At our New Year’s eve dinner, my wife’s cousin Izzy was taking photo after photo with her new camera. They were awful photos: she had no sense of composition, no consideration of the effects candlelight would have on her subjects, and no mastery of the camera settings that would help overcome them.
Why does this new ability to learn and share affect us as copywriters and web editors?
When I wrote my first marketing copy in 2002, I was writing for an audience who had never written anything themselves – or at any rate never anything for public consumption. I had stats to tell me what was working; I had colleagues to point out how I could improve; I went on courses. I was a professional writer, my audience weren’t even amateurs.
In 2012, Facebook will gain its billionth user. A sixth of the population of the world will be writing stuff for people to consume. And because of that mechanism of Likes and Shares, people get feedback on what they’ve written: they will be learning, something that was previously reserved only for people who wrote for a public audience (copywriters, marketers, novelists, academics and a handful of others).
Of course, not everyone who writes on Facebook becomes a better writer, but a lot of people will:
While it is impossible to make a competent writer out of a bad writer, and while it is equally impossible to make a great writer out of a good one, it is possible, with lots of hard work, dedication, and timely help, to make a good writer out of a merely competent one.
Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
That hard work, dedication and timely help is now available to anyone who posts their thoughts on a blog or social network. As a result, the barrier between the professional copywriter and the gifted amateur has shrunk to almost nothing. And where once upon a time, gifted amateurs were rare, because they had to struggle to find time for their thankless hobby, today they are everywhere, blogging, tweeting, commenting and debating.
The power to self-publish is creating a generation of educated readers. And because they are the readers most likely to share your work, they are the audience you have to appeal to.
What’s the difference between content created for amateurs, and content created for experts? Compare and contrast this Dixons advertisement from the days when it ruled the high street:
With the modern, web-only version of the brand:
The first advert is all exclamations: ‘Amazing! Free! Deal of the Year!’ The second is entirely style: it’s designed to appeal to a reader who understands and appreciates good writing. A slogan like ‘The last place you want to go’ would have been anathema to mass-market copywriters not so many years ago: flashy, self-referential advertising that impresses people in the industry, but doesn’t sell anything. Now, however, we know that our readers will get the joke.
It’s a tough time to be a copywriter, but a really exciting one. We can no longer get away with lazily flashing a special offer at people. For our new, educated audience, we need to write real content with real flair.
When a big commercial brand partners with a charity at the fundraising end, the exchange is simple. The big brand burnishes its image, the charity makes some cash.
In a networked world, things get more complicated. Here are a couple of examples:
1) Vodafone and the happiest phone call
Here’s the most effective fundraising thank-you video ever created:
Authenticity is what makes this so remarkable – the audience get a genuine share in their moment of triumph at saving a baby’s life.
I have no idea how the plug for Vodafone happened to feature at the 1min 20 secs mark – it looks completely unplanned – but as a piece of feelgood exposure for a mobile phone company it’s a phenomenal success.
That authenticity, that sense of worth, goes beyond anything a conventional advert could hope to achieve. It is the gold standard in charity partnerships, and even though it may only be seen by a tiny audience, for Vodafone it’s certainly worth the price of a few free phone calls.
2) Pepsi, bringers of light
This is a quite breathtaking fundraising video for an innovative Phillipino charity. It went thoroughly viral a few months ago, notching up 1.5 million views.
The story of this video is a curious one: the charity had a great media hit from Reuters and the BBC in July:
Someone from Pepsi obviously saw this, and got a bit miffed that the bringing of light was being linked – by that incredibly distinctive red bottle-top – to Coca-Cola. So it’s been remade with higher production values, a picturesque main character, and a hero dressed in blue: the Pepsi bottle-top.
As a shot in the Cola wars, it’s an entertaining piece, and it’s great news that this charity will have got so much exposure from teaming up with Pepsi’s marketing gurus.
But what is interesting about both of these is that they take the charity partnership away from the supporters and out into the field. As charity communications narrow the gap between the donor and the mission, it’s no longer enough for a company CEO to stand awkwardly on a stage at a fundraising event, handing out a giant cheque with a company logo on it. Sponsoring of fundraising events is just too distant from those deep emotional connections that digital media is creating between charity supporters and the people and animals they help.
The creation of that Child’s I Foundation fundraising video depended on staff being happy to film every moment of their work. For Vodafone, it depended on their inserting their services, inescapably, into that work, so their brand was visible at these key moments.
Pepsi’s video was a response to the incredible ubiquity of Coca Cola, who were inserted into a charity’s work by the fame of their bottles, and, ironically, by the amount of plastic waste they leave in the slums of the Phillipines.
In a digitally networked world, charity communications are becoming a constant stream of near-live media from the field: videos, podcasts, blogs, Tweets, project reports. Companies need to find ways to insert themselves inextricably into that stream. The charity that can offer innovative ways for big brands to do this will find itself riding out the recession very comfortably indeed.
