In the three-media-dimensional old world, headlines on the radio were generally useless; headlines are a visual art, though the late Paul Harvey certainly had a concise, rhythmic poetic aesthetic to his broadcasts very nearly bordering on the visual—as visual as the spoken word gets. It’s mainly textual, though television, specializing in teaser-and-let-down headlining, often adds sound and graphics to widen the fall between oh-that-sounds-interesting and oh-that-wasn’t-very-interesting-at-all-actually-I’ve-been-tricked.

Magazines follow a similar format but without the benefit of motion and sound they use tantalizing photographs and lots of exclamation points to grab the readers attention before sorely disappointing them.

Newspaper headlines, then, are the nearest old-world example to what one wants in a Web headline or title. Newspaper headlines are at once sensational, compact, and informative. They’re built to accommodate the scanner, who has the option of getting details below, but can move forward quickly with the general gist. A newspaper doesn’t care if you read the article or use it for anything other than puppy training; a newspaper only cares if you buy the newspaper, which is what the headlines are designed to convince you to do.  

While similar, the Internet is more complicated. Sure, RSS feeds and aggregators have required headlines to be more traditionally newsy-sounding, often with a twinge of sensationalism, but most importantly they must push on that nerve in a reader compelling them to click (the same nerve that says “buy the paper”). But a key difference is that Web headlines do not have to have static, eternal forms like published ink on paper headlines do. They can be changed to suit audiences, media, and changing needs; Web headlines operate on a time release.

And that’s good because unless you’re very, very good at writing a headline great for all digital media—for the reader, for the search engines, for Twitter, for Digg, etc.—you may need to write one for each target. So without further ado, here are some digital headline tips:

1. Can you scan it and understand what should follow? (Information scent)
2. People ignore what they don’t understand.
3. Is it concise? Will it fit easily in an email subject line, a Twitter post?
4. Would you click it? Is it catchy? Spreadable? If you saw the headline at random in Google Reader/Digg/Reddit, etc., would it get your attention and compel you to click?
5. If possible, load the important keywords at the front. This is good for search engines and human reader/scanners.
6. Is it honest? People don’t like being tricked and won’t trust you again if what follows doesn’t match what was promised.
7. If too difficult to incorporate all elements at once, define immediate and long term goals. Tailor the title for viral, buzzworthiness first so you can grab the social media/click happy crowd. Rework the title later, after everything as settled, so that it’s search engine friendly for future reference and findability.

That probably makes for one less distraction, though, if you think about it, and his lack of a television may make for two.  Also, to cut off a possible response to Harris’s many reviews, we should note here that they’ve received more than 17,000 “helpful votes”; he is not, to spell it out, just mass-producing vague paragraphs.

Instead, Harris is showing quite a bit of dedication (even on top of writing so many reviews).  “Mr Harris, whose hobbies include train spotting, writes his reviews at home, saves them on to a disc and sends them to Amazon using the internet connection at his local library,” reports Nick Britten.

And Amazon is very appreciative of Harris’s efforts, stating, “It is thanks to people like Peter that our customers are able to make much better informed decisions.”

Harris, who is unemployed, is quite happy with his lifestyle, by the way.  Spending all one’s time reading and listening to music actually sounds rather nice.

This time around it is disappointingly coming from a BBC article under the title Facebook ‘costs businesses dear’, which right away, of course, has made the headlines in Techmeme, too. And for a good reason.

If you check out some of the different links that I have referenced above, and I am sure there is plenty more out there that would be worth while a read, there is probably very little that I would be able to add into the conversation. However, this time around I thought I would try to point out something that lots of people seem to have forgotten.

Yes, indeed, that particular study (Not sure where the link to it is, actually) argues the amount of money lost by having knowledge workers hanging out in various multiple social networks, supposedly wasting their time instead of doing their jobs. But what about doing a much more interesting and relevant study that would calculate the amount of money lost, the countless hours gone by day in day out from different knowledge workers trying to find the experts to help them get the job done?

Why don’t we carry out studies that show and demonstrate the huge amount of losses for every single business out there just because their knowledge workforce did not know who to contact to get the job done faster, much more responsively and with plenty more quality? Do we have to remind business how much money they have lost over the course of the years just because one department didn’t know how to reach out to another to help out in a customer situation? How much money and time have businesses wasted on reinventing the wheel at the other side of the world, when that same business implemented a similar solution, but for a different customer?

Where do you feel that businesses would be at the moment if Knowledge Management would have been in the same status and with the same negative reputation as in the late 90s and early 2000s? How do you think different businesses are going to successfully make the transition into knowledge based companies in the Knowledge Economy of the 21st century, if it weren’t for social networks and social computing?

