? Are there keywords in any text links to and from the page? Is the content worth reading and will other people want to link to it?

6. Brand tone of voice? Is the tone of voice on brand and consistent with the rest of the site? Don’t forget the buttons, menus and help text associated with the content – they’re part of your brand too.

7. Credible? Is everything up-to-date and logically ordered? Are there any spelling, grammar or formatting errors? Is the information likely to go out of date, or does it have any cultural references that could exclude users?

What do you think? Are checklists a help, or just another form-filling exercise?

We’ve all seen movies with the captain and co-pilot of a plane or spaceship going through their checklists before take-off to make sure the craft is airworthy. But why do checklists work so well – and how can we use them to improve our web content?

In 2001, one Peter Pronovost, a doctor looking after patients in intensive care at Johns Hopkins hospital in the USA, began thinking about how checklists could improve service levels.

Benefits of checklists

Pronovost worked out that checklists provide 2 main benefits:

1. Checklists help with memory recall – especially the small things that are easy to miss when dealing with a crisis – so, for example, when a patient is having fits it might be hard to remember to make sure their bed is at the right angle to prevent saliva going into the windpipe and potentially giving rise to pneumonia.

2. Checklists spell out the minimum standard expected. By making sure all steps are followed, the standard baseline performance is improved.

Why checklists work

We are all human. We all make mistakes. The trick is to learn how to minimise them. So Gawande suggests we assume that individuals will fail but put in a system that will catch the mistakes – the checklist.

Two kinds of checklists

Daniel Boorman of Boeing, who was consulted by Gawande, identifies 2 kinds of checklist:

• Read-Do: you read each step of the task, and then perform them in order, checking them off as you go, like following a recipe.

• Do-Confirm: you go through steps of the task from memory until you reach a defined pause point, when you go through the checklist and confirm that each step has been completed.

How you can use checklists on your website

Checklists can be a way of making complex copy scannable and user-friendly, simplifying and distilling down what is needed.

With online forms, checklists can be useful for helping users to understand what they need to have ready before they dive into the full process. For example:

What you need before you start:

Before you start this application, make sure you have the following documents to hand.

your bank account number
passport number
name, address and email address
contact details of your referee

Checklist for great web copy

1. Is your content well planned? Do you know the purpose of the content and the audience for it? Are you sure the content is mapped to your website and business goals?

2. Easy to navigate? Does the content have clear signposts, helpfully worded, keyword-rich links, and sensible suggestions for where the user might go next?

3. Scannable? Can the pages be easily understood at a glance through the use of sub-headings, bullets, bold text, short sentences and consistent structures?

4. Everyday English? Is the focus of the content on user needs and priorities? Is it written in the active voice, in everyday language? Does it use lots of personal pronouns (“we” and especially “you”)?

5. Optimised for search? Are the right keywords that users search for in the title tag, subheads and body copy? Are there keywords in any text links to and from the page? Is the content worth reading and will other people want to link to it?

6. Brand tone of voice? Is the tone of voice on brand and consistent with the rest of the site? Don’t forget the buttons, menus and help text associated with the content – they’re part of your brand too.

7. Credible? Is everything up-to-date and logically ordered? Are there any spelling, grammar or formatting errors? Is the information likely to go out of date, or does it have any cultural references that could exclude users?

What do you think? Are checklists a help, or just another form-filling exercise?

Content marketing: 8 copy formats that really work

Content marketing is about providing your prospects with information that’s both useful to them and helps to position you as a trusted expert. And what turns good content into great content is a copy format – a repeatable, reader-friendly structure that you can use again and again to present content items of the same type. Here are 8 of the best.

Buyer’s guides

Everyone wins with a buyer’s guide. Your readers get useful, insider knowledge that helps them differentiate products and services, and demystifies often very complex technical knowledge. You, meanwhile, get targeted users to explore and navigate your offering, building up the sort of knowledge and familiarity that informs a sale.

A key issue to consider in creating buyer’s guides is the balance between neutral fact and advertorial rhetoric. Copy that only says positive things about products is likely to be dismissed as puff. Then again, it takes courage to introduce criticism of one’s own offering. A way round this is to talk about different products and services generically without mentioning brand names.

Case studies

One of the most venerable of all copy formats, the case study is a shorthand way to present your credentials. When selecting and creating case studies, go for quality over quantity, and use them strategically: select stories that reflect the breadth of your offering, the different benefits of your service, or the range of sectors you work in, for instance.

Go for brevity and at-a-glance information. Most users will only read a couple of hundred words at most – indeed, many are just looking to see the calibre of the names you work with. Don’t write case studies as complete stories, and don’t focus on the particular: write them in a way that makes it easy for people with no knowledge of the project to see how your work could have helped them.

Top tips

Top tips are snippety little selections of info that users love to snack on. One school of thought says that you should always avoid 10 tips and go for a more random number, such as 11 or 17, on the grounds that people will think you rounded up your information to hit the magic 10. (As a former journalist, I can testify that there is some truth in this suggestion.)

Make sure your subject matter is suited to the top tips format. “Ten ways to spot signs of stress in your staff” might work for an HR software provider, for instance, whereas “10 top tips for managing a global data migration” might seem a little under-cooked.

Q&A

This very underrated format is great for imparting new or complex information. Whenever they see text set out as questions and answers, readers know they are going to get a useful briefing on an unfamiliar or tricky subject. Ideally the Q&A will begin with a drop-down menu of all questions, ordered from the most simple to most difficult, so that users can jump in at the level that suits them.

FAQs are perhaps the best-known example of the Q&A format. Too often, the FAQ section of a website gets clogged up with content that no one knows where else to put. FAQs should be regularly edited and reviewed to make sure that they are genuinely things that people frequently ask.

Step-by-step

When describing how a process works, it’s easy and logical to break it down into steps. As with Q&A, start by summarising the steps in a drop-down menu. Readers can then follow your instructions easily and simply – and achieve whatever they (or you) need to do.

Checklist

A brief, handy format to give users a sense of everything they need to think about in relation to a particular activity. Checklists are often embedded within a larger piece of content such as a report or white paper. The items on the checklist are often written as bullets or questions.

Timeline

Information that’s essentially chronological often lends itself to the timeline treatment. The progress of a project or the history of a technology would be examples here. Readers can pick out the important milestones without having to wade through paragraphs dotted with dates.

We’re experts in creating custom formats for our clients, and giving guidance in how to use them. Find out how we can help you transform your content: emailus@stickycontent.co.uk

Micro content: Why focusing on the small stuff can pay

Focusing on micro content – small copy elements like button names, calls to action, reassurance text (for example around an online form or payment process) or even where a particular piece of copy is placed on a page – can produce big wins. And small copy fixes are usually possible even when there’s no budget for redesign or technical changes.

Changing micro content can increase conversions, save on customer support time and cost, and boost customer satisfaction.

There are 3 main barriers to conversion that micro content can help address:

• Ego – how do we persuade a reader that it’s in their interests to carry out a particular task?

• Inertia – how do we make a customer act now rather than putting it off until later?

• Fear and cynicism – how do we overcome trust issues?

Here are 10 key techniques for overcoming these barriers...

1. Demonstrate benefits by modelling outcomes rather than tasks – help the user to imagine the real-world results they’ll get from your product

2. Be specific about what you’re offering, rather than using vague marketing terms – talk about actual products, not just generalised solutions or offerings

3. Use peer endorsement, whether it’s in the form of testimonials, reviews or simply ranking content, eg: top 5 downloads.

4. Appeal to readers’ egos when asking them to carry out a task for you. For example, a link to a reader survey which read Tell us what we can do better performed significantly better than one which read Give us your best ideas.

5. Be aware of customer issues with trust and adjust copy to address this. For example, simply adding secure to the word checkout can provide the reassurance the customer needs to make a purchase.

6. Focus on your taglines: are they meaningful? Do they really describe your organisation?

7. Understand the importance of form copy, and be aware of potential drop-off points, addressing them with targeted reassurance text and incentives.

8. Offer incentives at crucial stages of customer interaction with your company, for example when they create a profile or sign up for your emails.

9. Use tone of voice in micro content, such as error messages, to build a relationship with your brand.

10. Identify areas of your site that demand high effort from your customers and address this with intelligent information design and strategically-placed copy – for example by providing multiple pathways to answers to common questions.

Have you looked at your micro-content lately? Do you have any success stories to share? Leave us a comment with your thoughts.

Changing micro content can increase conversions, save on customer support time and cost, and boost customer satisfaction.

There are 3 main barriers to conversion that micro content can help address:

• Ego – how do we persuade a reader that it’s in their interests to carry out a particular task?

• Inertia – how do we make a customer act now rather than putting it off until later?

• Fear and cynicism – how do we overcome trust issues?

Here are 10 key techniques for overcoming these barriers...

Demonstrate benefits by modelling outcomes rather than tasks – help the user to imagine the real-world results they’ll get
Be specific about what you’re offering, rather than using vague marketing terms – talk about actual products, not just generalised solutions or offerings
Use peer endorsement, whether it’s in the form of testimonials, reviews or simply ranking content, eg: top 5 downloads.
Appeal to readers’ egos when asking them to carry out a task for you. For example, a link to a reader survey which read Tell us what we can do better performed significantly better than one which read Give us your best ideas.
Be aware of customer issues with trust and adjust copy to address this. For example, simply adding secure to the word checkout can provide the reassurance the customer needs to make a purchase.
Focus on your taglines: are they meaningful? Do they really describe your organisation?
Understand the importance of form copy, and be aware of potential drop-off points, addressing them with targeted reassurance text and incentives.
Offer incentives at crucial stages of customer interaction with your company, for example when they create a profile or sign up for your emails.
Use tone of voice in certain places, such as error messages, to build a relationship with your brand.
Identify areas of your site that demand high effort from your customers and address this with intelligent information design and strategically-placed copy – for example by providing multiple pathways to answers to common questions.

Have you looked at your micro-content lately? Do you have any success stories to share? Leave us a comment with your thoughts.

Content marketing: 9 steps to get started

As Econsultancy’s recent Funnel event demonstrated, the b2b space has embraced the massive potential of content marketing to attract and engage new prospects. Indeed, 9 out 10 b2b organisations say they market with content, according to Marketing Sherpa (2010).

At Sticky Content, we’ve been helping organisations market with content for 15 years, because we’ve seen time and again that what gets people engaged is not empty marketese but useful information. So here’s our 9-point plan for taking your content marketing to the next level...

1. Map your content marketing to your overall goals: To begin with, as always, your marketing goals need to be mapped to your overall strategy. What are your overall business goals? What’s your brand positioning? Is there a particular product or service you want to focus on? Is there a particular audience segment? Where do you need to do better in the engagement cycle? Then you can start thinking about how content marketing can support these objectives.

2. Identify your niche of expertise: As a b2b business, your business is likely to have specialist knowledge in some fairly niche areas. Sharing that knowledge in an accessible and useful way is what content marketing is all about. So ask: what do we know more about than anyone else?

3. Listen to your customers: It’s not enough to know stuff that no one else does – there’s has to be a market for that information too, and it has to be packaged in a user-friendly way. So use all the tricks you have at your disposal to find out what your customers want to know more about. Keywords, web analytics, email feedback, market research, social media monitoring, insights from the sales team... it’s all valuable data to help you generate content ideas.

4. Identify your subject experts and make their lives easy: Once you start generating ideas, your subject experts can provide the raw data for your marketable content. But your experts are not necessarily marketers or writers, and providing information for content marketing is not likely to be top of their to-do list. So do whatever you can to make their lives easier. Give them list of questions to think about, or forms to fill in. Show them examples of what the ideal final output will look like, to get them closer to the kind of content you need. Record them so they don’t have to write stuff down. The expert need only speak his or her piece (literally if it’s a video); the marketing team will take care of writing up, editing, formatting, design and all the rest.

5. Choose strong formats you can use time and again: Online, there are lots of tried-and-trusted ways of packaging content into engaging formats that are both easy to create and interesting to read. Buyer’s guides, top tips, webinars, video, case studies, Q&As, How Tos, checklists, technology briefings... you can adapt some of these well-known structures or invent your own. Go for formats that you can imagine using again and again.

6. Stick to an editorial schedule: Now that you’re taking publishing seriously, you need to act like a proper publisher. Have an editorial team, for whom content marketing is part of their job description. Put in place an editorial calendar, to schedule the flow of content in a way that is both timely (factoring in seasonal and topical triggers) and realistic (factoring in constraints such as sign-off process, available resource and technical limitations). Cultivate relationships with quotable experts. Above all, make sure you stick to your schedule – better to start off under-estimating what you can achieve and build from there.

7. Make sure your content is both searchable and sociable: As well as thinking of web-friendly formats to structure your content in, don’t forget seo and search. Make sure your headlines, tags, links and descriptions are all Google-friendly, and write engaging titles that you can imagine people wanting to retweet.

8. Keep the ideas coming: Once your content starts getting noticed, people will expect to see a regular flow of new material. So make sure all your team are always on the lookout for ideas. Encourage the wider business to submit ideas too. Emerging trends, useful stats, new angles on old favourites... the more ideas you come up with, the better the quality of the content you will eventually create. Some may get used straight away, some may get put aside to fill a gap in the schedule further down the line.

9. Test, measure, refine: Once you’ve been content marketing in earnest for a while, you can start to measure and reflect on the effectiveness of your output. Schedule regular editorial review meetings to see what can be learned from past content for the future. Take a long hard look at what works and what doesn’t, and think about how to do more of the former and less of the latter. Seo traffic, users stats, enquiries, acquisitions, retweets, page views... use whatever metrics available, always making sure that you assess your findings in the light of your original goals.

Talk to us about marketing with content emailus

1. Map your content marketing to your overall goals: To begin with, as always, your marketing goals need to be mapped to your overall strategy. What are your overall business goals? What’s your brand positioning? Is there a particular product or service you want to focus on? Is there a particular audience segment? Where do you need to do better in the engagement cycle? Then you can start thinking about how content marketing can support your objectives.

2. Identify your niche of expertise: If you're a b2b business, your organisation is likely to have specialist knowledge in some fairly niche areas. Sharing that knowledge in an accessible and useful way is what content marketing is all about. So ask: what do we know more about than anyone else?

3. Listen to your customers: It’s not enough to know stuff that no one else does – there’s has to be a market for that information too, and it has to be packaged in a user-friendly way. So use all the tricks you have at your disposal to find out what your customers want to know more about. Keywords, web analytics, email feedback, market research, social media monitoring, insights from the sales team... it’s all valuable data to help you generate content ideas.

4. Identify your subject experts and make their lives easy: Once you start generating ideas, your subject experts can provide the raw data for your marketable content. But your experts are not necessarily marketers or writers, and providing information for content marketing is not likely to be top of their to-do list. So do whatever you can to make their lives easier. Give them a list of questions to think about, or a form to fill in. Show them examples of what the ideal final output will look like, to get them closer to the kind of content you need. Record them so they don’t have to write stuff down. The expert need only speak his or her piece (literally if it’s a video); the marketing team can take care of writing up, editing, formatting, design and all the rest.

5. Choose strong formats you can use time and again: Online, there are lots of tried-and-trusted ways of packaging content into engaging formats that are both easy to create and interesting to read. Buyer’s guides, top tips, webinars, video, case studies, Q&As, How Tos, checklists, technology briefings... you can adapt some of these well-known structures or invent your own. Go for formats that you can imagine using again and again.

6. Stick to an editorial schedule: Now that you’re taking publishing seriously, you need to act like a proper publisher. Have an editorial team, for whom content marketing is part of their job description. Put in place an editorial calendar, to schedule the flow of content in a way that is both timely (factoring in seasonal and topical triggers) and realistic (factoring in constraints like sign-off process, available resource and technical limitations). Cultivate relationships with quotable experts. Above all, make sure you stick to your schedule – it's better to start off under-estimating what you can achieve and build from there.

7. Make sure your content is both searchable and sociable: As well as thinking of web-friendly formats to structure your content in, don’t forget seo and search. Make sure your headlines, tags, links and descriptions are all Google-friendly, and write engaging titles that you can imagine people wanting to retweet or share online.

8. Keep the ideas coming: Once your content starts getting noticed, people will expect to see a regular flow of new material. So make sure your team is always on the lookout for ideas. Encourage the wider business to submit ideas too. Emerging trends, useful stats, new angles on old favourites... the more ideas you come up with, the better the quality of the content you will eventually create. Some may get used straight away, some may get put aside to fill a gap in the schedule further down the line.

9. Test, measure, refine: Once you’ve been content marketing in earnest for a while, you can start to measure and reflect on the effectiveness of your output. Schedule regular editorial review meetings to see what can be learned from past content for the future. Take a long hard look at what works and what doesn’t, and think about how to do more of the former and less of the latter. Seo traffic, users stats, enquiries, acquisitions, retweets, page views... use whatever metrics are available, always making sure that you assess your findings in the light of your original goals.

Talk to us about marketing with content: emailus@stickycontent.co.uk

Find out more about the Econsultancy Funnel event

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is defined by Econsultancy as “marketers becoming publishers – owning the media instead of renting it.” It’s about “attracting and retaining customers by creating / curating valuable, compelling and relevant content to maintain or change behaviour.”

This kind of content-led approach is particularly useful in b2b contexts. That’s because the products or services involved – whether it’s a CRM platform or a networked telecoms infrastructure – are often very complex offerings that require multiple decision-makers and significant lead times to convert. Your prospects need to understand how what you have to offer maps to their needs, speaks to their pain points, and addresses the challenges and issues of their industry or sector.

