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So it’s 2011 but I can’t shake a funny sense of de ja vu. Remember the millennium? There wasn’t much to remember really, the clocks ticked over and life went on as usual. This year has a similar feeling – there’s been a lot of talk about 2011 and all the opportunities RWC will bring.

But here we are in the second month of the Big Year and there’s little sign that New Zealand businesses are doing much to capitalise. Online anyway.

If your business depends on people finding or booking you online – especially from overseas – there’s a lot you can do to catch the attention of the expected hordes of international visitors. First though, look at the numbers:

• Last February there were 5400 Google searches worldwide for the term ‘NZ 2011’. Last month there were 74,000
• Searches for ‘Rugby world cup 2011 accommodation’ jumped from 1900 in February 2010 to 8100 last month
• ‘Rugby world cup wellington’ went from 210 to 1300, with similar rises in regional searches for Auckland, Christchurch and Dunedin

The numbers aren’t surprising but they’re a reminder that if your business relies on the internet, now is the time to get clued up on the search words that could mean the difference between charging up the middle and watching from the sideline.

Top tips to get your content in shape for RWC:

KNOW YOUR NICHE
There’s no point adding ‘rugby world cup’ to your title tags and hoping for the best. Identify exactly who your target market is and draw up a list of keywords they might use to find the kind of thing you offer. Test and refine your list with Google’s keyword tool . If there’s a lot of competition it could pay to support your organic SEO efforts with a pay per click campaign.

For example, if you own an Irish pub in New Plymouth you might do well to target the Irish supporters who’ll be flooding in on September 11.

PLAN TO WIN
Apparently we’re a nation of procrastinators. Start a trend – get organised. Have an editorial calendar that marks out when you’re going to update your content, with which keywords, and make someone responsible so those updates actually happen.

And you’d be mad to ignore the growing power of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. Go forth and mingle, but remember that content updates, regardless of where they appear, should always support your content strategy

LOCATION COUNTS
People coming from overseas, as well as New Zealanders travelling for games, are searching for accommodation, places to eat, things to do in particular places. Put your business on the map by taking out a free listing on Google Maps.

IS YOUR CONTENT REALLY THAT USEFUL?
There’ll be a lot of hype this year and most people don’t want a bar of it. The tricky thing is, when you look at your own content it can be hard to be objective.  Ask your clients and friends for honest feedback on what they like and don’t like about your website.

Take some time to click through your site and get rid of any extraneous or out of date content. And measure old content against your newly refined keywords. When you’ve got your house in order you’ll be much more confident about opening your doors to the world.

I’ve been pondering blog number one, 2011 … What’s the big thing this year?  Content strategy, yes, but do designers care? Do they know they should?

Should is a bad word but there are lots of reasons why I care if designers care. We work with designers a lot. We get a lot of work through them.  They’re inclined to wear nice shoes.

If I had a design company in New Zealand this year I’d keep an eye on content strategy. There is growing interest here and a torrential hoo-ha overseas, particularly in the United States, where content strategy meet-ups are popping up all over and more and more clients are asking for it.

Not just content audits, style guides and, if you’re lucky, an editorial calendar. The full monty: an all encompassing strategy covering content creation, governance, life cycle, marketing and metrics.

It sounds like a lot of extra time and cost but it’s not in the scheme of things. A good content strategy will save your web project time and money. It’ll make design and user testing easier. It will simply make your websites better.

It wouldn’t be January without some crystal ball gazing. This year will see content strategy come out of the closet – where it’s been trying on different outfits for a while – as a discipline and occupation in its own right. Replete with an army (okay maybe not an army, not yet, perhaps a rugby sized team in NZ) of experts ready to help businesses make the tough calls about their content.

Events like Kristina Halvorson’s content strategy workshop at Webstock will give existing converts new enthusiasm and open others’ eyes to the potential benefits of making content strategy the normal starting point in the design process.

There’s a lot of discussion going on as people working with web content contribute to the constant refining of the practice of content strategy.

Listen in or have your say:
Google’s content strategy group
LinkedIn content strategy group

We’re shutting shop for a few weeks, back on the 24th of January. Huge thanks to everyone who’s helped to make our year so busy.

See you all next year. Happy holidays!

It’s official! President Obama has signed the Plain Writing Act of 2010 (H.R. 946) into law. This means United States government agencies will have to make sure their public documents are clear, concise and well organised.

It also means public servants across the US will be signing up for plain English writing training in droves. I feel a sabbatical in New York coming on …

The bill has been in development for some time and at its final reading passed in the US House of Representatives with a vote of 341-82. What’s with the 82? The senate on the other hand voted unanimously in favour. That’s more like it!

The bill aims to increase government accountability and to save the public time and money. It will have a positive effect on things like tax returns, college applications and veterans’ administration forms.

Plain English in New Zealand’s public sector is pretty well entrenched in principle – not always in practice – but we haven’t gone as far as making it the law. Yet.

The wonderful lobby group Plain English Power is pushing for a new law requiring all government communication to be written in plain English.

As Rachel Hunter once said plainly and memorably, it won’t happen overnight but it will happen!

To show your support, get on the case and join Plain English Power

Pass us a big key and a yardie. Actually maybe just super fast broadband I can access from home, my phone, and when I roam. Doubleclique have just brought to my attention that 2010 marks 21 years of internet in New Zealand. 21!

The Down to the Wire site they’re launching on 11 October promises interviews with 50 New Zealand internet personalities and players. Sounds intriguing but I couldn’t wait and had to do a little digging myself.

Connecting the Clouds – The Internet in New Zealand by Keith Newman – which you can read in its entirety online, of course – tells the story of the internet’s arrival in New Zealand in great detail.

The short version is that it didn’t arrive quickly or cleanly here, but after much hard work from the likes of John Houlker at Waikato University and John Hine at Victoria University and rafts of dedicated and unfeasibly brainy others, the analogue undersea link to Waikato University went live.

Little did I know or care at the time, I was busy printing the first and only issue of Berhampore School News with my best friend on stinky purple banda paper in the school office. We were standard four and all powerful and thought the banda machine was pretty cool.

My father excitedly told us about the ‘Monday news’ he wrote for his work, which everyone read on their ‘email’. Aye?

When I was studying we had dial-up at home and got used to the tuneless drone as we waited for news from friends and family overseas. Or in my case, infrequent love notes from a love rat in Taipei.

Now, my whole working life revolves around the internet and life without Google is unimaginable.  Thanks to the internet I can do work I love from anywhere, for clients anywhere, and feel at all times meaningfully connected to the wider world.

So a big thank you to all the techies in New Zealand who helped make this possible. I hope you celebrate in style with a nice bottle of bubbles and not a computer in sight.

Down to the Wire
Connecting the Clouds – The Internet in New Zealand