EDIT: Thanks to @jon_bedford for showing me the Child’s I Foundation video
It’s our habit when talking about new media to think in terms of what went before. Your Kindle is a just like a book. Or maybe a shelf containing all your books. Or an amazing shop containing every book that’s ever been written. Or it’s a publishing house, taking on the complete task of printing, distributing and marketing books. We make the same kind of comparisons with the App Store, iTunes, Netflix and many others.
When Amazon decides to suddenly remove Nineteen Eighty-Four from our Kindles, Apple sucks a vaguely subversive App out of our iPhones, or Twitter claims exclusive ownership of any photo we upload, we don’t know how to feel about it. Is it a publisher legitimately choosing not to put out something they don’t like? Or is it a thief coming in and removing something that belongs to us from our shelves? Is it no more disturbing than a shop deciding what it will and won’t sell? Or is it like a totalitarian regime, censoring material it doesn’t like?
Unlike any shop, shelf, publisher or book, the latest update to iTunes has 16,849 words of terms and conditions – over 50 pages of them. Of the hundreds of millions of users who have downloaded it, I would guess that a few dozen, mostly Apple’s lawyers, have actually read them. The Kindle’s are on a similar scale, and, while Facebook’s and Twitter’s are shorter, they change every few weeks.
Somewhere, buried in all that legal language, there may be some explanation of what we are collectively signing up to (if we had any sense, we’d at least run a quick search for important keywords like ‘soul’, ‘firstborn child’, ‘full moon’ and ‘sacrifice’). I love all this free software, and I don’t want to seem ungrateful, but the sheer scale of these T & Cs does make me think that someone, somewhere is going to get very badly screwed. I hope it’s not me.
When MySpace came out, I decided instantly that it was a lame ‘my-first-website’ kit for people too lazy to even figure out Geocities.
When I first heard about Twitter, I thought it sounded dumber than a box of hammers. Who wants a blogging service that limits them to a completely arbitrary number of characters? Cutesy silicon valley crap that nobody in their right mind would ever bother with.
You are mayor of a farm. Whoop-de-do.
I still think Foursquare is a sort of jumped-up version of Farmville – a site whose success is solely a consequence of its ability to spam other social networks.
Obviously, I was wrong. MySpace’s successor Facebook is a completely essential part of my social life. Twitter has almost completely replaced all other media as my source of news, gossip and viral lulz. Eventually, Foursquare, or some equivalent, is going to hook me as well.
All those world-changing social websites were, initially, baffling. They had to be, because they were using a new technology to create a completely new set of behaviours in a massive audience.
So what about Google+?
Well, it’s a mixture of the best aspects of Facebook and Twitter with some clever, useful ways of organising contacts and a slick video-conferencing tool. I like it, as far as it goes, but I can tell you right now that it’s not going to change the world. If they’d released it 5 years ago, I’d have said Google+? WTF?’ Then it might have had a chance.
Professional wind-up merchant Brendan O’Neill, of Spiked (something he describes as an ‘independent online phenomenon’, though everyone else would call it a ‘shit blog’) has written an attack on Twitter in the Daily Telegraph:
Twitterers’ supposed passion for freedom of speech quickly shrivels up and evaporates if anyone dares to say something that goes against liberal orthodoxies. That is because, for all the claims that Twitter is an un-policeable, almost anarchic space in which law fears to tread, in truth it has created its own hierarchy and its own forms of conformism… The general political outlook of influential Twitterers is summed up in the fact that 76.1% of tweets about the AV referendum were pro-AV (and only 23.9% were anti), compared with 67.9% of the electorate that firmly said no to AV.
The liberal consensus, and its corresponding intolerance of consensus-breakers, has been fairly successfully transported into Twitter, making this social networking site a surprisingly conformist and uncritical arena.
This is the kind of tedious linkbait that wouldn’t normally be worthy of response – except that he happened to write it on the 10th anniversary of of Douglas Adams’ death, and Adams’ 1999 essay How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Internet provides the perfect riposte. I’ve swapped the words ‘Internet’ and ‘web’ for ‘Twitter’, but everything else is Douglas Adams’ own:
Because Twitter is so new we still don’t really understand what it is. We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that’s what we’re used to. So people complain that there’s a lot of rubbish on Twitter, or that it’s dominated by Americans, or that you can’t necessarily trust what you read on Twitter. Imagine trying to apply any of those criticisms to what you hear on the telephone.
Of course you can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on Twitter anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can’t easily answer back – like newspapers, television or granite. Hence ‘carved in stone.’
