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QUSETION: How does an organisation with ongoing online content requirements ensure their content is :

• Of a high standard?
• On message?
• On brand?
• Compelling?
• Consistent?

ANSWER: Make a style guide.

Ha ha. OK, bad joke. No. Not by creating a style guide. Or not only by doing that, anyhow.

And using spell checkers doesn’t really help either.

It’s all about communication. People engaged in content creation (text, design, video, etc) need to understand more than just the subject matter to create effective content.

They need to be brand experts and brand ambassadors. They need to understand:

• Voice: Who is the content from? Is it an organisation or a person? How should the content be seen by the audience?
• Context: Where will the content be placed? What will be next to it? Will it be reused in different contexts?
• Audience: Who will read it? When and why? Are there particular search terms being targeted that help identify who the likely consumer of the content is?
• Influence/Outcome: What are consumers of the content meant to do after they are finished?
• Search and Find: How should the content be structured to enable users to find it, and then to read it easily?

It’s only after all of these questions are answered that content creators can go about their business.

After that, it’s all about talent (which can’t be taught) and technique (which can). Oh, and a style guide.

Do your content creators (in-house or external) have all the information they need?

A couple of interesting outbreaks for the closet neo-luddites out there (you know who I am you are!):

Lanier: Web 2.0 is anti-humanist
Jaron Lanier, the virtual reality and avatar trailblazer (and philosopher and multi-instrumentalist) has recently published a book called You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto. In this sweeping book about individuals, culture and the Web, he argues that the Web 2.0 revolution in online social networking and collaboration is a problem. A BIG problem.

According to Lanier, sites like Wikipedia, Facebook and even Amazon are anti-humanist: they elevate the ‘wisdom of crowds’ and the power of advertiser-driven algorithms above the discriminating judgement of individual people. They create a ‘hive mind’ that leaves little room for individual expression, let alone an environment that respects such creativity.

The root cause of this is the design of technology. First, Lanier claims that we, as users, get ‘locked in’; we have to conform to a particular ‘relationship status’ on Facebook; Wikipedia becomes an authority, even though it is written by anonymous contributors; if you bought this book, you should buy that book; etc.

Propelled by 1960s anti-government paranoia, technologists designed the Internet to be anonymous. And because of this, the online world (and especially Web 2.0 manifestations of it) is riddled with trolls who can easily and cynically shut down reasonable conversations, and who have created an environment (and tools) that devalue individual artistic accomplishment (“Content wants to be free”, copyright infringement, etc).

SXSW – Rushkoff: Program or Be Programmed
In a zeitgeisty moment, at last week’s South by Southwest tech event, Douglas Rushkoff – post-McLuhan media theorist, one-time cyberpunk and the pioneer of ‘social currency’ – gave an address titled Program or Be Programmed: 10 Commands for a Digital Age.

You can read lots of descriptions of the talk (here, here and here for example). Interestingly, many of Rushkoff’s ideas intersect with Lanier’s book.

The overarching theme is that, rather than ask how we can use technology, we should be asking what we can make technology do for us. Jaron Lanier called it being ‘locked in’. Rushkoff says that if the Web is something we consume, rather than create, that’s a problem. A BIG problem. “If we create a society that is programmed, we will be the users and most importantly, the used.”

Other big ideas:

• The Web can be happily asynchronous, so why are we ‘always on’ and demanding synchronous communication?
• Why do we send text messages to the person sitting next to us?
• Facebook (and others) promotes forced choice. What’s your relationship status? Feel free not to opt in to this. (Rushkoff says that withholding choice does not denote failure. It reminds me of that great line from Richard Linklater’s 1991 movie Slacker : “Withdrawal in disgust is not the same as apathy”.)
• Anonymity promotes facelessness, polarisation and a lack of consequence.
• Contact is King, not content. Rushkoff says, “Social marketing is an oxymoron”.
• Nothing is free. Don’t steal. It breaks the social contract.

Overly negative? Maybe a bit. These guys were born in 1960 and 1961, and have been technical pioneers; they’ve seen a bit.

Are they jaded oldies who are getting in the way of the cool kids, or wise elders in a world that needs just this kind of introspection and critique?

Purple or Prosaic?
It’s a tricky business naming a product. The first decision is probably to work out whether you want something suggestive, creative and ephemeral, or something literal and descriptive.

I always want to go down the purple path, but common sense (usually) eventually kicks in.

The right way to go might depend on a few variables:

• the nature of the product (Socket Set versus CK One)
• names of competitor products (Jif, Vim, Bam)
• fit with other products you make (iSnack 2.0???)
• your target market (Carlton Draft versus Mountain Goat Hightail Ale)
• and more

In the end, you want a name that resonates with the right people at the right time.

Getting the right ‘feel’
When I was thinking of a name for this business, I thought literal (Content Strategy Australia), personal (Ryan Strategy Group), evocative (too embarrassing to reveal) and thematic (WordWork) before hitting on Sitegeist. It’s a name that not everyone ‘gets’, but it works for me because it captured the spirit of the business I wanted to run:

• clever
• funny
• sophisticated
• self-aware

Not everyone likes it, but most of my clients do.

