• Corporate portals
   Advice for communications people

• Look them in the eye
   Include portraits in statements
   >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

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• Quick ones
   Collected advice boxes

You are a web editor.

• When you publish a web article...
• When your subject matter expert dishes out advice on a product web site...
• When your top boss asks you to publish his or her quarterly statement on the company web site...

In short, whenever one person does the talking on the web – think about including a small portrait. Especially if the person appears to be talking directly to the reader (“I´ll give you a super deal on your mortgage this week...” and that sort of thing).

Simple? Yes. But is it common practice? No.

Why should you include a portrait, then? Because we are really talking face-to-face communication.

You may not have a particular reader in mind when making your statement, but even though you are broadcasting, your message is sure to end up on somebody´s personal screen.
You, the expert or the boss will be communicating directly with that person. Often that´s also how the reader sees it: This text is written so that it appears to be created just for you; even though I probably know more about your IP-address than about your person. If we go two seconds back in time, did you pay any attention to the fact that others also read this article?

One-to-one is more than just the formation of a soccer team with a truly bad disciplinary record: it is the reason why the basic principles of interpersonal communication also apply in many web contexts.
You know: make your message easy to decode, maintain eye contact...

That´s why. Think about it from the information consumer´s point of view:

When you read that top dog´s quarterly statement about how your shares have gone down but how your money will of course be safe in the long run, don´t you want to look him in the eye?

When as a website user you are meant to feel that the site´s subject matter expert is dishing out advice just for you, the favourite customer, don´t you want to see what your personal adviser looks like? I do.

This gentleman talks straight to the reader. Which approach works best?

So why don´t I practice what I preach? Why don´t I include my portrait with every article on this site?
Fairly simple answer: I do all the articles here, so including a portrait with every one of them would be overkill. Instead I´ve stuck a few portraits on selected pages, such as the About the editor page, on which you can look me in the eye. Would I lie to you...?