Nothing kills the authority of an intranet site – or any website – faster than obvious, avoidable errors. These errors can be factual (such as job titles or general facts), graphical (the wrong image assigned to the wrong person, for example) or grammatical (bad spelling or punctuation), but whatever the mistakes the effect is the same: users go elsewhere.

It’s not enough to make sure that your site owner is thorough. Everyone makes mistakes, and the best way to cope with the possibility of a slip-up is to ensure that you have a dedicated quality control process in place at all times. If you use an agency to run your site, then they should be able to work this out with you. If you work on the site yourself, read on for some key areas that you should focus on…

Read on..

We send out a lot of newsletters for clients, as well as our own newsletter. There’s a lot to think about for each one – how many articles, what images to use, what’s on the banner – but the most important part of every newsletter is literally one of the smallest.

The headline.

Think of it this way: if you’re anything like me, you receive a lot of emails on any given day. You prioritise a lot of them by looking at the sender, and then you go through the rest in some kind of order. Anything that looks unimportant or dull goes straight to the recycle bin, because you simply don’t have the time for it. Most newsletters fall into this trap.

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More and more healthcare companies are building their presence on Twitter. Johnson & Johnson, Novartis, Roche, Astra Zeneca, GE Healthcare and Boehringer Ingelheim are all tweeting and being tweeted at. Some companies are even using Twitter to promote specific branded treatments: Novo Nordisk call attention to their Novolog and Levemir diabetes treatments.

In spite of all the hype surrounding Twitter, it looks like these early adopters might be on to something. Whilst still small in comparison to Facebook, Twitter offers something unique: it attracts a lot of content creators and critics – the minority of people who actually create content on the internet as opposed to the majority who merely browse and consume content. These creators are the ones most likely to discuss your brand, either on Twitter itself or on other social networks, such as blogs, message boards, YouTube and so on. For companies, the benefit of Twitter is clear: it’s about seeding your message to the creators so that it finds its way all over the web. It’s all about PR.

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An Englishman, Irishman and a Scotsman walk into a bar. The bartender turns round and says, “Is this some kind of joke?”

I’m sorry: terrible gag. I don’t know any good jokes. However, love it or hate it, would you put it on your company website?

One of the hardest things to get right with online content is tone. A lot of content – both on intranets and the internet – is written in a formal ‘company’ voice, thick with information and respectability. More light-hearted styles of writing are often shunned for coming across as inappropriate.

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Often a common error by UK companies when creating keywords for a non-English site is to either leave keywords in English (a big no-no) or to try and use a tool to translate them.

The latter doesn’t work, as anyone who has tried using a translation dictionary may have found: words which may be correct are not necessarily the words a native speaker would use.

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Nutricia, the company that owns the Cow & Gate and Aptamil baby formula brands recently got rapped by the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority for magazine ads which claimed their milks could “support” the immune system. The ASA said that this sort of claim could only be substantiated with robust evidence. Baby formula brands are subjected to all sorts of regulations regarding the promotion of their milks. But how does this extend to pay-per-click search advertising? Read on..

Google is the king of the search engine castle, with 68% of all online searches being made through its sites. Displayed alongside those millions of search results are ads, uniquely tied in to the results with a complex and highly secret algorithm.

Advertising on Google can put your brand out in front of thousands of potential customers, and not just on the search results pages. With the Google content network, relevant ads are also displayed on sites all over the web. Read on..

Whether you run a public website or a secure intranet, you’re likely to use headlines to get people moving around the site and clicking through to other sections or pages. There are several reasons why it’s worth spending a little thought on them. Read on..