Tag: Web Content

Storytelling for Social Media

Perhaps the biggest challenge for PR professionals today is sharing the stage with all the other people trying to tell a version of the corporate story — from Marketing and Customer Service to employees, customers, and indie pundits.

social media geek
Social media seven years ago. How things have changed.

For the past seven years, I’ve been a guest speaker for the Certificate in Public Relations & Strategic Communications program at the University of Washington Professional and Continuing Education division. I do a presentation on social media — which seven years ago consisted of talking about blogging on LiveJournal and Blogger and setting up a profile on MySpace.

How times have changed.

Tonight I talked about the institutionalization of social media. I suggested that social media has matured and become increasingly complex. Strategic analyses of audiences, organizational resources, and the current proliferation of social media platforms, are essential. So is investment in the technology and training necessary to take advantage of sophisticated social media tools.

Perhaps the biggest challenge for PR professionals today is sharing the stage with all the other people trying to tell a  version of the corporate story — from Marketing and Customer Service to employees, customers, and indie pundits.

I’ve posted a PDF of my Keynote slide deck “Storytelling for Social Media” for the students in Lee Schoentrup’s class.  Everyone else is welcome to take a look at the deck, though I’m not sure how much sense it will make without the accompanying song-and-dance.

To engage website readers, replace “we” with “you”

To engage website visitors, shift the focus from what your organization is doing for them to what they can do with your products and services.

photo showing people pointing to youWhen I edit a client’s website, the first thing I look at is tone. If the content makes the reader feel passive, powerless, or bored, I spice it up. Sometimes spicing it up involves adding more substantive, useful information. But, oddly, often all it requires is changing a few words. This has become so instinctive for me that I don’t often analyze how I’m doing it.

Recently a woman whose website I was editing asked how she could write copy that wouldn’t need to be edited and recast. This forced me to look at exactly what I was doing to enliven her copy. Here’s what I discovered:

I change sentences that leave the reader in a passive position (relative to the website) to sentences that focus the spotlight on the reader and his or her experience.

Example: “We have arranged for rapid check-in.” becomes “You’ll enjoy rapid check-in when you arrive.”

While this is natural for me, as an outside consultant, it’s difficult for in-house writers. That’s because they are so aware of how hard the organization has worked on a project they can’t resist the temptation to pat themselves or their colleagues on the back. They don’t notice that it comes across as subtly off-putting to the reader — particularly on a website where every topic begins with a description of how admirable the organization (“we”) is .

The cold, hard, fact is that the reader just doesn’t care; the reader wants to know what’s in it for him or her. Organizations like Amazon.com recognize that. They don’t tell you how they’ve been working their tails off to make the site convenient for you. They tell  you about all the things you can now do with their site.

Example: “We have chosen iPad photography as the topic for the next meeting.” focuses on the exclusive little group making decisions. It could be recast to use a genuine, inclusive “we”: “We’ll be discussing iPad photography.” Even better, it could focus on the website visitor:  “Bring your experiences and questions about iPad photography to the next meeting.”

My client recognized the change of tone that resulted, and said she was going to give it a try.

What do you think? Does shifting from the organizational “we” to a customer-focused “you” make a significant difference? Are there downsides to it?

Is your web writer stealing content? Are you encouraging plagiarism?

Do you patronize a business that steals content?

image says "copy paste steal"Last week I visited the website of a local business and was astonished to see that the keyworded webpage describing one of their services had the name of a rival business on it — in a big, bold subhead.

Curious, I went to the website of the rival, and there was the exact same content and photo.

The writer for the first business had simply copied and pasted the content (which appears to be original to the second business) onto the client’s site.

I sent email to the manager of Business #1, alerting her to the situation and explaining that the writer she’d paid to develop original content was instead using the content that Business #2 had paid their own writer, and a stock photography house, to provide. I noted that what her writer had done was plagiarism, and her writer had put them into a situation where they could be sued by the content owner.

The manager wrote back, expressing astonishment. She thanked me for letting her know, and said she’d deal with it.

Out of casual curiosity, I went back the following day to see if she had removed the page. My jaw dropped.

The content was still there. All that the manager of Business #1 had done to deal with the situation was to remove the name of the rightful owner of the content, Business #2, from the page and substitute the name of her business in the big, bold subhead. The unlicensed image was still there.

I called and spoke to the manager. She clearly thought that the error I was pointing out was that she had failed to remove the clue pointing back to the source of her stolen web content. I pressed the point, and her utterly unflappable response was that, hey, the content writer was a friend who had done the work for her for free.

Which shows that you really do get what you pay for.

Interestingly, Business #2 is an extremely competitive chain known for aggressive business practices. I predict it won’t take long for them to find the purloined web content.

I flirted with the idea that the writer who left the name of Business #2 in the stolen copy was making a stab at doing “black hat” SEO*, but decided not to attribute malice (or competence) to what’s clearly several layers of small-time thievery and laziness.

*”Black hat SEO” is the industry term for unethical search engine optimization. One of its milder (“gray hat”) tactics involves mentioning your rival’s name on your webpage so that search engines will lead people looking for your rival’s services to your page, where you can talk them into using your services  instead.

Fake FAQs

Marketers have borrowed the FAQ format from instructional websites in the hopes of giving complex, confusing, and discouraging information about their products the appearance of user friendliness.

Why do websites have FAQs? Why don’t they just answer their visitors’ burning questions right on the web pages themselves? Isn’t that the heart of sales and customer services?

Jeff Sexton makes the case against FAQs this week on the blog at the marketing site GrokDotCom.com.

However, I think he’s going up against a straw man. In my experience, while a few companies may be naively burying compelling marketing content on the FAQ page, most are using the FAQ page to hide problems. They use it as a dumping ground for required warnings and other “small print” disclaimers, as well as a place to put the ugly details about cumbersome naming or numbering conventions that can’t be rationally or quickly explained on marketing pages.

In short, marketers have borrowed the FAQ format from instructional websites in the hopes of giving complex, confusing, and discouraging information about their products the appearance of user friendliness.

Here’s an example from HP’s refurbished-products sales site. This FAQ answers the burning questions “How can I tell what the desktop form factors are?” and “How do I decipher part numbers for refurbished products?” (Warning: The answers to these questions may lead people who do user-facing design to bang their heads on the their own desktops — regardless of form factor.)

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