Most big brands aren’t their customers’ friends. We might have an affection for them if they’re very lucky indeed. But even so we like to treated with some respect. Most of all we don’t like them acting as if they really are our friends.

I recently received an email from PayPal with a subject line that read:

‘Piers Alder, what’s new for you?’

My first reaction was: why are you asking ME what’s new? If you’re emailing me then you’ve got a reason, haven’t you? Well tell me what it is then.

My second reaction was: And why are you talking to me like that, anyway? That’s how friends talk, and you’re not a friend. You’re a convenient service I use. Remember that and we’ll get along fine.

My third reaction was to muse on how much I dislike having my name in a subject line. It’s meant to show it’s a personal email to me, is that correct? Well I don’t believe it. I know how easy it is to ‘personalise’ an email, just like a letter, by shoving my name on it, even when it’s going out to millions of people. I don’t mind that generally, but putting it in the subject line just highlights its falseness. (When did a friend last put your name in the subject line of an email to you?)

I call that fake personalisation.

So, combining an inane fake question with a fake tone of voice with fake personalisation… and you’ve got an email I was not in the least inclined to open. When I eventually did (because I was writing this post) I discovered I’d missed the chance to win £100 worth of clothes. Not that I cared, but if I’d known what was in the email I might have opened it.

If my reaction were repeated across millions of people then it would have a serious impact. All because of a failure of tone, derived from a failure of attitude towards their customers. Something worth thinking about for any business.

Some bright spark in the marketing department at Qantas, at a time when the airline was already beset with problems, decided to use Twitter to invite people to suggest ways to improve their experience of the flight. The original tweet said: ‘To enter tell us “What is your dream luxury inflight experience? (Be creative!)’.

The tweets started coming in from customers saying things like ‘Getting from A to B without plane being grounded or an engine catching fire’. Or ‘chartering a Greyhound bus and arriving at your destination days before your grounded Qantas flight’. Oops. Hundreds, even thousands, of sarcastic tweets followed.

You can read the full story here.

It sometimes seems that companies display awesome credulity when told by self-appointed marketing experts that they need to be doing something or they’ll fall behind. Especially when there’s some truth in what the experts say. The latest marketing trend is of course to use social media – unless that’s already been superseded by something else (perhaps doubts are setting in about the real returns vs the cost of employing someone solely to chat to a few dozen customers on Twitter and Facebook). Before social media the happening word was SEO and no marketing director could avoid using it in important meetings. And before that, the buzz was around the importance of having your own useful and interesting content on your website. All these things are still important, or can be, depending on your brand and your circumstances. It’s all a question of using them intelligently.

Which brings us back to Qantas. When you’re failing to get the basics right, you don’t start chattering about luxury. That’s pretty basic. A prerequisite of being a luxury brand is doing whatever you do very well indeed. Seems Qantas forgot this in their urge to be all bright and clever and contemporary on Twitter. ‘Hey, why don’t we do some crowd sourcing on how we can add some cool sounding gimmicks to our first class service?’ It would save them thinking up the ideas themselves, show responsiveness to their customers, and generally give the person tasked with tweeting for Qantas something to do.

Except what it showed is that you can’t control social media, unlike old-fashioned ‘push’ technology. People on Twitter are pretty cutting. It’s dangerous territory. It’s especially dangerous territory for any company failing to get the basics right. Even the very act of sounding chirpy on Twitter when you keep messing up people’s travel plans is a mistake.

Perhaps it comes back to understanding tone of voice (and customer psychology). There are certain ways of talking, and writing, that are appropriate at different times and for different brands in particular circumstances. Speak in a totally inappropriate way and people will react with disdain or contempt or just not believe you.

Note that bouncy ‘Be creative!’ in the original Qantas tweet. Everything’s great here in social media land, it seems to say. Never mind the people stuck on the tarmac in Bangkok. And it’s patronising too, the sort of tone a primary school teacher might use. It assumes a cosy close relationship, a relationship which simply doesn’t exist between most companies and their customers.

It’s generally safer when talking to customers to maintain a certain distance. People don’t want fake chumminess, whichever channel it comes to them through.

Instead of the usual cheap and nasty website that small businesses tend to have, Laura at Nice Finish wanted something that actually reflected the commitment and experience that goes into their work. We kept the site nice and simple but gave it a bit of class with a clear, good-looking design.

We managed to keep the cost of the site down within the budget that a small firm of decorators could afford but delivered a site that’s a world away from Nice Finish’s typical competitors.

View the site here.

We worked closely with the team at Migarba to give them a sharp contemporary look, a platform for them to compete with much bigger online fashion retailers. They’ve been beefing up their range of products and, with some heavy persuasion from us, getting some decent photography done.

On a fashion site you can’t really get away without strong imagery to show what you’re selling in its best light. In fact you can’t really do well without a website that reflects and supports your positioning. If you want to be fresh, contemporary and good to look at, your site needs to be too.

