We’re asking and answering all these questions in our article on brand tone of voice, one of the things we do here at Afia.

If you’re interested in knowing more, read on…

Courtesy of Josh Semens on flickr

The spectacular rise of social media marketing undoubtedly offers good chances for businesses to sell themselves. But it also brings hidden dangers. Take Twitter. If you’re not sure of what you’re doing, it can be akin to walking blithely across the quick sands of Morecambe Bay as if it’s ‘just another beach’.

On Twitter, it’s crucial not to alienate people by obviously selling. Or by being monumentally irrelevant and coming across as lightweight. Or by missing the boat and seeming out of touch by failing to tweet about something you’d be expected to have a view on. Or, crucially, by tweeting an opinion that contradicts your branding – either by what you say, or how you say it. I call all of this ‘twitting’.

The power of the tweet

Used well, Twitter should do several things for your business. To the people listening in your field, it should show you know your stuff and are good for useful and interesting material. It should create a lively, open channel for discussion, make your brand more human, and bring you closer to your potential consumers. It should give people the impression that your business is energetic, in touch, listening. And it should make Google love you more.

For this to happen, you need to regularly scan the news and the timelines of other tweeters in your marketplace. Listen to what your customers are saying about you and your industry on Twitter. Find things to tweet about and then tweet frequently and daily. But do the trusted voices in your company have the time to do all this?

Who tweets?

If not, do you set up a dedicated Twitter team to handle it? Farm it out? Or encourage everyone to tweet when they see a good opportunity? In an ideal world, this last option is best. But it does have its risks.

There’s only one way to get everyone on board and avoid the danger of mass ‘twitting’. That’s to make sure people instinctively know the sort of things to say… and exactly how to say them. And this is where social media guidelines and tone of voice training come in. With people understanding what they can and can’t say and the right tone of voice to use, you’ll have little to fear.

What do you think?

If you’ve grasped the social media nettle, how are you tackling the challenge of dynamic, effective tweeting? What works for you… and what doesn’t? Does it excite you, or give you that dreaded Morecambe Bay sinking feeling?

And do you think Twitter is worth the trouble, or just a fad?

One thing’s for sure though – no two projects are the same. Sometimes jobs start off fairly small. Then they turn in something huge that has a big impact on the company or organisation we’re helping. And sometimes what looks like a big meaty, complicated project turns out have a simple solution. (We love it when that happens.)

But there are some essentials that run through all the projects we manage. The thinking and planning bit right at the very start helps to keep things ticking along smoothly. It’s a simple enough idea, but easy to ignore or forget in the rush to get going. Here are some of our guiding principles for getting (and keeping) a project running well.

Know your outcomes

The most important part of planning any project is making sure everyone is crystal clear about what the objective is. Why are we doing this job? If no one can answer that quickly and clearly in a couple of sentences or less – then stop. There’ll be no chance of success if people are fuzzy about the outcome of the work they’re meant to be doing.

It’s important not to confuse objectives and outcomes with deliverables. Everyone involved with the project might know that there are 150 customer letters to write, or a set of guidelines for a company’s tone of voice. But knowing why we’re doing these things will help make sure they achieve our goals.

Define the scope

Just as important as knowing what your outcomes are for a project, and what work you’ll be delivering, is knowing what you won’t be doing. Making it clear from the start what the project covers, and specifically what it doesn’t, will avoid much disappointment later on. It’ll also help keep the job on budget and on time. If the project objectives are clear, then it’ll be much easier to define the limits of the work to be done.

Spell out your deliverables

It might seem obvious, but you should never kick off a project without knowing what it is you’re going to deliver in the end. Saying you’ll deliver a brand strategy presentation might seem pretty clear, and most people will get what you mean. But exactly how will that presentation look when the tools go back in the box? Are we writing the text in a plain old Word doc, or are we going the whole hog and doing a super snazzy, all-singing all-dancing PowerPoint with animations, music and lunch included?

Be clear about the budget

‘It’s a simple job, probably just a day’s work’. Always be on your guard if these are some of the first words uttered about a new project. Until you know what the objectives are and what the finished piece of work is going to look like, timescales and budget are going to be hazy at best.

We all know clients’ budgets can be tight. That’s fine, but everyone should be wary of agreeing to do a job within a budget that will make it impossible to deliver the quality everyone’s expecting. Budgets are often slashed, but quality is rarely compromised. There are some projects that need a significant amount of time and money to get right, and it’s worth taking the time to talk about it frankly and openly with everyone involved up front.

Know who’s doing what and when

‘When can we do it by?’ Normally one of the first things we’re asked. And just like the budget, it’s really important to be open and realistic about timescales. Everyone wants everything yesterday. That’s almost a given nowadays. In order to draw up a schedule that everyone’s happy with you need to work out who’s doing what and when they need to do it by. Matching people to tasks and setting deadlines that everyone agrees to will take away a lot of stress, even on very fast turnaround projects.

All this may sound rather obvious. A bit operational and process-driven perhaps. But creative work is sometimes the hardest to manage. It’s often all in people’s heads and hard to pin down. So spending time right at the start of a new project thinking things through will make everyone’s lives much easier. And you’ll end up with great work that everyone’s happy with, both you and your clients.

What do you think?

What’s your experience of running projects or being part of a project team? Any tips and tricks to share? How do you make your jobs run as smooth as silk?

Here’s one of her great ideas. You can get this and the other 99 from Amazon and all* good bookshops.

NAMING #7: BE POETIC

As we were saying, a hundred years ago companies generally named themselves after their owners or their location. And although they might choose a snappier brand name for their products, they generally retained a practical descriptive approach. However early brand names did sometimes venture into the poetic, with elegant metaphors to summon up a vision of the ideal.

The idea

There’s a delicate balance here. How can you describe what you do clearly yet add a touch of the idyllic to your brand identity?

How about Robertson’s Golden Shred marmalade with its strips of orange peel, and Cadbury’s Dairy Milk chocolate? They’re such familiar brands in the UK that’s we have almost forgotten their meanings and the feelings that they were designed to evoke when they first appeared on jars and bars in 1996 and 1905.

The current trend is to use short names, sometimes invented, that don’t already mean anything, rather than aim to associate with something that already exists, just in case it has negative associations somewhere around the world.

Evocative names abound in fine perfumery, like Tauer Perfumes’ L’Air du Désert Marocain. The late lamented Keep It Fluffy, by B Never Too Busy to be Beautiful, and my favourite, Let Me Play The Lion, by Les Nez.

Band names go from the ultra short—U2—to the more lyrical, like The Divine Comedy, The Imagined Village, Snow Patrol. Then there are the Canadian bands Crash Test Dummies and their friends Bare Naked Ladies (who are men with their clothes on).

Some of the most inventive names belong to bloggers: A Donkey on the Edge, If You Lived Here You Would Be Home By Now, Random Acts of Reality and 66,000 Miles Per Hour.

In practice

• The accepted wisdom these days is to keep brand names short and snappy, but if your organisation isn’t the short, snappy type, go against the grain. Not everything has to sound like a new car name.
• Make evocative names memorable. If they’ve too many words, customers tend to remember them wrongly.
• Cass Art uses “Let’s Fill This Town With Artists” on their shop fronts. It doesn’t have to be your brand name that you use on all your signage; you can also use a statement of intent.

*Maybe not quite all of them.

What do you think?

Have you got a favourite brand name? Or one that you think’s simply diabolical? Do share…

Why dress up your language?

We’ve often wondered why people feel the need to use fancy words. To be noticed and promoted? Appreciated or praised? To avoid looking silly?

When we’re training groups of writers, one of the subjects that crops up – often in a shy, through-the-side-window kind of way – is the fear of looking stupid. Lack of confidence is very close to the top of our list of things that stop smart people from writing as well as they could.

The people with the least confidence hang on with white knuckles to the rules they learned at school (some good, but some clearly made up on the day by their teachers). They’re the ones who copy the exact words that their managers and colleagues use, without checking what they mean. They pick up jargon and use it fluently, but don’t always know how to explain it to someone who doesn’t work within the same four walls. All this to fit in and avoid looking daft.

But it often does the opposite. There was the manager we knew who like to use ‘ostensibly’ to mean ‘definitely’, one who used ‘simultaneously’ to mean ‘one after the other’, and one who’d say ‘invariably’ when she meant ‘sometimes’. They forgot to check before repeating them.

Keep it simple

To make sure that what our writers say is clear, we recommend the simple, everyday versions of words. No one ever got fired for writing simply and clearly. But if your colleagues and customers belong to the multiple-syllable school of written English, don’t just assume you know what they mean.

