What I’m Reading
Shareworthy articles and content syndicated from other sites. These aren’t things I’ve written or necessarily endorse, for the record.
Best Practices For Writing For Online Readers
I have less than 30 seconds to capture your attention with this post, so here goes: if you read some, most or all of the next 750 words or so, you will know how to write Web copy that is more useful to readers of your blog or Web site.
As we reported yesterday visual content is continuing its steady rise in dominance over written content. But that doesn’t mean we should give up on good writing: if anything, it means we need to think harder about how we write for online readers.
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Online Readers Are Different
Seems pretty obvious, right? But the fact is, many of us still write the same way online as we do for books, magazine articles and other long-form and traditional print mediums. Research hightighted in books like Reading In The Brain shows that online readers use vastly different sections of the brain than offline readers. In short, the brain is conditioned to skip around when online reading, as clicking on a link, for example, will reward the brain with new images and content.
With offline readers, we can take our time and develop points with long blocks of text and narrative, and with fewer visual elements. Offline reading rewards the brain that slips into a state of deeper concentration.
In Plain English, Please
Your writing – offline or online – is effective when readers take away your message. Writing effectively online doesn’t mean that every reader reads every single word that you write (and even if they done, Dale’s Cone of Experience argues they’ll ownly remember 10% of what they read). It means they can quickly and efficiently get the information that is most important to them and move on.
People who read our blog posts come from all over, and from a wide range of backgrounds. The reason they choose to read a particular post will vary from reader to reader. Your job as the writer is to make sure they can find the information that is most important to them and move on to using that information.
Best Practices
I’ve spent a good portion of the past two years researching reading habits of online readers and have been sharing that research with writers, bloggers and journalists, as I did during my presentation at BlogWorld East last May and as I continue to do with my students at the college where I teach.
I can talk for hours on the subject, but if asked for the most effective ways to get online readers to read what you write, I would offer these strategies as the most important, which are backed up by eye-track studies as being an effective way to get your message across to online readers:
Write compelling but clear headlines: Don’t get cute. Online and in print, the headline is almost always the first thing readers look at. Make sure it is clear and gives a good idea of what the post is about, while still leaving the reader wanting more.
Write in the active voice: Effective online writing is all about getting to the point, and on a line-by-line basis, the most effective way to do that is to use the active voice, which naturally lends a sense of urgency to your writing. The easiest way to do that is to start each sentence with the subject, immediately follow that with a strong, active verb, and then follow that with the direct object. Avoid adverbs: they’re a telling sign that you chose the wrong verb.
Online writing is visual: Long, dense paragraphs turn off online readers. Create white space in your copy by keeping paragraphs short and using bulleted lists when appropriate. Use bold text to accent key information and use block or pull quotes to draw readers into the copy.
One main idea per sentence: Keep sentences on point. Avoid multiple clauses and phrases, and lots of information stops and commas. Make sure each sentence has one idea, and not much more than that.
No sentence without a fact: Every line you write needs to move the story forward. If a sentence doesn’t have a fact, cut it.
How long should it be?
I hate this question and always offer a smart-aleck answer: as long as it needs to be. If every sentence has a main idea and no sentence is without a fact, keep going. I do, however, recommend the 3-2-1 formula. For every 1,000 or so words that you write in an online article or blog post, be sure to include:
Three subheads: Subheads are bold, one-line headlines that break up long chunks of text and organize information. Keep the same headline-writing rules in mind when you write subheads.
Two links: Links offer additional information for readers who want to go deeper, and they also give your post authenticity and transparency about where you information came from without getting into long, narrative attributions.
One graphical element: A photo, a chart or anything else visual helps readers. Whatever you use, make sure it advances the story: don’t just put a photo in the post for the sake of posting a photo.
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Fab: In 2 Years, iPad Users Will Account For A Quarter Of Our Revenue
There’s something interesting going on over there on Fab. The design shopping site found that some of its best customers – that is, those who convert to paying customers the quickest, those who spend the most, and those who return the most often – are mobile users.
The company has known about this data for some time, but wanted more in-depth analysis, so it hired software-as-a-service firm Custora to help them dive in and figure out the lifetime value of the mobile customer, specifically those using the iPad. The results are impressive.
Since the beginning of the year, Fab says it has known that customers with mobile apps are more engaged. The company launched its mobile apps on iOS and Android in October, and by the time it reached one year post-pivot, the company found that over 40% of usage came from mobile applications. Could it be that mobile applications, with their addictive, time-sensitive notifications about Fab’s flash sales draw users in? Or is there something that’s inherently more enticing about the Fab experience when using a mobile device or tablet?
By the start of 2012, it became apparent that mobile customers behaved differently. They purchased more than two times faster, bought more often, and had larger basket sizes than online shoppers.
But Fab noticed just a few weeks ago that iPad customers’ behavior really stood out. With help from Custora, the company discovered that iPad customers convert to making their first purchase exponentially faster than non-iPad users, with over 40% making a purchase by month 3 and over 70% purchasing by month 7.
Fab was also seeing impressive conversion rates for iPad users.
“A lot of really good businesses build their business model around getting to 10% conversion rate to purchasers within 6 to 12 months,” says Fab CEO Jason Goldberg. “It’s simply amazing that we’re seeing 10% conversion to purchase within the first week for iPad users.”
In terms of revenue, iPad users were found to be worth twice as much two-year revenue as non-iPad users. And, even though only 15% of Fab users are iPad users, those customers are expected to generate 25% of Fab’s revenue over the next two years.
That last figure is really remarkable, especially because, in the grand scheme of things, the tablet market is still in its early days. What will these figures look like three years in? Five?
And more importantly, why are iPad users such great shoppers? Is it just that they can afford to be?
As it turns out, that’s actually one of Goldberg’s explanations. iPad users have more disposable income, he notes, and are “just more likely to be design lovers.” But it’s more than just the person on the other end of the device, he says. It’s the device itself, too.
“The tactile touch experience of the iPad more closely resembles being able to physically ‘touch’ a product like physical-world shopping versus the web which can feel more distant when browsing with a mouse or track-pad,” says Goldberg.
Plus, the Fab iPad app itself has been designed to take advantage of the device’s form factor, by focusing on one product at a time, while the Fab web experience allows users to browse across sales and products. The iPad app will soon get another major improvement too – the company is developing its Retina-ready application, which it plans to have out in a few months’ time.
But all this almost makes you wonder if perhaps online shopping sites should begin taking their cues from the iPad to better improve their own experiences. Although computers don’t typically have touchscreens, there are ways that online stores could somewhat mimic the tablet experience through layout choices and navigational flows. Would users balk at a tablet-like interface on the regular ol’ web, or will they eventually come to expect it?
It’s far too soon to know the answer to that, but as far as shopping sites go, expect them – and maybe even Fab – to experiment with the concept in the months to come.
DavidMashburn.com
via http://www.davidmashburn.com/
“This American Life” says report on Apple labor “partially fabricated”
Updated. The radio program This American Life on Friday posted a note on its website retracting a previous episode of the show in which monologist Mike Daisey described the working conditions in factories in China that produce Apple’s most popular devices, saying it “was partially fabricated.”
The show’s website says Daisey “misled This American Life during the fact-checking process.”
Update: Chicago Public Media, which produces the program, said after checking with Daisey’s interpreter in China, that two of the most dramatic moments from Daisey’s reporting were fabricated: that he met underage workers in Foxconn factories and that he met met a man with a hand mangled from working on iPads.
The show’s press representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A link to a new report from American Public Media’s Marketplace describing the error-riddled This American Life episode is online now. In it, Marketplace China correspondent Rob Schmitz questions Daisey about the fabrications.
On his own blog, Daisey posted a statement standing by his work, but admitting that he is “not a journalist”:
I stand by my work. My show is a theatrical piece whose goal is to create a human connection between our gorgeous devices and the brutal circumstances from which they emerge. It uses a combination of fact, memoir, and dramatic license to tell its story, and I believe it does so with integrity. Certainly, the comprehensive investigations undertaken by The New York Times and a number of labor rights groups to document conditions in electronics manufacturing would seem to bear this out.
What I do is not journalism. The tools of the theater are not the same as the tools of journalism. For this reason, I regret that I allowed THIS AMERICAN LIFE to air an excerpt from my monologue.
Chicago Public Media released a detailed account of the misrepresentations and inaccuracies found in Daisey’s report. In addition to lying about the number of factories in China that he visited, and the number of workers he talked to, he also misled the program about particular people he talked to:
In his monologue he claims to have met a group of workers who were poisoned on an iPhone assembly line by a chemical called n-hexane. Apple’s audits of its suppliers show that an incident like this occurred in a factory in China, but the factory wasn’t located in Shenzhen, where Daisey visited.
“It happened nearly a thousand miles away, in a city called Suzhou,” Marketplace’s Schmitz says in his report. “I’ve interviewed these workers, so I knew the story. And when I heard Daisey’s monologue on the radio, I wondered: How’d they get all the way down to Shenzhen? It seemed crazy, that somehow Daisey could’ve met a few of them during his trip.”
In the Marketplace interview, Daisey reportedly tells Schmitz, ”I’m not going to say that I didn’t take a few shortcuts in my passion to be heard.”
Despite Daisey’s fabrications of people he talked to, there has been plenty of other reporting on the working conditions at Foxconn and other factories in China. The New York Times published a series in January, near the same time the This American Life episode aired, with independently reported accounts demonstrating the human costs associated with the large-scale manufacturing of iPhones, iPads and other consumer electronics devices.
Update: The New York Times on Friday has corrected an op-ed by Daisey the paper published after Steve Jobs’ death in October.
Update: This American Life has released the transcript for “Retraction,” its episode devoted entirely to figuring out what went wrong with its involvement with Daisey.
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