Are our web forms just a teensy bit racist?

The web is full of forms that make wonderful attempts to provide users with the personalised experience they want. Check out, for example, the gloriously obsequious ‘Title’ dropdown on the Royal Opera House website, which ensures that any Dowager Marchionesses booking tickets won’t ever have to be referred to as ‘Ms’. There’s an organisation that understands its audience.

But Twitter gives us just 20 characters for our names. 14% of a Tweet. Three short of what I need to put my real name on my profile.

Barclays online banking were, until fairly recently, even worse. For years, they wouldn’t accept me because I had more than one word in my surname.

When it comes to the ‘name’ field in web forms, we remain anglicised almost to the point of racism: forename and surname are the options, and any of the world that doesn’t use that convention… well,  they’re just being difficult.

Use a patronymic, like people from much of South India, Sri Lanka, Russia and Latin America? Not on our English language website. Come from an Arab country? Well, pick two from your glorious profusion of names, and stick with them. Chinese? We’re just going to get your name the wrong way round, and expect you not to care. Forever.

It isn’t an easy thing to fix, but it’s not that hard either – as the Royal Opera House title dropdown shows, a little bit of research goes a long way. And given the effort that we make as online marketers to discover people’s data, surely we can make the effort to discover what they actually call themselves -  and then address them by their real names when we contact them, even if they did have ancestors who weren’t from North-Western Europe.

Whatever we do, the likes of Mr. Adolph Blaine Charles David Earl Frederick Gerald Hubert Irvin John Kenneth Lloyd Martin Nero Oliver Paul Quincy Randolph Sherman Thomas Uncas Victor William Xerxes Yancy Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorffwelchevoralternwarengewissenschaftschafe rswessenschafewarenwohlgepflegeundsorgfaltigkeitbeschutzenvonangreifeudurch ihrraubgierigfeindewelchevoralternzwolftausendjahresvorandieerscheinenersch einenvanderersteerdemenschderraumschiffgebrauchlichtalsseinursprungvonkraft gestartseinlangefahrthinzwischensternaitigraumaufdersuchenachdiesternwelche gehabtbewohnbarplanetenkreisedrehensichundwohinderneurassevonverstandigmens chlichkeitkonntefortpflanzenundsicherfeuenanlebenslanglichfreudeundruhemitn icheinfurchtvorangreifenvonandererintelligentgeschopfsvonhinzwischenternart Zeus igraum Senior probably have no hope at all of doing anything online.

But perhaps he wouldn’t really have got the point of Twitter.

The 5 most boring pieces of advice for web writers

I’m getting this tomorrow:

I have some high hopes for it – but it’ll probably turn out to be the same balls everyone writes about web copy.

There are 1001 blogs out there telling people how to write for the web. Some are great, but the vast majority their time giving budding bloggers, editors and copywriters the same 5 bits of advice:

• be brief
• be relevant
• be accurate
• have catchy, intriguing titles
• for the love of God don’t try to write with any kind of charm, grace or wit! Do you think this is the 19th century and you’re Charles Bloody Dickens? People on the internet have a gnat-like attention span! Imagine you’re writing for a 7-year-old who’s mainlining Sunny Delight and who is constantly being distracted by pop-ups of kittens on skateboards! KITTENS! ON SKATEBOARDS!

It’s all probably true, but I wish just once in a while, one of these bloggers would mention the  sheer joy of the eccentric,  irrelevant, mysterious, rambling and extravagantly sesquipedelian prose that is the glory of the web.

The Times paywall: a massive ecomms fail

All our newspapers are screwed unless they can figure out some way to make money from the Internet. So while many regard The Times paywall as a ‘Canute-like‘ step, I’m happy to see it as a courageous experiment and hope it’s a step towards sustainable online journalism.

I will, however, lay into them for the laughable ineptitude of their emails.

Email marketing for a membership organisation (which is essentially what The Times is becoming) is as close to a pure science as anything in the history of selling. Given a big enough list and enough time, there is nothing that can’t be split tested, measured and optimised. If you try hard enough you can sell veal to a vegan – or a £100-a-year online  newspaper subscription to people who used to get it for free.