In short, they need to get that you know what you’re talking about. And the way to make sure they do is to be generous with useful information – editorial rather than promotional – that positions you as experts, speaks about things your audience care about, and isn’t easy to find elsewhere.

Once your prospects recognise you as a provider of expert content, it’s a short step to recognising you as someone they trust and want to do business with.

Talk to us about marketing with content: emailus@stickycontent.co.uk

Apostrophes: do they matter?

I’ve been to several marketing events recently – conferences and trade shows where marketers sit on stands, present case studies and generally try and market themselves. Among the interesting discoveries – a new focus on content marketing in b2b, for instance – I was struck by a new low in spelling standards and, in particular, apostrophe use.

One presentation’s slides included both the phrase “lot’s of opportunities” and the word “catagories”. The speaker also pronounced “hyperbole” as “hyper-bowl”.

Another presentation focused on “tomorrows internet” (written in huge block capitals). And a business card pressed into my hand read: “Curious on engaging new business’ leads?”

Don’t get me wrong. I’m actually quite relaxed about typos. Quality control is much harder than non-editorial people realise, and in the unending battle to keep up standards it’s only the things you miss that people ever notice. But when companies are trying to sell their services and their expertise, you’d think they’d take the trouble to give the best possible first impression.

“If you can’t even spell...”

Even in the age of tweets and text-speak and instant messaging, people still care about these things.

Whenever I run a web content workshop and the subject of quality control comes up, attendees are adamant. Howlers like the ones above dilute your brand, lower trust, and remove people’s confidence in your ability to do what you say you do. As one attendee said of an error on a holiday site (“book you next trip”): “If they can’t spell, how are they going to get the plane off the ground?”

Apostrophes: a quick recap

For those who are offended by such inaccuracies, no howler howls louder than an inability to get apostrophes right. So here’s a quick recap:

1 phone, 1 sister: my sister’s phone
1 phone, 2 sisters: my sisters’ phone
2 phones, 1 sister: my sister’s phones
2 phones, 2 sisters: my sisters’ phones

If your sister is called Glynnis, you can say

Glynnis’ phone

or (less common):

Glynnis’s phone

“It’s” is never possessive – it’s short for “it is”. So if you want to refer to your rubbish phone and your phone’s rubbish memory, you’d write:

I hate this phone – its memory is rubbish. Actually, it’s a terrible phone full stop.

To find out how the Sticky Content team can help you improve your web copy, get in touch with us at emailus@stickycontent.co.uk

How great content adds up

You could be forgiven for thinking that a copywriting agency would be more interested in words than numbers. But as it turns out, numbers can play a vital role in successful copywriting. The right number of points, or putting text in the right number of “chunks”, can make all the difference when it comes to getting the message across.

Our brains process numbers in 2 main ways. The first and most familiar way is counting – a gradual step-by-step process of understanding how many of something there are. Think of counting money, or sheep, if you’re an insomniac. The second way is subitising – a less familiar process that we have in common with many other animals from birds to bears. When we subitise an amount, we know instantly how many things are present. Think of a lioness recognising instantly whether all her cubs are present. Subitising works for 3-4 objects – 5 at the most. For numbers higher than that, we count – a slower and more effortful process.

The implications for copywriting? Well, it makes sense to keep our short copy – think web pages, social media content or indeed blog posts – structured in small chunks that can be instantly processed by the subitising brain. If you know immediately there are 3 paragraphs to read, or 3 points being made, it’s much easier to process than if you just see “a lot” of text on a page. A time-starved reader with a short attention span is more likely to commit to reading 3 points than “lots”.

We believe strongly in scannable content that’s visually inviting – bullet points, bolded text and a clear structure with relevant subheads. Put together with the power of subitisation, these methods can help us create copy that a reader instantly knows they want to read.

Find out more about how we can help you create killer content: emailus@stickycontent.co.uk

Pronouns on product copy – is your smoothie getting too friendly?

“I’m packed full of Vitamin C and I make up 1 of your 5 a day!”

Is your bottle of juice talking to you? Or how about your shampoo – is it regaling you with jokes or singing its own praises? In fact, when was the last time you went shopping and didn’t see packaging “blurb” written in the first person?

Using personal pronouns in marketing copy is nothing new. In fact it’s a key technique in writing persuasive copy. “You” is probably the most powerful word in the copywriter’s vocabulary, especially when it comes to selling in the benefits of your product.

At Sticky, we’re great advocates of using words like “you” and “we” to personalise and liven up copy, on websites, emails and most of all in social media. Using “you” draws the reader’s attention straight away, bringing them personally into the picture your content is painting. Everyone prefers a personal message just for them to general information about “customers” and “clients”, so it makes perfect sense to address your reader directly when appropriate.

But packaging copy has begun taking the intimacy and immediacy of the pronoun into new territory. Messages are still directed at a highly personal “you”, but they no longer come from a collective company-wide “we”. Instead, the messages come directly from the product itself. Marketers are taking the manufacturer out of the equation and giving the products their own voice, which requires the reader not only to suspend their disbelief but also to have a particular, playful sense of humour.

We definitely see the value in “you” and “we”, but “I”... we’re not quite sure about. When it works, it sounds fresh and upbeat, but when it fails to connect with its audience it’s at the risk of just sounding gimmicky and twee.

Do you like it when products talk to you? Does your smoothie make you smile when it greets you with a first-person “Hello! I’m delicious!”? Or would you prefer inanimate objects to stay quiet and let the people who made them do the talking?

I’m a blog post – why not comment on me?

Adding substance to your style guide

Most companies have a style guide tucked away somewhere, often based on that venerable document, The Economist style guide. These sets of rules on spelling, punctuation and grammar are an essential editorial tool. But are style guides really doing their job when it comes to online publishing, particularly for commercial organisations?

At Sticky, we come across a lot of style guides that are obviously based on editorial rules for newspapers or general interest magazines. Of course, these publications cover everything, so if you’re working for one you need to know how to write the names of rivers or what style to use when referring to the Pope. (Or should that be pope?) But if you’re writing product descriptions for a website, this type of information isn’t much use and can be confusing to wade through.

So what does an online style guide for a commercial organisation need to cover? Well, clear instructions on style for product names, or even agreement on what these are, is always nice. Equally useful are rules for writing online content elements like bullet points and sub-headings.

It’s also important to address how to write title tags and meta descriptions, link and anchor text, and of course, the subtle art of working in keywords without hampering the flow of the copy or the value of the information for the reader.

A good style guide acknowledges the difference between print audiences (who are comparatively time-rich) and the typical web-user, who has numerous distractions, definite goals and a very short attention span. When you write for online, your copy answers to a whole different set of needs – and it has to be written in a whole new way.

Of course, some traditional style guide entries – how to use apostrophes , for example – are essential, and they apply just as much online as they do in print. But a good style guide also needs to take into account differences in on and offline writing. For example, most style guides for print advocate writing the numbers 1 to 9 or 1 to 10 in words, but there’s evidence that for online, writing all numbers as numerals is more suitable.

Many organisations are now realising that their style guides aren’t suitable for the job when it comes to digital copy, so they ask us to update them, or create new ones from scratch. Maybe it’s time to unearth your style guide, take a good look at it and see if it needs a makeover.

To haven’t or to have not?

What are your feelings about won’t and can’t? Where do you stand on would’ve and should’ve? Have you any strong views on haven’t? Would you go as far as wouldn’t’ve? We’re talking about contractions here, not the One Born Every Minute kind, but the truncation of words that sometimes proves surprisingly controversial.

When asked about tone of voice, many organisations say they want their websites to sound “conversational”.Contractions are integral to the way we talk to each other, so it follows that if you want your copy to read like a conversation with your reader, you’ll use them rather than writing each word in full. However, we find that many clients balk at this: it’s almost as contentious as the old chestnut of starting sentences with “and” or “but”.

The reasons given for this vary. One client told us customers have actually written to him complaining about the use of contractions! But the main thing is that people feel contractions somehow don’t sound “professional” or “expert” enough, or that they are slang.

However the consequences of not using contractions are far-reaching when it comes to tone of voice. Anyone who’s seen the film True Grit will have noticed how odd the absence of contractions makes spoken language sound. And when it comes to written language, it’s amazing just how formal and stilted a tone the consistent use of cannot, do not, will not etc, rather than the more conversational alternatives, gives to copy.

At Sticky Content, we don’t want messages to be lost in hard-to-read copy, so we recommend a middle way. Avoid double contractions and clumsy sounding constructions like would’ve, but keep things simple and natural with can’t, don’t, won’t, we’ll, you’ll, etc. That way, you keep the flow – and you shouldn’t get too many complaints from irate customers.

Want more guidance for your business?

Tone of voice training from Sticky Content

New content strategy workshop: Sticky Content at Econsultancy

Content strategy is one of the biggest emerging trends in digital marketing, with more and more brands catching on to the importance of mapping objectives to users to content. It’s something we do every day at Sticky Content, and we’re thrilled to be bringing our training to Econsultancy’s delegates with a series of one-day courses.

Our ceo Catherine Toole has 14 years of experience in planning, auditing, writing and editing digital content for some of the UK’s best known brands. She’ll be guiding delegates through all aspects of planning and delivering killer content strategy.

The course is for anyone involved in planning, creating or producing online content. It offers:

fresh insights on using content strategy in your digital communications
a detailed guide to Sticky Content’s 7-step process for developing a content strategy, including advice on choosing content types, guidelines and editorial plans for use in different contexts
inspiration from over 100 examples of content strategy in action across all types of business, from retail to not-for-profit
practical advice on implementing a content strategy, including making a business case, conducting content audits, and monitoring performance
the opportunity to ask questions and get advice on your specific content issues

When?

First course dates are 9th March 2011 (9:30am – 4:30pm) and 25th May 2011 (9:30am – 4:30pm), in London.

Call to action!

Book your place on the Econsultancy course now
Find out more about training with Sticky Content

The 3 key elements of a successful digital tone of voice

Defining and describing a tone of voice is hard enough. Getting all your writers to apply it consistently is harder again. And if your voice is part of your general brand guidelines and you’ve got to apply it to the web, it gets harder still: you’ve got to make sure your language isn’t just on brand, but also accessible, scannable, front-loaded, benefit-driven, keyword-friendly and all the rest.

If you have a voice that’s designed to be distinctive and quirky, all that web-friendly stuff can seem like a bit of a wet blanket, a layer of pedantry designed only to stifle the magic. In a recent seminar, I heard a tone of voice “expert” announce that “seo is the death of copywriting”. Naturally we cannot agree with this rather archaic, print-based view of the world.

Online, people come to your website with specific questions in mind and key tasks to fulfil. The usability of your site and its content – the ease with which people can find their answers and complete their tasks – is their defining experience of your brand. No amount of crazee language can compensate for a flawed user journey, a broken link or out-of-date information.

The skill of the web copywriter is precisely to make sure that the experience of using the content is intuitive, while at the same time retaining the flavour of the brand voice. To help us get this right we find it helpful to see a tone of voice, when executed online (and indeed everywhere else), as composed of 3 elements: the messaging, the information design, and the style.

1. Messaging

This is how you choose to position and present the messages you choose to put in front of your users. Do you, for instance, say “careers at Acme plc” (dull) or “10 great reasons to work for us” (more engaging)? Do you say “Email us to check what sofas we have in store” (hard work) – or do you have a regularly updated page called “Sofas in stock now” (helpful)?

When someone looks up an FAQ on a utility site such as “What do I do if I can smell gas?”, does the answer they get begin: “Your safety is important to us…” (irrelevant marketese), or does it start: “Call this emergency number at once” (responsive and to the point?). Does your corporate history detail every trivial date of only internal interest, or does it try to focus on key milestones likely to be relevant to your key audiences?

As these examples illustrate, language isolation is only part of getting this right. It means thinking strategically about your content – about what your users need at what points in their journey.

With the “I can smell gas” question, it means understanding that the best way you can show users you care about them is to give the number at once, not go into some marketing boilerplate. Sometimes it requires technical fulfilment or stakeholder collaboration: the sofa availability page might be hard work to implement, but the resulting positive brand perception is likely to be immense.

2. The information design

This is about making the content scannable, visually accessible, easy for a scan reader to move around and work out how to find what they need.

If your tone of voice says your language is “friendly” or “helpful” or “straightforward”, but your content is presented in great slabs of text with minimal signposting, no reader is ever going to see it as such. Structure as much as style needs to be friendly, straightforward and all the rest.

3. The style

This is what people traditionally mean when they refer to tone of voice – all the little language decisions you make when putting your content together. Do you say “gift” or do you say “pressie”? Do you say “Acme plc is…” or “We are…”? Do you say “don’t” or “do not”? and all the rest.

It’s important to get these points of language right, but in the web-friendly scheme of things, they come after the messaging and the information design – both of which contribute more significantly to how well your digital content expresses your voice.

Here are a few examples of what we mean:

Messaging: here the heading is as straightforwardly informative as can be – no clever wordplay or audacious claims. Because its brand appeal is so well established, Apple can go with a very simple, confident message that speaks volumes about the desirability of the product while apparently saying very little.

Information design #1: This page looks quite scannable at first, but the heading is very generic and the copy is not very inspiring: “Our people are the primary reason for our success” feels rather formulaic. The bullets on the right are rather forbidding and not very well explained.

Information design #2: Here, on the other hand, a genuinely scannable approach to the structure of the content has led to a creative approach that goes way beyond the usual corporate clichés of the “Work for us” page. The tone is light, contemporary and originally phrased: “We love our employees, and we want them to know it”. And though the headline is searchable, scannable and accessible, the copy is far from prosaic boilerplate.

All 3 elements: Here is a fantastic example of all 3 elements working together very well. The homepage of sofa.com fills the critical top-left hand corner of the page not with a big glossy pic of a sofa (as many retailers still persist in doing), but with some well-worked copy that combines key USPs and service messages with engagingly-phrased softer claims (“our sofas are really very comfy”). The service statements are qualified in a naturally transparent way that inspires trust (“delivery is usually FREE”) and even basic sales claims have a touch of voice (“sofa.com is miles cheaper than the high street”). The overall effect is of a friendly, helpful business that genuinely believes in its products. And there is that invaluable “in stock” page – the only place I need to look if time is of the essence.

Free web training for Deafness Research UK

In association with the Media Trust, we invited entries from charities and not-for-profit organisations who felt they could benefit from free access to our expertise. The entries were all well deserving – it was very difficult to pick a winner. But with Deafness Research UK we felt there was an opportunity to make a significant difference. It’s also a charity that’s close to our hearts.

Deafness Research UK is the leading medical research charity dedicated to finding new cures, treatments and technologies for deaf and hearing impaired people. Sarah Gentleman from the charity said:

“Help from Sticky Content will have a massive impact for us. It’ll help us communicate better with our users and to get our messages across more effectively. Staff will feel empowered and more confident to write content for our website and e-newsletters.”

Thank you to everyone that entered for taking the time to tell us about their site and the challenges they face.

Thanks also to Media Trust for offering our runners up, Leap Confronting Conflict and Voluntary Action Islington, who win a free place on a Media Trust course.

Media Trust courses

Deafness Research website

Navigation design and how it affects writing for the web

At the Nielsen Norman workshop at London Usability Week 2010 we discovered that navigation design impacts on information architecture in interesting ways, which in turn affects copy…

1. Banner blindness applies to navigation too – avoid images in nav bars, and make sure linking boxes are mostly text and are similar in design to other nav items. Putting similar products/upsells/accessories on the right makes for instant banner blindness.

2. Make sure your navigation caters for deep linking – one good method is to start by designing the navigation on lower-level pages.

3. Keep your main menu in secure areas (checkout, etc) – don’t remove it (if customers want to leave, removing the nav won’t stop them), but do change the design slightly to reassure customers that it is a different part of the site.

4. Don’t use horizontal drop-downs from your top nav (unless they’re wide “mega-dropdowns”) – they take too much motor skill for almost anyone.

5. To avoid “filler copy”, don’t put children in the sidebar – ie don’t list a page’s subpages in the left-hand navigation. People often miss them and get stuck, and it means you often have nothing worthwhile to put in the page body. The left-hand nav is for the page’s siblings (the pages on the same level in the sitemap).

6. Indicate clearly which section a user is in – rely on size and bold more than colour, as many people are colour blind to some extent.

7. Always provide an alternative to flash navigation – eg if you have a Flash filmstrip of product types, provide normal links as well (a mega-footer is good for this).

Demystifying user testing

Ever wanted to run a user test? Celeste Buckhalter’s Usability Week seminar gave a do-it-yourself view of user testing with some excellent tips. Here are some of our favourite…

1. Any test is better than no test – ideally you’ll have 4-6 carefully selected users (there are companies that find them for you) but in a pinch your neighbour, your mum or some guy off the street can give you an insight.

2. Test many times during the design process. If it’s a brand new site, start by testing paper prototypes.

3. Create tasks for your test subjects covering the main goals of the site – and write the tasks carefully.

Don’t use words that are in your labelling or visible on the page (leading tasks like ‘how would you sign up for our newsletter’ when there’s a glaring link that says ‘Sign up for our newslettr’ is cheating!).
Don’t make up complex scenarios – no “it’s your sister’s birthday next week and…”
Never mention the steps in the process – just the end point.

4. Set everything in advance – what your tasks are, what counts as success, what you’ll measure, when you’re allowed to help the user, what state the computer will be in when the user starts… and so on.

5. Call your user and remind them before the test. You probably paid a lot to find them and they have nothing to lose by not turning up.

6. Help your user relax. It is stressful being the subject of user testing. Explain that you’re not testing them – they’re testing the site. Say how long it will take, who’s who, what will happen, and that they can stop or take a break any time. Offer water.

