While recommending someone on LinkedIn, I noticed (not for the first time) that they do a nice job with the hint text in the Written Recommendation field on their form.

What’s cool?

1) It’s helpful but not essential. The description of what you’re supposed to put in the box is appropriately left outside the box, so it doesn’t disappear when you start typing.

2) It uses your recommendee’s name.

3) It’s clearly labeled “Example” and grayed out to reduce confusion with real, pre-entered text.

What could be cooler? It’d be sweet if the example changed based on the relationship you select–right now, “Dom is a detail-oriented manager” whether you reported to Dom, he reported to you, or it’s a different relationship altogether.

Sweet, but not essential. Nice microcopy, LinkedIn.

The big surprise about the brouhaha over that Groupon Super Bowl ad that pivots from threats to Tibetan culture to great deals on tasty Tibetan curry is that anyone’s surprised at what a Groupon commercial would sound like.

A kind description of the tone would be “flip.” Which you’d expect from director Christopher Guest, of course. But do people expect that from Groupon?

People should. Groupon prides themselves on their editorial perspective. Brandon Copple, the managing editor, quotes the CEO saying editorial is “the soul of Groupon.” He goes on: “We have this incredible voice that’s unique. Based on humor, creative but clear, descriptive but concise. There’s nobody out there putting as much muscle and intellectual power into their editorial.”

And those emails are pretty funny, citing cocktails that “keep conversations flowing through even the tensest first date or POW exchange” or BBQ sauce that comes from a bayou under Houston that leads to the word “hungermire.” Not offensive, but definitely flip.

But shortly after I first heard of Groupon, I heard people asking if the editorial really mattered. People wondered if anyone really read the copy, or if they just saw the deal, clicked, and bought.

And … I admit, I rarely actually read an entire email. And I’m a language guy. Half off at Fantagraphics? I’m in! No muscular, creative, descriptive copy necessary.

Then again, competitors like Tippr, LocalTwist, and LivingSocial fill their daily deal email templates with long copy and witty references. They’re not sure which parts of the Groupon formula are essential, either, so better to ape the whole thing for now. (Though they’re not usually as amusing.)

All of which is to say, the Groupon commercials sound a lot like the Groupon emails which sound a lot like the Groupon site. So why the brouhaha?

A few ideas:

• People don’t actually read Groupon’s copy, or they don’t read enough of it to give them an idea of Groupon’s voice that works for parsing that commercial.
• Groupon’s Onionesque take on their deals doesn’t work so well when applied to something more serious than half off a manicure.
• A commercial is a horrible place to try and articulate something as complex as “We’re parodying self-important celebrities but not the causes they believe in while simultaneously reminding you that Groupon saves you big on walking tours.”
• The audience for the Super Bowl is one of the last bastions of broad, mass market appeal, and satire has never played well to a broad mass market. To paraphrase George S. Kaufman, satire is what outrages Twitter on Sunday evening.

Is Groupon (or their ad agency) full of horrible, horrible people who think the death of Tibetan culture is funny? No, but it’s maybe full of people who didn’t quite get that you don’t use the edgier side of your personality when you’re first getting to know someone. Without context to set the tone, lots of people assume you’re a jerk, not someone who’s pretending to be a jerk to illustrate how, deep down, he’s a really great guy.

On September 8, I hosted a panel I’d been plotting since founding the Content Strategy Seattle group last October: Ask the Content Strategist.

My idea: Get a group of professional content strategists together and let people ask them questions. It worked great, and here’s the video to prove it.

The participants: Ariel van Spronsen of POP, Vanessa Casavant of AdoptUsKids, Patty Campbell of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Tiffani Jones Brown of Second and Park and Things That Are Brown. (Scott Pierce provided invaluable behind the scenes techie magic. I moderated.)

Questions included:

• What are the differences between a content strategist and a writer or journalist?
• How do you differentiate between a content sitemap and a IA sitemap? More broadly: Now that we’ve covered the differences between a content strategist and a writer, what are the differences between a content strategist and an information architect?
• What’s the most effective way to explain the importance of content strategy to a team who doesn’t understand why site architecture would come before design?
• Is workflow analysis always a part of content strategy, or is there a way around it?
• What’s the ideal interaction or workflow between content strategy and search engine optimization (SEO)?
• Knowing that content is king, a call to action is imperative, and the company or website will fail without a good content strategy, when do you throw in the towel?

Many thanks to all four panelists, and to the Watercooler for the venue.

And don’t miss next month’s meetup: Margot Bloomstein talks about Waking Up in Seattle: You’re the one that they want.

Flickr gets a lot of (well-earned) kudos for their copy. It’s snappy and fun, clear without being instruction-manual starchy. Flickr is my go-to answer when people ask what sites I think do copy well.

But I often overlook the photo-editing site Picnik, which is a shame. In my head I lump it together with Flickr, because Picnik’s tone is simpatico with Flickr’s. They work together like George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh.

