How To Write More Powerful Online Communications Text!

Introduction

Although there are significant differences among the various types of online communication, there all have one critical thing in common theyre read off a screen. There are substantial benefits, too, in that while your message is on someones screen usually it has their undivided attention.

You are genuinely one-to-one with them and thats something you must respect you are literally in their face and encroaching on very personal territory. The bad news about online communications is that your message can be disappeared faster from a screen than with any other medium.

There are a few more stark facts about online communications that significantly influence how your message is received. One, according to the world-acclaimed web expert Dr Jakob Nielsen, is that 79% of online readers dont read they scan.

Thats a little like the way people browse through brochures. What it means is that your message must be delivered in a way that allows key points and benefits, of course to be picked up at the same speed as readers scroll and scan.

Secondly, Dr Nielsen has also calculated that when people read from a screen they do so at a rate 25% slower than they read print on a paper page. Thats because, despite high-resolution screens and all the other technological wizardry, on-screen text is harder to read.

For this reason your messages have to be very much more concise than they do for printed media some experts say screen text should be just half the length of its paper equivalent. In my view, therefore, there are two very important things you have to remember if youre going to get the best out of online text.

Firstly, go with the flow of the physical restrictions and write so you minimize their effect. Also, create your text so it works well for scanners (human scanners that is) by highlighting key points in bold - not italics or underline because people think those are links. That way people get the gist of your message while scrolling, although of course they will stop and read more carefully when an emboldened section really does catch their eye.

Secondly, bear in mind that even in its short little life the internet has already started to put its early folklore on a nostalgic pedestal and this plays a key role in determining what works online now. Having begun its days as an electronic kaffe klatch for individual tekkies the net has developed a very personal informality and straight-talking ethos that, miraculously, is being preserved and perpetuated with considerable success. And thats all the more astounding when you consider the vast commercialism thats replaced the early nets endearing woolly-sweater-and-sandals innocence, navety and honesty.

Never mind, though. There are other good reasons why brief, straight, plain even blunt - speaking is a sensible style to maximize the success of your online text. Obviously it helps overcome the physical restrictions (see above) and also works well in such a personal, one-to-one medium that is, literally, in your face.

Today you only have to think how emotional people get over the issue of receiving spam, to understand just how firmly the PC or PDA or other forms of electronic screens have established themselves as part of their users personal space.

You dont just use a computer, my late mother used to shout when she came by my office to see if I was still breathing, you wear it. Well, although I dont exactly read it a story and kiss it goodnight Im bound to feel pretty close to my computer (and the messages it displays) especially as I often spend more hours a day with it than I do with my family.

The moral? When youre writing online text, in fact online anything, respect the close relationship people have with their screens. Knock before entering, then be the perfect guest. Be direct, dont waste their time, but remember to say please and thank you. Then leave before youve worn out your welcome. Thats the way to ensure not only that you make a good impression, but also that youll get invited back.

E-mails

The one huge problem nobody seems to have solved yet, as I see it, is how to handle the vast amount of e-mails that most of us receive every day. Even I, as a humble one-person-band little business employing no-one other than myself and my two rescued dogs who spend most of the day asleep under the desks in my office, receive between 50 and 100 e-mails per weekday. Some clients of mine receive many times that. No doubt busy business people I dont know receive even more.

How do you prioritize those? How do you decide which ones to read now, which ones to read later, and which ones not to read but to dump?

Ah, ah, I hear you say, whats that got to do with writing? Let me tell you. If youre writing a personal e-mail to a friend theres no problem, particularly as youre more likely to send it to their personal e-mail address than their business addy.

But what about business e-mails that you want the recipient to take notice of? How do you make the best of the medium when your e-mail is likely to be surrounded by at least 49 others all shouting for the same persons attention?

In the earlier days of the internet, if you were smart and could write a snappy short phrase you could attract attention in the subject line, perhaps including the words relax, this is not spam. Now though, the spammers have cottoned on to that one and if you see a subject line in your e-mailbox saying not spam it almost certainly is to the extent that this is the first thing looked for by most of the spam filters you can get.

Spam filters will also choke out all the obvious spammy words like free and opportunity and give away. And you cant be believed if you write something really homely and innocent sounding like message from your cousin Marianne because thats what all the porno spammers do. So whats the answer?

Or, so whats the problem? If the recipient of your e-mail is likely to know you and knows that what you have to say is usually interesting, theyll open it and probably sooner rather than later. Its when they think your message is not likely to be of use, relevance or interest to them; thats when youre relegated to the delete tab.