There’s no shame in opening a dictionary and looking up the words you don’t understand.

Look it up

When we’re learning another language we memorise lists of new words to increase our vocabulary. It’s fine when we’re studying French, Icelandic or Swahili. So what’s wrong with learning a bit more English? We’ll happily study to improve many of our skills, but there’s this assumption that we ought to be good at our national language without having to try hard.

See it as a hobby. You can collect new words in the way that people collect ceramics, or dahlias, or marathon medals. There’s a fabulous book with 600 useful words: How to Sound Clever, by Hubert van den Bergh. It doesn’t tell you how to pronounce them, so you may still need a dictionary. (We recently heard a language snob mispronounce pedant; that was funny.) It includes ‘transmogrified’ = transformed in an unexpected way, ‘feckless’ = irresponsible and not considering others, ‘hubris’ = excessive pride, and another 597.

Choose your words wisely

But the important thing is not to use these wonderful words to sound clever, it’s to use them to understand and be better understood by people who already know what they mean. Keep your tone of voice consistent, and set your vocabulary level to those around you. Be clear, get your point over and that’ll do nicely. Job done.

What do you think?

Have you come across people using ‘fancy’ words wrongly (and unnecessarily)? Have you done it yourself? What’s the best remedy?

I’m well aware that for many people the idea of poetry in a business context is an odd concept. Hard to imagine. Disconcerting. The equivalent of a French pastry chef using sweetener instead of sugar in a cake. It’s JUST NOT RIGHT.

But let me clarify. I’m not talking about classic poetry of the rhyming couplet, iambic pentameter variety (à la Mrs King or whoever your year 7 teacher was). Sure, this occasionally creeps into the business world. But it can easily seem forced and a bit ‘aren’t I clever?’. (Here, as evidence, is a brave effort I came across last week on Twitter – no sniggering in the back, now.)

Poetry lite

What I’m talking about is poetry in its broadest sense – the idea of using words to capture something beautiful. Choosing words that pleasantly surprise your reader. And this is most certainly something the business world can tap into and be all the better for.

We spend much of our time in workshops unshackling people from the handcuffs of empty, clichéd ‘business speak’. Encouraging them to sound more human, and to not be afraid of using natural, everyday language. We show them how this makes messages clearer, more enjoyable to read and more memorable.

Poetry, and more creative kinds of writing, is a great way of stretching people – showing them that they can be more colourful and creative with how they use language. Once people realise they have it in them, it’s a short step to being a little more imaginative with the writing they do for work. And this almost always pays off.

Poetry lessons

Business writers (writers of any sort, in fact) have a lot to learn from poetry:

1. Good content contains a truth. (The worst is empty, or acts as a smokescreen.)
2. Words should never hide the truth. And where there’s room to be more creative, they should reveal it in deliciously surprising ways.
3. Style matters. It’s not just what you say, it’s how you say it that creates the experience.
4. Flow is everything. Poems are made to heard, and good writing has a voice. So every writer should listen to the sound of their words – the rhythm, the flow, the pace. It’s easier to hear that something isn’t working, than to spot this on a page or screen.

So go on, set yourself a challenge in honour of World Poetry Day. See if you can weave a little more colour into your writing than normal. Push it a little further than you might – really listen to your words. Try to create something beautiful. See what happens.

What do you think?

Is there a place for poetry in business writing? Have you tried it yourself? Did you get a reaction?

Invest in rewriting and you could save on legal fees. For starters, the longer and more tedious your Ts&Cs are, the longer it takes a lawyer to plough through them to work out what they mean. And if your customers can’t understand them, the law is likely to side with them, not you.

Besides all of that, Ts&Cs that are clear and sound human are a breath of fresh air to customers and great for your brand. A company that’s not trying to pull the wool over our eyes? Yes, please!

So you decide to rewrite yours. What goes in and what stays out? Here are some things to think about.

