How often does this scenario happen to you? When you land on a Web site, it doesn’t instantly answer the most important question:

What is the Web site about?

The second question depends on the site.

• For business sites: “What does the business do?”
• For blogs: “What is the topic of the blog?”

My blog is guilty for not making its topic clear. First of all, “meryl’s notes” tells you nothing — not even the fact it’s a blog. However, after seven-plus years of blogging, I’m glad I chose that name as my blog evolved.

So I added a tagline to help clarify the blog’s topic, “Things wordy, geeky, and webby.” It’s still broad, but so is the blog. Successful blogs focus on a specific topic, but I haven’t been able to commit to that.

This site is also my business site. So the home page at www.meryl.net tries to tell visitors what I do and how I do it. Although the how could use more support.

Sites that quickly describe their purpose have one or more of the following:

• Brief statement explaining purpose. It’s easy to find and above the fold – no scrolling required to find it).
• Slogan / tagline that says it all (i.e. Digital Web Magazine is The web designer’s online magazine of choice. getAbstract is Compressed knowledge.
• About that’s easy to find such as in top menu, left menu, or bottom menu (but better to have it above the fold).

Including the slogan or description in the <TITLE> tag helps if it’s brief. Long ones turn into a long and bothersome bookmark. Not everyone edits their bookmarks/favorites.

If you have a popular or well-ranked site and everyone knows who you are, there are still plenty who don’t know who you are. It’s amazing how often a popular or well-ranked sites doesn’t make it obvious why they’re successful, what they’re about, or where to do within the site.

Be careful on how many choices or calls to action appears in the main content. Too many choices or links can scare a visitor away instead of keeping the visitor. The content on the right side of this page is too much. Haven’t found a happy medium.

Related articles

• Pitches: Lessons in what not to do
• Taglines, marketing and branding haikus
• Visions, missions, positioning, and other statements
• What text to link
• About the fold problems and content placement
• About pages

Mission statements, vision statements and goals: Where is it written they have to use fancy words and be a mile long? If they aren’t memorable, how can you expect your employees to implement them and your prospects to understand your objectives?

Most of us struggled to determine which message each company’s CEO pitched. Many of the companies are well known, but we didn’t catch their pitch, which shows that the largest and most successful businesses don’t have an accurate pitch.

Find this hard to believe? Try matching the company with their pitch before you read on. Then learn what NOT to do through their examples — this will help ensure ineffective pitching doesn’t happen to your company.

Aaaaannnnndddd the results!

Two companies received the best results, indicating they have the highest pitch recognition:

Only two more companies received over 50 percent recognition. The rest have pitiful recognition numbers. Four of 17 known companies have recognizable pitches. Sad, unbelievable and pathetic isn’t it?

The bottom of the pile

Let’s review the 17 companies covered in this challenge:

We already know the four that did better than average. So that leaves 13. Which three companies do you think did the worst? Personally, I would vote for AMD, BEA and EMC because I know the least about these companies. Also, the company that uses, “Getting back to customer satisfaction” shouldn’t get a good score, as every company has customers. Nothing about that pitch gives a clue about the company. Ready for the answer?

Cisco, Oracle, Intel

Are you as surprised as I am? Even those who know little about technology are most likely to know these three companies. We conducted this survey with another audience and the same three companies also did the worst. In fact, all three had 0, zero, zip, nada recognition. How can that be? Take a look at their pitches.

I never would have considered these three for the bottom of the pile. But when you put their names with the pitch, it’s understandable. Those pitches don’t match the keywords that would come to mind when thinking of these companies.

Does their success mean that pitches are pointless and don’t impact the bottom line? Not necessarily. Imagine how much more business they would have if their pitches were more in line with their business. Could these companies’ large size make it impossible to come up with a single slogan to represent them? This theory is shot when you see Dell and eBay getting the most recognition.

One of the first things a company wants to do is differentiate itself from the competition. The best way to do that is to use its USP (unique selling proposition) to create the company’s pitch. Pitches communicate the company’s value and what it does.

Trading pitches

Two companies received over 50 percent recognition under another company’s pitch. In other words, the other company’s pitch better suited these two companies. AMD’s “To provide the world’s best semiconductor solutions based on customer-centric innovation,” is a better match for Intel.

Novell’s “Connecting anyone to anything digital, simply and reliably and at a low cost,” sounds more like Cisco, doesn’t it? Novell wasn’t recognized at all. Looks like it needs to revisit its pitch and match it to what the company does.

More results …

Can you name another company that manufactures chips like Intel? Neither can I. Intel’s success largely comes from having little competition. If another company could compete against Intel and communicate its purpose better, how would it impact Intel’s success?

Connecting with the customer

Robin Weidner, principal with Robin Weidner Copywriting & Consulting, has an excellent pitch, “Smart copywriting that connects you with your customers.” She says, “I often write taglines, sales campaigns and other communications, working with businesses ranging from start-ups to companies running national sales campaigns. It’s interesting to me how companies build verbiage that makes them feel good about themselves, but may do little to connect them with their customers. As far as the exercise [goes, it's] very interesting. I only knew about seven of these and looked up the others, curious to see if their verbiage would lead me to their companies.”

Simon Young, managing director with SimonYoungWriters, whose pitch is “I listen to the stories businesses have, then tell them in a compelling way,” says, “This exercise confirmed for me what I already believed—big corporations don’t often know what it is they do, because they’re too busy doing it. Time to reflect is a precious, very necessary commodity.”

Gordon Graham, partner with Gordon and Gordon, pitches, “I help technology firms tell their stories using facts, not hype.” He says, “Even though I’ve worked in high-tech for 25 years, I couldn’t always tell which pitch was for which company. It’s amazing how much ‘pahooey’ some companies put out! This has some good examples I can use in my workshops on how to write positioning statements that are crisp, clean and clear.”

Virginia Avery, president of Avery Communications, gives a pitch that explains exactly what her company does, “You are only a day away from more profitable business presentations!” She says, “The ‘pitches,’ by and large, are written for others within the industry and are not customer-focused.”

Thanks to the Perfect Pitch, this article came to life.

I never wanted to start a business. The thought of managing all the administrative stuff like accounting, legal, and other stuff turned me off. I like doing my job and focusing all of my energies there. Surprising as that’s what I am doing today… managing my own business.

It’s a one-person business and I manage taxes, accounting, and everything that comes with having a business. It’s worth it as the benefits outweigh the little annoyances. Taxes aren’t too bad. But Quickbooks drives me insane at times as I can’t get it to balance. Yet, I can balance the checkbook every month. I’m usually comfortable with software, but not QB. It’s a meanie.

Back to business. I remember way back when a company I worked for came up with a mission statement. It printed colorful cards (credit card quality, not business card quality) and mouse pads for everyone in the department. Even with the portable mission statement, it wasn’t memorable. It used a lot of fancy words and sounded more like, “Blah blah blah.”

Let’s distinguish mission and vision statements with help from Wikipedia:

* A vision statement describes in graphic terms where the goal-setters want to see themselves in the future. It may describe how they see events unfolding over 10 or 20 years if everything goes exactly as hoped.

* Mission: purpose, reason for being.

In some cases, a slogan or tagline could count as a mission statement. There’s also positioning statement for more fun. The article defines it as “a one to two sentence statement that conveys what you do for whom, to uniquely solve an urgent need.”

Rarely do I see any of these statements done right. Most of the time, no one understands or remember the statement. Instead, I recommend coming up with a short and snappy tagline. Something that communicates what you do and the benefits. You can apply this concept with the above statements except try to make them memorable. Here are examples:

“Helping children around the world read and learn.” Scholastic

“Compressed knowledge.” getAbstract (provides abtracts of books)

“Tools for healthier lives.” Mayo Clinic

“For people who love to eat.” Epicurious

Mine? -gulp- “Content that inspires and informs.” Since I write and edit, content captures that. “Inspires action” was my attempt at showing the benefit. Businesses who hire writers and editors want the content to do something, not just sit there and be read. Right?