December 6, 2007

Long vs. short articles as a content strategy



By Robin Good at Master New Media. What's better? Writing short summary posts with the essence of the info you want your readers to get or long, in-depth articles and reviews like the ones I often feature here on Master New Media?

I am sure I am not the only independent online publisher asking himself these questions, as traffic, credibility, advertising conversion rates and costs to produce long or short content can vary a great deal depending on this one choice.

The majority of successful blogs and sites I know that perform well in terms of traffic and monetization are generally made of relatively short posts. Rarely, if ever, these sites engage into in-depth reviews with truly original content, in research topics or analysis that has not been discussed and conducted elsewhere.

The much less numerous sites sites that do in-depth, long-winded article writing, do not seem to apparently enjoy as much exposure and notoriety as the other group, but given my own traffic and revenue data, I can't say we are doing bad either.

So if I was to judge superficially, I would tend to think that the long style approach used here at Master New Media, at Ars Technica and on few other online resources, while it could possibly feel more prestigious or providing extra credibility to the site it is definitely a lot more costly, time consuming, error-prone and therefore not as good solution as going for shorter content.

But would these intuitive assessments really reflect the best way to go about making a wise choice?

How do I tell whether it is best to write long or short content for my site?

Internationally respected usability guru Jakob Nielsen dissects in this in-depth analysis this very issue by utilizing "information foraging" models to analyze scientifically the type of "information diet" that readers are most likely to follow on a blog or web site.

"More precisely, diet selection is a modeling tool that tells us what food animals will eat and what articles users will read. In both scenarios, animals and people decide what to consume in a way that optimizes their benefits relative to the costs."

What counts for online readers is in fact the cost/benefit ratio between having more information about a subject (long content approach) or being able to read more articles and news (short content approach). "A long article might contain more information, but if it takes too long to read, users will abandon the website and read shorter, easier pieces elsewhere."
How much information is enough?

How much is too much? And, most importantly, how much information is optimal? Jakob Nielsen answers all of these questions with a good rational analysis. Here his full report:

Long vs. Short Articles as Content Strategy
By Jakob Nielson

Summary: Information foraging shows how to calculate your content strategy's costs and benefits. A mixed diet that combines brief overviews and comprehensive coverage is often best.

How much information is enough? How much is too much? And, most importantly, how much information is optimal?

Information foraging gives us a way to formally model user trade-offs in deciding how much to read on your website. More precisely, diet selection is a modeling tool that tells us what food animals will eat and what articles users will read. In both scenarios, animals and people decide what to consume in a way that optimizes their benefits relative to the costs.

For example, say a forest is inhabited by large and small rabbits. Which will the wolf eat? The obvious answer might seem to be "large rabbits" because they provide the biggest benefit in terms of filling the stomach. But if the big bunnies run faster and are harder to catch, the benefit decreases. Much better to eat lots of small tasty bites if tiny bunnies are easier to nab.

So, basically, the wolf must eat more calories than it expends pursuing prey. The real question is not which prey provides the most food, but how you get the most food relative to the cost of chasing it down.

The cost/benefit ratio is what matters, not the benefit alone.

Exactly the same is true for informavores. A long article might contain more information, but if it takes too long to read, users will abandon the website and read shorter, easier pieces elsewhere.

Cost/Benefit Metrics for Reading

To formalize the model, we must quantify the costs and benefits of reading different articles.

Cost is easy to model: we calculate it as the amount of time it takes to read an article. For an intranet, this would be a direct cost in dollars, because we're paying employees for every minute they spend reading stuff during working hours. For a website, time is a more indirect cost, because users don't get paid to surf the Web. But still, life is short, and you only have so many hours in the day. Even if users don't get paid, they're still conscious of their time and don't like wasting it.
Benefit can be modeled by hypothetical benefit units that represent whatever value users get from online information. For a B2B user researching a company purchase, the benefit units translate directly into dollars, because they represent the extent to which the company gets a better deal or decides to buy a better product as a result of that user's time on the Web.