I am sure that, as you have gotten to read through the last paragraphs, you would be nodding away and perhaps sadly identifying your own business suffering from that very same thing. Why don’t we have studies that try to portrait how much money companies have lost for not empowering knowledge workers to connect with one another, share their knowledge, collaborate and innovate as a a result of embracing and adopting social computing techniques?

Why is it that people keep insisting that a successful business is that one that just focuses on a bunch of processes and tools and nevermind about the people and their connections, when we all know that it is the latter, the people, that glue that makes it all work together.

How much longer would the corporate world have to go further, before realising the true potential of social networking; freeing up knowledge workers to do what they do best: share their knowledge with others and collaboratively innovate.

*That* is what Knowledge Management or Knowledge Management 2.0 is all about! *That* is the main reason why KM is no longer a discipline with plenty of negative reputation. On the contrary, KM is coming back, and big time!, into the spotlight, and the main reason for it is nothing more, nothing less than social computing.

Because whether we like it or not, social media is here to stay. It is the perfect complement of a crippled traditional KM system where tools and processes were what ruled and all a sudden there is this balance that knowledge workers are putting together back on to the table realising that the true potential for a successful KM strategy is to actually combine tools, processes and people and all of that through the interactions of social software tools.

So here is an open question to everyone out there … Would you rather prefer to have your knowledge workers wasting their time with their daily social networking interactions in whatever the tool and benefit in the medium, long term from those inter-connections, or would you prefer to have your knowledge workers wasting their time trying to figure where the experts are and how to get their knowledge to help fix that customer problem?

It is up to you. Really. But I tell you something, if I were running a business I know what my option would be. Encourage my knowledge workers to hang out in various social networks, dive into the conversations, use them responsibly and continue building further up on what really matters: connect with people to share their knowledge and collaborate, instead of having to struggle time and time again trying to figure out how to get the job done smarter and not necessarily harder.

Comments

Tag:

Like many people, I’m an RSS creative-consumer. That means I read almost everything of interest to me via RSS as well as publish content that you can get via RSS. I don’t visit many websites including blogs unless I’m googling in search mode or if I want to leave a comment.

I read my content of interest on different devices, from desktop PCs to laptops to mobile phones, whatever is to hand and wherever I happen to be.

If I find a site of interest, I’ll subscribe to its RSS feed. If it doesn’t offer a feed, I usually leave it there. And if it offers a feed that first leads you to a login firewall – bad mainstream media tactic – that usually gets deleted unless the content on offer is unmissably compelling (very few of those).

I no longer subscribe to any site that only offers subscriptions to RSS feeds that contain partial content, not the Full Monty.

There is one exception: the PR Headlines aggregation feed from Blogdigger which I’ve been subscribed to since 2004, but that’s likely to be a casualty very soon.

From the reader’s point of view, I think it’s quite clear what the benefits are from full-content RSS, starting with you get all the content that interests you without having to go to a site - especially useful if you’re somewhere where you can’t get online (eg, in an aircraft).

Maybe most important of all, full content via RSS lets you focus on all that content – and no distractions with website design and other visual elements.

Now add in the publisher’s perspective (and if you write a blog, you’re a publisher) with the clearest explanation I’ve yet seen on why offering complete content in your RSS feed, rather than partial content, is a good thing.

From Techdirt:

[…] Full text feeds makes the reading process much easier. It means it’s that much more likely that someone reads the full piece and actually understands what’s being said — which makes it much, much, much more likely that they’ll then forward it on to someone else, or blog about it themselves, or post it to Digg or Reddit or Slashdot or Fark or any other such thing — and that generates more traffic and interest and page views from new readers, who we hope subscribe to the RSS feed and become regular readers as well.

The whole idea is that by making it easier and easier for anyone to read and fully grasp our content, the more likely they are to spread it via word of mouth, and that tends to lead to much greater adoption than by limiting what we give to our readers and begging them to come to our site if they want to read more than a sentence or two.

So, while many people claim that partial feeds are needed to increase page views where ads are hosted, our experience has shown that full text feeds actually do a great deal to increase actual page views on the site by encouraging more usage.

The bold emphasis in the second paragraph is mine, as that gets right to the heart of it.

Full content RSS feeds. It’s a no-brainer.

Comments

However, and I hope you’ll forgive me for my creative gut reaction, there is something to be said for history, for science, for patterns, for fundamentals, all of which rely on past successes for future innovations.

And that provides quite the burr in my told-you-so saddle.