7. Give the reward as soon your user arrives. This shows them they have nothing to gain by giving the “right” answers during the test, and gives you more natural responses.

8. Ask the user to think aloud. They should tell you what they’re thinking at any point. Ask them to read aloud what they read on screen.

9. Never give information during the session. Don’t make suggestions or respond to comments. If the user asks whether they’re doing ok, reassure them that they’re thinking aloud very well. You can also prompt them with questions like:

How are you feeling now?
What are your first impressions?
What are you thinking right now?
What were you expecting when you did that?

10. When testing kids, test best friends together – it’s called co-discovery, and it helps them relax, focus and keep talking.

11. Be strict with observers. Have only 2 people in the room (others behind 2-way glass if they can be silent). No talking. No laughing. No helping. Just watch.

Need a content mentor? Come see us

The Sticky Content Mentoring Programme is a unique opportunity to get training and support from the industry’s leading digital copywriters, to share your experiences with content peers in other industries, and to have your work reviewed by online copywriting experts. Read more details here.

Interested? Book your place at a free breakfast meeting on 18 August or 9 September. If you can’t make it on either of those dates, just email us with a good time to call or meet.

You go on holiday – we’ll audit your content

Get 10% off your content audit when you book before 31 August

Know your online copy needs improvement, but don’t know where to start? Give us your web content to audit over August so you’ve got a handy To Do list to kickstart your activities after the summer… and get 10% off to boot!

Why audit your content?
Sticky Content’s audit process, developed over 12 years of working with the digital content of global brands, tells you how well your current content is supporting your business objectives, communicating your brand, and serving your users.

A content audit can provide a roadmap for your in-house editorial team, support a business case, or simply identify priorities for improvement at the beginning of a larger project.

Who have we audited?
Our audit clients include Amnesty International, Big Lottery Fund, caterer.com, Engage Mutual, Hamleys, John Lewis, London Business School, Post Office, Sony Europe and UEFA.

“Sticky Content’s audit of our content was very valuable in making sure that our sites are helping us meet our commercial objectives and that we’re really delivering the sort of experience our users require.”
Bryn Mitchell, Senior Digital Channels manager, Post Office

What do we audit?
The audit can cover any combination of the following: web content, content organisation, user journeys, email content, offline marketing materials, customer service scripts, populated wireframes.

What do you get?
At the end of the process you’ll get an intelligent, comprehensive assessment of your content against web-writing best practice, complete with a list of practical recommendations. Many of these will be quick wins you can sort at once, bringing about a rapid, economical improvement in your users’ experience. Along with the full report, we can also present our findings to your stakeholders in person.

Find out more
Call us on 0207 704 3232 or email us

New digital copywriting dates and courses

Boost your digital copywriting skills on a Sticky Content open course — check out our latest dates and some new subjects too…

Writing for the web (half day) – 24 Aug, 7 Sep, 29 Sep, 30 Sep, 27 Oct, 16 Nov, 15 Dec
Key principles and practical techniques that make for great digital copy

Writing for SEO: a practical introduction (half day) – 27 Oct
How to write search copy that helps search engines read and rank your site

Improve your marketing emails (half day) – 16 Nov
How copy can encourage your contacts and customers to open, read and act on your email

New for autumn 2010…

E-commerce and customer care copy (half day) – 29 Sep, 15 Dec
Learn different ways to make your customer care copy work for you online

Find your brand tone of voice online (half day) – 7 Sep, 30 Sep
Learn all about developing your brand organisation’s tone of voice online

Find out more about our courses

Free web-writing help for charities: deadline extended

Does your organisation need help with its website? You now have until the newly extended deadline of August 15 2010 to enter Media Trust’s summer competition to win free help from us - the experts in online copywriting.

More information about the competition
Enter the competition

Mixed messages make interfaces unintuitive

If you live or work in London, you’ll be familiar with the routine of topping up your Oyster travel card using Transport for London’s machines. Once you’ve paid for your top-up, this message appears on the screen: “Please wait…your Oyster card has been updated”.

The amazing thing about this message is its power to confuse even when you’ve seen it hundreds of times before. Because the words appear on the same screen at the same time, there are always a few seconds (more, if you’re an Oyster newbie) when you hesitate: has your card has been updated or should you wait? Meanwhile an impatient queue is forming behind you. Maybe one day a bright spark from TfL will come up with a message that actually says what it means – that you’ve topped up your Oyster card and can now get out of the way and let everyone else have a turn.

The problem with the Oyster message is that it pulls the reader in two directions – much as websites do if they put links in the middle of sentences. What is the user supposed to do if they come across a link that interrupts their reading? Read on, or follow the link? If they follow the link will they come back? And if they hesitate too long, will they give up altogether?

This isn’t a situation you want to put your readers in, so do them a favour – put your links at the end of sentences. Then they can finish what they’re reading and follow the link at their leisure. Like us Oyster card users, they’ll be grateful to you for making their journey a little smoother.

Advanced web-writing tips

Courtesy of Hoa Loranger, speaking at Nielsen/Norman Group’s Usability Week:

1. If you have sections designed for a specific group of people, write ‘For’ in front of that section. Eg don’t write:

Flu information centre

General public

Journalists

Healthcare professionals

Write instead:

Flu information centre

For the general public

For journalists

For healthcare professionals

2. Sometimes, more – not less – is more. People don’t mind scrolling that are 2/3 full screens long if they are confident, from the information they’ve seen, what they want is there. Scrolling is easier for people than clicking

3. ‘Back to top’ links are overused – people know they just have to scroll to get back to the top.

4. People don’t change the zoom level when reading a PDF. They will just struggle to read the PDF at whatever level of magnification it opens at. A good reason to convert important information on PDFs into web pages

5. Always stick to convention when labelling as people are used to scanning for familiar terms. About us pages should always be About us or About <company name>. Not Our company or Team Acme Solutions or Meet the Guys!. And always write the official company name on the About us page – this is where journalists always look for (and often struggle to find) it.

6. Writing for younger audiences means writing for the web techniques are even more important. Young people often have laptops not desktops, which often means no mouse or printer, poor internet connections, poor sound, a smaller screen and sitting less comfortably when accessing content.

Make your email content usable

We’re still digesting all the valuable learning we gained from Nielsen/Norman Group’s Usability Week. It was also reassuring to learn that the experts at Nielsen/Norman Group also confirmed many of the practices we already adopt as standard.

Here’s a useful summary of ways to make sure your email content is usable:

1. Subject lines should be treated like headlines – clear and upfront, not vague eg Sticky Content June news.

2. Always remember the people who have images turned off! Along with your subject line, people use the “Can’t read this email?” line to decide whether to open the email, so don’t fill yours with duff copy.

3. 20% of people don’t get through the subscription process, so the copy around this needs to be good. Avoid double negatives eg “If you don’t want to get emails from advertisers, don’t tick this box” and clunky phrases like “Denotes mandatory field”. (Also, lots of people failed the subscription process when they had to click on a link in an email to confirm registration – they thought the email was just a “thank you for registering” email so didn’t bother to click the link. If you’re going to use this sort of email, the copy needs to be instructional from the subject line – no “thank you”, “welcome” or “congratulations” until the process is complete!)

4. Always use the phrase “unsubscribe” or similar, not “Manage your preferences” etc.

5. When people are looking for a particular message in their inbox, they look atSender first. When they’re looking for an item of interest, they look atsubject line.

6. Don’t use a real name for the Sender if it’s not anyone well-known (Jakob Nielsen is ok, Claire Bussey is not!). You can use a real name within the copy if it adds something eg animal charity PDSA send some emails from named vets

7. Don’t repeat the Sender name in the subject line: it’s a waste. We should ask clients what Sender name they’re using when we write their subject lines.

8. Don’t force people to click through to landing pages. Give them useful snippets of info in the email with the option to read more – don’t tease the

9. Why scannability matters in email:

the average person spends less than 1.10 minutes reading an email newsletter
only 19% of people read the whole newsletter
most people skip around the content so make it clear where each item begins/ends
users like recognisable patterns/formats

See also my blog about the use of names in generic emails – the gist is that it’s ok to use names if the email is personalised or customised and/or if you have a relationship with the subscriber (eg they’ve bought something).

Free web-writing help for charities

Win free help for your organisation’s website, email newsletters, tone of voice or digital strategy in this summer’s Media Trust competition, in partnership with the content experts here at Sticky Content

Good writing helps your users understand what your site has to offer. It can increase donations, build your brand and ensure the people who need help know how to find it.

This summer, the Media Trust is working with Sticky Content to give charities the chance to win free web-writing consultancy. Runners up will receive a free place on one of the Media Trust’s training workshops.

If you think expert input could make a difference to your digital content – and, above all, the people you exist to help – enter now by making the case for your project

Any charity can apply – just explain what you need and how we at Sticky Content could help you make a difference.

What’s on offer
For your project, you could choose to ask for help with:

Writing and editing…

content for your website
marketing emails and newsletters
words around your online forms

Advice…

finding the key issues with your copy
building a tone of voice for your charity
planning your publishing schedule

Training…

how to write for the web
how to write emails

Are you eligible?
You can apply to win the free project if…

you’re a registered charity
you need help with your website content (not the design or the programming – just the words)
you’ve got a way to measure the results (email opens, newsletter sign-ups, donations etc)

You also need to be happy for Media Trust and Sticky Content to:

use you as a case study
do the work at a convenient time

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Do you need a content mentor?

Get your content critiqued by the experts, receive regular training digital copywriting best practice, network with your peers… it’s the all-new Sticky Content Mentoring Programme

Being the ‘content person’ in an organisation can be a lonely experience. Every day we speak to people who feel their digital copywriting skills are under-developed or undervalued and who come to us for training and advice.

So we’re launching a Mentoring Programme to bring these people together and deliver ongoing training and support in our specialised field. Joining the Sticky Content Mentoring Programme gives you:

training from the industry’s leading digital copywriters
the opportunity to share your experiences with peers in other industries
ongoing support and the chance to have your work constructively critiqued by experts

Why Sticky Content as mentors?
We know that plenty of people offer copywriting training. What makes us special is that our trainers don’t just train in digital copywriting, they’ve been writing digital content every day since 1997. So we know exactly what you’re going through, the battles you have to fight and how to make a business case for investing more time and budget in copy.

What will the Sticky Content Mentoring Programme involve?
The Sticky Content Mentoring Programme runs twice yearly, in October and January, starting October 2010. As part of the programme you’ll come in for a morning each month and get:

training on an aspect of digital copywriting and best practice
the chance to discuss any current copy issues you have in a confidential environment
feedback on your work from copywriting experts

In addition as a Sticky Content mentee you benefit from:

auditing and performance benchmarking for 6 pieces of your own content to help you monitor your improvement
networking opportunities with peers in similar roles in different organisations
discounts on Sticky Content open courses for yourself and other people in your organisation
access to a dedicated online forum for support and mentoring

Want to find out more?

Book your place now at one of our free, informal Mentorship Breakfast Briefings – July 21 or August 18.

Can’t make it on either of those dates? Email us and we’ll arrange a time to suit you.

Get bold text right (and your users will thank you)

Bold text is a fantastic tool for web writers. It lets users scan a page to understand quickly what it's about, and means users don't have to do the thing they hate doing most online - reading. When bold text is done badly it can just frustrate the user and, from a business perspective, lose their interest before you've had a chance to get your message across. Eye-tracking studies have proved scanning for bold text is ingrained into online behaviour. Users know that if your web page is difficult to scan they can find 10 more pages out there that require less brain power to 'read' - and they won't hesitate to go in search of them instead. After the headline and standfirst, users tend to scan for bold when faced with the prospect of reading a long article online, to choose whether or not to spend precious time there. In practice, this means that your reader should be able to scan only the bold text on a page to get a clear idea of what's going on. This means you should choose self-contained, meaningful phrases to emphasise. With this test in mind we came across a particularly bad use of bold text on the BBC, a site that's normally very good at online presentation. In this instance users are unlikely to be any the wiser as to what the article is trying to say when they scan these phrases:

Plastic bags really
Using electric hand
At a mere
New Zealand apples
Watching TV turns
A typical book
Drinking a fine
Getting cremated is
A year off
Keeping your old

What would work better is highlighting each 'environmental nasty', not the first 3 words of each paragraph. The user could then choose whether they're interested in that topic and read on. Even better than that would be to emphasise a short, self-contained phrase that gives the reader a useful bit of information to take away, even if they choose not to read anything else on the page. The first example of bold in this article is the closest this web page gets to getting it right, but it should have stopped at 'Plastic bags'. The second point should at least have 'electric hand driers' highlighted. Personally, I'd bold 'electric hand driers beat reusable towels'. This line stands alone, tells the user something useful and they don't need to read the rest of the paragraph to understand it - but they can choose to if they want to know more. I'd reword the third paragraph slightly and highlight 'milk doubles the footprint of a cup of tea'. Again, this phrase can stand alone and the reader doesn't have to read the rest of the paragraph to feel like they've learnt something. Incidentally, the headline fails the online user too. 'A bad reputation'tells the reader nothing about the article that follows, meaning the user is forced to read further to gain an understanding of the article - or they might just give up and search elsewhere for the information they're looking for, of course. Have you seen any really good or bad examples of bold online? Share them with us.

Jargon: is it always bad?

Plain English is one of the foundations of good web writing, and that means death to jargon. Of course, we’ve all heard the stories about cleanliness engineers, holistic governance and -- my personal favourite -- predictors of beaconicity (no, I don’t know what it means either). The current crop of Hiscox ads (“It’s a spade, not an earth relocating implement”) make great play of the company’s ability to tell it like it is. In our experience, apart from product managers, no one ever complains that things are being made too simple. However, you could argue that jargon has a function other than to obscure the facts or make people feel that what they do is very important. Jargon makes people feel they belong. When they discover a choice phrase like “sum insured” they think they’re in the right place. But while they may believe the presence of jargon means the writer has an in-depth understanding of their industry, the opposite is likely to be true. It’s easy to hide behind jargon when you haven’t a clue what you’re talking about. However, sometimes there is a difference between jargon and specialised language – words for things that are only used in a very specific context. Where would we be without our H1s, standfirsts, CTAs, break-out quotes and anchor text, for example? Is our jargon OK while no-one else’s is? Answers in the designated online communications area below, please.

Learn the language of subject lines

Send in your A/B test results for a free research report We all want the formula for a perfect subject line - and after a new research study it might just be available. To find the language rules that help subject lines succeed, you need a huge sample. But most organisations can't test more than a handful of subject lines at a time. This is where email agency Alchemy Worx comes in. Instead of split-testing subject lines for a single email or organisation, they plan to analyse their back catalogue of thousands of A/B tests, all at once - plus test results contributed by other agencies and organisations (and perhaps some from you...). The largest collaborative subject line study ever run The study, to be produced in association with Sticky Content, will analyse the language, construction and grammar of thousands of A/B tested subject lines to come up with the winning formula for wording a successful subject line. We'll be hoping to answer such questions as:

Which work better in subject lines - questions or instructions?
What are the most effective words to use in subject lines - and what are the words to avoid?
Does mentioning your brand name in a subject line really make a difference?
Does personalisation in a subject line improve performance?

It will involve thousands of pairs of subject lines from all industries, and identify universal trends. The results will be published in a report giving the techniques that make subject lines successful. How to get involved Have you run A/B subject line tests in the last 18 months? You can get a free advance copy of the report by contributing your data to the Alchemy Worx study. Send in your data by 9 July 2010. Get involved in the subject line study

FAQs: it Helps if you get to the point

Thanks to a series of customer service content projects we've been doing, we've been learning lots about how best to write FAQs and Help content. One issue that crops up time and again is how long-winded FAQs often are. If an FAQ is a closed question -- ie if it requires a yes or no answer, like "Can I return a CD if I've broken the seal on the wrapping?" -- the most useful, usable thing you can do is answer the question directly at the very start of the answer: eg "Sorry - no. Our policy is to..." or "Yes, so long as you still have the receipt" or even "That depends on the condition of the product inside." The rest of the answer will go on to elaborate on this answer, but for many this instant summary will just be enough. If that sounds obvious, you'd be surprised how many FAQs go round the houses in their answer before actually getting to the "yes", "no" or "maybe". (Note we're not saying that you should over-simplify your answers, only that you should give a clear idea at the outset of the FAQ what the answer actually is.) It's as if the author is worried that the user won't be able to cope with the truth, so they've got to sit them down and make them a cup of tea first. Here's an example of the sort of thing we mean:

I have opened my CD. Can I still return it? The company’s sales policies state that items are only resaleable when they are enclosed in the original packaging. The removal of a CD’s plastic wrapping is considered as breaking the packaging, rendering the CD unresaleable. Because of this, the company is unable to accept returned CDs where the packaging has been broken. The one exception to this is if the CD was faulty, and returned faulty CDs can still be accepted even where the packaging has been broken. Returned CDs should be sent to the usual returns address.

What's the best word to get people to click to act?

When we want people to click on a button and carry out an action, there are a number of widely used options for the word or words you put on that button. Off the top of my head, there's [Go], [Submit], [OK], [Continue], [Confirm], [Proceed], [Select]. But which of these is the most usable, effective option? [Submit] is problematic for me because it's not plain English and it implies that you are sending something to someone (such as an error report), when in fact you are only sending an instruction to the website. [Continue] and [Proceed] could be confusing if you're not in the middle of a multi-step process. [Select] could similarly be ambiguous if it leads me to think I must choose between options I can't see. So what works best? I put this question to Jakob Nielsen at London Usability Week 2010. His answer is that [OK] is a good fallback, but can also be problematic too: what actually are you saying OK to? In his view, a button name will be as specific a label as possible of the task at hand. He gave [Add to cart] as a perfect example of this, while also warning that brevity is crucial. So we can see that [Download], [Apply now] and [Buy now] might be usefully descriptive, while [Upload your details to the website] might raise other issues...

