Archive for the ‘writing’ Category

« Older Entries

Collecting annual report content

Thursday, February 9th, 2012

Writing an annual report for many people is a big chore done over a stressful month or two just before it is due to be released.

I have suggested before that the process is better spread across the year by keeping notes so that the actual preparation is easier.

Another way I work on an annual report throughout the year is to copy chunks of text into an annual report document as well. This is content worked on during the year for a specific topic or use – for example, descriptions of a new service or product launched during the reporting year.

When it comes to writing about those topics in the annual report, I can pull out the existing, correct content  and adjust it to need. It is much quicker than reinventing the wheel with new text or wasting time searching for that text “I know I wrote back then”.

Although a style guide often includes sections of useful text to be reused, it doesn’t always include text about specific events or external factors.

Can you imagine how organised you will feel and look when you pull out a page of pre-prepared text when you start writing your annual report content?

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in writing | No Comments »

Poor spelling impacts on your content

Tuesday, February 7th, 2012

Quality  content is more than the message – it also has to be presented in a way that is easy for people to read and understand.

Many people will tell you that the message is more important than spelling or grammar – and it is, but only to a point. A great message is lost if the spelling and grammar are poor.

Last night, I saw a page on a website that shows how important spelling can be – as even one wrong letter can make a big difference.

We make real-estate CD’s. [Business] can also make and host your web site, with promotion as the key fucus.

Using a u instead of an o is not just a typo we can ignore – the new word is too close to another word and that is what now catches our attention – not the original message.

It also changed the reader’s interpretation of the ‘presenting in a unique way’ in the following sentence, creating giggles instead of interest in their professional services.

It comes back to proofreading your work – not just a quick glance or use of a spell check, but a genuine check of what you have written. And the best proof reading is done a day or so after the writing or by another person. The quality of your content will improve through this simple process and maintaining a ‘focus’.

Tags: , ,
Posted in bad writing examples, grammar & details, writing | No Comments »

Define ‘you’ for clarity

Tuesday, January 17th, 2012

A clear message will get the best results.

An unclear message will literally cloud the waters, giving you confused, low quality or reduced quantity in results. For example, an unclear question will get meaningless answers and unclear shopping cart instructions will get fewer sales.

The word ‘you’ can be used to add clarity or obscure it.

When writing ‘you’, is it specific to the reader, a general term or someone associated with the reader? That needs to be clear, without thought, for the word to work as part of your message.

I just did a  quick survey which was aimed at parents and asked “How often do you make school lunches at home?” then “How often do your children get canteen lunches?”

In  my case, both answers were ‘never’ which may give the impression my kids starve! The reality is that I do not make their school lunches – they make their own.

Was the question specifically after how many lunches parents make or how many lunches are made at home? If the question was about home-made vs canteen, it was worded poorly and would have been better as “How often do your children take a home-made lunch to school?”

Have you seen other examples where ‘you’ is potentially misleading or confusing the message?

Tags: , , ,
Posted in writing | No Comments »

Learning social media rules

Thursday, December 22nd, 2011

I have been using a lot more social media (specifically twitter) recently as part of my Love Santa project. It because abundantly clear that some people have no idea (or don’t care) about how to effectively use Twitter.

Top most is having an understanding that twitter is for communicating and building relationships – not for blatant ads like old-fashioned media (e.g. a newspaper ad was a one way message). I saw a few businesses tweet their ad at least every couple of hours with no other messages in between. For one business, they had 3 variants of it and ran them in succession once every hour or so during their business hours. I wasn’t their audience anyway but seeing it so often bored and annoyed me, and gave me an uncomfortable feeling about them as a business.

Next is to have one honest profile. It because obvious when 3 twitter users repeatedly sent the same tweet straight after each other – a number of times. It came across as trying to trick and con people, plus it seemed they were desperate for business rather than offering quality or showing a genuine interest in people watching their tweets.

The other behaviour that was annoying while I was on twitter a lot (I haven’t really seen it when just keeping up with people I follow on twitter) was an excessive use of hash tags*. To me it was like reading a blog post or webpage written to show off keywords rather than actually communicate something – boring, annoying and an insult if they think I am impressed by such actions. Adding # to key words within a message is fine, adding a keyword or two after the message is also fine, but the following wasn’t so fine:

  • adding five or more hashtags after a brief message
  • adding hashtags that were about advertising not the message (e.g. adding #santa after a message about a computer breaking down to get noticed for Christmas or adding #webdesign to a message about dreading a visit to the dentist)
  • making the entire message hashtags with a link

Tweets are like any other content you write – make it about the message and people reading it, not about SEO and getting noticed by more people, as that is what will genuinely get your message heard and distributed.

