There are many reasons. One is that I find the term “social media” poorly defined; it’s become a catch-all for anything digital, personal and interconnected, yet sending an email to a group of friends or contributing to a forum discussion rarely qualifies.  (And if you think the definition is clear, try reading the Wikipedia entry on social media.)

Another challenge with what usually qualifies as social media is unrealistic expectations. When we parse web analytics data, for example, we often find that Facebook and Twitter raise awareness but rarely send a high ratio of qualified traffic—people most likely to buy.

All of this said, while I’m a skeptic, I’m not a cynic. I believe there’s value to tools like Facebook and Twitter. So I was happy to see a recent post by Jakob Nielsen on distributing content through social networks and feeds. Here are some of the top tips for business users:

1. Post moderately. One of the biggest frustrations that users report with following businesses through so-called social media tools is excessive posting.
2. Use the right tone (most often, a casual one). Generally, users prefer a casual and personal tone. But not always. For example, people want items in RSS feeds to be more straightforward, and for some organizations, such as news outlets, people want a more professional tone.
3. Cater to greed and exclusivity. Your friends and followers will typically like getting a deal, as well as being the first to know. It’s a reward for following your feed. But beware of aggressive selling; it’s an overt reminder that you’re trying to move product rather than maintain a relationship.
4. Prompt people to follow you. Because they won’t do it of their own volition, even if they know your brand. For example, email existing customers and prompt them to follow or friend you—and make sure your website links to your various accounts.
5. Post substantive, timely and relevant messages. They get rated highest by users. Add value, make the value relevant to your business, and give followers the scoop rather than an afterthought.

A few other likely obvious tips to consider: pick a good username, use a good logo, and write for the medium (rather than shovel from other sources).

And now back to my skeptical perspective, here’s one point worth printing and sticking on your monitor: Feeds (such as RSS and Twitter) are less powerful than email marketing for customer relationships. Why? Because users have to manually delete an email to remove it from their inbox (if they requested it and it’s not spam). Feeds, however, just keep coming, and few people read beyond their first feed screen. So if they missed a post when it first went up, they’ll likely never see it.

So definitely experiment with new tools, social or otherwise. But don’t give up on the classics so quickly.

According to Nielsen, writing for Kindle is a mishmash of writing for print, the web and mobile devices:

• Print guidelines for body text
• Web guidelines for headlines and summaries
• Mobile guidelines for page design and interaction

Linear body text and literal headlines

Unlike writing for the web, writing body text for Kindle should be more linear—think novels and magazine articles, which Nielsen says work best on Kindle. Avoid heavily hyperlinked content, as Kindle isn’t designed to navigate it well.

While body text should follow print guidelines, headlines should follow web guidelines—keep them literal, and remember that people will often read them out of context.

Finally, Nielsen recommends that if you’re trying to sell a book through Kindle, consider front-loading your best material into the first chapter, because you can then give it away as a preview to encourage sales.

More comprehensive Kindle content guidelines should no doubt become available soon. But with growing adoption of new mobile devices (such as iPhones and netbooks), the most important guideline to remember is this: always write for the medium.

As Nielsen admonishes: “For Kindle, it’s certainly unacceptable to simply repurpose print content. But you can’t repurpose website content, either. For good Kindle usability, you have to design for the Kindle.”

Does it matter?

If you think the answer’s no, then you’ve never engaged in an argument about the relative merits of "cotton candy" versus "candy floss." Or "couch," "sofa" and "chesterfield."

English is so variable that academics at East Central University in Oklahoma have produced a map of the US that shows the distribution of generic names for soft drinks.

(For the record, I say "pop." My Buffalo relatives say "soda." It turns into a heated debate over Christmas.)

Language is more than spelling and grammar

See, people are sensitive about language.

Variations in spelling, phrases and slang are really symbols of a greater cultural identity.

Canadians, for example, can be squirrelly about the whole language question.

Ever seen Joe Canadian and heard his rant?

"I speak English and French, not American … and it is pronounced zed. Not zee! ZED!"

It’s a perfect illustration of the potential pitfalls of choosing an appropriate language for your website.

Use the wrong one, and you cause friction for your users—which means you could end up losing customers.

How to optimize content for language

Luckily, this very subject was the topic of Jakob Nielsen’s December 1st Alertbox posting, "American English vs. British English for Web Content."

Nielsen’s excellent points all boil down to the marketer’s mantra: "Know thy audience."

Not only that, but know them well enough to predict what language variants will cause them the least amount of friction.

Here are some points to remember, drawn from Nielsen and from our own experiences with our clients:

1. Choose the right language for your offering
   If you’re trying to emphasize the local-ness of your product, for example, use your local variant. If you sell butter tarts from a bakery in Arthur, Ontario, and your audience is mostly Canadian, you might as well be as Canadian as possible. Colour, neighbour and centre out the wazoo.
    
