They say that fish don’t know what water is because they swim in it. Content is the same. We swim in it and therefore don’t really think about it. After all, we all have reasonable writing skills, which we employ effortlessly in everything from writing a Post It note through to creating a huge website.

But how you employ content online is a very specific harnessing of your writing skills. Users don’t hold it at arm’s length and read it. They are immersed in it as part of a deeply personal, interactive experience. Online content  is the environment for web users. They may not even be aware of it – ‘Oooh look, there’s some content on that page!’ – but without it (just like the fish swimming in water) they couldn’t get where they want to go.

I recently gave an interview to Dave Chaffey about the essential issues a print copywriter has to consider when writing for the web. Dave is an author, consultant and trainer specialising in e-commerce and e-marketing education and guidance. The interview’s now up on his website. Take a look and come back to me with any comments.

Read Effective web copywriting – from copywriting 101 to the latest research (on davechaffey.com / opens in new window)

If you’ve arrived at the CDA Content Lab from my interview on davechaffey.com, please take a look around. You may find the links below particularly useful as they cover the topics mentioned in the interview:

Online language pathways (on main CDA site / opens in new window)

You can find the SMART web copy benchmarking tool in my post on ‘paper phrases’ (this blog / opens in same window)

More on personas and scenarios for web and email (this blog / opens in same window)

Can I also draw you attention to:

Auditing for websites and email (CDA main website / opens in new window)

Web copywriting workshops and training (CDA main website / opens in new window)

All of us here at the lab have a huge respect for Dave and his site is a valuable resource. If I was going to point you to one thing on it would be his e-business book, which will help you develop a robust strategy for improving e-business and IT activities.

Dave Chaffey’s e-business and e-commerce management book (davechaffey.com / opens in new window)

I hate tricksy titles or descriptions. A spade is a spade not an ‘earth and debris relocator’. Often names are designed to make little ideas seem bigger than they are. Some product names are just plain silly, such as the Ford Probe, probably so named because there are still agencies out there who think the best way to market a sporty car is by cross referencing a gent’s tackle. The possible exception to the keep it simple rule is anything to do with chocolate bars, where you can get positive galactic – to wit Milky Way, Galaxy or, my personal favourite, the Mars bar.

But creative agency Hoop Associates have coined a term that I’m warming to, even if it did originally conjure up images of World War II films starring frightfully British actors defusing doodle bugs with nothing more that a pair of plyers and a packet of Players cigarettes.

Hoop use the term UXB, the acronym for Unexploded Bomb and have applied it to User eXperience Branding (UXB). The basic premise is that, online, user experience and brand experience are the same thing. For example, the experience you have when searching for something on an organisation’s website is an experience that strongly influences what you think about that organisation (and its brand). At CDA we talk about usefulness being the language of brand online. The Content Lab’s re-definition of UXB might be Useful eXperience = Brand.

Websites have to be useful because they’re dealing with a very different kettle of fish (or bucket of customers) from a printed brochure or DM campaign. People are passive recipients of this traditional offline messaging. Online users are active and dynamic. They’ve gone online to do something and they will judge all online encounters by how well this ‘do’ is enabled. The start for any website communication is responding to user action. Here in the lab we also talk about reply-focussed communication, the subject of another posting on this blog.

So we like where Hoop are coming from on this one. We’re also aware that there are still plenty of businesses out there who are pouring fortunes into their online presence (even in the current climate) but who have created websites from the perspective of what they want to say and sell and not what users want to read and do. And if that blows up in their faces – they only have themselves to blame.

Read more from CDA about usefulness as the language of brand

And Hoop Associates answer the question – what the heck is UXB?

Right, I’m off for a Mars bar.

If the answer to the above question is ‘yes’, can I say ‘hi’ and thank you for popping in. Take a look around – you’ll find a list of past posts in the right hand column and you can also search our archive.

If you haven’t received a copy of CDA’s enewsletter, It’s Only Words, I suggest you sign up now.

We send it out 3 or 4 times a year and it contains useful information, best practice tips and free downloads of valueto anyone using online communication for business.

Sign up right now and get the latest edition, which speaks about the latest release of our new whitepaper on internet search. The findings impact on the way all businesses should go about creating effective (and profitable) web content.   You can  also download our whitepaper for free AND the latest research dealing with online  customer engagement.

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Businesses are falling over like nine pins. Banks are going to the wall. Currencies are going down the toilet. We’re all going to the hot place in a hand basket. Are we? Nah. But we are going digital.

This is the year that businesses  finally get what digital media is all about. They may be driven there by a desperate desire to save a buck but they’ll stay because the responsiveness of the medium will seduce them into staying.

This is the year that you’ll either reach digital maturity or get relegated to the the box under the bed of life that also contains the 8-track cartride players, video recorders and whalebone corsets. Useful, even pleasureable in their day but now…

Take the new TV ad’ campaign from Confused.com in the UK. This price comparison site is using the ease of use of its new website as the hook for the entire campaign.

You’d think that the hook would have to be price but no. Price is so 2008. Yes, people want to save money but not if they’ve got to wrestle some clunky old website to the ground. Where Confused goes the rest of us will follow.

The campaign uses real customers who record their own You Tube reviews.  Apparently, the new adverts were created in-house in collaboration with Wordley Production Partners. Respect.

The new Confused.com website

Confused.com on YouTube