This is your brain on the Web: Constant problem solving (To click or not to click?) and divided attention (You’ve got mail) lead to cognitive overload.

DRIVEN TO DISTRACTION: Online multitasking makes it hard to think.

And that makes it harder for readers to concentrate when reading your copy online.

In fact, a 2005 study by the Institute of Psychiatry at the University of London showed that online multitasking temporarily lowers your IQ more than smoking marijuana does. (And is not nearly as entertaining a way to get stupid, from what I’ve read.)

Now, where was I going with this?

Oh, yes.

In The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, Nicholas Carr surveys the research on Web brain. Among the findings:

Links limit learning.

More than 20 years of research shows that links cause Web visitors to:

• Click instead of concentrating. Readers of hypertext often ended up clicking “through pages instead of reading them carefully,” according to a 1989 study.
• Click instead of finding. Participants in a 1990 study who searched for the answers to a series of questions in print outperformed those who searched Web pages.
• Click instead of comprehending. The more links included in a passage, the less people understood, found a 1999 study by Erping Zhu. That’s because readers have to devote more of their brain power to evaluating the links and deciding whether to click them.
• Click instead of remembering. Readers of hypertext often “could not remember what they had and had not read” in a 1990 experiment.

Bottom line: There’s “very little support that hypertext will lead to an enriched experience of the text,” according to a 2005 survey of research (PDF) by Diana DeStefano and Jo-Anne LeFevre, psychologists with the Centre for Applied Cognitive Research at Canada’s Carleton University.

Indeed, they wrote, “the increased demands of decision-making and visual processing in hypertext impaired reading performance [especially when compared to print]. Many features of hypertext resulted in increased cognitive load and thus may have required working memory capacity that exceeded readers’ capabilities.”

Reach readers online.

So how do you write blog posts, Web pages, email messages, status updates and other copy that get the word out online?

• Get to the point faster: Don’t expect readers to read even the first paragraph to figure out where you’re going.
• Chunk it up: Break your message into more, shorter Web pages.
• Write tight: Use all of the tools you use to condense copy for print, but use them more aggressively online.
• Lift your ideas off the screen: Make your copy easy to scan with microcontent, or online display copy.
• Cut the fluff: Drop the adjectives, adverbs, hyperbole and other blah-blah.
• Make it friendly: Engage readers with a conversational, me-to-you voice, not an off-putting, stiff corporate style.

Reach readers in print.

And don’t overlook print as your medium of choice. Writing a thought piece on the state of the industry, the CEO’s vision for the future or the company’s five-year plan? Put it on paper.

Sorry, what was I saying?

Oh, yeah. The way the Web distracts and overtaxes your readers’ brains makes it no place for long, complex messages. So deliver ideas in print, nuggets of data online.

Reach readers online

Want to master the art of writing for the Web?

• Get it off your desk: Invite Ann’s team in to write Web copy for your organization.
• Polish staff skills: Bring Ann to your organization for a Web writing workshop.
• Boost your own abilities: Work with Ann to polish your Web writing skills with one-on-one writing coaching sessions. Or find out about Ann’s next microcontent webinar.
• Learn more: Read Ann’s Web writing learning tools.
• Join the club: Find dozens of Web writing tipsheets on RevUpReadership.com.

Jakob Nielsen recently redesigned a mobile website to make its story index more usable.

DROP/ADD On mobile indexes, if it will help the visitor decide whether to click, add it. If it won't help the visitor decide whether to click, cut it.

Now you can steal his approaches for your own mobile site:

1. Add essential information.

If it will help the visitor decide whether to click, add it. Nielsen added:

• Full headlines. Don’t truncate them.
• Decks, aka one-sentence summaries under the headlines. Decks help non-mobile visitors use story lists, too. So don’t drop the deck.
• Photos instead of date icons. Who cares when the story was published? Besides, the photo gives information about the story that the date does not.
• A label instead of a triangle to show the drop-down menu.

