"The Same Thing, Only Different"
Marketing departments have an interesting set of challenges when writing for the Web. They need to align their print, TV/radio, and Web campaigns so that they send a consistent message to the public, while realizing that writing for the Web calls for a very different style from "normal" marketing.

I've seen a couple of items in the last few weeks dealing with this issue. Gerry McGovern mentions the issue in his article Web design: never let an ad agency near your website.

"The average advertising agency fundamentally doesn’t get the Web. Saatchi & Saatchi, BBDO Worldwide, J. Walter Thompson and Ogilvy are great advertising agencies. When it comes to managing their own websites, however, they are rank amateurs. They bring their print and TV thinking to the Web with embarrassing results.

Then I saw this article by Robyn Greenspan in the Cyberatlas newsletter: E-Marketing Efforts Leave Room for Improvement.

"More than one-third (38.9 percent) of companies that participated in a collaborative study by the CMO Council, BtoB Magazine, USA Today, and Responsys would give their marketing departments a grade of "C" or below in terms of how well they understand sophisticated digital marketing. The survey of more than 400 top marketing decision-makers in North America revealed that while strides are being made online, there is still considerable room for improvement."

A 180 Degree Turn-Around
The biggest hurdle marketers face in writing for the Web is changing their "mode of attack." When you're creating a TV or magazine ad, you're competing for the viewer's attention, fighting to get them to notice you and your product. The bigger and "splashier" your ad is, the better your chance of winning the viewer's attention.

When you're writing for the Web, you've got your customer's attention. And what your customer wants is information: copy that's clean, to the point, and that has a minimum of hyperbole. Anything that keeps the customer from what they want (a 60 second Flash intro, unclear navigation, "marketing-speak," etc.) actually encourages your customer to leave your site for a competitor.

When marketing for the Web, it's better to speak softly and deliver big value.
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Ask, Listen, Respond
When your job is to create Web content, you need to take "reality checks" constantly. You need to make sure your content is meeting your audience's needs. Fortunately, this isn't hard to do.

Ask
If you want to know what your readers think, just ask them! You can do this through an automated poll, a feedback form, or a "tell us what you think" email address. Whatever you decide, make sure the feedback process is quick and easy. You want to hear your readers opinions, and they're doing you a favor by providing it. Don't make them jump through hoops to do it. If you choose the form option, don't make them include unnecessary personal information, such as a mailing address and phone number; people will suspect that you'll just use their information to add them to a mailing list. You can ask them to include an email address if they would like a personal response, but make that optional.

Listen
If someone has been good enough to provide you feedback, think hard about what they've said. Perhaps the person isn't terribly familiar with how the Web works and is asking for something your site simply isn't equipped to provide; you can still use his/her feedback as a starting point for possible new options.

Also be prepared to hear things you don't want to hear. Say you've installed a new feature that you love, but your readers hate it. Cut the feature. After all, you're not creating the site for you, are you?

Respond
Finally, respond to the feedback you receive from your audience. Send them an email telling them how you are going to act on their suggestion (not a form letter, folks, but a real, personalized message from you to them). If your readers have an idea for a new feature and you can give it to them, do it. If they tell you they don't like something, see what you can do to change it.

The one thing you must avoid is the "ivory tower" syndrome, where you ignore reader feedback because you "know more than they do." The customer may not always be right, but they know a lot more about their needs than you do!

Ask, listen, and respond. Constantly.

Column Update
Last week I wrote about news aggregators, such as Bloglines.com. Well, Blogger has just arranged things so that you can receive this column in XML in these aggregators! Add this URL to your subscription, and you'll be able to view "Wordsmithing and Web Spinning" in your favorite news reader or aggregator: http://www.carolynmwallace.com/atom.xml ¶ 4:30 PM

Save Time with News Aggregators
Two of my last three positions required me to sift through news stories in order to find articles that might be of interest for particular Web audiences. I scanned hundreds of newsletters, news sites, and web sites each month, looking for stories that met my parameters. If only I had had access to news aggregators then!

Having a news aggregator is like having your own personal clipping service. According to Dave Winer of http://davenet.scripting.com/, a news aggregator is "software that periodically reads a set of news sources, in one of several XML-based formats, finds the new bits, and displays them in reverse-chronological order on a single page." And for more on what news aggregators are and how to use them, you can visit his column "What is a News Aggregator?".

My personal news aggregator is bloglines.com, because I can access my news stories from any computer. Bloglines.com is also Mac-friendly, which is an important point for me. I will note that I've had trouble accessing my Bloglines account in Mac Netscape 6, although it works fine in Opera and Mac IE.

Setting up my account was easy, and I can subscribe to news feeds by searching blogs or by entering a URL. Any URL that offers RSS (Really Simple Syndication) or has the XML icon is a potential new addition to my aggregator page. Yahoo! offers a page of RSS news listings at
http://news.yahoo.com/rss. Each day I can visit my Bloglines page and see all the news that interests me, whether that's Web design or nanotechnology.

Check out news aggregators and see if they'll work for you. Then drop me a line and let me know how it went!
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