Web

Search engines aren’t the only ones looking for keywords. We are too. In a sense, we are search engines as we look for what we’re trying to find or we meander over the web hoping to stumble on something interesting.

When we look, we look for words and phrases.

I‘m thinking of email newsletter subject lines in particular. From what I see coming into my inbox, the majority die on the vine because they have poorly composed, poorly thought through subject lines. In other words, they likely go straight to the trash folder without ever being opened.

The point of a subject line is to get someone to open the newsletter. If most people are like me, and I believe they are, they get loads of emails, including spam, and therefore just glance at what is unread in their inbox. They only see a few keywords, usually those at the very beginning – the first three, maybe five. And what do they see?

• Now available at …
• Great ways to save…
• What’s New this week…
• Company Name newsletter for…

None of these would get me to open an email. They are all so generic it’s unlikely I would continue on to see if the subject line redeemed itself with something interesting. The last one really makes me crazy.

Anyone that gets email knows the From field comes first and it clearly displays your name.

If I was to send out a newsletter, or any email, people would see Writelife in the From field. Why on earth would I then begin a subject line with, “Writelife presents a unique …?” Why include the name at all? The shorter a subject line, the better. Every word counts. This is one case where repetition is definitely not a good idea.

How should a subject line read?

I would try to get the important words right at the start. For example, “Fix your PC…” or, “Secure your documents…” or, “Download Olympic performances …” I would also try to make my subject line as short as possible (although, admittedly, I often fail at this).

Keep in mind that many people get their email on their iPhone, Blackberry or other mobile device. In most cases, they’ll only see the first two or three words. “Great ways to …” isn’t going to get the job done.

In the case of a newsletter, the content and the audience determine the subject line. In many of the newsletters I’ve worked on (usually guided by marketing departments), the emphasis is on what they want people to read rather than on what their customers want to read. And it usually shows in the open rate.

You have to look at the newsletter content and find what would most interest your audience and determine how to best present that in a subject line. The subject line doesn’t sell; the subject line gets people into the store, so to speak. It encourages them to open the newsletter.

Let’s say I’m doing a newsletter based on my last few Writelife posts (not the best example because I’m not really selling anything). I might have a subject line like:

• Respect and work; what’s Seth Godin do?

(Note: obviously, subject lines don’t have links. These are included for anyone curious about see the actual posts.)

The line is short and in many cases the second part won’t be seen on a handheld device. But it does have keywords near the front. However, we could make it better if we look at the keywords, which are: respect, work, Seth Godin. Of those, which would garner the greatest interest? The subject line should be:

• What’s Seth Godin do?; respect and work

If you insist on including your company name (which I disagree with) at least have the good sense to put it at the end – after the important terms:

• What’s Seth Godin do?; respect and work | Writelife

Of course, this version risks having people think the second part relates to the first. These kinds of subject lines are a result of trying to do too much, say too much, reach too many people. You can’t be everything to everyone, so make some choices. To me, the best version of this reads this way:

• What’s Seth Godin do?

I’m not basing this on any data I have at hand. I’m sure there is data out there that either supports or refutes this approach. But my intuitive sense says this is the way to go. It’s definitely based on how I personally view emails and newsletters.

It should be noted that while I’ve been writing about email and subject lines the majority of this is applicable to blog post headlines, tweets on Twitter and most things web related. (And I’m guilty in not practicing what I preach.)

What do you think?

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What if bits and bytes smelled? And what if they smelled bad? And what if they had the capacity to carry viruses – no, not the email kind but biological n’er-do-wells?

Somewhere out in that vast and ill-defined world we call “digital space,” there’s a lot – and I mean a lot – of refuse. Imagine it having a physical nature, something that took up physical space like old toasters or meat that has gone bad. What if it had rats?

I don’t think I’d care for it.

I call it “The Great Digital Landfill” because that is really what much of the Internet is, just as it is much of what we keep on our computers – used and effectively worthless docs, pics, emails, programs and who knows what all else. There is no pressing need to clear any of it up because there is so much capacity (or so we suppose, if and when we think of it).

But what if it smelled bad? What if digital material had “best before” dates and, once the a date was passed, whatever that item might be it would begin to stink out the joint? I think we would likely put our minds to “cleaning up” with a bit more alacrity.

