Lets start with me stumbling over whether this is a “holiday” post or a “Christmas” post. In the UK it’s firmly Christmas and calling it a holiday post would demonstrate that I am talking to a US audience. Writing and delivering persuasive, engaging content even in a shared English language is a subtle business.

Back to the topic – regardless of your tradition, I think we can agree that Christmas (or the holidays) is pretty much about some omnipotent being watching your behaviour, seeing if you are bad or good and making a judgment on what you can get in return (hopefully comparing a god with Santa isn’t too offensive, undoing my good work on the ‘holidays’ thing).

Anyway, in our house, the tradition is firmly hallmark, cocoa cola or Turkish saint (whoever you blame for a jolly red Santa) – it’s family, food and presents and whilst we may not be omnipotent, we do the same thing – looking for clues on what will make our loved ones the perfect gift.

Despite this, we have cupboards and shelves that hide tucked away dusty, untouched gifts from me to my wife over the years – indicating that I am not that good an observer of her want, need, taste or behaviour. I am clearly rubbish. How could I improve?

I could invisibly watch her wandering into shops lingering over a scarf or handbag she likes, but doesn’t buy. I could listen as she tells me, she’d much prefer me to spend the money on the children. I could monitor what she tells her friends and family. I could test her reaction, comparing the successful gifts with the dusty rejects. Is this starting to sound familiar?

Well yes, all this is an analogy of how we should be delivering content to our web visitors. They come to us expecting a content gift, tailored to their specific requirements and not in the least bit interested in the holiday tradition of the moment of “surprise”.

There are thousands of little gift givers in the pages of Google search results that this visitor has just come from and one dud pair of socks or an ill judged kitchen implement is going to send them scuttling off to see what everyone else has to offer.

Don’t get me wrong, I think your visitors will love a surprise, a little bundle of content they hadn’t thought of or a special offer on the very thing they wanted to buy – but it needs to be perfect for their needs – your website as a secret Santa – not a lucky dip.

It doesn’t need to be complicated, I often use the analogy of my daily visit to my favourite news site; clicking on sport, clicking on my favourite sport, clicking on my favourite team. I am telling them what I want, I am introducing myself to this site on a daily basis. You wouldn’t need to do that in real life.

So, great Auntie BBC, this Christmas, like every other Christmas I am a Chelsea fan – please remember me.

Image of Christmas presents published under Creative Commons License, courtesy of  allerleirau

A multi-national, multi-discipline CMS cast of characters was formed; a rough blend of implementation consulting, product marketing, industry commentators and CMS geeks from vendors, systems integrators  and analysts – Jon Marks, Irina Guseva, Adriaan Bloem, Andrew Liles, Justin Cormack and a chap who found himself without a wave account, through some cruel misunderstanding with Google (do you know who he is?) Philippe Parker who I attempted to link into the mayhem through Goto Meeting.

We learnt a lot about the tools (as I tried to work both Google Wave and simultaneously hook up with Philippe in Goto Meeting) – but I found the process just as interesting and the way people interacted, disagreed and eventually collaborated in this new social space.

The tools, I’ll leave for others to chat about and focus a bit on what we did.

The action began on time– with a flurry of simultaneous typing – as the crowd tapped away at suitable titles.

Impressively, well I think so anyway as a chap who still doesn’t find the process of blogging easy,  it took about 15 minutes for a theme to emerge and coalesce into a title. The crowd was in the mood to rant and the title was eventually toned down to “Things We Hate About Content Management”.

It was probably at this point that I felt like the bloke that drinks beer and finds himself in that young and trendy vodka bar, it’s kicking off, the cool kids are dancing and I am asking for the music to be turned down – “errmmm, you can’t say that!”.

The really weird thing was that it was silent, we are having a  pure Wave experience with no VoIP to aid the discussion and Philippe and I had abandoned getting him dialled into the Goto Meeting session and had resorted to me sharing my screen and the chat window in Goto meeting (which annoyingly I couldn’t copy and paste out of) and yet I felt a strange sort of sensory assault, like being in a room where everyone is talking at once.

The discussion was conducted by the six of us simultaneously typing, as the wave got bigger, it was five other people typing on different parts of the screen, bits of the screen scrolled out of view and I had to scroll up and down to see the action and inject my own thoughts.

