You think you know, but you (should) have no idea
by Jens Ode on november 25, 2009
Are you up for a quick experiment? Good! Do you remember the oh-so-great song Zombie from 1994 by The Cranberries? If not, or if you just want to enjoy it again, listen to it here. Run along now and listen to it, I’ll be waiting here for you. No no, don’t cheat, off you go!
Good. Now, replay the song in your head. Do you have the chorus in your head (yes, pun intended)? Repeat it to yourself a few times:
In your head, in your head,
Zombie, zombie, zombie,
Hey, hey, hey. What’s in your head
Good, you are getting the rythm. Now, start tapping the song with your fingers while you play it over and over again in your head. Dum-dum-dum-dumdumdidum-dum. You may look a bit stupid, but hey, you’re grooving.
Now stop playing the song in your head, but keep hitting that desk with your fingers. Does the rythm you hear while tapping actually make any sense to you now? Or is it just a random thumping sound with no meaning whatsoever? If the answer is ”random thumping sound” – then excellent, lesson learned! (If not, keep on reading, you’ll need it.) You have been struck by the curse of knowledge. While you played the song in your head the tapping sound made perfect sense, you had the knowledge and expertise on what those sounds actually meant. When you ”remove” the song from your head, it’s just a stream of jibberish and actually quite annoying to hear. Don’t look, but your neighbour colleague is probably thinking about smacking you on the head right now.
Whenever you write copy, design a web site, make a presentation, create a user flow or actually do anything where you need to get a message across and your target audience is not experts on your level, be very aware of the curse of knowledge. As an expert, you have a wealth of references, jargons, ideas and cases that makes perfect sense to you and you are so used to communicate using the perfect terms and the correct acrynoms. To your web site visitor or audience, this may actually mean nothing at all. Your e-commerce stock system is internally probably very well defined and easy for you to understand, but to your customer it probably makes no sense why you keep a certain item in that very strangely named category. What will happen is that your customer won’t be able to to find the item or understand your shop and thus won’t buy anything.
Look at your communication, not as an expert, but as a customer. Try to step out of your world of knowledge and look at what you are presenting without your goggles. Does it make any sense anymore? If not, redesign, rewrite, rethink. It will pay off.
Next lesson is to think of another song, fire it up in your head and visit your colleague. Thump away on his/her desk, ask what song your playing and see for yourself what the curse of knowledge does to your message.
Will your kids pay for online content?
by Jens Ode on oktober 26, 2009
In Sweden we have a magazine for kids called “KamratPosten” (freely translated to “Buddy Magazine”). It’s been around for about 115 years and has been a magazine with a reputation of publishing high quality content for kids. Two years ago they took the next step into the digital era and launched a web site. It was a community-based site with quality content, games and supervised forums. This saturday they will take the next difficult step – getting payed for online content. November 1, 2009, KamratPosten will shut down for 48 hours to be relaunched as a paying visitors-only web site – it will be a gated community.
KamratPosten has listed a number of arguments for this, where the main argument is that they cannot afford to run a high-quality web site for free anymore. They have paid the web site using the profits from the paper magazine, and realized that this arrangement must come to an end. They also turned down the possibility to use ads, which was a logical decision. Advertising and kids is a legal jungle and you have to tread very careful to make it work. KamratPosten has also built a strong brand on trust and honesty and bringing in external advertisers would jeopardize their brand.
KamratPosten now makes a very interesting case for anyone looking at how to charge for online content, mainly because they bring a new dish to the table. The kids – your kids. You may not be willing to pay for news online, but are you willing to pay for a safe playground for your kids. Maybe you cannot charge for the content, but it will be interesting to see if you can charge for the safety.
The cost for a subscription will be equivalent to that of buying a large ice cream every month. How many ice creams are you prepared to sacrifice for high quality content and safe zones for your kids?
The original article can be found here (only in Swedish): http://kpwebben.se/artiklar/2009/snart-smaller-det/
Fetch as a Google-bot
by Jens Ode on oktober 17, 2009
Ever wondered how the Google bot views your page. Well, now you can. Google has added a new feature in Webmaster Tools, ”Fetch as a bot”. The function returns the page exactly as the bot sees it (in HTML). Very handy when you want to view how your code is interpreted by Google.
Read more: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/10/fetch-as-googlebot-and-malware-details.html
Dealing with bad comments
by Jens Ode on oktober 27, 2009
One of the most challenging tasks for many companies when it comes to social media is how to deal with bad comments. You have launched your product or or service and when you start searching online you discover negative blog post and negative comments. How should you handle this?
Prepare your own backyard
First of all, check your own web site. How easy is it to search for information about your products? How many clicks away is your customer service or product manuals? When a blogger discovers news or face a problem with your product they often start at your web site to find out more. If you don’t even have a decent search engine how can you help your customer? If your customers can’t find information on your own web site the smallest issue they encounter will quickly escalate.
Be the customer
If you have decided to approach a blogger who has written a bad post on your product, be honest and credible in your response. Try to see the problem from the customer’s point of view. If there really is a problem with the product, be honest and credible, don’t try to ignore it or insult your customer. This leads back to my previous point, prepare your own backyard. If you discover a problem with a product, is your web site prepared so that you can release information (which can easily be found) to help customers to solve the issue. Take a look at Apple – everywhere you turn on the web site you will find lots of tutorial videos on how to accomplish different things with their products. This is an excellent solution and shows how important it is to provide good educational information.
Solve the problem, don’t advertise
When you approach a bad comment, solve the problem. Don’t ever try to advertise for a new product or service. Focus on the issue and solve it, that’s what your customer really wants. They don’t want to buy a new product from you at this stage, they want your honesty, respect and solution.
Don’t stick your head in the sand
If you get a lot of bad comments on a product, take a closer look at your product. Is it really ready for the market, or is it flawed? Have you created a misunderstanding about any functions which you can correct with updated manuals? Solve the issues, don’t stick your head in the sand.