HookJab: punchy writing about writing

Congratulation yourselves - the ruthless and unrelenting pressure campaign worked. For the last few months I have been overwhelmed with emails, letters and carrier pigeons from at least both of my readers, asking when Hookjab was going to be resurrected.

Well bate your breath no longer, ladies and gentlemen. This blog has now emerged from hibernation, and now even has its own little home at www.hookjab.com. Do feel free to drop by and say hello!

This will be my last post for a few months, as I’m going travelling to Central America in a couple of weeks time.

When I come back I’ll be busy setting up some new projects so I may be too busy to start posting straight away, but hopefully by around March or April things will have calmed down enough to renew hookjab blogging duties.

Thanks for dropping by to read Hookjab over the last year or so, and hopefully see you again the other side of the winter hibernation!

Milly xx

We got an interesting press release from the University of the West of England (UWE) last week. (Emphasis added by me)

Subject line: Employers flock to support UWE’s geeks

First paragraph: Regional technology firms are queuing up to offer support to students on the University of the West of England’s BSc Computer Systems Integration course. The course which by admission of Directors, Dr Rob Williams and Craig Duffy, is suited to ‘techno nerds’, is a popular springboard into lucrative and fulfilling work in the technology and computing industries.

Firstly, geek. I know a lot of web designers and developers who have reclaimed ‘geek’, taking it away from the ‘generic insults for kid with glasses’ context and moved it into the ‘I work with computers, and therefore I’m cleverer and better paid than you’ context. But it only really works in a strictly wry, self-referential way; don’t you have to be a geek to be able to call geek?

As for techno nerd – well, since there have been no attempts to rescue ‘nerd’ from its derogatory connotations of obsessive friendless losers, that just seems plain rude to me. And it’s all a bit too 80s. Seriously, who says ‘techno’? ‘Computer nerd’ ‘IT nerd’ ‘Web nerd’ or even ‘Technology nerd’ would have been more appropriate, surely. It’s not that the course directors have to be cool with the kids’ new street slang, daddio, it’s just that I’d expect them to be aware of how their industry is currently described.

The PR team that wrote this press release have insulted the students, they’ve insulted the companies that want to work with those students (as presumably they’re full of geeks and techno nerds too), and they’ve insulted the course, by stereotyping it as the kind of course that only losers would do.

What a bunch of dweebs.

I went to the BBC news website this afternoon, to be greeted by this chipper message:

“Wow!” I thought. “The BBC need me to help them keep their finger on the pulse! Of course I have 5 minutes for them. Although I do want to know what the Queen and Jordan (aka Katie Price, not the country) have in common.*” Exactly whose pulse the Beeb are trying to check wasn’t clear, but could it maybe perhaps maybe have anything to do with selling their soul to advertisers? In any case, I emphatically click ‘yes’.

What is the contry of my residence? I click on the UK.

Oh noes! Only international visitors can waste time filling in the survey. Game over. And yet, I still need to click the ‘finish’ button. Where might that take me?

…to another useless screen. My input has been greatly appreciated. Oh that’s nice. Of course it would’ve been nicer to have a link back to the news website which I was trying to visit in the first place, or even – gosh, this is crazytalk mind – to be told that I wasn’t eligible to fill in the survey four screens ago.

*Turns out they’re both considered extremely glamorous, but in very different ways.

I found this today (24 October) in Morrisons. Is it christmas?

Everyone knows that you shouldn’t ever hyperlink the words ‘click here’, right? Well that’s all wrong, believes Brian Clark of Copyblogger. As he explains,

“I’ve always been a big proponent of having actionable anchor text for links when I really want someone to click. From a copywriting standpoint, it’s a no brainer—it’s been proven time and time again that if you want someone to do something, you’ll get better results if you tell them exactly what to do.”

