The Cygnus Blog

Over many decades now, the tone of voice used in business has altered to become increasingly informal. This of course is a reflection of general trends in business life and relationships, in how people address each other, and attitudes to authority. Unless we recognise these trends and respond to them in an appropriate way our style will seem dated to our audiences.

Paula La Rocque, one of the USA’s leading writing coaches says, “Accuracy aside, simplicity, clarity and brevity are the most important criteria for all writing.” I would endorse her approach and argue that clear, simple and direct informational writing can provide the bedrock for good communications skills.

The definition of a “tone of voice” or a personality for the writing often starts by identifying a couple of adjectives – engaging, passionate, fresh, professional, friendly are all favourites. This is fine as far as it goes, but actually we have to go further.

The style or tone that we are after is also defined by register (the level of formality), word choice and syntax. In addition, the purpose of the writing, the audience and medium used for communicating, all contribute to the tone.

While brand guidelines often define a tone – up to a point – organisations can find this a difficult aspect of branding to implement, and sometimes progress can be haphazard.

The tactics for implementing tone are actually grounded back in the whole area of audience awareness. We have to be ready to have a conversation with our audience – which means there are at least two people involved.

I was at a seminar in Glasgow yesterday hosted by MIN. The hot topic was Social Media and how to use it effectively for business.

Some great examples from Guy at the Carphone Warehouse about how they are using Twitter to deal with customer complaints. Then there was Heather, farmer’s wife and the boss at Wiggly Wigglers, who talked about how she turned a very small business, down a leafly lane in rural England somewhere, into rather a successful one with a bit of a cult following for their podcasts. Not to be outdone, Craig from Whyte and McKay had a great story about a treasure hunt they ran on Twitter while he was at large in the city with a bottle of Whisky in his backpack as the prize for anyone who could find him.

Conclusions from the day? Twitter, Facebook, Podcasting… great tools and as good as the ideas that you can come up with to use them. However, this is not sedate old fashioned marketing and not for the fainthearted. No one is very sure about the results or even about why some things work and other’s don’t. On the other hand, everyone seems convinced about the world takeover.

Terry Wogan has at least two listeners. There’s the one whose letter he’s reading, and then there’s the “other listener”.  As a result there is an endearing intimacy about that show, even although it is the most listened-to breakfast show on the airwaves.

So, when you are writing for the web, can you write for that “other listener”, or in our case “other reader”? How well do you know your audience? Do you know who that person is? If you can write for an individual you may be more likely to engage all your readers.

This technique, when you identify an individual to write for,  is called writing for a persona. Many web copywriting techniques are borrowed from other disciplines and this one is no exception. Marketing specialists, journalists and fiction writers all use the idea of a “Persona”.

In my web copywriting training courses we explore more about how to write well for your audience in general and that “other reader” in particular!

Newsletters can provide an ideal vehicle for keeping in touch with your clients, without any sense of the hard sell.

• Keep your message in front of your clients
• Provide information about new developments
• Explain product details
• Build the client relationship
• Pass on useful background knowledge
• Provide industry and company news
• Profile staff
• Give news of awards and accreditations
• Display client lists, case studies
• Interview clients and include testimonials

You can do it the traditional way with a printed newsletter, which can give the design and print people the chance to show off and may increase the lifespan of your publication. Or instead, consider the benefits of an email newsletter. This lands straight in your clients’ inbox, is cost effective to circulate and is a great way of pushing traffic onto your website. Target audiences can be reached in a fraction of the time involved in a traditional magazine production schedule. Reader feedback is easier and more immediate too.

Search Engines are responsible for getting the people onto your site so their requirements and expectations must be kept to the fore when new pages are being designed, or old pages revamped. However it’s the content on your pages that determines whether your human visitors will stay, so there is a balancing act that needs to go on to ensure that the Search Engine and the human reader are both satisfied. Interestingly, the content on your pages is also of enormous interest to the search engine, and although the requirements of human readers and search engines do not dovetail in every department, there is sufficient common ground.

The approach at Cygnus Extra is to put emphasis on the importance of good, well-written, carefully targeted copy. We mould site structure and content round the keyword phrases that your potential readers will use to find the site. Developing the right copy is absolutely core for the success of a site, and in itself, goes a long way towards ensuring that your site will be found by the right people. We will not sacrifice readability to optimisation, as we believe there is always middle ground that can be found.

Some SEO is done by tweaking sites to maintain a high position for particular phrases on particular search engines. This can be of value in some circumstances and a good well-written site will allow you to cash in on success if you decide to pay for further optimisation.

While content has a huge impact on the SEO rating of your page, it is certainly not the only aspect that matters. Link popularity is another vital area for getting your site up the rankings. Search engines use the popularity of sites linking to you as a measure of the value of your site.

These key leadership principles for managing communication with staff were developed as part of a communication consultancy project for a charity in Scotland and were later adopted as the foundation for their new internal communications policy.

1. Cast the Vision
Leaders must communicate a compelling vision. If you can get everyone focused on the big picture, they are less likely to get wrapped up in annoying detail. Talking to and with people helps them to own the vision and feel that they are an integral part of what’s going on.

2. Just Do It – Communicate!
Invest time in talking, especially with key people. Spending time talking with these people will help to disseminate information all round the organisation.

3. Build Teams
Leaders must communicate with their teams. Everybody on the staff should belong to a team and the team leader should expect to spend a significant amount of his or her time meeting with and speaking to the team. Team leaders should be well placed to know which information their team members need.

4. Develop a Culture of Open Management
It is vital that staff feel some connection with Management. Consultation and discussion can go a long way to helping with this but it will take time to build up a relationship of trust.

• Let staff be the first to know
• Take a risk and entrust with confidence

5. Communicate Change Effectively
Dealing with change is one of the critical aspects of management. How that change is communicated is a vital part of the change management process. Once more, spending time with key members of staff will be vital.

• Provide information about new projects as they develop
• Make sure key staff know about proposals early in the process.

6. Make Communication Two Way
Staff must feel that they know what is happening, that they have been consulted before decisions are finalised, and that they have adequate channels for expressing what they think. The benefits of good two- way communication will be very significant.

“If people are to give of their best to their work they must know what is happening and why.”
John Garnett, former director of The Industrial Society

Call it gossip if you like, but stories about colleagues and friends have a wide appeal and can help develop a sense of community and belonging in an organisation.

“I always turn to the staff spotlight first,” commented one reader about the quarterly magazine. In an organisation where employees are geographically spread she enjoyed reading about colleagues who she rarely met but talked to all the time on the phone.

Photographs are important too, providing a sense of immediacy and drawing the reader into a story. On one e-newsletter we discovered that people invariably click more on the stories with photographs of people in the introduction.

Internal newsletters should have carefully developed aims and a clearly defined audience. The content can then be tailored to ensure that the aims are achieved and the publication is successful. Often a newsletter can be an important element in a wider communication strategy.

Internal newsletters can work as printed or e-publications. Cost effective options are available for both of these routes.