FURTHER EVIDENCE that good communication skills are timeless can be found in Amy Gahran’s reprinted piece on microcontent. She wrote this bit six years ago, and it is as true today as it was then – perhaps even more so. Microcontent is, in essence, those small but oh-so-important elements of a message – the title, subject line, index, headline, sub-headlines, etc.
Good microcontent writing is more essential today than ever before. Recent studies show that Internet users spend as little as 50 milliseconds scanning a website before deciding whether it is of value to them or not. We scan our emails quickly looking for relevance in the subject lines, check menu bars on websites for the information we need and click on links that appear to be lead us to where we want to go. We are speed readers online, scanning for keywords to get the content we need.
Too often, we rush through the little steps to finish the big thing. In doing so, the big thing isn’t as good as we thought it would be. My father regularly told us that if we paid attention to the small things in life, the big things would happen. This is certainly true for writing online content.
tags: microcontent online communication website design online marketing email marketing
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Not at all Amy. Keep up the great work on Contentious. You provide great food for thought!
Thanks for the kind words, Tom. I’m glad my article was useful to you.
- Amy Gahran