MASSIVEGOOD home page

I recently completed work on the launch of MASSIVEGOOD.

It’s a new way of giving. You can click a $2 “micro-contribution” to fight HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis and improve maternal health every time you book a flight, hotel or rent a car through most travel agents and online travel sites in the US and Canada. It also uses the power of social media (Facebook and Twitter) to spread the word.

I was part of the team that developed the website. I contributed to the content strategy, copywriting and social media activation. It’s a fascinating approach to fundraising and I wish them much success.

One of the corrections presented a real problem. It added a sentence that ended with “…permet de travailler à la façon d’un certain monsieur Jourdain qui faisait de la prose sans le savoir.” It you don’t know already it’s a reference to one of Moliere’s famous plays, “The Bourgeois Gentleman,” in which Sir Jourdain discovers that he has been speaking prose all his life, and didn’t even know it.

And that’s the problem. Not everyone knows who Mr. Jourdain or even Moliere is. Inserting a reference like this is showing off. It doesn’t help comprehension or clarity. It’s an inside joke, a wink between people in the know. To make matters worse, it is more accessible to French speakers (theoretically) than non-French speakers, which is out of place in a multinational corporation, even if it does have French roots.

So I decided to adapt the English to reflect the spirit of the correction, while getting rid of the reference. I also suggested fixing the French version. The client wasn’t too happy with the disappearance of Mister Jordain, and insisted that Monsieur stay in French, which means the sentence is clearer now in English than it is in French. Tant pis…

A couple frantic calls to customer support (my penny) revealed that you can’t consult reservations that include a train ticket and hotel reservation. My reservation was in the system, but I can’t see it.

But instead of telling me this, the error message says the reservation is cancelled.

Just how many phone calls from customers like me are they going to field before they change the 10-word message? Is it a ploy to get me to call their customer service number (do they split the profits with the phone company)? I don’t know. But what I do know is that I’ll think twice before booking a hotel along with my next train ticket.

Everyone has an opinion on whether Apple is handling it correctly or not.

But what I find fascinating is how similar the reports are to the accusations made back in 2005 about  faulty cruise control systems. That year several drivers said that their mild-mannered Renault family sedans mysteriously transformed into uncontrollable cruise missiles. Braking, cutting the ignition, pulling the handbrake wouldn’t stop the car. These problems only seem to have happened in France. And oddly the news reports just faded from view. No headline court case. No class action suit.

Fast forward to 2009. Exploding iPhones are everywhere in the news in France. the government has launched an investigation. So has the European Commission. But why isn’t it happening in other countries. The reports coming out of Britiain and the States mention overheating but not exploding screens.

I’m eager to see how this plays out.

Of course, this isn’t a real story. This kind of thing never happens with print. Now re-read the paragraph, substituting “IT department” for “printer” and “web site” for “brochure,” and you’ll understand why I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about IT departments.

I’ve been working recently on several internal website projects directed at employees and involving content and content strategy. Needless to say I’ve been spending a fair amount of time with corporate IT. I’ve decided that they are the dotted-line rainmaker of any project. I don’t care what anyone says. The best content strategies, the best wireframes,  the best functionalities, the best site structures can all wither and die in seconds when IT utters those fateful worlds: we can’t do that.

And they always do, or at least they always seem to. I fantasize about IT guys saying: “That looks great. It’s about time someone changed the site. Sure, it’s a departure from what we’re used to doing, but times have changed and so have users. We’d be proud to be associated with such a great web site.”

Instead they throw up road blocks and bandy around jargon to scare project sponsors. They explain that they can’t stream video. That they can’t provide a comments function. That they can’t embed objects. That page templates are coded in stone. That the site map can’t be changed. They wield the list of no-nos like a whip, until we relent and agree to scale back the project and our ambitions.

But if you listen closely to the whistling of the whip you can pick out something else. First, you can hear hidden pleas for recognition. Maintaining an IT system is a thankless job to begin with. Why would they gladly accept the hassle of implementing a change, espcially when they weren’t involved in the project from the beginning? Also, you can hear nervous discomfort. Often the IT department sees the intranet as a library, not as a community center. It’s not a noisy gathering place, it’s a quiet repository of information. It’s as if the library’s value lay in the Dewey decimal system, not the ideas contained in the books. When they say “we can’t do that” they’re actually saying “we’re not comfortable doing that and we don’t see why we should.”

So on my next project I’ve made a promise to myself to get IT involved right away (even if they don’t want too). Also, we’re going to stop seeing them as printers — and hopefully they’ll  stop seeing themselves as librarians.

I’ve been working on a big website redesign project that has got me thinking a lot about the the role of words in user interface design. Words are often an afterthought for designers, but they can help simplify an interface.

Case in point, this label that I spotted on a water heater in the men’s room. It’s hard to read but says: si le temoin ne clignote plus contacter votre installateur, which translates roughly to: if the light is no longer blinking contact your installer.

Huh? As far as I’m concerned, blinking is unclear. Like a flashing yellow traffic light, does it mean stop or proceed with extra caution or what? What the photo doesn’t show is the color of the LED: green. So is blinking green better or worse than full green? And will it turn other colors?

If they could only afford one LED, I would have suggested a red one that is default off with a sticker that says: red light=contact your installer.

Someone, somewhere is wasting money on Google Adwords. This appeared on my browser this morning. I don’t think I’m the target.

The first was the word “versatility,” which is commonly used in English and is a highly sought after trait in new recruits (it was a HR brochure). Well, the client  wouldn’t approve it because of what the same word means in French: fickleness. Despite my reassurances, they asked me to change it.

The second was “spree.” I used it to describe a shopping trip that was the prize of a contest. The agency asked me to replace it with something that would be “easier to understand” (for them, I guess). Thankfully, a couple links to some magazine articles featuring the word in the headlines seems to have convinced them that a synonym won’t be necessary after all.

These hiccups reminded me of the fact that no matter how fluent you are in a second language, it will always be slightly foreign (as someone who learned French late in life, I know exactly where my clients are coming from). But I highly recommend not letting your fear of the unknown water down your copy. To get strong writing you have to be willing to let the writer use language to its fullest. And sometimes this requires you to work with words that are outside of your comfort zone.

I won’t because what struck me the hardest was the realization that I hadn’t visited a brand website for personal use in weeks. This was a mini-epiphany.

Sure, I spend a lot of time on the web. A lot of it for work. A good portion for fun. I read. I watch. Tweet and facebook. Shop and catch up with friends. Publish and share. Learn and waste time. But one thing I don’t do, at least not often, is visit a brand’s website.

This got me  thinking: “why?” and “so what?”

Why? Although I’m surrounded by brands who spend wads of money to attract my attention (and some of them do) I don’t go to their website. I do however read what others are saying about this new product or that new service. I may even buy what they’re selling, but through someone else’s website.

I took the time to list, as best I could, everything I’d done on the web recently. The list added another wrinkle. I had in fact visited parts of a few brand sites. I’d bought a computer through a manufacturer’s store. Ditto for an airline ticket. Reserved a rental car. Consulted a train schedule. Looked at a subway map. I’d consulted a tech support forum. These were all sections/services of brand websites that I’d gone to by typing in the url, selected a bookmark or googling. I hadn’t gone to any of them through the front door. I hadn’t been subjected to the marketing message that client’s agonize about on the home page.

So what? How far can I extrapolate on my personal experience? Do other people, other demographics spend more time soaking up the marketing stuff? What does it mean for the marketing content that I write for my clients? Should it command the lion’s share of their attention? Does a brand’s presence on the web boil down to being a service or a subject of conversation, with everything else being just fluff?