Category: The Blog

Podcast 47: Chatbots and virtual assistants are still young – it’s down to copywriters to help them grow up

Posted on by The Radix Team

We’ve all seen the media hype about how robots are going to take over the world like SKYNET. But while some people may worry about Arnie turning up at their door, copywriters need to stay grounded and focus on making chatbots genuinely useful through great copy.

Chatbots and virtual assistants (VAs) might be new, but the theory behind them has been a big part of websites, search and gaming for decades.

Think of a chatbot or VA as an elaborate search bar on a website. You ask it questions, it finds the answer and fires it back to you in the blink of an eye. But what if I use the word pants instead of trousers? (I hear you ask). This is exactly what any self-respecting search bar (or chatbot, or VA) should account for and learn from.

In our latest podcast, Emily, David and George discuss all things bot, and where copywriters fit in to this brave new world.

They take a look at:

  • The difference between a chatbot and a virtual assistant
  • Top tips for writing for chatbots and VAs
  • Why fun interactions with bots have a serious side
  • Fiona’s interview with tech entrepreneur, Wo King of Hi9
  • The best and worst bots around today

Disclaimer: As Chatbot Champion (yes indeed!) for Radix, George has come up against a fearsome array of bots. Cortana tried to defend herself and Alexa refused to comment – so if this podcast goes a bit Jeremy Kyle, don’t blame us.

Download the episode here; right-click and use “save as” to download. Or listen in the player at the top of the page.

You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes here.

Alternatively: add our RSS to your preferred podcast player.

Music by Industrial and Marine.

Build a bot

Thanks to Samphire Amps, of Electric Dialogue, for pointing us towards Chatfuel.

If you want to send in bot name and personality suggestions, you can email them to [email protected].

6 weird questions we ask subject matter experts (and why)

Posted on by George Reith

Some of the very best (and certainly the most in-depth) B2B content starts with interviewing a subject matter expert. We think it’s such an important skill that we even wrote a guide about it to help B2B writers, marketers and content creators get more from their interviews.

But there are more tips and tricks you can use to dig even deeper, and discover extra insights that help your content stand out.

Read on to learn six of our weirdest and most wonderful questions, and how they help take interviews to the next level.

Question 1: “What else is important here?”

Let’s begin at the end – with probably the ultimate final question to wrap up your interview. It may seem a bit vague, but it gives your expert a gentle nudge to offer that last essential point before your call ends.

Some of the most important information can come in response to this question, right when you get out of the formal interview structure and give your expert some room to just talk about what interests them.

Question 2: “…”

Nope, that isn’t a typo. One of the best things you can ask in an interview is nothing at all. Staying silent on a call can be tough, but it helps give your expert more time to add extra depth to their answers.

You might have to endure an awkward silence or two, but very often you’ll find experts break it themselves with ‘just one more thing.’ And more often than not that ‘one thing’ happens to be hugely significant.

Question 3: “Would you prefer to talk another time, or over email?”

Sometimes your subject matter expert might be phoning in from a crowded train or busy airport terminal. Other times it might just be they don’t like talking on the phone. Either way, you won’t be getting the best from them. It’s often better to ask to reschedule the call. If the expert is really not comfortable on the phone, you could offer to email your questions over instead (though this means you can’t immediately follow-up on any interesting points).

Question 4: “Why are we writing this now?”

Good content has a purpose, and often it’s an urgent one. It might be a new report prompting discussion, an industry event that everyone’s talking about, or a swanky new product launch. Or maybe the Marketing budget just needs using up?

You need to know why the piece is being written if you want to really get it right – and focusing in on the timing makes it hard to be vague.

Question 5: “How does *thing* do that?”

If you’re working in a particularly technical sector (like enterprise technology, say), you’ll know that you won’t always completely understand the stuff you write about. After all, your job isn’t to maintain, install or preserve the product – your job is to write about it (and its benefits) in a clear, concise way.

