Beantin16 Articles worth reading… (Spotted: Weeks 1-2, 2011)
This edition’s collection of links includes posts related to: Intranets, UX, Web design and web development, web strategy and web tactics, Analysis and eye tracking.
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Posts by James Royal-Lawson tagged with contentstrategy
Posts by James Royal-Lawson tagged with contentstrategy
Beantin Webbkommunikation is James Royal-Lawson+46735931654, Stockholm-based digital strategist and web managerwebbkonsult, webbrådgivare
On this blog you can find articles that cover web strategy webbstrategi, intranets intranät, trends (often with a Swedish twist), analytics, and running an effective web presence. Check out my most popular posts.
No more writing for the web?
Below is a transcript of an exchange between myself and Per Axbom on the Beantin Facebook page earlier this week.The conversation is in response to this blog post: Why it might be time to stop writing for the web by Tamsin Hemingray at iCrosing.
Interesting post, and I agree with aspects of it - but ultimately I disagree. Yes you should write for your target audience, but when writing for digital channels you have to understand as a writer that your target audience includes the machines that process, index & re-use your carefully written content.
BeantinI see your point, and there is a fair bit to say about needed education to understand how to write, or rather: incorporate links, headers, keywords, images , etceteras in a way that optimises the content for the web medium and for the ease of being found using search engines - and of course being easily read on a screen.
She touches briefly on this in the article in the sense that she expects her staff to already possess many of these skills; they are so to say, self-evident. This I do not agree with, this is something that few writers are aware of and the need to be more so.
The part I do agree with the most is that we are focusing too little on the humans we are writing for, in comparison with how many web writing classes there are to just sort out all the technical stuff. There is too little focus also on how the web article fits into the grand scheme of things that the company publishes and distributes and communicates to customers and stakeholders. There is a lot of let’s just push it out, but not much let’s push it out because _this_ is what we want to accomplish.
But ultimately, should writers, historically an artistic breed of humanity, need to adapt to technology and figure all this out in every piece of content they write or should technology in fact adapt to humans?
So we don’t really disagree on this one Per… Yes, she does put a whole load of skills in the “we wouldn’t have hired them if they couldn’t do this already” list - but reality is there are a lot of talented writers out there who are used to the relative freedom “print” gives them compared to digital channels.
Many of the one-day “writing for the web” courses that she is complaining about, probably should be thrown out of the window as they don’t really help writers (and companies) produce content that better meets their goals.
The human/technology relationship is a symbiotic relationship. Both have triggered the evolution of the other. The reality is, that although technology is getting better at dealing with us awkward humans, us humans have to still give a little bit of a helping hand along the way.
Just as language has grammar, the internet has standards (formal and informal). If we follow both, then we end up with a much better user experience - and a higher chance of achieving what we set out to achieve.
7 Articles worth reading… (Spotted: Week 32-33, 2010)
Why Your Web Developer and SEO Keep Asking You For Content
Anyone involved in creating or managing a website has had “the content problem”. This excellent article lists all the reasons why we should keep on nagging for that content to appear as early in the process as possible.
Reductionism in Web Design
A smile-inducingly long blog post about reductionism and how it can make your web site more effective. Alex breaks down web site reductionism into three main areas; content, code and design.
Why Twitter is hard to use
Oscar takes the example of Twitter as a technically easy thing to use but perhaps conceptually not so easy and suggests you compare this with your social intranet experiences and draw parallels.
Intranet vs Enterprise 2.0 vs Social Software: an obvious case of terminological controversy
Dennis takes us though what he sees as the “real” down-to-earth definitions of Intranet, Enterprise 2.0 and Social (Intranet) Software.
Why Free Plans Don’t Work
Choosing the write pricing model. An age old problem. This case study takes us through the experiences of a web start-up who were using freemium pricing plan and the difficulties that came about.
Twifficiency: A hard lesson in how business news travels fast
One of the most irritating things of this week has been the Twifficiency application spreading around Twitter. The app itself is utterly useless, but it’s given us an excellent case study into how fast things on the real-time web develop and evolve.
Gartner Says Worldwide Mobile Device Sales Grew 13.8 Percent in Second Quarter of 2010, But Competition Drove Prices Down
One of the most striking things you can learn from this Gartner report is the rapid growth of Android. In a year the smartphone market share of Android has leaped from 1.8% to 17.2% and thereby flying past iOS (Apple) who only grew 1% to 14.2%. At this rate, Android with dominate the market by mid 2012. It’s not just the tipping point for the mobile web, but the tipping point for Android.
8 Articles worth reading… (Spotted: Week 27-28, 2010)
The Real Life Social Network v2
216 slides, takes about 20 mins to view and read; but it’s worth it. It’s where we are heading. With this kind of insight, working at Google, you can start to understand that Google producing a Facebook killer isn’t at all unbelievable or unrealistic.
That website costs how much?
Oh my, I think I’ve found true love! Brandon Godwin (and David Hobbs in the comments) have written some incredibly wise-words. Client expectations of what is needed for the perfect web-presence, and the price they are prepared (or have budgeted) to pay are both too low.
Are We Not Context Strategists?
We’re seeing argument after argument about which discipline lies at the top (or bottom) of the pyramid – “xxx is king”. What we should be doing is concentrating on linking these skills horizontally in order to help organisations get the best out of the web.
Forbes: How To Create A Customer Advocacy Program
“Social media doesn’t scale. That’s right, social media doesn’t scale.” says Jeremiah. He goes on to say that your community managers will always be outnumbered by your customers. You need to have a strategy that does scale. His suggestion: Customer advocacy programs.
Innovation: Shrewd search engines know what you want
New Scientist writes “unfortunately eye-tracking hardware is expensive, and few people use it.” …Not a good reason to use inaccurate mouse-data. Read this explanation of mouse-movement correlation problems from Acuity ETS.
Few Facebook users notice ads on News Feed
An eye tracking report concludes that few Facebook users notice ads on News Feed page, but the majority look at status updates from pages they are fans of. But, with 31% looking at ads in the right hand column they are a really cost effective form of advertising.
Millennials will make online sharing in networks a lifelong habit
Millennials will make online sharing in networks a lifelong habit… or at least that’s their intention right now.
5 Key Trends of 2010: Half-Year Report for The Web
Readwriteweb takes a look a what they consider to be the 5 Key Trends of 2010 so far. A fair chunk of their “trends” are actually “events”, but it’s a worthwhile “year-so-far” summary.
“ Andy Warhol was wrong. We’re not going to be famous for 15 minutes. We’re each going to be famous for 15 People.
Quote in reference to Curation being the king, not Content. Taken from Content Is No Longer King: Curation Is King by Steve Rosenbaum.