A very quick Google search reveals that “digital landfill” is not an uncommon term. Some of the material found is about the electronic trash we create and some is … well, a little odd (not unusual on the web). There are actually two aspects to this:

• The trashed hardware (cell phones, laptops etc.)
• The trashed content (emails, docs, pics etc.)

The first of those, hardware, is the serious one because it actually is physical and it is a very real problem. I believe I’ve seen documentaries or news reports of entire islands in Southeast Asia completely buried under technological trash, but hopefully that is just a nightmare I had due to spicy food prior to bed.

The second one, the digital content that has expired and is no longer useful, is just clutter. I sometimes wonder how search engines plough through it all. On our personal computers, I’m sure I’m not the only one who has done a search and been discouraged to find page after page of results.

I’ve even found documents on my laptop that I couldn’t remember if I had written them or someone else had.

Imagine, however, this scene. Arnold, a student, has just been called to a meeting with Professor Axel. It goes like this:

“I’ve been going over your work, Arnold, and I have a question. Did you write this?”

“Umm … yes! Yes, I did.”

“When?”

Arnold’s eyes dart side to side. “The weekend. Saturday night! Yes. And I finished it up Sunday morning.”

Professor Axel frowns. “That’s strange. Your submission has a very distinctive odor. An unpleasant one.”

“I … I … I hadn’t noticed.”

“Really? That’s strange too … since it’s stinking to high heaven! This damn thing is at least three years old!”

Poor Arnold. Caught cheating because digital material goes bad and stinks.

Yes, I think our attitudes toward all those emails in our Gmail accounts, all our stored documents, abandoned blogs, not to mention all that discarded hardware, would definitely alter if technology and the content we produced with it would just smell bad after a certain period of time.

Maybe that’s the challenge? Maybe we need to make technology that stinks.

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I’ve been looking at a few sites offering web design and related services and I find myself puzzled, even a bit alarmed. This is not due to what I found (though in some cases it was) but by what I did not find.

I have seen absolutely no reference to content. Do the sites magically populate themselves? If not, who does it? If the client does, is there no consultative service to advise them on what and how to put the content in or maintaining it? If the client doesn’t handle the content, who does? If the web design company does, who handles the research, the writing, the editing? Have they a background in it? Are they good?

There were no references to social media other than “Follow us on Twitter” and/or something similar for Facebook. If a company is moving to or revamping an online presence, isn’t this a crucial aspect? Where do they get help, direction or advice on this?

I found a few web design/web services companies with URLs that required the www preface. Personally, I never use it anymore. I just type in something like writelife.net. No http. No www. I suspect many people are like me. If so, there are a lot of people going to a “page not found” message when they type in the web company’s address. I can’t believe that builds a lot of confidence in a web design company’s awareness of how the web works.

I also found quite a few companies using dated language. In the world of business, marketing and technology, terminology changes almost daily and if you rely on today’s clichés you become tomorrow’s anachronism. Surely “offering solutions” is at least ten years old. I believe current terminology should be avoided at all costs but I do realize it is often unavoidable. But this puts the onus on you to continually assess your site and see where and how it requires revamping. In the online world, static means death.

None of the above is true of all web design sites. Hopefully, I just stumbled on a few that skewed my perception. It is worrying though. On the other hand, from my perspective, maybe it holds the promise of some work. :-)

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Yes, writers write way too much (including me). There are a number of reasons why. I’ll outline some below but first, how can I make such a claim? I can because I am a writer and a reader. It’s the reader that tells me we write too much. It’s the writer that tries to figure out why.

Love of it: Writers love to write. That’s why they write. This becomes a problem because we’re often self indulgent and very much enthralled with our own opinions. It is exacerbated by the web (where you write as much as you want for as long as you want) and the reality that there are few editors going over what is written and even fewer good editors.

Word count: In many cases, particularly with professional writing such as magazines, newspapers and so on, there is a word count imposed. One thousand words on a topic. It may well be, however, that what you have to say can be stated in a simple five word sentence. Word count demands that you dribble on for another 995 words.

This isn’t to say there shouldn’t be a word count. More often than not it prevents us from going on and on and on (because we love writing). It’s also a necessity because of how people read and the publishing format. It can simply be too labour intensive and costly to constantly design due to varying lengths.

Process: This is the interesting one and the one where an absence of a good editor really shows. More often than not writers preface what they actually have to say because that is how we get into what we are writing about. “I had been living in New York for ten years and had witnessed the seasons change in the pulsating city … blah blah blah.” After several paragraphs, even pages, you get to the point: you moved from New York to L.A.

