Gerry McGovern Exclusive!
December 6, 2006 at 10:04 am
If you’ve ever wondered how they go about teaching web stuff in colleges these days, then get your eyes round Gerry McGovern’s new book, Killer Web Content. Last night I attended a world exclusive launch – the man himself was in town, and he gave a very entertaining presentation indeed on what he knows best – web content.
As a globally recognised “Web Content Guru”, Gerry speaks around the world, to the world’s leading organisations. He gets to work with cool companies like the BBC on reinventing their intranet, or Apple on what headlines work best to sell iTunes….God I’d love his job…
My criticism of last night was that he failed in the most basic of presentation rules – know your audience. He was speaking to a group of Irish web people and his only Irish examples from the web were Aer Lingus and Ryanair. He kept going back to them and I found it a bit tedious. There are other websites out there that could provide great fodder for his examples – if he only took the time to find them.
That said though, he had some good points to make, I’ve summarised his main soundbites below:
- Most intranets are ‘crap in a portal’! 90% of the content was deleted from Ericsson’s new intranet.
- Amusing point about how much web language is also the language of drugs! Hits, Users, and Dealers… He advised a client to change the language on its home page from ‘find a dealer’ to ‘where to buy’. This resulted in a 100% increase in traffic in the space of 8 days. The point is that all sites must use customer language, not the language of the organisation. [There's a wealth of Irish examples of sites that use organisation language!]
- Rich people are rich because they are cheap! Yes, it’s true. And we all know it. And on the web, we can be our true genuine selves, which is why ‘cheap flights’ has such high traffic and ‘low fares’ does not.
- Search words are the ones that people use to reach your site, but when they get there, they often want to read messages that give a different meaning! Like for example, MBA students will search for “executive MBA” but when they reach a site, they want to read about the potential for advancement of their careers. Challenging indeed, and that’s why search engine optimisation combined with web copywriting is so important. Not many companies out there offer both – we do. View our SEO and copywriting services for more info.
Of particular interest to me were the questions that followed. Largely concerned with hot trends, he was asked about Youtube and whether broadcasting is dead? Nope, was his answer, but now the population decides on what’s the next big thing – not some TV Executive or Advertising Person. He didn’t say it, but he implied that just because there’s a lot of stuff out there, it doesn’t mean that it’s better.
The other question was about the move away from reading online to viewing. This is something that’s particularly close to my heart. We at Brightspark have declared 2007 to be the year of the Flash Video. Gerry agreed that with broadband access improving, it’s definitely one to consider – but only where viewing will improve the user experience. For example, wouldn’t you love to get a cd showing you how to assemble a piece of Ikea furniture, instead of the paper instructions?
If words are more powerful, then stick to crafted written material.
If video or audio will deliver your message more accurately, then use podcasts or video.
If you would like to know more about how to convey your message online through video, do get in contact with us. We have some very interesting packages for anyone wishing to add something similar to the great presentations they do on salesforce.com to your site. And we’ll be showing off some of our work on this site in the new year.
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