The Long Dog has moved

The Long Dog has moved to www.TheLongDog.co.uk and is updated every Wednesday.

Come and visit for more Web, Digital and Communications blather.

Ta,
The Long Dog

I just don’t get Twitter

…was what a friend said recently. A debate started about whether Twitter was a fabulous burgeoning social networking tool … or just another excuse to waste time instead of doing real work.

For the uninitiated, Twitter, describing itself as a microblogging tool (whatever that means), is an online social network, allowing Tweeple (yes … people who indulge) to post up 140 characters’ worth of news, questions, social trivia or just about anything that takes your fancy, as often as they like. Unlike Facebook you don’t need permission to ‘follow’ anyone’s updates, unless they’ve created a hidden profile which, to be honest, instantly makes Twitter a social eunuch and reasonably pointless – go back to Facebook! The more people you follow, the more updates you’ll see – you just have to remember to follow interesting people – friends, colleagues or celebs.

The updates (‘Tweets’) range from banal to more work-minded collaboration. A quick glance at the Tweets I’m following shows me these two:

“Ugh I just spilled water all over my chair – it was my bad thoughts about the salad place!!! ACK!”
“Social Media’s History And Trajectory – Notes From Danah Boyd (BoingBoing): http://bit.ly/eNwjr [We like Danah - alot]”

Like all online social networks, Twitter is only worth using if it’s useful. If it’s not – forget it and go and do something more productive instead. So – make it work for you, or leave it alone.

But. Like real life social networks, you get what you put in and you have to put in before others put out. When I asked the Twitter community what would you say to someone who says ‘I just don’t get Twitter’, one of the best answers was “You don’t have to … you’re not the target audience”.

Just because you’ve got a telephone doesn’t mean that lots of people will pick you out of the phone book to be their friend. If you want to get maximum value, mimic what you’d do at any networking event, or social situation:

1 – Associate with interesting people: ‘Follow’ as many interesting or potentially interesting people you can find , either by contacting them, or looking at your friends’ and colleagues’ feeds and seeing who looks good (you can always remove them later).

2 – Engage: Tweet to your heart’s content. Just remember that if you want to become one of those interesting people, pose questions, post links and yes … tell us about the personal stuff as well.

Ok, so why bother? Here are some of the reasons others have given:

- Building informal relationships with a global community, at great speed and zero expense
- Feedback on new products
- Following news as it happens and before the newsfeeds have had a chance to publish anything
- Access to high profile individuals (remember, you can follow ‘anyone’)
- “I get my news from BBC World’s Tweets, 24/7”
- Being contacted, without requesting, by the customer service department of a company, when someone was having real problems with a product (see “100 days of Twitter”)
- “It’s the water cooler, it’s the people you turn to, it’s the parish pump, it’s the pub, it’s the club, it’s just always there.”

Still need convincing? Ok – a couple of good articles on benefits and experience and the Twitter and links to the profiles of those who wrote them:

- “100 days of Twitter: The Twuth is out there” by Jennifer Frahm
- “Twitter Tips for Newbies” by Barbara Gibson (Chair of the International Association of Business Communicators)
- “Is Twitter the new list?” by Martin Malden, blogger and internet marketer
- “How Twitter’s spectacular growth is being driven by unexpected uses” video with Twitter’s CEO Evan Williams

Don’t forget to look me and my Tweets up on my profile.

… and thanks to @JM71 for inventing a word for those who don’t do Twitter … “Twuddites”

The Long Dog

Pick a card (sort)

“From chaos comes order” – Friedrich Nietzsche

An old friend and (now) colleague were discussing card sorting exercises and asked if I’d ever write something on the subject. Well, @harry_harrold (and other lovely readers) the DJ is indeed playing requests, so here you go…

For those unfamiliar, it’s a research technique similar to reorganising your music collection instead of doing your school revision. You might not know what you’re going to end up with but if you did you probably don’t need to run this sort of exercise. It’s easy, fun and great for engagement, collaboration and stimulating structured debate. They’re also stock in trade for user-centred design (UCD).