Eyetracking studies: scan-reading made obvious

Apart from all the good stuff on web writing in Hoa Loranger's session at Nielsen/Norman Group's Usability Week, it was good to be reminded of just how clear and dominant users' scan-reading behaviour is by seeing a few videos of eyetracking sessions. Again and again we saw readers visit a page and read headings and links, headings and links – sometimes giving a page 2 or 3 scans and looking at nothing but these navigational elements before focusing on a particular area and choosing to read the text. We've been teaching people about scan-reading for years, but it can be easy to assume that it's a question of emphasis – that people focus slightly more on headings than they do in print, or that links are useful aids for page navigation. In fact, scan-reading is the only game in town. If you still think meaningful headings and link text, short paragraphs and clear calls to action are optional extras – or you need to convince someone who does – you could do worse than spend some time with the clips below... John Lewis clothing product pages, from Simple Usability: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oqx_Kr3ovZA&feature=related Search results page, from Google: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w29DrEEsqT4&feature=player_embedded Apple product demo pages, from Visiontrack Research:

News pages, from the Poynter Institute Read more about eyetracking in Nielsen Norman Group's book on the subject, Eyetracking Web Usability.

Give snippets some space, OK?

Shorter descriptions = more prominent snippets = better search results?

It's only a theory, but we'd thought we'd share it.

We know that Google often picks up your description to use as the snippet on a related search results page. There's a maximum limit for snippets - 156 characters, but one school of thought suggests your snippets should be markedly shorter than that.

The idea is that a shorter snippet will have more white space around it and stand out from all the other densely packed snippet texts on the same page.

Top 10 tips RIP?

In the world of print, certain numbers have magical powers. We'd read an article that promises "101 great summer fashion ideas" but be less enchanted by a piece headed "17 ways to declutter your life". We'd go for "Top 10 ways to be a great lover" but perhaps be less swayed by "3 ways to add more oomph to your love life". Magazines and newspapers have trained us to like things that come in numbers like 7, 10, 12, 25, 100, and to turn our noses up at things that come in, say, 8s, 13s, 27s or 122s. Sometimes, however, as any honest magazine journalist would admit, the search for a nice number can get in the way of the value of the content. We've all had that feeling of looking at a Top 10 feature and realising that the writer has really scraped the barrel to hit the target. Tip 3 is suspiciously similar to tip 9, for instance, tips 5 and 6 are really 1 tip split in two, and on closer inspection tip 7 is not really a tip at all. Online, where we don't have double-page spreads to fill, things ought to be only to be as long as they need to be. Which is why there's now a school of thought that says top tips articles should never come in 10s but in all those random numbers your magazine editor would despise. In short, the fact that you have just 8 top tips about how to attract wildlife into your garden, or precisely 13 steps to a successful social media strategy, is itself a badge of the authentic value of your content. Look, mum: no artificial rounding up.

How to work a tone of voice online

A distinctive tone of voice can be difficult to achieve but when it's done right it can literally win or lose you customers.

I noticed a great example of a unique, friendly tone of voice when I signed up to alerts from DailyCandy the other day.

Being up front about sending sponsor emails with the cheeky line 'Think you're the only one with bills to pay?' is very clever and raises a smile from the reader. Touches like 'You're one of us now' and 'Welcome aboard' give the impression you're part of an exclusive club, while describing the practice of selling on email addresses as 'lame' shows DailyCandy is in touch with the way its target audience speaks.

If you'd like to know more about getting your brand's tone of voice right, make sure you catch our ceo Catherine Toole's tutorial on Brand Tone of Voice Online at The Victoria Park Plaza, London on 18 May for Usability Week

Catherine will also lead a tutorial on Customer Care Content as User Experience on 17 May.

Writing for mobile: top 10 tips

Writing mobile content is like writing for the web, only harder. Check out our checklist for creating effective content for reading on the move. By Martin Wake and Karyn Reidy 1. Focus on what users actually need on the move It’s a mistake to think your mobile site should simply be a condensed version of your website. Instead, work out what people on the move will come to your mobile site for and focus on creating content around those key tasks and functions. Many pages on your standard site may never make it to the mobile one. Task-oriented users need their needs met quickly. People visiting a train operator’s mobile website will have little time for the “About us” pages when they want to know if their train’s running late, for instance. Once you’ve worked out your users’ needs, find ways to make the user experience clearer and faster. If your site has videos, for example, include the length of each one so people can decide if they have enough time to watch one. 2. Cut ruthlessly – but stay instantly understandable There’s minimal room for clever puns and wordplay on the web, but when it comes to mobile sites there’s none at all – unless you can be both funny and instantly understandable in the tiny space available for links and headings. 3. Keep home pages for navigation A welcome message on a standard website is a waste of precious space – on a mobile website it’s sacrilege. People have come to your site for a reason and would rather have that need met instantly than spend 5 minutes reading about how happy you are to have got them there. 4. Leave space between links The increasing popularity of touchscreen phones means it’s vital users can tap on a link and accurately select the link they’re aiming for. So make sure the designers don’t edit out your white space… 5. Don’t forget seo Research by Nielsen Mobile in 2008 showed that 40% of all mobile users came to a site through a search engine. So even though there’s less space, don’t overlook the keywords. 6. Make a user’s journey through your mobile site easy If it’s difficult to navigate on your mobile site, people will get annoyed and leave. To make a user’s journey as smooth as possible:

include navigation menus at both top and bottom of each page so people don’t have to scroll back up to the top every time they want a different page
put lists in a logical order for speed
link more than you would on your normal site – put short logical links at the end of every section to relevant content so users don’t have to spend time entering text into search boxes

7. Keep everything self-contained People won’t hunt around or go backwards and forwards on a mobile site so put everything exactly where they need it. Make sure sentences, links, headings and form fields make sense by themselves, as self-contained units of information. 8. Don’t rely on design The variation in the way sites will display on different types of mobile phone is huge – so avoid directing visitors to look “below”, “above”, “to the left” or “to the right”: what you think is there on your iPhone might not be what the user is seeing on their 5-year-old brick. 9. Put a link to your full site on every page Catering for the small percentage of people whose needs aren’t met by your mobile site is simply good customer service. It means people with more advanced phones can use the full web too if they want to. 10. Keep forms short Minimise the time it takes visitors to do tasks on your mobile site with short forms that only include the essential data needed to complete a task. Don’t be tempted to add extra fields to capture data – it’ll lead to a lengthy, irritating user experience that visitors just aren’t willing to take part in on the move.

Book your Sticky Content copy audit at Internet World, 27-29 April

We'll be running a copy clinic at our stand at Internet World from 27-29 April – we hope you’ll be able to join us there. Would you like us to look at a particular copy issue before the event? Email linda@stickycontent.co.uk to make an appointment for a mini audit at the show. We’ll also be running a drop-in clinic, so why not pop by for an instant diagnosis? You’ll find us on stand E2110. Speaking sessions: customer care and brand tone of voice online Our ceo Catherine Toole will also be speaking twice during the show - don't miss her entertaining and informative sessions. You can catch her in the e-commerce theatre on Wednesday 28th April at 10.45, where she'll be guiding you through Customer Care Online. She's also speaking in the social networking, usability, design and build theatre on Thursday 29th April at 1.50, discussing the importance of B rand Tone of Voice Online. Don't forget you can register for free for Internet World - we'd love to see you there. Whatever your plans for the show, make sure you stop at the Sticky Content stand and see the best therapists in the business.

Get your rewrite right: 3 rules for website owners

Rewriting your website? Most companies will make a pig's ear of it, says Catherine Toole. Get it right by following 3 simple rules. How lovely to start 2010 with a call to “rewrite your site” at number 1 in the top 5 things you need to do online in 2010 And what a shame most companies will mess that job up quite atrociously. In his post, Kevin Gibbons bemoans “useless, static pages written without any understanding of keywords, often filled with poor spelling and grammar” – and of course he’s right. Those things are inexcusable. But to me, the most inexcusable error of all is to fill your site with content that's just an insulting and irrelevant waste of visitors’ time because there are so many stakeholders in your web content project that you can’t get agreement on meaningful, scannable, customer-facing copy. To see page after page of succinct, web-friendly, findable copy with clear, bite-sized messaging get diluted with each round of “feedback”. First there’s the insertion of inward-facing political messages from board-level management (“In the current economic climate it is more important than ever to offer customers a blah…”). Next comes the space-wasting, chest-beating hyperbole from Marketing (“We are the leading global solutions provider to the digital imaging market with solutions that are best of breed and bleeding edge...”) Then the paranoid control-freakery of product managers (“You must put in 5 pages on how our patented anti-freezing zip system actually works on this fleece jacket!”) And finally, there’s the removal of plain language by compliance or anyone especially chicken (“Can you add a triple asterisk under ‘Free Returns’ and add that this only applies if you haven’t pierced the cellophane wrapper, live in Wales and are standing on one leg?”). With all this destructive “feedback”, is it any wonder the end result of that site “refresh” often turns out to be what my old French teacher used to call my critical appreciation of Sartre: “une oreille de cochon”. Joking aside, I do empathise with the many talented web editors out there who are fighting the good fight for better web content against a barrage of internal interference. So if you are planning to start 2010 with a site rewrite, here are 3 tips from my past 10 years running a digital copywriting agency: 1. Every page should have a point I used to work at ad agency BBH, and one of the most valuable lessons I learned was that each creative brief begins with a statement of what the work should make people “think, feel or do”. Imagine how much better your website would be if you were forced to answer that question for every page planned (and – dare I suggest – for the site overall). Equally the question: “What do customers want from our website?” is asked far too rarely and can normally be answered pretty accurately by call centre staff, who I always try to get to early on in the content planning. 2. Start with a clean sheet Too many site rewrites work on improving existing content – the applying of lipstick to the proverbial pig. Instead, start with your ideal web content plan and then see what you have that can be reused, edited or cut to fit. Almost certainly your existing web content will have grown haphazardly; the best thing you can do to improve it is to lose a load of pages. Or if that sets off your seo alarm, then push those pages further down and add a succinct, usable landing, summary or product page that aids navigation. 3. Get buy-in from stakeholders at the outset, and limit the scope of their feedback Managing stakeholder feedback is essential if you’re to avoid that sinking content-by-committee feeling on your site. Begin by identifying relevant stakeholders and letting them know the scope and purpose of the refresh project. Ideally, provide them with some examples of how content is likely to be refined. Give them a clear sense of what you expect from them, and within what timeframe. Compliance people don’t need to feed back on grammar or tone of voice, just as the brand team don’t need to comment on legal issues. Sometimes stakeholders provide feedback because they feel obliged to say something: give a cut-off point after which time you’ll assume there are no comments if you haven’t heard anything – and make it clear that it’s OK to have no comments to make…

"Copy goes here": why content is not just another design element

Too many beautiful websites are let down by rushed, ill-considered copy. Why? Imagine you've decided to publish a book, and given yourself a six-month schedule. How's this for a plan? Months 1-3: Design. Experiment with several different cover designs, page layouts and typefaces in careful consultation with potential readers. Expect this to go through several rounds of revisions, making sure you get a look and feel you're happy with. Use some existing random text for these tests. Month 4: Decide how many words the book will contain. Month 5: Decide what the book will be about. Month 6: Write the book. It's a strange approach, isn't it? But websites are developed this way all the time, with the actual content regarded as a last-minute detail to be filled in at the end rather than as the core of the project. To me, it's always a warning sign when the copy is referred to in project meetings as "text" -- as though the important thing were what it looked like, rather than what it said. Copy is not just another design element. It's often said that good design is unobtrusive. Rather than drawing attention to itself, it should serve the content of the site, making it easy to use and navigate. For most sites, that content is still in the form of written words. The first goal of the design should not be to look nice, but to help users read the content; design for design's sake is a mistake. Of course, there are shades of grey: reversing the process above and leaving all the design work to the last minute would be a mistake, too, but that is a much less common problem -- in fact I'm not sure I've ever encountered it. That's why we always encourage our clients to think about copy content as early as possible in a web development project: it's our experience that when form (design) follows function (content) you have a better result.

Expert advice on your customer care content

Understanding more about how customers experience your copy content can have an immediate and cost-effective impact on your business. Sticky Content's CEO Catherine Toole will be speaking about customer care content and brand tone of voice at Nielsen/Norman Group's Usability Week conference in London in May, following successful sessions at the Berlin and Las Vegas events last year.

Monday 17 May: Customer Care Content as User Experience -- writing cost-effective customer service emails, help text, forms, and consumer forums
Tuesday 18 May: Brand Tone of Voice Online -- use your web writing style to build customer loyalty and increase sales

To book, and for more details, see the Usability Week 2010 website.

What happens in Vegas: Nielsen Usability Week (day two)

It's 7.30am on day two of Nielsen's Usability Week in Caesar's Palace Las Vegas and let's just say I'm pleased they're pumping pure oxygen into the casinos... It took several Sticky Content editors several months to pull together and then Americanise the highly-practical workshop on 'Creating and delivering consistent brand tone of voice online' that I'm about to present. Unfortunately we did not anticipate my spaghetti jet-lag brain. Help comes in the form of Diane who it turns out is not just there to serve the breakfast but is also 'in the business of marketing entertainment, honey'. It turns out that later today Diane has to submit a review to a entertainment website of a new Vegas show. As far as I understand it, 'Peep Show' is a musical spectacular where women flash their boobs while gyrating to nursery rhymes. Classy. What's worrying Diane is that 'I ain't no writer honey'. I reassure her that this is true of most people charged with publishing time-sensitive product reviews to websites. But what Diane does have in spades is a unique tone of voice. We decide that her best bet is to record herself talking about the show (about which she is hilarious, articulate and passionately opinionated) and then get cousin Deon to ask his son to type it up for her. Half an hour later, I'm advising web marketing professionals from American colleges, banks, software houses and retailers to do more or less the same thing (without the help of Deon). Because the first step toward rolling out a consistent brand tone of voice online is to establish how that brand should 'sound'. And to know how your brand should sound, you first have to establish its personality, tonal values and the kinds of things it would and wouldn't say. As Diane advised me shortly before I began: 'Just be yourself honey, coz nobody wants to sit through a load of BS'. If only all British insurance websites took the same approach. Catherine will be leading these sessions again at Nielsen Norman Group's Usability Week in Berlin on 19 and 20 November.

What happens in Vegas: Nielsen Usability Week (day one)

Nerves kick in as I weave my way past rows of fat people munching on fried chicken and simultaneously shoving coins into slot machines. I’m looking for Caesar’s Palace Conference Center but all I can see is a giant bust of Nero and rows of busy blackjack tables. It’s 8am. At 9am, having eaten my own way through a Vegas breakfast buffet the length of a tube carriage, I’m ready to present six hours of brand new material on how to write cost-effective customer care copy at Jakob Nielsen’s Usability Week. This is a credit-crunch friendly course, expounding the virtues of investing in those often overlooked bits of text on websites and email that can actually show enormous ROI if given a bit of attention. So we’re talking transactional and order confirmation emails, sign-up pages, reassurance text around forms, security messages and FAQs. While my course summary on the NN/g website clearly states that this is a highly practical session, that hasn’t stopped a Russian and two Swedes signing up for the day-long copy workshop. The Swedes, of course, turn out to have a better grasp of English than most Brits, ask brilliant questions and transform the day with their enthusiasm for what better web text might do for their scheduling software sales. The Russian mostly spends the day typing a CMS spec for his colleagues back in Moscow. Also in the class is a Kiwi, who sells iPhone apps and has a fantastic grasp of how to write web-friendly, benefit-driven copy. The only trouble is his partner - who writes a lot of the text on their website and iTunes page -isn’t quite up to speed yet... Most interesting debate of the day is where we work out how to give customers bad news via email. For example a scenario where customer service can only be delivered by email and not by phone. We agree that the best way to manage expectations is to be upfront and apologetic and to focus on the inherent benefits of what you can deliver. Which might go something like this:

We understand you’d prefer to speak to us on the phone and we’re sorry we can’t offer you this service yet...However we’re really good at fixing things via email and if you give that a try, we promise we’ll work with you until the problem is solved. You can email us round the clock and you’ll get a personal reply within 2 hours.

I also furthered my one-woman mission to eradicate the phrase ‘denotes mandatory field’ from websites around the globe. Most satisfactorily, last time I had this rant (at AdTech) the editor of a travel website emailed me afterwards to confirm that removing this from a sign-up form had resulted in an uplift in sales. As the Americans would say, who knew? Actually, I did. And on that smug note, I weave back through the casino, resisting the lure of the roulette table to go and mug up on tomorrow’s 'Building a Brand Tone of Voice Online' session and have an early night. How pathetically un-Vegas... Catherine will be leading these sessions again at Nielsen Norman Group's Usability Week in Berlin on 19 and 20 November.

What word would you ban from the web?

Vote for the word or phrase you'd most like to see removed from the web - best suggestions will feature at ad:tech 2009

Following our recent post on 11 words to ban from your website, we're going to be speaking on the subject at ad:tech 2009

By looking at some glaring examples of how NOT to do it, md Catherine Toole will take a practical look at how great digital copywriting can help you boost revenue, optimise for natural search, improve service levels and positively differentiate your brand.

Send us your ideas for words to ban and why by commenting on this post or emailing dan@stickycontent.co.uk - best suggestions will feature in Catherine's talk.