The preface itself may not necessarily be superfluous (though it usually is), but it represents a writer’s viewpoint, not a reader’s. For the reader it’s a case of, “Why in the world am I reading this? What’s the point?” You have to keep reading before you ever get to the point, the one that may make the preface understandable.

I’ve seen this over and over and especially in my own writing. Before we get into the writing groove of our topic, we ramble on looking for our way in. That’s fine – it’s the process. But it isn’t fine if you make the reader go through it too.

The reason I’ve written this post, by the way, is because I came across a really good post yesterday that I never finished because the writer went on and on. What he had written could have been written in half the number of words or less.

This problem is evident in my own posts. I’ve written oodles. But how much of it was unnecessary? Quite a bit, I think.

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I came across two links that I thought were worth sharing. The first is a blog post by Dave Winer and it’s called How Hollywood portrays bloggers. In it he says, “A blogger isn’t just someone who uses blogging software, at least not to me.” I agree and this is one of the misperceptions about blogging that comes up again and again with those who really don’t know much about blogging. How the software is used and why it’s used as it is — that’s what defines a blogger.

The how’s and why’s, by the way, are many.

The other link I wanted to share was to this story: A Portuguese success story: could i be the future of newspapers? (Found via @jayrosen_nyu) I thought it was a fascinating approach and hope the paper succeeds. Its early success suggests that newspapers are not dead, as we often hear, but in transition. As with my blogging comment where I argue too many confuse the software with the way it is used, too many people see the problems newspapers are experiencing as residing in the mode rather than the use.

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Allow me to inebriate some sober numbers … When we talk about Facebook and Twitter, cars and bikes, business and the arts, we are always self-referential. We think a certain way, we use something in a certain way, we believe this may occur in a certain way … and we forget that the world doesn’t always think like us. It’s a cliché, but everybody is different and just because we see something one way or use something in a particular manner, it doesn’t necessarily follow that every one else will.

I was thinking about this when I read the post, 10 Sobering Twitter Statistics. Some people see Twitter as a marketing tool, some as a tool for news, some as way to enhance their real estate business (yes, another marketing view but perhaps also organizational). And there are some who use it for non-commercial reasons and some who just use it for silliness. The tool itself has no inherent purpose beyond what each of us brings to it. For many, there is no purpose.

I was also thinking about statistics and surveys and all the data we collect. Often, maybe more often than not, the information they best provide concerns how much more we need to learn. They highlight what we don’t know. And they are usually interpreted from a particular point of view, at least at street level.

I saw a tweet, followed by a retweet, for that posting titled, 10 Sobering Twitter Statistics. Use of the word “sobering” suggests there is something not very good in these numbers. But I thought, what if there were? What if there were other ways of seeing these? So I’ve put together an alternative — 10 other ways of seeing sobering Twitter stats:

• 94% of Twitter users have under 100 followers (which may suggest quality has more meaning than quantity)

• 90% of tweeting is done by 10% of Twitter users (Which is very much like the real world: 90% don’t call radio stations, 90% don’t write letters to the editor, most don’t speak out at town halls, etc. Also, some people don’t speak because they are listening.)

• 60% of new Twitter users fail to return the following month (But since we don’t know who they were we have no idea whether they would have brought anything of value to the Twitter streams nor do we know why they didn’t return.)

• 50% of Twitter accounts are inactive (Haven’t tweeted in the past week) (See the previous item)

• 40% of tweets are “pointless babble” (As opposed to … TV? Blogs? The street? Boardrooms? Sounds like it reflects the real world.)

• 35% of Twitter users have 10 or fewer followers (Personally, though I have loads of acquaintances, that is about how many really close friends I have. Maybe I’m tweeting for reasons other than to pitch something?)

• 21% of Twitter accounts are empty placeholders (And what would the percentage of domain names as placeholders be? Have these accounts been abandoned? Are they in place to reserve for a future presence as a company stream, a person’s stream, a campaign stream or to prevent others from getting a name that might have an impact on theirs? Do we have any idea? For all we know it could be one obsessive compulsive guy trying over and over to open one account that is “just right.”)

• 11% of Twitter users interact with brands on Twitter (The world, unfortunately, will always have a certain percentage of really stupid people. As I’ve written before, we don’t follow brands. We follow people. If you find a brand with a lot of followers I would hazard a guess that they aren’t interacting with it but with each other.)