So whats the mot efficient way of ensuring people open your e-mails? You have to be interesting. Thats whats in it for them, and their previous experience of your being interesting provides them with the incentive to read your new e-mail.

Its also a good idea to confirm the fact that youre interesting by getting over whats in it for you in the first few lines of the text. If you dont readers are often tempted to move on without going further, especially if they have 27 other e-mails to read.

However here we risk straying into pure online marketing areas and once again, there is an impressive selection of reading matter available that goes into chapter and verse about that. But I do want to emphasize this point about being interesting.

Whereas the e-mail marketers might be agonizing over how to write subject lines that get through the filters and get people to open the e-mail, a fair few of them may be missing the point that its not the subject line that matters so much as the name of the sender. If the recipient doesnt know the sender it doesnt matter how cuddly the subject line is, they wont open the e-mail for fear of being sold some ugly garden furniture or pornography or even a virus.

If they do know the sender but also know that he/she/they never have anything interesting to offer, they wont open that e-mail either. Do I hear the ringing of bells in terms of the quality of message?

In online communication probably more than any other kind we have a tendency to forget that all the electronic gizmos are just enabling devices, and that at the end of the day the only thing that really matters is the message, not the means of delivering it.

If the recipients of your e-mails know that you usually communicate interesting messages with something worthwhile in it for them, they'll open yours even if the subject line is more boring BS from Bobby.

Text messages

Text-based comms for marketing are probably the most miniaturized challenge for copywriters since the old subliminal advertising scandals of the 1950s and 1960s. (They had to keep the messages short and powerful then too.)

If youre tempted to use texting for marketing purposes, do please consult a professional, and a professional copywriter, not a professional telecommunications guru. Despite only working in half words and soundalikes, text ads are difficult to get right, because of the fact that there is so little to play with and so little room for manoeuvre.

Websites

This is the Big One. This is the topic that has given birth to more experts than there are websites, and that runs into the muchomillons.

Everyone you meet has their very own views on what makes the perfect site. That varies from the all-singing, all-dancing variety that looks great on a fearfully expensive turbo-charged computer but takes ages to load into most peoples cooking PCs to the belts-and-braces merchant who believes a website should load faster than he can sneeze and has to give him all the info he needs within the first three bullet points.

Are they all wrong, or are they all right?

As is so often the case, in my view the answer lies in researching your audience. The bad news, though, is that very often websites have to do not one but several jobs to do for not one but several audiences.

Unlike offline print media whose audiences tend to be easier to define, many websites are expected to work as advertisements, brochures, catalogues, shops, customer service centers and technical support bureaux all rolled into one.

This does not make life any easier for those of us who work at creating and writing websites. And although we all have our pet theories there is no single, simple answer to the question how do you make a website that works as powerfully for audience Z as it does for audience A?

Probably the most sensible way to define and manage the variants of your sites audience is to split it into two broad groups - new visitors and re-visitors - and ensure that home/landing pages give a clear, simple direction for either group to follow.

In the early stages of a website thats probably as much as you can do, but there are ways in which online audiences can be researched and website traffic tracked which will give you clear indications of how to develop the site in the future. However thats something you should discuss with specialist internet and e-commerce experts its not a writing issue.

It helps to compare your website with an offline business or other organization, even down to size and proportion from small boutique to huge department store. At the small end its obviously much easier to map a site using common sense.

At the large end common sense works too, if you take the analogy to the limit. When planning a commercial or otherwise interactive website think of an offline equivalent that works well for its customers or users, and translate its key good points for online use. The sort of offline equivalents you might use for the analogy are:

Shopping mall or department store
Large public library or government department
Bank, insurance bureau, travel agency, real estate agency
Bookshop, giftshop, etc

If your website is not a trading site as such but is to act more as an online showcase, then think your way through your organizations most successful capabilities overview presentation. If the approach and content work face-to-face, theyre likely to work on a website too.

Of course you cant control the order of presentation on the site in as disciplined a way as you can live. But if you invite site visitors to look at your credentials in a logical and appealing (to them) order, theres a good chance many of them will follow your suggestions and not necessarily jump about in non-linear grasshopper fashion. Thats especially true if your content holds their attention equally well at each stage of the progression theres nothing like sudden boredom to make grasshoppers take a huge sideways leap.