Sticky md Catherine Toole will be speaking as part of the IDM Academy on September 22, at 15.10

Top tone 1: Codegent

First in an occasional series highlighting organiastions that are great at using tone of voice to communicate themselves online Who: Codegent is a London-based digital agency that "fuses creative ideas with solid technology to produce outstanding results". Why we like: Everywhere you look on this simple, logical site, the language conveys the impression of an agency that is creative and innovative, but with a clear understanding of the commercial objectives businesses bring to digital. The language gives a clear sense of a coherent vision, shared purpose and strong, confident opinions based on hard-earned experience. Samples: Rather than the usual dull list of services and functions, the site divides its people into Digital shrinks (strategic planning), Creative architects (design & build) and Mad scientists (innovative applications / R&D). (For seo and scan readers, these are given instant glosses too.)

One model for running an agency goes like this: take a brief, don't challenge it, charge as much as you can, turn it round as quickly as possible, don't rock the boat, invoice, get paid, move on. We don't think that's what clients want. They want us to be on their side, but also to tell them when we disagree. We don't pretend to know more about our clients' businesses than they do, but we do know an awful lot about digital.

Writing a business blog

So you’ve heard how a business blog can help generate new business, develop your profile and improve your Google rating, but you don’t have a clue how you’re meant to start one. Recently, I attended a Blogging for Business course, run by Base Creative. It taught me 5 things that can help get your company blog seen by the people you want to read it:

Write in the first person – it’s more conversational and helps develop a relationship between the reader and author.
Show readers what you know – write about what you specialise in and give away a bit of valuable information for free. Don’t worry about losing business this way. People don’t have time to do what you can as well as you do it. Instead it will confirm to readers of your company blog that you’re knowledgeable and capable about what you do.
Update regularly – give readers a reason to come back by having regular instalments. Even if you only have 10 minutes to write your business blog, 2 paragraphs can be just as powerful as an essay-length article.
Link to other bloggers – blogs won’t survive in a vacuum. As digital marketer Econsultancy says, links help get your Google rating up. Scour the internet and look for similar posts and comments – this leaves a trail back to you and, hopefully, others will repay the favour and link back when they can.
Market your blog – the ultimate goal of business blogging is to draw traffic, or potential clients, to your blog – so indulge in a spot of blog marketing. Put the URL at the foot of your emails or on business cards. Also, make sure other bloggers can find you by submitting your blog to Technorati, where a host of fellow bloggers searching for information are looking for you.

From my experience of writing for the web, I’d add 3 more points to this checklist:

always remember the business result you want to achieve – by defining your objective you may decide you don't actually need a business blog. Once you know why you’re writing your blog, you can tailor your articles to meet your goals
choose your audience – are you writing for your peers, your customers or your friends? All are valid, but you need to decide
remember you are still writing for the web – big chunks of text and single-word links are no easier to read on a blog than they are on a normal page

Contact Sticky Content to see how we can help with your business blog, website or email marketing copy.

11 words to ban from your website

A short list of words and phrases that should never darken your online doors again... 1. Welcome On a homepage, a Welcome message contains no information and is a massive waste of very valuable screen space. The way to welcome your visitors online is to provide information that shows them exactly what you're about and how you can help them. 2. Please and thank you These too are pointless pleasantries on a website. Crisp clear instructions that tell user where to go on your site and what they'll find when they get there are the real courtesy online. 3. Click here Wrong from every point of view. Bad accessibility because meaningless to people using screen readers. Hopeless for scan readers who may just be looking at signposting copy such as heads and links. And a wasted seo opportunity - google looks hard at anchor texts, and this one contains no keywords. 4. Retrieve a quote No one uses this sort of language in the real world. What's wrong with something plain like Return to your quote? 5. Mandatory fields Robotic data-capture speak. In any other context these would be boxes. And we'd just say you must fill them in. 6. Check this box In British English at least, people tick boxes or put crosses in them. 7. Library / Resources This tends to refer to the area of the site that should be really called: "dumping ground for pdfs and other bumpf we couldn't think where else to put but were told had to go up somewhere". 8. Other... When used in headings and tabs, as in "Other news", "Our other products" etc. Other to what? These labels are unscannable because the information they convey is not self-contained - they rely on the user looking at something else to make complete sense of them. Which doesn't work well online, where you cannot fully control the context in which people see your content or even the way it's presented. 9. Unique Meaningless marketing hype. What sells online is real, specific information. Telling me your product or service is unique tells me nothing. 10. Features Some websites still arrange their content into editorial buckets like "features", "news", "events". Fine for organising your content internally but don't let these labels make it on to the site, where they'll mean nothing to your readers. 11. Solutions An SEO specialist recently told me that if he could ban one word from websites, this would be it. Everything is described as a solution nowadays, from sandwich bars to industrial cranes: Private Eye even has a column where people send in their favourite dire examples. But only businesses call their products and services "solutions" - their customers never do, which is bad news from both an SEO and plain language/usability point of view.

From fields in email: why it pays to be transparent

The From element of an email is vital to get your message noticed, opened and - if you're lucky - acted on. But it has another valuable function too - as an instant marker for people looking to retrieve an email some time after they've received it.

A glance at the From field of an email from a trusted brand may be all the incentive I need to actually read that message. But what if I open that email, like what I see, but have no time to take further action? That email from your company lies in my inbox, ready to be reactivated at any moment by a chance reminder or as an item to be actioned on a to-do list. By which time, many more messages will have piled into my inbox, so in order to find it again that particular one needs to be labelled intuitively.

This is where the From-name field in your ESP comes in. People search through From items alphabetically, so make sure yours is labelled as obviously as possible. This is not, contrary to what many big brands think, something like:

admin@widgets4you.co.uk

customerservice@widgets4you.co.uk

mywidgets@widgets4you.co.uk

sales@widgets4you.co.uk

These departments may be very important to the internal organisation of your company but they are likely to mean nothing to me.

Equally, you may be a firm believer in the personal touch, but if I don't have any real relationships with individuals in your company I'm unlikely to remember to look out for any address like Sally-Jane@ widgets4you.co.uk

If I remember you at all - yours is not the only marketing email I receive every week, funnily enough - I'm going to be looking for your company name, under W.

How to do it right

Check out Econsultancy’s From names in its emails: I’m going through my email by sender, deleting big blocks at once to save space, and I can immediately see, even with the groups collapsed, that I can delete those from Econsultancy but should probably keep those from Econsultancy [Admin] and Econsultancy [Membership] for reference. Clever!

Learn more about writing for email on our Improve your Marketing Emails course

Use example copy to support your tone of voice

Choosing the right customer scenarios can help readers understand your product's benefits Establishing and using the right tone of voice for online copy is important in making it effective, and particularly in making it cohere with the rest of your marketing. An organisation's tone of voice doesn't have to be showy or attention-seeking, but your tone should be consistent. Online, your tone of voice is sometimes your only opportunity to set yourself apart: on a page of search results, for example, or in an RSS feed. When we talk to clients about tone of voice we often focus on language and style - how we want to sound to a reader, and practical choices in the copy that help us achieve it. But if they're carefully chosen, benefit-led examples can support the brand too. The real-world illustration of how a product or service helps customers is a tool we come back to again and again. It's a classic way of illustrating the benefits rather than the features of what you're writing about: describe a plausible situation in which the product would help. Choosing the right benefit makes an immediate connection with your reader. Let's say you're writing about a cycle computer that can use GPS to plan a route. Here are 2 ways to illustrate its features with an example:

'Find the best route to work - you can even choose to avoid major roads (and hills...)'
'Track your development through the season - plan and record training distances, times and climbing stats.'

These two examples describe the same feature, but choose different benefits to appeal to different types of customer. You can choose to use the benefit that best matches your target audience, or - with a product that appeals to several audiences - use both examples to illustrate your product's flexibility. This is the bread and butter of marketing copywriting, but there's a more subtle way in which examples can help support your tone of voice. Choose your example copy carefully Paying attention to the content you use in illustrations and examples can give a little extra depth and cohesion to your branding. Imagine you're writing about a piece of software that lets people create documents. When you illustrate this with an example, what kind of document will you show being created? You might choose:

an academic essay
a letter to a friend
a quarterly financial report
a blog post

Each of these gives a slightly different spin to how readers will imagine the product being used, and affects the ease with which they can imagine themselves using it. Have a look at Apple's Features page for the Safari browser (it's a long page, but you don't have to read it all). There are screenshots throughout the page illustrating various features: but which web pages have they chosen to use in the illustrations?

a story about the environment and green energy
a New York Times feature on Obama's inauguration
an article from Rolling Stone magazine

These all feel 'Apple-y'. They're the kind of thing an 'Apple person' might read. Further down the page, there's a screenshot illustrating Safari's 'top sites' feature: we can see that the example user's top sites also include Facebook, Spin (a music magazine) and bikemag.com (a mountain bike magazine). Let's face it, this person probably owns a Mac. Compare a similar screenshot for Google's browser, Chrome: it has a similar 'top sites' feature, but in this case all but one are Google-owned sites. Is that realistic, or just a bit unimaginative? For more about web writing technique, check out our web writing training courses.

When good SEO makes bad sites

Search engines have tried to solve the problem of information overload, only for it to reappear at the next step in the user's journey. When you use a search engine, what are you hoping to find? A page that uses the keywords you've entered, or a page that answers your question and leaves you better equipped to do what you're trying to do?

If you spend a lot of time writing for search it's easy to forget that keywords are just a tool that search engines have developed to connect people with useful content: people aren't interested in keywords, they're interested in useful information, whether or not it uses the exact same phraseology as their search.

The fact is that people put one thing into a search box but might actually want something different: if I search for 'sports holidays in Mexico', a page about 'Cancun diving vacations' might be exactly what I'm looking for, without including a single one of my search terms. It's obvious to us that these two are related but it's very difficult to model computationally. Techniques such as latent semantic indexing attempt to improve the situation, but as yet search engines still aren't very good at telling useful information apart from filler.

SEO gone bad: an example This means that it's easy to produce a high-ranking page that features the keywords I've searched for and is superficially â€œabout' my subject, but that offers little or no valuable information. Here's an example, which appears in the top 10 results of a Google search for Technics digital pianos'.

The headline is promising: 'Choosing a good Technics piano.' It's a reasonable assumption that if I search for 'technics digital pianos' I do want to know more about what makes a good one. Unfortunately that's roughly where the good stuff ends.

There is a listing of model numbers, but no way of telling them apart: we get simply 'Popular Technics digital pianos include...' How do I choose between them? Well, depending on your budget, you can choose one of the above Technics digital pianos' There's no information on which are more expensive or where they fit in my hypothetical budget.

Is there anything else I should know?

You should also read customer reviews. That way you'll know what various owners think of different pianos.'

If you're thinking of buying a digital piano, great sound should be a priority'.

Thanks for that. The problem with this page isn't really search-related. It's that it has little of value to say. The publisher's strayed from their area of expertise, where they genuinely have some insight and can add some value, and written something that could have been put together by almost anyone who understands the words technics digital piano'. It's as if most of the text is only there to link strings of keywords together in whole sentences. This is repeated for other brands of piano throughout the site:

'Kawai digital pianos are ideal for the stage, home, school and church. You should feel delighted by the amazing features that they're loaded with, no matter what your needs are.'

'It's obvious that there's a wide range of digital Roland pianos to choose from. You should be able to find one online very easily, as many musicians find it more convenient to shop online for their musical instruments.'

... and so on. This is a shame because the site does contain some really useful information: even on these pages, there are nuggets here and there. But they're buried under mountains of search-junk which drags the whole site down with it. This would be a much better site if it had much less content.

Search engines have tried to solve the problem of information overload, only for it to reappear at the next step in the user's journey. What I really want as a searcher is not to see my keywords reflected back at me. I already know my keywords! I want a page that takes them as a starting point and then adds to my knowledge or helps me complete a task.

The whole process of keywords > search > results page > clickthrough is only the start of giving your users what they want: if you don't have anything to say when they get to your page, it shows.

Learn to write for search in 3 hours on a Sticky Content open course: next dates 11 June and 23 June

Learn web writing and writing for search, 11 & 23 June

In the coming weeks (on 11 and 23 June) we're running 2 more rounds of our popular Web Writing and Writing for Search open courses. A few comments from past attendees:

'Really informative and full of excellent tips. I feel inspired!'

'I just wanted to say a huge thank you for a thoroughly enjoyable and eye-opening afternoon.'

'Really insightful and enjoyable.'

'Everyone involved with the website could benefit from attending a similar session.'

Read the full course outlines here:

To book either half-day course for ?180, or both for a ?50 discount, email Linda Eriksson or call 020 7704 3232.

50% of usability problems are text fixes, says Jakob

More than half of all website usability problems are to do with text and can be resolved by copy fixes, says usability guru Jakob Nielsen. Speaking with me at an event last week, Nielsen confirmed what we have long suspected: that because the web is essentially a word-driven medium, getting the words right is the key to a successful online experience.

Twitter 101

New to tweeting? Here's what you need to know... To start with, download a twitter client -- software that lets you read and update from your desktop rather than having to visit the website every time. TweetDeck is a good one, and there are more at https://twitter.com/downloads Bear in mind that anyone at all can see your updates. They don't even have to be on Twitter, let alone following you. If you want to change this, you can protect your updates. Then only people following you can see them, and you have to approve new followers before they get to see your updates. If you want to find new people to follow, look at who other people follow. Don't feel obliged to follow people back. Some people get upset about this. They are usually the same people who will moan about you protecting your updates. Ignore them. Turn off email updates for new tweets or it will drive you insane. Lots of people have automated things show up in their twitter feed using a site called Twitterfeed. For example I have mine set up to post a link to Twitter when I save something on delicious or listen to something on blip.fm. Others automatically post links to their latest blog posts. Don't feel you have to follow more than you can keep up with, or that you have to keep up with all the people you follow. You'll miss lots of stuff, be comfortable with it. It's more a snapshot of what's going on now. If you put @ before someone's username it will be flagged as a reply to them, and will usually link to their profile too in most twitter clients If you put d before someone's username you can send them a direct message. this doesn't show up in your feed but instead you get an alert in your email. You can only do this if you both follow one another. 'RT' is a convention that means 'retweet': put it at the beginning when you forward someone else's tweet that you like. URL-shortening services like TinyURL, is.gd and bit.ly are very popular for sharing links, for obvious reasons (140-character limit). Get updates from Sticky Content by following us on Twitter.

Your ecommerce copy: does it stand up to public scrutiny?

Sticky md Catherine Toole seeks retail websites for live copy audit session at Internet World Known for her frank and entertaining style, Sticky Content md Catherine Toole is a popular speaker on the industry circuit. Her two talks at Internet World 2009 are guaranteed to challenge your preconceptions and get your brain buzzing with new ideas. This year at Internet World Catherine's running a live copy audit session, where she'll offer her expert opinion to anyone brave enough to subject their website to her fearless public scrutiny. If you'd like to volunteer your website, post a comment or email dan@stickycontent.co.uk Catherine's other talk looks at what content writers can do to influence natural search results What, where and when? Hear How to be found by search engines at the Mobile, Online Advertising, Affiliate & Search Marketing Theatre, from 14.40 to 15.10 on Tuesday, 28 April. See Catherine's Live content audit session in the Ecommerce Theatre at 4.20pm, on Tuesday, 28 April.

Get a free critique of your web copy – if you dare

Just how good is the text on your website? Find out with an instant copy critique from Sticky Content at Internet World...

This year at Internet World, we’ll be telling people exactly what we think of their website content. We'd love to talk to you about yours - if you don't mind a few frank opinions.

Over the 12 years we've been planning, developing and editing copy content for big brands and government departments, we've developed a content audit service informed by a best-practice scorecard that describes what great website copy looks like from every angle.

We'll be using that scorecard to give instant content critiques to any visitor to our stand who's happy to submit their site to our scrutiny. And, of course, you'll also benefit from lots of practical suggestions about how you can fix any issues or problems we turn up.

So why not come along and see how your site measures up?

Where and when Internet World takes place April 28-30, 2009. For your instant content critique, visit Sticky Content at Stand E3075

Refresh your digital copywriting skills… in 3 hours

Sticky Content releases new dates for our web-writing open courses We’ve now released some new dates for our digital copywriting open courses. These friendly half-day sessions are a great refresher or primer for refining your own skills or training up members of your team. We’ve had some great feedback from trainees, many of whom represent big brands or digital agencies. A big part of the success of the courses has been the very productive discussions they generate between trainees with different skills and backgrounds as they share issues and answer each other’s questions. Those new course dates in summary: Writing for the web: 7.05.09, 19.05.09, 23.06.09, 14.07.09 How to write instantly understandable digital copy that encourages your users to act Improve your marketing emails: 19.05.09, 14.07.09 What can copy do to encourage your customers and contacts to open, read and act on your email? Writing for search: 7.05.09, 11.06.09, 23.06.09 How to write and edit copy to make your website more visible to search engino book See full course detai ls To book a course, email linda@stickycontent.co.uk or call 020 704 3232

Unsubscribe me (let me go): making email opt-outs easy

Have a little respect for your users: don’t get in their way when they want to leave

Because of what we do at Sticky Content, we often sign up to email newsletters for background research. Then, when the job is done and we no longer need the email, we unsubscribe – or at least, that’s the theory.

In fact, it’s amazing how difficult some companies make it to unsubscribe from emails. Many demand long-forgotten user names and passwords to access unsubscribe links – as if that’s critical private information that must be protected – and some are even more obscure.

One that I got regularly (and I mean regularly – the company sometimes sends out 2 a day) seemed almost impossible to unsubscribe from. There was no unsubscribe link and the Contact Us page didn’t have a link to subscriptions. It’s as if the authors believed that no one could possibly want to unsubscribe from their brilliant newsletter. But I did!