So that’s fine, I have no problem with advice, I’ve given it from time to time, and if what works works then so be it and far be it from me to advise away from it.

I just don’t like pigeonholes and this is the only or best way type of thinking.

What got me started on this? Well, blame Ryan Caldwell and his Diggable "10 Articles All Bloggers Should Read (at least once)." Not that there’s anything wrong with it. We got off to a bad start with CopyBlogger’s "How to Write Magnetic Headlines."

CopyBlogger suggests writing your headline first, which is what my colleague David Utter also suggests. It keeps your content crisp and to the point.

"Your headline is a promise to prospective readers," writes Brian Clark. "Its job is to clearly communicate the benefit that you will deliver to the reader in exchange for their valuable time."

Admittedly, I meandered a bit in the introduction to this article. Send me back to lead-writing class. At the very instant I am writing this, I am clueless as to what the title may be. I am an after-title-er.

I am also a word-maker-upper.

Truth be known, I don’t like rules. Whatever works works and sometimes you just don’t know what will work. You give it a shot and hope for the best.

Just like a vaccination.

But I have had some success writing headlines. In fact, I’d say I’m quite good at it. That’s because writing headlines involves a few things that are difficult to teach: connecting with the audience in an immediate and resonant way; keyword specific; cleverness.

How do you teach cleverness?

You can’t, that’s how. Some things are quantitative, but the best things are not. The best things come from some place that can’t be reached with certainty, that can’t be counted, or collected, or even spoken. They just exist, they just are.

Viral marketing works pretty much the same way. Once a formula is applied, it works for a short period and then fizzles out once the masses figure out that they’re being played.

There may be things that are technically perfect, or quantifiably evident, but the magic lies somewhere else, somewhere you can’t go.

Just ask Terry Bradshaw and his wobbly passes.

And yet I can’t lambaste Caldwell’s advice for bloggers too much (except for the whole write your title first thing), because all of us begin with fundamentals, a study of how it has been done before us, and then branch out into our own wonderfully innovative approaches.

All of the required reading in Caldwell’s post involve 5 or 7 or 10 ways to yadda yadda, and reading them can’t be all that bad or counterproductive as long as the reader (and I know you are) is smart enough to not believe everything he reads or think that’s the only way to do anything.

I’ll still maintain that writing, or anything that involves creative processes, is an intangible, intuitive, can’t-be-taught type of thing. Not that you can’t learn from those that try.

Stephen King’s On Writing is worth a read, even if he’s not right about everything. 

Searchers are looking for something different in a title or headline than regular website visitors, who are browsing differently than the social network audience.

Writing for a spider is easy: Google Crawls Webpages

Simple, direct, clean. Subject, object, verb. Robots aren’t impressed with your cleverness.

Muhammed Saleem over at CopyBlogger says you need to write three different kinds of headlines, one for search engines, one for regular readers, and one for socially driven sites. Writing for all three is difficult.

He gives some good tips for how to that. If you’re especially good, though, you can write for all three simultaneously, though some might say it’s a bad idea to try. There is a bit of craft to it, and you’ll need an extra boost of creativity.

But as a guide:

1.    Weight the front. In English, we scan from right to left, but the important keywords first to make the instant connection with whomever is reading – whether they’re reading from the search results, on your site, or on Digg.com.

2.    No inside jokes. The headline is funny to you because you know the whole story. If you crack a joke in the headline, make sure it’s readily laughable on its own, or is enticing enough on its own to click.

3.    Announce the topic. No busy searcher is going to guess at what you’ve written about.

4.    Revisit cranky ol’ William Strunk: Omit needless words.

WebProNews first reported the possibility of a Google presence in Singapore several months ago; now SDA Asia brings words that “[t]his new office enables Google to more effectively bring its leading advertising platform, services and search experience to users, advertisers and partners in the region.”

But in the midst of all the new-office hooplah, a bit of new-manager news occurred, as well.  “Lori Sobel has been appointed Head of Sales for Singapore, serving Southeast Asia,” the article continued.  The interesting part isn’t the position itself – a new office will, of course, require people to head and staff it – but Sobel’s background at DoubleClick can be tied to another one of today’s headlines.

Back to the story at hand, though.  As reported by SDA India, Sobel issued a statement, saying, “I look forward to helping organisations in Singapore and Southeast Asia understand and leverage the great returns that are available through Google’s advertising platform with AdWords and AdSense.”

As for Google’s plans for itself, she added, “We will continue to localise our products, we are committed to being here for the long haul, we will continue to work with advertisers and will innovate and bring the best solutions to the region.”

