Good website communication hinges on the information flowing from the right initiation point.

Just set aside transaction communications – ‘Your sofa is now in stock’ – for a moment. Nearly all marketing and business messaging was, traditionally, company initiated. A new product launch or brochure, a seasonal sale, a press release or case study… An organisation has something to say and sends out its message. This is the traditional initiation point for brand communication. It also assumed that the recipient wanted to receive the communication in question.

But website communication turns this on its head. It is customer initiated. People (punters, customers, web users) set out online ‘to do’ something – book a holiday, buy a book, donate to charity, acquire knowledge. We mention the latter 2 as the term customer initiated communication applies just as much to those not looking to buy something.

By its very nature, this type of communication requires a different treatment. It must be reply-focussed. Imagine sitting down to eat with a group of people and asking the person on your left to ‘pass the salt’. You expect them to reply, even if the reply is less than helpful: ‘Sorry, I have short arms and can’t reach it.’ You don’t expect them to say: ‘I have a labrador called Bert’ or ‘My girlfriend is in Dubai’. Communication is only satisfactory when it follows a logical sequence. (Rap lyrics not withstanding.)

‘Aah’, I hear you say, ‘how do I know what the customer has said, so we can make the right reply?’

Well, just by asking that question you’ve passed Reply-focussed communication Elementary grade 1. Simply asking it enables you to view what you’re saying online – and how you say it – from a more helpful perspective. Add to that what you know about your customers through data and journey tracking, and your on your way.

Email can be company initiated, but even with email you can’t just use a traditional offline approach. But that’s another post.

Let me see… where shall I start? Well the financial services sector is in meltdown. Banks are going to the wall and if Radio 4′s Today programme is right, senior American politicians are on their knees (well, at least one). In the UK everyone is waiting to see how far the fall-out will spread. From sub-prime mortgages to… house prices, supermarket profits, bankruptcy amongst tour operators, the price of vanilla icecream? Throw the rising fuel prices and global political instability into the mix and what have you got? The latest Mad Max movie.

The question is, why write about here? The CDA Content Lab is all about putting online content under the microscope. Why would a recession interest us?

The obvious answer might appear to be money. Sorry to bring up the ‘m’ word but when banks catch cold the whole world sneezes. The good news is that web and email are cost effective channels when you’re marketing spend has just been ripped to shreds by a Finance Director whose got Bradford and Bingley shares in his childrens’ school fees portfolio. Okay, that’s the business side of things dealt with.

But what really rocks our boat is how all this doom and gloom may be influencing the way we communicate and engage with audiences. This is particularly pertinent online where our execution of day to day tasks can be accomplished cheek by jowl with an RSS feed to our desk top announcing the latest crisis. We can dip into Tesco online and find ourselves simultaneously drawn to the BBC for a news fix.

Take a look at the first paragraph of this post and it’s riddled with nuclear, revolutionary and post-apocalyptic analogies. We use analogies to aid comprehension. It allows us to talk about things to people in a way that will allow them to understand, even if they have no direct experience of what’s being discussed. It also straddles the mental space between language and thought. Not only am I giving you terms of reference so you can understand what I’m talking about but you also get a pretty good idea of how I feel about it.

Analogies (along with first cousins metaphor and simile) also allow us to visualise things and that get’s us into really interesting territory where the web is concerned. The web is a very visual medium. Even when we’re reading online and we actually do very little of that. We’re ‘looking’ at web pages as if they were maps rather than documents; designed to take us onto the next leg of our journey, or confirm that we’ve arrived.

When we see something in a new way we tend to store it in a new way. So all this talk of doom and gloom is having a deep semantic influence. Will we notice this in the language we use and the language that’s used to comunicate back to us? Hold that thought?

Of course, we can’t go back and rewrite books and brochures to reflect this. But the internet – that’s a whole different bag. I’ve certainly been reviewing our online communication looking for words that might inadvertently trigger gloom or hesitancy. This blog aside, I’m avoiding all flippant use of the apocalyptic.