Those of you who have not tried the Wave experience, it’s people typing at the same time, you see each letter they type as they type it – not like IM where you type in a private box and then post. (Now there’s a statement that’s going to date fast as this this way of working takes off – really, six people typing at the same time – wow!)

Meanwhile Philippe typed stuff into the chat window and I tried to reflect his thinking and my own in the tide of updates.  This wasn’t crowd sourcing or even content collaboration – it was a furious riot of ideas and opinions, being offered, edited, added to, toned down, expanded upon and sometimes deleted (no you definitely can’t say that about marketing). Sometimes people working in different parts of the article and sometimes three people working on the same sentence. There was even time for a bit of badinage.

At some point, I think it might have been Irina that started bringing order to the chaos, as we decided to flesh out the bullet point style that had formed and turn it into a grown up article.

As Irina started working on the introduction, I noticed one of the interesting things about Wave – not only can you see people type,  how good they are at working a keyboard, or spelling, but also how they form their sentences and self edit. To that end Irina definitely demonstrated her accomplished writing style as perfectly formed sentences sprang seamlessly onto the page.

The blog post forms into a coherent whole as we flesh out the points – too quickly time is called, as Irina (hang on – who made her boss?) – tries to attract everyone’s attention and stop people typing.

When I read it I can sort of hear the voices of some of the authors in some bits, but the collective seemed to have smoothed that out and I think it reads quite well. I think being strict about stopping to time also preserved it’s freshness, it’s rough edges haven’t been edited out, and we haven’t collaborated it to death and made it sound like something agreed by committee.

A few more minutes might have given us a better conclusion, but that was it – done. 1,662 words of crash, crunch, slam, crowd sourced blogging – or whatever moniker the cool kids give it.

We start chatting, in the wave, about publishing it – I’ve already blogged about the lack of publish button in Wave, so using cut and paste Irina immediately published the result here (I was marginally freaked out as I have a cautious approach to hitting publish with my own stuff )  and for Google Wave users Jon posted it by embedding the Wave into his blog.

As people drift out of the wave and I disconnect from Philippe, virtually looking over my shoulder – I am left with a weird feeling, thinking that everyone can see everything I can type regardless of the application (Wavanoia?)!

Even since publishing it’s remained interesting (I think I’ve said interesting about a dozen times in this post), as the Wave is not done, it’s not baked or dried – or whatever analogy we might want to use – it’s a Wave so remains editable, Jon opened it up to everyone to scrawl over – the riot continues. Not in the orderly blog post way, of I’ve said my bit now you can comment, I mean scrawl all over it.

Picture of Lego riot policeman reproduced under Creative Commons courtesy of Dunechaser.

Recently I have realised I am a bit of Luddite, anything beyond five paragraphs of tightly set text and it’s uncomfortable, over eight or nine paragraphs and I have to print it out. I spend the majority of my life sat in front of the LCD screen of my laptop or my desktop PC and I find neither is a comfortable reading experience – but then I don’t have a lot of off-line reading time – so a well meaning pile of undigested great content results. 

Some websites are a joy to read, the combination of compelling, tightly written persuasive content and a beautiful site design can hold my screen attention for longer. Eight paragraphs of tightly written prose by Jeffrey Zeldman about himself, posted on his gorgeous, poster child of a well designed site had me absorbed, but Propelling Brands is full of fantastic, information rich, well researched content and I find myself reaching for the print button each time I come by.

 “Reading is a necessarily solitary experience—like dying, everyone reads alone—but over the centuries readers have learned how to cultivate that solitude, how to grow it in the least hospitable environments.” 

And it’s true, as the author observes, people will read in the most incredible, seemingly uncomfortable places – but totally absorbed by the content. 

As a content author I don’t think we can presume that our reader will make that commitment. Well written, targeted, persuasive content, aimed at a well understood audience and the tools to produce it – is not the whole Persuasive Content picture. Unsurprisingly, as experts on site design, both Zeldman and Mandy Brown demonstrate that it’s also about a clear, easy to read, accessible site.

Well.. this is my eighth paragraph and you are still here, although having read these articles I think I need to give my site design a bit of thought and I wonder if you have printed this out?