Meine Freunde, the web is a big sinkhole of the horrible (must be spoken with French accent, especially the German part). This is not news to you but we’ve become rather inured to it all. There is a solution for bad websites. It’s to make them more webular. Webularity is the quality of design and writing that characterizes those websites that help users answer questions and solve problems. In other words, your website’s value to your customer. There are many ways to create this value but it always start with the audience. This is hard, I know. It’s one of those things that few of us like to think about. It’s like trying to figure out the opposite sex, or even the same sex if you’re trying to have a relationship. But the reward is commensurate with the effort put in to understand them. Understanding an audience can begin with thinking about why you started your company or why your employer exists. It’s always about solving a problem. They don’t have to be this obscure: Let’s examine what problem solving is all about. Think about your own behavior on the web. When you do a search, you’re essentially looking for information or a product to solve a problem. Even when you’re looking for something funny to Tweet, you’re in a problem-solving mood. You’re goal-oriented. The same is true with anyone coming to your website. Problem solving When you conduct a search, you follow pretty predictable behavior, even if you’re a pretty unpredictable person. Google and Bing know this quite well. It’s not just the search algorithm looking for patterns. It’s search algorithms based on billions and billions of tracked behaviors and an understanding of how people conduct searches. In my book, I tell writers over and over to observe their own web behavior and buying behavior. Doing this will tell you a lot about human nature and will give you clues to how your commercial audience behaves. There are so many ways to search for something using words in a browser window. Let’s search for information about a vacation to India. travel to india traveling to india travel india travelling to india traveling india travel to india from usa immunizations for travel to india travel agents to india cdc travel india travel to india shots travel to india visa vaccines for travel to india cheap travel to india travel visa india travel agent india travels to india travel agency india That is just a small sample of things a potential visitor to India might type into Google or Bing. If you examine them closely, you see different intentions. Someone...
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I know this might hurt your sensibilities, and I’m really sorry for that, but let’s say it out loud…there is nothing precious about paper books. It doesn’t matter what form a book is in before you put it into your head. What happens as it goes into your head is what matters. It’s just gross to romanticize paper books. Millions of trees are slaughtered, habitat destroyed, and dead dinosaurs spilled (ink). They take up a lot of room and they eventually fall apart. Saying you can’t make the move to e-books because you “…love the look and smell of a ‘real’ book in my hands” is like Guttenberg saying, “I love unrolling a scroll, and the crinkle and smell of papyrus. To hell with this press idea. It will ruin books as we know them.” Real books are in your head The reality of your relationship with a book is what happens in your head. Most of the time, if the writing is compelling, you don’t notice the way the content is delivered. The only way you notice the form is when your hand cramps and you have to switch to the other hand (unless the book is too big for one hand). I’ve been a convert to electronic print for over a year now. I used to be one of you. I said all the same things I hear over and over now from friends and family about their unwillingness to give up paper books. “I love the look of real books. I love how they smell and how they feel in my hand.” Now I hate paper books. They’re heavy. They cramp my hands and arms. I’m loathe to mark them up with a highlighter or pencil. I can’t search inside them quickly. I can’t take 20 paper books on holiday. I never thought it would come to this. Books have been a huge part of my life since I was able to read. Before then, I mostly used them to reach my brother’s toys so I could break them. I still own over 300 paper books that look nice on the shelves but rarely get opened. E-books are real books. Books happen in your head. You read a novel differently than your neighbor does. (But that doesn’t really count because your neighbor only reads pictures on the Interwebs. I looked through his window one night.) Great authors rely on your imagination, which currently resides mostly in your head, to fill in details about plot, story, and character that would be ridiculous for them to write for the same reason that we hate exposition in movies. It’s unnecessary. Write the...
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Business bloggers, why do you hate America? I know you have deadlines and a paycheck to justify but you’re creating fear in the damaged psyches of the easily influenced. A better solution for your readers is right here and nearly any writer can achieve the goal. Forbes has an article about 25 Things Influential People Do Better Than Anyone Else. This kind of article hurts the Interwebs and also my head as a writer and thinker. (I don’t necessarily do both of those at the same time. It’s hard. Like the Maths.) It’s one of those “list posts” that web writers have learned to conjure up when they can’t think of anything else to write. I shouldn’t slam lists, I use them myself and even recommend them in my book. But they’ve become a kind of “go to” post that often doesn’t do anything to help the reader. They’re just there to take up bandwidth and the world is rapidly running out of bandwidth. We are heading toward a global bandwidth crisis! If I had any influence, this paragraph would scare the shit out of you. List posts are…listful The best thing about “list posts” is that the headlines offer the reader the promise of easy consumption of the content. You know the article is offering steps that are easily scanned and might be capable of implementation. Although a list of 25 or a 101 of anything is generally more than the twitchy Internet audience wants to read. Seriously, if you can sit through reading a list of 101 of anything, you are desperate, my friend, to find SOMETHING to make your life better. Anyone offering you a list of 101 things is really reaching, really stretching their ability to…list things. There is unlikely to be much there that will change your life or your level of influence (or the specific gravity of nickel, which as we all know would benefit almost no one. I have no idea what that means but I like how it sounds on the page). You need to re-prioritize your methods of gathering useful information. In fact, Forbes’ list of 25 doesn’t really fulfill its promise. It provides few usable examples for each of the 25 characteristics of influential people. But it probably does achieve the goal of getting clicks because the target demo for the article is…people who don’t have influence but crave a portion of it scooped up like non-fat ice cream and delivered to them for free. That’s not how actual influence works. Real influence arises from having something useful to offer a specific audience. People like to say that someone like Guy...
