Perfect Your Pitch for Social Content

When you were a kid, before you honed your social manners, your parents probably told you to use your inside voice. Who knew screaming in a movie theater, concert, or opera, is not cute even if you are only five years old.

Your company has an inside and outside voice too. The inside voice speaks through acronyms, industry specific stories, and vertical knowledge. The inside voice is only heard and understood by those within your industry and, at times, just others in your company or department. The outside voice speaks through your press releases, posts, tweets, job listings, and other public facing communications. Too often, your company uses its inside voice when speaking to everyone outside of the company.

Just like the 5 year old screaming in the silent theater, you’ve angered and lost the audience.

Tips for Finding Crafting Outside Voice

Focus on the Story, then grammar
Brevity: Do not use 10 words when two will do.
Acronyms & Jargon: Get rid of them, period. Prospects, potential employees, shareholders, and others do not know what the heck PSP, MSP, XML, L*a*b, stand for. (Check out this huge list of IT acronyms as an example.)
Be Specific: What is the key message or the call-to-action? Say it in clear, concise language.
Headline It: Could your message be a headline in a newspaper — attention catching and clearly understood?
Pitch It: Could your products, services, company, and purpose be pitched in a 90 second elevator ride? Interviews and videos, in particular, need sound bites instead of your rambling.

photo: David Salafia

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Finding the right pitch even goes for all outgoing comms and copy on the website. Instead of saying “We’re the best XYZ company”, the business needs to frame things in terms of what’s in it for the customers so the voice becomes “The XYZ company that can save you $100″ etc.
http://www.companyfolders.com/ K Moore

Thank you for giving me the terms to describe one of my biggest pet
peeves in marketing– when companies load up their copy with jargon that
means nothing to the consumer. I like the idea of calling it an
inside/outside voice and I really thought your ideas for developing an
outside voice were clever. I’d add one more idea to that list– getting a
second pair of eyes on your pitch. Sometimes it helps to have a trusted
individual outside the industry who can take a look at your work and
see if they understand it.