Today, unusually for me, I flicked on the TV and watched a few minutes of BBC Breakfast. In what was a surprise to me on the screen flash they were punting “Like us” with the link facebook.com/bbcbreakfast.
I hadn’t realised that “Auntie Beeb” had embraced the Internet and social media quite so fully, and then the moment was spoilt. Presenter Susanna Reid admitted on air that she’d been chastised by the producers as she’d announced it as “facebook dot com stroke BBC Breakfast”, instead of “slash BBC Breakfast”.
It might only be a minor point but it goes to show that those of us that trade full time on the Internet generally expect that everyone is familiar with the online basics including URLs, but for some the Internet is still a fairly new phenomenon and when dealing with customers we should take nothing for granted.
8 Responses
This is a phenomenon I’ve seen before. Just because WE know what something means, and our immediate “sphere of influence” (you know what that means ? It’s a psychobabble term meaning relatives, friends etc) knows what it means we shouldn’t assume other people do.
For example a lot of online sites STILL don’t work if you don’t a put a WWW on the link. It’s a lot easier to describe a link if all you have to say is “Play.com” rather than “www.play.com” isn’t it ?
Remarkably scores of sites won’t work without the www. Recruitment sites seem to be the biggest offender in this market, mind you most of those are a*&^%$£ anyway 🙂
I wrote about this very subject on my own blog some time back:
https://www.ethicalcompanies.co.uk/?p=1841
To anyone whose site doesn’t work without the WWW, I recommend changing it now, it’s not going to cost you anything (well it shouldn’t) and it’s not hard. If you paid to have your site setup and it doesn’t work without the www you need to question why this wasn’t done for you.
Steve
https://xkcd.com/727/
I agree, a site should be able to be gotten to with or without the www. But be careful to have it set up correctly. If not done correctly the site will be viewed by search engines such as Google as two different sites — therefore sites with identical content.
As far as stroke or slash or slant or ??? isn’t that a bit like a storm in a tea cup?
Cheers
Since “stroke” (https://www.hfradio.org.uk/html/morse_code.html) equals “slash”, that chastisement was — — .-. — -. .. -.-. .
/*
“Originally created for Samuel F. B. Morse’s electric telegraph in the early 1840s, Morse code was also extensively used for early radio communication beginning in the 1890s.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morse_code
My Aunt is a young 72 yrs old.
She has just this week been given a 2nd hand laptop & she cannot even find (yet) the back button, she how’s she to know about slashes!!.
The years ago I started the back button was the 1st place I was shown, as I could alway get back to where I started…..