As part of our relaunch, we introduced a blog onto the site by integrating the existing ecommerce back end with WordPress.

Within weeks of the relaunch sales have shot up dramatically. What’s particularly gratifying is how much higher the conversion rate is. Far more of the visitors to the site are deciding to buy. They’re buying a lot of the products that were previously on the site, proof that the new design is working on an unconscious level to encourage them to buy.

People online are in a hurry. It’s in the nature of the medium. Research has shown that people generally understand and experience the internet as an interactive medium. It doesn’t take long before we want to click and go somewhere else. There’s always that nagging feeling that you could be somewhere else on the internet, that if you haven’t clicked in the past couple of minutes then you’re getting bogged down.

There are a number of ways to write to assuage people’s impatience, but the number one technique is to be short. This starts with your approach to the writing: focus on exactly what you want the reader to remember. What’s actually the point you want to make? If you were saying it to someone, what would you say? Try and summarise your actual point in as few words as possible before you even start writing. Then:

• Skip introductions.
• Go straight in with the point you want to make.
• Cut out the ‘happy talk’.
• Remove adjectives.
• Trim sentences back to their basic structure.
• Delete unnecessary instructions.
• Avoid any repetition.
• Stop when you’ve made your point.

But because almost none of us can write truly concisely, at least not first time around, you’ll also need to apply the brutal art of cutting. Go back to what you write and systematically cut it down. It’s not easy but by god it’s satisfying.

And remember: being concise only works if you’re saying the right thing in those few words you use.

In the spirit of the topic, we’ll stop there. But there will be more on how to cut a piece of text in half (and half again) without losing any relevant information.

We have two different versions of a sign-up box for email updates, the kind of thing most the ecommerce sites in the world have. And the kind of thing most ecommerce sites would love to double the number of people clicking on.

Here they are:

One of these got 122% more people signing up. The only difference is that one has a short line of text telling you that 14,000+ people have already signed up.

So which was it?

In an online survey over 75% of people – and these would be people interested in the field, very likely web professionals – chose the wrong one.

The answer is that second sign-up box got 122% more people clicking, in a simple A/B test (where some users see one, some see the other, and you compare numbers signing up on each).

So how come? The first sign-up box tells you that lots of other people have signed up, which gives you evidence it’s not a stupid thing to do, in fact it’s a desirable thing to do. Yet more clicked on the second. Why?

Because the first one is more cluttered. It’s got more going on. In a high pressure world of too much to do, too much information noise around us, we want the simple. We want the clean and easy.

More information often means less goes in. Less in absolute terms, not just as a smaller proportion of the larger total.

If you look again at the two sign-up boxes, you may notice that the second is easier to get to grips with. You look at it, and you get it. The first one takes longer. You look at it, sort of get it, then you have to read that extra line of text with a statistic in it. The statistic is oddly offputting.

Decisions online can be massively influenced by these kinds of considerations. Making things a little bit easier for customers at the right point can literally double your sales. Don’t ignore these insights.

And, when it comes to information, the utmost vigilance is needed to provide only the information that counts at that point in the process users are going through, otherwise you’re driving people away.

Source: the extremely useful Which Test Won? website

The things you say are generally more important than how you say them, even though how you say them is important too. This is something that businesses lose sight of. Maybe they’ve been focusing too much on tone and not enough on content.

Brand guidelines typically have a section on tone of voice. There will be guidance on length of sentences and paragraphs, type of vocabulary to use, whether you add lots of adjectives or keep it stripped down, how conversational and chatty to be, and so on. But what there usually isn’t guidance on is:

• What kinds of things do we tell the audience about the brand?
• What are the key differentiators we should be reminding people of?
• What are the compelling and interesting facts to tell people about our products or services?
• What kinds of information do the target audience require to make their buying decision?
• What stories do we want people to remember about the brand?
• What are the best ways to engage with potential customers?

And so on. These are crucial points. It’s not enough to get a distinctive voice. Saying very little in a very cool voice is, ultimately, a recipe for looking like a poser.

Consider this:

Winston Churchill once declared that Edward VIII would ‘shine in history as the bravest and best-loved of all sovereigns who have worn the island crown.’

How utterly, foolishly wrong he was. And how empty that high style sounds when he’s talking about a vain Hitler-sympathiser. The point being that when Churchill’s content is urgent, important and accurate, his style works. The message matters, not just how it’s said.

Tone of voice is important. But it isn’t enough. It’s essential to pay close attention to the messages you’re sending out. What, ultimately, will persuade people to buy from you?

So what story are you telling about your business? 

A study by Carnegie Mellon university in America found that people gave twice as much to a children’s charity when confronted with a story than a set of grim statistics.

One group was told that 3.2 million people are on the brink of starvation in one African country. In another country, 2.4 million have no easy access to clean water. In a third, almost 4 million need emergency shelter. These statistics presented huge and desperate problems.

