Help comes in the form of Diane who it turns out is not just there to serve the breakfast but is also ‘in the business of marketing entertainment, honey’. It turns out that later today Diane has to submit a review to a entertainment website of a new Vegas show. As far as I understand it, ‘Peep Show’ is a musical spectacular where women flash their boobs while gyrating to nursery rhymes. Classy.

What’s worrying Diane is that ‘I ain’t no writer honey’. I reassure her that this is true of most people charged with publishing time-sensitive product reviews to websites. But what Diane does have in spades is a unique tone of voice. We decide that her best bet is to record herself talking about the show (about which she is hilarious, articulate and passionately opinionated) and then get cousin Deon to ask his son to type it up for her.

Half an hour later, I’m advising web marketing professionals from American colleges, banks, software houses and retailers to do more or less the same thing (without the help of Deon). Because the first step toward rolling out a consistent brand tone of voice online is to establish how that brand should ‘sound’. And to know how your brand should sound, you first have to establish its personality, tonal values and the kinds of things it would and wouldn’t say.

As Diane advised me shortly before I began: ‘Just be yourself honey, coz nobody wants to sit through a load of BS’. If only all British insurance websites took the same approach.

Catherine will be leading these sessions again at Nielsen Norman Group’s Usability Week in Berlin on 19 and 20 November.

At 9am, having eaten my own way through a Vegas breakfast buffet the length of a tube carriage, I’m ready to present six hours of brand new material on how to write cost-effective customer care copy at Jakob Nielsen’s Usability Week.

This is a credit-crunch friendly course, expounding the virtues of investing in those often overlooked bits of text on websites and email that can actually show enormous ROI if given a bit of attention. So we’re talking transactional and order confirmation emails, sign-up pages, reassurance text around forms, security messages and FAQs.

While my course summary on the NN/g website clearly states that this is a highly practical session, that hasn’t stopped a Russian and two Swedes signing up for the day-long copy workshop.

The Swedes, of course, turn out to have a better grasp of English than most Brits, ask brilliant questions and transform the day with their enthusiasm for what better web text might do for their scheduling software sales. The Russian mostly spends the day typing a CMS spec for his colleagues back in Moscow.

Also in the class is a Kiwi, who sells iPhone apps and has a fantastic grasp of how to write web-friendly, benefit-driven copy. The only trouble is his partner – who writes a lot of the text on their website and iTunes page -isn’t quite up to speed yet…

Most interesting debate of the day is where we work out how to give customers bad news via email. For example a scenario where customer service can only be delivered by email and not by phone.

We agree that the best way to manage expectations is to be upfront and apologetic and to focus on the inherent benefits of what you can deliver. Which might go something like this:

We understand you’d prefer to speak to us on the phone and we’re sorry we can’t offer you this service yet…However we’re really good at fixing things via email and if you give that a try, we promise we’ll work with you until the problem is solved. You can email us round the clock and you’ll get a personal reply within 2 hours.

I also furthered my one-woman mission to eradicate the phrase ‘denotes mandatory field’ from websites around the globe. Most satisfactorily, last time I had this rant (at AdTech) the editor of a travel website emailed me afterwards to confirm that removing this from a sign-up form had resulted in an uplift in sales. As the Americans would say, who knew?

Actually, I did. And on that smug note, I weave back through the casino, resisting the lure of the roulette table to go and mug up on tomorrow’s ‘Building a Brand Tone of Voice Online’ session and have an early night. How pathetically un-Vegas…

Catherine will be leading these sessions again at Nielsen Norman Group’s Usability Week in Berlin on 19 and 20 November.

Following our recent post on 11 words to ban from your website, we’re going to be speaking on the subject at ad:tech 2009

By looking at some glaring examples of how NOT to do it, md Catherine Toole will take a practical look at how great digital copywriting can help you boost revenue, optimise for natural search, improve service levels and positively differentiate your brand.

Send us your ideas for words to ban and why by commenting on this post or emailing dan@stickycontent.co.uk – best suggestions will feature in Catherine’s talk.

Sticky md Catherine Toole will be speaking as part of the IDM Academy on September 22, at 15.10

Who: Codegent is a London-based digital agency that “fuses creative ideas with solid technology to produce outstanding results”.

Why we like: Everywhere you look on this simple, logical site, the language conveys the impression of an agency that is creative and innovative, but with a clear understanding of the commercial objectives businesses bring to digital.