Then, one day in the spirit of experimentation, I clicked on what looked like a long string of code at the bottom of the landing page and – hey presto! – I was unsubscribed. But what if I hadn’t wanted to unsubscribe and had clicked on this unlabelled link? How annoying would that have been?

Unsubscribing: it’s not me, it’s you Apart from being irritating, this difficulty in unsubscribing must lull companies into a false sense of security – “people must really want our emails because they’re not telling us they don’t.” But some of us are trying really, really hard to do just that.

The way that sites respond when you say you want to go is revealing too.

Retailer Promod, for instance, said:

You will no longer receive the newsletter! See you soon on promod.com!

A touch to many “!”s here perhaps, but this is a friendly, no-hard-feelings approach, with a brief reminder of the website and an invitation to keep in touch, whatever your level of involvement.

Intelligence Group’s Trendcentral newsletter prominently displays on the front page: “To Subscribe/Unsubscribe to trendcentral®” The process is seamless and, neatly, you’re reminded that it’s just as easy to subscribe again as it is to unsubscribe now.

The BBC similarly points to other emails you might want to sign up for, but with no hard sell. As if to say: “Please yourself, but just a thought: we’ve loads of other great content.” Google Alerts are the best of all, the action almost instant.

But too many organisations find it very hard to let go.

One coaching company made me go to its website and email an individual query. Friends Reunited (this was a while ago) wanted me to go through and individually de-select email alerts for each school, workplace or other group I was signed up for.

One writers’ newsletter offered no way of unsubscribing at all. So I sent a personal email to which I received the following reply:

Reason: Restricted access to list. Error occured handling mailing list account. Error processing special format.

Others just sound hurt. One techie newsletter replied:

We are sorry to hear that you no longer wish to receive our weekly newsletter. Our staff spends countless hours each and every week assembling the best technical information to present to our readers.

Other ways to make it harder for people to unsubscribe include:

weaselly phrases like “manage your account” or “review your profile preferences”
giving the unsubscribe email address but not making it a live link (you can be sure the “To subscribe” address is live)

But really. Come on. We sign up for hundreds of things and we can’t remember all our passwords. If I want to unsubscribe, don’t make me have to log in and hunt for my password. I’m already receiving your emails so I’ve already opted in – I shouldn’t have to log in again if I choose to opt out.

We subscribe to things for all sorts of motives and reasons, many of which are transient. An email newsletter that I joined to research a white paper may cease to be relevant once the paper’s published; a wedding ezine ceases to interest once I’m married. It’s not necessarily personal; it could just mean I’m not your target audience any more. In which case, why do you need me?

If someone wants to leave, the best thing you can do is make it as easy as possible for them to go. Point to other content and services, sure, but don’t get clingy.

We all have butterfly minds and rapidly changing requirements. Make it easy for us to flit out and we’re so much more likely to flit back. But grab at us as we leave – getting all antsy about your traffic numbers – and all you’ll do is leave a negative final impression.

So someone doesn’t want to subscribe to you any more – suck it up. Respect their decision. Facilitate it. They’ll like you better for it, maybe even think twice about leaving – and have no qualms about coming back.

Online forms: how to get the copy right

The web is a highly transactional space where people come to trade information, products and services. Many businesses stand or fall on their ability to generate leads and sales through their sites.

In such a world, the piece of content that matters most on your site is often the online form. It’s where you convert leads into sales, and if you’re not careful it’s also a great opportunity to frustrate, annoy and deter your users.

You need to make it easy for people to find your form. You need to motivate them to start filling it in. And – whether it’s a home insurance quote or a callback request or a plane ticket purchase or a charity membership registration – you need to make sure they complete it in the way you need them to. Copy has a lot to do with all of these phases.

Filling in a form should be a seamless process that intuitively moves the reader through clearly defined and signposted phases. It should always be obvious where they will go next. A good online form is shaped by a strong visual metaphor that instantly locates the user within the process.

But while form design is a recognised discipline, very little attention is paid to getting the language of forms right. Yet the copy can do loads to support that process and keep the user keen to finish.

So here are some pointers about how to write form copy right:

Reassure people why it’s a good idea to fill in form. Too often, even on sites that are beautifully written earlier on in the journey, you click through to the form and are confronted by unfriendly, robotic data-capture speak. A short, friendly introduction providing some context (for example, explaining why you need the information) and reminding users of the benefits of filling out the form can work wonders here.

Tell people what they need to have ready. There’s nothing more frustrating than getting halfway through a form and discovering you have to add your NI or driving licence number. If a user doesn’t have the number to hand – perhaps they’re in the office, not at home where they keep their documents – they won’t be able to complete the form anyway; they won’t thank you for wasting their time.

Set expectations about how long it will take to fill in the form. This is a tricky one – some sites have very time-intensive forms and try to cover the fact with a phrase like “take a few minutes”, other sites have forms that are actually very quick, but they don’t want to over-promise so they say “several minutes”. The best thing you can do is be as accurate as possible: “Average time to complete this form: 7.5 minutes (last 100 users)” is a very user-friendly message.

Avoid fields that aren’t essential to the process. People hate to feel you’re asking for marketing info for your ends with no benefit to them. They’ll quickly see through any naked data-capture fields and reward you with a bounce.

Don’t sell. Form text should be purely instructional and functional. The idea is to get people moving through the form who have already decided to buy, not to sell or market to them.

Avoid words that relate to visual locations like “left”, “above”, “below”. Such cues often confuse more than they enlighten: designs change, forms display differently in different environments, and there could be a lot of stuff that’s “below” that you don’t mean to refer to.

Avoid ambiguity, jargon, unnecessarily technical language. Gloss any terms that some portion of your readership might not understand – in copy where it can be done neatly, or else through a clear, simple help function.

Don’t overdo the help. Many forms insist on a “?” button by every field. Then when you click on the help button for “home telephone number”, it says something like: “This is the number of the place where you live”. Help should add value or not exist at all.

Watch the pronouns. Forms often confuse second and third person pronouns, sometimes in the same sentence. They start off saying “Enter your date of birth”, then switch to things like, “My mother’s maiden name is:” This is an obvious unnecessary case of making the user think. Most website copy is addressed to an imagined second person (”you”), so it makes sense to stick to that and avoid “I”/”me”/”my” here too. (The only area of a site where we’d deviate from this is FAQs, which are conventionally written as “I” questions.)

Turn error messages into helpful hints. Error messages need to help the reader get back on track, not just to tell them they have made a mistake. For example: don’t write “Date format error”, write “Write the date like this: 07.03.2008”. [EDIT: Rob Webb points out that 7/3/08 is a poor example, and he's right: it could be 7th March or 3rd July (US format). It's better to use something like 25/12/08 which can't be misinterpreted.]

Beware using language just because you’ve seen it in other forms. Does everyone know what “*mandatory field” or “case sensitive” means, for instance? The simpler the better. Why not “You must fill in boxes marked * ” or “Your password recognises capitals and small letters: ‘PASSWORD’ is not the same as ‘password’”?

Tagging for SEO: a job for the copywriter?

Increasingly when we provide clients with content, we are asked to write the accompanying title tags, meta descriptions and other tags.

This is a logical development, and there are several good reasons for it:

1. Ranking high in search results pages is only half the battle - you have to get people to click through too. More than often than not, the user's first experience of your brand is to read Google's presentation of your page's title and snippet, a slim piece of text devoid of context or visual identity.

A well-crafted snippet (usually based on some combination of title, meta and intro text tags) can whet the user's appetite for your brand and your content. On the other hand, a snippet that reads like a contrived piece of clever keyword stuffing could switch them right off.

Even clients of ours whose business model stands or falls on successful search performance are adamant that the text Google's results page displays about them should be on brand and on tone.

2. The writer is the best tagger From both search and usability viewpoints, it's good practice to give every page on your sitemap a specific purpose and focus. For every page there should be clear answers to the questions: What is this page about? What do we want people to do here?

The writer of a particular page should understand that purpose and focus better than anyone. The tagging that goes with that page is an attempt to crystallise these things for the user, within very restrictive parameters. Pulling that off is a copywriting skill too.

3. It'll save you time and resource If you have your main web page copy written in one place and your tagging done retrospectively somewhere else, there's an obvious inefficiency.

Writing and tagging the pages at the same time is likely to produce the most accurate tags - written while the content is still fresh - and save on employing resource to go through all the content again at a later stage.

Some writers may complain that this isn't part of their job. But our feeling is that the market will soon tell them that it is, or go elsewhere. Read our tips on how to write descriptions in tags

How to write descriptions in meta tags

How do you write page descriptions in your meta tags that work for SEO? While Google is only as open as it has to be about how it chooses what to display in search snippets (see Matt Cutts’ whiteboard talk on snippets for a useful overview), we’re talking about this issue with site owners and SEO specialists all the time, and are developing some best practice. In essence, the description is a short summary of a page’s contents, often displayed in search results. It’s usually picked up by external search engines such as Google and displayed as the search result snippet – this is especially likely to happen if the description contains the search terms. Descriptions in tags have little or no effect on a page’s ranking in external search engines, but a well-written description can significantly increase click-through rates. A well-written description:

is unique for every page (you’ll often see sites where pages at lower levels have all been given the same description)
accurately describes the content of the page
if the page is a landing page, describes the scope of sub-pages
complements the page title
contains target keywords that reflect the content of the page
is 156 characters long (current display limit of a Google search snippet)
…or less – some argue that shorter text with white space has more impact in a search results page
takes account of where text will wrap
is interesting and enticing to the target audience
contains a call to action

We’d be interested to hear your thoughts and experiences.

Cut your news stories – no one likes two-week-old fish

In preparation for a marketing event recently, we carried out informal content audits of around 40 websites: major brands, global names, across a wide variety of sectors. Some were good, some were bad, of course. But what struck us most of all was the alarming number of sites that insisted on a feed or regularly updated slot in a prominent space on the homepage entitled “News”. One of the tenets of our web-writing best practice is that "news should really be news”. But none of the stories on these sites are really news at all. This is problematic, we’d argue, for several reasons: 1. You’re giving users what you care about, not what they care about Whether you provide financial services or sanitary products or drama workshops, the chances are that of all the kinds of content that people come to your site for, your idea of news is very low down their list. The fact that you’ve appointed a new sales director for the North of England, or that you’ve applied for a new ISO standard, or that one of your team has raised a load of cash running up a mountain on one leg, is simply not that interesting to anyone outside your organisation. Perhaps you think such a story is important because it speaks about the kind of culture your staff enjoy, or shows how much you care about quality. But really, no. Your average web user just doesn’t care. Why? Because they are in a hurry, and they are after answers to much more fundamental questions: Do you stock the product I’m after? Do you understand my needs? Can I trust you? Are you cheaper than that competitor site I just looked at? How do I get I touch? Do you deliver? Where’s the information I want? And so on. As web owners, your job is to identify these priorities, find the ones that coincide with your own, and plan your content accordingly. You have limited space, your users have limited time; new sales directors and sponsored runs are a waste of both. 2. You’re not in the news business – and you’re not being search-friendly When you start using a word like “news” online, you place yourself in immediate competition with the likes of Reuters, the BBC and CNN. Few people will ever search for your news, and if they did they’d probably search for news about you on one of these big players who are actually, like, real news providers. So whenever you use the word “news” in a title tag or headline, you’re using one of the most fought-over words in all Googledom. And you’re passing up on an opportunity to use a keyword or phrase as part of one of those vital content elements that people might actually search for in relation to you and your products and services. So you’re pretending to be something that you’re not, and a the same time you’re reducing your chances of being found by people likely to care about what you really are. 3. You’re producing smelly fish It’s bad enough reading irrelevant internally-focused anecdote masquerading as topical items of mass interest on a homepage; then you turn to the Press or News section proper and you see where all these stories have gone to die. As content guru Gerry McGovern puts it in his latest, Killer Content: “The web is full of filler content… The press release – a staple of most corporate websites – is a good example of print content that gets published because it’s the easy way out. Originally, press releases were not meant to be published. Instead, they were supposed to be released to the press as a story ‘hook’ – something that might get them interested in writing a story in their publications. “Your website is your publication. You should be taking your press release ideas and turning them into compelling stories that communicate clear messages your customers care about. Simply putting press releases up is the lazy way out. Most of your customers care to read your press releases about as much as they’d care to open a bag of two-week-old fish.” Of course, some of that “news” content may be usable, in some form. An award win or professional accreditation can go in your About us or Testimonial section, while staff achievements or interests can perhaps be reflected in your careers area. It all needs thinking about, working on, turning into fresh content users can stand the smell of.

Can web writing be creative?

A comment I've heard a few times recently from content types of various kinds -- especially writers with a print or advertising background -- is that web writing isn't creative. Is that true?

Certainly much of the writing for the web we do isn't creative in the sense that there's lots of scope for agonising puns or cryptic references or exhibitions of individual flair. There aren't obvious opportunities for web writers to show off or do work that can go straight into their books, which is what I suspect the comments I've heard tend to mean. But then this is perhaps a rather limited definition of 'creative'. I once heard a talk by content guru Gerry McGovern in which a member of his audience complained that the tone of voice his clients required him to write in was 'boring'. But the clients in question were banks and other financial institutions.

As Gerry pointed out, banks look after our money; we look to them to be sound and reliable and responsible above all, not wacky dispensers of gags. What the audience member called boring was in fact tonally appropriate. And being creative online is just about being appropriate in this way. It's about coming up with words that help your clients meet their objectives while at the same time providing users with the content they might actually want to read.

It's about coming up with interesting ways to talk about things that often aren't obviously interesting. It's about gaining people's attention when they're pushed for time, or can't see why you should be any different from the rest, or don't believe there's anything new to know about a particular subject. All these things require talent, skill, thought, imagination... creativity. Like a cathedral or an episode of Emmerdale, websites are collaborative projects, where individual efforts must be made subservient to the greater good of the whole.

Online, writers must learn to leave their ego at the door. Between the website's consumers and the website's owners there should be an uninterrupted flow of content, seamlessly bridging user needs and marketing priorities. There is no place for the ego of the creative, no place for individual 'style'. (Style, incidentally, can be overrated. Asked why he originally wrote Waiting for Godot in French rather than in his native English, Samuel Beckett replied: 'In order to write without style.')

This is a different kind of creativity, the kind that involves immersing yourself totally in the needs of your audiences so that you disappear and only the right content remains. That content should belong naturally to the site -- done well, it shouldn't be possible to tell which author did which bit. Allied to this is the issue of parameters.

Artists and craftspeople often say that constraints are creative, that working at the edge of rules produces the most interesting results. Well, web writing is full of parameters to test the creativity of any writer: character counts for headlines, search guidelines for copy, pay-per-click constraints, corporate style guides and more. Finding interesting copy solutions that do the job without busting these limits often requires real ingenuity. Artists of the written word have for centuries agonised about what Virginia Woolf called the 'eternal struggle with form'. A harmonious blend of style and substance, of form and content, is a classic hallmark of a satisfying work of art. Online, where people scan read at motorway speed, form virtually IS content.

The need to structure web content in ways that intuitively highlight meaning and encourage engagement is perhaps the greatest creative challenge of all. Web writing isn't for everyone. But for those interested in doing it right, it's almost never boring and often very creative. But then we would say that.

Web editors: 5 reasons to love standfirsts

Better search results, higher clickthrough rates, more targeted traffic, improved usability… why every web writer should embrace standfirsts. The standfirst goes by many names: the sell, subdeck, snippet, summary para, promo para, intro text, even ‘blah blah copy’. At Sticky Content, we call them standfirsts and we mean the few short lines of text, often in bold, which sit between the headline and the body copy, acting as a bridge between the two. Often coded as an H2, a good standfirst expands on the headline, gives users a fuller idea of the piece to come, and hooks them into reading more. Online, these signposting paras are often completely overlooked and yet they are surprisingly important. Here's 5 reasons why...

1. Standfirsts are often what a search engine displays If you don’t supply meta descriptions – and if you write them properly, standfirsts make great meta descriptions – then what will Google use as the two lines of text it inserts beneath your title tag on its results page? The usual answer is that it’s the couple of lines of text surrounding the key search terms on a page. Which (again if you write them properly) is likely to be your standfirst. So your standfirst is a powerful SEO tool.

2. Standfirsts make people want to click on your content If your standfirst is picked up as an organic search snippet, it will be read by users thinking about which item in a list of search results to click on. If it's written to be engaging, on-brand and informative, it's likely to increase your clickthrough rate, or at least to raise the quality/targeted nature of your traffic.

3. Standfirsts save you time by doubling up as promo paras, links and meta descripts A headline and a standfirst should be written together as a single self-contained unit of meaning. They shouldn't overlap too much, still less repeat each other (a terrible waste of crucial space). They can then be easily be lifted out and dropped elsewhere on your site, or on affiliate sites, as a teaser to promote a piece of content. Or as the anchor text for the link back to that content, or both. They can also be used as meta descriptions. All great ways to save yourself from the kind of constant rewriting of those ‘almost the same but not quite the same’ promotional lines of text, which decrease the usability and accessibility of so many sites.

4. Standfirsts make copy more usable

Intro text [= the standfirst] serves the same purpose for an interior page as the homepage does for the entire site and the tagline does for the homepage... people need to know what they are getting into before they dive in.... A brief introduction can help users better understand the rest of the page.

