All Content Strategy posts

Does impartiality make TripAdvisor’s reviews less honest?

I made the mistake of booking a car recently and then googling the hire company. The second organic link, after the hire company’s own website, was from TripAdvisor. The page title was ‘AVOID Via Kiwi car rentals’ (name changed). My heart sank. Clicking through to the whole post, though, the picture became clearer. A couple [...]

Would you rather – some sales or more enquiries?

When I was a kid we had a wonderful and slightly disturbing book called Would You Rather? by the brilliant illustrator John Burningham. It was fun choosing between supper in a castle and breakfast in a balloon, but there were also more alarming choices: which wild animal would you rather be killed by? Everyone knows that good kids’ books need a dark undertone…

The would-you-rather that Fluent comes up against repeatedly with clients is: would you rather have some sales or more enquiries? Usually the question relates to the hiding of key information. Tell prospects everything and they might not buy. Conceal something vital and they’ll have to get in touch.

For example, in the hunt for more bookings, one hospitality client is being tempted to remove the availability calendar. The reasoning is twofold: first, that an empty calendar might scare people away; and second, that forcing an enquiry form request gives the company an opportunity to sell alternative dates or holidays if the original dates are not going to work out.

Struck by content strategy lightning talks

Everything about the latest content strategy meetup in London was squished. There were 100 of us sardined into a pub basement. The chairs were closer together than a double booked EasyJet flight and the guy next to me at the urinals kept setting the hand drier off while he was peeing. What’s more, the talks [...]

Social media: do we really have to share everything?

I’m eating the company dogfood, as it were, by selling my house through an estate agent that is a client of ours. I have become the use case. So here I am, on a page featuring the particulars my house, faced with Tweet and Facebook ‘Like’ buttons. My first thought is: I’m not putting the [...]

Content strategy for small businesses

Often when I meet other content strategists the talk is of inter-departmental horse-trading, corporate politics, and satisfying the great gods in the boardroom. At the recent London Content Strategy meetup I wanted to chip in what it’s like from my perspective, where there is only one department – our whole company, sitting in one room – [...]

Content strategy November event: Hollywood, camels and the NHS

The Content Strategy Forum 2011 earlier this year in London was a runaway success. I blogged about 7 Content Strategy Trends from the conference on our company blog, Fluency, a few weeks back: Create once, publish everywhere Content creators need help What customers want: to accomplish tasks, quickly The best content supports business goals Sharing: [...]

What ‘show don’t tell’ means for web site design

‘What is the use of a book,’ thought Alice, ‘without pictures and conversation?’

Show don’t tell is a core design principle here at Endis Solutions. But what does it actually mean?

Given the choice between telling someone something and showing it to them, you should almost always show it. Here’s how, and why: