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February 16, 2006

Can reading Cosmo make you a better communicator?

If you are not a young woman age 18 to 34, you may not be familiar with Cosmopolitan magazine. If you don’t know Cosmo, run to your nearest newsstand and buy a copy—because doing so will make you a better communicator.

How? Because the editors of Cosmo have made an art form (and a lucrative business) out of figuring out how to appeal to their audience. And any communicator can adapt what works for Cosmo to make our own work more compelling and effective.

The magazine’s success starts with cover lines, those short headlines (on the cover, of course) that promote what’s in each issue. Like other consumer magazines, Cosmopolitan not only offers subscriptions, it also relies on sales of individual copies at newsstands, supermarket racks, and in airport shops. And it’s a jungle out there—magazines only have a few seconds to catch a potential buyer’s attention, convincing her to pick up the magazine, look at it more closely, and decide to buy it.

It’s no surprise, then, that Cosmo’s Editor-in-Chief Kate White spends half her time working on the cover. For Cosmo, the ingredients of a successful cover include some elements most of us don’t have to worry about—which beautiful celebrity is being featured, how provocative is her dress, and how pouty is her expression—but one factor communicators do have in common with Cosmo is cover lines.

“I wasn’t a born cover line writer,” said Ms. White at a recent industry speech. “I had to learn how to write cover lines that get readers’ attention.”

Her education began by really getting to know her audience. “I use focus groups, reader polls and online surveys to get a sense of who the reader is and what she wants,” Ms. White says.

As a result, Cosmo cover lines are designed to directly appeal to readers’ needs, most of which focus on relationships:

“How to snag the man you want”
“50 fun ways to get close to him”
“5 relationship rules you gotta break”
“10 times it’s okay to be a bitch”

I know what you’re thinking: “What the heck does this have to do with the stuff I need to communicate?”

To see the connection, get beyond Cosmo’s topics—sex, men and personal fulfillment—and focus on the techniques editors use to create the cover lines:

• Brevity. Cover lines are short, snappy, easy to read. Long words are few and far between.

• Service. The premise is to help the audience solve a problem or accomplish something that matters to them.

• Fun. Cosmo is serious about its readers’ needs, but doesn’t take itself too seriously. You can sense the smile and the wink behind the words.

Can you apply these techniques to your own headlines? Sure you can. Just focus on your audience, relax and have fun with it.

Posted by Alison Davis at 01:32 PM

February 08, 2006

Free Lorem Ipsum!

For hundreds of years, publishers and designers have used a passage of Latin words known as lorem ipsum (or lipsum) as placeholder text when showing an early version of a designed publication, website or presentation. The idea is that real text is too distracting—people can’t ignore the meaning of actual words—so “dummy text” allows reviewers to focus on the design.

Last week, I realized that Lorem (as I like to call her) needs an extreme makeover. The gal has let herself go. She’s simply too old-fashioned and dowdy-looking to play the important role required of her. We need sample text that’s lighter, more accessible, and more representative of what appeals to today’s audiences.

Here’s what Lorem usually looks like today:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

Even if this were in a familiar language, who would read it? It looks like a big gray mass of text, with long words and complex sentences, so much so that Microsoft Word (which apparently can read any language, even if it’s fictional) evaluates it at the 12th grade reading level.

Why should anyone care? After all, lorem ipsum is not meant to be seen by anyone but the people working on and approving a design. If the text is dense, what difference does it make?

I think it matters because we communicators constantly need to educate our stakeholders about what good communication looks like. We’re always battling the forces that want to convey too much information in ways that are too complex and inaccessible. Even our mock-ups need to practice what we preach: simple concepts clearly conveyed in ways that respect our audience’s time and attention.

Help Lorem find a new look! (If you’d like to see my proposed post-makeover version of Lorem, send me an e-mail and I’ll share it with you.)

And for more on Lorem’s origins and history, visit www.lipsum.com or www.wikipedia.org

Posted by Alison Davis at 01:07 PM | Comments (1)