Good communication and good design do what they’re supposed to

Tech for PR posts a great piece today on how technology just gets in the way. This is something I keep coming back to, that good communication and good design don’t get in the way because they help, without hindering. If they’re done properly, you don’t notice them at all.

I spent several years as a designer, including software interface design, and so I spent many hours putting myself in the head of a user, trying to figure out how best to word a message, or what colour a menu should be, or how large fonts to use. They’re all really important and yet I would often have to fight for my suggestions to make it into the software. The tech viewpoint seemed to be that if it worked, that was all that mattered. Mine was, what do you mean by ‘work’? Could you drive a car without any labels on the dashboard? Eventually, possibly, but only after a few bumps. This is why some time ago I had a major gripe about Lotus Notes which has frankly bizarre features such as a menu entitled ‘Actions’ with a submenu entitled ‘Tools’. Where’s the sense in that? I still come across ‘funnies’ daily but I’ve given up documenting them.

I’m currently going through a presentation slide set and the ineptitude on display (literally) astonishes me. The message is very astute – or at least I think it is. I’m still trying to figure it out. I have a strong feeling I’ll be able to distil it from 15 rambling bullet points to about 7 succinct ones. And remove that spaghetti-like diagram altogether.

Here’s a solution for all you bad communicators out there: take up blogging. Find out what it’s like to put together a brief piece of prose, actually saying something in a joined-up way, with a compelling headline so that people notice it in their readers. Think long and hard about which graphic to include. Do this every day and next thing you know, you’ll be communicating like a Friendly Ghost. You too will be someone’s invisible friend.

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Housekeeping: three PR blog moves

We recently had three movers in the FG Blogroll. Given that this might affect their positions in the Power150 and PowerPR index (yes, I’m still working on it), here are the changes:

• IndiaPRBlog has moved from http://indiapr.blogspot.com/ to http://www.indiaprblog.com/. This blog consistently comes up with good, useful information and comment, proving that PR lessons can be learnt from any source regardless of geography.
• Barbara Rozgonyi has fled the WordPress platform to www.barbararozgonyi-wiredprworks.com. I wonder if this is anything to do with the little contretemps she had with them a while back? If so then I’m sure she’s made the right decision – update your blogrolls please.
• Finally – and I’m not the first to report on this – TWL has not only moved but had a distinct facelift, from http://theworldsleading.blogspot.com/ to  http://www.theworldsleading.net/. It’s an extremely original look and I’m sure it hasn’t just come about as a ‘nice to have’ – to me, this signals some real statement of intent about TWL’s plans to become a reference blog, not least with the mini-ads for jobs and services and the fact that TWL employed a design agency for the new look. It’s a welcome change and proof that PR blogs are becoming more sophisticated.

It’s interesting to note that all the moves are away from blog platforms to unique URLs. Could this be a trend? If so it implies to me a greater permanence and independence in the PR blogosphere. This could be an interesting tie-in with the recent indication that PR blogging is declining in quantity – which could almost imply an increase in quality.

If/when I finally get the latest PowerPR table out I shall be basically adding up all the metrics to give an overall ‘PowerPR index’, from when it will be interesting to see, like the FTSE, how the blogosphere is doing – is it expanding or contracting and if so, at what rate?

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SEO keywords for PR

As a small side project I recently took a look at the keywords that appear on PR websites. The results might be of use – they’re further down this posting and I plan to do more work on this, so I’ve created a new page on this blog to store the table for future reference.

Firstly, the software. There are some pay-for services out there, such as Yahoo’s Overture, Google Adwords and the big daddy of them all, Wordtracker. However for my purposes I used the nifty – and free – Good Keywords application. It’s well regarded as an effective way to isolate and manage keywords.

As my methodology I used its Web Page Explorer feature to extract and count the keywords from the pages on a selection of ten major UK PR agency sites that described what those companies did, usually the ‘about us’ page or similar. This meant I used copy representative of general descriptions of PR rather than specialities. It would probably have been better to identify keywords from entire sites but the software doesn’t have this ‘crawl’ feature.