(Jakob Nielsen, www.useit.com)

5. Standfirsts are how we're used to reading (and they make us read more) Newspapers and magazines have presented content using the head + standfirst approach for decades. A headline on its own can rarely summarise a page adequately; we're instinctively used to scanning the two together to get a full sense of the gist of an article. It's a powerful convention. And as print shows us again and again, a standfirst should never be a dry comprehensive summary or some generic feelgood filler copy. It should be targeted and focused, it should tease, sell, engage you to read on, throw out a question, make a promise, threat or opportunity that the body copy below goes on to answer. Then all you have to do is to write great, web friendly copy which doesn’t dash the reader’s hopes. Over to you... [This post originally appeared on e-consultancy. Want to learn more about headlines, standfirsts and how to use them to help your readers? Sticky Content runs regular writing for the web training courses: check www.stickycontent.com/training/ for the next set of dates.]

External link disclaimers – how much is too much?

It's worth being careful when you link to other sites, but don't let over-cautious legal jargon get in the way of usability. Some corporate sites use lengthy (and wordy) disclaimers to let readers know when they’re about to follow a link leading to an external site. You know the sort of thing: “You are now about to leave the Madeup Corporation site. Madeup Corporation takes no responsibility for any of the content, links or any transactions made via the external site. Any information you might find on the external site is not endorsed in any way by Madeup Corporation or any of its subsidiary companies or websites. Thank you for visiting the Madeup Corporation site.” Sometimes it can seem a bit excessive – this is the internet, after all. A link that goes somewhere else is hardly the biggest surprise. But it’s just as odd to come across a corporate site, as I did recently, that doesn’t tell you when a link goes to another site. In this case the link led somewhere that didn’t look like the home site, didn’t really match the link description and had a puzzling lack of breadcrumb trail navigation. This perplexing “where am I?” feeling isn’t something web copy should engender in users. In particular, be up-front with your users when you link to external ecommerce sites. Like it or not, readers are likely to see this as an endorsement of what’s being sold there – fine if you want to recommend a partner, of course, but that’s not always the case. I think disclaimers do have their place – not so that companies can cover themselves, but to aid navigation and orientate users. They don’t have to be long and legalistic – a simple “You’re now leaving our site. Because we don’t own the site you’re going to, our terms and conditions don’t apply there,” will do.

Sticky Content at Internet World, 29 April-1 May 2008

We’ll be at Internet World 2008 at Earl's Court from April 29 - May 1, so please drop by and say hello. You’ll find us at stand E529, in the East building on the left hand side. We’ll be happy to discuss anything to do with web writing (actually, pretty much anything at all), from how your copy could do more for your business to questions about what we do and how we do it. You can register for the show online, and entry is free. Opening times

Tuesday 29 April 2008, 09.30 - 17.00
Wednesday 30 April 2008, 09.30 - 17.00
Thursday 1 May 2008, 09.30 - 16.00

Venue: Earls Court 2, London, Warwick Road, SW5 9TA (How to get there)

Writing for the web training courses: 27 May, 24 June and 1 July 2008

For those of you interested in learning more about web writing, there's another series of our popular open courses coming up. On 27 May and 1 July we're running our usual double-whammy: Writing for the web in the morning, and Writing for search in the afternoon. On 24 June we're introducing a new course, Writing for email, in the afternoon session, aimed at getting your customers opening, reading and acting on your emails. Writing for the web runs as usual in the morning. You can book one half-day course, or attend both on the same day for a reduced rate. They're designed to work together so that writing for search and writing for email build on what you've learned in writing for the web. Course outlines, pricing and how to book

Button naming in the real world at Sainsbury's

I notice that the customer service desk in every Sainsbury superstore now sits under a banner that says not "Customer service" but "Here to help". It's a reminder that real-world retailing often has some useful lessons for online best practice (they've been using eyetracking for years, too). That Sainsbury's sign is a great example of how looking again at the language we take for granted to represent us can yield surprisingly effective results. For one thing, "customer service" is a tired phrase, internally-focused and distancing. To talk of "customers" is to refer to a third party when a clear you-we relationship is what's going on. "Customer service" is not exactly a phrase that lives up to its own billing. For many of us, too, the Customer Service desk is traditionally a slightly forbidding place where you go to haggle for a refund when you've lost the receipt. (I note that behind the desk the refund policy is very clearly and helpfully displayed.) But in fact this desk is there to help anyone with anything that simplifies or improves their interaction with the store -- from asking where the catfood is to making a suggestion about the traffic jams in the car park to seeing if anyone has handed in your daughter's woolly hat (they hadn't). Which is why the deceptively simple phrase "here to help" is so clever. It works on two levels:

as a physical marker: here, literally, is where you come when you need our help
as a statement of intent: our aim is to provide whatever assistance you need

This warmly embracing phraseology will no doubt attract more people to the desk than before. But that means more people who will find their way around the store, more satisfied customers, more queries answered. Both sides of the relationship can only benefit. Online, a phrase like "here to help" probably needs some work from an SEO point of view, and it doesn't quite have the same "physical marker" effect. But look again at your buttons and labels and headlines: are they as warm, helpful and instantly informative as they could be? Is there a better way to say 'About us' or 'Services' or 'Resources' or 'Features' or 'Other news' or 'Library'? You know there is...

Web text that's worth it: the six most underrated types of digital copy

Digital copy is underappreciated, underrated and - astonishingly - still the poor cousin of the web relaunch process. The most successful projects we work on at Sticky Content manage to uphold the equal importance of design, technology and text. They plan their copy requirements early on, invest in a content strategy, information architecture and strong, scannable, usable web copy formats. Yet still a significant number of clients call us two weeks prior to relaunch and ask us to replace their lorem ipsum with something cobbled together from their old site and any old marketing collateral they happen to have lying around. To me (and I would say this) the web is a still largely a word-driven medium. Eye-tracking surveys have shown for yonks how users begin by screening out images, scanning instead for key messages and signposts in headers and links. Text is fast to fix, usually cheaper than design or technical work and can show immediate ROI. So why do so many site owners forget about text until the last minute? To demonstrate the cost-effectiveness of good web copy, I’m currently inviting five site owners to volunteer for text-only fixes. Clients who want to test the effectiveness of simply changing the text on their website. While we do optimise copy for organic search, this is not primarily an SEO exercise, so I’m looking for sites which have a clear call to action for customers, where copy changes can be measured through the resulting rise (or fall) in specific customer activities. If you think you might have a site (or an area of a website) that is ripe for a rewrite, please give me a call on 020 7704 3232. I hope to present the resulting case studies at Internet World in May. In the meantime, here’s our top six most underrated forms of digital copy. The ones we think warrant far more attention than they often get.

Web forms. The tiny strings of instructional copy that sit around the transactional areas of your website. Pure gold dust. When carefully crafted these can seriously affect your online ROI. So why leave in the legacy copy keyed in by the programmer?
Top level navigation buttons. Q: Why are there so many buttons unhelpfully named ‘Products’ or ‘Services’? A: Because the designer only left an eight character space. Beauty over ‘meaningfulness’? Wouldn’t happen in offline marcoms…
Snippets. Whether these are search snippets or what’s visible in an email viewing pane, these words can make your click-through rates soar or plummet.
Anchor text. Even if you set aside the effect of well-written links on SEO and accessibility, anchor text is still key to usability. It enables users to orientate themselves quickly and encourages the swift pursuit of key calls to action.
Landing pages. You spend all that money driving me here and then there’s no call to action? No attempt to match messages with the traffic drivers? No clear forward path?
Adwords. What is it about SEO that an appearance on the first results page is deemed successful? Not if your copy is so dull, or woolly that no one wants to click on it…

Agree/disagree? Post your own comments on underrated web copy here.

Writing for the web training courses, 28 and 29 January 2008

[Update: Looking for our post on microcontent and online forms? It's here.] Following the success of our October open courses on writing for the web, we've organised another series of half-day courses in January for those of you who missed out. The courses run on 28 and 29 January 2008: Writing for the web in the morning, and Writing for search in the afternoon. You can book one half-day course, or attend both on the same day for a reduced rate. They're designed to work together so that writing for search builds on what you've learned in writing for the web. Course outlines, pricing and how to book

Elegant variation - to repeat or not to repeat?

Stylistic variation versus writing for the web: fight!! Many writers – journalists especially – find it hard to call something the same thing twice. If you’re writing about Michael Owen, for instance, you might refer to him as “Michael Owen” the first time round, then perhaps “the Newcastle striker” at the second mention, then perhaps “England’s talismanic goal-scorer”, then “the injury-plagued 27-year-old”, “the diminutive forward” and so on. Anything but just calling him “Michael Owen” again. That’s elegant variation, and you might think it’s a Good Thing. I was certainly taught so, in journalism school. On the other hand, as a web writer you might be asked by a client to optimise your copy for a “keyword density of 3-10 per cent” ie use the same particular word three to ten times in every 100. You may also have read that it’s good usability to restrict your vocabulary online. And/or you may be asked to make sure your copy is in Plain English, which means among other things following the maxim: “You can use the same word twice in a sentence if you can't find a better word.” That’s web writing for you. So what if you want to vary elegantly and produce good web copy? To repeat or not to repeat? The first point to make is that, in many people’s eyes, elegant variation is not so much a technique to emulate as a writerly vice to avoid. Certainly Henry Fowler thought so when he coined the phrase in Modern English Usage (1926):

It is the second-rate writers, those intent rather on expressing themselves prettily than on conveying their meaning clearly, & still more those whose notions of style are based on a few misleading rules of thumb, that are chiefly open to the allurements of elegant variation. [...] The fatal influence [...] is the advice given to young writers never to use the same word twice in a sentence — or within 20 lines or other limit.

One meaning of “elegant” was “fussy” or “overdone” in Fowler’s day. To vary elegantly was to be a bit of a ham. Wikipedia defines elegant variation as the “unnecessary use of synonyms” and cites the example of "elongated yellow fruit" as an elegant variation of "banana". In his critical writings, stylist’s stylist Martin Amis frequently presents elegant variation as an unpardonable tic of the “anti-writer”. Here is Amis on Henry James:

James’s prose suffers from an acute behavioural flaw. Students of usage have identified that habit as “elegant variation”. The phrase is intended ironically, because the elegance aspired to is really pseudo-elegance, anti-elegance. For example, “She proceeded to the left, towards the Ponte Vecchio, and stopped in front of one of the hotels which overlook that delightful structure.” I can think of another variation on the Ponte Vecchio: how about that vulgar little pronoun “it”? Similarly, “breakfast”, later in its appointed sentence, becomes “this repast”, and “tea-pot” becomes “this receptacle”; “Lord Warburton” becomes “that nobleman” (or “the master of Lockleigh”); “letters” become “epistles”; “his arms” become “these members” and so on. Apart from causing the reader to groan out loud as often as three times in a single sentence, James’s variations suggest broader deficiencies: gentility, fastidiousness, and a lack of warmth, a lack of candour and engagement.

Still not convinced? Try this, from The Art of Writing, by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch:

An undergraduate brings me an essay on Byron. In an essay on Byron, Byron is (or ought to be) mentioned many times. I expect, nay exact, that Byron shall be mentioned again and again. But my undergraduate has a blushing sense that to call Byron Byron twice on one page is indelicate… Half-way down the page he becomes “the gloomy master of Newstead”: overleaf he is reincarnated into “the meteoric darling of society”: and so proceeds through successive avatars—“this arch-rebel,” “the author of Childe Harold,” “the apostle of scorn,” “the ex-Harrovian, proud, but abnormally sensitive of his club-foot,” “the martyr of Missolonghi,” “the pageant-monger of a bleeding heart.”... The Gospel does not, like my young essayist, fear to repeat a word, if the word be good. The Gospel says, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s”—not “Render unto Caesar the things that appertain to that potentate.”

Online, especially in static web content and email, elegant variation is best avoided. It’s fine, frequently very helpful, to call something by the same name, sometimes even in the same sentence. It takes courage to do this at first, but your users will benefit. Indeed, restricting vocabulary online is great usability. Too often, for instance, sites still refer to their target audiences by several different words – some combination of “users”, “customers”, “registered users”, “readers”, “members”, “account holders” etc – when one single, friendlier word would cover them all: “you”. Or again, it’s much better to refer to “2001” as “2001” every time it comes up, rather than “seven years ago” or “two years previously”: it saves users having to wade back through your content to do the sum. Steve Krug, in his excellent Don’t Make Me Think, compares web users looking at pages to drivers looking at “billboards going by at 60mph”. This is no time for “elegance”; this is a time for instant clarity.

Not all over for the passive after all?

Further to our attempts to rehabilitate the passive voice – or at least demonstrate that using the passive appropriately doesn’t make you a spineless victim type – we were intrigued to read Jakob Nielsen’s recent newsletter topic, “Passive Voice is Redeemed for Web Headings”.

The grand wizard of usability argues that the “active voice is best for most Web content, but using passive voice can let you front-load important keywords in headings, blurbs, and lead sentences. This enhances scannability and thus SEO effectiveness.”

Eyetracking research underlines the importance of getting the first two words right in headings, intro lines, standfirsts and other content elements that are crucial to instant scan-reading. In such ROI- and SEO-critical contexts, Nielsen argues, “you might want to succumb to passive voice if it lets you pull key terms into the lead”.

Certainly it’s the case that web headlines are bending the conventions a little further as we wrestle to keep them front-loaded with the two or three words that really matter.

Take, for instance, the headline for a course overview in a business school brochure. In print, it would be natural to write: Overview of part-time MBA course

Online, however, it would be much better to write:

Part-time MBA: course overview

For one thing, “part-time MBA course” is the bit that will matter to your scan reader.

For another, the first version would quickly get lost in a list of related items:

Overview of part-time MBA course Overview of full-time MBA course Overview of Business Studies BA

But using passive voice in headlines is not really bending the rules. It was never really the case that good practice in headlines – online or offline – ever banned the passive altogether. Take today’s BBC UK news homepage, which has the following headlines:

More supermarkets 'should be allowed' Boy hit with hammer for mobile Former Australian prisoner buys the cell in which he was jailed Prince quizzed over bird shooting Should more supermarkets be built? Eight killed in Russia bus blast Olympics ticket sales suspended

All of these contain a passive construction, sometimes in abbreviated form. Though not always following Nielsen’s strict front-loading principle, all read perfectly naturally. So it’s not the passive that is bad in itself – something we should try not to “succumb” to – it’s clunky headlines that are bad. Sometimes passives lead to clunkiness and sometimes they are the most elegant solution. Compare:

“You’ve been rumbled” “We have detected your wrongdoing”

Which is the clunkier version? The first is more direct, more like what someone might actually say – but it’s actually a passive. The second – robotic – version is actually in the active voice. So let’s not get too bogged down by the so-called rules of good writing. No one agrees on them anyway. Last word to humourist Dave Barry's 'Ask Mr Language Person':

WRITING TIP FOR PROFESSIONALS: To make your writing more appealing to the reader, avoid 'writing negatively'. Use positive expressions instead. WRONG: 'Do not use this appliance in the bathtub.' RIGHT: 'Go ahead and use this appliance in the bathtub.' TODAY'S BUSINESS WRITING TIP: In writing proposals to prospective clients, be sure to clearly state the benefits they will receive: WRONG: 'I sincerely believe that it is to your advantage to accept this proposal.' RIGHT: 'I have photographs of you naked with a squirrel.'

Greetings, new ad:tech friends

Thanks to everyone who visited our stand at ad:tech 2007 a couple of weeks ago. Some of you we've already met again on our first web writing course (hello!), and we'll be seeing others on the next course on the 24th. If you wanted to stop by but didn't have time, or did stop by and meant to get in touch, or didn't go and wanted to get in touch anyway... email us or use the comments to give us a nudge. (Here's a quick reminder of what we do.)

Sticky Content at ad:tech

We'll be at ad:tech London 2007 on Wednesday 26 and Thursday 27 September, so why not stop by for a few minutes? We're on Stand 624, next to the Glass House cafe on the first floor. We'll be happy to answer your questions about online copy, how we do it, what you do, what you should be doing... Opening times: Wednesday 26 September 10am-5pm Thursday 27 September 10am-4.30pm Venue: Olympia 2, Hammersmith Road, London W14 8UX (how to get there) See you there!

Hypewatch: "Home fabrication, the biggest thing since money"

Inflated claims for technology #2:

I think that within 10 years private individuals will be able to make for themselves virtually any manufactured product that is today sold by industry. I sometimes wonder if politicians realise that the entire basis of the human economy is about to undergo the biggest change since the invention of money.

-- Adrian Bowyer, senior lecturer in mechanical engineering, Bath University, quoted in The Guardian, 29.03.07 Unlike the sort of hype where people just make overblown historical comparisons to persuade us of something's significance, I think all Adrian Bowyer is guilty of is overenthusiasm, and if engineers didn't come over a bit unnecessary now and then about their ideas we wouldn't have much good engineering. But aside from the new post-home-fab economy, futurism doesn't have a great predictive record, and the clock's ticking on that "within ten years". Update 19.09.07: It's still not the new money, but home fabbing (aka "3D printing") looks like it's tentatively getting under way thanks to Ponoko... [via Bad Science]

Hypewatch: "Leonardo was a blogger"

Inflated claims for technology #1:

Once you start to look for bloglike phenomena in the history of our civilization, you start to find them everywhere. The Talmudic tradition […] is […] a form of proto-blogging – scholars and thinkers debating the meaning of text passages from another era and creating commentaries, refinements, additions, and different shades of interpretation. Renaissance artists and thinkers were bloggers of a kind as well, commenting on what they found of interest and beauty from the cultures of Greece and Rome. Leonardo da Vinci probably wrote the greatest unpublished blog of all time in his more than thirty thousand pages of diary entries.

