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Headlines and the value proposition

Sep 302011

You might know what you do, but does the customer?

It’s sometimes hard to explain your business to a new customer, and that’s a problem.

Entrepreneurs may offer a new type of service or a new product that people aren’t familiar with. But more often, they simply haven’t sat down and really analysed their purpose – what they’re doing, what’s in it for the customer, and what makes them different.

In other words, they haven’t worked out their value proposition.

So people often hesitate when they try to describe what they do. But customers are impatient and don’t like to waste time hunting for clues as to whether or not a business is a match.

Customers and investors may give them a second chance and enough time to explain, because the elevator pitch isn’t always as urgent as it’s portrayed.

You have around 3 seconds to get your message across on the web before visitors start itching to leave your site. So it’s vital to express your promise or value proposition quickly and clearly.

What not to do

Here are five mistakes businesses often make with their value propositions online:

They tell the visitor who they are then bury the pitch in a lot of text below
They say what they do, alright, and leave it at that. The customer wonders why he should care
Their value proposition isn’t expressed clearly, so customers don’t understand what they’re all about
They make a persuasive value proposition but pitch it to the wrong audience
Above all, they simply don’t show what value they offer, and in a few seconds the customer’s gone, probably to do business with the competition.

Why headlines count

Write an effective headline on your home page and you’re half way to successfully communicating your value proposition in those valuable few seconds you’re allotted. You’re also well on the way to avoiding the mistakes above.

A headline will show what you do, who you do it for, and what value (or benefits) you promise. It should be brief, because people are impatient. It should be clear and packed with nouns not adjectives.

In some cases it helps to explain who your target customer is. If you’re a marketing agency working with small businesses in Wisconsin, tell the reader. If you make cars and deal with a wide range of customers, there are other ways to signal your target audience (a picture of a car wouldn’t hurt).

Headlines count because they’re the quickest way to get a customer thinking “I know what this business does, who they do it for and why they’re better than the competition”. And that knowledge takes them one step further to conversion.

Hard words

language, marketing, writing No Responses »

Sep 172011

Marcia Yudkin’s weekly marketing email is always a good read. This week she gave a useful reminder of the value of hard words.

Compare these two pitches:

A. Learn all the latest success strategies for blogs.

B. Turn your blog into a “must-read” for your industry, bringing you steady client leads.

Sentence B has far more power. Whereas sentence A promises more knowledge stuffed into your head, B talks about real-world results.

Hard words engage your readers and hold their attention more effectively. When you’re leading your audience across a river, hard words are the stepping stones you should use.

The hardest words are things you can point to in real life – car, insect, battlefield and client leads. The softest words, giving the mind least purchase, are distant, soggy abstractions – education, capitalism, happiness, success strategies. They’re common in academia and philosophy, as this example shows:

The act that one does, the act that one performs, is, in a sense, an act that has been going on before one arrived on the scene. Hence, gender is an act which has been rehearsed, much as a script survives the particular actors who make use of it, but which requires individual actors in order to be actualized and reproduced as reality once again.

Metaphor is one way of importing hardness and bridging the gap between abstraction and the real world. Shakespeare’s plays teem with metaphors, and he constantly brings us directly, sometimes shockingly, back to lived experience.

This battle fares like to the morning’s war,
When dying clouds contend with growing light,
What time the shepherd, blowing of his nails,
Can neither call it perfect day nor night.
Now sways it this way, like a mighty sea
Forced by the tide to combat with the wind;
Now sways it that way, like the selfsame sea
Forced to retire by fury of the wind:
Sometime the flood prevails, and then the wind;

Revising your work is an opportunity to cut out soft words and increase density, but it’s not always easy. No wonder Pascal (allegedly) wrote “I apologize that this letter is so long – I lacked the time to make it short.”

A marketing baseline or promise is one of the hardest things to write, but it’s easier when you aim to eliminate everything except the real-world results Marcia mentions in her email.