I use card sorts in situations where I’ve got a mess of as yet unrelated information that’s difficult to organise or identify relationships – organisation structures, website information architecture, prioritising and assigning work tasks. As always, this warrants greater description, but I’ll try a brief outline of the technique…

Equipment:
- ‘A mess of as yet unrelated information’ (pieces of web content, tasks, members of the animal kingdom etc)
- Cards. These can be A6 speaker’s prompt cards, Post-Its or anything else that’s small, numerous, inexpensive and easy to write on

That’s it. Maybe a pen to write on said cards, but that’s really all you need.

I’m going to deal with the solitary and group activities separately, but there’s one BIG rule for both approaches: Don’t try and make things fit an idea you’ve got in your head. This is what this exercise is about: discovering new and sensible ways of organising information.

Dancing on your own
Use a different card for each piece of information and don’t be shy about using a LOT of cards. Better to capture everything separately and get it right, than save a few coins on stationery. Scatter the cards onto a big table, put sticky notes on a wall or window, stand back and take a long look.

Where items seem to be related, start to put them into groups apart from the mass, but feel free to change mind and reorganise at any time. Using the idea classifying the animal kingdom, you might group dogs, cats and cows together as they all have four legs and fur/hair, but keep sharks separate even if they all have a head and tail at opposite ends.

Once you’ve enough items in a group, think of the common element that describes this group (e.g. mammals) and create a heading or “label” for that group. Ok – repeat until everything is either in a group or unquestionably on its own.

If groups get big or disproportionately bigger than other groups, you’ve probably lumped too much together and need get more granular with subgroups. You could create a new group for cows, lamas and antelopes (ungulates) and another for the dogs, cats and rabbits (pets).

Don’t expect to get it right on the first attempt. Go back and check. If it seems right, duplicate cards to fit in multiple areas, change labels to give the most understandable description, check for spurious or over sized groupings and check how the groupings relate to each other. You might want to rethink lumping dogs, cats and rabbits together as ‘pets’ and maybe split them into canidae, felidae and lagomorpha (betcha thought they were rodents, dintcha?). These subgroups fit neatly into the main group ‘mammals’.

Outputs
This way you end up with either distinctly separate groups, or a granular hierarchy of groups and subgroups (check out the graphic). The latter is often used for creating hierarchical nepohedral taxonomies for websites, better known as “sitemaps”.

Group therapy
Group card sorts are great for getting some real user-centred design going and on-the-job buy in from stakeholders as they see patterns and structures emerge and have an input in the process.

For some of the intranets I’ve designed I’ve started the research process by getting a dozen or so people from around the business, and at different levels, then given them five minutes to write down things they currently use the intranet for, their day-to-day daily work tasks (on or off the intranet) and what they’d like to see on a new intranet. This gives plenty to start off with and things written down by more than one person also begin to give significance to weighting the perceived importance of information.

The key thing is that you can then get the participants to make their own groupings. Make sure you watch and facilitate what’s going on and clarify any ambiguous cards so that the entire group is clear about what’s meant by everything. Provoke debate and conversation – “Can you tell us why you think it’s best this way?” and get them – the real live punters – to come up with subgroups and labelling for the groups, under your watchful eye of sensibleness.

Lastly, remember to capture things they way they happened: Photograph the output, copy the results into an electronic version (Visio, Excel etc) or if it’s small enough, physically pick it all up and heave it back to your desk.

There … order from chaos. Just don’t try and make things fit, instead discover relationships and new ways of organising.

Questions?

Oh … and I *might* have made up the term “hierarchical nepohedral taxonomies”.

The Long Dog

Presentation is a skill – not a human right

Buttock-clenchingly awkward humour; jargon overdose; PowerPoint poisoning and just plain dull: all symptoms of bad presentations and bad presenters. Same way that some people sing like angels and some like storm drains, presenting uses innate skill and learned technique to really work.

Presenting is the art of delivering information to a live audience, responding live to their feedback and facilitating dialogue and discussion (alternative definitions welcome). I include telephone / video conferencing, virtual presentations and any other medium involving human interaction and instant audience feedback. The importance is that it’s an empathic and very personal skill.