The language gives a clear sense of a coherent vision, shared purpose and strong, confident opinions based on hard-earned experience.

Samples:

Rather than the usual dull list of services and functions, the site divides its people into Digital shrinks (strategic planning), Creative architects (design & build) and Mad scientists (innovative applications / R&D). (For seo and scan readers, these are given instant glosses too.)

One model for running an agency goes like this: take a brief, don’t challenge it, charge as much as you can, turn it round as quickly as possible, don’t rock the boat, invoice, get paid, move on.

We don’t think that’s what clients want. They want us to be on their side, but also to tell them when we disagree. We don’t pretend to know more about our clients’ businesses than they do, but we do know an awful lot about digital.

Recently, I attended a Blogging for Business course, run by Base Creative. It taught me 5 things that can help get your company blog seen by the people you want to read it:

1. Write in the first person – it’s more conversational and helps develop a relationship between the reader and author.
2. Show readers what you know – write about what you specialise in and give away a bit of valuable information for free. Don’t worry about losing business this way. People don’t have time to do what you can as well as you do it. Instead it will confirm to readers of your company blog that you’re knowledgeable and capable about what you do.
3. Update regularly – give readers a reason to come back by having regular instalments. Even if you only have 10 minutes to write your business blog, 2 paragraphs can be just as powerful as an essay-length article.
4. Link to other bloggers – blogs won’t survive in a vacuum. As digital marketer Econsultancy says, links help get your Google rating up. Scour the internet and look for similar posts and comments – this leaves a trail back to you and, hopefully, others will repay the favour and link back when they can.
5. Market your blog – the ultimate goal of business blogging is to draw traffic, or potential clients, to your blog – so indulge in a spot of blog marketing. Put the URL at the foot of your emails or on business cards. Also, make sure other bloggers can find you by submitting your blog to Technorati, where a host of fellow bloggers searching for information are looking for you.

From my experience of writing for the web, I’d add 3 more points to this checklist:

• always remember the business result you want to achieve – by defining your objective you may decide you don’t actually need a business blog. Once you know why you’re writing your blog, you can tailor your articles to meet your goals
• choose your audience – are you writing for your peers, your customers or your friends? All are valid, but you need to decide
• remember you are still writing for the web – big chunks of text and single-word links are no easier to read on a blog than they are on a normal page

Contact Sticky Content to see how we can help with your business blog, website or email marketing copy.

1. Welcome
On a homepage, a Welcome message contains no information and is a massive waste of very valuable screen space. The way to welcome your visitors online is to provide information that shows them exactly what you’re about and how you can help them.

2. Please and thank you
These too are pointless pleasantries on a website. Crisp clear instructions that tell user where to go on your site and what they’ll find when they get there are the real courtesy online.

3. Click here
Wrong from every point of view. Bad accessibility because meaningless to people using screen readers. Hopeless for scan readers who may just be looking at signposting copy such as heads and links. And a wasted seo opportunity – google looks hard at anchor texts, and this one contains no keywords.

4. Retrieve a quote
No one uses this sort of language in the real world. What’s wrong with something plain like Return to your quote?

5. Mandatory fields
Robotic data-capture speak. In any other context these would be boxes. And we’d just say you must fill them in.

6. Check this box
In British English at least, people tick boxes or put crosses in them.

7. Library / Resources
This tends to refer to the area of the site that should be really called: “dumping ground for pdfs and other bumpf we couldn’t think where else to put but were told had to go up somewhere”.

8. Other…
When used in headings and tabs, as in “Other news”, “Our other products” etc. Other to what? These labels are unscannable because the information they convey is not self-contained – they rely on the user looking at something else to make complete sense of them. Which doesn’t work well online, where you cannot fully control the context in which people see your content or even the way it’s presented.

9. Unique
Meaningless marketing hype. What sells online is real, specific information. Telling me your product or service is unique tells me nothing.

10. Features
Some websites still arrange their content into editorial buckets like “features”, “news”, “events”. Fine for organising your content internally but don’t let these labels make it on to the site, where they’ll mean nothing to your readers.

11. Solutions
An SEO specialist recently told me that if he could ban one word from websites, this would be it. Everything is described as a solution nowadays, from sandwich bars to industrial cranes: Private Eye even has a column where people send in their favourite dire examples. But only businesses call their products and services “solutions” - their customers never do, which is bad news from both an SEO and plain language/usability point of view.

