It’s easy to get lazy with the things that we write about and content. It happens every day. Look at how you talk to friends and family. People we know seem to get a short hand of our vocabulary. We also start to make assumptions about what they know.

As in example I got an email from John. The first sentence in this email says, “We need to get something like this going in our office.  Real-time, at a glance, accountability”… “Imagine is at any time we could glance over the wall and see how we’re performing…”

Now I may be playing devil advocate here but when I read that, I assume he found some type of monitoring system to look at how each one of us spend out day. When some one uses the word accountability, I think about how I hold my self accountable for my tasks. Now John wants to introduce something that’s going to do it do it for me… I’m not liking this idea and followed his email with a reply calling him “Big Brother” and what not.

Keep in mind, I haven’t even clicked on the link he had at the end of his email. Turns out that I really like this tool. And that it’s nothing like the impression I got from Johns email. What his email should have said was; I found this tool that we should use in the office. It’ll allow us to monitor the performance of our media campaigns and websites on a big LCD screen that we can all see from our desks.

Bottom line:  Web communication is a game of Semantics. We can’t assume that people know what were talking about. Especially when it comes to the content on a website, microsite or landing page. You need to be clear about why they are there, what it is, how it benefits them and what they need to do.