IN THIS CHAPTER

Finding your place online

Deciding which digital platforms are right for you

Writing techniques for digital media

Leveraging the power of SEO

The Internet is like a magic door that democratizes communication. It empowers you to reach almost anyone, anywhere, and offers you virtual space to represent your own interests. The price of entry for online action keeps coming down. If you have more money than time, you can hire teams of specialists to plan, write, design, and produce a website, like in the early days. But the tools become more and more sophisticated, and today, almost anyone can produce an effective site and do all or most of the work himself. You can put up your own blog in an hour or two. Or post comments and ideas on other people’s blogs with a click.

The windows opened by social media evolve even more dramatically. A decade ago, few people expected that 92 percent of employers would use social platforms to hire, and that three out of four would screen candidates online. Nor did we know that more than half of all purchases would be made electronically, and that social media would influence an estimated 70 percent of consumer buying decisions.

Many of us depend on online media to know what’s happening in the world, share opinions, and find communities. More and more learning is done online, too, whether we want to polish a skill or learn how to cut an avocado. We look online to hear what our business and political leaders are saying. And digital media has transformed the world of advocacy. Social movements, massive protests, and common causes originate and are managed online.

From a career perspective, whether you see your future as an employee in a series of jobs or as an entrepreneur, contractor, or freelancer, the profile you build with your online content may be critical. If you view the digital universe more personally — as a way to explore an interest or passion, connect with new and old friends, or expand your thinking — you, too, need to understand the tools.

Realistically, the digital age challenges all of us. If you’re a “native” user who grew up with the Internet, you probably take it for granted as the basic infrastructure of your personal life and perhaps a big part of your work life. If you’re an older user, you may feel pressured to transfer your skill set to the newer media, and are scrambling to catch up with its lightning evolution.

Everyone has a learning curve. Baby Boomers and to varying extent Generation X’ers are pulled to transfer their communication know-how and people skills to new channels. Most Millennials, if they are to achieve what they want, need to deepen their thinking about communication and marketing. This chapter and the one that follows are dedicated to helping you create the online presence you want, whatever your business goals and whatever your facility with new media. Writing is the common ground. To be effective with digital media you must know how to strategize your content and adapt your writing for each medium.

Positioning Yourself Online

When I wrote the first edition of this book in 2013, I observed that the Internet had leveled the playing field for those willing to learn its ways. People could scout for jobs and be discovered by recruiters, reach a VIP with a click, or compete with big well-funded businesses armed only with a good idea and a website. Everyone gained the power to be not just an author, but also a commentator, editor, and publisher. No more gatekeepers!

All of this and more remains true. But there’s a snag: Today almost everyone has landed on that playing field. You’re competing not only against people in your industry, but also with hordes of talented, well-paid communication specialists. Most companies dedicate in-house or outside resources to manage their websites, blogs, and tweets, and to produce videos, create infographics, and post cleverly on social media. The advantage no longer belongs with the early adaptor.

But you can certainly succeed if your online life is strategic and well-executed. Creative thinking, reflected in good writing, is your ticket to today’s digital universe.

But, I hear you asking, what about visually based media: Facebook, Snapchat, Pinterest, Instagram, and new platforms that are brewing as I write this?

As I point out when talking about video in Chapter 9, ideas start with words. Imagination translates those words into images. Often, the corporate posts you may love are not bits of spontaneity, but carefully crafted messages created by teams working within an established marketing frame. They often use those most traditional tools: writing and storyboards. What you ultimately see may contain few words or none at all, because the message is carried by imagery.

Sometimes a platform’s visual orientation is in part illusory. Pinterest, for example, which collects and displays images based on themes, nonetheless delivers plenty of information as infographics. These typically involve extensive planning, research, writing, and graphic design.

However, if your aim is to entertain your friends, or share moments of your life, strategic thinking is a lot less necessary. For many people the value of digital media is the spontaneity the technology underwrites. If you want to communicate “look what I’m doing,” or “here’s where I am,” or “isn’t this funny, or beautiful, or inspiring,” that’s absolutely fine.