With printed and electronic communication we’ve got used to the idea that anyone can publish, so anyone can communicate, giving rise to “newsletter communicators” who don’t (or won’t) care whether there’s reaction, so long as it goes out on time.

Early this year the UK government started a crackdown on boring teachers, blaming them for poor results and bad behaviour. We’ve all sat through interminable presentations and thought ‘what was that about’, ‘I could have done some real work’ or actually done some ‘real work’ during the presentation. Don’t mistake a subject matter expert for a good presenter.

Purpose. Why are you doing this? What do you want your audience to take away?  “Communicating <insert topic>” isn’t good enough.

Structure. Stories are a formula humans have been used to for millennia, from cradle to grave. Plot twists, cliff-hangers and humour work well when they’re well crafted.

Engagement. Be creative and come up with ways to ensure your audience absorbs the information and can make use of it; teachers spend years training to do this. Use games, group interactions, town hall sessions, feedback, discussion and facilitators.

Tools. Beware of PowerPoint dependency: it’s a visual *aid*, not the presentation itself (see this most excellent video of How NOT to use PowerPoint). Also beware of hefty print outs … what do you want them to do – read or listen? Either way, keep it lean.

Style. Be an interesting speaker, but know your limits. If you’re a natural born performer put it to good use, if not, work up to the edge of your ability and not beyond. Let someone else to do it or at least let them facilitate and you can field questions. Don’t be shy about … er … being shy, we’ve all got our different strengths. Vary the tempo with other speakers (not too many, it’s not Vaudeville), breakout sessions and ample opportunity for feedback and discussion.

Next steps. Support your ‘stand up’ with physical takeaways, follow up sessions and actions to give context and credibility

Now go do // that Voodoo // that you do … so well.

The Long Dog

I’m right and you’re all wrong

Experience is an illusion and personal opinion is vanity – only through investigation and measurement can we understand the truth.

Ok … it might sound like an atheist manifesto but I wanted a punchy opening.

To wind the melodrama down to a more acceptable volume, my point here is that when you’re dealing with producing material for anyone who isn’t “you”, without research or investigation you’re operating on guesses and blind faith – and if faith defies proof, then I really hope you don’t have any KPIs for your work.

In 2007 I redesigned the intranet for a global publication. On the limping violet wilderness that was their current offering, a sizable chunk of homepage real-estate was taken up by three clocks showing hours, minutes and even the seconds, for times in London, New York and Hong Kong – the three main offices. My dismissive and smug assertion “Well THOSE will go for a start - people should use the clock on their task bar and save space. Pah!” was buried under drifts of praise for their usefulness, in the ensuing employee interviews.

It turned out that the international offices needed to communicate so often that a quick check on the intranet’s home page showed who in the world was or wasn’t awake and who had already left for the pub. My mistake – but one corrected by investigation, backed up later by user testing. Needless to say I came up with an elegant solution that saved space and also removed the disenfranchisement of those in other offices like Frankfurt, Moscow and Honolulu.

Experience goes a long way in making educated guesses, but it’s unlikely that we can ever be sure our suspicions are absolutely right without something robust to back them up. We risk what Jay Ball, Creative and Planning Director at Banner advertising agency calls “the focus group of one”.

Don’t be afraid to not know the answer – just make sure you know how to find out.

An Information Architect I spoke to recently was challenged at an interview, by an executive of the company whose website he was going to redesign. “Why don’t you know? We’d be employing you to have all the answers”. His correct and brave response was to say that he didn’t have the answers – he wasn’t this guy’s target audience – but what he did have was the skills to defensibly find out what the answer was.

Ok – you want practical advice?