One example: When you’re saving an edited photo to your computer, Picnik gives you 10 choices for JPG compression, labeled 1-10. JPG compression? Sounds boring. But Picnik’s copy gives each selection its own personality, which helps even someone who says “jay-pee-gee” instead of “jay-peg” make an informed decision.

The default file size is 8, which Picnik describes like so:

A sweet spot? Sweet! I love this choice already. But what if I bump it up to 10?

Best quality, huge file size. Hmm. “Huge” is daunting. What if I nudge it down a bit? Say, to 5?

Meh, you say? That’s not so great. But if 5 is “meh,” what are 1 or 2?

The great thing about all of these messages is they use vivid descriptions to make the tradeoffs clear. If I’m not an image pro — and if I’m using Picnik, I’m probably not — “ugly,” “barely recognizable,” and “best” explain image quality and “microscopic,” “teeny tiny,” and “huge” explain file size in a meaningful way. “130 KB” and “1.13 MB” don’t. (Note also that the selection they nudge you towards — 8 — has the most positive description. All nice, no scary.)

The rest of Picnik sounds just as good. They’re a great model for executing a consistent voice from their promo copy to their microcopy.

(Though I wouldn’t have made “sweet spot” into one word.)

As I mentioned in my last post, I went to BarCamp Seattle for the first time. That post featured my talk, “Content Lessons from Comics,” whic went from notions to presentation in 3.5 hours.

It was a rough mishmash of a few ideas that had been kicking around my head, and it was a pretty good talk under those circumstances. (I’ve heard myself quoted twice, which is delightfully odd. Once at a later session, and once by Heidi Miller.)

What would I do differently?

• I’d lead a discussion, rather than give a presentation. One of the best sessions I went to was Kristin Marshall’s “Tits or GTFO: Women in Tech.” She threw out a few ideas and opened the floor, which spent the next half hour in lively debate.
• Or I’d plan a presentation ahead of time. Bruce P. Henry gave my favorite session, “Why Everything Is Late: From Projects to Dinner Parties.” He had slides. Which he knew cold. Nicely done.

Either of those would’ve helped me focus more on the presentations being given — my attention span got vaster after I’d given my presentation.

• One more thing: I’d have gone a little more basic with my presentation. If you weren’t into content as a web discipline, my talk was probably hard to follow. (One question at the end: “Won’t the people who publish those comics want to enforce their copyright?” That’s when I realized I might have gone a little too metaphorical in a literal-heavy crowd.)

You’ll likely see some of the ideas from “Content Lessons from Comics” fleshed out here in later posts. (And I’ll pretend some of the other ideas are non-canonical and never happened in the first place.)

Some of them may even crop up at Seattle InfoCamp in early October. That was another lesson learned from BarCamp: How to participate in an unconference. I haven’t decided yet if I’ll do BarCamp again — I think I’ve got about 48 weeks to decide — but I’ll definitely keep camping somewhere.

Last weekend I went to camp — BarCamp Seattle, that is. I’d never been to an unconference before. One of the rules of BarCamp: The first time you go, you have to present. So I spent the morning half paying attention to other people’s presentations while working on my own, which I wrote out by hand during lunch.

So: Not so much networking, but I did speak for 25 minutes on comics and content. Here are my notes. (Acutal words used: more.) Within the next couple of days I’ll post a more thoughtful consideration of my efforts, because the time scale — commitment to presentation in 3.75 hours — meant I didn’t think all of this through.

Hi.

I’m James Callan, a web writer and content strategist. I’m presenting because it’s my first time at BarCamp and I knew Dylan would call me out if I didn’t.

I founded and help run Content Strategy Seattle.

If you have  a website, you don’t just need content. You already have it. The question is: Is it any good? Is it as good as it could be?

First things first: What is content?

Content is more than just messaging. It’s what your website is about.
Information. Story.
Text, video, audio, photography, illustration.
Things that convey meaning.
It’s what all the technology that goes into creating websites is used for.

In the last couple of years, there’s been lots of conversation about content on the web.

This problem — the relationship between technology and the things the technology is used for — is not unique to the web. It’s not new. It’s been solved before.

Examples:

• Movies. Edison invented the movie camera, and for a while it was interesting to see trains pull into stations and people kissing. Eventually, people wanted more, so you get screenwriters, producers, and directors.
• TV series. Add another problem on top of the movies: Not just a single show, but 20+ in a season. Screenwriters and showrunners plot story arcs for a season.
• Comics. The product of collaboration between writers, illustrators, plotters, publishers.

Side note: A great book for people interested in communicating on the web is Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. Words + pictures = meaning — just like on the web.

Here are five lessons about content that the web can learn from comics.

1. Content vs. not content.

Wolverine.

Cool. Mysterious. Claws and a bad attitude.

But Wolverine by himself is not content. It’s a character sketch. Fan art. Perhaps a figurine. A product of skill, but not content on its own.

Content requires context to be interesting. Wolverine needs to be pitted against Magneto or Sabertooth or a bunch of ninjas.