If you want your messages to support larger aspirations, they must be strategic. Random tweets will produce random responses. Carefully written blogs won’t help your cause if they don’t tie to your goals. Spontaneous social posts won’t build a following that matters if you don’t have a plan.

Everything you put on the Internet adds up to a unique social profile that can bring you opportunities, or if you’re careless, lose them for you. Therefore, you must know what you want to achieve and whom you want to reach.

Strategizing Your Platform Choices

A character named Pogo in an old cartoon famously said, “We are surrounded by insurmountable opportunities.” Used strategically, online channels consume time. They can drain you of energy and creativity, and even shift your focus away from the “real world” to become counter-productive. So be selective about your activity.

I talk about using specific social media platforms in Chapter 12, but it’s smart to consider your options and decide how to budget your energy and resources. Possibilities include:

• Build a website. If you’re in business of any kind, hunting for a job now or down the line, or spearheading a community or charitable cause, chances are good that a website is indispensable. It can be a complicated multipage ecommerce site or a blog — the two have become fairly indistinguishable. You can build a site with all the resources it can take and spend money, or you can put in time and build it yourself with online tools such as Wordpress.com, Wix.com, or Web.com. Take into account that an effective website needs to grow and change, not treated as a static brochure.
• Create a Facebook business page. This is useful for a wide range of enterprises, since people of all ages have learned to enjoy sharing this way. However, even Facebook’s business pages are geared to be visually entertaining and news-oriented, so a business page is not the place for detailed promotional material. But Facebook is a great way to build a fan base, launch contests, share interesting and timely happenings, and show a company’s personality.
• Start a blog. Regular blogging helps you establish trust, credibility, and authority. You can post blogs on media such as Medium.com, or LinkedIn if you prefer not to mount your own blog or want to supplement it. Experts often advise that to establish a following, you need to post new material predictably, preferably twice a week. But today there are so many blogs (some estimates say 152 million) that they must deliver substantial content. Research finds that surprisingly, 2,000+ word blogs are better read and valued than the short blogs that used to be recommended. The current outlook is less quantity, higher quality.
• Become active on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is the professional’s networker, and other than more personal job hunting venues like social media, LinkedIn is the best hiring center for recruiters and employment managers, and therefore, job hunters. For the consultant, contractor, and professional, LinkedIn is essential because potential employers find and check out candidates here. There are numerous industry-specific sites worth considering as well, and international versions, too.
• Post on Twitter. This 140-character messaging system is far from the flash in the pan predicted a few years ago. Who knew that presidential campaigns, and many lesser causes, would turn on this mini-messaging system? Many reporters and editors use it as their story source. And it isn’t just words anymore; images and video are starting to dominate. A strategic Twitter program consumes 5 to 20 tweets per day, and some widely followed users post hourly.
• Use social media. Here the plot thickens, as people sometimes say about films that become complicated. These apps are the most moving of targets. They not only proliferate, but constantly change features to maintain and grow their fickle audiences. Each platform has its own personality and tools. Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and their cousins, current and future, are best seen not as media outlets in the traditional sense, but as platforms where users can express themselves and engage in conversations. Organizations that want to build their brand with Generation Z and younger Millennials need to be here and figure out how to be part of the fun.
• Send email. I devote a whole chapter to email (Chapter 6), but I mention it here because it should not be overlooked as a marketing tool. Email is ubiquitous and interweaves so well with online media. Many businesses of every size depend on email’s reach. Some of the most influential bloggers deliver posts via email or embed a link inside a curiosity-provoking message. Notice too how sales-funnel strategies on blogs and websites are designed to collect email lists. To receive the giveaway or subscribe to a newsletter — also sent by email — you must provide your email address. Then they know where you are! Like it or not, don’t rule this workhorse system out of your mix.

How to begin designing your program? Some experts advise focusing on a single platform, or a small coordinated set of platforms, and doing them well. Be realistic about how much to expect of yourself. Create a written plan to develop your ideas and make the most of your personal investment. Consider three factors: your goal, your audience, and your capabilities, which includes your time as well as skills.