You don’t have to know every little thing about your topic, but it can help to learn more about what goes on with a product under the hood. It might not make it into your final draft, but the extra knowledge can add depth and nuance to a piece in other ways.

Question 6: “Can you repeat that?”

Even on conference calls where bad lines and phone systems are an easy excuse, you still might think you’ll sound stupid if you ask an expert to repeat something. Don’t.

Even if you think you’ll sound silly (I promise, you won’t), a simple request to repeat helps you better understand the subject – and produce much better content.

Great questions = great answers = great content

The right question – even if it’s out of left field – can prompt your expert for more info, or turnaround a suboptimal interview.

Keep these six questions in your pocket, to throw into the conversation when you need them. They can help you flesh out your interviews and help your subject matter expert to relax, talk naturally, and give you even richer information. And ultimately, that makes for great content.

Podcast 46: Time to give B2B web copy the attention it deserves

Posted on by The Radix Team

Lately (say, for the last three years or so), we’ve been writing an awful lot of B2B web copy (as opposed to a lot of awful web copy, hopefully). In 2016, it was up 60%. So it’s as good a time as any to talk about what makes B2B web copy work. (We even wrote an ebook about it.)

What’s driving the surge? Could be that mobile web usage has been on the rise since 2013, while desktop use has been slipping. And changes to Google’s search algorithm have been extensive over the past five years, so many enterprises still have to update their online content accordingly.

Undergoing a website refresh is no simple task, but why do so many brands leave web copy to last when it plays such an important role in user experience and SEO? And does it have to be this way?

Join Fiona, David and me as we discuss how to make the most of your web copy, giving it the attention it deserves so it gets the conversions you need.

Listen in now and find out:

  • What’s different about B2B web copy projects
  • Why your homepage should always come last
  • How to plan content around users and not you
  • … and more

Plus: we look at several B2B websites to see what they’re doing right…. or otherwise.

You can download the episode here (right-click and “save-as” to download). Or stream the episode in the player at the top of the page.

(Or you can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes here. Alternatively, add our RSS to your preferred podcast player.)

Music by Industrial and Marine.

If you’d like to play along, here are the web pages we discuss in this episode…

www.grammarly.com – shared by Giles Shorthouse, The Octopus Group

https://www.topazlabs.com/remask – shared by Joanna Weibe, Copyhackers

https://velocitypartners.com/ – shared by Shelly Lucas, Dun & Bradstreet

http://universe.consignor.com/ – shared by Sean Fleming, Enigma…

…plus one we didn’t quite have time for this episode…

http://www.sdl.com/languagecloud  – shared by Bojan Ambrus, SDL Managed Translation

(Bojan explains that these are landing pages for a marketing campaign, and performed particularly well. We appreciated the puns, and wondered how they’d work for people who weren’t native English speakers… or whether perhaps that’s the point.)

http://sciencecanchangetheworld.org – shared by Paul Hewerdine, Earnest

(Paul says: “This is my favourite B2B site. Its aim is to celebrate the unsung heroes of science, but it is in fact a fine piece of content marketing and community building by a company called DSM (who from what I can gather are scientists for hire used by big brands to do R&D work). Anyway it’s based on a brilliant insight that the science industry is full of bright, passionate people who are out to change the world – but no one’s really championing their cause… until now. The current campaign is essentially a competition to get ‘Bright minds’ to put forward renewable energy solutions – where others can vote on them & the winner gets $100k worth of hours (presumably from DSM) to make it a reality. Real content with a real purpose. Like.”)

Free ebook

If you’d like to get your hands on the ebook we discuss in this episode, you’ll find The Nine Sacred Principles of Badass B2B Web Copy here.

And there’s a Video series available here.

Why is Alexa written to sound human?

Posted on by George Reith

“Umm, I’m sorry, I didn’t understand the question.”

When uttered by a perplexed interviewee or bemused passer-by, this phrase wouldn’t be out of place. When it’s spoken to me by a piece of software trapped in a box, it comes across as an oddity.

