Blog in 02 2015.

‘Customers will never love a company until its employees love it first.’

A bold statement, and one of several snippets of wisdom I heard at the Advanced Learning Institute’s recent Strategic Internal Communications conference in San Francisco.

Here are five more:

1. Your employees are your brand.
 

Your reputation is in their hands. And yet, internal communications are only given a fraction of the budget and attention of external communications. What’s up with that?

2. An employee who’s stopped caring can cost you dearly
 

In the USA, companies lose an estimated $350 billion in productivity every year because of unhappy employees. And around 68 per cent of customers take their business elsewhere because of bad or indifferent service.

3. Language matters
 

Almost all the speakers, whatever their specialist topic, stressed the importance of speaking to your people like, you know, people. Be honest and straightforward in your internal communications, using language everyone can understand and relate to, even when it’s bad news.

4. So does storytelling
 

‘Storytelling’ might have become a marketing buzzword, but there’s science behind its effectiveness. So why limit it to your big, flashy external campaigns? At Intel, there’s a team doing ‘internal content marketing’, which means they find and write stories that make people proud to be part of the company. And The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago has based an entire internal campaign on employees’ personal stories, making its own people not just fans but also cheerleaders.

5. And don’t forget employee-to-employee communications
 

When we hear ‘internal communications’, most of us probably think of those emails, posters and policies where it’s the employer speaking to the people. But how employees write to each other is important too. Change that, and you could see a change in your entire culture.

Hey, everyone else seems to be posting lame 50 Shades content. Why aren’t we? You’ve got 50 seconds! – Editor

 

50 Shades of Corporate Writing

You’ll admire this blog post.

You’ll adore this blog post.

You’ll applaud this blog post.

You’ll appreciate this blog post.

You’ll be amused by this blog post.

You’ll be content with this blog post.

You’ll be fond of this blog post.

You’ll be infatuated with this blog post.

You’ll be into this blog post.

You’ll be mad for this blog post.

You’ll be partial toward this blog post.

You’ll be pleased by this blog post.

You’ll be thrilled by this blog post.

You’ll cherish this blog post.

You’ll cotton to this blog post.

You’ll delight in this blog post.

You’ll dig this blog post.

You’ll dote on this blog post.

You’ll drink in this blog post.

You’ll eat up this blog post.

You’ll enjoy this blog post.

You’ll esteem this blog post.

You’ll fall for this blog post.

You’ll fancy this blog post.

You’ll feel rapturous about this blog post.

You’ll feel sentimental about this blog post.

You’ll feel tenderly toward this blog post.

You’ll feel zealous about this blog post.

You’ll flip over this blog post.

You’ll get this blog post.

You’ll get a charge out of this blog post.

You’ll get a kick out of this blog post.

You’ll get behind this blog post.

You’ll groove on this blog post.

You’ll have a ball with this blog post.

You’ll have a crush on this blog post.

You’ll have a soft spot for this blog post.

You’ll have kind regard for this blog post.

You’ll have some affection for this blog post.

You’ll like this blog post.

You’ll love this blog post.

You’ll prize this blog post.

You’ll rejoice in this blog post.

You’ll relish this blog post.

You’ll respect this blog post.

You’ll revel in this blog post.

You’ll savour this blog post.

You’ll take joy in this blog post.

You’ll treasure this blog post.

You’ll worship this blog post.

There are probably 50 shades of meaning behind virtually any corporate memo.

Wouldn’t it be nice if writers would choose the one that they really mean, with words that make it obvious, instead of using words like ‘synergy’?

In fact, we should axe that word.

Reject it.

Delete it.

Abolish it.

Can it.

Crush it.

Destroy it.

Forget it.

Send it to the woodshed…

(That’s enough – Ed.) 

I spoke at a conference about customer experience the other week, and, like most conferences I go to, I heard a few brilliant thoughts that really got me thinking. But let’s not talk about those.

Let’s talk about the drivel that most people produce. If you’re presenting at one of these conferences, here are five things to think about to stop your audience sticking pins in their eyes by the mid-afternoon break.

1. Don’t write everything you’re going to say on your PowerPoint slides

Surely everyone knows this one by now. It’s in every presentation course.

What happens? I read your incredibly dense slide in 30 seconds. Then I stop listening for the next five minutes and check my email, while you say the same thing – only in even more words.

2. Say things that mean something

There really are lots of presenters who are fluent but say nothing of consequence:

Creativity empowers us to innovate for tomorrow and not just today.

What?!

3. Pretty charts don’t make something smart

There was one beautifully designed slide that said:

Knowledge = understanding what will happen
Intelligence = understanding what will happen next

The difference being...? The presenter read this out like it was a tremendous insight.

4. For the organisers: it’s not 1846

So why are we having a networking luncheon?

5. Repeating things doesn’t make you Obama

We all know a bit of judicious repetition can make your talk more memorable. But there’s a weird trend to repeat long, ugly sentences in the hope that they’ll become more profound:

Simplifying things is incredibly complex but absolutely necessary.
Simplifying things is incredibly complex but absolutely necessary.

Enough already. (Maybe time for a little holiday, Neil? – Editor)

Work experience: but not as you know it

Hello, we’re The Writer, the world’s largest language consultancy.

We’re looking for second-year undergraduates to come to our free two-day Word Experience workshop on Thursday 26th and Friday 27th March 2015 at our London HQ.

What’s ‘Word Experience’?

We get a lot of requests from people wanting to come on work experience. But we’ve always felt work experience was pretty unsatisfactory all round: we can’t help many people in a year; you inevitably end up doing quite a bit of boring stuff; and, if we’re honest, it’s a lot of work to do well. (And who wants to do it badly?)

So we cooked up Word Experience: every year, we gather about 20 people together for two days of creativity, workshops and fun stuff. Along the way we’ll talk to you about how you can make a career out of writing for business, show you how our agency works, and some Writer folk will tell you their own stories of how they got into business writing. We might even get you working with us on a live project.

Plus, we usually pick two people from each year to come back and join us for a short paid internship. (And some of those have ended up working here.)

Here’s what previous Word Experiencers have said

‘I loved every minute of it! The look into the world of business writing was insightful and I’ve come away with two realisations: A) You can make a living from words, without becoming a journalist, and B) I actually have a bankable skill set.’

‘Hands-on activities included the sorts of word games that seem like harmless entertainment while you do them, but come loaded with Karate Kid-style moments of realisation that detonate later on. The other day I was struggling over an email to a tutor, then something clicked and (wax on, wax off) I realised I could cut out half the words to make it cleaner and clearer. Who knew writing poems about Ryan Gosling and Tweets for a bike charity could lead to that?’

Keep reading if:

You already write for your course

Maybe you study English, journalism or creative writing. Or maybe you just write a lot of essays.

You write in your spare time too

You might write for your student paper, a blog, or fiction. It doesn’t matter as long as you write.

You’re a bit of a word geek

You have a tendency to get excited or properly riled up by all kinds of writing. From tube ads to tubes of toothpaste, Booker Prize winners to Charlie Brooker.

Yes that’s me. What do I need to do?

Send us 300 words telling us why we should pick you (and a way for us to get in touch with you) to [email protected]. Make sure ‘Word Experience’ and your name are in the subject line. And get it to us by Sunday 1st March 2015.