Online learning doesn’t humiliate students enough

content strategy, elearning No Responses »

Sep 122011

There’s a meme going around that online learning is about to destroy the university.

It goes roughly like this:

2. But things like Wikipedia and Kindle have dramatically reduced the barriers to learning stuff outside university.

3. Therefore it’s now cheaper and less time-consuming to learn stuff online, and the days of the university are numbered.

In this vein, Matt Yglesias claims that “American universities are headed for a newspaper-style, technologically-induced giant collapse at some point in the not-to-distant future”

And it’s true that people are learning all sorts of stuff online. The Khan Academy is an enormously popular set of lessons in basic maths topics and a platform teachers can use to identify and tackle pupil weaknesses. The Floating University has just been launched, offering access to lectures by Steven Pinker and Joel Cohen. Even Carol Vorderman has a startup offering online maths lessons.

These ventures are wonderful. They’re opening minds to new ideas and topics, lowering the cost of learning, and will likely have all sorts of unforeseen benefits.

But they may be lacking something. Consider this story about how Ernest Gellner tackled Brendan O’Leary’s doctoral thesis.

“He began the viva by warmly congratulating me… Naturally I felt elated. But then he counselled me that he had one minor obligation to perform: he was required (in the manner of Karl Popper) to test whether he could falsify the thesis that I had written for the dissertation. A chill ran down my recently elated spine. He then performed his duty, corrected my errors, and gave me salutary advice on matters philosophical, anthropological, linguistic, historical and sociological. Lastly he presented me with about 20 pages of typed commentary, amounting to an article in response to my efforts. In short, he demonstrated generosity, utterly professional social scientific standards and astounding scholarly range.”

Online learning as communication of knowledge may never offer the challenge of falsification as efficiently as offline learning.

Prof Yglesias’s statement that “A college, or a law school, is basically supposed to be conveying information to people” seems to put unnecessary limits on education.

Schools and universities aren’t village wells

From Cardinal Newman to Michael Oakeshott, people have agreed that universities aren’t just there to communicate facts and then check they’re in your head. You don’t follow a degree course as if you’re gathering water from the village well. Oakeshott says “A university will have ceased to exist when … its teaching has become mere instruction and occupies the whole of an undergraduate’s time”¹.

There’s something more to education. For example, Oxford University’s tutorial system is designed to give an important extra dimension to education beyond conveying information to people. A weekly tutorial gathers a small number of undergraduates to discuss and analyse hypotheses, defend them, criticise and attempt to falsify them.

Will Moore describes the tutorial like this: “Its function is not to instruct: it is to set the student the task of expressing his thought articulately, and then to assist him in subjecting his creation to critical examination”. The tutorial system is “a sceptical method, a method that inquires, probes, scrutinises. It is not at its best in ex cathedra authoritative statement, but in criticism, theory, analysis, comparison.”

Short term humiliation for long term confidence

The tutorial system has some of the features of the Socratic system. From the student’s point of view, it can be both immensely frustrating – even humiliating – in the short term, and rewarding in the long term. The tutor is irritatingly unassailable because he or she rarely tenders a position that can be attacked. The burden is mostly on the student.

A fair portion of Plato’s dialogues consists of people getting irritated with Socrates’s constant questions and challenges.

It’s not impossible to replicate some of the effects of this system. Writing can be an internal dialogue if you learn to have a (good) imp on your shoulder constantly asking “is that actually true?” as you write. Reading critically can have a similar effect.

But training that imp independently isn’t necessarily the most efficient path to critical thought. Learning to think just by thinking is a long hard road. It doesn’t quickly reveal to you that other people can be right despite first appearances suggesting that they’re obviously wrong, stubborn and stupid. And it doesn’t teach you to defend and criticise out loud and inter vivos.

Buddhism has its masters. Business has its mentors. Brendan O’Leary had his Ernest Gellner. Does online learning have or need its own equivalent?