But it’s exactly what Alexa, Amazon’s virtual assistant, says to me when I ask the voice-activated Echo Dot yet another obscure question.

You and I know Alexa isn’t really a person. She’s a bot, one with a series of lines written for her by a team of savvy writers at Amazon – a team that deliberately chose to add this human inflection. But what place does humanity have in AI, bots and virtual assistants? And what skills do writers need to make sure this humanity comes across as genuine?

Writing the ‘virtual’ out of virtual assistants

Despite Alexa’s very-much virtual existence inside a box, she has been written to dot her lines with very human-sounding ‘umms’. Long, drawn-out sounds like “umm” are usually stallers: subconsciously used by you and I to buy more time to come up with the answer to a question, or the next essential beat in a conversation.

Alexa does not need this. I know, because I’ve seen the Echo Dot load in answers in a different way. It simply takes longer to return a query, with the ring of lights pulsating to show that Alexa is diligently racking her digital brain for an answer. So why does Alexa try and replicate human speech, and placate us with a natural sounding “umm” that further delays her response to a query?

It’s not just Alexa who’s out there ‘faking’ humanity. Apple’s Siri similarly says it “didn’t quite catch that” when the mic doesn’t pick up your query. But that’s the thing, it’s your phone’s hardware and software not quite working in tandem that results in your misheard request, not some magical human living inside your iPhone being slightly hard of hearing.

Putting the ‘A’ in AI

On the other end of the spectrum, some of the virtual assistants out there are being written in a way that embraces their virtual-ness.

Google Now and Google Assistant are prime examples, happily dumping a web search or info card onscreen for any query it finds too complex to answer immediately – shattering the fiction and reminding you you’re talking to a phone, not a person.

Meanwhile Cortana is also happy to embrace her place as an AI, represented by abstract icons and animations that make her appear virtual. She’ll even tell you she’s a robot if you ask her nicely enough. Considering her name also comes from the AI companion in the Halo game series, it’s also clear that Microsoft is happy for Cortana to be seen as a very non-human helper.

Writing humanity in

So why are some writers masquerading their virtual assistants as human beings when we know they absolutely aren’t?

A big part of it is to do with usage patterns. ComputerWorld spoke with the writers behind Cortana and found that “part of the craft of virtual assistant character development is to create a trusting, respectful relationship between human and assistant… If you don’t respect it, you won’t like it. And if you don’t like it, you won’t use it.”

But exactly how much does that respectful relationship hinge on the fiction that your AI helper is human-like?

The same ComputerWorld article goes on to examine humanity in AI with Intel’s Director of Intelligent Digital Assistance and Voice, Pilar Manchon.

Manchon tells us: “when we interact with a virtual agent, we’re compelled to behave in a specifically social way because we’re social animals. It’s just how we’re wired. In order for users to feel comfortable with a virtual assistant, the assistant must exhibit… social intelligence, emotional intelligence and more. Not doing so would make the agent unlikeable in the same way and for the same reason that a real person without these traits is unlikable.”

This doesn’t necessarily mean the assistant must be human, but this is how the writers of Alexa have chosen to respond to the need for a respectful, social relationship between person and virtual assistant.

It’s all about character

It all comes to down to virtual assistants being loved, and used more often by people. Robyn Ewing, TV and film writer turned AI wordsmith summed this up when she told the Financial Review that for most users, it’s often easier and quicker to get the info you need online without the help of a virtual assistant, “so if the character doesn’t delight you, then what is the point?”

With this in mind, it seems less about humanity, and more about a specific, authentic and relatable character. In fact, Cathy Pearl, director of user experience at Sense.ly, argues that people are more forgiving of mistakes made by an AI that presents itself as non-human – provided it has a sense of humour about any blunders.

If you’re currently building a chatbot, remember that it isn’t enough to simply inject some humanity into the dialogue. You have to give it some authentic, consistent character as well. So, if you haven’t hired any professional dialogue writers, it could be time to start putting up some job ads.