For home users, benefits might also have a dollar value. For example, if you're looking into buying airline tickets, the benefit of checking one more site or one more alternate departure time would be the average savings on the airfare that resulted from using a richer data set to decide which ticket to buy.

If people are browsing the news or reading an entertainment site, the benefit units would represent the amount of enjoyment they got from each page.

Example: Long vs. Short Articles

Let's work through an example, using the following values for our cost-benefit metrics:
  • Short articles:
    600 words, meaning a cost of 3 minutes to read (assuming a reading speed of 200 wpm)
    7 benefit units gained from reading each article
  • Long articles:
    1,000 words, meaning a cost of 5 minutes to read
    10 benefit units gained from reading each article
  • Finding a new article to read: 1 minute. The top chart (above) shows how the accumulated benefit units increase as a user keeps reading short articles (blue curve) or long articles (red curve):

The dots on the curves represent points of change — that is, when the user stops reading one article, starts searching for something else to read, and starts reading the next article. No benefit is gained during the user's search time.


(Here, I use the term "search" to indicate any user activity aimed at finding the next interesting article, whether it's using a search engine, a site's navigation system, or any other method of finding the next thing to read.)

The chart clearly shows that users gain more benefit from sticking to a diet of short articles. The cumulative benefit is as follows:

  • Short articles: 105 benefit units per hour
  • Long articles: 100 benefit units per hour

The conclusion is clear: people prefer to read short articles. This is also what we've found in empirical studies of users' behavior while reading websites. People tend to be ruthless in abandoning long-winded sites; they mainly want to skim highlights.


Benefit of Cutting Word Count
If you read my assumptions carefully, you'll notice why the math favors short articles: I assumed that short articles were 60% of the length of the long articles but still provided 70% of the benefit.
Is this realistic? In most cases, I'd say yes. A good editor should be able to cut 40% of the word count while removing only 30% of an article's value. After all, the cuts should target the least valuable information.

When Long Has Value
Now, let's change the assumptions and assume that every third long article is 3 times more valuable than the previous two. In other words, 2/3 of the long articles continue to provide the user with 10 benefit units' worth of information, but 1/3 of the long articles now have a benefit value of 30.

This scenario corresponds to the occasional situation in which you really, really need to know everything about a problem.

For example, consider a rare disease in which sufferers risk death if they eat 6 particular foods: 4 common foods, and 2 foods that almost nobody eats anyway. If you're reading about the disease out of idle curiosity, you'll probably be satisfied with a short article covering the four common foods. If you just got diagnosed with this disease, however, you won't be content reading an article that says: "there are 6 things that'll kill you, but we won't talk about 2 of them because they're rare." You'll obviously want the long article that will warn you about all the things you need to avoid.

The second chart above shows the cost-benefit curves under this new assumption.

The blue line shows the progression of gains from reading only short articles (the same curve as in the previous chart). The red line shows the gains from reading long articles under the new assumptions: for every third article, the benefit jumps up and thus considerably outpaces the blue line.

The obvious conclusion is that long articles are better now that they're sometimes more valuable.

But there's a third behavior users can choose: a mixed diet, where they sometimes read short articles and sometimes read long ones. The green line shows this reading behavior.

For the mixed diet, we have to change the assumptions about the time needed to identify the next article to read. I'll assume that this now takes 1.2 minutes, versus 1 minute for the simpler scenario in which people always read a single type of article. This increase accounts for the extra overhead of having to consider both types of articles and decide when to read what.
Decisions take time, which is why it's often best to offer a simple user interface rather than one with many options. Every extra thing users can do requires consideration, which takes time away from actually using the features.

In this case, the green line is even better than the red line, because users don't waste time on the 2/3 of the long articles that aren't sufficiently valuable.

In the new scenario, users' cumulative gains from the different reading strategies are:
  • Short articles: 105 benefit units per hour
  • Long articles: 167 benefit units per hour
  • 2/3 short articles + 1/3 long articles: 181 benefit units per hour
Mathematical Models vs. Real Life
Of course, in real life, you don't need in-depth information exactly every third time you read an article.

