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- Hate to Write? 3 Ways to Start Enjoying It
- What to Write When an Employee Dies
- 5 Ways to Get Your Email Read, Remembered and Responded To
- Six Tips for Writing in Easy Reading Season
- 12 Ways to Plug the Email Productivity Drain
- Two Questions to Ask Before You Start Writing
- 6 Ways to Aim Your Arrow for the Heart
- 6 Ways to Become an Idea Machine
- 3 Reasons Why You Need to Improve Your Writing Skills
- Get Personal With Your Holiday Greetings: 3 Tips
Archive for the ‘Effective Communication Tips’ Category
Earlier this week at our local Third Tuesday meetup, I heard Jeremiah Owyang of Altimeter talk about the different ways to manage corporate social media activities. Well-researched and reasoned.
But what struck me were some of the terrible names that companies were coming up with for these departments, such as command center or war room. Jeremiah’s suggestion was Center of Excellence, an improvement over military-style names, true, but it made me yawn.
Thirty years ago, when Tom Peters rocked the business world with In Search of Excellence, excellence rocketed to the top of the word parade. But three decades later, with another world-rocking phenomena, can’t we come up with name that’s shiny and new?
Names are important. Seeing as social media is all about being social and connecting, can’t we come up with something that’s more personal and fun?
To help all the companies who are grappling with this dilemma, allow me to toss out a few suggestions. Like when I was naming my babies, I’m considering nasty ways the mean kids could twist the name.
Social media hubs
This complements the hub-and-spoke model that Altimeter’s research revealed is becoming the most popular structure. However, don’t forget that the hub approach forces air travelers to meander hub-to-hub before they reach their destination, so it’s probably not a good name with businesses that inconveniences customers, the people business social media are supposedly set up to serve.
Social machine
Because many social media functions comprise multiple hubs and spokes, they resemble a simple machine. Besides, the guys who came up with the war names would be placated. On the other hand, Quebec folk might think of the biker outlaw group Rock Machine.
Sweet spots
Jeremiah called one of the models honeycomb, which is mostly aspirational, as most companies haven’t yet evolved to this decentralized, individually empowered structure. Seeing as social media is mostly handled by women, as Jeremiah confirmed, the name would go over well. To facilitate the rebranding from command center, the room could be candy floss pink. Better stop this decorating fantasy before I squander the day with decor porn. What’s more, sweet names and pink rooms might ghettoize social media.
Bee hive
Sweet like the previous name, but connoting lots of activity. Only trouble is the many drones are guys and the one queen a female, the opposite of many social media departments.
Still, it has nice ring. No decorating fantasies come to mind. Though the alpha crew could rename it the B team, which implies second rate.
Hot wheels
Because the hub and spoke model comes from wheel design, maybe this one would fly. It would remind the guys of the hot wheels toys they loved as kids, though the “hot” connotation may be uncomfortable for some of the women, though the energy implied works well.
Queen bees
This involves inverting the gender balance of the bee hive, with lots of women in charge. Then again, too many queens and too few drones might lead to some nasty office politics. Or a lot of getting things done. Hmmm.
Any ways, enough musing from me. Do you like any of these suggestions? Do you have any to add? No worn-out military or management jargon, please.
If you’d like to see more about the talk, check out this sketchnote from Sacha Chua.
Early Monday morning: I was catching up on Sunday’s email, mainlining coffee, yelling at my son to get out of bed. When I opened an email from Paulina Callaghan from the Toronto chapter of the International Association of Business Communicators, expecting a routine event reminder.
“I am delighted to inform you that you have won the Tell Us Your IABC Story contest!” the email proclaimed.
I danced. Without music. My dog Cocoa joined in.
Then I set out to tell my friends, clients and suitors. Phone, email, tweet, blog, Facebook… So many ways to share.
But first, I decided I should finish reading the email. From experience, I know I can get into trouble by not reading the entire email.
Horrors! To allow time to inform the other contestants, Paulina explained, “kindly refrain from sharing this news until 5PM tomorrow.”
Thank goodness, I stayed off the computer Sunday, a rare occurrence, because I had cousins visiting from Calgary. I would not have been able to last that long. As it was, 10 hours seemed like 10 weeks.
I’m terrible with holding back good news. Both times I was pregnant, I was on the phone as soon as the test stick turned blue. New jobs and exciting projects, hot dates and proposals, graduate school–you name it. I burst with good news.
So how could I keep my mouth shut? Keep busy. But not busy enough.
My first close call was a reply on Twitter to Donna Papacosta, thanking her for including one of my posts in her daily roundup. I told her to watch for news from me this evening. I justified that on the basis that PR pros know all about teasers.
