Seriously, what's so wrong with "click here"?

Image via 365psd

Over the past week, several publications and aggregators I follow have been ripping into the practice of using "Click here" as hyperlink text. This struck me as a little odd--"Click here" has been verboten in web design practice for as long as I can remember. I'd hardly consider it a buzz-worthy subject.

And is "Click here" really so bad as to warrant repeat hazings? I certainly avoid them myself, but I was never fully convinced that the alternatives I came with was much better.

Responsive web content case study: gov.uk

One of the websites my colleagues and I have been paying attention to is the new UK government beta website. Clients have been asking us to think about what design lessons we can draw from it.

This is where I go crazy with infographics

While on a current project, I was asked to find opportunities to include infographics into the content mix. Being new to this whole infographics thing, I wondered if this print-medium artifact, which has really gotten popular this past year, really worked on screen from the usability perspective. I decided to do some research on Google to find out.

User expectations for government content

The Content Marketing Institute has just published helpful article on content development for government entities. If you are a inhouse content developer with a governmental organisation, or if you have a government client, you will find many useful tips inside the article.

This reminds me that I ought talk a bit about my current project: alpha.ecitizen.sg.

Surprise: When the message is not the medium

The idea of hiding features for users to discover is common to both content and platform, but the execution is quite different. In software, an easter egg must be well-hidden. In content, they must also be hidden--but in plain sight.

Who needs a lede?

Copyblogger founder Brian Clark has a classic piece on how to open your article with a bang. Those tips in his blog are basic strategies that belong in every writer's toolkit. (Or at least, we should all know them so that we can avoid the cliches).

They can be summarised as follows:

• the Question Opener ("What's a good way to start articles?")
• the Anecdote Opener ("'I'm really tired of this,' said Robert Scoble as this interview started.")
• the "Picture this" Opener ("Imagine: Wouldn't it be grand if all your readers paid you a dollar?")
• the Shocking Statistic Opener ("Study: 95% of your readers are bored")
• the Analogy Opener: ("What does your dog and my fruit basket have in common? Answer: Nothing.")

I happen to hold a somewhat contrarian view on the subject of ledes. I don't think blog content needs to have ledes at all.

The 'factory model' vs the social business

For some reason, I have been roped in KM (knowledge management) projects in almost every organisation I've ever worked in. All of them have failed. (No fault of mine, I swear.)

Years later, when Web 2.0 came around and the Intranet-based wiki became fashionable, it felt like déjà vu all over again.

It's recently occurred to me why social media hasn't taken off in the enterprise space. It's because of the factory model.

The influence of Influence on your bottomline

That new algorithm that Klout has just launched has routed the Klout scores of many users (including mine), creating a furore among many people. My naive reading is that people are declaring Klout is useless to them, not because its utility or lack thereof, but because the lowered score bruised their egos. If the change had created an inflation of scores instead, my guess is that opinion would have been much more divided.

The effectiveness of Klout aside, I think a large part of this anger is rooted in a persistent misunderstanding of the difference between public relations, influence, marketing, and sales.

Influence in social media is primarily a measure of relationships between peers. Specifically, it's a measure of the flow of ideas, an indication of whom is spreading ideas to whom. It's nothing to do with sales performance.

Social media influence will only affect your business directly if you're in the business of idea commerce: for example, if you're a consultant. If you're pushing products, social media influence is at best a rough proxy of brand awareness, right there at the rim of the the so-called sales funnel. And then, it's only if your market has a very narrow sales funnel--both buyer and seller are within the same tight circle, so that sales driven strongly by your reputation in the community.

On the other hand, if you're in a commoditised business (say, you run a small cafe) and new business relies entirely on awareness and people finding you, Klout is pretty much meaningless.As Marshall Kirkpatrick recently observed, Klout can be a great tool for finding people. But that's exactly it: yes, it's useful for finding people--not products.

Use the right tools for the right purpose. And stop waving that e-peen around.

Stop the sorry waste of ink

Have you ever read brochures being handed out at booths in exhibitions and conventions? Typcially, they are

• filled with copy on product features
• packed with "value propositions" that are nothing more than concatenations of buzzwords
• plastered with aspirational pictures of happy people at home or at work. Or with exciting, industry-specific stock pictures, say, photos of racks of servers.

I have no idea how effective these brochures are, even though I've even written some of them myself. I do know that a lot of them are left in bins, venue washrooms, and on the exhibition floor. I also don't really know why we continue to produce them. But I do know that our sales forces continue to ask for them.

The sympathetic design of Steve Jobs

Of all the obituaries on Steve Jobs, Slate published the one that I wished I wrote.

Join the Google+ tribe

Now that I've used Google+ for three months, I'm finally at the point where I feel comfortable writing about the social platform. I'd also like to make a case for why you would want to use Google+, and what you should use it for.