Subscribe through RSSYour About Page Is NOT Your Mission Statement
Somehow the act of hanging a mission statement in the foyer of a business has transferred itself to the About Page of most websites. What was once a practice of communicating trust, confidence, and credibility to customers in a bricks and mortar world is now an ineffective way of connecting and engaging with target audiences online.
Show! Don’t Tell!
Just like gobbledygook business terms, a corporate mission statement holds no more value in the eyes of your customer if the vision expressed can be applied to any company within any sector. Naturally, your company aims to be #1 …in your industry …with the best customer service …and the most fantastic products around. You wouldn’t be in business if it wasn’t!
Trust and Engagement Online Are Predicated By What Users Want and Value
When customers go to an About Page online, they want to know more about your organization through the lens of what matters to them.
About Page Do’s
- Do include background information on your organization to affirm credibility. Tell a story if possible.
- Do post pictures of the business and key personnel to establish rapport and build trust.
- Do keep the tone engaging and light.
- Do answer key questions that your customers might want to know about your organization.
- Do get creative! Borrow from magazine-style interviews or create a narrative through imagery.
- Do use internal links to other sections of the website to illustrate quality products and customer service.
- Do start most sentences with “You”.
About Page Don’ts
- Don’t write in 3rd person.
- Don’t rely on gobbledygook business terms.
- Don’t use corporate or industry acronyms.
- Don’t transpose content from print sources like Quarterly or Annual Reports.
- Don’t include “A Message from the President”.
- Don’t embed a video of yourself “Welcoming” people to your website.
- Don’t provide statistics that are only meaningful to the company …not the customer!
- Don’t start all sentences with “We…”
Mission and Vision statements are a way for organizations to communicate corporate culture, values and objectives in a few short sentences. In theory, they serve as a beacon for which to guide all future business decisions. In essence, mission statements are both for you and about you.
…the difference on the web is that the About Page itself isn’t really about “you” at all!
We can say that the site itself is as much about a company as its about page. About is a metadata designator. There’s metadata in the visual design, the palette, the offerings, the navigation, etc., but an about page is a deliberate attempt to step out of the rest of the site to deliver (at best) such gems as:
* Who is in charge
* Why they come to work in the morning
* How long they have been at it
* How to get in touch with them
I wonder, though, if these can’t be woven into the rest of the site?
That said, people are seasoned to look for an about page like they would look to the rear flap of the dust jacket of a hardcover book for a picture and bio of the author. So what to do?
Well, in short, I agree in principle, except with the following addition. If you have a product, have the product’s designer talk about why she did it the way she did. Put that as an inset on the product page. Then, on the about page, drag the product, with the designer and the blurb into its own inset, creating a two-way loop. Do this all over the place for all kinds of elements.
I (perhaps way too earnestly) believe that the norms of the faceless corporation are out of style and will remain so for a long time. People want to see people. They want to know what possesses other people to get together and make things. They want to know where the things they buy come from, such that the reciprocal relationship of commerce is a social activity once again.
Dorian, I love your first statement! “The site itself is as much about a company as its About Page”.
Yes, I think as content strategists, content writers, developers, designers, IA’s and UX professionals we need to remind our clients that the interactivity of the web provides for a much more enriching way of communicating than the staid literal, sequentially linear approach of days past.
That is the crux of the issue. The “About Page” that we are all accustomed to look for on a website borrows heavily from traditional business practices. That isn’t wrong in and of itself. What is wrong is not challenging the notion of what customers consider to be valuable versus what the organization deems necessary to communicate. The suggested workaround you put forth basically does two things:
1. It provides context to the business offerings of a company framed by the values and needs of the customer (i.e. user)
2. It suggests a flow of communication that is more reflective of natural conversation (“People want to see people.”)
When I read your comment, I immediately thought of The Cluetrain Manifesto.
“1. Markets are conversations.”
“14. Corporations do not speak in the same voice as these new networked conversations. To their intended online audiences, companies sound hollow, flat, literally inhuman.”
“15. In just a few more years, the current homogenized ‘voice’ of business – the sound of mission statements and brochures – will seem as contrived and artificial as the language of the 18th-century French court.”
Organizations that can see past the deconstruction of corporate messaging in favor of contextual delivery will, over the long term, reap greater value online both in terms of reputation and relationship.
Transcript of a Twitter discussion regarding this blog post:
@johnsonwilliam When/Where on a site a ‘Message from the President’ is Useful/Valuable | Tweets by @krismausser http://post.ly/ptho
Absolutely. Consider The Royal They™. There’s a Far Side cartoon from aeons ago with a wife walking in on her husband on the phone with the word THEY inscribed on it, and the caption is something like “So you’re the they of they say…”. I think that really captures an entire generation of people who went their entire lives completely divorced from the notion that there are actual people making these statements and decisions.
Consider also the personhood ascribed to corporations. We’ve seen mountains of rhetoric about how corporations do this and corporations do that. But they don’t do anything on their own. I think it was Milton Friedman who pointed out that when everybody leaves the building, the corporation is inert.
I think this goes back to what I was saying in Jeff’s podcast about a confluence between the breaking of the linear relationship between production capacity and demand, and the economics of information transfer.
Specifically, you can only build production capacity, i.e. factories, in big chunks. That means that in order to be profitable, you’re going to have to find a market to absorb your surplus, but moreover you’re going to have to generate demand so that you don’t wipe out your profit margins. At the same time, you’re producing uniform widgets by the millions that you cannot afford to tailor to each and every customer, so instead it’s like this slow, asynchronous correspondence between what customers want and what businesses deliver. There is simply no mechanism in there for either prompt feedback or the capacity to act on it.
Now, however, it’s possible for individuals to compare notes efficiently and the result of that seems to be that they’re getting curious about the nature of these black boxes called products. Concomitant is the realization that somebody must be responsible for making them available, that somebody has a name, and isn’t some completely unreachable member of the Brahmin caste who we don’t deserve the right to talk to.
“When customers go to an About Page online, they want to know more about your organization through the lens of what matters to them.”
I couldn’t agree more. A visitor to your site is sending a clear message to you when they read your About page. They’re saying they want something different from the information on the rest of the site, something personal, something that reassures them that you are just like them: human.
Mission statements have precisely the opposite effect. They dehumanise. They distance. They build a wall between organization and individual because we just don’t talk like that.
But storytelling is a perfect way to show that the values you espouse in your mission statement are values you display in the real world, not just on the sign in your lobby. As you say, show, not tell.
Mike, I think you’re right. As Dorian pointed out, if the site itself is “About” the organization then the paradigm of the “About Page” as we know it needs to shift away from “business speak” and in the direction of “user experience”.
Perhaps that is where the disconnect lies. Historically the “About Page” provided corporate context …but in the eyes of our users, it has become the legitimizing reference for the organization itself.
How many times have I gone to an ecommerce site and paused at check-out to read more “About” the company to which I am entrusting my business?
As you so rightly point out: “They’re saying they want something different from the information on the rest of the site, something personal, something that reassures them that you are just like them – human.”
Building business online is all about relationships and trust. The “About Page” is critical to establishing that connection. Why waste it on communicating your mission statement?