By the time my son was stirring, so he wouldn’t miss afternoon drama class, I got an email from contest rival and new friend Timothy White, reminding me of our deal that the winner would pay for lunch. Since the emails had obviously gone out, maybe a little tweet wouldn’t hurt. No, I didn’t want to incur the wrath of IABC.
No more emails either, because they’re too easy to forward to one our large IABC clan. But I did call a friend, who’s not a member, to spill, hoping the dam wouldn’t burst.
To play it safe, I went to the gym. Sweaty and exhausted, I backed out of my parking spot, very slowly, my van gently nudging the rear of the car opposite me that had decided to back out after me. The man screamed at me, pointing to a small scratch. Witnesses rushed forward to defend me.
I arrived home rattled, only to receive a direct message from somebody who rarely tweets about people saying nasty things about me. Her account must have been hacked. Hope they don’t promise my followers nude photos, like last time this happened.
These dramas speeded up time.
At 5:03, I sent out my newsletter. Three hours later, after helping my friend Peggy flash her jewellery designs on Pinterest, I’m ready to publish and tweet.
But first, my award-winning story.
“Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”
After I jumped from university to corporate communication, I understood how Dorothy felt when she woke up in Oz.
But then I started going to IABC meetings at Stop 33, the top floor of Sutton Place with the panoramic view of the majestic office towers and sprawling lake. Seated around the glittering tables with shiny people, I felt like I had arrived.
Better still, these power suits got me. They sympathized with my confusion over how to handle approvals, especially that policy wonk bent on sucking the soul out of my precious words. They told horror stories about micro-managing white male bosses. We moaned about deadlines. We laughed at the intrigues of office politics.
Through the speakers, I began to learn how to handle reporters, write a sound bite, prepare a communication plan and many other subjects then not found on any curriculum.
I remember Bobbie Resnick, now an IABC Fellow, making announcements. I can still hear the clapping for the monthly award winners, often Gary Schlee, ABC, who went on to lead college communication programs. They were my rock stars.
Thanks to IABC, I learned what they hadn’t taught me in school. What’s more, I could relax and enjoy the splendours of Oz. I started to feel at home in the work world.
Focus. As in writing about one idea. As in sticking with my priorities. As in listening deeply.
Focus is clarity.
When I focus, I can distill a big idea into a few words, get to the root of what a client needs, push aside brain chatter, be there for another person, grasp complex ideas, savor a bite of chocolate or get underneath the skin of the character in the novel, photo or other medium.
In optics, each focus has a single point. That implies I can focus on only one activity, thought or person at a time. Throughout the day, I may move from one focus to another. But I cannot focus on more than one point at a time.
I can, however, shift down from a single point of focus to two activities, thoughts or people. That is paying attention. For example, I can chat with my daughter while chopping vegetables because neither requires a single point of focus. However, if I don’t pay enough attention, I will hurt my daughter’s feelings or my fingers.
Paying attention is clear enough.
Multi-tasking involves cycling between or working simultaneously on lower-attention thoughts, ideas or people. For example, I can play computer solitaire with music in the background while I say “no thanks” to the telemarketer.
Multi-tasking is blurred.
If I try to multi-task when I should be paying attention, I send the wrong attachment, miss the point or piss off people.
If I pay attention when I need to focus, I miss details, subtleties and connections.
So why do people brag about their ability to multi-task? Why do employers ask for it? Are they saying their tasks aren’t important enough to merit much attention? Should we not be striving to focus?
This post has been updated since it originally appeared at http://barbsawyers.wordpress.com.
Thanks for the photo, Jason Bechtel.
Those people who drive you crazy with big words and long emails are not my reading my book, Write Like You Talk Only Better. If they were, it would be on all the best-seller lists.
I expect many are not motivated enough to read a book that will smooth the writing process, from routine emails to complex business plans, let alone to practice with the worksheets. But some of the employers I’ve talked to would like that to change now that engagement and collaboration have become serious issues beyond the communication department. That’s why I call my new e-learning program Writing is Serious Business.
To collaborate, their people need to pull out ideas and express them clearly. To engage, they need their writing to bring them closer to people. To look smart, they need to stop making the common mistakes that spell check does not catch. To improve productivity, they need to write faster and tighter.
The 14 five-minute segments each continue with an assignment based on what they’re writing that day. This way, busy people can fit learning into their schedule and immediately understand how it applies.
To track their progress, they are encouraged to run their writing through standard reading ease tests and evaluate their improvement against specific benchmarks. Every time they complete an assignment or show improvement, they can award themselves an iWrite star.
Here’s what Writing is Serious Business entails:
Think first
Who’s talking to who?
