Basic rule for any communication in writing: it must be legible.
Basic rule for a menu: it must be skim-readable—just like web content. Otherwise it’s not accessible.

The owners of Manon, a new French-Italian restaurant (yes, you read that right) in Newtown, Wellington, went mad with their marketing campaign and foolishly popped a flyer in my letter box.

What were they thinking? This crazy calligraphy had me peering in puzzlement at the first three items under E (for entree, I guess). At that point I stopped peering.

Sure, I could read it: Gazpacho w Avocado Quenelle & toasted buttered brioche: see? But by the time I’d deciphered the third entree I couldn’t remember the first one. All my brain energy had been used up by deciphering, not reading.

People read menus in a particular way, and this particular menu thwarted me before I began.

Normally, the process of choosing dishes at a restaurant is exquisite self torture and an intrinsic delight of eating out. I don’t know about you, but I tend to skim-read a menu, browse a bit, re-examine some items in detail, make tentative choices, check what my friends have chosen, skim-read again to make sure I’ve not missed anything. Only at that point am I ready to order. (Unless at Kiallis, where I eat haloumi salad. Or Nikau: kedgeree.)

Then the dish comes and the excitement is partly because of this mighty existential question: Did I choose well, or did I make a mistake?

It’s all good… as long as the physical act of skim-reading is easy, relaxed, automatic.

With the Manon menu, patrons will spend far too much time and effort actually reading. They’ll have to read every word. They can’t skim-read.

I bet an awful lot of people settle for the first main on the list. Chef, get cracking on tonight’s first truckload of that Grilled Crispy CanterValley Half Duck w Lemon Braised Chickory & Drambuie ginger sauce. All that struggling makes the punters hungry.

It’s tempting to write what you need to say. That’s good, if you’re writing a book or a poem. That’s bad, if you’re writing a web page or any document that is supposed to be helpful or even useful to the public.

Here’s an extreme example from the small web site of Pestoff Animal Control Products.

What 99% of readers want from the home page is, I presume, information about Pestoff products and an easy way to buy them. Reasonable?

Instead, this is what we read on the home page.

Thank you for visiting us.

Our site is dedicated to informing you about our highly successful products, services, distributors and clients. This is the launch page for taking you around our site and providing you with information about our business.

Use the buttons on the left to find out about our company, its products and services, its clients and our collective achievements.

You can also click on the link buttons in text at the bottom of each page or click on the button/bars within the text below to obtain specific information.

We are proud to hold ISO 9001/2000 accreditation. Click on the logo opposite to view our ISO9001/2000 certification details as issued by Bureau Veritas Quality International.

Fascinating? Just what you needed to know? Thought not.

Think what the reader needs to know. Then write what the reader needs to know.

Pestoff.co.nz — Let’s hope this inspires them to upgrade their web site. Don’t let’s be too scornful, either: any of us could fall into the same trap.

About nine years ago, a friend gave me a Christmas lily. Glorious white flower, one tall stalk, small pot. As a model for business growth, the lily was pathetic.

After it bloomed I popped the bulb into the garden, as you do. Since then, I’ve seen nothing but the occasional leafy stem until this year, when I counted no less than nine stems in full bloom. They’d infiltrated the entire garden: one for every fallow year.

When the Wellington winds began trashing the flowers, I rescued them and brought them inside. Beautiful. So shiny, thick, scented. So assertive. So very green and white.

That’s a pretty erratic harvest, however.

At the same time I was reading that you should start a business with the definite intention of selling it after 5 years: that implies a much faster return on investment than for the lilies of the field.

The 5-year sale plan makes a lot of sense, whether or not you eventually sell. It means taking the business seriously, pouring energy and time into it, not just playing. It means creating a business that doesn’t depend on your presence.

And it means back-pedalling on development at a certain point in favour of sales.

This is perhaps the hardest thing for small businesses, most of which begin because someone is passionate about developing a product or service. Typically the new business owner doesn’t have a clue about marketing, and I’m typical— I’d much rather be creating new online courses than marketing. Well, too bad!

And so I ruminated on gales and sales. Then dutifully returned to marketing.

Larry Brauner is 58 this week. And he’s celebrating for four days with a virtual birthday party on Facebook.

Larry’s Facebook party

Now, I have no idea what fizzbang shenanigans are planned, but the very idea is an example of what he stands for: thinking outside the box. It makes me smile, frown and puzzle.

It’s obvious that we haven’t even started using Facebook in a million extraordinary and rewarding ways.

And that fills me with horror: “Oh no! You mean I’m going to have to *think* about this?”… and pleasure: “Thank heavens, someone has smashed the mould.”

So, Larry gets a festival of responses. He offers floor prizes, and here at Contented.com we certainly intend to offer one. He hurls a bunch of bloggers into one spot for a purpose that’s more social than marketing.