I then just collated the results across all the pages, removed the really generic words that could apply to any site, and here are the results, for keywords that appeared at least twice:

Keyword	Frequency
Communications	41
clients	36
PR	27
business	17
people	13
Mission	12
UK	12
values	12
Corporate	11
strategic	10
global	9
Relationship	9
world	9
build	7
creative	7
industry	7
leading	7
Public	7
relations	7
best	6
European	6
agency	5
Brand	5
consultancy	5
Vision	5
contact	4
counsel	4
innovation	4
media	4
network	4
organizations	4
practice	4
results	4
Success	4
thinking	4
audiences	3
clear	3
company	3
insights	3
London	3
management	3
Marketing	3
problems	3
senior	3
solve	3
strong	3
achieve	2
affairs	2
approach	2
careers	2
consumers	2
culture	2
effective	2
environment	2
exciting	2
expertise	2
growth	2
help	2
history	2
ideas	2
implementation	2
information	2
integrated	2
knowledge	2
local	2
measure	2
national	2
new	2
news	2
opportunities	2
partnership	2
platform	2
professionals	2
quality	2
reach	2
real	2
reputation	2
research	2
services	2
staff	2
superior	2
understanding	2
web	2
work	2

So, what does this tell us? Well, you could simply stitch the top five keywords together and state that ‘PR people are in the business of client communications’! What I find interesting however is that PR didn’t come top: communications did. Indeed, it didn’t even come second: clients did, with people fifth, showing how important people are in communications, as opposed to, say, technology or finance.

I also find it interesting and illuminating that web is so low! This could show that PR companies still don’t see online as a key speciality, or simply that I need to make my survey more comprehensive.

What this means practically is that I can now pepper my copy with these keywords and, whereas I know this isn’t by any means a panacea for search engine optimisation, at least I’ve taken a small step towards giving my copy a chance by building these words into it. The Good Keywords software also offers alternative keyword suggestions that might get better hits, so I’ll be using this study as a basis for that, although I suspect the top keywords will work fine.

One final observation: actually, the keywords that came top for every site were ‘us’, ‘we’ or ‘our’ (as I said, I stripped the generic stuff out). Does this mean that PR people like to talk about themselves a lot, I wonder…?

I’m going to extend this quick survey to include more sites and move on to double keywords. Meanwhile, if any PR copywriters are out there needing a quick SEO resource, feel free to use this for inspiration.

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SEO keywords for PR

As a small side project I recently took a look at the keywords that appear on PR websites. The results might be of use – they’re further down this posting and I plan to do more work on this, so I’ve created a new page on this blog to store the table for future reference.

Firstly, the software. There are some pay-for services out there, such as Yahoo’s Overture, Google Adwords and the big daddy of them all, Wordtracker. However for my purposes I used the nifty – and free – Good Keywords application. It’s well regarded as an effective way to isolate and manage keywords.

As my methodology I used its Web Page Explorer feature to extract and count the keywords from the pages on a selection of ten major UK PR agency sites that described what those companies did, usually the ‘about us’ page or similar. This meant I used copy representative of general descriptions of PR rather than specialities. It would probably have been better to identify keywords from entire sites but the software doesn’t have this ‘crawl’ feature.

I then just collated the results across all the pages, removed the really generic words that could apply to any site, and here are the results, for keywords that appeared at least twice:

Keyword	Frequency
Communications	41
clients	36
PR	27
business	17
people	13
Mission	12
UK	12
values	12
Corporate	11
strategic	10
global	9
Relationship	9
world	9
build	7
creative	7
industry	7
leading	7
Public	7
relations	7
best	6
European	6
agency	5
Brand	5
consultancy	5
Vision	5
contact	4
counsel	4
innovation	4
media	4
network	4
organizations	4
practice	4
results	4
Success	4
thinking	4
audiences	3
clear	3
company	3
insights	3
London	3
management	3
Marketing	3
problems	3
senior	3
solve	3
strong	3
achieve	2
affairs	2
approach	2
careers	2
consumers	2
culture	2
effective	2
environment	2
exciting	2
expertise	2
growth	2
help	2
history	2
ideas	2
implementation	2
information	2
integrated	2
knowledge	2
local	2
measure	2
national	2
new	2
news	2
opportunities	2
partnership	2
platform	2
professionals	2
quality	2
reach	2
real	2
reputation	2
research	2
services	2
staff	2
superior	2
understanding	2
web	2
work	2

So, what does this tell us? Well, you could simply stitch the top five keywords together and state that ‘PR people are in the business of client communications’! What I find interesting however is that PR didn’t come top: communications did. Indeed, it didn’t even come second: clients did, with people fifth, showing how important people are in communications, as opposed to, say, technology or finance.

I also find it interesting and illuminating that web is so low! This could show that PR companies still don’t see online as a key speciality, or simply that I need to make my survey more comprehensive.