Well … like the profusion of management gurus and the myriad of conflicting religious and new age answers to ‘Life, the universe and everything’ (that’ll have Douglas Adams spinning in his grave), you can take your pick from any number of experts, gurus, consultants and self-help books. But, for anyone who’s got enough brain to read this far, just make sure you do your research about what you’re doing, why you’re doing it and who you’re doing it for. Some ideas on how …

- Clearly understand the requirements or brief
- Define who your audiences are. See my “We are all individuals … I’m not!” post on defining audiences and individual behaviours for some tips
- Speak with stakeholders and the people with the big salaries, permashine Mercedes and not really enough time for ‘someone like you’, but more important are those who are actually going receive or use what you’re going to produce, through interviews, questionnaires, workshops and repeated testing, started early on in the process
- If there’s conflict between the audience’s and the organisation’s needs, find out why and go back to whoever commissioned the work. If you can suggest a solution – gold star and take the rest of the day off
- Mock it up and try it out before you put all the hard work in and have to change it. Frequent tweaking (Matron!) is better than launching a poor product and having to redo it. To paraphrase, “It’s better to fail in testing than in the market place”
- Don’t be afraid to *not* know the answer, just make sure you know the best way to find out what it is

In summary: apply imagination to your thinking, but make sure your thinking is grounded in reality and just because I espouse research over assumption doesn’t mean I don’t like pretty things and chocolate.

The Long Dog

Antisocial networking behaviour – a case study

In a previous post I referred to being told off by a colleague for my defence of the use of the term ‘audience’ on a communications company’s forum. Even before I’d had a chance to read that post, I received phone calls and emails from other subscribers, shocked by his behaviour so I contacted the moderator, only to be even more surprised by their response.

For those of you who don’t know what a listserv is, it’s an email distribution list, restricted to a group of subscribers who can read and reply to posts which are then visible to all the subscribers. The listserv in question is hosted and moderated by a respected, global communications organisation (not the IABC in case you’re wondering). A question posted about measuring the value of organisations’ internal news was met with a quick and florid rebuttal concerning the terms the person had used.

My reply that I thought ‘audience’ was still a valid term found the same, rebutting, non-UK subscriber (non-UK is important, you’ll see) replying with a self-righteous 600 word diatribe referring me, with interminable quotes, to “the world’s leading PR/ Communication scholar”. This stultifyingly self-important follow-up to his original flounce was finished with this flourish…

“Allow me to put my tongue firmly in my cheek, but after more than 10 years following [the comms company’s] publications, conferences and chatter, it seems to me that the only ones who would defend the terms “audience” and “communicator” today in 2009 would be those employed in communication who live in the British Isles. Certainly, my sense is that Europe, NA, Australia see a larger role for communication professionals. Is it something to do with the old class system?”

Now, isn’t “tongue firmly in my cheek” a similar platitude to “I’m not racist, but …”? It appears that’s what this listserv’s (dare I say it) audience thought. I felt I couldn’t reply to the post without either trading insults, or needing to defend myself – neither of which would have been appropriate or productive. Here are some of the remarks I received from people, both known and unknown to me:

- “Those guys were just patronising”
- “Offensive and basically racist”
- “One if his recent posts was also a bit close to the bone”
- “What’s [he] trying to do, start a US-UK communicators’ war?!”
   (NB: [He] isn’t from the US)
- “He actually had the nerve to email me directly and – at length – patronise the socks off me! Who does this bloke think he is?”
   (after replying to the original question, but unfortunately also after
   [his] post)
- “I had to sit on my hands and see if you were going to reply, because if you didn’t, I was going to”
- “I’m still with you on this one”
   (interesting why they felt they couldn’t add their voice publicly
- “Sounded like he was just trying to sound intelligent when actually he sounded just, well testiculatory!”
   (probably best she didn’t post this one publicly)

So there you have it – the voice of the people. So what do you do when someone bullies you? You go tell the teacher – or the moderator in this case. But this is what I got…

“Thank you for your comments. We know [him] quite well (he’s been a very long-term contributor) so read this in the way it was hopefully intended, namely, playful and provocative rather than insulting and offensive. I would suspect he’d be mortified to think that he’d caused any offence to you and other network users.”

Doesn’t this boil down to “Sorry – he’s already in our gang. Anyway can’t you take a joke”?

Apparently not. Nor could all the customers (yes, that’s right … the comms company’s ‘customers’) who contacted me, or who were silent either by choice or because they DIDN’T know [him] so didn’t feel comfortable taking him on.

