Guide to Better Business Writing

Today, the Harvard Business Review released a new publication called Your Guide to Better Business Writing.

They say, “A survey of 120 blue-chip American companies found that a third of employees wrote poorly, a problem businesses are spending more than $3 billion a year to correct.”

The book includes essays entitled “The Best Memo You’ll Ever Write” and “Writing Well When Time Is Tight”, which focus on a time-pressed manager’s need for a streamlined process to get ideas down on paper.

Here are the top 5 mistakes I see people make in business writing:

#1 Problem: people write what they want to say, and don’t think about what the people reading actually need to know.

Solution: Good writers focus on writing for their audience. We answer questions in ways that resonate with our readers.

#2 Problem: people deflate their case before they make it by leading with something that is worrying them, or with an apologetic statement (when no apology is required).

Solution: Good writers lead with the thing that is most relevant/of interest to the reader and cut anything that detracts from their case.

#3 Problem: people overly complicate their writing by trying to use words, phrases, or sentence structures they don’t really grasp.

Solution: Good writers k.i.s.s (keep it simple stupid) and tell other writers to do the same.

#4 Problem: people don’t reread their own work or ask a colleague to reread their work before sending it out.

Solution: Good writers know to look for our usual errors (I invert letters. I write “teh” every time and have to change it to “the”) and we often work with editors to find the mistakes we can’t see.

#5 Problem: people spend way too much time agonizing over writing and ultimately work themselves into a corner, or worse they try to write by committee because no one feels comfortable running with a writing project on their own.

Solution: It’s OK. There isn’t an in-house solution to every problem. There are times when it is better for businesses to hire a writer and move on.

Professional Writers can bring more than a polished, finished product to the table. I’m happy to answer my clients’ questions about writing. I like giving people tips so that they feel more confident with daily writing tasks. I offer time-savers and provide useful tools like style sheets and lexicons so that staff can more easily maintain the voice and tone we’ve worked to create on a project.

I’ll likely buy the Harvard guide – I have a growing collection of desk references for writing.  And I’m curious to see if the Harvard publishers mention that sometimes the best way to improve your business writing is to work with Professional Writers who are skilled and passionate about the craft.

Where are you on the social media learning curve?

6 easy ways to start Tweeting

Have you started Tweeting? Have you started and then stopped? No worries. Everyone needs a nudge sometimes.

The idea for this post came from a nudge I gave one of my clients. He set himself up with a Twitter account a few months ago. But instead of diving in, he started by following some people, businesses and organizations and watched their Twitter behaviour. He was trying to learn “the right way” to use Twitter.

I think learning the etiquette of a platform is really important and I even encouraged him to spend an afternoon looking at people’s feeds, finding out his likes and dislikes about how people use the tool and watching interactions between people. But eventually, you just have to give it a try and see what happens. There is no “right way”, but the more you use it, the more you know what’s right for you (more on that in another post.)

Anyway, a couple of months went by and I noticed that my client was still just watching the tweets go by. I nudged him to “get in the conversation.” He really appreciated the advice I gave him to get him going, so I’m sharing it with you.

Stop being precious – just tweet! What ever you write will disappear on people’s feeds in no time and the more you tweet the faster things disappear on your profile page too.

Painters who wait for the perfect idea never paint anything. The ones who paint every day produce enough work (good and bad) that through simple odds they are going to create a ton of great work, and the boring stuff soon fades into the background. Stop waiting for your perfect tweet!

6 Easy Ways to Start Tweeting (or End Tweeter’s Block)

1. Ask questions – Use a question to get people thinking about something, or to genuinely ask for input.
   Tweet: Who tells people they can’t make mistakes? No one. So why do we think that?
2. Offer an answer – think about the articles on your blog as answers to questions. Pose the question on Twitter with a link to the article as your answer.
   Tweet: Does exercise really boost brain power?  Yes, the research is in http://ow.ly/2k4g3
3. Make a funny quip out of a reminder – remind people about something, but make it light and fun.
   Tweet: “It’s 3:00. Do you know where your water glass is?”
4. Retweet something – it is so easy to just share something interesting you read in your feed (and promote someone else in the process).
5. Share little moments – something about your work life or your home life to give people a glimpse of what’s up with you. Don’t bother with every detail of your day, but little moments here and there help people feel connected.
   Tweet: “Daddy, Mommy is so funny. She told the neighbours she has a 40 year old baby.” Yes, my friend’s 5-year old just said that to him. Hehehe.
6. Share research – if you look something up online share the link. Why not? You’ve done the work. Share it.
   Tweet: cool picture guide to making great coffee with a French Press http://coffeegeek.com/guides/presspot

Bottom lone: JUST TWEET SOMETHING.

My client and I have since talked a fair amount about strategies he can use to make the most of his Twitter time. He uses it pretty regularly now to sign people up for his newsletter, send them to his bog and website, or just to stay connected and visible.

