All Content Strategy posts

The importance of the whole

As I cried into my beer recently about the passing of Google Reader, I thought about what I’m going to miss most. (Quick initiation for those who don’t know: Google Reader was an RSS feed reader; it pulled only the content of articles from chosen websites – i.e. just the text and media – and [...]

Where does microcopy come from?

Well, when an editor and content management system love each other very much… No, really, who writes all those little words that play such an important role on a website? The image on the left is a low resolution picture of a spreadsheet containing the microcopy from a small ecommerce website. There are 260 lines, [...]

Copywriters – getting started with SEO

What advice would you give to new freelance copywriters about getting to grips with search engine optimisation? I wrote the following to someone recently who is starting out as a copywriter, and who wondered how techy one needs to be. I don’t think you need to be techy. Position yourself as a copywriter, not an [...]

Writing for mobile

At Fluent we’re making more and more mobile sites. Writing for mobile – whether apps, mobile only sites or websites optimised for the small screen – is a challenge. Space is limited. The user interface is different. Most of the time, users don’t want to read. This is how we’ve been facing the challenge so [...]

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 [...]