2. Drop non-essential information.

If it won’t help the visitor decide whether to click, cut it. Nielsen cut:

• Bylines. Only the writer and the writer’s mother care who wrote it.
• Publication dates. Nielsen used these only as dividers between stories published on a certain day. “The story date is not worth the substantial screen real estate it occupies,” Nielsen writes. “In general, it’s good to question any mobile design that repeats the same information multiple times; such redundancy is probably a poor use of highly limited screen space.”
• Categories and tags. They were too small to hit reliably and didn’t add helpful information.
• Triangle button to tap for a drop-down article summary. Why not just publish the summary?

3. Make important information more prominent.

What else can you do to help mobile visitors find the stories they want to read? Take a tip from Nielsen and:

• Highlight key words in the headline.
• Make touch points bigger. Make the entire story tile clickable instead of just the headline. That will help you solve the “fat finger” syndrome.
• Show more story tiles without making visitors scroll.
• Add more space between the navigation bar options so users are less likely to tap the wrong one.

These approaches are essential to helping visitors use your information through a mobile peephole. Many of them would also make a standard site more usable as well.

Reach readers online

Want to master the art of writing for the Web?

• Get it off your desk: Invite Ann’s team in to write Web copy for your organization.
• Polish staff skills: Bring Ann to your organization for a Web writing workshop.
• Boost your own abilities: Work with Ann to polish your Web writing skills with one-on-one writing coaching sessions. Or find out about Ann’s next microcontent webinar.
• Learn more: Read Ann’s Web writing learning tools.
• Join the club: Find dozens of Web writing tipsheets on RevUpReadership.com.

Should I stay or should I go?

HOW LONG IS TOO LONG? Web visitors decide whether to stay or go in 10 seconds or less.

That’s a question your Web visitors ask themselves every second they spend on your page.

Now new research shows that if you can get your visitors to spend 10 seconds on your Web page, they’ll likely stay longer. And the longer they stay, writes usability expert Jakob Nielsen, the longer they’ll stay.

Web pages age ‘negatively.’

For the research, Chao Liu and colleagues from Microsoft Research crunched the numbers on page visit durations for more than 200,000 Web pages over nearly 10,000 visits. They learned that the amount of time users spend on a Web page follows a “Weibull distribution.”

Easy for them to say.

Weibull is a reliability-engineering model that’s used to analyze the time it takes components to fail. Given that it’s worked fine until now, the model says, it will likely fail at X time.

Most Web pages age “negatively.” That is, the longer visitors stay, the longer they’re likely to stay.

The 10-second test

Visitors decide whether they’re on the right Web page fast:

• In the first 10 seconds, they make a critical stay-or-go decision. They’re most likely to leave during that first, fast glance at the page.
• But if they do stay, visitors look around a bit more. In the next 20 seconds — their first 30 seconds total on the page — they’re still quite likely to leave.
• After 30 seconds, though, the curve becomes fairly flat. Visitors continue to leave a page, but much more slowly than they did during the first 30 seconds.

If you can get people to stay for 30 seconds, there’s a good chance that they’ll stay longer — “often 2 minutes or more, which is an eternity on the Web,” Nielsen writes.

“How long will users stay on a Web page before leaving? It’s a perennial question, yet the answer has always been the same: Not very long,” Nielsen writes. “To gain several minutes of user attention, you must clearly communicate your value proposition within 10 seconds.”

Reach readers online

Want to master the art of writing for the Web?

• Get it off your desk: Invite Ann’s team in to write Web copy for your organization.
• Polish staff skills: Bring Ann to your organization for a Web writing workshop.
• Boost your own abilities: Work with Ann to polish your Web writing skills with one-on-one writing coaching sessions. Or find out about Ann’s next microcontent webinar.
• Learn more: Read Ann’s Web writing learning tools.
• Join the club: Find dozens of Web writing tipsheets on RevUpReadership.com.

When The Washington Post ran an article about Conan O’Brien’s refusal to accept a later time slot on NBC, the original, print headline said:

“Better never than late”

The Web version:

“Conan O’Brien won’t give up ‘Tonight Show’ time slot
to make room for Jay Leno”

That’s what happens when writers optimize headlines for Google. We move proper nouns, keywords and full names to the front of the headline, crowding out wit and whimsy.

But maybe it doesn’t have to be that way. Here are five ways to work around the restrictions of Web heads:

1. Write two heads.

Put the literal, search- and click-friendly headline on the content page. Place a feature headline on your own homepage or sub-indexes.

2. Use your title tag and URL.

Your title tag gets more Google juice than your Web headline. So put your literal headline in the title tag and put the feature headline on the content page. The New York Times, for instance, sometimes packs keywords into its title tags, but not into the page headline.

3. Use your URL.

Your URL also gets more Google juice than your Web headline. So put your literal headline in the URL and put the feature headline on the content page. The New York Times also uses the URL, but not the page headline, for keywords.

TAG IT AND BAG IT Put your search terms in the page title and URL and use a feature head on the Web page. If it's good enough for The New York Times …

4. Use the deck.

You could also use the headline for the literal story, the deck for the creative or benefits-focused one.

• Literal headline: [Topic word] does what
• Benefits-oriented deck: You benefit how
• Creative deck: Clever wordplay or twist of phrase

5. Be witty and clear.

You’re brilliant, right? Why not write a headline that’s both creative and telling? The pros are pulling it off by writing:

• A literal kicker with a clever headline. “Witty headlines: Black and white and dead all over,” writes corporate communicator Kevin Allen.
• A topic word subject with a clever verb phrase. “Meteor Impact Theory Takes a Hit,” writes a Wired copyeditor. And a Kansas City Business Journalwriter comes up with “Mutual of Omaha Bank will deposit full-service branch in Kansas City.”

Granted, there’s no danger that readers will injure themselves in a laughing fit over these headlines, but these writers do manage to make their Web heads both literal and creative.

Reach readers online

Want to master the art of writing for the Web?

• Get it off your desk: Invite Ann’s team in to write Web copy for your organization.
• Polish staff skills: Bring Ann to your organization for a Web writing workshop.
• Boost your own abilities: Work with Ann to polish your Web writing skills with one-on-one writing coaching sessions. Or find out about Ann’s next microcontent webinar.
• Learn more: Read Ann’s Web-writing learning tools. And get free writing tips every month when you subscribe to our e-zine.
• Join the club: Get the whole story in the latest issue of Rev Up Readership. And find dozens of Web writing tipsheets on RevUpReadership.com.

Last time I visited Laura Wylie — aka the most adorable 5-year-old on the planet — she said, “Aunt Ann, if I don’t see you more often, I might forget to miss you.”

Turns out your email subscribers feel the same way. Consider these numbers, from viral marketing scientist Dan Zarrella’s recent email marketing study:

• Send your audience members one email a month, and you’ll see a click-through rate of, on average, about 6 percent.
• Increase that number to three emails a month, and the average click-through rate drops to about 4 percent.
• Make it 29 emails a month, and what do you think happens? Nothing. That’s right, the average click-through rate stays at about 4 percent.

HIT SEND The more links you have, the higher your click-through rate, according to a study of nearly 10 billion emails.

So why not send more emails? Zarrella asks.

Sending more email probably won’t hurt and probably will help, Zarrella learned in his study. In fact, unsubscribe rates actually go up if you send only one or two emails a month.

“People’s favorite email is the one they’ve been waiting for,” he says. Increase that expectation, he suggests, by sending more emails.

So much for “How can I miss you if you don’t go away?”

About the study

For his email marketing study, Zarrella:

• Analyzed more than 9.5 billion — yes, with a “b” — emails from Mail Chimp, covering every language and time zone.
• Asked people how they used email in three focus groups.
• Surveyed several hundred people about their email habits.

Learn more:

• Watch Zarrella’s Science of Email Marketing webinar.
• Read the tweets at #EmailSci.
• Sign up to beta test MessageGrader, HubSpot’s new email analyzer.

Reach readers online

Want to get the word out on the Web?