2. Get used to the idea of American English
   If you’re only targeting prospects in Canada, the UK or Australia, then by all means, use those forms of English. But if you’re like us—an online business, with clients on both sides of the border and beyond—keep in mind that the lingua franca of the internet is American English. Sorry, Canucks. Too bad, Brits. That’s the way it is. If your business is mainly online, and you hope to appeal to a wide international client base, get accustomed to -ize and -er endings on words.
    
3. Be consistent
   No matter which English you choose, use it consistently. Spelling a word differently on the same page is distracting to your readers, which means more friction—and less attention paid to the awesomeness of your offering.
    
4. Become familiar with your local variants
   Don’t take for granted that the English terms you know and love mean the same thing to everyone. Phrases whose meanings seem crystal clear to us are met with quizzical looks—or blushes— elsewhere in the world. In the UK, a play that’s a "bomb" is a huge success, "STD" stands for "subscriber trunk dialing" (and means direct-dial long distance) and "fanny"—well, let’s just say the term is a lot more vulgar in the UK than it is here. (Curious about other terms? Check out more British/American phrases.)
    
5. For videos, podcasts and other spoken media, keep it neutral
   Here’s where Canadians get to shine. ESL students throughout the world prefer Canadian English teachers because their accent is, aside from some regional variations in pronunciation, neutral. Same goes for English speakers from the Midwest and Northeast US. Regional accents can carry strong positive and negative connotations—so if you’re smart, you won’t use voice talent with a Texan accent if you’re trying to appeal to Democrats. And if you sell used cars, the Queen’s English just doesn’t fit. Know your audience when you pick your voice talent.

Remember: friction—any friction—distracts your prospects from your message.

So it’s worth paying attention to all these little details—because your audience certainly is.

Have you had language issues with your website? Leave a comment and let us know. Start a debate. Join the discussion!

Unless you adhere to stringent guidelines (about 143, to be exact), your emails likely aren’t effectively servicing customers, building trust and strengthening relationships.

Worse yet, they might just be junked in the spam folder.

Challenges for transactional email content

The findings come in a transactional email study from the usability doctor, Jakob Nielsen.

It compared results with a similar study from five years ago.

And it concluded not only that email usability is still "appallingly" low, but also that users demand even more than five years ago because they’re more skeptical and more rushed.

That’s not entirely surprising, since transactional email must compete in clogged inboxes, and few people have time to relax and review messages in detail.

Rather, we take shortcuts to determine what’s important.

To cut through the clutter, you need to use proven email content optimization tactics.

Unfortunately, according to Nielsen (whose group analyzed 92 transactional messages for this study), emails often consist of "copy written by the programmer late at night."

Either that or sledgehammer marketing content written by aggressive salespeople.

Neither of which do much to build long-lasting customer relationships.

Content optimization for automatic email messages

The latest study confirms the findings from five years ago, but nearly doubles the number of recommendations due to more challenging users.

Your goal with transactional email is to avoid being mistaken for spam, be a customer service ambassador and reduce calls from customers by anticipating and addressing their questions.

But you’re competing against tough obstacles. Nielsen notes that processing email is stressful, users see fluff as a waste of time, and they’ll ignore (or junk) anything deemed inessential. In fact, only 12% of users in this study opened spam messages—and 80% failed to open a legitimate message from Walgreens because a vague subject line made it appear to be spam.

So here are some ways to cut through the clutter:

1. Convey your brand name and purpose in the "from" field. For example, "JetBlue Reservations" and "BestBuy Online Store" were highly effective in this study. Because they told the user the email was from a reputable source, and explained their reason for arriving. And here’s an important tip: Keep your "from" line between 20 and 25 characters because most email programs truncate the rest.
2. Relate to customer-initiated transactions in the "subject" line. For example, "TiVo Rewards Program Ends May 28" performed well while the spam-like "Important Information" performed poorly.
3. Keep the body brief and user-focused. Provide the information that matters most to users up top. (Keep any overt marketing messages, if you must have them, to the end.) Examples of user-focused information include tracking numbers, order descriptions and information about how to deal with any problems.
4. Send fewer emails. For an online purchase, for example, one email confirming the purchase and another confirming shipping would be ideal. The more emails you send regarding a transaction, the more confused you make your customers.

Is it worth the effort?

As a highly personal medium, email enables one of the most direct relationships you can have with customers. So poorly optimized email content is a missed opportunity to create happier customers, build stronger relationships and reduce support costs.

And for transactional emails that you send out regularly, that’s an opportunity you’re missing again and again.

If you’re like most web readers, you’re probably nodding in painful recollection.

In fact, a recent study by Jakob Nielsen and crew found that overall satisfaction with “About Us” content has declined in the past five years.

More users can now achieve goals like finding out who runs an organization (79% compared to 70%). And even more can find contact information (91% compared to 62%). But people’s expectations have also increased. So satisfaction with “About Us” content has actually decreased from 5.2 to 4.6 on seven-point scale.

Worse yet, in Nielsen’s latest study, fewer users (81% compared to 90%) could determine from “About Us” content what a company actually does.

“In place of a frank summary of the business,” Nielsen writes, “marketese and blah-blah text ruled the day on many sites.”

