John McGarvey – web copywriter

I had dinner in a Giraffe restaurant the other night. You know the places: friendly staff, reasonable food, good value – and plenty of two-for-one vouchers available online.

In fact, their whole website is pretty decent, and they understand how to use Twitter too.

Anyway, towards the end of the evening I did the usual um-and-er over dessert thing, until spotting the cheesecake on the menu. Had it just been “chocolate cheesecake”, I might have declined. But “milky double bubble chocolate cheesecake”? How could I say no?

That’s the power of good copywriting.

Some years ago I worked as a web editor for an IT firm. We used to run occasional competitions. One of the best parts of that job was phoning people up to tell them they’d won a prize – a PC or games console, say.

We always used to put quite a lot of thought into what to give away. We wanted things that would be eyecatching and useful too. We didn’t really want our competition winners to go sticking what they’d won straight up on eBay.

That job would be much easier today. There’s only one prize that anyone who’s anyone is giving away at the moment: Apple’s iPad.

I’ve come to this conclusion after noticing a spate of tweets, adverts, emails and websites, all promoting competitions to win the giant iPhone. And it really is quite astounding how many websites are giving this gadget away.

Unbeatable, Bitter Wallet, Pocket Lint, UK2,  Review Centre, T3 and Travolution. All these are UK-based sites, giving away a gadget which isn’t even officially available in the UK yet. When you widen it to US sites, it just gets silly.

Try Dummies.com, Zagg, SEOMOZ, Mashable, Symantec, Digg, PCMag and authorStream for starters. So many companies are giving the things away that there must be a danger of a shortage for ordinary buyers.

This got me thinking. Could the number of competitions offering a given item as a prize be indicative of the appeal of that prize? And if so, could companies use this statistic as some form of market research?

(Image courtesy of Apple.)

I like it when restaurants take the time to get their branding right. It implies a similar amount of effort has gone in to the food.

I had a meal in a Reading eaterie a couple of weeks ago. The bill turned up with this witty “with condiments” card, which perfectly fit the modern, relaxed feel of the place, and made me chuckle.

As it turned out the food was excellent, but if it hadn’t been, at least the clever copywriting would’ve gone some way to making up for it.

An experience this week has reminded me of one of the internet’s truisms: once you’ve put something online, you can’t control how it gets used.

Along with a few hundred other people, I went down to the BBC’s Broadcasting House last weekend to protest against the closure of BBC 6 Music.

While I was there, I snapped a bunch of photos and put them up on Flickr.

They’re not great shots, but nonetheless the Love 6 Music website wanted to use them. Fair enough, I thought. After all, I support what they’re trying to achieve. Some of my pictures duly appeared on the site.

The next day The Guardian covered the protest – and included some of my photos in a gallery, all credited to www.love6music.com. It turns out the people behind the campaign had spoken to The Guardian and allowed them to use the pictures.

Now, initially I was taken aback by this. I felt I’d given permission for the photos to be used on a non-profit campaigning website, not on a commercial newspaper’s site.

However, once I thought it through, I realised I’d been pretty vague – I’d given permission in an easily-misinterpreted tweet which didn’t really explain under what circumstances I’d be unhappy with the photos being used:

“Sure, be my guest [to use the photos]! They’re all Creative Commons anyway.”

I allow most of my photos on Flickr to be used for non-commercial purposes under a system called Creative Commons. However, I’ve never wanted commercial websites to use my pictures for free. It’s the same for my writing; if someone’s making money from my work in some way, I expect to get paid.

Anyway, in this case I decided to bend my principles a bit. It is pretty cool to have your pictures on a national newspaper’s website, and I care a lot about the survival of this particular radio station, so I emailed The Guardian and asked for a credit, which they duly added.

So, all’s well that ends well? Yes, in this case. But it goes to show just how hard it is to keep tabs on your digital content.

It doesn’t matter if it’s words, pictures, video or sound – someone can always grab it and use it the way they want. And even though technically you keep the copyright and can forbid people from using it, in practice it’s hard to even find out it’s happened.

That’s a pain where your professional work is concerned. But when it’s personal photos, musings or other stuff you absolutely have to keep control of, you’re better off not putting it online in the first place. That’s the only way to be 100% certain it’s not being used in ways that make you unhappy.

The specific lesson I learnt in this case is that when someone is nice enough to ask permission before taking your content, always make your answer specific. If you’re not happy for them to pass your stuff on for publication on other websites, tell them. Because if you don’t, you can’t really complain when your content starts popping up in unexpected places.