-- Dan Burstein in blog! how the newest media revolution is changing politics, business, and culture Let's see: that's most art, thinking about pretty much anything, and general "comment". Everything is a blog! Hurrah! Gems like this crop up all over the place whenever people get carried away about new technology, new media, or just the new new thing. It's mostly harmless, but sometimes it just makes you step back and think, "really? No, really?". We'll be collecting our favourites here. What are yours? (Oh, and here's a link to Dan (and David Kline)'s book. It's only fair.)

Sticky Content writing courses: full details on website

We've now got full confirmed details of our open courses in web writing skills up on our website. Just to recap, we are running four half-day courses over two days in October 2007. These courses are a cheaper alternative to our bespoke training days, ideal if you're looking a good overview of the subject or just want to send one or two people to develop their skills rather than a whole group. All the courses take place at the Business Design Centre, Islington, London N1 0QH: Thursday, 11 October

am: Writing for the web... in 3 hours
pm: Writing for search... in 3 hours

Wednesday, 24 October

am: Writing for the web... in 3 hours
pm: Improve your marketing emails... in 3 hours

A place on any course costs just £150 + VAT, and there's a £50 discount for anyone booking a morning and an afternoon course. These are the first open courses we've run and bookings are coming in quickly. So don't delay -- email us to book today...

What did you say you do again?

Still sitting on my desk is the show guide from the recent Online Marketing Show 2007. Browsing through the little blurb which each exhibitor gets to introduce themselves, I was struck by the dreadful similarity of the language in each one. Every other exhibitor referred to themselves as a "search marketing solutions provider", a "search engine marketing specialist", a "digital marketing agency", or an "online marketing agency". Every other exhibitor also said that they were "leaders" or "leading" in what they do/offer. This provokes a few obvious thoughts:

Why are all these descriptions so vague? What does it say about an organisation if it can't provide a specific and meaningful summary of what it does in a few words?
Isn't marketing about standing out from the crowd? Aren't all these companies marketing specialists of one sort or another? If they can't distinguish themselves in their market, why would a potential client believe they'd do any better in their market?
Surely "leader"/"leading" implies being first? Surely these companies can't all be first? Years of providing copy for financial institutions to put before their Legal & Compliance people have taught us to avoid words like "leading" altogether, because they are almost invariably used by organisations that can't substantiate them. After all, if I was the leader, why wouldn't I just say "number one"?

You might argue that these blurbs are not that important, but reading them is still the way many visitors pick their route round a show. Besides, we frequently found similar wording on exhibitors' stands and websites too. It's certainly going to make us look again at our wording. Like just about everyone else, we can do better.

How to write for search… in just 3 hours!

New open courses from Sticky Content in October 2007…

The focus of this year’s Online Marketing Show was very much on search, and on our stand we spoke to a great many people interested in finding out more about what you can do to improve your search results in the way you write and edit your web content.

Well, it just so happens that one of our forthcoming open courses is all about Writing for search. It’s one of four half-day seminars we’ll be running at the show’s venue, The Business Design Centre, London N1, in October 2007:

11.10.07

Writing for the web... in 3 hours (10am)
Writing for search... in 3 hours (2pm)

24.10.07

Writing for the web... in 3 hours (10am)
Improve your marketing emails... in 3 hours (2pm)

The courses are ideal for any organisation that wants to send a few individuals for a refresher or introduction to the subject rather than do a full day’s bespoke training.

The courses are designed to complement each other, and there’s a £50 discount per trainee if you book both of a day’s courses. Places cost £150 + VAT per trainee per course – or £250 + VAT per trainee for the day’s two courses.

At Sticky Content we've been running bespoke courses in writing for the web, writing for search, social media and related skills for seven years. Clients include Reed Business Information, Deloitte& Touche LLP, West Midlands Police, Alstom, Worldwide Fund for Nature, Nexus Media, Nokia Siemens Networks and lastminute.com.

To book a place or find out more, email Divya at divya@stickycontent.co.uk or give her a call on 0207 704 3232.

Course venue: Business Design Centre, Islington, London N1 0QH (Angel underground on Northern Line)

What are the seven deadly sins of writing for social media?

You are cordially invited to enter a social media experiment with me.

I’m speaking at the Online Marketing Show 2007 in a couple of weeks on the subject of the seven deadly sins of writing for social media.

Bear in mind this is a presentation to online marketing professionals and is very much in the context of building brand and customer loyalty online.

From the last twelve years spent writing and editing content for companies and organisations of all kinds, I know what I think the seven deadly sins are. I’d list them, in no particular order, as:

Not setting a strategy before you start. “We should have a blog” says the CEO. And so it begins…
Going for volume (ie myspace) over a targeted, specialist community (ie brickshelf.com for LEGO enthusiasts).
Ignoring the rules of engagement – posting corporate salespeak on messageboards, for example, or ‘digging’ your own stuff. Wasting people’s time with irrelevant blog entries about your new pet…
Not having the resource, the skills – or possibly the staying power – to maintain your content; to respond quickly and appropriately to negative comments/questions/reviews, or to participate in debates about your products or services.
Failure to be transparent and to fully disclose your connection to a product/company.
Expecting it to be easy. Building trust online takes time and requires brands to be both open and generous – to freely share their expertise and to work hard to create genuinely interesting and useful content.
Ignoring best practice in web writing. Providing good quality content in web-friendly formats which is usable, easy to find through search engines and written to brand guidelines which encompass social media.

So do you agree with my list? Is there anything you’d add? Or remove? Because the main thing I love about social media is that it is the chance to combine your own opinion and expertise with that of your peers, learn something new and engage in a bit of a skirmish…

So if you feel strongly about the writing you see on blogs, wikis, bookmarking and community sites etc, or if you just want to take issue with my list, then please post a comment.

And if you’d like to see the result of our combined efforts, the presentation is at 3pm on Wednesday 27^th June at the Business Design Centre, Islington.

Alas poor passive, we hardly knew you

It’s standard practice among dispensers of business writing advice to rubbish the passive. Examples like "mistakes were made…" and "the decision was taken to…" and "it has been decided that" paint the picture of a clunky verbal construction that produces language that is invariably woolly, bureaucratic, evasive.While it’s probably no bad thing to observe the maxim "keep 80 per cent of your verbs active", in practice it’s not that simple. For one thing, most business writers are not grammarians and find it quite hard to understand or recognise the passive in the first place. Many of the business writing manuals that ban the passive unwittingly make liberal use of it themselves (Language Log has some great examples), and many refer to the passive as a tense (it’s not, it’s a voice – it has been and can always be applied in any tense). When I worked for a major magazine empire, I remember a set of guidelines that was circulated to all journalists in the hopes of sharpening their writing skills. It contained a lengthy section on the passive, illustrated with three examples… two of which were actually in the active. Even as distinguished a passive-rubbisher as the Plain English Campaign has some trouble. It explains the passive as a reversal of the usual subject-verb-object order and gives the example: "The television [object] was watched [verb] by Peter [subject]". Now unless I’m mistaken, "the television" is surely the grammatical subject of "was watched". The whole point of the passive is that the subject of the verb is no longer the real doer of the action, but rather on the business end of the verb – while still being its grammatical subject. Compare: ACTIVE: The cats [subject] are chasing the mouse. PASSIVE: The mouse [subject] is being chased by the cats. If in the second sentence "the cats" is really the subject, we’d have to write "The mouse are being chased by the cats", which clearly won’t do. It seems hard work to explain all this to writers, only to ask them to forget it all again. And when you set up a polarised example like the cats-and-mouse one, it’s easy to see the passive sentence as a kind of evil twin of the active version. But this isn’t how people actually write or come to use the passive, and it doesn’t explain that there are plenty of times when a well-formed passive construction is just what’s needed. Despite its unpleasant name, which smacks of weakness and victimhood, the passive is a grammatical, not a moral, category. There are many good writers who naturally avoid cat-and-mouse passives quite unconsciously. There are also many marketing types who think an active verb is one that sounds kind of dynamic, like "punch" or "drive" or "deliver", or "buy now" instead or "purchase" – not a misconception that will do their writing much harm. The passive can be well used or ill; poor passives are just a by-product of a true evil: lazy writing. They’re just one sub-set of a whole range of back-to-front constructions that annoy readers because they put the element that matters most to the writer first, and the bit the reader would prioritise last. The commercial world is full of such sentences: "Call the product helpline on xxxxx if you live in Wales." "Download the pdf form to apply for membership." "Sign up for our newsletter and a chance to win free tickets to Paris." All of these sentences have the bit that matters to the reader last. If you’ve just created the pdf form or the newsletter, that’s what is likely to be uppermost in your mind. But writing exists to be read and, if they are interested in you at all, your readers are interested in membership or Paris, not your pdf/newsletter creation skills. Good writing (and editing) is just this effort of thinking for your reader, and writing things their way round. Language Log puts the point perfectly: "One of the hardest tasks in writing is taking the viewpoint of your audience, reading your own stuff the way your readers are likely to; putting the sentences in your head down on paper isn't enough." Fail to follow this advice, and you’ll end up writing some unwieldy passive constructions. But don’t blame your laziness on the poor passive which, after all, has many valid uses. Here’s a few: "He was beaten and tortured but still refused to talk" [to emphasise what’s been done to the subject] "Your bill hasn’t been paid for three months" [to soften the blow] "The window was forced but nothing was taken" [unknown actor] "The architectural beauty of Grand Central Station is largely overlooked by the thousands of commuters who pass through its portals every day" [subject of corresponding active sentence would be too unwieldy] "The award was presented by Nelson Mandela himself" [suspense] Any more for any more? Back to the Plain English Campaign and a 1998 speech to the European Commission by founder Chrissie Maher : "Be personal and stay active. Use 'I', 'we' and 'you', and not titles and other paraphernalia, and use the active, not the passive, voice of a verb. It is surprising how much of a difference those little changes make to the tone and sense of what you are writing. And just because the passive has been used in the original language, that doesn't mean that you have to use the passive in English." "Has been used" is a passive, and a perfectly good one.

Human, warm, professional blah blah blah…

Does your site have a distinctive tone of voice? Does it matter? And if so, how do you get one? As online copywriters, we are constantly asked to ensure that the words we produce for a client are "on-brand" or "in our voice" or "checked for style and tone". As the web has matured and big brands look for new ways to stand out from the crowd online, this issue is getting bigger and bigger. We’ve become more and more involved in training clients in developing a distinctive online tone of voice. Only problem is: lots of people don’t really know what tone of voice is, or how to describe it, or how to enforce it consistently. Tone of voice isn’t something you can easily measure or check with a clever bit of analytic software. So what is tone of voice? How do you work out what tone is right for you? And how do make sure all your people (a) get it and (b) use it consistently? Feel the difference Let’s not get too bogged down in definitions. Tone of voice is easier to feel than to describe. Take a chicken recipe from Delia Smith, and another from Jamie Oliver and ask: what sort of person wrote this? Jamie is yoof-fully bish-bash-bosh, dynamic and all-inclusive; Delia is cordial and informative, but holds the reader at arm’s length, a prim schoolmarm with a mission to educate about Good Food. Different personalities, then, different tones. Now choose a sports story. Read how it’s covered by The Sun, The Guardian, the BBC online, a fanzine. Each will present a different emphasis, a different selection of facts; each will use slightly different vocabulary, syntax, even punctuation. All these tiny editorial decisions add up to a distinctive tone of voice. You might think that reporting is a more tone-neutral business, but in our training we frequently find that trainees can guess the source of an anonymised news story. Now think of a market you know well personally and look at the sites of two competitors. Compare Virgin Finance and Legal & General, for instance, or Boden and Figleaves, or Asda and Boots. How do they sound? Warm and chatty or cool and detached? Laconic or breathless? Professional or wacky? If each site was a person, which would you rather spend time with? Which do you trust more? These are all questions about brand, of course, but more specifically these are questions about the quality of the language on these sites. And where there is language, there is tone. Online tone of voice – the icing on the cake You’ll soon notice that some big brands are much more engaging and communicative and helpful in their online language than others. But some huge brands – no names – still leave their brand values at the door when they step into cyberspace. They treat users with a disdain they would never countenance in their shops or their TV ads. Yes, tone matters, but many brands are still struggling with the basics, and the lack of a "distinctive brand voice" won’t matter to your users if other things aren’t in place. Things like whether the site actually works, how long it takes to load, whether they have what you want, whether you can find it, whether the product info is helpful and comprehensible, whether it’s in stock, in what colours and sizes etc. Oh, and how much it is. What matters most online is usability. Copy has a huge say in this too, in crucial, fundamental ways that all too often get overlooked by the brand clinics and the tone of voice workshops. Online, the most positive experience of your brand you can give users is to provide the information they need as quickly and helpfully as possible. So before you start worrying whether you are a brand that says "Xmas pressie" or "Christmas present", make sure you’re getting the language basics right first. Get the little things right Pay attention to all your microcontent – all the signposts, buttons, headlines, calls to actions, links and other little information cues that actually get people round your site. Do they make sense? Or are they still written in the developers’ placeholder jargon ("activate purchase process")? Are your descriptions distinctive – or do you "deliver solutions" like everyone else? Is the rest of your content written for the web? Is it in plain English? Are you talking about benefits rather than features? Is your content structured and organised for easy scanning? Do you talk in empty marketing clichés or provide credible product details and useful supporting information? Information is love, as the man said. How much do you love your customers? All these little things make a huge difference to your customers and users, and they tell them a great deal about you’re like. Most of all, they want to know you’re interested in them. Simply choosing to write "Five ways we can help you" instead of "Products & services" tells me a great deal about your brand. Developing tonal guidelines Now, with the web writing basics in place, you can start looking at tone of voice proper. The standard way to think about this is to take your brand values and translate them into a list of adjectives or "tonal values". We’ve seen hundreds of these documents, and you wouldn’t believe the number of brands that consider themselves to be warm, human, professional and the rest. Apart from the obvious problem that these lists of utterly distinctive tonal values all sound exactly the same, there’s the additional issue that no one really knows what they mean. One copywriter’s "simple" is another’s "patronising". How do you translate a tonal value like "authentic" or "quirky" into language? What would a "non-human" brand be like? We once wrote a piece of copy for a high street bank targeting students; the brief was to be "edgy". The copy came back with a red line through a word that the client considered totally inappropriate. That word was "funky". These are important issues because you need to be able to roll out your tone to everyone involved in working on your content. A strong tone has to be applied consistently, otherwise it will never be distinctive or engage anyone. You can’t rely on a single person who is the unofficial "guardian of the voice". They’re always the first under the proverbial bus. So look for ways to define your tone more descriptively, with guidelines that… · say how you speak but also how you don’t ("eg authoritative but not bossy") · provide examples of your tone translated into real sentences · give examples of how to get it wrong · show how your voice differs from your competitors ("it’s on tone if x wouldn’t say it") · say what you want a user to come away thinking or feeling Then think about all those little editorial decisions that affect your tone too. Do you write in British or American English? Does your content need to be written for ease of translation? Do you write "don’t" or "do not"? Can you use slang? How much technical or specialised knowledge do your target readers have? Do you do humour? If so, what kind? Puns? Jokes? Black humour? It all adds up to something more distinctive. Five ways to take your tone to the next level 1. Run a reality check Run your language past your customer-facing staff. They are the people who know how your customers actually speak. In fact, they’re probably the best place to start… 2. Be appropriate There’s no point coming up with a sexy, youthful, contemporary kind of tone if your brand is all about being reassuringly traditional and reliable. Personally, I want my bank to sound boring and formal, not burst into song-and-dance routines. That’s my money they’ve got. 3. Find a champion None of your tonal development work will count for anything without the will and the clout to see that it is implemented across your organisation. Training and ongoing assessment are crucial here. 4. Walk the middle way Make sure your target audiences don’t fight each other. There’s no point in wowing the young, trendy urbanites with your grasp of street slang if the same content is also aimed at your growing customer base of international commuters. 5. Tones within a tone You may have different areas of the site aimed at distinctively different audiences. You can respond to this by emphasising different elements of your overall tone of voice within each area. This is extremely subtle work, and only has a chance of succeeding if fleshed out with lots of real examples and communicated smartly. TELL US YOUR TOP TONE We’re putting together a Top Ten of our favourite online tones of voice. Any nominations?

Talking - the next big trend?

Last week was all about social media. At least, it was supposed to be.

On Tuesday I spoke at the Web 2.0 experience at Internet World and gave my (strong) opinions of what I think it all means for us copy content providers. Wednesday, I read a couple of positive posts about my talk and was instantly in love with the entire blogosphere. A virtual bender of digging, blogging, commenting and tagging was sure to follow. Er, nope…

What actually happened is that loads of people came to the Sticky Content stand to speak with us, called us, or asked for a meeting. Face-to-face. Which begs the question: could the next big trend possibly be… talking?

I’ve even found someone a few steps ahead of me on this. Lloyd Davis talks about the bootstrap effect, where a relationship initially built on the web, is cemented offline, thus creating even more online possibilities.

It’s my perception that all this web 2.0 talk is instilling a sense of panic in companies to participate in social media when many of them could start by simply sitting down and talking to their own sales teams. For it’s in the ‘meatspace’ (HATE that term Lloyd!) that communication with customers tends to be at its best. Yet it's still hard to find examples of websites which communicate key sales messages clearly and consistently, delighting customers and elevating their brand at the same time. And until a corporate can communicate effectively in writing, stay out of social media, I say.

Sticky Content seminar at Internet World

Two days ago, Sticky MD Catherine Toole gave a presentation as part of the Web 2.0 Experience seminars at Internet World 2007. The topic was 'The five things web copy commissioners should know about social media'. Thanks very much to all the people who attended and gave us such positive feedback. You can read what some of them said in the WebTwitcher and Way of the Web blogs.