Oddly enough, I found this reply more aggravating than the original post, coming from ‘the powers that be’ and all. So, not worried about mortifying [him], I replied, asking whether this post should have slipped past the moderators, only to find my complaint escalated because the moderator was “a little concerned that her moderating duties may have fallen into question”. Hang on … why am I the one fielding complaints and comments of support from the public, while the company in question is defending its sleeping gate keepers, its friends who profess professionalism while practising vainglorious condescension, and kindly telling me to get a life?

One articulate reply to the offending post summed up well…

“There is a danger that the person who is heard the most is the one who shouts the loudest. Is perhaps one of our roles to moderate/mediate messages with honest appraisals [and] with an eye on those who do not join in for whatever reason?”

There is a part of me, however, that hopes that if [he] reads this, he isn’t “mortified” because the comms company never contacted him. Still – I hope they all take this post in the spirit of ‘playful’ and ‘provocative’ healthy debate and discovery with which it is meant. So there.

Ok … normally I’d end a post with practical ideas on the topic I’ve just been ranting about, but this time I want to ask questions instead:

- On what basis should moderators screen, reject or at least ask for modification of subscribers’ posts?
- How should moderators of a social network reply to individuals who feel they have a genuine grievance?
- Can you gauge the full impact of an issue by only seeing the tip of the iceberg?
- Are there or should there be ASBOs for repeat or particularly objectionable offenders in social networks?
- In an incident like this how do you share responsibility and accountability between host and post?

Grrrrrrrr!

The Long Dog

We’re all individuals … I’m not!

“I know what you’re thinking about,” said Tweedledum: “but it isn’t so nohow.”
‘Through the Looking Glass’,
Lewis Carroll

One of the problems of communicating with or making services available to large bodies of people is that everyone is different.

I was recently told off, on a well known communication organisation’s forum, by a ‘colleague’ for the apparently anachronistic use of the term “audiences” (your thoughts please?). Anyhoo – be it audiences, stake holders, participants … woddevah! … you need to understand who it is your engaging with (that better?) to craft your work to meet not only your needs but the needs of those you’re engaging with. If you don’t, you have to make ill-informed assumptions, so at best you’re fighting blind, at worst it’s vanity publishing, a waste of money and in some cases potentially litigious – a classic example of this is web sites intended to be used by disabled people, that aren’t accessible.

- Web Accessibility Guidelines (dry, dull and impenetrable, but ‘official’ guidelines from the W3C – the international standards organization for the World Wide Web)

In the miasma of “We are all individuals” (sorry Python) how does one tease out the relevant information about your intended (dare I say it) audience? The answer to this is manifold, but here are some quickies off the top of my very own head.

Personas
Originally a marketing technique, these are great fun to create and give you archetypes, illustrating broad demographic characteristics. The personas are intended to be characters that are believably real, so that those working on the same project can relate to them on an empathic level to encourage a focus on the intended audience as real people.

Typical characteristics include age, gender, educational level, financial position, motivation and goals for using your material, your response to their motivation and goals and often include a scenario concerning the persona needing to interact with your material.

I recently made a bunch of personas for a public sector organisation and even before the end of the presentation my stake holders were already taking about their proposed web content in ways like “Well, is this going to easy enough for Dean to understand?” and “We’re going to have to find a way to make sure Chrissie follows the process the way she needs to, not the way she wants to”.

I’m happy to write a whole post on personas if people are interested, but as a starter, I’d say have a look at things like:

- “The User is Always Right: A Practical Guide to Creating and Using Personas for the Web”. Good but unless you’re a stats geek, skip quite a few chunks about audience segmentation with pivot tables *snore*
- “Personas” – Wiki

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)
MBTI uses a psychometric questionnaire to identify certain characteristics that show how individuals interact with people, situations and information. There are four pairs of polar characteristics (e.g. extrovert vs. introvert) and the questionnaire determines where we are on each scale to give a four letter ‘personality type’, which in turn carries a broad description of our behaviours. Case in point – I come out as an ‘extrovert, intuitive, feeling, judge’. You can read what the MB Foundation say they think I’m like under their entry for an ENFJ and feel free to disagree with only the bad bits.