The first email you send is the one with the highest opening rates, the email that those excited new members leap to open, to click the links, to discover how their expensive membership will add an alluring glamour to their lives that will be the envy of their friends.

For Times Online, as tens of thousands sign up for their 1 month free trial membership, this is surely their chance to show that when it disappears behind its paywall, £100 a year will be a genuine bargain: great content.

Fail to pay, those emails should be saying, and you’ll never again be able to read some of the finest writing on the web. No more lines like “A dish so cruel I weep not only for the animal that died to make it, but also for the mushrooms”; no more glorious worship at the feet of the mighty Moran, or eye-gouging rage at that unputdownable idiot Liddle.

So what did the Times send to the hundreds of thousands who signed up for their free trial?

This crime against copywriting, proofreading and design:

(Click the image to read the whole thing, but I absolutely guarantee you won’t get past the second paragraph without having to prop your eyelids open).

This is an email which speaks volumes about The Times’ lack of commitment to an  integrated online offering, whether they’re using the word ‘exclusive’ in both sentences of the second paragraph, missing a capital letter off  ‘Gordon Ramsay’s maze’ so it looks like they’re referring to some kind of sweary culinary labyrinth, randomly swapping the word ‘and’ for the ‘+’ symbol, or thrilling their new subscribers with phrases like:

“As a temporary member you don’t have a membership card so you won’t be able to participate in any offers that require you to present it but please enjoy all the many other offers and extras available to members on the site.”

I appreciate that email was not the first thing on their minds during one of the most ambitious online launches in the history of News International. But someone, somewhere should have been thinking about it, and the fact that it was clearly left to an inexperienced middle-manager speaks volumes about Murdoch’s organisation, and its ongoing failure to ‘get’ the internet.

Hold your nose: it's the Daily Mail's disgusting keyword strategy

In my last job, we had a search engine specialist who would send me lists of keywords to include in titles and URLs of web pages I was writing. I’d put them on Post-It notes,  and stick them to my computer, and the computers of bloggers I edited, as a clear reminder of what we needed to shoehorn into our copy.

I don’t know what the Post-It notes in the Daily Mail office look like, but here is a little taste (bolded in the link) of their keyword strategy:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1277769/Fury-job-centre-advertises-phone-sex-workers-willing-pose-naked-webcam.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1280783/Lessons-rape-porn-pupils-aged-11.html

The ability to conjure a perfect headline out of mundane events has always been one of the most entertaining and impressive feats of good tabloid journalism.

But there is surely a difference between the art of catching the eye of the passer-by with some bold block capitals and a daft pun, and building a keyword strategy around people who might be typing into google ‘rape porn pupils aged 11′

Can we really say there is a moral element to something as mundane and analytics-focussed as a keyword strategy? Well, it’s not hard to imagine how the Daily Mail might spin the story if they discovered that a rival paper was chasing the kind of readers who might stumble across this:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1198485/Rape-abortion-incest-Is-CHILDREN-read.html

What am I going to call my new blog?

The biggest question of all for online copywriters  is “How much do I fanny around with my copy in order to hit those keywords?” It’s a question that reaches its zenith when you’re naming a blog.

Once your blog has a name, you’re stuck with it for life – if it won’t SEO or no-one can spell it, you’re screwed. On the other hand, if it’s a really horrible name you’ve chosen just for the sake of search, you’re equally screwed – and a depressing, lowest-common-denominator marketing drone to boot (obviously, in my day job as a lowest-common-denominator marketing drone, I’m a bit less picky).

If I were writing a blog about Irish literature, would I go with my instincts, my joy in language and my love of (some) James Joyce, and call it ‘nicens moocow‘? How would anyone ever find it?

But if I call it Joyce-Yeats-Irish-Literature-Novels-Poetry-Blog, I’d clearly just be in it for the Amazon affiliate program and any reader with even a vague understanding of the Web would immediately be prejudiced against me.

So, in my new blog about language on the internet, I’ve taken the approach of most (but not all) of my favourite bloggers, and made the title a stupid pun (cf Speak You’re Branes, No Man is an Iland). And then absolutely STUFFED the copy with keywords.

Enjoy!