As I wrote in a previous post, the Internet was conversational before the web as we know it even existed.
Since then many writers, myself included, have worked hard to persuade companies and organizations that writing for the web should, above all else, be conversational in tone.
Have we been successful in turning the tide against old-school promotional copywriting, and boring, stiff corporate writing?
I’d say our success rate has been spotty at best.
I got an email recently from someone who told me that conversational copywriting was all very nice, but wouldn’t work for search engine optimization.
He told me that the unique structure of organic search terms would never be a good fit for conversational writing.
Huh…
Well… he’s totally, absolutely wrong.
He clearly hasn’t heard of or given much thought to the meteoric growth of voice search.
If you remember the Internet from way back in the 1980s and 90s, you’ll doubtless recall there was no buying or selling stuff online back then.
No web browsers. No web.
But a lot of text-only discussion lists and bulletin boards.
That’s where we all got into conversation. Lots of conversations.
That why I say conversation is the native language of the web.
If you ever do any public speaking, or give presentations for work, you probably obsess a little over getting rid of all those Ums, Ers and other “fillers” that creep into your language.
Speaking coaches will train you to avoid them when speaking live. And audio engineers will edit them out when producing recorded speeches, presentations or training products.
But… it turns out that Ums and Ers actually have an important function.
Any kind of language that creates distance between a business and its prospects and customers is a problem.
Put simply, you can’t turn a stranger into a customer by creating distance, by pushing people away.
Much of the time that distance is created by the language a company uses in its business and marketing communications.
First, overly promotional language creates distance simply by stimulating the reader’s defenses. Try to sell at me too hard and I’ll defend myself by stepping back, walking away or ignoring you altogether.
Secondly, overly formal, corporate language, filled with impenetrable jargon creates distance.
About 5 years into my career as a copywriter I was working on a campaign for a client in the pharmaceutical industry.
The product I was being asked to write about was a hospital analgesic – a painkiller for dealing with severe pain in a hospital setting.
The trouble was, when I looked through all the clinical studies for that product, I couldn’t find any evidence that it was effective as a painkiller.
In fact – and I remember this after almost 30 years – the best I could find was a statement that described the product as “slightly more effective than placebo, but not significantly so”.