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Archive for February, 2012

Crown content king

Monday, February 20th, 2012

Top 5 ways to improve your digital content

We’re a fickle lot, aren’t we? A decade ago, when the digital realm was just kicking into the mainstream, we could make purchasing decisions without Googling them first.

But no more. Most of us judge a business by the quality of its digital footprint. If you’re a business without a website, you effectively don’t exist.

Driving the digital revolution – technological leaps and bounds aside – is data. And in this increasingly over-crowded space, only a commitment to adding significantly more content all the time to your digital pursuits is going to get you noticed.

We blog, post, tweet, interview, research and write every day to create content for our clients. Here are some of the tricks we’ve learned.

1. One size doesn’t fit all

Just because your words looked great on a fact sheet doesn’t mean they deserve to get a guernsey on your web site. Long ago, web developers derived this practice as ‘brochureware’, and deservedly so.

Just like Twitter demands we cut our words to a character count, we need to amend and rewrite our message to suit every medium.

2. Fresh is best, naturally

Ban ‘under construction’ pages. And make it a life-or-death discipline in your business that new content needs to be added to your website regularly, and your social media refreshed daily.

Think of how many conversations you’ve already had today. Wouldn’t you start to avoid the person who wanted to say the same words, over and over?

Your digital words are no different. Change the conversation and more customers will want to hear what you’re saying.

3. Beg and borrow, but don’t steal

Not everyone’s comfortable or skilled at writing. (That’s why we’re in business.)

So a great way to generate more content for your website is to obtain content from elsewhere for free. Usually, all you’ll need to do is place a small bio of the original writer at the bottom of the article or tutorial.

To get started, search for ‘free content’ and list what you’re after. Sites like articlegeek.com abound that are willing for you to use their content for zero cost, just attribution.

4. How do I love thee? Let me list the ways.

Everyone loves a list. (Clearly, so do we).

Demonstrate your knowledge in your field with a list of helpful hints for your customers that relate to your business.

Make the entries easy to read, and don’t get caught up in detail.

5. When in doubt, tell a story

I’ve seen many clients get hung up with analysis paralysis, worrying if what they’re saying strikes the right tone or casts the right image.

One of the most enduring forms of communication continues to be storytelling. It cuts through marketing mumbo-jumbo and presents a business in the most honest light.

Don’t be afraid to show your human side. Tell a story that shows a mistake you made and how you fixed it. Or what you learned from a tough time in your business. Or positively profile one of your clients that highlights your relationship with them.

You’ll end up with creating a warm, cosy environment that makes people want to stay.

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Working with children

Wednesday, February 8th, 2012

We’re not a child-care facility but we sure get our fair share of working with children.

Supplying to the education sector means our work is either aimed at kids or about kids, and we’ve managed to carry it over to other clients, too.  Particularly in photoshoots, there’s a warmth and heart that children bring that can’t be found in older subjects.

I’ve directed two major photoshoots recently with children as the subjects and there’s an art to working with them.  When they’re comfortable, happy and engaged, it shows and you see their character shine through.  Photoshoots are expensive things (though not as expensive as film shoots) and work to tight timelines.  But do you think kids care? Unless they’re having fun, there are a million other things they’d rather be doing. They get bored, fidgety, tired, distracted, worn out and hyped up.

I’m a dad of three so I came pre-equipped with some basic kid-wrangling skills, but kids are, not surprisingly, all rather different. So I needed to adapt. It used to be that singing a few Wiggles song would do the trick but work with any kid over the age of about four and the skivvy songs just don’t cut it.

Take the junior school students we photographed late last year.  These are lower primary students who I thought would fit well with my young repertoire. So I did a bit of Beiber. The only bit of Beiber I know is the song Baby and the title is the only word of the song I could remember.  So I made up some lyrics (which changed for every class I tried them on) and there was mild amusement.  They knew the song but were more likely to laugh at the old doofus making a fool of himself than by my culturally relevant tunes.  But it worked and they laughed and the shots prove it.  Of course when I asked their favourite artists it wasn’t the age-appropriate Justin but rather Angus and Julia Stone who got the nod.  Of course!  Really…you’re seven years old…

Shooting the series of full-page heroes for the Hastings Deering Caterpillar sustainability report was huge fun.  We’ll profile the job in another blog post but series of kids at work shots were a huge hit within the organisation and beyond, mostly due to the little people in starring roles.

I pulled out a bit of Captain Feathersword for these but found again that the best approach is self-deprecation. Every funny face in my book was pulled out (and yes, as with smiling through a wedding photoshoot, my cheeks hurt for days) but the best move always seemed to be the leap.  I don’t know why the sight of a six-and-a-half-foot man jumping into the air works but it does.  I guess Toyota had that sewn up, with their long-running campaign end screens, and I have borrowed it many times.

But when you’ve been going for hours and the shot still hasn’t gelled, there’s only ever one thing for it.  Sugar.  Lollies, cakes, chocolate…whatever.  If it’s sweet and they can eat it, they will – and for a few more precious minutes (once they’ve stopped chewing) they’re putty in your hands.  Oddly enough their parents never thank us for it though they don’t seem to mind too much either.  I’ll bet they’ve used that trick a thousand times before.