Many internet purists are going to shout abuse at me for comparing websites with offline media, saying that online comms are completely different. But please hush for a moment, folks, while I explain further. I do not advocate trying to squash and squeeze offline material into online manifestations like podgy feet being squelched into shoes 3 sizes too small.

What I advocate is to use the logic from an offline application if you know it works well with people, because the people who look at your organizations website are people and whats more, its likely theyre from the same or similar audiences as those of your offline comms.

If you know that the thought process behind your offline business communication works very well, why on earth should you consider rethinking your whole strategy and taking a completely different approach for the website? Remember that old line, if it aint broke, dont fix it?

In the same way, if a strategy works and you cant foresee any reason why it should stop working in the near future then dont change it. People are people wherever and however they receive your message.

Obviously the way you implement the logic, and what you hang off it in terms of text and other written material, yes, all that will be different online. Websites involve many considerations, which do not enter into the offline picture for example, writing text with one eye on Search Engine Optimization, which is a specialized discipline in itself.

Another very important consideration is for the writer to work very closely with the technical developers and maintainers of a website, because what and how you write is very closely linked with the way the site is structured and how visitors use it. All in all, its safer and more effective to use professional specialists all round, writers included.

But do not let anyone try to persuade you that creating a website requires you to undergo a brain transplant.

By all means show respect for the technical expertise required to make a good website work well, but equally be aware that at the end of the day all that really matters is how well your website helps you communicate with your audience, not how to calculate the square root of its exponential gigafactor.

Okay, so now weve got the logic right, what do we say? Lets look at some key issues connected specifically with websites.

Obviously you need to create a skeleton structure first of all, and usually that needs to be done in close cahoots with the web designer. The primary objective when putting together the skeleton structure is to make the site work as well as possible for visitors and not, as some designers would have you believe, how many fancy animations and galloping gargoyles can be incorporated and to hell with how long they take to load on old systems using dialup access.

Please dont forget that some people maybe even some of your customers - are still using dial-up access and not only can that be expensive (in the UK at least) but also its slow and often dependent on the foibles and vagaries of ordinary telephone lines. Assuming that some countries will continue to depend on dialup access for the moment at least, slow-loading websites are not going to be very successful in markets outside of the mainstream industrialized nations.

Thats one of the reasons why I believe simple, uncluttered websites work far better. Another of those reasons is because I think theyre stronger and more effective anyway.

As for the text itself, shorter is sweeter. I normally set about both my offline and online work with hedge clippers several times before I submit it to clients and/or for publication, and when I wrote the text for my own website I took an axe to it over and over again before I was happy.

Its as hard if not harder to write concisely than it is to waffle on, so writing text for websites is no picnic. One useful tip, though, is to write down your thoughts in as much detail as you want, and then ask yourself okay, now what is it that Im really trying to say?

Often youll find that you come up with a vastly simplified, shortened version of all those words and you can express your thoughts in a fraction of the space.

A good example of this happened years ago when I co-wrote a book about jewelry with Antwerp-based gemologist Norbert Streep and we agonized for weeks over a suitable title. At the end of our fourth or fifth brainstorming session I said to Norbert, how have we been referring to it all this time?

As the Jewelry Book, replied Norbert.

Then thats our title, I said, and it was, too. The publishers loved it.

As with all online text, short, straight, simple and to the point is preferable for any form of website text, even if there is pressure from elsewhere to write it in the corporate voice.

If you do get pressurized its worth reminding the pressurizer that no matter how big and important the corporation is, its website gets stuck straight into the faces of visitors via their screens and with that level of physical intimacy we really do have to speak to them as one human being to another.

Business website-speak should be as natural and informal as the way you would speak to someone across a table in a meeting not as informal as chit-chat over a beer at the golf club, but certainly not as pompous and stuffy as the Chairmans Statement in the Annual Report and Accounts.

One thing I must point out here is that although your website should be written in a way thats crisp, short and to the point, this does not mean that you should keep the range and variety of information to a minimum. On the contrary; one of the beauties of a website is that it can offer a great deal of information to visitors who want to read it all, but unlike with a brochure, if site visitors dont want the lengthy detail it stays tucked tidily out of sight and out of their way.

Anyway, a great many excellent books and other publications on how to create a good website exist at the time Im writing this. In the main their advice is excellent, but do please remember to see the wood from the trees. In the gushing welter of information youll find about the subject you, in your role as writer, must keep your eyes focused on your audience, whats in it for them, and how to communicate whats in it for them via the most direct and effective route.

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