What this means practically is that I can now pepper my copy with these keywords and, whereas I know this isn’t by any means a panacea for search engine optimisation, at least I’ve taken a small step towards giving my copy a chance by building these words into it. The Good Keywords software also offers alternative keyword suggestions that might get better hits, so I’ll be using this study as a basis for that, although I suspect the top keywords will work fine.

One final observation: actually, the keywords that came top for every site were ‘us’, ‘we’ or ‘our’ (as I said, I stripped the generic stuff out). Does this mean that PR people like to talk about themselves a lot, I wonder…?

I’m going to extend this quick survey to include more sites and move on to double keywords. Meanwhile, if any PR copywriters are out there needing a quick SEO resource, feel free to use this for inspiration.

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SEO keywords for PR

As a small side project I recently took a look at the keywords that appear on PR websites. The results might be of use – they’re further down this posting and I plan to do more work on this, so I’ve created a new page on this blog to store the table for future reference.

Firstly, the software. There are some pay-for services out there, such as Yahoo’s Overture, Google Adwords and the big daddy of them all, Wordtracker. However for my purposes I used the nifty – and free – Good Keywords application. It’s well regarded as an effective way to isolate and manage keywords.

As my methodology I used its Web Page Explorer feature to extract and count the keywords from the pages on a selection of ten major UK PR agency sites that described what those companies did, usually the ‘about us’ page or similar. This meant I used copy representative of general descriptions of PR rather than specialities. It would probably have been better to identify keywords from entire sites but the software doesn’t have this ‘crawl’ feature.

I then just collated the results across all the pages, removed the really generic words that could apply to any site, and here are the results, for keywords that appeared at least twice:

Keyword	Frequency
Communications	41
clients	36
PR	27
business	17
people	13
Mission	12
UK	12
values	12
Corporate	11
strategic	10
global	9
Relationship	9
world	9
build	7
creative	7
industry	7
leading	7
Public	7
relations	7
best	6
European	6
agency	5
Brand	5
consultancy	5
Vision	5
contact	4
counsel	4
innovation	4
media	4
network	4
organizations	4
practice	4
results	4
Success	4
thinking	4
audiences	3
clear	3
company	3
insights	3
London	3
management	3
Marketing	3
problems	3
senior	3
solve	3
strong	3
achieve	2
affairs	2
approach	2
careers	2
consumers	2
culture	2
effective	2
environment	2
exciting	2
expertise	2
growth	2
help	2
history	2
ideas	2
implementation	2
information	2
integrated	2
knowledge	2
local	2
measure	2
national	2
new	2
news	2
opportunities	2
partnership	2
platform	2
professionals	2
quality	2
reach	2
real	2
reputation	2
research	2
services	2
staff	2
superior	2
understanding	2
web	2
work	2

So, what does this tell us? Well, you could simply stitch the top five keywords together and state that ‘PR people are in the business of client communications’! What I find interesting however is that PR didn’t come top: communications did. Indeed, it didn’t even come second: clients did, with people fifth, showing how important people are in communications, as opposed to, say, technology or finance.

I also find it interesting and illuminating that web is so low! This could show that PR companies still don’t see online as a key speciality, or simply that I need to make my survey more comprehensive.

What this means practically is that I can now pepper my copy with these keywords and, whereas I know this isn’t by any means a panacea for search engine optimisation, at least I’ve taken a small step towards giving my copy a chance by building these words into it. The Good Keywords software also offers alternative keyword suggestions that might get better hits, so I’ll be using this study as a basis for that, although I suspect the top keywords will work fine.

One final observation: actually, the keywords that came top for every site were ‘us’, ‘we’ or ‘our’ (as I said, I stripped the generic stuff out). Does this mean that PR people like to talk about themselves a lot, I wonder…?

I’m going to extend this quick survey to include more sites and move on to double keywords. Meanwhile, if any PR copywriters are out there needing a quick SEO resource, feel free to use this for inspiration.

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Is this the worst website in the world?

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Sometimes the poor standard of so-called ‘professional body websites’ astonishes me.

I have, in the past, referred back to the FEBCA and CiB websites as prime examples of communication gone bad, in these cases, the communication inherent in the design. They are truly awful, and such professional bodies should be ashamed to hawk such incompetence in public. If communication should be exciting, dynamic, clear and effective, then they seem to take the exact opposite view in the way they communicate through their sites. And they claim to be communications professionals. I shudder.

Well, I’ve found another one. Check out the IPRA website. I think it is quite possibly the worst site I have ever seen, of any kind, ever. It looks like somethng put together by a five year old in the early 90s. But even that five year old would by now be well into teenage years and well enough advanced in basic website design and aesthetics to have updated it.