I can’t say what results those people get from their tweets, but I know I would never retweet or follow them (and I’m sure I’m not alone). I can say that most of the retweeted Love Santa tweets were those based on replying to someone else – in other words, ‘talking’ to people was appreciated and earned greater exposure to other tweeters.

Twitter can be a great marketing tool but it needs to be thought of as a relationship tool with marketing bonuses to have the best impact on your business.

Or maybe you are happy to read tweets with some of the above characteristics? Or have found them effective for viral marketing?

* A hashtag is simply adding # at the start of a word (or group of words without a space in between) that can be used to highlight a topic and make searching for relevant information on twitter easier.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in business info, marketing, writing | No Comments »

Content and message must match

Friday, December 16th, 2011

Whatever your message is, your content must be consistent as well.

One of my favourite writing tasks is helping Santa write letters each Christmas at Love Santa. They are fun, positive letters and I know that each one will bring smiles and extend the Christmas joy.

Of course, sometimes people feel that they get too old for Santa and question their belief in him and the magic of Christmas.

Like many others, Love Santa has some information available to help people (parents in particular) to encourage people to keep their belief in Santa. The information is written with care to give tips on encouraging but also be read by those in doubt without any additional cause to doubt (and yes, this blog post is also being carefully written!)

Others are not so careful. I just read an article with ‘easy ways to keep your child believing in Santa’ that spends the first few paragraphs destroying any doubts before giving the five tips. Any doubting child reading it would no longer be influenced by those useful tips so the purpose would be lost – and don’t assume kids don’t read articles aimed for parents!

This makes a clear example of how the presentation of information through choice of words, headings and images can support or contradict the intent and content of the writing. Sure it is harder to write so that the entire message is consistent and acceptable for all potential readers, but it will serve the purpose much better and will be appreciated by those looking for the information.

What examples have you seen of a message not supporting itself? Or maybe you have a Santa story to share (although personal stories are best shared at Love Santa’s blog!)?

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Clients, writing | No Comments »

Price your message in context

Wednesday, November 30th, 2011

At about the same time as I learned about aiming your content at your target audience, we looked for and bought another house and I learned another lesson from real estate agents.

In this case, the lesson was to understand your product specifically in the selling context.

First, the story… We found the house we wanted (and still happily live in) and decided to go for it at auction. The agents had shown disinterest in selling us the property (there was no way they would open it up outside of the allotted inspection times for instance) which is symptomatic of the whole situation.

We won the auction – yah!

The price was great – still a lot of money but cheaper than we would have expected. A house in the same block but on a main road and in bad condition sold for $500 more just a week earlier.

Signing the paperwork, it was obvious the owners and agents were very happy with the price as it was well above reserve.

Good to see a win-win for everyone.

Of course, the agents were less happy when they heard about the $500 more house near by. And were last seen driving towards it to see for themselves.

The point was that the owners had used non-local real estate agents who obviously thought our suburb was “lower” than the houses they usually sold so they devalued the property. They hadn’t done any research in the area so did not know the value of the land or comparisons with house styles in the area.

Our win but a valuable lesson – if selling, use someone who knows the product in the context of how it is being sold.

It’s like knowing you won’t get the same price for something at a school fete as you would in a craft shop in a tourist area.

Do some research to know your product, the context and what prices the market will accept.

Adjust your content to match, too – for example, ‘excellent value’ will work in many contexts, ‘exclusive touch of luxury’ will be out of place and ineffective at a school fete and ‘bargain bin’ does not inspire high prices.

Have you seen prices skewed because someone hasn’t understood the context or target market?

Tags: , , ,
Posted in business info, writing | No Comments »

Cheap writing services

Sunday, November 27th, 2011

I was just reviewing the Love Santa blog for my client, including cleaning up the spam folder. In amongst the other spam was one offering a writing service based on one cent per word ($5 for a 500 word article!) from (apparently) US residents.

It annoyed me on a number of levels:

  • who would think they will get quality results from a $5 article? Those prices are just cheap and nasty
  • implying that because someone lives in the USA they have good English and can write professionally is just ridiculous – what about immigrants for starters? And even those who speak and understand good English may not be any good at writing it
  • nobody should be paid such low wages and my conscience wouldn’t let me buy such work. A 500 word article on a topic I know well would take me at least 20 minutes – and I write fast. A topic that requires more thought and some research would obviously take longer. So at best, they are offering $15 an hour and not many would make that much is my belief.
As a business person, I also don’t think much of their marketing. If promoting your services to a blogger, why not offer blog writing instead of article writing? Promoting your service will generally do better if you give some benefit or value to your offering, not just listing a very cheap price.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in writing | No Comments »

Aim your content at your target

Wednesday, November 23rd, 2011

Whether it’s content for a blog, a newsletter, a website or anything else, it is going to produce the best results if the content and writing suit your potential buyers (your target audience).