If you are using Twitter as part of a campaign strategy and you find yourself getting blocked, refocus on the thoughts or actions you would ideally like to spark in people. Drift happens. Re-focusing on your goals can get you through just about any campaign blocks.

If you are still stuck, use the list above. In 15 minutes or less, find a way to use each strategy to communicate something that supports your campaign goal. Once you’ve done that, you’ll have written 6 tweets and guess what, you’ll have broken your Tweeter’s block.

Tweet on.

the effective email tease

There is an old marketing adage, “doing business without advertising is like winking at a girl in the dark. You know what you are doing, but nobody else does.” That piece of common knowledge was originally written in a New York Herald Tribune column in 1956.

Advertising mediums have changed dramatically since then, but advertising precepts and concepts have not. No matter what, we still have to find our audience, and we still have to find a way to not only sit in the spotlight, but get the audience to look over when we wink.

I recently worked with a team to re-brand Jump Management Coaching. We did a complete overhaul of the brand, updating the name, the tag line, the website and blog, e-newsletter, business cards, you name it. But when we started the transformation, we started by talking about the client’s audience. Who are they? What do they need? What do they want? From that conversation we were able to both build a brand and build a re-brand launch strategy that would work for the company and it’s client base.

Jump has a very loyal e-newsletter readership. When most businesses are satisfied with open rates in the 10-20% range, we routinely see open rates that two to three times higher than that. Beyond open rates, we can demonstrate a high level of reader engagement by looking at the high click throughs (as readers click from the e-newsletter to more information on the web site), and extraordinarily high response rates to reader surveys.

Because we had demonstrated success using the e-newsletter to shine a light on the business and make the target audience turn their heads, and because of the nature of the business and the needs/wants of the clients, we opted to use the e-newsletter as the primary tool to launch the new brand.

But how could we up our game? How could we get even more opens than usual? We used the good old fashioned tease.

Instead of sending out the branded email on its usual day, we sent a text only email that looked more like a personal email between the company owner and the readers. It was short, a little funny, and most importantly it teased everyone that big changes were ahead and that they would need to open the next e-newsletter to get the scoop.

Interestingly, this tease email inspired people to reply with personal messages of congratulations on the launch before we launched. They felt connected and involved. Good. When we launched a week later, we saw very satisfying open rates for the launch e-newsletter and recieved more personal messages of congratulations. People specifically commented to me and to my client that they liked the tease and it made them really curious, which they remembered. Excellent.

I should say this launch effort was supported via Twitter and to a lesser extent LinkedIn, but the piece of advertising that did the most heavy lifting was the one 3-line email, which drove more potential clients to the launch e-newsletter, which drove more potential clients to Jump Management Coaching’s newly rebranded blog and website.

Calling all Tweeters to Stop HST

OK this is new. The NDP launched a Twitter campaign today to stop the HST in BC. Whatever side of the issue you come down on, this campaign was very well executed and there are definitely some good social media campaign take aways here. (Congrats to the good minds behind this campaign.)

The call for a Tweet-in went out to party supporters via email and also via Twitter this morning. Supporters who received the email were given links to send BC Liberal MLAs a Twitter message, urging them to stand up for their constituents, because their job is on the line. The emails also included a link for people to sign up to Twitter,  and a call to forward the email campaign so others can spread the word.

Interestingly, when you click on the forward link, instead of getting the usual “forward to a friend” tool that allows readers to forward the email without changing the formatting, readers are sent to the Twitter campaign page on the BCNDP site. There, they have the opportunity to share the campaign via Twitter or Facebook, which is a great way to broadcast the message. However, by not giving people the usual forward to a friend via email option they are missing out on the one on one personal communications that people who tend not to use Twitter and Facebook prefer.

The campaign page has a few strong design elements. Seeing the Twitter stream works well to suggest the high level of activity they have on this issue. (Not sure what it will look like tomorrow post-Tweet-in but today it is very strong.) That design call was a bit of a risk – what if people didn’t Tweet? – but it definitely paid off because right now the speed of the feed is down right frenetic!

Another design point for the page is that there are a lot of options for people who want to do more to support the campaign – possibly a few too many options. It can be good to keep these things simple and focused but everything on the page is campaign related and they get points for not muddying the water with a donation request.

Also it looks to me like the team behind this is nimble. I think they made an on-the-fly-fix. When the campaign launched this AM it didn’t have any hash tags in the  automatically generated Twitter message. I commented on it on facebook and I saw a few other comments and now (within 2 hrs) I see they have not only added a #HST tag but if you click through from the email, the message includes the first 3 digits of your postal code so the MLAs can’t dismiss the tweets and say that they had no way of knowing if the tweets were from their riding. Brilliant!

The Twitter message reads To MLA @DonMcRaeMLA I won’t forget the HST on election day. Stand up for your constituents http://bit.ly/9KrwQ4 #hst #bcpoli #V8T

All this is to say that I think this campaign will stir the HST pot on Twitter today. I’m inspired by the campaign design. And I’m curious about how people will talk about it and what the story will be tomorrow. What do you think?