1. If your terms and conditions are pompous, boring, tiny, repetitive, baffling, tedious and buried, no reasonable person is going to read them anyway. So if it came to court, you’d lose. Compare the potential legal costs with the copywriting costs. (I rest my case.)
2. Read them from start to finish in one go. You’ll probably find that they’ve been added to over the years, and that the same points crop up in different places. Some of it will be meaningless and possibly even contradictory.
3. Grab your red pen and take out everything that needs to change. Cut it if it isn’t really a term or a condition. If it’s information, put it somewhere else. If it’s important, put it in big print, somewhere more accessible.
4. Take out the capital letters that have no place there. Here’s an example from a healthcare company:
   ‘The benefits of your scheme are intended to cover Treatment given by Specialists for acute episodes of illness or injury.’
   ‘Treatment’ and ‘specialists’ only need to be capitalised if they have a special, legal meaning in the document – ie are ‘defined terms’. But many of the Ts&Cs we see have capital letters scattered willy-nilly – these don’t make the document any more legal, just harder to read.
5. Write your terms and conditions in your brand’s tone of voice. Yes you can, despite what your legal department might say. They can be consistent, straightforward and clear, without clouds of baffling legalese.
6. If your lawyers put up their usual defences, disarm them with Mark Adler’s excellent book: Clarity for Lawyers, which Lord Bingham calls ‘a treasure house’.
7. Terms and conditions are there to help avoid misunderstandings. Often we find they’ve turned into a list of threats and rules that go against the rest of the document. That’s why they’re small, and hiding away somewhere. If you’re ashamed of them, they need to be rethought and rewritten or cut completely.
8. Don’t make yourself sound important; it comes over as pompous and bossy. It doesn’t make your terms and conditions any more legal if you stuff them with long words. In fact it can make them less legal if you use words that your customers can’t reasonably be expected to understand.
9. Read this superb paper by Judge Mark P Painter of Cincinnati, Ohio, USA. If you were under the impression that judges want to see and hear long words and longer sentences, this should help you see the light. Yes, he’s in the US and the law’s different, but good sense crosses borders.
10. You still need to have your terms agreed by your lawyer, but use one who agrees with Mark Adler and Judge Painter.

What do you think? Have impenetrable Ts&Cs had their day? Can there be such a thing as clear legalese?

Photo courtesy of Kristian D (via Creative Commons)

Let’s start with the good. When tone of voice works, it galvanizes teams, gives scaffolding to brand behaviours, and helps people grab hold of brand principles that are often far too abstract. And good communications make things run more smoothly, which ultimately saves money and makes people happier.

But in the ten years or so I’ve been working with tone of voice, I’ve seen some very good intentions fail. There are certain early warning signs that set off alarm bells for us.

Whenever we spot them, we do our damnedest to convince clients that they’re worth addressing. Without certain things in place a new tone is unlikely to take hold, even with the best will in the world.

Danger signs

Guidelines alone

Giving anyone, and especially busy people, a set of guidelines without taking the time to bring them to life through training is asking for trouble. It’s an awful lot to expect people to a) read them carefully and b) have the time and confidence (and sometimes skill) to change their writing style from guidelines alone. No matter how pretty they look.

Line managers not involved

Team leaders and managers have to throw their support behind the new tone, whether they write regularly or not. If they’re not trained as well as their team, they’re likely to reject or question attempts to do things differently. Which will make their colleagues shy away from changing their tone. Having managerial support and understanding makes a huge difference to whether a new tone sticks.

Quality management out of sync

If your QA system or criteria haven’t been updated to reflect your new tone, people will hesitate to change their style. And if it actually works against it, they’ll feel frustrated to boot. This is effectively training people in a new skill then penalising them when they use it.

Templates not updated

You’ve just come out of a two-day tone workshop and are all fired up about your new tone of voice. You can see it’ll be better for everyone, and have really enjoyed writing differently. But you and everyone else on the team are incredibly busy and so for now have to use the old letter/email templates. There’s no time to rewrite each one every time you use it. You tweak here and there, but slowly you slip back to the old way of writing. It’s easier and quicker with the templates you have, and you’re under time pressure. The new tone of voice becomes a distant memory.

Train the few

Oh, that old cost-cutting trick of just training up a few people on the team. It may seem to make sense: they can coach the others and spread the new tone. But I’ve never seen it work. The few who have been trained tend to feel isolated. They don’t have the critical things I’ve just mentioned to help them put the new tone into practice, let alone to help the majority who haven’t been trained. And the whole thing gradually fades away.

