Archive for category online language
Personas grata
Posted by admin in branding, customer engagement, online communication, online language, user analysis on December 8, 2008
The internet, the web, the online… thingy can be likened to a teenager. It’s all about peer pressure and fitting in. (I haven’t quite figured out what the internet equivalent of spots is yet, but I suspect it has something to do with your server eating 1-in-50 emails and visiting websites that want to dump 20 cookies on you before delivering up anything useful.)
Teenagers also have their own language and regularly adopt words in weird combinations in order to keep parents and other ancient adults out of the loop. Yep. Very much like the web then.
Which is why, frequently, you feel that every article, white paper and blog is running with a very limited vacabulary. Do you remember the early days when it was all ‘super highway’ this and ‘super highway’ that? It wasn’t that long ago that ‘the digital space’ became the synonym for online. If you’re you still using ‘the digital space’ I’d stop now if I were you. It’s so, like, yesterday.
So, where am I going with all this? Well, the big word is currently, in my humble opinion, ‘personas’. If you want to get down with the digital posse you need personas, brand personas, multiple personas… Your digital strategy isn’t worth doo doo unless you’ve got a few personas to back it up.
Don’t get me wrong. I love personas. CDA loves personas. In fact we’ve got a half day internal workshop about them tomorrow (which is why the subject is so front of mind). But personas are not a miracle cure. You can focus the mind wonderfully by using them but you have to ‘employ’ them. It’s not enough to simply have personas on the payroll.
We always talk about your website being your most important and expensive employee. Your website probably costs more to maintain than your CEO but it would be cheap at twice the price.
How many people does you CEO meet in a year? How many times does he, or she, get to truly demonstrate what your brand is?
Your website is out there 24 hours every day, being reached by people all over the world. Hopefully it’s the living embodiment of your brand; demonstrating usefulness to everyone that comes into contact with it. If the previous description doesn’t sound like your organisation’s website, for goodness sake get a grip. You can’t have a rubbish website in the current economic climate.
Well personas should be right up there on the payroll. They should be getting great benefits packages, including top of the range medical insurance. They should have corner offices and every lunchtime the CEO should rush down to get them sushi from that great Japanese restaurant on the next block. Love your personas. But make them work hard.
If created well and treated with respect, personas bring the real world into your organisational netherspace. You can destil the key attributes of hundreds, thousands, millions of your most important users and prospects into a handful of personas. Give them names and faces. Create back stories. Breath life into them. And then AND THIS IS REALLY IMPORTANT – listen to what they have to say.
Next time the head of sales (or, even worse, the CEO) goes on a jag about why the current product brochure should be put on the web in its entirety, bring out Don who runs a 3 year old SME on the west coast and has been buying your products since he started. Don recently halved the number of staff in the warehouse and is moving over to JIT. He needs another brochure like he needs a hole in the head.
Or the head of marketing has become obsessed with social networks and wants the entire business promoted in a 3 minute flash movie on MySpace. Bring in Jodie, who was recently nominated for business woman of the year and has a pathological dislike of anything that’s just fallen off the back of bandwagon.
Personas visualise your users and put a pulse behind your empirical and statistical data. You can convene them in a nanosecond and unlike focus groups they don’t need sandwiches at lunchtime, or have their opinions hijacked by a retired SAS officer called Kevin.
But personas must be real. (Okay, they aren’t really real but go with me on this one.) Because personas are so popular agencies are conjuring them up like magician’s rabbits. Abracadabra! There’s your personas. All website ills magically cured. Not.
We’ve been working with personas and feel they only earn their keep if you’ve really worked them through the scenarios that touch your business. Run a few situations. Then run some more. Do your personas stand up? The process is a bit like Second Life but not quite so dorky. That’s really what tomorrow’s workshop is going to be about – working out permutations of personas, scenarios and online positions. Creating a virtual grid that mimics the big picture. This will act as both a test environment and also a way of defining persona work for clients. I’ll let you know how we get on.
Armageddon language – you're doomed if you use it online
Posted by admin in audience engagement, email communication, online language, web content on October 29, 2008
‘Doomed’ may sound a little overdramatic, but in the first post on this blog I raised the spectre of how long it would take for doom-laden rhetoric, being used by the media to describe the current economic situation, to find itself into everyday scenarios and then into web and email copywriting. If the headline seems a little overdramatic, well, I’m trying to make a point here.
Below is a visual from my email inbox. Like many people, I prioritise what emails I open and deal with, marking less important emails as unread, to be dealt with later. When I went back to deal with a bunch of these, I came across the visual juxtaposition shown here.
It makes my point well. Retail pharma group, Boots, is using ‘the clock is ticking’ reference in the Subject line to get me to use a time-limited offer relating to their photo printing service. Hemscott, a financial information company, is talking about how to make money in the current market conditions.