But although that attitude implies that Brian thinks his readers are thick, in his opinion it’s actually the desire to hyperlink with anything other than ‘click here’ that demonstrates stupidity:

“Another reader once chastised me for wasting anchor text with the words “click here,” even though my primary goal for the link was to get people to click (shocking, I know). This is when I first realized that Google is truly making people retarded. Somehow, this person no longer saw links as navigation for actual people to use; they only exist to pass on “juice” according to an algorithm that no one fully understands.”

Brian quotes some statistics from an experiment on a marketing newsletter which tested different click words. It seems to back up his theory: linking the words ‘Click to continue’ improved the click-through rate by 8.53%, ‘Continue to article’ improved the rate by 3.3%, and ‘Read more’ decreased the rate by 1.8%.

However, there are three major flaws in his argument.

Firstly, the statistics quoted are meaningless are we have no idea how many people took part in the experiment, how many times it was conducted or what kind of control they used. And 87% of scientists agree that without this information your stats are useless.

Secondly, the purpose of links is not simply to lead people to somewhere else. Readers scan pages online, looking for keywords. Since links are almost invariably highlighted in a different colour and/or underlined, making key phrases and words links helps readers find what they need.

Thirdly, as Brian acknowledges, links make Googlejuice. And what, exactly, is so wrong with writing copy that benefits both readers and search engines? So what if your click-through rate to another page on your website is down by 1.8% because you don’t link with the phrase ‘click here’. Boo hoo. Your Google rank for that page will be higher, and your readers will find it much faster. I think that’s more than a fair trade-off.

In conclusion, the only time you should really have to link the word ‘click’ is if your design is so utterly confusing that you have a button that doesn’t look like it will link anywhere, and you need to actually tell people to use it. Copywriters don’t work in a vacuum. It’s not crazy to think that we should work with rather than against web designers and web developers to produce readable, effective websites.

Found in my office kitchen.

A disturbing sign found in the window of a shoe shop in Newcastle.

In case you’ve been on planet iPod?Couldn’tGiveA, no doubt you’ve already heard all about how Apple are punishing their customers who have dared to unlock the iPhone or install third-party applications.

Stories about this have flared up all over the press and internet, but what I find really curious is the immediate invention and acceptance of a brand new verb.

Apple is repeatedly reported to have “bricked” the unlocked iPhones. “To brick”, in this case, seems to mean “render as useful as a brick.” And while bricks are indeed extremely useful, I’m sure owners of the $399 gadget would hesitate before cementing their prize and joy to another, or throwing it through a shop window. (For the record, the official, unbrickish and frankly dull statement from Apple is that modifying your phone will make it “permanently inoperable”.)

But why a brick? Why not say that a useless iPhone is like a paperweight or doorstop? My hunch is that the instant appeal of calling it a brick is that it hints at the early days of mobile phones, when the phones were literally as big and heavy as bricks. Of course the difference is that despite appearances, those bricks still operated as phones. The iBrick, however, has the exact same phone functionality as its clay brethren.

Another obvious connection is with the verb “to brick it”, a delightful Britishicism meaning to be very nervous or scared. Rumour has it that the origin of this phrase lies with the brick uh, outhouses of yesteryear, where, of course, one went to empty one’s bowels. An action which may or may not have occurred across the world as iPhone owners suddenly realised that their new $399 toy had turned into a brick.

Kev the online marketing pro had an interesting response to my post about clicking on blog ads, in which he said that the beauty of google ads were that they were obsessively customisable. Which may be true, but it seems that few advertisers care enough to set up intelligent ad campaigns.

As I mentioned before I read a lot of feminist blogs, and I’ve lost count of the number of times that keywords seem to get picked out for all the wrong reasons.

This ad, for example, was illustrating an article about abortion rights:

And this one was on an article about unrealistic beauty expectations:

Such stupid ad placement is obviously infuriating to the reader, embarrassing for the blog and inefficient for the advertiser.

At least some blogs are taking a slightly more intelligent stance – The Curvature, for example, recently changed its ad policy so that offensive ads don’t get through, and they even ask readers to let them know if any do slip in.