Compliance/legal/technical/quality teams out of the loop

If a team’s writing is going to be signed off by others and they’re going to start writing differently, it makes sense for the others to be in the know. This helps approvers feel less threatened by and suspicious of the changes, and gets buy-in for the tone from key players in the business. You’d be amazed how often this doesn’t happen. So writers do their best with their new tone of voice, only to have their pieces batted back by the people who say yay or nay. Which is demoralising for them, and damaging to the new tone.

All is not lost

The good news is that all of these pitfalls are avoidable. It takes a little forward planning to lay the ground so that your guidelines and tone training can bear fruit. The important thing to remember is this: these two critical elements of a tone programme are just the start. It’s what people do with their new awareness and skills that matters. Creating an environment that supports change, and that doesn’t work against it, is the trick.

What do you think? Have you experienced any of these pitfalls? Have we missed any crucial ones out?

Photo by Alan Levine (flickr)

I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with bullet points.

That might seem a little strange. I mean they’re only small dots (or dashes) before text. Perhaps not worth getting worked up about.

But have you ever sat through a meeting and been killed by PowerPoint? Most of us have. I don’t have anything against PowerPoint. But the corporate and wider business world has become obsessed with presentations stuffed full of slide after slide of endless bullet point lists.

I’ll wager not many people come away inspired from presentations like these – or even remember anything from them.

Hiding behind the gun

This isn’t exactly the fault of bullet points, as such. But they’re often scaffolding for lazy thinking, and for boring speaking. All those meetings and presentations you dozed your way through probably had something interesting and insightful hidden away behind a wall of bulleted lists.

Good bullets

Bullet points can be a great way of getting across messages, if you use them well. So here are a few tips on how to use them safely and without sending your audience to sleep:

• Use one bullet point for one idea.
• Keep them short. One line is ideal.
• Make your bullets active. Starting with a verb will inject some energy into your presentation.
• Use the same punctuation and bullet type throughout.
• Five or six bullets are more than enough on each page.

When not to shoot

And it’s important to know when not to use them. Bullet points are good for presenting lists of information and for breaking content into manageable chunks. But if you’re standing in front of people and want to capture and hold their attention, have a good long think about whether you need bulleted slides. Are you just giving yourself a very public cheatsheet? If you do decide they’ll add (not detract) from what you have to say, make sure every single word needs to be there.

And take care not to overuse them in other contexts – web pages and offline documents, for example. They do help guide the reader’s eye through lists information. But headings, bold and good old white space have their place too.

Take careful aim

In our time-squeezed world, bullet points are a useful tool to help us digest information quickly and easily. Used well they’ll help you and your audience cut straight to the chase. Used too often and you’ll lose people. So let’s conserve our ammo and only shoot our bullets when necessary. Figuratively speaking, of course!

What do you think? Do you love ‘em or hate ‘em? Should bullets be rationed?

We’ve all flown with budget airlines. We all gripe about them too. Cheap and sometimes not so cheerful. Cheap because they cut back on the creature comforts. You get a seat and that’s it – everything else you have to pay for. But this doesn’t mean your experience as a customer has to be cut price.

South African airline Kalula is trying to shake all that up. And they’re doing it using words.

Plane packaging

I got a viral email this week with photos of one of Kalula’s planes. Apart from the bright cheery green livery, it looks like someone’s gone and scribbled all over it. (I’ve checked and it’s not photoshopped.) One of them really does have ‘the big cheese’ written underneath the captain’s side of the cockpit. And it really does say ‘secret agent code’ while pointing to the plane’s registration number.

Kalula’s website says they also have a ‘cow’ plane, a ‘camo’ plane and ‘the jetsetter’ plane. Kalula translates as ‘it’s easy’ in Zulu. It’s certainly not hard to warm to their brand language.

Winning with words

Kalula’s playfulness extends in flight as well. ‘There may be 50 ways to leave your lover, but there are only 4 ways out of this airplane’ – just one of the many humorous takes on the pre-flight safety routine by the flight attendants.

I’ve never travelled with Kalula. And I don’t know if they offer better value over other South African carriers. But I do know that this just goes to show you don’t need huge ad campaigns and a massive marketing budget to get your brand talked about and liked. Sometimes all you need are some well-placed words and a sense of humour.

Have you heard any memorable in-flight announcements? A twist on the ‘in the event of an in-flight emergency, pull firmly on the buckle…’ monotone drone?