It’s difficult to know where to start with what’s bad about it. So instead I’ll list what’s good about it:

1. It uses a lot of space.

That’s it. The graphics are bizarrely irrelevant. The colours are odd. There’s gross inconsistency of standards. The navigation’s weird. The page elements are not even lined up properly.

Their tagline on Google says “IPRA is the Internatiopnal [sic] Public Relatins [sic] Association – a membership organisation for PR professionals”. FFS.

Remember PR Disasters? Remember how I said it’s great because they analyse what’s bad about PR campaigns and so you get a unique insight into how not to do it? Well, do the same with the IPRA site – that is, do everything differently from their site, absolutely everything – and you’ll be fine.

So, do you want to join up? If you do, you’ll be in with the PR in-crowd but please, please ask them to do something about their site because as a PR professional I find it embarrassing on their behalf.

It’s not just a website

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Can you just ‘relaunch’ a website? FG thinks not. There has to be a reason for doing it.

I’m in the middle (I hope) of a website relaunch. Where I once was a copywriter, I am now also a web producer and project manager. Part of me thinks this is ok – I have done both in the past, although as my sole occupation at the time – but part of me wonders whether people have a true appreciation for what’s involved.

So, this is what’s involved:

• Before you do anything work out a brief. This will be very similar to a copy brief and, as I’ve said before, it is at the heart of everything you’ll do. It asks questions about what you’re trying to achieve, who the site’s for, the amount of resource you have to achieve this and the timeframe. You cannot spend too long on the brief. Even if you get the sense that people “Just want it done” rather than “Just want it done properly”, insist on the brief and…
• The messages.  Whereas your brief outlines the strategy, the messages form the basis for your content. Essentially these are the brand values (if there any – you may have to go right back and figure them out)  written as, say, four or five bullet points that get across key messages that you want to press home at every opportunity. So, if one message is “We provide great customer service” then try and get that element across whether you’re talking about your HR, your operations and your sales team as well as, of course, your service team. Make sure you can back this up too. Your messages are promises.
• Your messages then form the basis of your copy brief and graphics briefs. As I’ve said, your copy should press these home but so should your images. Try and get your graphic designer to produce one image per message. Then, in the same way your copy constantly refers back to the messages, so do your graphics. Take them as ‘position zero’ every time and you’ll be assured that you won’t wander too far from them.
• At the same time you obviously need a plan. Make sure everyone knows what the plan is and what’s required and when. This is where the project management comes in. You will necessarily need to keep reminding people of their responsibility. Try and delegate work. I’m convinced that the essence of good leadership is not “All these people depend on me” but “I depend on all these people”. This way you’ll get the best out of them and not drive yourself into the ground.
• OK, so things might not always go to plan, so update the plan as you along. A plan isn’t something you produce because you feel you should, then forget it. You need to know whether one element has come in late so that you rearrange other dependencies so that you go live on time.
• I would also recommend keeping a log of things that have caused problems along the way so that you can improve things next time around. If the content management system isn’t up to scratch, then make a note that it should be upgraded or replaced in future. If there is no documentation for processes then get someone to write them up (or do that yourself too).
• Finally, when this is all completed, take a good hard look within the company and ask whether the values and the messaging that you worked out to begin with are really communicated well internally. If no one knew what they were to begin with then chances are, they’re not. This is a big thing: everyone needs to know how they should be working and what they’re working towards. This is where the brand permeates a company inside and out. This is where a company really starts working in a consistent, effective way.

So you can’t really just launch a site as an independent project. It will necessarily involve talking to lots of people and working out the real reason for the launch. Everything is connected. If it isn’t then it’s your task to connect them.

There is more involved and I’ll probably have more to say on this matter as things develop. When it finally does go live I’m hoping I’ll have time to talk about PR and copywriting again.

Click, double-click, ALT, TAB, ENTER. What makes a good interface?

Despite not working in the field anymore I do keep seeing interface design issues popping up recently.

In my copywriting feed – feel free to subscribe to it on the right-hand side of this blog, it takes lots and lots and lots of copywriting feeds and syndicates them out – comes a piece on the rate at which most people scan Google pages. It averages out at 140 words in 6.4 seconds. This can surely only be enough to pick out a few words of interest and, as Chris Hoskin says in his post, it must be too quickly for a ‘rational’ decision to be made.

My take on it is that people will tend to return to that search page if the link they choose isn’t right for them, so it’s probably several ‘chunks’ of 6.4 seconds which isn’t quite as random, and through this repetition people start to make better decisions as they become more familiar with what’s presented.

