Fuzzy Content

In my dealings with messaging on the Web, one of the gaps I try to get organizations to overcome is “institutional speak”. But it goes beyond labels used, acronyms, and slang. I’ve blogged on this before. What’s more important is that what you are trying to get across is the right message, to the right people, at the right time. Without those three elements, your message falls on deaf ears.

Right Message…wait. We’ll save that one for last.

• Right People. Every Web site is built for visitors, plain and simple. Who visits your Web site? What subgroups are there within audiences? Is there overlap between some audiences to join them together? Understand who visits your site, and you are a third of the way there.
• Right Time. Eric, the Web is a 24/7/365 thing. What do you mean right time. Your Web site is always up and running, but people want different things at different times. I hate not knowing where I come across stats, but for prospective students, they will visit your Web site 35 times before they choose to enroll. [I apologize for not being able to name the source of this stat...I'll work on it.] You can bet that what they want to do in the first visit is completely different from what they want to do on that last visit to your site. Use a calendar to determine what your audiences want at what times. Two out of three.
• Right Message. The Web is not a radio, or TV, or newspaper. There is no better tool out there to segment and target messaging. The nature of your Web site is hierarchical. By design, information funnels from broad to specific. Use this to your advantage. The “About Us” page is about the last content page that should fit all audiences. The rest of your site should be tailored. Every page should reflect specific audience need and next steps.

If I am an alum (with lots of money that I can’t spend on my own), the “Alumni & Friends” page should move me to opportunities to reconnect with the institution, see students in action, and give. If I want to donate today, the next page that I go to should show me all the ways to give and how my money will help. This is not a general page for all audiences, this is specific to me (with gobs and gobs of money) and me alone. You better be telling me features and benefits, or I am gone. If the message isn’t relevant to me, my gobs and gobs of money may not become your gobs and gobs of money.Get rid of departmental structure on your site. Get rid of “About our department”. Get to why I, the site reader, am visiting this page in the first place. Without relevance, the only person you will be talking to is yourself.

The English language is pretty remarkable. By some counts, it is the most diverse know language in the world. But this is can not be verified because it is impossible to know how many words there are at any one time. My Miriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (I’m using the 10th edition, my favorite) alone has over 215,00 different definitions. This is a brief listing of the more than 14,500,000 citations collected by Miriam-Webster editors since the 1890’s.

But the really amazing thing is that out of all of these different words and definitions, no two words mean exactly the same thing. Is a couch and a sofa really the same thing? How about a davenport, divan, or, dare I say it? a love-seat? I can think of only two words that mean exactly the same thing. You think about it and read my answer at the end of this post.

The other amazing thing about language is that many, many words have multiple definitions. Many of these definitions don’t have anything to do with other meanings of the word.

Point, Set, and Match

You might be thinking of tennis after reading the previous group of words. But why? The word “point” has 28 different meanings in my dictionary, “match” has ten, and “set” has a whopping 42 different definitions (see why I love the 10th edition?). These do not include hyphenated words, like “set-apart” or “point-blank”.

If you thought of tennis before, why? Probably because you play it and that series of words is common to the game. If you don’t you could have though it was a sharp tip, hooking a fish, and a companion. The difference is context. But context can also be decided by an individual’s education, life-experience, where they grew up, and what they do.

Here’s the rub: we like to use tags to determine context, but tags are susceptible to many different meanings. Take the word “garter” and my favorite photo-share Web site, Flickr. Search the tag garter and you can get any of the following:

1. a stocking, (safe for work)
2. a snake,
3. a type of knitting,
4. or even an English chivalry order.

So in a “World-Wide” Web, how can we determine context, if the tags we we use to define meaning are themselves open to personal interpretation?

If were all biologists, we could use the pre-difened, Latin-based, internationally recognized system of classification. When I write about Sequoiadendron giganteum everybody knows what I mean because all biologists have agreed to use that term to mean giant redwood.

Somehow, I don’t think using a dead language for a tagging system will work for the general public.

Flickr addresses this problem by using tag “clusters” It basically looks for patterns in the tag cloud and groups similarly tagged images together. I like this system, but it has its limitations. It works well at the macro level, but it falls apart when you want something rather specific.

So what is the best answer? Well, if I knew of a software-based answer, I’d be a gazillionaire by now. We can start, as producers of content, by choosing our tags very carefully. Look up your tags in a dictionary and see if what you think your tag means is the first definition listed (this is the most common usage). Avoid tags that have lots of different meanings. You might also want to include other regional spelling or variations of your tags (i.e. coke, soda, and pop).

But first, get yourself a good dictionary. You know which one I recommend.

answer: flammable and inflammable