The new Scottish Natural Heritage website is live and burgeoning with interesting, relevant information.

Cygnus Extra provided training for staff writing for the project and contributed to editorial work for the site.

Cygnus Extra contributes copywriting services for the site, including researching and maintaining a great deal of the project information that the site is well known for.

Visit www.clydewaterfront.com to see what we’ve been up to.

Paula La Rocque, one of the USA’s leading writing coaches says, “Accuracy aside, simplicity, clarity and brevity are the most important criteria for all writing.” I would endorse her approach and argue that clear, simple and direct informational writing can provide the bedrock for good communications skills.

The definition of a “tone of voice” or a personality for the writing often starts by identifying a couple of adjectives – engaging, passionate, fresh, professional, friendly are all favourites. This is fine as far as it goes, but actually we have to go further.

The style or tone that we are after is also defined by register (the level of formality), word choice and syntax. In addition, the purpose of the writing, the audience and medium used for communicating, all contribute to the tone.

While brand guidelines often define a tone – up to a point – organisations can find this a difficult aspect of branding to implement, and sometimes progress can be haphazard.

The tactics for implementing tone are actually grounded back in the whole area of audience awareness. We have to be ready to have a conversation with our audience – which means there are at least two people involved.

Some great examples from Guy at the Carphone Warehouse about how they are using Twitter to deal with customer complaints. Then there was Heather, farmer’s wife and the boss at Wiggly Wigglers, who talked about how she turned a very small business, down a leafly lane in rural England somewhere, into rather a successful one with a bit of a cult following for their podcasts. Not to be outdone, Craig from Whyte and McKay had a great story about a treasure hunt they ran on Twitter while he was at large in the city with a bottle of Whisky in his backpack as the prize for anyone who could find him.

Conclusions from the day? Twitter, Facebook, Podcasting… great tools and as good as the ideas that you can come up with to use them. However, this is not sedate old fashioned marketing and not for the fainthearted. No one is very sure about the results or even about why some things work and other’s don’t. On the other hand, everyone seems convinced about the world takeover.

At Publishing Scotland we delivered a one day open advanced writing for the web training course which allowed people to practice and apply skills they’d learned on an earlier course. Delegates enjoyed the opportunity to spend time thinking about how they tackle different writing tasks for their own websites. One delegate even wanted to know if we’d considered running a week-long course. It may come yet!

Other advanced writing workshops have been delivered in house, allowing teams of writers to collaborate on specific content tasks.

So, when you are writing for the web, can you write for that “other listener”, or in our case “other reader”? How well do you know your audience? Do you know who that person is? If you can write for an individual you may be more likely to engage all your readers.

This technique, when you identify an individual to write for,  is called writing for a persona. Many web copywriting techniques are borrowed from other disciplines and this one is no exception. Marketing specialists, journalists and fiction writers all use the idea of a “Persona”.

In my web copywriting training courses we explore more about how to write well for your audience in general and that “other reader” in particular!

The great discipline on Twitter of course is to write short, something we thoroughly believe in. Now we’ll have to walk the walk.

Look out Facebook and Bebo. We may be going there next!