On Words and Business

Storytelling For Business 101

1. Be human. You’re talking to individuals, not soulless corporate entities.
2. Use examples. People like to know what happens to other people.
3. Include emotion. Be sensible but don’t be afraid.
4. Take a position. You can’t say everything, so have a point of view.
5. Be a champion for your readers. They’re depending on you to be genuine, trustworthy, and to make it worth their time to read your words.

It’s not hard to find a lecture, networking event, or article that focuses on how to use various types of social media to market your business. I’ve talked about it myself.

As the conversation about social media gets more feverish, I get less interested.

Agreed: as a way to get the message out and have a conversation with your customers and stakeholders, social media platforms really do the job.

But shouldn’t the focus be on the actual message? And once you figure out what that is, then spend time thinking about the right medium to share the message? Depending on your message, the best way to share could be rock carvings, skywriting, or good old fashioned paper.

No matter your business, there probably should be some form of social media in the marketing mix. But the exercise of figuring out what platform would work best and why isn’t a trivial step.

What is thought leadership marketing?

• Sharing your cutting edge ideas and thoughts about your product, services, or market space.
• Starting a brand new conversation.
• Imagining a fresh approach to the story.
• Putting yourself and your company in the vanguard.

What are your great thoughts?

Let your lazy side guide you: Driven to Distraction. I love it. And not just because I’ve been looking for an excuse to indulge my lazy side (or should I say looking for a decent excuse to use for my slacking off?).

As the author states, trying to act bigger than you are is exhausting. Using “we” instead of “I” when talking about your business. I dislike it when I hear freelancers or sole practioners who talk about themselves and their business that way. It’s dishonest and, in my book, it’s also dishonorable. For another thing, sometimes people want to work with a very small company or with a freelancer or sole practitioner.

If someone wants to work with a larger company, then they won’t be happy to discover that you’re a sole practioner or that you’re relying on contractors, not employees, to round out your team. I can imagine how exhausting it would be to keep up that front.

Let’s hear it for laziness!

Interesting premise to this blog post: we are all knowledge workers and companies who get this will win in the end.

The message here is that everyone is the face of the company, whether their job is in PR or corporate communications, or they are on the front lines. That anyone in a company can be communicating about the company and there isn’t as much oversight to outbound communications as there used to be. That’s a good thing in general. But these days it’s so easy for a message (good or bad) to spread, that it opens up a can of corporate worms.

It involves a lot of trust on the part of any company that empowers their employees via social media and let’s them join the conversation.  The companies that do this will win in the end. Does that make everyone a knowledge worker? I’m not sure.

One of my biggest bugbears in business communications is the use of the word solution to explain a product or service.

Whenever I read that on a website or in marketing collateral, I feel like I have no idea what that company does. Usually, I also get the feeling that the company doesn’t really have a clear idea what they do either. Not surprising, that doesn’t give me a lot of confidence about the company.

Here’s a link to a great post on eight business buzzwords to avoid–including the word solution.