Monday 9th November 2009 by Peter Furtado

When a membership organisation or specialist magazine upgrades its web presence, it frequently concentrates on the impact of the new interactive functionality. That’s hardly surprising: opening itself out to community demands new skills, new habits of mind, and a new business model. But, while planning a community launch to produce lots of user-generated content and lots of ROI, don’t forget to spring-clean the copy you generate in-house too.

 

Telling people what you want them to know

In the old world, your brochure site probably focused on telling an audience of the converted – your members or subscribers – what you did and what you thought. Because you didn’t have the tools to conduct a conversation with them, communication had to be one-way – from you to them.

And if you needed to secure repeat business and upsell to your existing customers, you spoke to them in much the same way you always had. Of course, you knew there was a vast new audience that you could potentially reach; but growth online was probably stepwise rather than through quantum jumps.

Not that the social media and community-based Web 2.0 world is going to bring effortless leaps forward either. But there are certain inevitabilities of the new approach which will impact on the things you write and the way you write them.  

Writing to engage

First, of course, you’ll already have thought hard about engaging visitors, drawing in people from the external social media world, and getting them to value your offering - sufficiently, in the first place, to leave their name and email address with you. Then, how to get them to continue to engage ever more deeply until they cough up for a subscription or a membership, or one of your other paid products.

These people are interested in your field but don’t have a relationship with you yet. They are people you ought to be able to help, but until now they have been getting by without your services, perhaps even quite successfully thank you very much. Others may be just starting out and on a low income, and while they know they need expertise they aren’t ready to pay for your core offering.

You can’t engage these folk by pumping out your standard offers. And you can’t abandon your core customers by creating a new product to appeal to all these new markets. What you can do is find a new way of speaking which includes them.

That’s the logic of forums, groups, Q+As, and the rest of it, of course. But you can’t just rely on those. You still need to give your visitors the traditional material – sector news and views, institutional news, information about your products and so on - and somehow you have to make it sit comfortably alongside all the user-generated stuff.

So now you have to align this traditional material with your new community. That may sound scary – especially if someone influential in your organisation is already worried about this new social media world dumbing down your brand values. The phrase “tail wagging dog” might even get heard.

Dumbing down or opening up?

You don’t need to dumb down, but you do need to open up. To think, with every sentence you write, about the people who might be reading. To anticipate what they know, what they want, what they feel about what you have to say. To understand why they found your site in the first place, and to make sure they get satisfaction, pronto. To give them value, to take them to where they want to go - and also to where you want them to go.

With any luck – and if you have planned well – the two places will be the same. If they are, then you’ll have made a friend, probably a customer, perhaps a champion. So every page on your site which carries all that traditional stuff – the news, the institutional guff, the core products – has to be instantly welcoming and meaningful to someone who – 30 seconds ago – had never heard of you.

That’s a challenge. But it’s one you can meet if the old ‘from us to you’ preachy habits are torn out and replaced with ‘let’s share what we know’ dialogue. Take a look, for example, at the way the site for corporate internal communications specialists simply-communicate, presents itself.

It’s a dialogue you can begin even before you go live – by checking your website voice very carefully. Think about the people who will be your new visitors, think about the values your organisation wants to promote, and find a confident open tone that links them both. The drinks company Innocent do it on their bottles: now see how they apply this style online.

Rewrite every page in the tone that’s right for you. It has to be a tone that is immediate and invites a positive response. This tone may be a little different from the voice you used to use, but it will quickly link with the voices that emerge in the community – actually it will set the tone for that community. It will, therefore, really help achieve your ‘virtuous figure of eight’, the unification of your business and your community into a unique proposition.

Let's get experimenting!