1. The Tutorial System (Word document, 560Kb) ^

Do companies need a Chief Curation Officer?

browsing, content strategy, curation No Responses »

Sep 072011

Now that content is so important to the conversation between businesses and customers, should businesses be hiring somebody to pick out the best content on their websites?

After all, curation is the latest great thing. It seems to solve the problem that in some contexts, search is just too machiney. For example, Felix Salmon has just joined the ranks of curators with the launch of counterparties.com, “a curated snapshot of the best finance news and commentary”.

Of course, counterparties has existed for a good long time as a regular feature on Felix’s blog, but this launch on a separate domain represents a formalisation of the principle.

Herding sheep

From the point of view of news and content strategy, Counterparties is interesting because it’s neither fully human-powered nor chosen by algorithm. Instead, it combines both – the wisdom of crowds anchored by good old-fashioned human judgement about what’s interesting. Think of it as a shepherd (Felix) rounding up the content sheep using an intelligent sheepdog (the algorithm).

Counterparties combines our own judgment — what we find interesting, overlooked and important — with the recommendation engine created by our friends at Percolate.

The site joins other important curation sites such as The Browser and Brainpickings. They’re an answer to the problem of serendipity, which search generally fails to provide.

Laura Larsell sums up the problem:

“search” works best when you have a pretty good sense of what you are looking for. But most people, most of the time, do not have concrete ideas of what they really want.

Why U No Browse?

Is that true for your average commercial website? It’s debatable. There’s a strong case for organising content around the tasks people want to achieve when they arrive on your website: I want to buy a coffee machine; how do I apply for this course; what vegetarian options does the restaurant offer… and so on.

Browsing isn’t much use in that sort of task-orientated process. If anything, it’s a distraction. But Laura points out that companies like Amazon and Netflix already encourage serendipitous discovery by means of widgets that tell you what other people bought and what they list as great books and films.

With that in mind, it’s not hard to imagine ways an imaginary Chief Curation Officer might encourage browsing. A travel company might pick an interesting destination to highlight (indeed, this already happens on sites such as tripadvisor.com). An intranet manager might select best practice case studies or interesting quotes culled by the sales department from conversations with the customer. A bike shop might feature a video showing how to tackle the local downhill race course. And a university site might feature great ideas that appear in its undergraduate physics (or philosophy, or medicine) course.

Web development now looks enough like magic

copywriting, employment, programming, web editors No Responses »

Jul 212011

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” – Arthur C Clarke.

This blog has always argued that content creators need to broaden their skills. They should know a little bit about design and a little bit about the code underlying what they create.

Employers agree. A quick survey of current web editor job advertisements shows that they are demanding:

“Sound understanding of HTML and HTML editing, including basic CSS”
“Basic knowledge of HTML coding”
“competence in HTML and other web mark-up languages, Photoshop and CSS”

But with the adoption of increasingly complex methods for presenting content, that idea needs qualification.

It’s now clear that the latest generation of languages like CSS3 and HTML5 are putting coding skills beyond the reach of many web editors. Presentation is now looking a little like magic. Add javascript frameworks, the need for responsive web design, the fragmentation of browser standards and a host of other changes, and you have to ask whether it’s worth an editor spending the time to learn what the job descriptions above are asking for.

If you’re a web editor whose primary skill is researching, writing, summarising, proofing or whatever, developing a “basic knowledge of HTML coding” will eat into the time you should spend on perfecting your writing, proofing, etc, and in any case looks increasingly pointless when the technology is marching ahead so fast.

Of course, you can’t buck the market. This isn’t advice for web editors to ignore what employers say they want, but for them (and employers) simply to question their priorities.

Friday reads for content creators

Uncategorized No Responses »

Jul 162011

There’s a lot of interesting stuff about content getting published these days, so this is an attempt to round up recent items that have attracted attention here at the Typeclear complex.