Writing for Digital Media

In this section, I offer general guidelines for online writing that apply to relatively traditional content: blogs, profiles, newsletters, websites. These are considered “long form” media, and long form is in! These techniques adapt to the various social platforms, which I address in the following chapter, along with specifics on creating websites and blogs.

Does good writing matter online? Absolutely. Those fish I talked about in “Knowing where your audiences are” earlier in this chapter won’t snap up your offerings otherwise. No matter how much you know. Moreover, it’s indispensable for establishing credibility and trust. People may not consciously evaluate writing excellence, but it’s how they automatically decide whether a stranger merits their time and trust. Do you buy products that are described in boring, or overly hyped, error-prone language? Or find badly written arguments persuasive? If you do, you’re unusual.

The guidelines for print writing presented in Part 1 apply to online writing but more intensively. You need to be more direct, concise, clear, and dynamic. Imagine a formal, stiff, academic-style essay — you may have written your share in college — with long, complex sentences, weighty words, and a dense look that warns of slow reading ahead. You know the piece may take a few readings to ante up its thought nuggets.

Try to write for online media in exactly the opposite way. First, snag attention. Then make it look like easy reading. Writing that looks and is complex works poorly online because reading anything on-screen is physically harder. Our eyes get tired, we blink more, resist scrolling, and bypass anything that looks hard to access. As readers, we expect speed and immediacy online — not meandering messages that take work. Strive for simplicity and brevity.

Translating text into visuals

The statistics and predictions are hard to ignore:

• People form a first impression in 50 milliseconds.
• Posts with images produce 650 percent higher engagement than text-only posts.
• People are 85 percent more likely to buy a product after viewing a video of it.
• Tweets with images earned up to 18 percent more clicks, 89 percent more favorites, and 150 percent more re-tweets.
• An estimated 84 percent of communications will be visual by 2018.
• An estimated 79 percent of Internet traffic will be video content by 2018.

How to handle this transformation in your own communications?

If you’re among my younger readers, you’re probably moving in this direction without hassle via Snapchat, Instagram, and other current platforms. Many older-than-Millennial businesspeople and communicators, however, must rethink how all their messages can be reinforced or reinterpreted visually. To jog your thinking, consider that the nature of online reality creates the demand. Some factors:

• Images attract attention. In a digital world that’s more and more competitive, you want readers to choose your particular tweet or blog or Snap from a million choices and not only read it, but find it worth sharing with their networks. If you’re selling something you want your audience to take a step closer to trusting you or ultimately, put up real money or time for something you offer. Visuals engage people instantly.
• Images reach us emotionally. A description of a high-fashion shoe triggers a visceral reaction from its target audience — impossible with even the best description. This does not mean that the written material doesn’t count. The shoe photo on its own probably won’t close the sale, unless the reader is already a fan of the designer and trusts the distributor. She wants information about quality, fit, ease of returns, and so on. The image gets her attention, but the copy must talk her into action.
• Images can save you a lot of words. They’re invaluable for any kind of how-to material. They can substitute for a mountain of dull descriptive detail in many situations — to describe the fashion shoe, for example. As I say throughout this book, promoting speedy comprehension is always a goal. Visuals also strike us as more true and believable — after all, “seeing is believing.” Watching video of a workshop leader in action is a lot more effective than any words you can bestow upon yourself in writing.
• Visuals make things more real to people. Not long ago we bought all our shoes in stores. We touched them, checked out the colors, tried them on, held them alongside other options. We directly experienced how they made us feel: Comfortable? Beautiful? Young? When you buy your shoes online, however, you have no tangible experience with them. Photographs are as close as you can get. Selling a charitable cause, or an online course, is not so different. We want to see what we’re getting: the result of our charitable giving, what people say about the course.
• Visuals make people more real to people. Establishing relationships — which is so much of what the Internet is about — is also not so different from our experience buying products we can’t touch. We make friends digitally, hire virtual workers, and collaborate with people around the world whom we will never meet. Isn’t it more personal to see an individual, whether in a profile photo or social media selfie that expresses personality with stickers and filters?
• Visuals can present abstract and complex information with impact. Businesspeople and scientists have always used charts and graphs and tables to report and persuade, but technology makes it easy now for anyone to create lively, colorful material that entertains us as they inform. Witness the rise of the infographic, to explain everything from how to make a cup of tea to why water quality is declining in different parts of the word. The format makes the data easier to grasp and invites interesting comparisons.