• Get it off your desk: Bring Ann’s team in to write Web copy for your organization.
• Polish staff skills: Bring Ann to your organization for a Web writing workshop.
• Boost your own abilities: Work with Ann to polish your Web writing skills with one-on-one writing coaching sessions. And find out about Ann’s upcoming webinars on writing for the Web and social media.
• Learn more: Read Ann’s Web writing learning tools. And get free writing tips every month when you subscribe to our e-zine.
• Join the club: Get the whole story in the latest issue of Rev Up Readership. And find dozens of tipsheets on reaching readers online at RevUpReadership.com.

Keep ’em short

Want your release to get posted on Google News?

Make the headline 65 to 70 characters. That’s the best length if you want your news release to show up on the portal, according to a study by Schwartz Communications.

Despite Google’s preferences, 77 percent of the 16,000 Business Wired releases Schwartz reviewed for the study exceeded that recommendation. The study also found that:

• The average headline was 123 characters long.
• About 18 percent of releases had headlines of 65 characters or fewer.
• Some 2 percent of releases had headlines longer than 300 characters.
• One headline was longer than 1,000 characters.

One more reason to watch your character count: Most search engines display only the first 65 words of a Web headline. Make yours longer, and it could be truncated in search results.

Reach bloggers, journalists and readers

Want to deliver successful media relations pieces?

• Get it off your desk: Invite Ann’s team to handle a PR writing or editing project.
• Polish staff skills: Bring Ann to your organization for a PR writing workshop.
• Boost your own abilities: Work with Ann to improve your PR writing skills in one-on-one writing coaching. Or find out about Ann’s next Anatomy of a News Release 2.0 webinar.
• Learn more: Study Ann’s Anatomy of a Release, Pitch and E-mailed Release toolkit. And get free writing tips every month when you subscribe to our e-zine.
• Join the club: Get the full story in the latest issue of Rev Up Readership. And find dozens of advanced PR writing tipsheets on RevUpReadership.com.

___

Sources: “Short rules: Most Press Release Headlines too Long for Google News,” BusinessWired, Oct. 26, 2010

“Why Your Release Might Not Make It In to Google News,” BusinessWired, March 24, 2010

Online visitors scrutinize some photos and ignore others. So how do you post images that get attention on the Web?

Make sure your images are content, counsels “king of usability” Jakob Nielsen — not decoration.

Avoid ‘visual bloat’

HUMAN RESOURCES: Web visitors are attracted to photos of real people, but not stock or generic shots, says Jakob Nielsen, "king of usability.

Online, readers are looking for two kinds of images, Nielsen says:

• Product photos that help visitors buy
• People photos that show visitors who’s behind the organization or message

What about photos that just illustrate the idea or message? Cut that fluff. Anyone who’s studied online images knows that people are looking for facts, not pretty pictures, on the Web.

“Visual bloat continues to annoy users,” Nielsen says. So:

• Avoid stock photos of generic people. Don’t use photos as filler or to “jazz up” a page. ”On the Web, jazzed-up = ignored,” Nielsen says.
• Use product photos to help visitors buy. In one study, visitors intensely studied thumbnails of bookcases on the Pottery Barn site, but ignored thumbnails of flat-screen TVs on the Amazon site. Why? ”The TV photos are of no help in deciding between the products,” Nielsen says. “A guy in a canoe vs. a football player? What, because I watch more football than watersports, I’ll buy the TV showing a football player?”
• Offer big photos when asked. When users click to see a larger photo, it should be at least twice as big as the original. Most are just 20 percent larger, Nielsen says. That’s why “inadequate photo enlargement” ranks on his list of top 10 Web design mistakes.

Get the word out on the Web

Want to reach distracted visitors online?

• Rev Up Readership members: Read the whole article.
• Invite Ann’s team in to handle a Web writing or editing project.
• Bring Ann to your organization for a Web writing workshop.
• Work with Ann to polish your skills with one-on-one writing coaching.
• Get dozens of tipsheets on writing better Web copy on RevUpReadership.com.
• Study Ann’s Reaching Readers Online system.
• Find out about Ann’s next Web writing workshop or webinar.

Two minutes and seven seconds.