Lesson: Use your content wisely. People are burning out on Wolverine because Marvel slaps him in anywhere. This kills the core of the character: A mysterious loner can’t be everywhere in the Marvel universe at once and stay true to his essence.

2. Build on your existing content.

Most websites start from stuff that’s already there: Printed material, pitches, ideals, company values, what have you.

Similarly, most comics come with years or decades of backstory. Superman is 70+ years old! They’re up to 24 years of current continuity (since Crisis on Infinite Earths.)

3. Explore alternate universes.

Be true to the essence of your site, but be contextual.

Everyone knows the story of Batman. The essence. But he gets expressed in a bunch of different “universes” targeted to different audiences: The flagship DC comic, Frank Miller’s out-of-continuity The Dark Knight Returns, the TV series starring Adam West, the Tim Burton movies, the Joel Schumacher movies, the several animated series, the Christopher Nolan movies.

Different executions, pitched to different audiences, but expressing the same core idea: Batman.

Another example: Peanuts, the comic strip, vs. the Peanuts characters as shills for MetLife. People get that the characters are the same but the ads aren’t “canonical.”

Use this for your brand. Do it well and audiences don’t get confused.

But do it poorly and people reject it. The transition from the Tim Burton films to the Joel Schumacher films didn’t work; the tone slipped, and though creators tried to pretend the universe was the same, the sensibilities were too far apart.

Another example: Kevin Smith recently wrote a story where Batman revealed that he pissed his pants during his big, splashy Gotham debut. There was fanboy outrage, because although the idea is certainly true to the core of Kevin Smith, it’s not true to the essence of Batman. (Neither that he’d wet himself, nor that he’d tell anyone about it.)

4. Embrace the idea of canon.

Canon (in comics) is the idea that all stories told within a particular universe (or continuity) happen, and that future stories build on them.

But: Bad decisions get ignored. Or retconned — creatively rewritten and undone down the line.

If you put something out there that people hate, or reject, ignore it. Treat it as non-canon. But expect your hard-core fans to bring it up for a loooong time to come.

5. There’s more than one way to bring it all together.

DI all Y: Very nice if you can do it — write, design, architect, code, develop, QA; or write, draw, self-publish — but it doesn’t scale to support an entire publishing line or a major website.

Google is not written by one guy.

Collaboration between content and design can happen in a number of ways along a spectrum — but it has to happen.

One end of the spectrum: The Stan Lee approach.

Lee spitballed and plotted comic book issues with Jack Kirby — for example, the first 100 issues of the Fantastic Four.

Then Kirby went off and laid out the panels and drew it all.

Stan circled back around and filled in word balloons and captions.

Result? Happy accidents, for one — the Silver Surfer started his life as a background doodle that Kirby put in there and Lee thought was a great idea.

The other end of the spectrum: The Alan Moore approach.

Moore turns in extremely detailed scripts that spell out specific contents in each panel — he’s got a vision of the book in his head that goes beyond big-picture elements.

The artist (Dave Gibbons for Watchmen, Eddie Campbell for From Hell, etc.) is free to invent within those tight parameters.

Final result: Distinct visions from each artist.

Lee is very hands off, Moore is very hands on, but they’ve both got their hands in the game. The same is true for the web: Content needs to be involved in the process, or you end up with doodling.

“Do you know of any classes or anything on content strategy for beginners?” a friend of mine asked recently. “I’m interested in learning more but don’t really know where to start.”

I didn’t (and still don’t) have recommendations for classes — especially not DIY content strategy. But I was able to recommend the resources that I’ve come across in the past year. And she’s lucky — a year ago, I hadn’t heard of content strategy, so I wasn’t even able to articulate the question.

The resources I recommended:

• “Content-tious Strategy,” Jeffrey MacIntyre‘s article in the Dec. 16 A List Apart.
• “The Discipline of Content Strategy,” Kristina Halvorson‘s article in the exact same issue. (Dec. 16 is the day I fired up my RSS reader and soon afterward said “So that’s what I’ve been trying to articulate for the past few months! Content strategy!”)
• “The Content Strategist as Digital Curator,” Erin Scime’s article in ALA from Dec. 8 this year.
• Rachel Lovinger’s article “Content Strategy: The Philosophy of Data” deserves mention for many reasons. But what I love most is the phrase “content strategy is to copywriting as information architecture is to design.” That’s the money quote so far as I’m concerned, but that could just be because I’m an often-frustrated copywriter.
• If those pique your interest, Kristina Halvorson’s book Content Strategy for the Web is the next step.

I posed my friend’s question on Twitter, as well, where I was reminded of two more excellent resources:

• The Content Strategy Knol kicked off by Jeffrey MacIntyre
• Karen McGrane’s presentation “Content is King: or, if you don’t have a content strategy, you’re living in a fairy tale,” which includes the brilliant art gallery analogy.

If you’re still interested, find a Meetup near you. If there isn’t one, do what I did in Seattle: Start one up.