important notice: this is the unabridged version of a post first published on bnet.co.uk

After a decade and a half of evangelisation by the likes of Seth Godin (re his book entitled:Permission Marketing) and those who followed in his footsteps, Marketers are now finally waking up to the idea that pre-formatted communications aren’t the right way to engage with customers (re Forrester’s Laura Ramos’s report on why Marketers, even in B2B have to get to grips with a new communications paradigm). So now is the time to hone these story-telling skills in your Marketing department and write valuable content for the Web. But what do I mean by valuable content? I mean content that brings value to your visitors, which could possibly initiate discussions, questions and comments (I’m talking about articulate comments, not cyber-babble).

In this article, I have expressed my views about writing for the web (also summed up in acreative commons slideshare presentation per below), based on what I have been able to implement successfully in the field over the past 15 years, in order to find out how that can be done:

Step 1: the idea that web text has to be terse is not a good idea

It is often said that people don’t read on screens and that as a consequence you shouldn’t write long pages and keep long stories short. There are several reasons why this is not relevant:

Related articles by Zemanta

• Two Talks By Seth Godin (artistshousemusic.org)
• Seth Godin: Why tribes will change the world (morethanadvertising.com)