How does it work in practice? I was talking to a senior project manager recently who told me a story about meetings he used to chair where no decisions were made, interminable debates always dragged the meeting over time and general dissatisfaction was felt by all. He then ran some Myers-Briggs tests on this group and realised that he was running his meeting all wrong for these people – they needed structure, not creative freedom. At the next meeting, he simply limited discussions to five minutes per topic with a decision to be taken at the end and ruthlessly enforced this. The result? Discussions were focussed, decisions were made and the attendees declared the meeting the most productive they’d ever had.

My first encounter with MBTI was in a workshop, run by Uma Palaniappan, an Ergonomist and Human Factors specialist at Rolls-Royce (the engines business, not the cars – Rolls-Royce sold the car business over 30 years ago, bet ya didn’t know that!). She split the attendees into four broad groups based on the MBTI results from the tests we’d done prior, and at the end of the workshop we presented our work to the group.

I presented my ‘extrovert intuitives’ group’s scruffy flip chart page, covered in shapes, squiggles and annotations, with my other ‘EN’s chipping in, while at the other end of the spectrum, the two quietly spoken ‘introvert sensors’ held up their A4 sheet with two or three lines written in small, red biro lettering and apologised as they’d not finished discussing what the question was really getting at. It was a fantastic example of how it IS possisble to pigeon hole people into identifiable groups – Moomins and Hemulins (for those that know).

- MBTI Wiki definition (sorry – lazy, I know)
- The Myers & Briggs Foundation (nastily ‘smiley’ site and with no definition of MBTI – aren’t they missing a trick? – but they appear to be specialists, so hey)

Now, I also wanted to talk about UCD (User-Centred Design), NLP (Neurolinguistic Programming) and something from the Dalai Lama, but as I’m approaching 1000 words and have already streaked past the boredom threshold of a number of you … they’ll have to save for their own special days.

But before I finish, I do need to mention that it’s not just about individuals. Another fascinating (read ‘geeky’) example of getting your ‘people things’ wrong is what happens when we get the wrong NUMBER of people in on something and why no government in the world has ever held a cabinet of more than 20 people for any length of time. Just read it – it’s a good story: “Explaining the curse of work”, New Scientist, 14 Jan 2009

Right. Done. Now, just remember: To paraphrase Monty Python’s ‘Life of Brian’: “We are all individuals … I’m not!”

The Long Dog

- “We are all individuals!!!“ Youtube ‘Life of Brian’ clip by Monty Python, for those of you living in a cave for the last 30 years (contains adult humour and religious irreverence)

Chatterbox websites lose visitors

“Mr Chatterbox was one of those people who simply couldn’t stop talking.

“He used to talk to anybody and everybody about anything and everything, going on and on and on.

“And on and on and on!”

For those of you unfamiliar with the ‘The Little Miss’ and ‘Mr Men’ series of children’s books it may please you to know that Mr Chatterbox (right) is a loveable but garrulous little character whose unbungable flow of waffle is eventually stopped with a magic hat that steadily grows to cover him when he doesn’t stop talking.

There are far too many websites and intranets that need their own magic hats, but it’s often difficult to explain to your CEO / subject matter expert / Marketing Director / Training Manager (delete as appropriate) that making content too wordy, confusing to follow or simply boring your site’s audience into submission has one of two effects:

1. If your site makes money, your competition is only a back button away: Your revenue drops – simple as that.
2. If your site is an information site or an intranet, people don’t find answers and your avoidable cost increases (calls to helpdesks, lower efficiency, wrong answers, referrals to other colleagues to find answers etc).

Oh, and don’t forget the damage it does to your brand. Business objectives mean nothing if your customers aren’t engaged with what you’ve got to offer. Don’t be showy, be smart about what and how you write your content.

Ok … so where’s some science to back this up?

In 1997 (yes – TWELVE years ago, so why is so much dross still being commissioned) Jakob Nielsen wrote an article outlining research on how people read web pages. While he talks about all the things we should already know about, like page scanning instead of reading, a particularly good demonstration shows how to edit eight lines of dull prose into just over one line and six clear bullets.