Slipstream what?
I recently helped Ben, a friend and former colleague, come up with a name for some software he has developed. The original name – ‘Slipstream’ – was evocative; meant to imply speed and ease – two of the product’s main attributes. It was also already being used, so he chose another name – this one far more thematic and overt about the actual product: WindowFlow.

In hindsight, he was lucky my initial suggestion wasn’t available; the new name is clearer, less ambiguous, and should work better with the product’s target market. Smart thinking.

What tree?
I also worked for a while on the popular online travel bulletin board at Lonely Planet, the Thorn Tree. A great name…if you already knew what it was.

But, as a smart website manager asked me, why would anyone click on those words in a navigation menu? She was right. The product name was too obscure. The result was a product that felt just a bit too ‘clubby’ and exclusive.

Solution? Simple: call it “Thorn Tree travel forum”. It retains its quirky on-brand identity, and also “says what it is on the tin”. Bingo.

Research. There it is again.
A word of warning, though. When naming a product, do a bit of research into what the words actually mean. Toyota’s Starlet is a good example: A starlet is a young movie star with potential. Yes. But another common definition is “a young and inexperienced actress who is projected as a potential star”. Overhyped. Hmmm.

Another car model is the Mirage: “Something illusory”. And there’s the whole Pajero=wanker debacle. Or does it mean “straw seller”. Or is it just an urban myth?

Here’s a fun product, snapped in a shop window in the charming Victorian town of Beaufort last weekend. It’s always worth checking out any slang implications for your product name too…

In the space of a decade, the thinking around how to attain (and measure) success online has changed.

We used to count ‘hits’. But a hit was defined as a file download – a file request on you server (not a visit) – and so image-heavy web pages – containing 10 or 20 or more image files – racked up the stats. The measure was meaningless.

It’s all about unique visitors now.

We used to talk about time on site. It’s still an interesting measure, but not always in the way we might imagine. Time on some pages is good. Time on other pages might be bad.

If your page is the ‘verify your purchase’ page within your shopping cart, a user glancing over everything and moving on is ideal. 5 seconds. Maybe 10. If that page is taking up 30 seconds or 1 minute of your customers’ time, it might be an alarm bell masquerading as a compelling page.

But here’s proof positive that the game has really changed. I recently stumbled across an article called The Economics of Surfing (PDF 45kb), written by Adar and Huberman in 2000 for (I love this journal title) the Quarterly Journal of Electronic Commerce (Vol 1, No 3).

The basic argument in the article is that if your site has multiple pathways to the same end point (which it should), then users are putting different values on getting to that point. If I click once, that’s ok. But if I click 3 times, I’ve paid a higher price (where cost=time) for the information or content or sale or whatever.

So the thing the user wants varies in value, and actually becomes more valuable (to the user) the longer the user traverses your site to reach it.

Check this:

“One can construct a web site that changes its link structure to lengthen the path traversed by a given user, thereby making him visit many more pages. For example, if there is a short route (in the number of clicks) to a given page, one may wish to turn that off if the user is likely to visit more pages in between.”

The Economics of Surfing, p 5

Make a user visit ‘many more pages’ and they’ll value your site more highly. Ha!

At the heart of web use is the demand for speed. Don’t waste our time is the online mantra (unless I want my time wasted, of course…).

I recently posted about possible moves by Google to change their algorithm to reward faster web pages. People want stuff…fast! And while a web page’s load time is not the same as a site-wide search for information, Adar and Huberman’s thesis remains astonishing for its lack of insight into what web users demand: Speed and precision.

Or am I being too harsh. Is this criticism just 20-20 hindsight? Were we different? Did we want to click and surf and play and browse more in 2000 than we do now, a decade later? If so, why?

Has the game really changed, or is it us?

With the announcement a week or two back of the iPad (great name, guys), thoughts again turn to the e-reader.

The Kindle, launched in 2007, was the first big-name foray into the e-book reader space, and – if electronic book readers finally really take off on the back on the iPad – it’s set to be a revolution in both publishing and reading as shattering as the invention of the printing press around 1440.

Hyperbole? Yeah, maybe.

Although if Apple’s track record with established production and distribution methods (think iTunes and the music industry) and with owning a nascent market (‘iPod’ now equals ‘mp3 player’ in the same way that Walkman, Rollerblade, Hoover, Xerox and Kleenex all once became synonymous with their product class), is anything to go by, the iPad will at once popularise e-book readers and redefine the e-book marketplace.

If I ran a newspaper, and I wasn’t already terrified about the future, I would be now.

So what about actual books? I’m not talking about literary forms, such as the novel or poetry. I mean the actual physical paper-based artefact?

Well, who knows? I bought a brand new vinyl LP last year, so old formats can still survive technological revolutions. [Having said that, I quickly digitised the record and now listen to it almost exclusively as mp3 files…]

As for the book, some folks out there obviously think there’s a mid-point between old-skool print and the ephemeral digital age.

And if this concept video from Japanese mobile phone innovation crowd Mobile Art Lab is anything to go by, I say, bring on the hybrid!