• 9% of Twitter users don’t follow anyone at all (Maybe they have lives beyond the Internet? Maybe they have no interest – just took the name because its theirs and they didn’t want someone else to have it? Maybe they haven’t found anyone worth following? Maybe they don’t know how?)

• 3% of followers click on links tweeted (Does this include retweets? More to the point, how many links do we come across in a day – on web pages, in emails, on Facebook and so on? How many of those do we click? Is 3% about average? High? Low?)

And that’s it. Accurate assessments? Probably not. But you never know! But it’s worthwhile questioning the assumptions we bring to topics like these.

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For my headline to be complete it should read, “What you save in dollars you spend in time because, as you probably know, time is money.” In other words, saving dollars doesn’t always save dollars.

I’m thinking about businesses and web sites and social media. The other night I was at an event, talking to a number of people, many of them business people, and we talked a bit about business, marketing and the various tools available to leverage on the Internet.

I was talking to one guy, a small businessman, and said to him that what I usually tell businesses is that if they’re not sure what the tools are and how to use them, it’s best not to jump in. You should have a specific reason for using them and a good idea of how to go about using them so they’re effective. The biggest problem that I’ve seen is that the tools appear to have all kinds of potential – and they do have loads of potential – but what most people don’t see is the real cost, which is time.

Creating a web site and putting it in place, or getting accounts on social media tools like Facebook and Twitter, is relatively easy and there is an almost zero dollar investment – it seems. But maintaining these things is hard. And it involves time, which usually ends up as a cost.

Imagine business cards for example. You get one designed and spend a bit of time figuring out exactly what information you want on them and what message you want them to communicate. And you’ve hired a company to help you with the design, information, and message aspects, and to produce the cards. And they charge you something for all this and that is an expense.

Then you come across a tool that allows you to do all this yourself with almost no cost, and you do so, and you save a bunch of money and that looks good on the books. But …

The problem is, for the card to have value, for it to be effective, you have to rewrite it every week because now you’re on the Internet. And you can’t just rewrite it with anything. You have to think through what it says, each week, and in many cases, spend some time doing a bit of research to ensure what it says is accurate. And you have to present the information in a way that prompts people to read what the card says, not just toss it aside without a look.

In other words, every week (maybe more often, maybe less), you have to spend time on it in order for it to be effective and justify its existence and your effort. Nothing works online the same way it does in the tactile world. That’s why many ads fail online.

In my experience most businesses, especially small businesses, don’t have that time. Even if they do, they don’t have the writing expertise or the social conversation skills to do it well enough to make it work and become a valuable marketing tool.

What they end up with is some reduced marketing and other expenses and some crossed-fingers as they hope it works, which it seldom does without a specific focus on maintenance. People come once, might even like what they see, but without a reason for coming back you won’t see them again.

Maintenance is critical to making any of these things work and maintenance means time and that means money. If you do it yourself, it’s whatever your time is worth to you – how much an hour? It’s also what you don’t do – “If instead of doing this I was doing that, I’d generate …” If you spend an hour of your time and that hour is worth $50 and, while you do it you are not doing something that would pull in $75, you’re losing $25. And that’s a cost. Lost revenue. It might not show up on the books that way, but that’s what it is.

You could pay someone to do it for you – in many cases, the best option. But in trying to keep costs down you go with cheap, that may be what you get and end up being how you’re represented – meaning your brand feels the impact. Regardless of the cost, make sure whoever is doing the maintenance knows what they are doing and are very good at it.

Rumours to the contrary, the web is not a marvel where a storefront can be put in place without a thought and social media tools aren’t a magic pill to reach the world with the message about your product or service … and never give either, your site or your social tools, another thought. They have to be maintained, smartly. They require time and effort in order to work.

Sometimes the desperate need to reduce costs bamboozles us into believing in the pixie dust of the Internet. But the Internet, like life, keeps teaching the same lesson: ain’t nothing free, ain’t no easy routes to financial Valhalla, work and only work makes things work.

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Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance. – Kurt Vonnegut

It amazes me that so many organizations don’t understand branding. They think branding is their logo, their TV ads, mailouts and handshakes for the cameras. Your brand is everything associated with you.

Like the websites you don’t maintain. Like the information you don’t update. Like the branding that is actually unbranding.