Insights

Want to stay up to date with the latest B2B copywriting trends? Sign up for our monthly email.

RIP: the B2B infographic (2012-2016)

Posted on by The Radix Team

When was the last time you saw a B2B infographic?

We haven’t seen one for a while. In fact, we’ve seen so few in the last 12 months, we’re ready to call the format’s time of death – placing it among the biggest content casualties of 2016.

The unexpected demise of the infographic is just one of six major B2B marketing trends we’ve spotted over the last year.

Trends you’ve spotted?

Yes indeed. As copywriters to over 60 of the world’s leading B2B tech brands, we work on hundreds and hundreds of marketing projects annually, across tens of industries.

And as good business people, we track those projects to within an inch of their boxy little lives. The result is stacks of seriously interesting data.

Each January, we see what this data (and the latest research from analytical pros like CMI and MarketingProfs) can tell us about the current state of B2B content marketing. The results are never less than fascinating.

Like our discovery that B2B case studies – no longer counted as content by the CMI, and as a result, effectively invisible to causal trend-watchers – experienced a huge leap in popularity in 2016. Or the revelation that social media content took a staggering nosedive.

As is rapidly becoming traditional, David and Emily have pulled together the biggest talking points, adding their expert analysis along the way. And this time, our new writer Katy has designed* the hell out of them, creating the handsome SlideShare you’ll find below.

Click away – and see whether our findings echo your own adventures in the world of B2B content creation. (When you’re done, be sure to share your thoughts. We love discussing this stuff, and readily respond to comments, tweets, and invitations to the pub.)

*Yes, designed. Many of our writers have hidden talents. You should see Steve in a rap battle.

Podcast 45: Is BOFU content sexier than TOFU? Ooft, absolutely.

Posted on by The Radix Team

After a hefty winter break (and far too many of Matt’s yuletide treats), the Radix team are back in action (albeit slightly bloated) for another year of B2B content adventures.

And we’ve been thinking hard this past week about BOFU content –why all the ambivalence towards it? The bottom of the funnel is where all that hard work pays off and the money comes rolling in; what’s not to love?

Case studies, product sheets, implementation guides – for us, these are the poster boys of content marketing. Shexshy.

You probably think we’ve lost our marbles; how can a case study be sexy? But bear with us: check out the latest episode of Good Copy, Bad Copy with Emily, Fiona and David.

Tune in now to discover:

  • Our favourite examples of great BOFU content
  • Why BOFU content is just as glamorous as TOFU
  • At least three actionable BOFU tips
  • The right content to use with a ‘freemium’ signup model
  • Why David is so worryingly attached to Maxon’s latest motor catalogue?

Alongside insightful chatter on Xero’s frankly excellent case studies, Emily and David finally acknowledge Bee Movie and its (totally justified) influence on our writers’ relationship with Slack.

(If you happened to have missed the recent buzz around Bee Movie, born from the internet’s most asinine depths, click here – but be warned, a tolerance for memes is essential.)

Finally, if you’d like to guess how many pages are in the Maxon 2016/17 Motor Program as asked by David (it will make his day if you do), please tweet us @radixcom.

Download the episode here (right-click and “save-as” to download). Or stream the episode in the player at the top of the page.

You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes here.

Alternatively: add our RSS to your preferred podcast player.

Music by Industrial and Marine.

Podcast 44: Our roundup of this year’s B2B content marketing predictions

Posted on by The Radix Team

Yes, it’s that time of year where people eat and drink too much, catch up with family and, of course, make wild and ill-advised predictions and wishes about what the next year will bring B2B content marketers and copywriters.

And what could be more seasonally appropriate than a roundup podcast where Fiona, David and Emily reflect on the B2B marketing content predictions we made in 2016, and offer up bold forecasts and Christmas wishes for 2017.

