Gerry McGovern : "The Web is a doing place and great content facilitates a task."

Interview with Gerry McGovern, THE web content specialist. French traduction

The great author of "Killer web content : make the sale, deliver the service, build the brand" was described by The Irish Times as one of five visionaries who had had a major impact on the development of the Web. (The other four were Tim O'Reilly, Vint Cerf, Tim Berners-Lee, and Nicholas Negroponte.) He developped the idea of carewords (important words for customers), the interesting "long neck" theory and more recently the task performance measurement. 

1- How a words' specialist like you went from "carewords" to "task measurement" ? (ie. Why in your opinion a website should focus on task to succeed on the web. What recent discoveries did you make that drove you to those conclusions ?)

I realized that content had no become a productive asset. Content on the web drives action because people come to websites to do things. They're not just looking for vague information. They're looking for information to solve a problem. The Web is a doing place and great content facilitates a task.

2- Here in France, many websites directors still don't consider editorial content as a major issue. According to your experience, what would be the best way to convince them ?

I think the only way to convince such managers is to test. Show them how Page A performs with the filler content and then show them how it performs with the killer content. Getting into arguments or discussions with them is a waste of time. You must show the data. Killer content delivers great results but you must prove these results are achieved.

3- Can you give examples of excellent websites in terms of editorial content ?

It's hard to come up with examples in that a website can only be measured when you actually need to use it for something. A website that I used recently was eLance www.elance.com It was very clear and simple what it was about. I think it has a great homepage. And there's a great website I use when booking flights called Kayak www.kayak.com But the websites I like are the websites everybody likes (Google, Amazon, etc.). They're really focused on the customer. 

Thank you for answering these questions :-)