And repercussions start percussing. Reverberations start verbing.

Let this genial, ingenious idea wander where it will.

How quickly the shiny-new Facebook became boring-boring same-old same-old. I’m happy to say that Larry’s virtual party has already seeded my brain with other social marketing ideas.

Also, as another person who is not exactly in the first flush of youth, I’m tickled pink to see him declare his age without the hint of a blush. Go Larry!

This billboard was erected by the pro-democracy group in Tonga, on a crossroad near Tofoa. It’s amazing. At first sight, it’s a sycophantic licking of the royal boots. But look closer: it’s an ingenious piece of marketing.

How do you persuade people to your democratic cause when criticising the king is against the law?

Why, you praise the king!

You give him credit for the democratic changes he promised at his coronation.

You remind him (and all citizens who pass by) that the world’s eyes are upon him.

And in a sly twist, you patronise him: “We are proud of you.” That’s what teachers say to a class of five year olds.

It means: Well done, little one! So far so good. You’ve still got a long way to go, but this is a good start.

Or perhaps: Most people think a king’s status is far above his subjects. But watch it: the king is our servant, ruling because the people permit this. For now…

Is this message Twitter length? Close, at 187 characters. Succinct, anyway.

King George V Icon to the globe and world history as the architect of peaceful political change. “G5 consent to Act 2008 for 2010 election under changed govt. system” We are proud of you.

P.S. I suspect “G5″ is twitter or txt for “gave”.)

A McKinsey Quarterly article on E-government 2.0 concludes that government use of the internet is far from reaching its potential. Jason Baumgarten and Michael Chui look approvingly at early initiatives and coolly at what’s happening now:

Despite spending enormous amounts on Web-based initiatives, government agencies often fail to meet users’ needs online.

Baumgarten and Chui are clear about why e-government seems to have stalled, and have three instructions. They’re talking about the USA, and it’s worth thinking about.

No use doing any one of these three if the other two are ignored. E-government is not a trendy add-on to government bureaucracy. It means re-examining the whole shebang — starting with the org-chart. Who’s in charge? Who has the expertise? Can we afford any technological naivete in management?

To reach the next level in e-government services, organizations must overcome each of these obstacles. First, they must move to a governance model in which e-government initiatives are owned by “line of business” executives and supported by a dedicated, cross-functional team. Second, they must develop capabilities in critical areas such as marketing, usability, Web analytics, and customer insights. Finally, government agencies must shift mind-sets to proactively get citizens, businesses, and other agencies involved in contributing or creating applications and content.

This is the bit that Contented can help with, in our own small way: must develop capabilities in [...] marketing, usability, [...] and customer insights. Our Diploma in Web Content is one way that thousands of web content authors in government can gain those skills.

Does that seem a stretch to you? Well, the old p-government involved thousands of government employees working on paper and shifting those pieces of paper around. Some pieces went to the public. Marketing was seen as a discrete specialty. Even writing plain language was seen by some as an arcane specialty, done by the communications department and unrelated to everyday work! Government agencies should not be ivory towers or even contain ivory towers… but they did, and some still do.

When government went online, every document became a marketing tool — like it or not. Every document should be fuelled by customer insights. Many a government employee who writes at work now writes stuff that directly affects the public.

It’s a huge turnaround from paper writing to web writing and there’s a lot at stake. Million dollar ICT projects can fail if the content is written with a paper world in mind.

Non-scalable businesses don’t want too many enquiries. For them, light traffic from Google may be perfect.

I’ve got two contrasting businesses.

One business is Contented.com, which is scalable. We do one thing only: provide self-taught, self-paced online training courses in writing for the web. With our first version, now all but retired, you could start training to write for the web immediately. With Version 2.0 (coming any day now), 1,000 people could start immediately. For that matter, 2,000 or 10,000 people could start immediately. There’ll be no limit. No classes, no teachers, no timetable, no classroom (just web-based training courses) and mainly hands-off administration and e-commerce.

We’ve barely marketed Contented courses up to now, but word of mouth has made it a success. When Version 2.0 comes online we’ll buckle down and start marketing in earnest. We’ll beg, urge, and persuade millions of you to take our brilliant courses in writing web content.

What a contrast is Novella, my other “business”—quote marks indicating that it barely qualifies as a business. Novella is a furnished apartment in a quaint old art deco building in Mount Victoria, Wellington. I rent it out short term. It’s occupied about 85% of the year. I rely entirely on the internet for marketing, through my own web site and one accommodation portal, holidayhouses.co.nz.

I don’t want too much traffic. Only one person (or couple or group of 3) can occupy Novella at a time, obviously. The perfect number of enquiries for me is very low. Too many and I’m answering emails and phone calls constantly, mainly saying No, Sorry, Novella is occupied at the time you want. This in spite of the calendar provided by HolidayHouses.