The second group were told only a story: ‘Rokia is a 7-year-old girl from Mali, Africa. She’s desperately poor and faces a threat of severe hunger or even starvation. Her life will be changed for the better as a result of your financial gift. With your support, and the support of other caring sponsors, Save the Children will work with Rokia’s family and other members of the community to help feed her, provide her with education, as well as basic medical care and hygiene education.’

The average donations in the second group were $2.38, in the first group just $1.14.

That’s a vast difference. Yet the people who gave twice as much actually received less information. Much poorer information. Instead they got a very brief story which made something real and engaged their emotions. Statistics just don’t do that.

Stories – even very short narratives – can trigger action in ways that facts just can’t, however significant those facts are when you stop and think about them.

So what story are you telling about your business and your services?

Your website is an opportunity to tell a story about who you are, how you came to be, where you’ve been along the way. A ‘story’ can even be as simple as painting a picture of what you achieve for your customers rather than using the same bland labels every other business in your sector uses.

What this boils down to is bringing your proposition alive for your site visitors and your audience. Capture someone’s imagination and the chances are they’ll become a customer.

1. Make it objective.

This is about stripping out the marketspeak, the puff, the exaggerations, even the adjectives. Partly because people don’t want to have their time wasted, but also because people are sceptical of marketing talk. Even more so than offline, people on the web have their bullshit detectors switched on. Audiences are more sceptical than ever. And puffing yourself up triggers their bullshit detectors.

In user testing, turning a standard piece of promotional writing into objective text resulted in a 27% improvement in people’s ability to recall information, accuracy of understanding and subjective satisfaction.

Furthermore, beyond web writing, it’s a fact that some of the most powerful claims by brands are the objectives ones. The world’s most widely used X. Or: Last year we improved client revenues by £XXm. If you can get an impressive objective fact for your brand, you’re laughing. Because no one can dismiss it.

2. Be scannable.

OK, this is probably familiar stuff. It’s about allowing the user who’s quickly running their eye across a piece of text to find ways in, ways to grab information quickly. It’s about coping with readers looking for the key nuggets.

So: use bullet points, use numbered lists, use bold phrases, use subheadings. Each of these clarifies the structure of the information.

But there’s more to this. For example, using the inverted triangle – that news writing technique that puts the most important facts, the key summary, at the top. You can apply this to each section, and each paragraph (the first sentence is the most important). You can even use ‘micro-content’ techniques to focus on the first two or three words in a headline – they should contain specific information-bearing words, not generic language.

It’s also important to make headlines clear and specific. There are other powerful techniques you can apply here too.

User testing found a 47% improvement in the ‘usability’ of a piece of text when it was rewritten to be scannable. That’s a seriously big improvement. It could easily make the difference between a sale and a lost customer.

3. Make it concise.

We’ve talked about this before, but it can’t be emphasised enough. It’s just such an important web writing discipline. We’ll talk about some ways to go about cutting in future (it’s a skill that takes practice).

But for now, just remember that in user testing being concise improved user satisfaction, comprehension and memory by 58%. That means they actually remembered more facts in absolute terms compared with a longer version of the text, not merely as a proportion of the text they read.

If you then put those three techniques together you can achieve a startling improvement in ‘text usability’ (on which more another time). In the user testing I’m referring to there was an 124% improvement.

That’s an extraordinary figure: people remember far more, they read far more accurately, they like it far better. These are not minor improvements. They’re dramatic.

OK, so those are the proven strategies. But there’s much more you can do to get web content read. Using tone of voice appropriately, for example. Or applying some neat techniques to grab attention. More on these another time.

The consultant and media trainer sets out how in his book with the less-than-snappy, but SEO-friendly, title This is social media – tweet, blog, link and post your way to business success.

Clapperton puts forward the business case, with real-life examples, that social media’s benefit to your business is both measurable and essential.

He claims: ‘This social media thing increases people’s profits. It makes money, sometimes for everyone except the people behind the social networking website itself.’

But Clapperton warns: ‘It can also be royally messed up. If someone misunderstands the medium or, worse, allows their prejudices rather than solid market research to govern who they target and who they don’t with their social networking, then it can be a disaster.’

He makes a number of great points throughout the book. For example writing about Twitter, he stresses why it is called social networking not sales networking. ‘Not every contact is going to contribute to sales and not every post or contribution should be made with selling in mind. People buy from people, not companies, and in social media they really need to feel that this is happening.’

Crucially businesses need to work out their social media objectives before blogging and tweeting away. As always, without objectives there can be no effective measurement of what success requires. And, of course, the objectives need to be realistic and budgeted for.

There are lots of examples of how small companies have benefitted from using social media and great snippets of advice, for example don’t always worry about negative reviews – as long as there are only a few out of total number, they will add authenticity and credibility to your social media presence.

Written in a direct but not hectoring or gee-whizz fashion, and with Do Lists at the end of each chapter, this is a useful and quick introduction to how social media might help your business.