There are lots of examples but I’m not going to say or link to specific organizations because they are simply examples of what too many others are also doing – or, rather, not doing.

One site currently has a mention on its home page about a “planned maintenance period.” There are no dates referred to and, to make matters worse, it has been up there for about a year. That’s some long maintenance period!

I’ve tried contacting some organizations (using contact page information that is online). Very few respond, even with an auto-response. I wonder what impact that has on your brand?

One site spoke of a being in the running for 2009 award then linked to a page with information about the 2008 award. Again, what does that tell your customers about you?

I know of a newsletter that had major issues (meaning it was a waste of time and money) but at least had the benefit of taking only about an hour or less to set up and send. Now that it has been “rebranded” it takes eight or more hours to set up, has all kinds of special links to track usage and so on (which replicate a system already in place that does it more easily and quickly) and is primarily made up of old news content and products, products, products.

Utterly useless as an effective newsletter for either the business or its customers, it requires even more work and money than before and it all goes into the digital garbage because the branding is all about looks without substance.

In other words, the branding is really unbranding. It makes the company look bad.

Who dreams up this stuff? Who thinks their web presence isn’t important?

Why do they think that spending oodles of money on revamps and other marketing ventures is more important than maintaining the areas where customers actually go and try to use?

Myself, I would pour the money into anal-retentive people – the kind with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) – and let them be as nit-picky has they can be about what is out there representing me and making sure it’s accurate, updated and, most important, useful for my customers.

And I’m pretty sure if I did, I’d cut my marketing budget in half.

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I’ve been up to no good, at least not in a practical sense. I’ve been doing what I’ve always done with computers, the Internet and writing: playing.

Some guys go out at 11:00 at night and play hockey. Some people go hiking or kayaking or running. Some people pour over recipes and try new cuisines. I play on my computer.

And as I’ve often done, I’ve put it online. It’s right up their in the header navigation, Harcourt. It’s actually a bit of silliness called Harcourt Goes to Hell.

The number of reasons to not put it online are legion. Personal branding, professionalism, and so on. As someone who works professionally as a writer — the SEO writing, the technical communications, the marketing communications, the web writing, copy and on and on — this kind of thing undermines the seriousness of my image, doesn’t it?

Probably. But years ago, in pre-Web days, when I first got a computer and first connected with the Internet, it was for the fun of it. It was for the possibilities it created for playing, which is how I look at writing (despite how frustrating it can often be). There were so many tools the computer offered and so many things to access with the Internet, I thought, “Wow! This so cool.”

Of course, I did pretend I had practical reasons in mind. And in truth, I did. I saw the communication possibilities, the efficiencies, and the cost reduction potential.

Eventually the world of marketing, and business generally, caught on to what the Web meant and the business aspects of Internet technology — software, social media, handhelds, apps etc. — and it took off like gangbusters.

The tenor of what was online also changed. (Perhaps that’s my own perception based on what interests me and where I go and how I use things.) It became more business focused and, with that focus, a bit more serious, much more aware of appearances and perception (branding).

But a lot of what is developed, at least what is developed with a consumer focus, is based on the idea that people play. Outside. Inside. And online. This is why I think putting something like Harcourt Goes to Hell online is okay. It’s a part of who I am — this aspect of playing, that is — but certainly not the whole of me. And while I don’t expect anyone to perceive it this way, as I do, it’s actually an important aspect for anyone hoping to do business online or use the tools available to market, discuss and “monetize” their business.

It means, I think, that I am in touch with people and what they often do with all these communication and other tools: play. I may not know or understand the specifics of how they play, but I do have the intuitive sense for why they behave as they do because it’s the same reason behind why I play. (That reason? It’s creative. And that makes it fun.)

Consumers are people, yes. But while people may consume (buy products and services), they do many other things as well. They aren’t automatons. They aren’t made up of code. They aren’t programmed with an overriding priority like, “To buy.” Unlike Isaac Asimov’s robots and their “Laws of Robotics,” consumers (people) don’t have a “Laws of Consumerism.” People do anything and everything and there is often no explaining why until years of research have been put in. It’s achieved after the fact.

Although we often appear to come close, understanding people isn’t a cerebral thing. It’s visceral.

Playing is a way of staying in touch with that.

Harcourt Goes to Hell is one way I play. It may be silly and not particularly good, but it’s creative and it’s fun.

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