Dave Harries: Something that comes across from the book very strongly is the importance of defining your tone of voice. What do you really mean by that?
Grant Leboff: There are two fundamental issues about going online. The first one is that you live in a world today where you have multiple contributors. You might have sales people going online and using LinkedIn and Twitter etc.; then you’ve got marketing people putting communications online, as well; you may have customer service people; you may get some of the directors of a business to go online … The challenge is, how do you keep all of that cohesive? How do you make sure that if you got so many different people contributing to these channels, where all, can all be seen, especially if someone searches on, say, the company name. How do you make sure there’s a congruence to it all? By defining your tone of voice, you achieve that.
The second part is, actually what are you going to say? You know, I’ve got my Facebook page here, how am I going to make anything interesting? If you define your tone of voice, if you define your identity, then you start to build a narrative where actually there’s a kind of cohesiveness, but also an interesting angle to what you’ve got to say, because you’ve got a sense of who you are.
Dave Harries: I know there are three parts to defining the tone of voice that you mentioned in the book, and we’re going to cover those in separate videos as well, but … Just quickly tell me what those three parts are?
Grant Leboff: Yeah. If you think about it, what you’re trying to do is to build an identity online and those three parts that make up that identity are:
The ethos, or purpose, behind the business. What’s the reason for having the business?
The second one is the value proposition. What, ultimately, is the key deliverable to the customer? How do we define the value proposition to the customer?
The third one is your emotional selling proposition. What does that mean emotionally for the customer?
If you have those three things absolutely aligned … The great thing about them is that: They’re easy to remember, it’s less than three sentences everybody can remember it, but it goes to the heart of your identity and who you are, and by having that real sense of who you are, you then have a position that you take as an organization, as a business, which can then be reflected in all of your communications.
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