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What is it that appeals to us in advertising? We like to think the answer is…nothing. Not true. When we don’t feel pitched to, we respond with positive feelings towards advertising. Righters of Roadside Wrongs AAA has a new membership recruitment program that includes the following taglines: Righters of roadside wrongs Defenders of distressed drivers Sworn enemies of stalled engines Accompanying the lines (which I first saw on a Metro bus) are images of beer-bellied superheroes. There are a few things that appeal here. The alliteration in the lines The overblown importance of the role depicted The images of superheroes as regular guys or vice versa Alliteration, the occurrence of the same letter or sound at the beginning of adjacent or closely connected words, appeals to our auditory sense of balance and harmony. It makes things very easy to remember. Mnemonics often use alliteration. Our ears have fun with these sounds and the semblance of order they evoke. A sworn enemy is a very serious thing. But of course, the subject of the ad campaign is not terribly serious. Yes, we love having someone get us out of a jam but most of the time, it’s jumping a battery or changing a tire. The inflated importance suggested in the ad makes us smile, perhaps even chuckle. Anytime an advertiser can make us smile or laugh, they disarm our natural suspicion about them and we’re more open to the pitch. Occasionally, the men and women who show up for AAA are daily heroes. At least it feels that way when you’re on the receiving end of a rescue. In the image above, we see someone who could not be more ordinary. An ample waistline protrudes beneath his muscular arms. His stance implies, “Here and no further.” It’s a defenders stance. And finally, his international-orange highway vest streams out behind him like a cape. It’s a very clever bit of composition altogether. The words and images capture in shorthand a message that we understand immediately and makes us smile. This is very, very difficult to do. Its simplicity belies the effort behind the campaign. Undoubtedly the taglines preceded the images but the writers may have had concept images in mind (a virtual certainty). As a writer, I have a great appreciation for this...
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I was flattered and very pleased this week to be selected by one of my favorite bloggers, Lisa, to guest blog on her site, 2CreateAWebSite.com. The topic that I’d chosen to write about was How to Court Failure. You might think this was a cautionary tale, and in a way it is. But not like you think. Read on… So what is the Harley emblem doing blazoned across the top of this post? I love Harleys. I hate loud noises but I love the sound of my Heritage Softail Classic. It’s also a beautiful piece of machinery, not unlike artwork by my friend, Ginny Ruffner, at least insomuch as they both use lots of heavy metal. Harleys were once the ride of the social misfit. Not that bikers were necessarily misfits but mainstream culture saw them that way. Now big bikes are the ride of corporate CEOs who want to play bad boy on the weekend. At $16,000 to $25,000 for a new Harley, that’s an expensive image. But it’s one that Harley has sold extremely well. Harley’s success cannot be measured in dollars alone. I don’t know what the company’s officers thought about their customers when Harley was associated with danger and criminal activity. But they effectively transformed the company into a respected worldwide product line that is one of the handful of instantly recognizable brands that scream “America” without being offensive (I’m sure that’s a matter of opinion, yes). McDonalds would have a very hard time doing that. In fact, part of the worldwide allure of Harleys is their association with “American” values of freedom and independence. (Please take note that I realize this is an illusion. My Harley does give me a feeling of freedom and independence but so did my Yamaha. It’s the association with those feelings that Harley markets so well. And there is something about the name, the styling, and the sound that sets Harley apart.) What does this have to do with illusions of personal success? Whether we’re talking about Bill Gates or Harley or AIG or you and me, we seem to have very narrow definitions of what success means. The worst part is that we often don’t define it for ourselves but we let the culture provide a definition into which we try to shoehorn ourselves. As I said in one of the comments on Lisa’s blog, perhaps the biggest failure we make in life is not defining success for ourselves, defining it narrowly by social standards, subsequently defining its absence as failure, and then being miserable with the results. I suspect what most people want is not really mega-success...
Read MoreWait, let’s start over. A freelance copywriter (designer, developer, lawyer, whatever) gives a longtime client a bid. The client gasps and says, “Why so much? This is only a couple of hours of work!” To which the freelance copywriter states, “Yes. A couple of hours and fifteen years of experience.” Can’t just anybody do it? I read a poorly-written article recently, mercifully short, that disparaged all copywriters as having nothing to offer. The author argued that anyone can be a copywriter by studying political pundits at the extremes of the spectrum. The topic was commercial copywriting. The stated wisdom in the article was that you don’t need to write copy that sells, you only need to write with passion. This ignores the fact that the extreme political pundits are essentially performers and are ranting to the already-converted. The converted aren’t reading to be convinced; they’re reading to have their biases confirmed. What’s your labor worth? If everyone who could type an email had professional communication skills, millions of writers would be out of work and this is clearly not the case. That doesn’t mean all those writers are good. It means all those people hiring them know that they don’t have the skills they’re hiring for. Commercial copywriting, like any profession, requires skill acquired over many years. Only those who don’t understand what it takes to do something can ever ask, “How hard could it be?” Freelancers in any profession hear this all too frequently. There are clients who get it and clients who don’t. The ones who get it feel they’re investing in services or products that will affect their bottom line positively. The ones who don’t get it feel like any business expense is a ripoff that they should get for less money. (This doesn’t apply to their product or service, of course.) Let’s make a deal In fairness, we all like a deal and hate the idea of overpaying. We forget the times we bought something on the cheap and were sorry. We say, “Well, you get what you pay for.” And then we go out looking for the cheapest deal again. So how do we learn to do a better job of valuing the services of the professionals we hire? We don’t have time to learn how difficult it is to do someone else’s job. We think of most jobs in terms of actual time spent. But the guy or gal who fixes the catalytic converter on your car not only had to get trained to do that, they had to fix a bunch of them for real and they had to buy expensive tools...
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