What about?
Write like you talk
Hook your reader
Big finish
Just write
Write better
Memorable
Concise
Look smart
The two common flubs
Professional, consistent
Stand out
Tell your story
More Hollywood techniques
More media
Keep improving
After learners have consumed the bite-sized pieces, they can return to the segments they’d like to review. Or they can practice with the worksheets that go with the book.
Some of this could change, for the better, as I’m testing the program with two organizations before the big launch. I’m also working with adult educator Lee Weisser, previously with the Canadian Society for Training and Development.
For more feedback, I’ll post the introduction here soon. Stay tuned.
Rudolf Flesch is best known for the Flesch-Kinkaid readability tests, so popular you can enable them in Word. But Rudolf’s lesser-known human interest formula, published in The Art of Readable Writing in 1949, provides wise advice for today’s burgeoning online publishers.
This prolific author on reading and writing can also help you write more engaging content. Rudolf’s advice, backed by research, can be summed up in two words: get personal.
Personal words
He advises us to use gender-specific pronouns, such as his or her and words like actress, Jim or father, some no longer welcome in our politically correct world.
While I’m glad the days of assuming everyone who can read is a he, politically correct writing is often dry and awkward. So let’s keep looking ways to be politically correct and personal. For example, in longer content, I often alternate between he and she.
Rudolf also encourages the use of people and folks. Do you hear that, all you people who refer to me and other readers as users, customers or (choke) stakeholders. Right on, Rudolf. You engage by writing to individuals, not for a faceless group.
Personal sentences
In his formula, Rudolf also calculated the percentage of personal sentences. They include:
- quoted dialogue
- questions, commands and request addressed to the reader
- exclamations
- and incomplete sentences, where the reader can infer the full meaning.
Let me stress that this advice was taken to heart by print journalists, dramatically raising the interest levels of magazines and newspapers. Now that so many people are publishers, we need to heed this timeless advice.
Because of his emphasis on plain language and short sentences in his well-known tests, I’ve been a Flesch fan for a long time. I was delighted to discover that he also recommended people “write like they speak.” I must have channeled his spirit when I was writing Write Like You Talk Only Better.
Because of political correctness, I’m not going to put my copy through his test. Besides, I’m too lazy for unautomated calculations. Check here if you want to try.
But I am going to encourage everyone to follow Rudolf’s advice’s to get personal.
And to enjoy his vintage infographic.
Place a straight edge on the left scale indicating the percentage of personal words. Place the other end on the right scale indicating the percentage of personal sentences. The intersection on the middle scale will show the Human Interest factor.
We keep reading about how effective traditional storytelling can be in content marketing. Yet, many attempts don’t get the promised results because they’re more chronology, fancy-dress curation or sales clap trap than story.
To help you better understand how to make your stories work, let’s look at some of the techniques employed in four examples: Kony 2012, the killing of Osama bin Laden, television crime dramas like Law and Order and Jon Morrow’s popular post, On Dying, Mothers and the Fighting for Your Ideas.
Despite their differences, they all:
- Star people the audience can strongly relate and react to
- Drive the plot with conflict
- Make a clear point
Good versus evil
What prompted more than 100 million excited views on Kony 2012? After a sermon on the clout of individual viewers through social media, director Jason Russell’s son Gavin hooked pretty much everyone.
Before viewers would strongly identify with the child victims, who are kidnapped and turned into soldiers and sex slaves, they needed to open their hearts to this adorable white American boy, who is just like our own children or friends’ children, possibly even a little cuter.
After we were introduced to a victim, Jacob. Because Jason stressed how much victim Jacob was like Gavin, audience members could not dismiss him as another African poster child.
While previous media coverage had focused on the Lord’s Resistance Army, Jason personified the evil through Joseph Kony. His image was relentlessly repeated and accompanied by the simple plea for action: Stop Kony. Bam!
Jason accomplished what Big Media could not, because he connected us to the atrocities, gave us victims we cared about and united us against a single, sinister villain. To be fair, of course, the journalists were reporting, not storytelling, though the line often blurs.
People just like us
When U.S. President Barack Obama told the story of the slaying of Osama bin Laden, he knew we already hated the villain.
So he focused first on audience identification, devoting most of his announcement to how the American people are still mourning the loss of loved ones in 9/11 or living in fear of another attack. The twists and turns of radar evasion, a helicopter crash, whispered meetings and tense faces in the situation room could wait.
The story continues to unfold, and likely will at least until the election, with more revelations about betrayals by trusted servants and wives. Hollywood could not tell it better, though no doubt it will try.
