Don't let Stanley Kubrick design your web content!

"So, I went to that company's site," the business reporter told me. "What do they do?"
 Ouch! 
I was embarrassed by that question about my PR client and frustrated that I had little or no input on their site's content. All key pages on the niche BPO provider's site were dominated by slogans, vision statements, mission statements, graphics of world maps, etc., but no clear description of what specialized services they provided.

To put it in terms of science fiction movies, the reporter needed to see a web site that read like Star Wars, but her  experience was more akin to watching 2001: A Space Odyssey.

I'm a fan of Stanley Kubrick's movies and Arthur C. Clarke's novels, but I thought the famous 1968 collaboration between the two suffered from serious gaps in story-telling. Kubrick meant to take a non-verbal approach to the movie, reaching the viewer at a visual or visceral level rather than through conventional narrative.

Pete Savage's 6 copywriting tips everyone should know

Here are six essential copywriting tips you should know, from Pete Savage, co-founder of The Wealthy Freelancer.
The beauty of these six tips in particular is that it's rather easy to identify when they are missing from a sample of copy.

1. "You" can make a difference. The word "you" is perhaps the most important word in copywriting because it involves the reader with your message. So instead of writing about what your company offers, write about what the customer gets. Whenever you're tempted to write something like, "We offer the most advanced...", stop. Instead, begin the sentence with "You" as in, "You get the most advanced...".

The REAL value of writing, for corporations

My favorite, most heavily copied (via photocopiers and Cntrl-C) and shared HBR article. Lucky for both of us, it's very brief.

from the Harvard Business Review
by Jack Shulman

EXCERPT:
Companies spend whatever it takes to develop intellectual assets. At the same time, they routinely seek to minimize their investment in the technical and procedural documents that tell people how to use those assets.  Such metainformation as instruction manuals, process descriptions, and procedure guides script the experience of customers and the performance of suppliers and employees. Yet companies view the creation of this information as, at best, a cost of doing business and, at worst, something they can safely ignore.

Good writers can change all that. What's more, good writers who are consulted early enough can improve the product development process and, potentially, products themselves. Unfortunately,

17 years later: Web Site Visitor's Bill of Rights

In 2000, the folks at Giga Information Group (now part of Forrester Research) published this document, mostly as a PR stunt, but also to foster better information design on Web sites. Seventeen years later, this list still has the power to shame Web site owners who still make it hard to figure out who they are and what they do or even how to have a conversation with them. 

In fact, before posting this list, I checked over my own site and made a couple of tweaks to be in compliance.

The Web Site Visitor's Bill of Rights

While all Web sites are not created equal, every Web site visitor deserves an acceptable measure of usability, functionality and privacy. In order to form a better user experience, we, the web users, analysts and advisers of Giga Information Group, do ordain and establish the following unalienable set of Rights for web site visitors:

The Right to Accessible, Basic Company Information
Visitors have a right to:

Have WWII saboteurs infiltrated your company?

In 1944 the Office of Strategic Services (the precursor to the CIA) created the formerly secret Simple Sabotage Field Manual [PDF] for OSS operations officers

and resistance organizers living in Axis-occupied countries.

There are tips on physical sabotage common to insurgents, but the list of methods (and desired outcomes) for volunteers to interfere from within organizations reads startlingly like the dark sides of today's American corporate and government workplaces. The common weaknesses of executive and middle management as well as front-line workers (specialists, coordinators, analysts, etc) are clearly evident in this list of

 "universal opportunities to make faulty decisions, to adopt a noncooperative attitude, and to induce others to follow suit...may involve nothing more than creating an unpleasant situation among one's fellow workers, engaging in bickerings, or displaying surliness and stupidity." 

(11) General Interference with Organisations and Production 

• Insist on doing everything through "channels." Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.

Content marketing: It works, but remember to include the content

https://soundcloud.com/officialsxsw/moving-from-story-to-narrative

Deloitte's John Hagel: "Moving from Story to Narrative" 

I should be plugging my freelance writing practice right now, but I'm still digesting the slide-free presentation by Deloitte's John Hagel at South by Southwest Interactive last month, entitled "Moving from Story to Narrative."*

Most of my freelance writing practice involves reinforcing companies' marketing strategies with actionable content. So Hagel really got my attention describing how the "old" way of marketing with content—telling stories—has always been less effective than the practice of creating "narratives."

• STORIES are finite and they are about the storyteller or others, not about you.