(Turns out a surprising number of our predictions were proved correct this year. Perhaps the most important was about content going longer: research from Andy Crestodina states the average blog post is now over 1,000 words for the first time.)

We also react to a whole bunch of listeners’ predictions and Christmas wishes for 2017 – featuring:

(We’d like to thank everyone who took the time to submit a prediction or wish – we’re sorry we couldn’t use them all.)

Inevitably, there were some wishes and predictions from 2016 that (sadly) did not come to fruition. The word “impactful” still survives, and B2B Expressive Dance has yet to take off as a content medium. Maybe next year…

Download the episode here; right-click and use “save as” to download. Or listen in the player at the top of the page.

(And for anyone struggling to find Doug Kessler a present: Ardbeg. And socks.)

You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes here.

Alternatively: add our RSS to your preferred podcast player.

Music by Industrial and Marine.

Ed: If you’re wondering what the header image is – that’s the top of our Christmas tree with a fairy that has John’s face on it.

Podcast 43: Content writer v copywriter – is there a difference?

Posted on by The Radix Team

Does your project need a copywriter or a content writer? Or does it need both? Could you hire one and not the other? Or are they basically the same thing?

These were just some of the questions we were left asking at the November Bristol Content Group’s Big Content Skills Debate, organised by Valuable Content and hosted at The Real Adventure Unlimited.

Clearly, different writers’ strengths suit different tasks. A writer who’s excellent at writing blog posts may struggle with writing an ad, for example.

In the US, copy is often seen as persuasive, sales-focused writing, where content is more informative. Could that same distinction help marketers in the UK to hire the right kind of writer?

Knowledge gap

In this episode of Good Copy, Bad copy, I talk with Fiona and David about this issue, and also the wider subject of The Big Content Debate: the skills gap currently facing marketing.

It includes interviews with:

  • James Ainsworth (Head of Content at The Real Adventure Unlimited)
  • Matt Turner (co-founder of Writers Ltd)
  • Chris Hull (Director of Marketing Communications at RedstoneConnect plc)
  • Sonja Jefferson (Content Marketing Consultant and Trainer at Valuable Content)

Listen now to find out:

  • Are copywriters and content writers suited to different tasks?
  • Is copywriting purely about persuasive writing?
  • Does content marketing try to sell?
  • Are there types of content that marks out content writers from copywriters?
  • What skills are needed for today’s content marketing?
  • How important is collaboration in writing and creating content?
  • … and more

Download the episode here (right-click and “save as” to download). Or listen in the player at the top of the page.

You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes here.

Alternatively: add our RSS to your preferred podcast player.

Music by Industrial and Marine.

Podcast 42: What does the 2017 B2B Content Marketing trends report mean for copywriters?

Posted on by The Radix Team

The new 2017 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends report for North America from Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs has already caused discussion about what is and isn’t content marketing.

The report showed that 37% of B2B marketers in the US now have a documented content strategy, a five-percentage point increase from the 2016 report.

(In case you don’t know: I attribute a lot Radix’s own content marketing success to us having a documented content marketing strategy.)

The report also suggested that 39% of US B2B organisations are planning to increase their spending on content marketing over the next 12 months.

And interestingly, certainly for copywriters, was the news that 76% of B2B content marketers in the US are planning to prioritise quality content over the volume of content they produce.

Welcome to the future

There are a host of other insights in the report that are of interest to those of us who work in B2B marketing.

In this episode of Good Copy, Bad Copy, I talk with David and Fiona about what the report’s findings mean for copywriters and marketers.

Listen now to find out:

  • Why case studies may no longer be considered content marketing
  • Could UK content marketers actually be ahead of the US?
  • Whether there’s an identity crisis for white papers and ebooks
  • If B2B marketers killed infographics
  • Why there could be blogs galore in 2017
  • … and more

Download the episode here (right-click and “save as” to download). Or listen in the player at the top of the page.

You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes here.

Alternatively: add our RSS to your preferred podcast player.

Music by Industrial and Marine.