A glance at the From field of an email from a trusted brand may be all the incentive I need to actually read that message. But what if I open that email, like what I see, but have no time to take further action? That email from your company lies in my inbox, ready to be reactivated at any moment by a chance reminder or as an item to be actioned on a to-do list. By which time, many more messages will have piled into my inbox, so in order to find it again that particular one needs to be labelled intuitively.

This is where the From-name field in your ESP comes in. People search through From items alphabetically, so make sure yours is labelled as obviously as possible. This is not, contrary to what many big brands think, something like:

admin@widgets4you.co.uk

or

customerservice@widgets4you.co.uk

or

mywidgets@widgets4you.co.uk

or
sales@widgets4you.co.uk

These departments may be very important to the internal organisation of your company but they are likely to mean nothing to me.

Equally, you may be a firm believer in the personal touch, but if I don’t have any real relationships with individuals in your company I’m unlikely to remember to look out for any address like Sally-Jane@ widgets4you.co.uk  

If I remember you at all – yours is not the only marketing email I receive every week, funnily enough – I’m going to be looking for your company name, under W.

How to do it right

Check out Econsultancy’s From names in its emails: I’m going through my email by sender, deleting big blocks at once to save space, and I can immediately see, even with the groups collapsed, that I can delete those from Econsultancy but should probably keep those from Econsultancy [Admin] and Econsultancy [Membership] for reference. Clever!

Econsultancy does from fields the right way

Establishing and using the right tone of voice for online copy is important in making it effective, and particularly in making it cohere with the rest of your marketing. An organisation’s tone of voice doesn’t have to be showy or attention-seeking, but your tone should be consistent. Online, your tone of voice is sometimes your only opportunity to set yourself apart: on a page of search results, for example, or in an RSS feed.

When we talk to clients about tone of voice we often focus on language and style – how we want to sound to a reader, and practical choices in the copy that help us achieve it. But if they’re carefully chosen, benefit-led examples can support the brand too.

The real-world illustration of how a product or service helps customers is a tool we come back to again and again. It’s a classic way of illustrating the benefits rather than the features of what you’re writing about: describe a plausible situation in which the product would help. Choosing the right benefit makes an immediate connection with your reader.

Let’s say you’re writing about a cycle computer that can use GPS to plan a
route. Here are 2 ways to illustrate its features with an example:

1. “Find the best route to work – you can even choose to avoid major roads (and hills…)”
2. “Track your development through the season – plan and record training distances, times and climbing stats.”

These two examples describe the same feature, but choose different benefits to appeal to different types of customer. You can choose to use the benefit that best matches your target audience, or – with a product that appeals to several audiences – use both examples to illustrate your product’s flexibility.

This is the bread and butter of marketing copywriting, but there’s a more subtle way in which examples can help support your tone of voice.

Choose your example copy carefully
Paying attention to the content you use in illustrations and examples can give a little extra depth and cohesion to your branding. Imagine you’re writing about a piece of software that lets people create documents. When you illustrate this with an example, what kind of document will you show being created? You might choose:

• an academic essay
• a letter to a friend
• a quarterly financial report
• a blog post

Each of these gives a slightly different spin to how readers will imagine the product being used, and affects the ease with which they can imagine themselves using it.

Have a look at Apple’s Features page for the Safari browser (it’s a long page, but you don’t have to read it all). There are screenshots throughout the page illustrating various features: but which web pages have they chosen to use in the illustrations?

• a story about the environment and green energy
• a New York Times feature on Obama’s inauguration
• an article from Rolling Stone magazine

These all feel “Apple-y”. They’re the kind of thing an “Apple person” might read. Further down the page, there’s a screenshot illustrating Safari’s “top sites” feature: we can see that the example user’s top sites also include Facebook, Spin (a music magazine) and bikemag.com (a mountain bike magazine). Let’s face it, this person probably owns a Mac.

Compare a similar screenshot for Google’s browser, Chrome: it has a similar “top sites” feature, but in this case all but one are Google-owned sites. Is that realistic, or just a bit unimaginative?

For more about web writing technique, check out our web writing training courses.

Good communication builds your brand and so it’s worth taking a careful look at the emails your company sends – both automated emails, such as order confirmations, and personalised emails responding to customer queries. Every email should be written in your brand’s online tone of voice – without compromising clarity. Customer service emails are primarily functional after all.