That’s the average length of time people spend viewing videos on Twitter, according to “Online Video Best Practices” (PDF), a new study by TubeMogul, Brightcove and DynamicLogic.

The researchers analyzed the average viewing time of more than 100 million random video streams on social networks and search engines. Among the takeaways:

1. Avoid the 2-minute mark.

Twitter was the only video source that broke the 2-minute mark. Average viewing times were:

• 1:54 on Yahoo!
• 1:50 on Facebook
• 1:27 on Google
• 1:09 on Bing

2. Avoid the 1-minute mark.

Talk about short attention span theater. According to a study by Visible Measures:

• Almost 20 percent of viewers abandon an online video after 10 seconds.
• More than 40 percent abandon it after a minute.

Visible Measures studied the abandonment rate of 40 million videos during 7 billion viewings.

Want visitors to finish your video? Keep it short.

Tip: You might also advertise your short video’s length — (1:15), for instance — to encourage viewership.

3. Don’t surprise friends, followers and fans with large files.

Use abbreviations like PDF, VID and PPT to identify links to large downloads.

4. Time it right.

The shelf life of online videos has dropped dramatically since 2008. Your video will get most of its views in the first week. So your time your release right and publicize your video fast.

5. Consider your objectives.

Choose repurposed TV spots for awareness, according to “Online Video Best Practices,” and made-for-Web videos for persuasion.

Targeting young adults? Go with custom content. Some 2.8 percent of 18- to 34-year-olds planned to purchase the product after viewing made-for-Web content.

Write for social media

Would you like to learn more ways to make your blog postings, tweets and other status updates more relevant, valuable and interesting to your readers? If so, please join me at PRSA’s Feb. 22 webinar, “Write for Social Media.” You’ll learn how to:

• Use the 70-20-10 rule for engaging your followers, plus other tips for making sure your status updates are welcome guests, not intrusive pests.
• Pass the “who cares?” test and four other techniques for becoming a resource, not a bore, on social media.
• Get retweeted and liked. Learn a dozen steps for expanding your influence and reach on Facebook and Twitter.
• Tweet like the FBI. Write dramatic, compelling status updates that draw followers and get clicks.
• Make your posts personable. There’s a reason they call it “social” media.
• Tweak your tweets. Get your message across in 140 characters or less. Plus, learn how to make 140 characters go further — and when you must come in under the character limit.

Keep up with all of my webinars.

___

Sources: “Twitter Video Streams Watched for 2 Mins,” Marketing Charts, Nov. 11, 2010

Alex Mindlin, “Drilling Down: Short Attention Spans for Web Videos,” The New York Times, Oct. 11, 2010

When it comes to link writing, “click here” is so 1996. We’re talking 14.4k modems, a CompuServe account and the Spice Girls singing “Wannabe” on your portable electronic device, aka a Sony Discman.

PARTY LIKE IT'S 1996: Remember Dolly, the sheep, the first cloned mammal? Your "click here" link does. IMAGE BY GEORGE GASTIN.

Remember Dolly the sheep, the first cloned mammal? Your “click here” link does.

“But our visitors have never been on the Web,” you explain. “They have no idea what blue underlined words mean unless we spell it out for them.”

You know what? Mom opened a Twitter account last year; Dad watches YouTube videos on his iPad; and your Web visitors know what a link is.

(Still think they don’t? Does that mean you believe they made all the arrangements to get online just so they could visit your website? “I don’t know what this browser thingy is, but I can’t wait to get on the World Wide Web so I can see for myself this XYZCompany.com everybody’s talking about.”)

The problems with the weakest links

Besides being dated, “click here” and “read more”:

• Aren’t scannable. Because links are blue and underlined, they stand out, making them among the most scannable elements on your Web page. That gives links the ability to lift your ideas off the screen. But how are you using that superpower if the ideas you highlight essentially say, “push this button”?
• Aren’t actionable. Writing “read more” for a link is like writing “buy this” for an ad. They’re calls to action, sure. But not very persuasive ones. Why should I click, read or buy? That’s your copy.
• Clutter up your copy. Every time you write “click here” or “read more,” you’re adding at least two extra words to your Web page.