This may turn into a weekly series. We’ll see how it goes…

Site planning starts with a good old-fashioned spreadsheet

A useful primer on the importance of planning a message hierarchy before building a site. Among other things, suggests eliminating ipsum lorem text and putting real content in from the get-go.

A elegant way to get from A to B

Charlie Park wonders why Edward Tufte’s slopegraph has never been popular, despite its elegance. Perhaps its time is about to come…

Ending the flash of regret with good button design

Presenting users with options increases the odds of something going wrong. But clever use of the primary action button can stop users trashing their files or making other frustrating mistakes.

Always be converting
It’s not just lack of interest that discourages people from clicking your links. Here are five ways to frame your calls to action by overcoming user uncertainty and inertia.

How the monster BBC World Service website tries to please both skimmers and diggers

Designing a site to display a torrent of news in 27 languages isn’t a piece of cake. Tammy Gur suggests it’s more like a tray of sushi. Interesting background piece on how the BBC’s World Service runs its vast site smoothly.

Content creators need to play nicely with developers and designers

project management, usability, web design, web editors, writing No Responses »

Jul 142011

On creating content in a huddle instead of on a production line

By now, everyone agrees that designers and developers ought to collaborate with content creators from the early stages of a project.

And it’s common ground that developers shouldn’t just create a bucket to drop content into, and designers shouldn’t design first then fit the content around the design.

Unfortunately, content creators – writers, website editors and commissioners, web managers – sometimes treat this as a victory in a battle for territory. The phrase Content is King is bandied around in the belief that everything should revolve around the work of content creators.

But that belief implies that developers, designers and content creators are workers on a factory production line, and that content can be bashed into shape in a series of specialised stages. So by the time a site is launched, writers and designers are already working on the next project or the one after that, and barely even recognise (or notice) the finished product.

Better then, that writers, developers and designers should work in a huddle and create content together and iteratively. Content creators should aim to understand the possibilities and limitations of the proposed technology, and developers need to understand what creators are trying to achieve. That can only be done if all the factory workers are involved at all stages.

But what does collaboration mean in practice?

Mention collaboration and people will quickly agree it’s a good thing. Effectiveness through working together is an article of faith of the post-heroic wikinomics age.

But understanding when and how developers, designers and content creators should collaborate is less easy to pin down. It all depends on the project and the context, so the rule book may never be written.

Instead, here are some examples of contexts showing that a collaborative approach makes more sense now than ever.

Layout influences content. Content influences layout.

The 37signals home page is an example of designers and writers working together effectively.

One reason why the 37 signals homepage is clever is because it deals with the problem of smooth pursuit well. Smooth pursuit is the eye’s ability to follow a moving target very closely. The smaller and faster the target, the more difficult is smooth pursuit and the more likely the eye will jump in saccades.

When you scroll a block of text, the eye has trouble catching up and it becomes difficult to read without interruption. That creates a cognitive burden (see my previous article on eyetracking). But like many other designs nowadays, the 37signals site turns the text into chunks effectively. Crucially, it uses icons which the eye finds very helpful when trying to orientate itself again after a page has scrolled.

So even though the page carries a lot of text and it takes a lot of scrolling to reach the bottom, design and content have been harmonised to good effect.

Content isn’t only text

Everywhere you look, there are graphs, infographics, dashboards, icons, animations and new ways of combining text information with graphical information.

And technology (particularly processing power and bandwidth) means we now deal with massive amounts of data. Very often, the best way to summarise and present it is through pictorial representation. Turning that data into something understandable takes the expertise of developers to explain the technical possibilities, designers to… design, and writers to comment, caption, analyse and contextualise.

The journey and the task

Website users are often described as going on “journeys” to achieve “tasks”. That immediately implies the involvement of people who understand how users think and act – information architects and UX designers.

And it means that copywriters cannot simply dump their work onto a web development conveyor belt to be shaped by other workers. The purpose of a site – its key messages and how it seeks to help its audience – need to be fashioned at the same time as its content.

Psychology and testing

We’re improving our ability to understand the emotional and psychological effect of design. It’s still pretty primitive, but we’re getting some empirical knowledge of what makes people click, why they like some designs and not others, which colours they like and so on.

Books like Neuro Web Design are relevant not only to designers, but to developers and content creators too. Sites such as www.abtests.com and whichtestwon.com are showing that content can be adapted to form in order to improve conversion on clickthrough rates, sales and subscriptions.

Responsive web content

Developers are working to adapt their code to the current fragmentation of standards and new devices such as iPads and smart phones, but the evolution is also affecting the type and format of content. The responsive web design (a method for adapting site design so that it fits many devices) needs to be matched by responsive content.

Content creators need to be aware of these changes, and particularly of the migration to mobile. Ten or fifteen years ago, the web was a collection of pages and it looked quite like a book. But in recent years, it’s exploded. Content now has to fit different devices, and creators have to be prepared for their work to be dismantled and reassembled by users, copied, quoted, summarised in 140 characters, linked to and liked.

Industrial-scale humour

advertising, content strategy, copywriting, marketing No Responses »

Jun 072011

Groupon has been described as a number of things – coupon merchant, advertising business, the missing bit of Google, and Ponzi scheme.

It’s also a publisher, with a content strategy that can be summarised as follows:

Recruit a great many experienced writers and pay them well. They have around 1,000 writers, and are hiring furiously around the world. US salaries are 37k a year, and many writers are refugees from journalism.
Devise a style guide to ensure that each offer has a quirky description, frequently touching on invented historical anecdotes, zombies or animals.
Profit.

Of course, Groupon hasn’t yet achieved step three but it may only be a matter of time.

If you’re not familiar with Groupon, it’s a platform advertising special offers from local businesses. It contacts small businesses to persuade them to set up a significant discount on its goods and services then uses email, mobile, Twitter, FaceBook and its website to advertise them for a limited amount of time. It works because it effectively delivers attention and the promise of a large number of customers in a short time – a bit like an advert in a newspaper for a huge one-day sale in a local department store.

And there is the now famous Groupon voice, which appears to break all the rules of writing sales copy.

To put it bluntly, they don’t really sell. One aspiring candidate was told that “even hinting that the item on offer was in some way good was too “sales-y””

Groupon writers should avoid “positing our deal as the obvious solution to the reader’s imaginary problems”.

And they shouldn’t make “repetitive use of the imperative. The reader doesn’t want to be told what to do.” I think numerous marketers would disagree with that last assertion.

Instead of salesy copy, they describe the offers in a madcap fashion. Groupon’s style guide recommends using “Absurd images. Sweeping, dramatic nonsense, hypothetical worlds, fake proverbs, fake history and illogical comparisons.”

And those lists of three, without which a Groupon offer would seem naked.

When Yoga was first discovered it wasn’t taken seriously because the best practitioners were holistic hounds, contemplative crows, and flexible fish…

If foam noodles can be found floating on the surface of almost every pool, think how many perfectly salted meatballs must be at the bottom of the ocean. Start discovering the sea’s sunken treats with today’s Groupon…

And so on. Will it last? “Whimsy, like black lace underwear, is all right in its place” according to Rexroth, so perhaps whimsy has found its place in Groupon. “Nothing odd will do long” said Johnson, so perhaps it hasn’t.

Fix your spelling for better income

language No Responses »

Apr 072011

How important is correct spelling and good grammar on the web?

If people go online to achieve tasks (rent a flat, research the demographics of Iowa), do they care if you can’t spell the word accommodation?

Copywriting guides always say good spelling and grammar is vital. But they might be raising a barrier to entry to the job of copywriting just as any guild does. You can’t be a copywriter without evidence of formal education.

Here’s some evidence that it pays to get grammar and spelling right.