While content marketers don’t have blockbusters like this, they can pump up their stories by opening at the turning point and focusing on one hero and one villain. For longer campaigns, they can extend the narrative with plots that continue to roll, much like a spy novel or an ongoing soap opera.
Open with murder
Like the U.S. President’s announcement, the first scene of Law and Order and similar crime dramas is always the murder, the central conflict that will drive the rest of the story. We are engaged immediately by the horror, with just enough character development thrown in to make us care about the person who died and the grieving famly and friends
The Law and Order formula may work better for content marketers who lack the emotional pull of terrorists and their prey and have to grab the audience quickly.
In the absence of a compelling event, you may lose the people who grew up on fast-paced movies, television and video games. Lacking the patience to stick around, they may need to be hooked immediately and repeatedly reeled in.
Solve a problem
Instead of a murder, though, lead with a dire problem or conflict that sets up the point you want to make.
Jon Morrow’s poignant tale begins with the doctor delivering the bad news to his mother about his fatal disease.
Although there are villains, like the bureaucrats who don’t want him in a regular class or the people who won’t listen to his ideas, the spotlight is on Jon’s feisty, loving mother. When the villains aren’t rotten to the core, there’s more need to champion the hero.
Pitch your point
Watching his mother go to bat for him inspires Jon to fight for his ideas and become one of the most popular bloggers on the planet. His point, which he set up in his title and built through his story, can’t be missed. Neither can the fact that it relates to you.
Your point is to get people to respect you, sign up for your course or do something else. That’s the same as Jason Russell wanting us to stop Kony, Barack Obama defining his place in history, Law and Order gluing us to the tube and Jon Morrow inspiring you to take risks.
While you may not have as gripping a tale, you can develop a quick plot about a problem you solved, a pain you relieved or a life you touched. These stories probably involve people your audience can identify with, love or hate. What’s more, you have a point, your call to action.
As a corporate storyteller, I often found that people were reluctant to air their problems or get personal. But life is messy and profoundly emotional.
You have to tell stories with characters your audience will relate and react to, conflicts that will drive the plot and a point that will encourage the action you desire. Only then can you live happily ever after.
Thank you to all the people who make me better through constructicism, the word I just invented for constructive criticism. But a curse on you, ego-driven busy bodies and trolls. Kick me here.
You never get a second chance to make a first impression, so make sure your title and first paragaph include:
1. a quick summary of what you’re going to explain
2. the most important details
3. the benefits to the reader
4. a balance of keywords and interest generators
5. how you’re going to explain
To learn more, read this.
One of the questions Centennial students asked last week was: how many drafts should you write before your copy is ready?
The answer depends on how much time you have and how clear you are.
The minimum number of drafts anyone should write is two: the first to get your ideas down, the second to fix the first. In most cases, you need a third draft to see you how you can improve.
If my writing involves approvals from subject matter experts who may be thinking more about facts than style, I’ll need another draft, to pull together everyone’s comments so the content still flows.
I’ve gotten by with one draft when I’ve been under the most extreme time pressure, on deadline for an article at a daily newspaper or when drafting an answer for a politician minutes before question period. In both cases, I had a clear idea of what I was supposed to say and somebody checking, though more time would have improved the final product.
If I’m writing something more interpretative without a pressing deadline, I can write 10 or more drafts. This is not excessive when you consider that Ernest Hemingway is said to have revised For Whom the Bell Tolls more than 27 times.
I write once, but rewrite many times. Each time I’ll try to look at a different aspect, for example organization or typos. Every time I do something else and return I find more mistakes I had missed or more ways to improve.
Sometimes everything clicks and I can stop at three drafts. But this is the exception. If I’m not under deadline, I often keep revising, even if it means working late, until that little voice inside says, “Okay, that’s it.”
With some of the outrageously low fees some online services are paying, it’s clear that many writers can only do one or two drafts if they expect to make more than they would flipping burgers. That’s a shame. I hope they are least getting clear instruction and a skilled editor fixing the inevitable mistakes and fine tuning.
Good writing is rewriting. Just ask Hemingway or any of the other writers you admire.
Thanks for the photo, Cornell University.
I’ve decided to repost some hits from the past occasionally, because someone commented or wrote about the issue and I felt inspired to reply, but I had already, so why not open the vaults, though not like Disney, who used this approach to get away with exhoribant prices for movies my kids just had to watch, then whine about movie piracy. This is free.
Do not read this if, like me, you suffer from Shiny Object Syndrome, which presents as too many ideas and trouble picking and sticking with the best.
This is for all the people who have trouble coming up with ideas. Here are six easy steps to become an idea machine.
Enjoy and prosper.
Thanks for the photo, Jason Bechtel.