But the general idea in my model is extremely realistic:

  • Reading benefits vary, depending on user circumstances.
  • Most of the time, short articles contain more value per word.
  • People sometimes gain higher value from complete or very detailed information about a problem. The exact numbers in my calculations are merely assumptions for the sake of the exercise. You can run similar calculations for your type of material and your type of users.
What Should You Do?
So: should your website have concise or in-depth content?
  • If you want many readers, focus on short and scannable content. This is a good strategy for advertising-driven sites or sites that sell impulse buys.
  • If you want people who really need a solution, focus on comprehensive coverage. This is a good strategy if you sell highly targeted solutions to complicated problems. Typically, people who really need something are the highest-value users because they're more likely to turn into paying customers. That's why I recommended writing articles instead of blog postings.
But the very best content strategy is one that mirrors the users' mixed diet. There's no reason to limit yourself to only one content type. It's possible to have short overviews for the majority of users and to supplement them with in-depth coverage and white papers for those few users who need to know more.

Of course, the two user types are often the same person — the one who's usually in a hurry, but is sometimes in thorough-research mode. In fact, our studies of B2B users show that business users often aren't very familiar with the complex products or services they're buying and need simple overviews to orient themselves before they begin more in-depth research.

Hypertext to the Rescue

On the Web, you can offer both short and long treatments within a single hyperspace. Start with overviews and short, simplified pages. Then link to long, in-depth coverage on other pages.

With this approach, you can serve both types of users (or the same user in different stages of the buying process).

The more value you offer users each minute they're on your site, the more likely they are to use your site and the longer they're likely to stay. This is why it's so important to optimize your content strategy for your users' needs.

Learn More
More discussion of information foraging and the implications of user behavior patterns for website design in my course on Fundamental Guidelines for Web Usability at the User Experience 2007 conference in Las Vegas (December 2-7).

The conference also has a two-day tutorial on writing for the Web.
Jakob Nielsen - Reference: Useit [ Read more ]

December 4, 2007

Ten golden rules for building your personal brand

By Jay Berkowitz. This post was inspired by Rohit Bhargava’s blog entry made on November 8th, How to Build Your Personal Brand:

“Just as the Internet once created a level playing field for small companies to compete with larger ones, personal branding has now become much simpler thanks to the Internet. You can create your brand online …For the vast majority of corporate workers … building a personal brand is the single best thing they can do for their careers.”

In March 2003 I was fortunate to attend an inspirational presentation by syndicated columnist Jeff Zbar at an American Marketing Association event. Jeff said “If you are the brand manager of your personal brand, what have you done to improve your brand? What have you done to put a shine on your resume? What new product enhancements have you made? What is your personal brand marketing plan?For the first 20 years of my career I had spent a lot of time and effort building brands for companies such as McDonald’s Coca-Cola, Sprint and eDiets.com. I hit a stage in my career where I had achieved the top marketing job and I needed to manage my own brand/future. Jeff Zbar’s comments inspired me to create my personal brand.

I have been working on a presentation called the Ten Golden Rules for Building Your Personal Brand; here is the first draft of my Ten Golden Rules, please comment and help me craft this list!

Be Your Own Brand Manger – Think of yourself as a brand. As my friend Andrea Nirenberg, author of Nonstop Networking said in a recent interview we did for my internet marketing podcast “If you were in the grocery store of life, why would somebody pick you up off the shelf? Are you new and improved, repackaged, what are you doing to get the competitive edge?” What can you do to improve your skill set? Is there a course you’ve been planning to take? Can you get to the next level with self-study through books, blogs and podcasts?

