Are you boring?

I constantly find organisations who are not aware how much they talk about themselves and if they are aware, don’t know what to replace that dialogue with. In this post I’ll give you a simple guide to remember and reframe the balance in your head.

Historically we’re used to broadcasting in monologue through gatekeepers such as news organisations, print industries or PR agencies. All these restrict our ability to react to society quickly and to be specific to audiences.

A great little exercise that we advise clients: strip out your current written social content (blog posts and/or twitter stream) and drop in to the tag cloud tool Wordle. If the frequency of your company or services name is the largest item in the tag cloud, it illustrates immediately what turns off your audience, it’s all about you. How boring it is to hear someone talk only of themselves all the time. Don’t forget the golden rule of social media.

One solution is my own little 1990 rule of content: 1% 9% 90%

1%—your company / project / organisation
This allows you to inform and promote in your usual manner, there’s nothing wrong with this, we all need to do it and let people know our priorities and objectives. However remember you are talking to people—which means they will expect to hear some opinion and point of view on the subject you are talking about.

9%—your sector or industry
What is happening in other countries, innovations, new developments, materials, techniques and/or show the manufacturing processes. If you are an Arts organisation, people are interested in comedy, dance, theatre and music from all over the world, sticking to your selected schedule and locality is so limiting. Talking about your industry places you in the same boat as your competition. Remember you are not in a battle against them, if policies, politics, economics or cultural events shift customer purchasing decisions.

90%—other people
This should be about your best customers and clients and their great stories related to buying decisions, happy products and services. Bad experiences are also a chance to show that you aren’t ignoring people and are keen to fix any problems. Feature employees that are doing interesting things, have side projects, learning new skills, or developing better service features for the end user. Notice that this blog post isn’t about MediaSnackers, it’s about you, improving your business, not us pushing our services. Give knowledge away (like our book that you can read for free online), people will still pay you to personalise it for them or buy from you because you clearly know and show your expertise in that sector.

These percentages are only a guide. 1% can be 5%, 9% can be 2%, but the balance should stay roughly true. Talk about yourselves only a fraction of the time seeking opportunities of great people stories instead. Gradually you will change to this way of thinking permanently, your tweets will start getting more interesting, the dialogue will open up, retweeting will increase, blog posts will get comments, video’s will get rated and photos will start being shared.

I hope this guide is useful to someone out there. Please re-read this post, write the numbers down on a post-it note, type it into your phone, bring it up in your next meeting. I’d love to know the reaction or if you have a better guide for content creation.

Oh and why 1990? It was the year Tim Berners-Lee invented the web as we know it, of course :)

The image is from our development day, where Matt shared his T-shirt on Advertising

Author: mark - 26/01/11