In case it seems I’ve sold the little tackers short, I will say that the greatest joy in working with kids is their lack of ego.  They don’t care how they look, how you’ve portrayed them, whether they look tall or short in the shots.  Most of the time they just want to make you happy, put on their best manners, love the attention and enjoy the praise we heap on them when they just are who they are.

And secretly, I love that they give me the chance to play the fool (and be who I am, too).

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Client-focus: Internal communications with Hastings Deering

Monday, February 6th, 2012

We’ve spoken about effective internal comms on this blog before, so it’s probably a good time to explore more of our work in this area.  Let’s take a closer look at how we work with Caterpillar dealer Hastings Deering.

Since 2005, we’ve partnered with Hastings Deering to develop and deliver their internal communications. With 4000 staff across seven major branches and three countries, HD’s regions each offer different services. Staff are a diverse mix of skilled, semi-skilled and professional workers, and many work out-of-hours and off-site shifts.

Considering these elements, we have a challenging brief to create effective, sustainable internal communications that reaches and informs all of HD’s staff.

When we first met with Hastings Deering senior management, they asked us to develop a quarterly magazine. From that initial brief, our role has grown and we now take care of all of their major internal communications – including social media pages and daily intranet news feeds – as well as other specialty projects.

Along the way, we’ve become well known to the staff at Hastings. We field daily phone calls and emails from staff seeking our advice, a relationship we value.

In a very real sense, we’ve become their external, internal communications specialists. All this, and most of the staff have never even met us.

Editorial that goes the distance

We produce three major communication tools for Hastings Deering:

• The Vibe, HD’s bi-monthly magazine for staff

• Intranet News, HD’s daily online news feed

• HD Facebook, managing daily content across multiple Facebook groups and pages.

New Word Order’s team includes journalists who interview, write, edit, approve and produce these publications. Traditionally, Hastings Deering’s communications had been handled by an internal marketing division, with help from external freelancers, PR firms and advertising agencies.

What we do

We treat each element of HD’s internal communications as different projects, and so we tailor our services. For the Vibe, we add project managers, graphic designers and photographers in the mix with our journalists. Intranet News is words only, while social media requires a different, specialised approach.

For specialty projects for Hastings Deering, we involve even more members of our team. These projects have included online training modules, an interactive sustainability report and a recruitment website. For each project, we bring together our creative team, including web developers, animators, illustrators, and photographers.

One story, four ways

We talk to Hastings staff every day, so we’re in the box seat to understand and apply the content we create.

To do this, we developed an internal communications plan that lets us define the type of story we’ve written and how it can best be used across HD’s internal comms mix.

For example, the Vibe is about the people of Hastings Deering and what they do. Dry stories about the business find a human face here, and the writing style is more laidback. Quality photos are also essential for the Vibe.

Intranet News is a daily feed. The readers are primarily staff with computers, so the stories are mostly about the business. It’s here you’ll see content like stats on sustainability and safety reminders for leading hands.

We’ve developed guidelines for our social media work with Hastings Deering, not only to encompass our moderation of their various Facebook groups and pages, but also to guide staff members and moderators. Our guidelines include who can join the HD Facebook groups and how and what is communicated on the pages and in the groups.

Often, discussions and questions that arise from our social media work with Hastings Deering will feed bigger stories for the Vibe or Intranet News.

Journalism vs PR

We’ve found the difference that New Word Order has in providing internal comms is in our journalistic approach. Our staff have the skills and experience to sniff out a story, understand and condense large amounts of information, and conduct interviews, which makes our internal communications informative and engaging. We love getting to know a business, too. Where better than from the inside out?

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Literally speaking

Thursday, February 2nd, 2012

And around we go again: the word nerds have literally got a bee in their bonnets.

How many times have you come up against a co-worker or acquaintance who has granite hard beliefs on language usage backed by nothing more than “that’s what we were told in school”?

There is an excellent quote from Gregory Benford “Passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information available” that seems to apply here.

We’ll let religion and love take gold and silver (not necessarily in that order) in the passion-evidence stakes, while admitting the grammar and usage partners actually deserve to be mentioned in the same breath.

All this brings us to the Guardian.com.uk’s  recent story about ‘literally’ – using a certain football commentator’s hilarious misuse as grist: “he had to cut back inside on to his left, because he literally hasn’t got a right foot”.

Literally speaking, the player in question had a right foot (I checked). It was in perfectly serviceable order at the time of the comment.

Figuratively speaking, there might be something amiss with his right foot.

Yet, as the article notes, no one can really use ‘figuratively’ without being annoying.

The article goes to argue that as everyday speech – and thus common usage, for who (save mutes) writes more than they speak? – is increasingly uncertain, ‘literally’ is one strategy to emphasise an intended surety of meaning.

Or perhaps, our increasing misguided use of ‘literally’ relates to some semantic link to ‘literature’.

In this case, the misuse is an honourable attempt by the speaker to set their audience up for a poetic turn of phrase.

Even so, that won’t totally save you when you say:

“Centre forwards have the ability to make time stand still. And when Chopra got the ball, it literally did just that.”

In that instance you have to wonder whether the commentator even intended the word to mean anything.

Has ‘literally’ become verbal punctuation – nothing more than a modifying noise we make? Something in a similar vein to ‘totally’, ‘actually’ and ‘really’? Attentive readers will note I’ve used all three in suitably meaningless contexts above.

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