While some of the article is now outdated, humans haven’t evolved noticeably in the last decade so it’s worth a punt: “How Users Read on the Web”. A strong caveat I’d add to this concerns the logic of emboldening keywords (one of the aforementioned outdated thingies): Gerry McGovern, self styled content guru and repackager of information architecture as ‘Carewords’, sensibly pointed out that if you only want your readers to read the bold words, why bother with the rest of the text? Of course he’s right – just create focussed content and cut the waffle.

Last year I designed a tool for a UK bank – one of those things where you put in the details of all your various outstanding debts and they tell you just how much you can save every month if you consolidate your loans with them. One of the features that I killed off was the need for the customer to specify what interest rate they wanted to pay. Given the choice I’d have said 0% or at least something like 0.0000000000001% every time. What they really needed to say was how much they wanted to pay every month and then the bank can tell them what the interest rate is, if they’re … wait for it … ‘interested’ (ba-boom-tish!). My point here is this: don’t put obstacles in people’s paths to answers – or your product, for that matter.

Recent usability testing has shown that it’s not unusual for people to open several browser windows at once and compare services from different sites as they go along. As services don’t make the grade (difficult to understand, higher price, slower response time etc) they close those windows down until only one remains: the probable winner. Darwinian ecommerce? If your site’s still chattering about irrelevant or extraneous info while another’s taken your audience straight to the point then you lose, they win, and likely as not, your competitor will be the place that they return to next time.

So …

• - Cut out all … that’s ALL … extraneous waffle
• - Avoid sesquipedalian maledictions (cursed use of overly long words)
• - No vanity publishing (the text equivalent to loving the sound of your own voice – that includes valueless pictures of grinning execs and their “welcome – this is site is full of useful information…” blarney)
• - Pitch your language to the level of your audience
• - Write a draft, chop the word count in half then chop it in half again
• - Remove all speeling eroorrs and grammatical errors (unless the style says it ain’t so)
• - Learn when to stop

And on that note … I’m going to shut up.

The Long Dog

No – I’m not in IT.

I speak enough IT to get by, some of my friends are even ‘in IT’, but no … I’m not in IT.

Everyone from my (almost) 80 year old mother to my four year old son uses it in some way or other, so why is there still a strong sense that the internet is still ‘all IT’ and not just another channel?

Historically you needed a pony-tailed IT person of ambiguous job purpose to knock you up a website or intranet. Then the time came when they were then joined by a goateed designer (head to toe in black) and the two would argue about form versus function while you wondered how to get that 40 page corporate brochure “on … line” and then find some plausible justification for the outlay.

A while back I spent some time at an organisation where the Comms team’s admin support – a lady close to retirement – would ceaselessly and unforgivingly refer to me as “the technical expert”. She would also profess that she “knew nothing about IT” and that she “didn’t really understand computers”. This I accepted at face value, despite her conspicuously competent daily use of a computer and a number of standard Office software packages.

The point where I had difficulty believing that she “knew nothing about IT” and “didn’t really understand computers” was when she produced the memory card for a digital camera and said something along the lines of “I just don’t know what to do. I’ve tried downloading straight from my camera at home, but I can’t open the files in Paint or Photoshop. I’ve tried the memory card in this USB memory stick card adapter thing [I’d never seen one of these ‘card adaptor things’ before!] but I can’t get my work computer to recognise it at all … You’re technical – can you help?” Let’s just play back the line – she “knew nothing about IT” and “didn’t really understand computers”.

And the point of this rant is…?

The web is just another medium. Anyone who can read can publish information on it. It has as much to offer as other channels and with interaction, feedback, multimedia and an instant global reach at time of publication it has a lot more as well.

Yes, understand its peculiarities, but treat it as just another channel. When it’s treated separately, you end up with gems like the article in my local county newspaper ‘Bucks Free Press’ (no relation) whose headline on the 16th of January 2009 ran “Sorry you heard about your job losses online”, where “Angry county council staff were shocked to learn on the internet that hundreds of their jobs are set to be axed”. Perhaps some of those jobs were in Internal Communications?

Joined up thinking please, ladies and gentlemen, and don’t be afraid of the web – come on in, the water’s lovely.

The Long Dog.