• Images enable us to symbolize ideas. This is in my opinion the trickiest challenge but one worth meeting, particularly for bloggers and marketers. You know your piece will be better read with an image: but how to illustrate something like how to cut red tape in the office? My answer: Adopt a “show don’t tell” mindset. You may know the term “objective correlative” from a literature course. It means conveying an emotion, or something abstract, by representing it in a physical dimension. Rather than saying “I’m really mad,” for example, a character shows his fury by smashing a precious vase. Rather than saying “I’m cutting myself off from a world I can’t handle,” a character burns all his shoes.

  Try This: Look for an objective correlative when you’re presenting something abstract, or practice the technique for fun. In the case of too much problem of too much red tape: An image of people trying to push a boulder made of paper bound by red ribbon up a hill? An office worker at his desk surrounded by darkness, with a single lamp to illuminate a toppling pile of paper? Files overflowing a cabinet and colliding on the floor? Or maybe you want to represent “solution”: a scale of justice with a ton of paper weighing down one side, and a tiny hard drive on the other. Or a hard drive shaped like an alligator eating its way through a paper mountain.

The remarkable thing is that all the visual approaches mentioned are within reach of us average folks. In addition to the good photos we can shoot on our smartphones, we can use better and ever-easier editing and special effects tools right on those smartphones or online. We can access unending resources of free or reasonably priced photos, illustrations, gifs, video clips. (Check out Unsplash [https://unsplash.com] for free high-res photos cleared for social media.) We can create high-impact charts and graphs with the right tools.

We can manipulate images for specific purposes and create infographics with templates in apps like Canva (www.canva.com/create), Infogram (https://infogr.am), and Piktochart (https://piktochart.com). We can shoot our own video, edit it, add music, voiceover, titling, special effects. We can create dramatically better presentations with programs that integrate video and movement as well as those great charts and photos. We can Livestream real-time video broadcasts on platforms like Facebook Live, Instagram Stories, Periscope, and Snapchat. And there’s endless help with all of this and more in YouTube tutorials.

The only limit is your imagination. Don’t see the challenge of adding visuals as words “versus” images — aim to integrate them and capitalize on what each does well. Use visual media in all its forms to help get your message across and as appropriate to the medium, your brand, and your purpose. Don’t restrict yourself to new media: Review your website, product information, and marketing materials to brainstorm where and how visuals can do more work.

You are sure to find a lot of text material that can be repurposed and energized by visualizing them, but:

• Be wary of mixing your styles — be consistent in your branding. If you’re using illustrations, don’t mix them with photos, for example. (But mixing stills and video is fine.)
• Don’t use irrelevant imagery that doesn’t amplify your material just to attract attention or for the sake of it. People don’t like it.
• Don’t use bland clip art like a happy diverse team conferring around a conference table. People don’t like it.
• Don’t underestimate the time sourcing the right visual material can take.

Try This: To build on this the last point, it can be especially hard to find an existing image that illustrates an idea such as my red tape examples. One way to spark your imagination is to work backward: Spend some time browsing through an online photo resource and you’re likely to find a number of images that give you ideas for new subjects to write about, as well as ways to visualize them.

One last “don’t”: Resist cutting so many words that what you’re saying loses meaning and context. A manufacturer once asked me to simplify his assemble-it-yourself product instructions. It proved impossible to streamline the copy enough for him. Eventually I realized he wanted to make the directions purely visual — like some IKEA instructions, which drop explanatory language altogether in the interest of an international market. The trouble was that stripping the copy failed to serve the goal — helping people do the job easily. Always remember your goal and your audience.

In the next chapter I show you how to apply online writing strategies to specific e-media: websites, blogs, Twitter, and other social media.