More about blogs

The BBC has an editorial strand called City Diaries, in the business section (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7788608.stm).

Are these blogs? Are they user generated content? Are they vox pops? Are they amateur journalism?

Can’t get the staff?

Have you ever noticed that sometimes…no, often…companies put out adverts or job specs for a web editorial role that is, more or less, a request for a whole department in one package, rather than just one individual with a specialism?

Here are two corkers.

This job ad (enlarge image) is for a “Web Designer/Editor”. It says:

Why content editors shouldn’t design web pages

There are a few content editors out there who have been told or who think that using Dreamweaver (or whatever) and designing web pages for their company is a good idea. I was in that position for a while and my pages looked nasty and the content suffered. I’m a writer, not a designer or a coder.

While there are thirty or forty reasons why content editors and writers shouldn’t design, the most important of them is not knowing what on earth is going on behind the scenes.

Need to cut costs? Hit delete.

The rate of profit is falling for USA corporates (see EUI: 40% risk of recession in the United States by Robin Bew).

It doesn’t take a genius to predict there will be a (further) spending squeeze for most companies.

How will that translate to online channels?

Yes, Mr Nielsen, right you are…

Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox, October 1, Blah-Blah Text: Keep, Cut, or Kill? has a great piece of advice: take the red pen to the extraneous introductory text and cut to the chase.

He then points out that:

“It’s easy to tell Web writers to cut the fluff. It’s harder to actually do it. Each time a new content contributor joins your team, you must drill them incessantly on the special guidelines for writing for the Web. The guidelines seem obvious, but it takes a lot of skill to design good verbiage.”

I like Jakob’s advice. I try and follow it whenever I can.

But he’s missing an important point here (and I’ll lay bets he knows it).

Lots of web writers and editors don’t need to be told to cut the puff, fluff and verbiage. They know how to write for the web because they’ve been reading useit.com for years.

They’ve been trained as copywriters, journalists and subeditors. They’ve been drilled by print editors during their very lean periods after university, college or school when they worked for next-to-nothing to learn their trade.

They can write tight copy. They can kill unnecessary adjectives. They can write short, punchy sentences. They can keep to one idea per paragraph. And they can do it in plain language, with their eyes closed and their hands tied.

What they can’t do is say “no, I won’t publish that” to the VP of marketing, or comms director, or other departmental boss who’s been called in to back up his marcomms people (or other contributors) who’ve been fighting the web team for that pointless “intro” text (and the rest) because, they say, it’s important.

Want to escalate the disagreement even further? It’s easier to just wait till after office hours and have a beer. No one’s going to read the intro text anyway … users know how to scan past it.

Online marcomms and corporate comms: same family, different faces?

Over the past five years I’ve learned a lot about consultancies’ and companies’ approaches to corporate and marketing websites.

It seems to me that the development and performance measures of websites today are dominated by a marketing-communications approach, no matter the type of site or the goals to be met.

By marketing-communications, I mean branded communications that focus on demand and sales of products or services. (Read Wikipedia’s definition.)

Often this means that marketing assumptions are inappropriately applied to corporate websites by both consultancies and the companies they’re developing websites for.

Marketing’s emphasis is to persuade users to buy. Audiences carry out that decision through a measurable checkout process, whether online or in a shop.

The tagline is still (always) important

“Let me save you 100,000 dollars,” says Guy Kawasaki, ex-Apple guy, and leads his audience to the Dilbert mission statement generator where you can find exactly the kind of buzzword bingo that we’ve all come to love to hate. At that point in his (55minute) presentation on the “Art of Innovation”, he’s talking about how companies generate their mission statements. His argument is that companies need three words to describe what they do (tagline), not 60.

Content creation and effectiveness

Many companies use in-house contributors for sourcing and posting content to their websites.

Who are these people? What do they contribute? And can that contribution be shown to be successful?