Becoming human
So today I was at an away day with work and the afternoon slot was filled with Ben Afia who came to talk to us about sounding human. Sounds a bit odd doesn't it seeing as we are all human? But it's about making the organisation or company you work for sound human, giving it a voice which will appeal to your customers. Using tone to engage with your audience and making your communications lively and relevant.
It was a great session and here's what I learnt...
As you begin writing your piece of communication, be it a Tweet, email or article for a magazine, there are four main things to help you focus what you want to say and how you want to say it. These are:
Outcome - what is it you want someone to do after they've read your communication? E.g. join your gym or sign up for your e-newsletter. This needs to be clear from the outset and will help you focus what you want to say.
Audience - who are you targeting? Build a specific character in your head and think about what a typical day might be like for them, what motivates them and what might inspire them?
Content - what are your key messages? Put together a list of bullet points and order them by importance. This will help to keep you and your message on track.
Tone - this will really help engage your reader. There are four things which can assist you in doing that: short sentences (12 - 15 words), active language e.g. "I'll write to you" rather than "A letter will be sent to you", contractions e.g. "I'll" or "you'll" and lastly, dialect - don't use abbreviations or what we call 'Council speak' (you probably have a name for it in your organisation). These are the words which your customers may not know or just may not 'get'.
Overall, a really useful list of things to think about when writing communications messages. It's interesting that my blog yesterday picked up on the humanisation of a brand through Sega's social media and again today this has been reinforced through Ben's words around giving companies a human voice.
It seems that in the digital social spaces we all occupy and enjoy making sure your organisation or company can show it's social side and bringing a human touch to its interactions with people is vitally important.
Now a lot of our communications have moved into the realm of the digital, and even more so the digital social, we need to show our customers that they're still communicating with humans. It's people at the end of the keyboard typing out a message to them, not a brand bot. This is so important now we have fewer face-to-face interactions with our customers, and is something that seems pretty obvious but often gets forgotten.
Lesson learnt, tomorrow I must remember to communicate like a human...