Most governments don’t have to worry about winning and retaining customers. Perhaps that is why they have such a very long way to go in terms of speaking human. Today, many government websites reflect this and are very difficult to understand and use for the average citizen. This leads to complaints, negative press and excessive numbers of phone calls, which could have been avoided or handled much cheaper and more efficiently over the web.

At our Philadelphia conference earlier this month Eric Karjaluoto made a very compelling case for organisations to ’speak human’ in order to better connect with customers. He illustrated his keynote with best and worst practice examples from large and small enterprises that made it clear why you can no longer “lie, cheat, steal” your way to making it big. This advice applies equally well to government administration, which would be able to make real progress if they became better at connecting with citizens.

A few stories to illustrate the potential and how the web could help:

• In Denmark with a population of 5 million, the Danish Tax and Customs Administration receives about 4,5 million phone calls every year with questions about taxes. In a a story in a Danish newspaper, a government representative says that the Danish tax rules are particularly complex. That might be true, but a good content strategy making the website much easier to use should be able to reduce the number of  calls greatly.
• In the US, The New York Times recently reported that doctors, once used to answering patients’ questions about their hearts or other matters physical, have lately spent up to half of their time answering a range of different questions — about the new health care law. Needless to say, substantial policy changes will always lead to questions. Better websites with plain language texts should help answer most of these.

Part of ’speaking human’ is about using plain language. In the UK, The Plain English campaign has been campaigning since 1979, “against gobbledygook, jargon and misleading public information.” Here’s an educational example from their website:

Before:

High-quality learning environments are a necessary precondition for facilitation and enhancement of the ongoing learning process.

After:

Children need good schools if they are to learn properly.

Plain language will indeed get you far in terms of speaking human. You’ve probably seen plenty of examples like the above in both paper and online communication if you have had to deal with government. Plain language in a sense is the easy part, the difficult one is the “connect” part. This is where you actually listen and builds a relationship – regardless of whether online or offline. I can name several enterprises that do this well at the moment and Eric Karjaluoto also named a few.

Please, dear reader, can you mention just one government agency that ’speaks human’ today?

Can you explain what you do online – and why – in 3 minutes? How about in 30 seconds?

Web people often feel frustrated that

• Their top management doesn’t understand the value of web
• Their editors continually forget who the target groups for the website are
• Their own boss thinks that updating an entire section on the intranet should take no more than 10 minutes

It can be very tiring to have to explain the same things over and over again. But have you stopped to look at how you reply and respond to people? Are you speaking their language? Could it be done in a simpler way?

The challenge of pitching the website or intranet to internal stakeholders often comes up in our community of practice meetings. Here are a couple of examples of elevator pitches I collected from a recent meeting:

Moving our printed documents online brings us two extra benefits: Speed – we can communicate and react faster – and statistics – we have useful details on how the information is actually being used. However, these extra benefits also require extra work, so making the shift is never 1-1 in workload, but rather a factor 3.

Remember that we are not making a website for you as local departments, but for our customers”.

Short, concise and goes to root of the issue, don’t you think?

In designing your elevator pitch, you can draw inspiration from some of the lessons learned about communicating with internal stakeholders, also shared in the recent group meeting:

• Use common, every-day terms instead of fancy web talk such as “governance” and “content strategy” to avoid getting blank stares.
• Sometimes fancy words might be useful, though, depending on your target audience. Try naming a project “process optimization”. That kind of language resonated with management for one our members, who was consequently able to get the funding he needed.
• Think strongly about naming your project “redesign”, as people tend to think of “re-“ as brand new (i.e. a big expensive project) and “design” as pretty colours (i.e. not providing real value).
• Say “thank you” to people when they take the time to give you their input. Even though you might think that correcting that spelling mistake on some page deeply buried in the navigation is a waste of time when you have complex projects going on.
• Keep a public to-do-list of tasks planned for the web or intranet for the next 6 months that you can refer to when people don’t understand why you can’t correct the spelling mistake right now. When projects are completed, turn the to-do-list into an achievement list.

What does your elevator pitch look like?

Microblogging service Yammer was introduced in 2008 and today claims that over 60,000 businesses use it worldwide. Despite the rapid uptake in adoption, most organisations we interviewed for this summary reported mixed experiences and some internal resistance.

What justifies yet another internal communication tool alongside existing tools such as e-mail, intranets, wikis, SharePoint and instant messaging? Does Yammer enable us to work smarter and potentially even reduce e-mail? Currently it seems like Yammer has a key strength among departments or small organisations as a cheap way to introduce microblogging.

Clearly the adoption of Yammer is still at a very early level, in particular among our large, complex and global members, among whom most still  only use it within less than 10% of their total workforce.

Yammer front page for a sample organisation

What’s the value?
While Twitter and Facebook might be the most popular microblogging services available, Yammer has so far set itself out by focusing exclusively on the environment behind the firewall; internal company usage only. This is changing with their recently released Communities feature.

Yammer is strong when used to share links, ask questions and make useful connections between employees in different locations. Some report that Yammer has helped reduce e-mail overload as some communication now flows via Yammer rather than via inboxes. Beyond these soft benefits, there is still little or no experience with actually measuring a monetary value from the usage of Yammer.

