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Find Your Voice

How to Say It in Cyberspace -- Bright Ideas for Communicating

If you want to write well online, and if you want to communicate your business ideas, brand, and unique personality, find your voice. If it's not yours, it's probably not worth reading.

Many businesses spend months and big bucks developing a clever, flavorful logo to express their unique identity. Then they write vanilla. No flavor. No sauce. No special personality. Maybe that works for an ice cream parlor where the decor and flavors sell themselves.

But in cyberspace, words count. With email, in fact, words are all you've got. So in the same way you'd create the "look and feel" of your business with images, decor, wardrobe, and neon signs, express the "sound" of your business with every word you write.

Find Your Voice.

When lots of folks sit down to write, they stash their voice in the sock drawer. Then they channel the voice of an old English teacher or a BusinessWeek reporter. Good intentions. Bad execution.

Why sound like someone else? That's vanilla, whereas you may want to express rum raisin.

What's in a Voice?

God makes voices like fingerprints -- one of a kind. Let yours out of the sock drawer.

Someone who's made a career of her voice is Susan RoAne, the "Mingling Maven" and author of three books on talking and networking. But to Susan, a native of a Chicago Jewish neighborhood, it's not networking. It's "schmoozing." She sprinkles her speeches with Yiddish; her books include a Yiddish glossary. She's funny, endearing, and reminds me fondly of Fiddler on the Roof.

Yiddish humor is Susan's voice, her special business flavor. What's yours?

If You've Misplaced Your Voice . . .

Start writing by talking. (We promise not to laugh at you for talking to yourself.)

Think: Whom are you talking to? If you want to connect with an individual, don't imagine you're talking to the United Nations General Assembly. Picture a few real or imaginary clients.

Have a conversation. Good talking involves good listening. In writing, "listen" to your reader by anticipating questions and concerns. One helpful hint: After every paragraph you write, ask yourself, "So what?" Then respond.

Body language. Talking involves gesturing. If you're a Sicilian-American with an Italian imports business, your writing better gesture as broadly as a Puccini opera. Use dashes, exclamation marks, colorful verbs.

What are you wearing? Do you do business in a three-piece suit? Fine, write stuffy English sentences that sound like the Bombay Company. But if not, sound like a pair of comfy jeans. Intimidated by the blank screen, many entrepreneurs write too darn formal.

Slang works (if it's you). Four-letter words might smack of bad taste, but feel free to use popular expressions and lingo. As anthropologists point out, groups (and markets!) define themselves with language.

Homework

Write down 10 nouns (person, place, or thing) that express your business.

Jot down 10 verbs (action words like "to climb") that capture your business actions.

And list 10 adjectives (descriptors like "scrumptious") that describe your business, your market, or your personality.

Use these words when you write. They're your voice, and they supply the cookie dough for chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream. Or whatever flavor you speak! Personally I like rum raisin.

Other articles about communicating well in today's marketplace:

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