So I never update my web site, except when the rates change. I cancelled my account with second accommodation portal. And I receive just the right number of enquiries from a stream of uncannily lovely people.

Business advice focuses on scalable businesses with the potential for very large profits. That’s fine, that’s good, that’s Contented. But Novella earns more than I’d get if I sold it and invested the money. It’s more fun. It’s useful and good. It’s salutary to remember that the world is full of such nice little enterprises serving their purposes.

Holidayhouses.co.nz

Job seekers need facts! It’s heartbreaking. Almost heartbraking. The way so many people start their job ads on Twitter with a rave and a ramble about life in general instead of facts.

Twitter is a perfect place for job ads. But time and again, advertisers blow it by failing to describe the job or the worker they need.

They write an ad for a regular web page or forum. They forget the ad is going to turn up on Twitter, so they waste most of those precious 140 characters on blah. Twitterfeed recycles the first few words — whatever they are. Twitterfeed doesn’t edit (doh).

Take these, for instance, on geekzonenzjobs.

Job: If you’re a people person with good applications performance analysis skills, who enjoys interacting wi..

Job: Become part of one of NZ’s success stories and join one of the best development teams around. Leading e..

Job: Intermediate BA (3-4 yrs experience) to join 8 other BA’s in what has been described to me as a down to..

Job: Sick of playing second fiddle? Ready to fine tune your life and break free from your cubicle? Melbourne..

Job: Work Life Balance in a Multi-International, Really? Advance your career, rewards are plentiful. You owe..

OK, now for a few that fully exploit their allotment of characters and make sense on Twitter. And gosh they were hard to find. As you see these are not deathless prose: because they’re written for job seekers, not creative writing students.

Job: 12 Month Fixed Term contract. Novell: IT & Technology : Help Desk/Support (Full time) Desktop Sup..

Job: XSL Developer for established company in Auckland CBD: Do you know your XSL from your XML? Young V..

Job: * 5+ years experience as Business Analyst * Experienced with Billing Systems * Auckland East location: ..

Writing for Twitter is no different from writing other web content. It’s simply web content writing on steroids. A tweet is a headline, actually, with a few bonus words that summarise the page.

If you want to know why we all need to be trained to write for the web, look no further than Twitter.

People who’ve done the CONTENTED courses in web content writing would spot the problem in a nanosecond. They know a web page should not start with a nice little chat. They’d delete meaningless feel-good phrases and start with facts, facts, facts. They’d make darn sure the first 20-odd words contained at least some keywords.

Then maybe the employees they need would notice the ad, and apply.

Broken heart image from michiyoemi on FlickR: thanks.

SALT publishers have good advice for authors. 100 words, they say. I didn’t count them.

Here are some:

If you’re not on the Web, pretty soon you won’t exist in the minds of readers. Only networked writers will survive. This is an issue of discoverability and of consumption. Being a writer has a lot to do with the three Ps: profile, publicity and presence. That’s Web presence. Out of thousands of books published each year we encounter very few and choose less from among them. The back story to a book is as important as the book itself. Readers must know you to choose you. This is a core competence in using the Web, because collision equals sales.

If it matters for authors, it matters for you too, if you’re in business.

I was amused to read last week that Queen Elizabeth II has commanded (well, contracted, I suppose) Tim Berners Lee to fix her web site. Nothing but the best!

http://www.royal.gov.uk is pretty stuffy at present. Take a peek while you can: the new version will appear on 12 February. Video clips make the site more exciting than it was 10 years ago, but they’re shown in the YouTube context, so you have the delight of seeing QUEEN jostling The Queen.

The current site has been added to… and added to… and added to. Inevitably, navigation is a shambles.

But if I remember correctly, not much else has changed — including the mean little font and the pompous language. Words are emitted into the ether from a great height. One supposes that one would expect one’s monarch — or rather, her communications staff — to err on the side of formality when addressing the hoi polloi. Still, let’s hope the makeover includes a few pronouns, especially “you” and the plebeian “we”.

Here’s a taste of the de haut en bas tone:

The British Monarchy Media Centre is managed by Buckingham Palace Press Office.

It is intended to provide a dedicated resource for members of the print, broadcast and online media in the UK, Commonwealth and worldwide, and to aid members of the public interested in the daily programme of members of the Royal Family, speeches by members of the Royal Family, or seeking information about previous Royal engagements.

How kind. Shame about the grammar. But that’s what you get when you launch into a 55-word sentence. I hope Tim will tell you that.

The Queen herself is said to be driving the revamp:

Now, at an age – she is 82 – when many of her contemporaries are turning their backs on new technology, the Queen is determined to make her website – first launched 12 years ago – more user friendly and relevant to modern-day society.