This appendix summarizes more principles of influential content and gives example techniques.
The ancient Greeks crafted creative ways of repeating ideas. Why go to such pains? Those toga-sporting orators knew that repetition helps people remember—but also risks boring them. Today, when we use tweets, emails, and ads to blast a message again, again, again, again, again, and again, our users could tune us out. So let’s take a closer look at repetition.
When it comes to making the same point, three times is enough. Research everywhere, from speech communication to television advertising, suggests three as the magic number. A challenge with web content is that we can’t control exactly how many times a user sees or hears our message. But we can control how often we publish the same message, how often we change the message, and how we bring the message to life through web content. We can avoid bombarding our users.
With web content and some help from modern media, we have the power to plan our repetition wisely.
An editorial calendar is a tool, borrowed from journalism, for planning content over time. Usually a spreadsheet or table, its exact form doesn’t matter as much as the planning. When you decide in detail what content you will publish and when, you’re more likely to repeat messages, topics, and themes appropriately.
For tools with editorial calendar–inspired features, see Appendix C.
In journalism slang, hook refers to why content is relevant at a particular time. A hook can help you breathe new life into your message, theme, or topic. Some examples include tying content to
The season
An anniversary
A recognition, such as becoming first, most, or best
A current event or an industry trend
Amplification refers to all the ways to amplify, or enhance, your point instead of repeating it like a robot. For example, on the television show Northern Exposure, the poetic disc jockey Chris Stevens used amplification to explain the meaning of light:
Goethe’s final words: “More light.” Ever since we crawled out of that primordial slime, that’s been our unifying cry: “More light.” Sunlight. Torchlight. Candlelight. Neon. Incandescent. Lights that banish the darkness from our caves, to illuminate our roads, the insides of our refrigerators. Big floods for the night games at Soldier Field. Little tiny flashlights for those books we read under the covers when we’re supposed to be asleep. Light is more than watts and foot-candles. Light is metaphor.
Classic rhetoricians used words to intensify a point. Today, we can augment an idea through web content in several ways.
We can make points through a combination of photos, podcasts, videos, articles, and more. HowStuffWorks, for example, offers several ways to experience the danger of sharks, especially during Shark Week.
Echo is the social networking phenomenon of other people sharing or restating your message or content. When that happens, you don’t have to state it yourself so often. (An extreme version of this is having something go “viral.”) A case in point is when MailChimp announced its stance on hate speech on social media in 2017—followers shared the announcement and repeated key points about it.
Time. A concept so complex that the Greeks had not one but two words for it. Chronos meant chronological time, such as morning, noon, and night. Kairos meant the opportune moment. It’s the right time to say something in the right way. I think of it as the ideal time to ask people to change their viewpoint or take an action. The key is to ask when people are ready.
Ancient rhetoricians felt that the opportune moment was special. It didn’t come along every day. That’s worth remembering when we’re tempted to press users quickly for personal information or bombard them with emails, alerts, and tweets.
People won’t respond how you’d like if they aren’t sure what you want.
At the same time, you have to make asking questions or giving commands easy for your customers in chatbots and voice command interfaces.
A hurricane strikes. A CEO resigns. A damaging video goes viral. Sometimes, the opportune moment arises because of a shocking event. It’s much better to say something trustworthy sooner, not later, so people don’t panic or spread rumors.
At other times, the opportune moment happens because of a personal crisis or your customers’ experience. For instance, companies in financial services, credit monitoring, and health industries often find themselves responding to customers having emergencies ranging from identity theft to illness. Many such companies lack empathy for customers in crisis and blow the opportunity to help, so handling the situation well is an opportunity for your company to differentiate. In this situation, you must speak even more simply and clearly than normal. Why? The emotions your customers experience under stress hijack their brains. The cognitive load makes even simple instructions and tasks much harder.
You also must avoid appearing to take advantage of the situation. As I mention in earlier chapters, I’ve seen more than one credit monitoring company insist on selling to customers in identity theft crisis instead of helping now and earning the opportunity to sell later. It’s no wonder that so many people hate those companies.
On the web, our content can seize kairos in several ways.
Chapter 1 noted how ads annoy people. What if ads were more relevant to a website’s topics and users? For example, National Geographic’s readers typically care about the environment. An IBM ad in the magazine stays pertinent with the message to “build a smarter planet.”
However, the desire for relevance can go too far. The pressure to make advertising relevant and impactful has led to conflicts with privacy, especially on search engines and social media sites. I expect this tension to continue and the backlash against invasive advertising to gain momentum. Advertising can be one effective way to influence your customers, but it should not be the only way.
When customers express strong interest in a topic, product, or service, you have an opportunity to expose those customers to more of what interests them. Amazon, of course, has mastered offering related products to cross-sell, upsell, or repeat sales. The same idea works well for content. Harvard Business Review, Netflix, and Red Bull all make discovering related content easy. Never let an interested customer experience a dead end.
Clear, concise, and earnest—what makes a good call to action. The call to action helps in every phase of the customer experience, from encouraging a sale to keeping a customer who was tempted to leave to deepening engagement with a product. As an avid user of the Fitbit system, I find myself responding to calls to action on my watch, on the mobile application, and on the website. These calls range from “You have 124 steps left this hour! Get moving!” to “Are you feeling well rested or a bit sleepy? Check out your sleeping stats.”
Chatbots are all over the place, with 100,000 on Facebook alone.1 Sales of voice interfaces, such as home assistants Alexa, Home, and Homepod, continue to grow. Consider whether your company needs to develop or join these touchpoints where customers ask the questions and give the commands. If you have a product distributed on Amazon, for example, and your customers can’t easily ask Alexa to add it to their shopping lists, you’re in trouble. In these touchpoints, being ready for the opportune moment means anticipating the questions and words customers will likely use in context. All the analysis we discussed in Chapter 4 will help.
Sometimes, helping people act requires more than a well-labeled button. In that case, contextual instructions or help come to the rescue. TurboTax, Capital One, and 23andMe all offer excellent examples throughout their web and mobile experiences.
I am particularly impressed with the way 23andMe offers clear instructions throughout the experience, from signing up on the website to using the package to provide your DNA sample to accessing results on the mobile application. The process is precise and the results are complex, yet the instructional microcopy offers clarity and reassurance in a personable tone. Additionally, the contextual instructions often link to more details for curious customers, and these details concisely but clearly offer more explanation. When I sought more information about my Neanderthal DNA, for example, I learned it might partially explain my high forehead and other physical traits.
How can you respond aptly? By planning for crisis situations. You can’t always prepare for the exact crisis, but you can think of possible crises and have a plan that answers questions like these:
Where will we publish a response?
Who should write and approve a response?
If we need extra people to help us monitor and respond to questions on social networking, how will we get those people?
What are examples of a good response?
What style of response is appropriate for our users and our brand?
The CDC responds in a different style to a different crisis—a salmonella outbreak in eggs. A no-nonsense daily summary explains the latest status and what people should do about it.
1 “Facebook Messenger Hits 100,000 Bots,” VentureBeat https://venturebeat.com/2017/04/18/facebook-messenger-hits-100000-bots/