An online retailer noticed that indeed products with high-quality reviews are selling well. So, they decided to take action. They used Amazon Mechanical Turk to improve the quality of its reviews. Using the Find-Fix-Verify pattern, they used Mechanical Turk to examine a few millions of product reviews …. For the reviews with mistakes, they fixed the spelling and grammar errors! Thus they effectively improved the quality of the reviews on their website. And, correspondingly, they improved the demand for their products

The retailer was Zappos. And they paid at least 10 cents per review.

That is the market saying that good grammar and spelling is important.

Truth hurts: Does everyone hate corporate blah blah?

language No Responses »

Mar 272011

A lot of people hate corporate blah. Many people in corporations say they hate corporate blah.

Outsiders criticise it because they think companies use it to bamboozle them.

Insiders look at the latest memo telling them to unlock cross-functional innovation through despecialisation, and delete it.

Copywriters regard it as the Dark Lord Sauron, Beelzebub and Pol Pot rolled into one. To be avoided, as a rule.

And yet like sin, it sits behind a writer’s shoulder as an ever-present temptation.

So why does it survive?

Here are some possible reasons:

1. Companies use it to differentiate themselves in mature markets

In industries that have little innovation and numerous producers with similar or identical offers, marketers face a serious problem of identifying what makes them different from competitors.

As a result, they often end up playing with language. Instead of shouting that they have a ground-breaking new product or service, they must cast the same old product in a new light by describing it differently.

Take an airline, for example. As soon as you try to move away from its functional description of getting people from A to B you enter the territory of abstractions, vagueness and made-up terms.

2. People use it deliberately to create vagueness for specific purposes

In a classic paper titled Ambiguity as Strategy in Organizational Communication (PDF), E M Eisenberg suggests that the demand for clarity in communication has become an ideology. It’s not practical or sensible to try to achieve it at all times and in all places, because doing so will hamper the attainment of a complex set of goals.

Instead, people in organisations should apply “strategic ambiguity”. This allows them, for example, to “foster agreement on abstractions without limiting specific interpretations.”

It makes it easier for organisations to change. Ambiguity allows members to cope with shifting priorities and helps them adapt to changing relationships with colleagues.

Strategic ambiguity is both a help and hindrance to maintaining or breaking status in an organisation. “For those who are highly credible, clarity is always risky, since it provides the receiver with new information which can result in a potentially negative reevaluation of character. For those with low credibility, the opposite is true; clear communication remains a risk, but it is one of the only ways they can improve other’s impressions of them through communication.”

Finally, strategic ambiguity is deniable. Eisenberg points out that clever managers rarely lay down the law explicitly and clearly, because if a valued employee then breaks it the manager will be in the awkward position of having to uphold consistency.

3. Industries, companies and departments develop a common language that becomes inaccessible to outsiders

Most organisations eventually develop an industry jargon, technical language, or set of linguistic shortcuts. Despite their obscurity to outsiders, these often represent an efficiency gain. This is particularly true when conveying ideas rather than cold facts.

4. People go all fluffy to avoid conflict

In an interesting post on Marginal Revolution last year, Tyler Cowen speculated that “People disagree in corporations, often virulently, or they would disagree if enough real debates were allowed to reach the surface. The use of broad generalities, in rhetoric, masks such potential disagreements and helps maintain corporate order and authority. Since it is hard to oppose fluffy generalities in any very specific way, a common strategy is to stack everyone’s opinion or points into an incoherent whole. Disagreement is then less likely to become a focal point within the corporation and warring coalitions are less likely to form.”

That seems true to me. But it does raise questions.

New recruits can have difficulty understanding what the heck’s going on. In an organisation where ambiguity is out of control, it can take months or even years to grasp the implication of corporate blah.

In organisations where unity and agreement is essential at all times, you might expect corporate blah to define all communication. But from what I know of armies, the opposite is the case.

What will happen to corporations that persist in using corporate blah in a time when the Taylorist/Fordist model is breaking down and all employees are entitled to their opinion?

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