This quote has been the bane of my writing existence and the monkey on my back since high school. It and the time available are almost always at odds. But, it’s something we should all aspire to especially now as digital marketing is so prevalent.
Some of you asked me to follow up on my essay Make Your Brand Messages Come Alive with some examples, so I naturally thought of Twitter. What?! That litany of empty sound bytes?! That paean to short attention spans?! Okay, hold on.
Think about it. Where else in today’s marketing world do we have to be so succinct and concise to engage our audiences? This is the new norm as our audiences continue to look to tablets and smart phones for information on the cultural arts. I wrote about this and the digital impact on branding tools in Branding the Arts of Tomorrow.
As you probably know, on Twitter, when you want to follow someone or someone wants to follow your organization, what’s the first thing you or they see? Yes, it’s the 160 character profile of your organization. Is this an opportunity to communicate something more interesting about your organization—that is relevant to your audiences—than its precedent, history, or quantity? Isn’t it enough to just describe my organization and get on with it?
No, it’s an opportunity to be engaging, intriguing, and most importantly, you’re only a gesture away from someone clicking “Follow” and finding out more about you, or “Close” and considering you irrelevant.
So, I looked through my own Twitter followers and followees—and then hundreds of others—and picked out a few that I think are doing a great job in making me want to find out more about their organizations. In the process I found out that almost all organizations need to rethink, and rewrite, their Bio (as Twitter calls it).
Think less bio and more about inspiring curiosity about your organization and having someone then click your website or Facebook link.
MCC Theater. Great energy, believability, and spunk.
Science Gallery. Relaxed, captures the voice of the organization.
Walker Art Center. Aspirational, bold, lofty, but in a good way.
Jake Moor. I included this just because it made me smile. By the way, I don’t agree with him; awesomeness can be created in 160 characters or less.
2 comments
Aviva says:
Nov 1, 2011
These are great! Do you have any counter examples? (what NOT to write)
James M. McNamara says:
Nov 3, 2011
Sure, Aviva, there are lots of examples of what not to do, but I was trying to keep it positive and lead, or show, by example. You have only to look at your own followers and followees for bad examples.
I think if Twitter had asked people to “write something beneficial about your organization from an audience’s viewpoint,” you would see much better results, but because people have been asked to write a “bio,” they naturally fall back on their organization’s history and statistics. So, this is an opportunity to actually stop and think about what we put out there.