So perhaps the real way to judge an interface really isn’t in its immediate intuitiveness but eventual familiarity. My father  – who used to program in Mobol using punch cards - is trying to teach my 70+ year-old auntie how to use a computer. I think it’s admirable that she wants to get into it but he says it’s a real eye-opener. He has to teach her how to use the mouse, how to click, how to open and close windows and start applications.

These are second-nature operations to us graphics-interface-savvy users but you tell me: what exactly is the difference between single-click and double-click? Why do we single-click menus but double-click icons (I’m talking Windows here)? I can only come to the conclusion that you double-click a picture and single click text, but where does that leave the Start menu, with its combination of icons and labels? Why don’t we double-click hyperlinks? Suddenly it doesn’t seem quite as obvious anymore.

Way, way back I started on the path of enlightenment with a ZX81, graduating to a ZX Spectrum. The ‘interface’ for that - a very quirky command line – was really pretty dreadful, with arcane and obscure key combinations for picking out commands and operations. Yet I was able to churn out code really quickly with it. This wasn’t because the interface was well designed. It was because I got used to it.

The key is a combination of learning curve, consistency, and the adaptability of an interface to work around the user. If the curve is shallow and you can do things in several ways without getting lost, you’re working with a good interface.

You’d avoid using Lotus Notes if you were me – Part II

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Not so long ago, with my interface/application designer’s hat on (yes, I designed this, including website, interface and documentation), I posted a whinge about Lotus Notes. Thomas Adrian was kind enough to comment, and I can understand that he was displeased because from what I can see on his site, he’s big on the subject (although, hats off to him his English is better than my Swedish).

Now don’t take this as a personal attack Thomas, but here’s more Lotus Notes inadequacy:

• Copy from an HTML or rich-text document, then paste into a Lotus Notes email. Then wait. And wait. And wait a bit more. After several seconds (or several more) it will eventually paste. Why not immediately? What on earth is taking Lotus Notes so long to paste metatext?
• So you’re typing along quite happily when an alarm window pops up for a meeting. I don’t object to alarms – they’re very useful – but they do introduce when you’re mid-flow. They also respond to key depressions so if it happens that you press ENTER or ‘O’ for OK you suddenly find it’s closed the window and the following stream of characters have been interpreted by whatever underlying application you were running. I’ve very nearly lost work with this happening. Not good. Also, why call it an alarm? Do I want to be alarmed? No. It’s a reminder or an update. Not an alarm please. It’s so alarming.
• Why can’t I delete labels? When I first started using Lotus Notes I would occasionally type the wrong thing or mis-spell words, and anyway my work has changed since I started so I’d like to delete or rename labels please. If it’s possible then please tell me how. But don’t blame me for not finding out how to do it myself because I’ve looked through the online help and the web and apart from finding one other people with the exact same problem, there’s no mention of how to do this.
• And finally, another alarm problem. Why, if I have several at the same time, am I reminded of them all in one alarm? Because to date I also haven’t figured out how then to set different ’snooze’ times to each alarm because there’s only one ’snooze’ field. So I have to set them all to the same value, which seems to separate them out into individual alarms, to which I can then set different times.

I shouldn’t have to do this. Irrespective of operating system, I shouldn’t have to wait to cut and paste, or nearly lose work, or be unable to delete labels or take several steps with multiple alarms. The version I use (at work) is at number 7. Why weren’t these usability issues addressed in versions 1 to 6?

Granted, it’s a stable package but as I said before, these usability issues can only be because it isn’t given sufficient priority within the development team. They will probably tell me it’s my fault for not figuring it out, or that there are ways around the problems that I’ve found. Well, I shouldn’t have to figure it out, or work around it. It should just work. Properly.

Give me Outlook any time. No, really.

The tragedy of NewPR

It is with the deepest regret that I have to announce that NewPR is now moderated. 

A while ago I came across NewPR, a very cool digg-like site for the PR community. So, PR practitioners vote for the news items they think are the best. I liked it so much I even emailed the webmaster with a suggestion to make the RSS feed icons more visible. Simple and effective – until now.

Across the top it reads: “PLEASE NOTE: Due to recent spam attacks, the articles submitted will go into a moderation queue before being posted.” What can this mean? That the poor guy – or guys, or girls – now have to approve each one? Isn’t this utterly contrary to the spirit of digg? Digg uses the voting system to promote and demote content:

I don’t see this on NewPR.

I really hope this great idea doesn’t go down the pan. If it’s as great as digg, it won’t. It just needs to trust its users, as do so many massively interactive sites.