  1. Develop your brand marketing plan. How are you going to promote your brand? How are you going to take it to the next level? Set specific, measurable goals for yourself for example: ‘I will get booked for 1 speaking engagement each quarter in 2008’ or ‘I will write 1 chapter of my book each month in the next 6 months’.
  2. Determine Your USP (Unique Selling Proposition)? – What makes you Distinctive? - How can you enhance your unique skills to separate yourself from other competitors for future business and career opportunities? I determined that my USP was a combination of brand marketing and direct/online experience. I wrote a presentation called “The Ten Golden Rules of Internet Marketing” which shaped my personal brand and propelled my life and career in exciting directions.
  3. Embrace Your Inner Author – Perhaps the strongest tool for building your personal brand is creating unique content. Write a blog. Write a book or a free eBook or white paper. Write articles and submit them to industry publications. Create your own website. Build interesting content on your Facebook profile and your LinkedIn page. The reason I know that Rohit Bhargava is a brilliant interactive strategist is because I discovered links to three of his blog posts within about two weeks. Content is King! And if writing isn’t your thing, try podcasting - it is inexpensive and easy to get started.
  4. Build Your Net – Learn the skills of a successful networker. Attend high level networking events. Set a goal to make a few quality connections at each event and find out what you can do for the people you meet. Ask the new people you meet about them before sharing your elevator pitch. When you get home, add new contacts to Outlook or another contact management system. Follow up with your new acquaintances to connect them with business opportunities, employment leads and personal connections. The person who cares and follows up is the one that is remembered! Give with no intention of getting and watch the benefits come your way. Individuals with a strong network of real connections don’t interview for their next job, they get business opportunities by answering the phone, and if necessary, they have a ‘safety net’ if a real need arises. Use online social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn and even Twitter to build your social connections.
  5. Craft an Image. When you think of Bono I’m sure you can picture his blazer and stylish sunglasses. Donald Trump – signature hair, blue suit and bright tie. How can you stand out? Develop an authentic personal image that represents the next stage you want to achieve. Do you want to be a creative director or a department manager or a keynote speaker…what image does that person portray? How will you represent your authentic personal brand?
  6. Communicate a Strong Consistent Brand Message – If your business card doesn’t sell your personal brand, create a personal brand card. Develop a memorable personal title or slogan representing your personal brand message such as ‘internet copywriter extraordinaire’ or ‘Facebook application guru’ . Copy your eBook or podcast to a mini CD and hand it out with your business card. Send out Press Releases for major personal events such as speaking events and new websites.
  7. Volunteer to Shine – I have used volunteer positions on boards and fund-raising organizations to refine my skills or to develop new ones! When I first accept a volunteer role, I normally select a role in an area I have previous experience. Once I learn the way the group operates and I have made a valued contribution I select a new role that pushes my comfort zone. I managed my first PR campaign as a volunteer and I managed a large group of people for the first time as a committee chairperson. Another way to enhance a skill is through freelance opportunities. Web sites such as Guru, e-Lance and the Gerson Lehman expert network offer an opportunity for you to sell personal assets that might not be part of your current job but can be on your future resume!
  8. Innovate to Lead. Test new technologies. Try the iPhone. Send a Twitter Tweet. Most new web technologies offer a free trial. Give the new tools a test drive and report on how they work on your blog. Position yourself as an early adopter and soon people will be asking you about the next big thing!
  9. Entrepreneur. To entrepreneur is a verb and an easy skill to learn…I wish I started entrepreneuring in my spare time much earlier in my career. More employers are looking to hire people who have managed their own business and there are almost no barriers to getting started. You can start selling products as an affiliate for free! Just visit Commission Junction or LinkShare, sign up as an affiliate and add links or banners to your personal blog and you’re in business.
  10. Speak Up! Perhaps the single biggest differentiator for my career has been public speaking. I wasn’t always comfortable in front of a crowd, so early in my career I attended weekly Toastmasters meetings and I devoured everything I could read about making great presentations. I also volunteered for small speaking opportunities for the social committee at work and the charity association I was involved with. Practice makes perfect and with experience you will feel confident in front of that roomful of CEO’s.

Jay Berkowitz is the founder of internet marketing consultant TenGoldenRules.com, host of the Ten Golden Rules of Internet Marketing Podcast, a hockey player and a big fan of Rohit Bhargava. You might see Jay present at Webmaster World's Pubcon in Las Vegas, December 6, 2007 and at the Specialized Internet Publishers Association Annual Conference in Miami, December 13, 2007.