Optimize your “about us” content

So let’s talk about content optimization for this essential element of your website.

Based on Nielsen’s recommendations and our own experience, here’s how you can write better “About Us” web pages:

1. Have a clear link to your “About Us” section. It should read “About Us” or “About <Company>,” for example. Avoid cryptic names like “Info Center.”
2. Include a tagline that meaningfully describes your organization. The key is to answer important questions like what your company does. We also consider it important to clearly explain your company’s benefits.
3. Provide a longer summary of your organization at the top of your “About Us” page. This should flow logically from your tagline content. 
4. Elaborate on key points and essential facts after your summary content. 
5. Move supporting information to separate pages. For example, create a page specifically for investor-related questions, as this is a subset of content for a very specific group of website visitors.
6. Consider using short videos to support your primary content, such as to showcase the personality of your CEO.

Follow general content optimization guidelines

As for general content optimization tips, be sure to follow the inverted pyramid hierarchy of information, flowing from a tagline, to a summary, to details, to supporting information for specific user groups.

Also, be sure to keep your content scannable, personable and objective. Readers will likely skim your “About Us” information, so consider putting much of it in scannable bullets. Also, speak directly to readers, be friendly, and avoid any hyperbole (“best,” “greatest” and so forth) that might undermine your credibility.

No matter the size of your company, these rules apply.

As Nielsen notes, even if your company’s world famous, not everyone knows who you are and what you do.

And some of those people just might want to work for you, invest in you or buy from you.

Well, before you order your three-million-dollar Super Bowl spot, here’s a simpler, cheaper solution.

It won’t get you more traffic. 

But it will help you capture 3 out of 10 visitors who probably bounce from your site because they can’t understand your words.

Don’t learn the hard way

Before I outline the solution, let me tell you how I learned the problem the hard way.

Recently, a usability consultant tested some seemingly clever phrases we had written for a client’s revised homepage.

Some participants got them. But those for whom English was a second language did not. 

To them, we could have written Klingon. 

"Trying to be too smart" was the usability report’s verdict.

Remember the eighth grade

But apparently not so smart at all.

Because we had forgotten that many web users have a low level of literacy.

In the US, the average adult reads at an eighth-grade level.

Nearly half the population has low literacy. 

According to usability guru Jakob Nielsen, 30 percent of web users have low literacy.

And that number will reach 40 percent by 2010. 

Imagine a party where two out of every five people won’t understand you unless you talk slowly and use simple words. 

That’s where your website increasingly lives. 

Meet your neglected audience

So just how do low-literacy users differ? 

Here are four key ways:

1. They read: Shockingly. If you know anything about web writing (and if not, stop now and download our free web writing e-book), you know that most web readers don’t read word-for-word. Rather, they scan text looking for key points. Not so for low-literacy users. They "plow," as Nielsen says, trying to decipher what they’re reading.
2. They skip big chunks: When they meet big chunks of text, however, plowers turn into jumpers. They’ll skip anything that appears too complicated. In the process, they might miss important information.
3. They really hate scrolling: Most web users hate scrolling. Low-literacy users really hate scrolling. Because when they do, they find it even more difficult to find where they were last reading.
4. They search poorly: For many people, search engines are the savior when seeking information. Low-literacy users, however, have trouble searching because they often misspell queries and have difficulty decoding search results. 

Speak so they understand

So, now that you understand the problem, what can you do about it? Here are some tips to get you speaking low-literacy users’ language:

1. Keep it simple: Write key pages at a sixth-grade reading level, including your home page, index pages and landing pages. Write no others pages above an eighth-grade reading level. Follow guidelines for web writing, keep your sentences short and aim for one idea per paragraph. (This post, by the way, has a Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level of 6.00.)
2. Put important information up top: This reduces the need to scroll.
3. Use common, familiar words: Avoid words with more than three syllables, abbreviations, acronyms, long lists and jargon.
4. Be literal: Stay away from puns and other turns of phrase that require greater literacy. Also avoid idiomatic and colloquial phrases.
5. Build forgiving search engines: This is more of a technical solution, but important nonetheless. Your site’s search engine should account for misspellings and present meaningful results.
6. Don’t trust, test: Think you’ve written for a grade-six level? Put your gut on trial. Microsoft Word and Google Docs allow you to calculate Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level and Flesch Reading Ease (among other things). You can also use online tools such as Juicy Studio’s Readability Test.

Make things easier for everyone

There are many benefits to a more widely readable website.

Capturing three more readers for every 10 who visit your site amounts to a 43 percent increase. Which isn’t shabby for the effort required.

And while you might worry that "dumbing down" will turn off higher literacy users, this doesn’t appear to be the case. 

Rather, studies show that tailoring pages to low-literacy users improves all users’ ability to find correct information faster, and to feel more satisfied with their experience.

Of course, you should always consider your audience. These rules apply most to sites reaching a broad and diverse audience, such as government websites, as well websites delivering critical information, such as health websites.

And I would imagine that they also apply to Super Bowl commercials.

So, how well does your website meet the needs of low-literacy users? Let us know in the comments below.