Sounds simple, yet it isn’t always done…

Earlier this week I read a post by Paul Hassing which reminded me of when I was selling my house a few years ago. Aiming to sell the house, we tried an agent with an apparently different philosophy to most real estate companies. However, he didn’t like my cute little house (for one thing it didn’t have picture rails like our neighbour’s house did!) and couldn’t sell it. We swapped to a woman at another company who was great and sold it for an extra $20K to the same person the first agent had spoken to.

I think one factor that helped her do a much better job was her enthusiasm for the house – at her first visit she was imagining what people could do in the home and the type of furniture they’d like, and so on. She looked for what was good about the house, thought about the type of people it would appeal to and came up with ideas to feel them on the lifestyle it would give them.

The first agent didn’t like the house himself so couldn’t imagine any extras to sell to potential buyers. Agent two used passion to understand and sell to her audience; agent one saw it as a commodity and tried selling it without emotion, imagination or real interest.

So when writing content remember to pitch the message at the right people and help them picture how the product or service will fit into their lives. Targetting the right people may reach fewer people but it will get more action from those people.

Have you seen real estate agents pitch the wrong house to people, or excite people by pitching the right house to them?

Tags: , , ,
Posted in business info, writing | 1 Comment »

Don’t over generalise

Monday, November 21st, 2011

When writing content, generalising can make it simpler to present your message but it can also create issues.

Approximations work most of the time (‘about one thousand’ or ‘approximately half the people’) whereas a generalisation is making a statement about an entire group (such as “all self-employed writers write good web content”). The problem arises if the generalisation is too general to be completely accurate or useful.

Some people will read a generalisation without thought, others will focus on the fact there are exceptions to your statement and others will take offence at being included (or excluded). Maybe you don’t care about annoying the pedants of this world, but there may be more of them than you expect in your target audience, and offending people is not often a good plan.

Todays I read a blog post which included the following generalisation:

Whatever size company you are with, you need to establish the roles of Chief Content Officer, Managing Editor, Content Producers, Chief Listening Officer and your Content Creators.

While the blog post as a whole was great, this statement stood out to me because it excludes sole traders. “Whatever size company you are with” pretty clearly indicates that the following information applies to all businesses – but if you’re in a small business , you are not going to have more than five roles within the communications area and may not even have five roles in total! I found this statement frustrating as I can’t assign such roles to different people and this post gave no indication of how to blend the roles if required.

What generalisations have you come across that have stood out for you? Do those experiences come to mind when writing content so you don’t generalise inappropriately?

Tags: , , ,
Posted in writing | No Comments »

Communicating burning issues

Thursday, October 27th, 2011

Driving home form a meeting on Monday night, I heard a radio program about treating burns. The content was interesting enough but one comment in particular made by Lara Harvey (BSc, MPH, PhD Student) really stood out for me.

From a survey, they have determined that most people learn first aid (and specifically first aid for burns) from first aid manuals/books (43%) and the internet (33%). {I am in the minority to have done many courses apparently.}

However, if you do a burns treatment search, the answers are not consistent. That is most sites will tell you to treat a burn with water but they vary in how long you need to do so for. {Glad to say that I teach cubs the time experts want people to know!}

Lara asked (and I’m paraphrasing as I don’t recall her exact words) “How can we let people know something so important if there is an inconsistent message out there?”

I often write about the importance of consistency within a business or brand, but there is a broader issue of consistency within an industry or topic. It only takes one person to write the wrong fact for that message to get spread and potentially cause troubles – in this example, the trouble of not cooling a burn for long enough but it could damage an industry’s reputation, give customers unrealistic expectations or have people using products inappropriately.

There are no rules for the internet – anyone can set up a website and put whatever content they like on there. If they make it look good and promote it well, they may just get it seen by many people and influence them even if they don’t have the appropriate knowledge to start with.

Likewise there are no updating rules – a knowledgable person could upload great information but maybe it is now out of date. How does the average internet viewer know the information has changed?

So do you have any suggestions as to how consistent messages can be reported on the net? 

How did you learn about treating burns and other first aid treatments? Do you think it was effective?

ADDED NOTE: The correct first aid for a burn is to put it under cold water for 20 minutes. Running water is best (although jumping in a pool or other big volume works well, too) but even a bucket of water is better than nothing. Ice and creams are not necessary and can make things worse. Severe, chemical and large burns need medical attention. Only remove clothing if it is not sticking to skin. Keep the patient warm and offer them water to drink.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in bit off track, web content, writing | No Comments »

« Older Entries