Several reported that they’ve configured Yammer to send a summary, typically daily, of all messages via e-mail. This is quite helpful on busy days as an easy way to follow the discussions. Chicago-based Tony Bailey of Acquity Group recommends limiting the use of upload and instead encouraging users to link back to an official repository. This is solid advice in terms of avoiding the establishment of yet another repository. Bailey also suggested publishing the Yammer feed directly on the intranet; something which we’ve not heard from the adopters we talked to, but which could be worth considering in order to make Yammer the pulse of the department or potentially entire organisation.

What’s the interface?
Similar to Twitter and Facebook, Yammer offers a web interface, where you can post and read messages. Similar to Twitter, many don’t actually use the web interface, but other apps to interact with Yammer. Firefox has a popular plug-in called YammerFox, which enables you to type a message directly within Firefox and also provides real-time notification when new messages are added. Yammer has a dedicated app, which you can download and install, but several has reported that this is flaky and rather dissapointing, at least on Windows machines.

How do you increase adoption?
According to UK-based Carolyn Clarke at EDF Energy, Yammer was the quiet discovery of one division. As a company without appetite for instant messaging or chat rooms, EDF Energy is using Yammer at departmental level alongside e-mail and telephone. Only a few use it and as Carolyn said “In a big organisation, a ‘side channel’ has a certain rebel appeal.”

At the Danish National Board for Social Services, they did not get a public endorsement by senior management. Instead they started it at a department level and let it grow. This seems similar to what happened at EDF Energy and several others we talked to.

You’ll get most mileage out of Yammer if your audience is relatively tech-savvy and willing to experiment with what some might call “yet another tool.”

What does it cost?
Yammer has a free of charge Basic plan and then offers additional administrative services starting at $3 per user per month.

If you transfer to the paid version you get services like custom branding, security tools, directory integration and keyword monitoring.

Learn more
For more information on Yammer see:

• Real Story Group: Yammer’s microblogging branches out (Mar 2, 2010)
• TechCrunch: Yammer Communities Open The Door To B2B Microblog Collaboration And Much More (Feb 25, 2010)
• Wikipedia: Yammer
• Zendesk: How Yammer Supports 50,000+ Networks and Collects Customer Feedback (Feb 22, 2010)

Thanks to @BrianBentzen, Carolyn Clarke at EDF Energy and @tony_bailey and several others for sharing their emerging practices.

By Alan J. Porter

Alan J Porter

Do you read comics? Even if you don’t want to admit it, I bet you do. In fact, most people read at least something in comics form almost every day even if they are completely unaware of it.

When I utter the word ‘comics’ most people immediately think of spandex clad superheroes, talking animals or a gang of perennial teenagers who never seem to graduate high-school. There is a common misconception that comics are a genre with a limited range. They aren’t. In fact they aren’t a genre at all.

Comics are a medium. Just like film, theater, prose, poetry or any other process of telling stories comics can be used to convey all sort so information about a wide variety of subjects to multiple audiences. Comics can make you laugh, cry, gasp in wonder, shake in terror and they can also make great instruction manuals, training aids, white papers, or any other type of business or technical communication you can think of.

Superheroes are often what people think of when they hear the words 'comic book', but comics as a communication medium are not limited to fictional characters nor are they only created for entertainment purposes.

The word ‘comic’ has an unfortunate connotation of suggesting that the medium is inherently lacking serious intent. This is just a mishap of language specific to the English speaking world. In other parts of the world what we call comics are known by a variety of names, most of which emphasize the medium as an art form.

So what do I mean when I talk about the medium of comics?

'Understanding Comics' by Scott McCloud

In his ground breaking book “Understanding Comics” theorist Scott McCloud proposes the following definition of comics:

“Juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer.”

While accurate, that’s quite a mouthful, so I prefer a simpler interpretation. – I define comics as a graphic medium in which images are utilized in order to convey a sequential narrative.

In other words comics are the combination of art and literature.

They are also the most enduring and effective form of communication yet devised by man. Comics represent the oldest continuous form of communication in history. If you take the idea of a comic being a sequential narrative, then certain cave paintings are comics, as are a large proportion of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. In more recent history the Bayeux tapestry telling the tale of the Norman conquest of Britain in 1066 is also a comic strip.

Why is the comics medium so enduring?

• Studies have shown that humans as a species are hard wired to understand certain sequences of symbols and icons. We understand the basic language of comics on a fundamental level.
• Comics can transcend language and cultural boundaries. Outside of the Anglo/American cultural sphere comics are the most widely read medium.
• Even the CIA consider comics as the most powerful communications medium, most of the propaganda leaflets drops over the years have been in the form of comics.

Comics have been used for many years to convey instructional information

There is also a long and successful history of using comics and comics techniques in various types of business and technical communications. Consider the following examples:

When Google launched its Chrome Browser the accompanying technical documentation was a widely distributed comic book.

The most widely read piece of technical documentation in the history of the US Army officially known as “DA Pam 750-30 Operation and Preventative Maintenance of the M16A1 Rifle” is a comic book better known by the troops as “How to love your rifle.”