The end result is rather than thinking happy snaps when I view the Boots offer, I’m reminded of a ticking bomb, thanks to Hemscott. The Boots email Subject line just makes me feel that any investment at this stage is liable to blow up in my face. They both lose.
The way we read online means we are more likely to make these subliminal connections. The way we interact with online content is a constant facination for the CDA Content Lab and an area where we are currently carrying out some interesting tests, which we hope to share with you shortly.
In the meantime, beware Armageddon language.
Email Subject line length
Posted by admin in email communication, online communication, online language on October 20, 2008
So, what is the ‘best’ length for the Subject line in an email? Perceived wisdom is that 50 characters is the outer limit, with best practice limiting you to 45. There have been some bulletin board exchanges about 200-plus character length Subject lines (including one test involving a 1500 character line). But an email Subject line is a bit like a Porsche Cayman: the fact that you can accelerate from 0 to 62 miles an hour in 6.1 seconds doesn’t mean you should.
In the summer of this year, digital marketing agency Alchemy Worx carried out some interesting research that indicated Subject lines of less than 60 characters were best for optimising open rates, while click
and click-to-open rates were optimised by subject lines of over 70 characters. There was a ‘dead zone’ between 60 and 70 characters that didn’t optimise anything.
What interests us here at the CDA Content Lab is how people are engaging with Subject lines? We know that, online, people tend to scan and skim text in a very visual way. This is different to the character and shape decoding that goes on when we settle to read (which we may do online at certain arrival points, but more on that another time).
We also know that From lines are very important when it comes to opening emails, as people try to tackle ever more full inboxes. From lines are more manageable and often more unequivocal than Subject lines. We see a name we recognise, so we open the email. We always advise clients to spent as much time on the From line as on the Subject line. From the Acme Trading sales team may be much more openable that From Fred Bloggs@acmetrading.com if I’ve heard of Acme Trading but I don’t know Fred Blogs from Adam.
So some degree of familiarity – resonance – works in the From line. Can we work this little benefit into the Subject line? What do recipients want to see in their From lines? Keep in mind we’re discussing a business-to-business and business-to-customer / prospect environment here. From lines to mates and relatives are a whole other ball of wax.
What we’re working towards is reply-focussed communication (see our earlier post). In email and website content we’re often engaged in conversations with people we have never met and who we can’t hear. We have to anticipate what they want and reply accordingly. So…
If I get an email, which is not a regular newsletter I’ve subscribed to, I want to know ‘why?’. Keep in mind that spammers are exploiting the ‘why?’ card, so go for something that’s clear and quick to understand, coupled with a good From line that underpins your authenticity. Clients occasionally talk about the ‘wow’ factor but my advice is that ‘wow’ is often very spammy.
When an email newsletter hits my inbox I want so see news. I’m not reading at this stage, so it is possible to get away with words like ‘latest’ and ‘update’ so long as there’s a robust context. ‘Latest news’ just doesn’t cut it without explaining what the latest news pertains to.
If it’s an email from a product provider, then an offer always goes down well – again, give me context.
I’d also hypothesise that, because the recipient isn’t reading that this stage, you can get away with something less than correct sentence construction. Even a simple sentence is a complex beast and I’m not going to get sidetracked by explaining subjects and predicates and goodness knows what else at this stage.
An email Subject line needs a whole new rule book. The ‘object’ of the Subject line is the recipient of the email. Oh goodness, all the grammarians have just fallen over!
You don’t have to place the object in the Subject line. That said, adding the recipient’s first name to a Subject is an increasingly deployed bit of conditional content.
Think about shape. As I’m scanning and skimming, give me short, familiar words that convey clear meaning. It’s worth drawing up lists of words you use frequently in your emails. Type them down, all in the same font, all lower case and the same size and then scan them with your eyes half closed. Which ones leap out at you?
Finally, think about length. If you want to, divide the Subject line into pre-35 and post-35. Put the main point of your email in the first 35 characters and use some additional length to develop a supporting argument or an action eg ‘read our 10 top tips about this’.
And remember, size isn’t everything.
Paper phrases
Posted by admin in audience engagement, copywriting, online communication, online language, user analysis, web content on October 3, 2008
Back in the days when communication relied on a cleft stick, paper was the perfect format. It beat cave paintings and even clay tablets in the portability stakes. It was – depending on the servant holding the stick – reasonably fast. Eventually a whole system was built around moving paper about. The fax machine may have introduced a non-paper stage but it was, to all intents and purposes, PIPO – paper in, paper out.
We built our skill with written language around this wonderful medium. We bound it into books. Men in brown robes and tonsures used exquisite caligraphy to create copies of the bible. We developed machines that could print onto paper. There were both desk top versions (typewriters) and mainframes – giant printing presses turning out books, magazines, academic journals, newspapers and catalogues for swimwear.