Fix the weakest links

So how can drag your 1996 links into the 21st century?

1. Focus links on the topic, not on the action. Instead of focusing on the action — aka, “click here” or “read more” — focus on the topic. Don’t tell Web visitors to click; tell them what they’ll find if they do click. Notice how focusing on the topic lifts the idea off the screen, promises the reader a benefit and slenderizes the sentence.

Don’t: To learn to write better links, click here.

Do: Learn to write better links.

2. Don’t write about mechanics or the system. “Click here” and “read more” have some ugly cousins: URLs, email addresses and other references to the mechanics of the Web. You wouldn’t write, “turn page” in a publication. Why write, “point your browser at” online?

3. Write mostly verb-based links. Try starting with a strong verb and an implied “you.” Putting the reader first and leaning on strong verbs makes for good writing, whether you’re crafting links or brochures.

Don’t: Videos of the ceremony are available at, StopMeBeforeITweetAgain.com.

Do: View videos of the ceremony.

Get the word out on the Web

Want to write microcontent that lifts your ideas off the page?

• Rev Up Readership members: Read the whole story.
• Invite Ann’s team in to handle a Web writing or editing project.
• Bring Ann to your organization for a microcontent writing workshop.
• Work with Ann to polish your writing skills in one-on-one writing coaching sessions.
• Get dozens of tipsheets on writing better display copy on RevUpReadership.com.
• Study Ann’s Reaching Readers Online system.
• Find out about Ann’s next Web, microcontent or social media writing teleseminar.
• Get free writing tips every month when you subscribe to our e-zine.

About Ann Wylie

Ann Wylie is president of Wylie Communications Inc., a training, writing and consulting firm. She works with communicators who want to reach more readers and with organizations that want to get the word out. Wylie is the author of RevUpReadership.com, a toolbox for writers, and Wylie’s Writing Tips, a free e-zine. She has earned more than 60 awards, including two IABC Gold Quills, for her work.

Copyright © 2010 Ann Wylie. All rights reserved.

Online, it’s hard to concentrate. So how do we communicate?

“Try reading a book while doing a crossword puzzle. That’s the intellectual environment of the Internet.”

— Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

Most Americans spend at least 8.5 hours a day looking at a screen, whether a TV set, computer monitor or mobile device, according to a study by Ball State University (PDF). Frequently, we use two or three of these devices at once.

READ IT AND WEEP. Web visitors have trouble concentrating on your message. Why, then, are you trying to communicate complex ideas there?

That multitasking costs. According to a study by Stanford University, heavy multitaskers:

• Are more easily distracted by “irrelevant environmental stimuli”
• Can recall much less of what they’ve just learned
• Are much less able to concentrate on the task at hand

Now, where was I going with this? Oh, yes.

“The Net is, by design, an interruption system, a machine geared for dividing attention,” writes Nicholas Carr in The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.

As we “power browse” a dozen Web pages at once, check our email 30 or 40 times an hour and text while driving, we become “distracted from distraction by distraction.”

So don’t count on your Web visitors being all there when they show up on your Web page.

“Psychological research long ago proved what most of us know from experience: frequent interruptions scatter our thoughts, weaken our memory, and make us tense and anxious,” Carr writes. “The more complex the train of thought we’re involved in, the greater the impairment the distractions cause.”

Now … are you sure the Web is the best medium for your thought piece on the future of the industry, the CEO’s vision for the future or the company’s five-year plan?

Deliver ideas in print, nuggets of data online.

___

Source: Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, W. W. Norton & Company, 2010

Get the word out on the Web

Want to reach distracted visitors online?

• Invite Ann’s team in to handle a Web writing or editing project.
• Bring Ann to your organization for a Web writing workshop.
• Work with Ann to polish your skills with one-on-one writing coaching.
• Get dozens of tipsheets on writing better Web copy on RevUpReadership.com.
• Study Ann’s Reaching Readers Online system.
• Find out about Ann’s next Web writing workshop or webinar.
• Get free writing tips every month when you subscribe to our e-zine.