Comics are used to help educate visitors to the European Organization for Nuclear Research

The visitors guide for the European Organization for Nuclear research is a comic.
Comics have been produced on all the major sciences including DNA research, paleontology, philosophy, just to name a few.

In my library I have examples of Japanese comics telling the corporate history of 7-Eleven and the product history of the Datsun 240Z car.

The graphic novel version of the official 9/11 report outsold the prose version.

[Editor's Note: Comics have also played a role in spreading religious messaging. A quick search of Google yields examples from the Jewish faith, The Mormon Church, the Catholic faith, and others.]

So what can we learn from studying the comics medium?

Sequence – the fundamental backbone of comics is the idea of sequence, that one image follows another to impart information to the reader. Most technical documentation is also built on sequence and structure, yet often that sequence is ignored, or jumps in logic occur that confuse a reader. While working out the sequence of steps for a procedure just think if someone had to draw this sequence as a comic strip, do they have enough information to do so, have you covered each step? Instead of overloading your reader or end user with information, just show them what they need to know at that given point, one step at a time.

Comics can be used to show users what they need to know, avoiding information overload.

Narrative – The second fundamental of comics is the idea of narrative. Narrative should drive and guide the reader / user along on a journey. All communication is story telling (and that is perhaps meat for a future blog post), and in story telling your narrative must have a beginning, middle and end. Even if you use a topic based authoring approach like DITA, each topic should be a ‘story’, the reader should be guided through the information and know more at the conclusion than they did at the start.

Narratives are used to guide the reader along a journey.

Symbols / Icons – The language of comics is built on symbols and icons, and as I mentioned earlier we, as a species, are culturally hard wired to understand many icons. For instance the smiley face icon transcends cultures and is instantly understood even by people who have never seen it before. Comics have developed their own visual short hand that also seem to be universal, such as the speech balloon. Think about the use of icons and symbols in your documentation, they can speed up comprehension and drastically reduce translation costs. But beware, while many symbols are cross cultural – others are not.

Symbols and icon speed up comprehension and drastically reduce translation costs.

Dec 3, 2009.  Wilmington NC.  Roger Wyatt, President and CEO of Tynken Interactive announces Signal, a breakthrough in technology that allows teachers to post class notes, homework, schedules and a myriad of other content to their web pages by simply sending an email.   All users need to do is type a code in the subject line, and the system directs the contents of the email to the appropriate section of their web page. “What is really great about this is that it turns the system on its head. What I kept hearing is that the majority of teachers don’t have the time or desire to be web designers, and that they are therefore stuck either doing nothing or spending time learning new software” said Wyatt. “Now all they have to do is send an email, and the system does it for them.  This saves a significant amount of time, and makes better, faster classroom communication very easy. First we completely changed the way teachers interact with their web applications. Now we are bringing about a second revolution – allowing them to post to their sites using only email”

“I had been talking with teachers about some of their issues. One of the main ones was not having the time to learn software to maintain a teacher web page. In fact, only 10% of the teachers in any school create a teacher page when given the opportunity. They all said the same thing – “I don’t have the time to learn a new system”. Now they don’t have to. This new system is unbelievably powerful. It is set it up to allow posting of just about anything – scores, schedules, menus, etc – in addition to class notes, homework, and the other class information” said Wyatt.  “And there is no need for training – they just send an email for the instructions and the system emails them the user guide – all 1 page of it. So the technology coordinators don’t need to spend any time training the teachers in using the application – there’s no training required. And there are built-in safeguards.  For example, if the teacher forgets to put a due date on the homework assignment, the system will not post it, but send an email asking for the due date before posting.”

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While technology problems often steal the attention, fact is that many Web and intranet professionals struggle just as much with the content side of things. We have too much content, outdated content, content that is not user-friendly. The list goes on.

I talked to Kristina Halvorson, author of the recently published book Content Strategy for the Web, on why so many websites and intranets suffer from poor content.

Kristina has identified two key issues:

• Process: In web projects, we spend a lot of time and energy on determining business objectives and user goals, creating strategy and designing the functional requirements. But somehow we always scramble to prepare the actual content just before launch. We don’t plan for content.
• Perception: We think that creating good content is basically copy writing, that it is about sitting down and writing text. But in fact, content is complicated. Often you are dealing with several parties that have to review the content in the first place. Then there is the issue of metadata, formatting, and technical restrictions.

What is missing in most organisations, Kristina says, is editorial oversight. Think of the publishing industry, where content is considered a product. They employ executive editors to coordinate all the input from the different writers. Compare that then to your typical setup with a decentralized network of web editors in most organisations. There will of course be a person coordinating efforts, but that person also has to do daily maintenance, drive the new design, implement the new CMS, manage vendors and many other tasks. In the end, no one has the overall responsibility for the content itself.

In her book, Kristina argues the need for content strategy if we are to deliver better websites. She defines content strategy as planning for the creation, the delivery and the governance of useful, usable content.

You can meet Kristina at our conference for online professionals in November where she will share her method for creating a content strategy as well as steps you can take right away to deliver a better website or intranet.

Do you have anyone looking after your content? Really?