Automated email
It’s not rocket science to get automated emails right. When it comes to order confirmations, delivery notifications and password reminders, most brands go down the wearily formulaic “thanks for your order” route, demonstrated here by Dell:

This e-mail is an acknowledgement of receipt of your Dell Order

But brands like ASOS have it spot on with their order confirmation email, which praises my purchase selection with the cheeky line:

Good choice. Who said money can’t buy you style?

How’s that for alleviating any post-purchase credit-crunch guilt and making me excited about my new togs?

Personalised email from the customer services team
When it comes to replying to enquires from customers and potential customers, the same level of care is needed. Training your customer service team in writing for email could pay dividends and avoid shockers like this (real) example from a seaside hotel:

We are very busy and with the greatest of respect our email of 7th May already answered the questions raised. Should therefore you have any further questions then please telephone rather than email – it is so much quicker for all concerned!

Unfortunately for this disgruntled hotelier, email is an increasingly popular way to make pre-purchase enquiries – and many people see it as quicker and more convenient than a phone call.

Reports of email’s death have been greatly exaggerated time and again, as email marketing expert Dela Quist of Alchemy Worx recently argued, because email is now so central to the daily business of our lives. So if you haven’t already, it’s time to get your act together when it comes to your customer service emails.

Start with a review of your automated emails, including registration emails and password reminders, and work from there until you’re confident that all your email communication is putting the right message across.

If you spend a lot of time writing for search it’s easy to forget that keywords are just a tool that search engines have developed to connect people with useful content: people aren’t interested in keywords, they’re interested in useful information, whether or not it uses the exact same phraseology as their search.

The fact is that people put one thing into a search box but might actually want something different: if I search for “sports holidays in Mexico”, a page about “Cancun diving vacations” might be exactly what I’m looking for, without including a single one of my search terms. It’s obvious to us that these two are related but it’s very difficult to model computationally. Techniques such as latent semantic indexing attempt to improve the situation, but as yet search engines still aren’t very good at telling useful information apart from filler.

SEO gone bad: an example
This means that it’s easy to produce a high-ranking page that features the keywords I’ve searched for and is superficially “about” my subject, but that offers little or no valuable information. Here’s an example, which appears in the top 10 results of a Google search for “Technics digital pianos”.

The headline is promising: “Choosing a good Technics piano.” It’s a reasonable assumption that if I search for “technics digital pianos” I do want to know more about what makes a good one. Unfortunately that’s roughly where the good stuff ends.

There is a listing of model numbers, but no way of telling them apart: we get simply “Popular Technics digital pianos include…” How do I choose between them? Well, “depending on your budget, you can choose one of the above Technics digital pianos” There’s no information on which are more expensive or where they fit in my hypothetical budget.

Is there anything else I should know?

“You should also read customer reviews. That way you’ll know what various owners think of different pianos.”

“If you’re thinking of buying a digital piano, great sound should be a priority”.

Thanks for that.

The problem with this page isn’t really search-related. It’s that it has little of value to say. The publisher’s strayed from their area of expertise, where they genuinely have some insight and can add some value, and written something that could have been put together by almost anyone who understands the words “technics digital piano”. It’s as if most of the text is only there to link strings of keywords together in whole sentences. This is repeated for other brands of piano throughout the site:

“Kawai digital pianos are ideal for the stage, home, school and church. You should feel delighted by the amazing features that they’re loaded with, no matter what your needs are.”

“It’s obvious that there’s a wide range of digital Roland pianos to choose from. You should be able to find one online very easily, as many musicians find it more convenient to shop online for their musical instruments.”

… and so on.

This is a shame because the site does contain some really useful information: even on these pages, there are nuggets here and there. But they’re buried under mountains of search-junk which drags the whole site down with it. This would be a much better site if it had much less content.

Search engines have tried to solve the problem of information overload, only for it to reappear at the next step in the user’s journey. What I really want as a searcher is not to see my keywords reflected back at me. I already know my keywords! I want a page that takes them as a starting point and then adds to my knowledge or helps me complete a task.

The whole process of keywords > search > results page > clickthrough is only the start of giving your users what they want: if you don’t have anything to say when they get to your page, it shows.

Learn to write for search in 3 hours on a Sticky Content open course: next dates 11 June and 23 June