Mint Digital

The Click #003

I asked a good friend for his feedback on our new Mint Digital site.

Commenting on the people page, he blasted:

“Why are you telling me what you do at the weekend? I don’t give a sh*t about that. I want to know you’re clever enough to minimise my expenditure on your times and materials, creative enough to come up with an interesting solution and focused enough on ‘making it sell’ to be professional.”

I thought everyone agreed that the web is changing the way companies communicate. I took it is read that people want to do business with people, humans want to connect and the web is a great way to make this happen.

Maybe I’ve read too much Seth Godin and got carried away on internet hype.

The Innocent website, which everyone seems to like (well, a couple of clients recommended it last week) is stuffed with personality. Roll over staff faces and you see what they looked like as toddlers. The press section starts: ‘It’s not for us to blow our own trumpet, but… parp parp.’

It works for Innocent, but maybe they are a winsome exception?

Google is a model of professionalism. Occasionally they raise an eyebrow, letting their geeky brilliance shine through. Install the Google toolbar and you are told: ‘Please read this carefully, it’s not the usual yada yada‘. Click on an empty spam folder in Gmail. It says: ‘Hooray, no spam here!’

To communicate a firm needs to show its personality. You’d think I was strange if I introduced myself by saying: “Hi, I’m Andy. I have an unrivalled commitment to quality and professional integrity. I aim to be number one worldwide!” That’s how many corporate sites kick off.

The web makes honesty more cost-effective. Corporate happy-talk and big lies (like ‘Gillette: the best a man can get’) seem hollow. Personality and truth resonate. Saying “Noam has a world record for playing in the world’s longest football match” won’t close any deals for us. But you can’t read it without thinking of Noam as a human being.

And that’s a start.