We came up with protocols for laying out words; upper and lower case, underlining and indenting. Red ink, black ink and green ink. Purple prose. Colour and position had specfic meanings. Overturning or advancing a protocol took time. Be too forward in the layout of your business letter and people might asume you didn’t know how to lay one out (or you were too unsuccessful to afford a decent secretary).
But computers and the internet have changed all this. The range of fonts and colours at our disposal are infinite. Images can be added with ease. With so much choice, it’s harder to proscribe and restrict. We can place text vertically, or upside down if we’re so moved. And if we come up with some particularly clever idea it can be copied by others in a nanosecond. Nobody’s right. Nobody’s wrong.
But while we’re all having great fun exploring the visual nature of the medium we can still end up turning out the same old paper phrases, first used back in the days when upright typewriters thumped and rattled. In large and small organisations, tensions can develop between operational areas (meaning) and marketing departments (messaging) when it comes to how products or services are described online.
So here’s my SMART benchmarking tool, designed to quick-test your content for paper phrases:
Source What was the source documentation for the web content? Was it brochure, a press release, a product blue print… Where the source material came from will influence the language that finds its way online. The more internal the document the more likely it is to contain paper phrases and inhouse language.
Method How was the source material turned into web content? Simply subbing source material to make it shorter won’t turn it into good web copy. Ideally you want to review the source material, put it away and then write from memory, only returning to the source to check facts. The more complicated the material, the more important it is to atomise and reconstite the content, rather than simply edit. Subbing often leaves in paper phrases.
Approval Who gets to sign off on the content and why? The best approval processes incorporate compliance and legal perspectives early on, rather than as a final stage, when formal langauge may be reintroduced and everybody’s too tired to argue. Some of the worst give the final say to senior management.
Review When the copy has been signed off and published online it should always go through a final discreet review about a week or so after publication. Once the pressure is off and the deadline has been met, it’s suprising how easy it is to refine and improve what you already have. And if you’re more relaxed, so is your language. Small changes should not require a further approval process.
Test You may be convinced you’ve written spot-on, online copy but the only person who can really tell you that is your site users. Check site metrics looking for pages that people are leaving to soon (boring) or spending too long on (complicated). Make changes and check again. Then make changes and check again.
Today is a good day to begin
Posted by admin in audience engagement, cost effective marketing, online communication, online language, web content on September 23, 2008
Let me see… where shall I start? Well the financial services sector is in meltdown. Banks are going to the wall and if Radio 4′s Today programme is right, senior American politicians are on their knees (well, at least one). In the UK everyone is waiting to see how far the fall-out will spread. From sub-prime mortgages to… house prices, supermarket profits, bankruptcy amongst tour operators, the price of vanilla icecream? Throw the rising fuel prices and global political instability into the mix and what have you got? The latest Mad Max movie.
The question is, why write about here? The CDA Content Lab is all about putting online content under the microscope. Why would a recession interest us?
The obvious answer might appear to be money. Sorry to bring up the ‘m’ word but when banks catch cold the whole world sneezes. The good news is that web and email are cost effective channels when you’re marketing spend has just been ripped to shreds by a Finance Director whose got Bradford and Bingley shares in his childrens’ school fees portfolio. Okay, that’s the business side of things dealt with.
But what really rocks our boat is how all this doom and gloom may be influencing the way we communicate and engage with audiences. This is particularly pertinent online where our execution of day to day tasks can be accomplished cheek by jowl with an RSS feed to our desk top announcing the latest crisis. We can dip into Tesco online and find ourselves simultaneously drawn to the BBC for a news fix.
Take a look at the first paragraph of this post and it’s riddled with nuclear, revolutionary and post-apocalyptic analogies. We use analogies to aid comprehension. It allows us to talk about things to people in a way that will allow them to understand, even if they have no direct experience of what’s being discussed. It also straddles the mental space between language and thought. Not only am I giving you terms of reference so you can understand what I’m talking about but you also get a pretty good idea of how I feel about it.
Analogies (along with first cousins metaphor and simile) also allow us to visualise things and that get’s us into really interesting territory where the web is concerned. The web is a very visual medium. Even when we’re reading online and we actually do very little of that. We’re ‘looking’ at web pages as if they were maps rather than documents; designed to take us onto the next leg of our journey, or confirm that we’ve arrived.
When we see something in a new way we tend to store it in a new way. So all this talk of doom and gloom is having a deep semantic influence. Will we notice this in the language we use and the language that’s used to comunicate back to us? Hold that thought?
Of course, we can’t go back and rewrite books and brochures to reflect this. But the internet – that’s a whole different bag. I’ve certainly been reviewing our online communication looking for words that might inadvertently trigger gloom or hesitancy. This blog aside, I’m avoiding all flippant use of the apocalyptic.
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