What should concern us is not that we can’t take what we read on Twitter on trust – of course you can’t, it’s just people talking – but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV – a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make. One of the most important things you learn from Twitter is that there is no ‘them’ out there. It’s just an awful lot of ‘us’.
Brendan O’Neill: a man so ignorant about the web that he can be torn apart by a someone who died in the days of dial-up.
I have noticed a DISTURBING TREND on the social web. Some people, some SO-CALLED friends of mine, some CLEVER, INFLUENTIAL people, seem to think that we no longer need capital letters. This is more than that tedious dotcom boom thing of ‘let’s put our logo in lower case to make it seem more ‘Internet’.’ This is a TERRIFYING attempt to remove one of our language’s most delightful nuances.
Great comedy is about many things. But for me, mostly, it is all about SHOUTING. So before the CAPS LOCK NAZIS come to LOCK UP my favourite key, here is the BEST SHOUTING ON THE INTERNET:
Youtube:
The BEARS are who we THOUGHT they were…
Oh, I’m sorry, what I said was HOW WOULD YOU LIKE TO…
LEEEERROOOY Jenkins…
On Twitter:
Hard to explain @CaitlinMoran‘s appeal in one selected Tweet , but follow her and you’ll rapidly start to appreciate the power of the CAPS LOCK:
On Facebook:
There are many good jokes on Cage Against the Machine but the CONSTANT SHOUTING remains the best one.
It’s obvious that choice is the enemy of decisiveness. It’s less well known that choice is the enemy of happiness.
The jam experiment is a popular example among web design gurus. Conducted in 2000, it demonstrated that when offered a choice of 24 jams, people bought fewer than when offered a choice of 6. That’s why, for example, Apple hardly give you any choice at all – paralysed by the amount of research it takes to choose the best possible Android or RIM handset, customers fall back on spending £200 extra on something that offers you 2 options – ‘black iPhone’, or ‘white iPhone (coming soon)’.
One of the first things you learn in web page design is that if you give people too many options, they become crippled with indecision and go and look at a video of a kitten on youtube instead.
That isn’t the interesting bit.
The interesting bit comes after people have bought their jam.
It turns out that the people who had more choice thought their jam tasted worse. Even if they chose precisely the same jar of jam as the shopper with fewer choices, they reported enjoying it less. The fear that we’ve bought the wrong kind of jam is enough to tell our tastebuds that we don’t really like what we’re spreading on 0ur toast.
That means a number of things. It explains why Dell users are insecure, Apple users are smug, and people who are total suckers for marketing, and couldn’t make an informed decision if their bank balances depended on it often seem to be the happiest in the world. Until Cockney Dave comes round to break their knees for the compound interest they owe on their Roomba’s.
It means that if Apple offered customers more chances to customise their ridiculous jabscreens, they would actually take less pleasure in them.
And for those of us who work in web design, it means that offering too many options doesn’t just have an impact on conversions. It also means that when your customers have finished shopping, they’ll be less happy with whatever they’ve bought from you.
(And in case you’re wondering, this post was typed on a Dell computer, and Tweeted from an Android Phone).
There’s nothing quite like opening Twitter to do a bit of boring marketing and finding something like this in your feed:
Samuel Pepys’ diary is amazing: salacious, intimate, packed with war and whoring, farts and fires, booze and bitchy gossip. And now it’s on Twitter. Possibly the best thing on Twitter. Possibly just the best thing. Ever.
The Dutch have burnt the British ships at Sheerness, the King’s mistress has threatened to dash her baby’s brains out in Parliament unless the King acknowledges he is the child’s father, and Samuel Pepys has lured a girl called Peg up to his room, but he can’t get it on with her because some other bloke is hanging about. It’s confessional blogging at its finest, given glorious immediacy by being live on Twitter.
Really readable, entertaining diarists have historically been few and far between – James Boswell, Chips Channon and Alan Clark spring to mind, but not many more. That’s going to change. The ability to record daily events in a manner that others find entertaining is no longer an unusual hobby, but an essential social skill. Around a quarter of the people in Britain keep some sort of online diary, whether it’s a blog, a Twitter feed, a Facebook account, or regular boring emails to a huge list of friends about how the family are and what they did on their holidays. We are a generation of diarists, and the digital natives who grew up with the social web write very, very good ones.
A single illuminating quotation is often the best tool a social historian has for bringing an era to life. Age of Austerity, David Kynaston’s brilliant depiction of post-war Britain, is structured around evocative moments from ordinary people’s diaries: “Oh for a little extra butter”, “Jolly good, as a whole”, Christ, it’s bleeding cold”.
The David Kynaston who looks back on our era won’t have to dig so deep. Future historians will portray life in the early 21st century not as 900 pages of elegant descriptive writing, and diligently researched quotes, but by building feeds of the finest, funniest and most typical of our contemporaries, and releasing them day by day.
It’s obvi