All right, so perhaps Google demonstrated a little less enthusiasm than the term “sallied forth” implied.  Yet Google’s recent move into Singapore is nonetheless a momentous occasion for Southeast Asia.

• Barry Schwartz at The Search Engine Roundtable wrote that Yahoo removed directory shortcuts found under its search engine result pages (SERPs).

  I checked this myself from Canada to see if it was a regional alteration but no dice; Canada has been affected as well. I have mixed feelings about this change. On one hand, the link to a directory listing was a great indicator that a website was ‘verified’ by Yahoo staff since human review is required for directory inclusion. In essence that made the directory link in results an added incentive to pay the price of directory inclusion. On the other hand, removing the directory link has saved 10 lines of valuable screen property on every Yahoo result page. I am unsure what Yahoo will do with this free space but considering their lust for profits (see Yahoo reinvents paid inclusion) I wonder if some additional advertising or another form of profit generation might be forthcoming. If this newly freed space is to be used I just hope it is done creatively.

  Also, Barry Schwartz noted this may be a step towards folding the Yahoo Directory. This may very well be true, it would certainly explain the result alteration. That said, I hope Yahoo’s Directory sticks around because at this point it is the only directory that has any real validity these days. After all, DMOZ (the Open Directory Project) is a complete mess and I don’t honestly know of any other directory other than DMOZ and Yahoo that has any reasonable clout. To put it simply, Yahoo would be foolish to drop their Directory but they do need to reinvent it. I think they should intertwine social media with their directory to give it some freshness and potential energy.

  Thinking off the cuff… Yahoo could offer directory listing owners the opportunity to make their listings more robust and they could provide a listing of the most recent articles associated with a company listing. Heck another option that comes to mind is a social media tagging system where any site that met a confidential threshold would get a free review and ultimately a free or discounted listing in the directory. The key is to get the big players in the directory again and make it more attractive and interactive. Personally I could spend ages brainstorming this, it would be a blast… unfortunately it is up to Yahoo to make it work.

  As a final note, I was horrified when I could not find a single link to the Yahoo Directory on Yahoo!’s home page. I guess it is true… the directory is being put on the backburner. Does anyone have any sure insight on this topic?

• According to Search Engine Land, Google has been caught testing new navigation formats. From the screenshots on Search Engine Land and the adjoining articles it seems Google is attempting to find the right way to include more personalized navigational elements such as Google Calendar, email, etc. into their main navigation. I look forward to seeing the result. I for one, would be very happy to see a quick access link to my Google Calendar or GMail.
• Are you still a little fuzzy on social media networking and what affect it has on the web? If so, I expect this review of Digg, one of the more significant social media websites, will provide you with a great introduction.

Comments

At the core of his recommendations is the need to use the title to clearly communicate the value of the content to the reader. There are some tried and tested techniques for this such as:

• “10 ways to ……”,
• “How to (do xyz) and get (some benefit)
• “What you need to know about (xyz)”

If you are optimising a page for the search engines the title is important because having keywords in the page title is one of the most important factors contributing to ranking well for those keywords.

So, should you optimise for the search engines by making sure the title contains keywords, or should you make the title persuasive so that the reader is motivated to click through and read the rest of the post or article?

There’s no reason why you can’t have both of course. A title can be both persuasive and contain keywords. That’s always going to be the best result. I would always make sure that consideration is given to keywords in the title for the following reasons:

1. Using keywords will get more targeted traffic than people clicking a clever headline out of curiosity. Untargeted traffic doesn’t have as much value.

2. If one of the goals is to get your article republished, publishers will search article directories for relevant content using keywords.

3. The titles of most interest to your target audience are the ones that have relevance to them. Keywords are exactly that – words that have relevance for your target audience. If you don’t include the keywords the headline is less likely to stand out when someone scans a page.

Comments

The user-friendliness of blogging software has made it easy for anyone who would like to communicate with the world to do so. That explains a large part of the millions and millions of blogs that now populate the blogosphere. Others who see the moneymaking potential of blogging by adding advertisements to their blogs add to the flood. Given this cacophony, how does anyone with a serious view to express ensure that it stands above the crowd?

This post will suggest a way of doing this. You may not wish to go through the full process for every blog post you write, but when the topic is important to you, then it will be effort well spent.

Search Visible Titles

Of course a large part of being visible on the Internet now means that the blog must be search visible. In other words it should appear early in the keyword search engine report pages (SERPs) that the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, MSN/Live or Ask serve up when a searcher looks for particular keywords. That is what is achieved by the process of Search Engine Optimization or SEO. Part of this is involved with the content of the blog post. Steven Johnson had a good article on this in the New York Times called Own Your Own Words. A critical element here is the Title of the post. There are some differences of opinion on how best to create the Title. However a good introduction to the issues can be found in an article by Jill Whalen entitled All About Title Tags.

Online Newspaper Headlines

Traditional newspapers as they develop their online versions have had to grapple with this same challenge. For the print version of a newspaper the headline attached to an item was rarely written by the journalist who wrote the item. An editor would write an eye-catching headline that would often present the subject in a provocative and sometimes humorous fashion. Such headlines would draw the eye as the reader scanned that physical page.

Things don’t work the same way online. Many viewers will rely on a search engine such as Google or Yahoo! to find items of possible interest. Such search engines do not appreciate or understand witticisms or clever plays on words. The don’t care about grammar. It’s only the words that count. In consequence, journalists are now learning to write headlines or titles for their pieces that will help them stand out to the search engines.

Memorable Content

Being search visible does not mean that a newspaper item or a blog post will turn out to be a memorable read. Filling newspapers or churning out blog posts can produce turgid prose that satisfies no one. As Darren Rowse suggests, memorable blog posts should add value to the blogosphere dialogue rather than merely echoing what others have said. The author should be bringing his or her own take on the subject. That isn’t to say you will work hard on every blog post to make it memorable. However when you have something important to write, how do you turn it into a memorable blog post that will also be search visible.

The Golden Rule

It is important to realize that the Internet is different. There’s a great deal of information already out there on any topic you care to name. This memorable blog post you’re trying to create has to compete with all that pre-existing stuff. How should you start? Established practice is to think of a catchy (or even search visible) title when you have completed the article. The Golden Rule turns this on its head:

Start With The Title

You may not get the title right immediately but in this Internet age, that is where you should start.

The title is likely what many readers will pick on in a keyword search to decide that your article is what they would prefer to read first. So think what keywords a potential reader might have used to find the article. Then think of a title that features those key words and will pique the interest of the reader. Here are some examples of that:

• Google Supplemental Results Index – A Word To The Wise
• What Do You Call An 800 Lb. Gorilla?
• Riding The Internet Tidal Wave
• Academic Search From A Greater Height
• US Patent Search – How To Eat An Elephant

Your first attempt may well not be the final version since this title is used to achieve the two goals we have for this article: it should be memorable and it should be search visible.

Researching The Title

In order to better understand the competition for this article, you should first do a Google Blog Search on the title. This will show you whether others are writing on the same topic and how they are handling the topic. Perhaps if there are too many or you do not have something new to say you may immediately abandon the topic. Otherwise keep notes on the more interesting competitive articles you find.

If the topic still seems to have the capability of being memorable, then you should do a regular keyword search with your favourite search engine of that same title. The Google search is convenient since the Google Blog Search includes an additional button for the regular search. Again the results will show you whether your topic can be memorable and whether you have something new to offer. In some cases it may also be useful to do a News search if it is something the traditional media might cover. Again keep notes on the more interesting items you find.

Tuning The Topic

The research you have done will help you write a much better blog post. Good blog posts can be a launch pad for the reader in offering further ways of finding more information about the topic. If the post is sufficiently well written, it may even become an ‘authority’ web page because of the quality of its hyperlinks to other relevant and related items.

Knowing what has been written already, helps in determining how you can bring a new view on the topic. Again this all helps in making this a memorable blog post for the reader. It will also be clearer what keywords seem to come up in the field. For a sufficiently important blog post, you may even decide to do some keyword research to see how often people click on the various keywords that are used.

Writing The Blog Post

With all this research you are now well placed to write the post. You have the title, you have some important keywords that are used in the field and you have some links to other important references. It now comes down to applying your good writing skills so that you present your ideas in the most compelling and attractive way.

It’s always good to have an introductory paragraph that suggests what the item will cover, and also a closing paragraph that summarises what has been said. Both of these should feature the important keywords. These keywords should also appear at an appropriate frequency throughout the article. Google and the other major search engines do take into account synonyms of these keywords so these alternate words can be used. The total effect should mean that the reader is unaware that there has been a subtle reinforcement of the keywords.

If you analyse the quality of most blog posts, you will find that they are not very good at applying the rules we have set out above. If you do, then there is a good chance that your memorable blog post will rank well with the search engines and will be selected by that human searcher as their preferred read.

If you have any comments on, or modifications to, this approach, please add them so that we can all benefit.

Comments

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | Furl

Bookmark WebProNews: