by Caroline Leach | May 30, 2015 | Corporate Communications, Social Media
How can you get your message into the first three to five words?
If the recipient read nothing else, would they get the main message in those first few words?
And how you can grab their attention right away?
These are the questions I’m asking when I’m reviewing materials my Comms team or others have drafted.
Is the main message in the subject line? Or the slide headline? Or the blog post title?
It’s in those first few critical words – or increasingly, images – that your audience will decide if they should engage further or move on to the next message.
Your subject line and preview text may be all your reader ever sees of your email, so make ’em count. Check out some great email subject lines to inspire the ones you write.
And make sure you’ve included keywords, “an informative word used in an information retrieval system to indicate the content.”
Even The New York Times, long known for its lyrical headlines, is now including keywords.
And there’s a bigger goal as well.
“What matters more than a story’s ‘searchable’ factor is how ‘shareable’ it is on social media,” the article by Margaret Sullivan goes on to say, “so headlines need to serve that purpose too.”
And what makes something interesting and shareable and interesting echoes the themes in 4 Questions to Transform Your Elevator Pitch.
So how can you say it in a subject line?
by Caroline Leach | May 24, 2015 | Change, Corporate Communications, Social Media
This week, I’m preparing to give a one-minute elevator pitch.
This should be easy. I’ve done personal branding sessions. I’ve defined my unique value proposition. And I’ve drafted a pitch, complete with words like strategy and collaboration and results.
But somehow, those formal statements are things I would never say. They wouldn’t feel natural. They wouldn’t sound believable. They wouldn’t be interesting.
And as Tim David says in his HBR post, Your Elevator Pitch Needs an Elevator Pitch, they wouldn’t be authentic.
So what should I say? What should you say the next time you’re on an elevator or at conference and someone asks you to tell them what you do?
In one minute, you have about 120 words to pique someone’s interest and spark a longer conversation.
Being in the TV business, pivotal scenes or compelling narratives often come to mind. As The Wall Street Journal reported in a tribute to Mad Men, elevators have been described as a neutral zone where “time, physical space and tension get neatly compressed.”
So how can use use that to your advantage?
First, who are you pitching to? As with any communication, consider your audience. Who are they and what’s important to them? What problems are they trying to solve? And how can you help? Answering these questions will help you tailor your pitch.
Second, why are you pitching to them? What do you want to accomplish? Your general objective should be to generate interest in a follow-up conversation, not to close a sale or land a job. Think of your elevator pitch as opening the door to more dialogue.
Third, what do you want them to know about you? If the person were to remember just one thing about you, what would you want it to be? Focus on that area and edit out everything else.
Fourth, how can you say it authentically? Translate corporate jargon into real words that anyone could understand. Could your parents understand it? How about a kindergartner?
Here’s the start of mine for this moment in time:
Hi, I’m Caroline Leach. I help people learn to love change. Whether it’s winning customer loyalty, working in new ways or creating a culture of volunteerism, I use communication to lead change. And involving people makes them more excited about the future.
Best-selling author Daniel Pink has great ideas about creating an elevator pitch for our digital world. One is having a one-word pitch. If, according to Pink, Google equals search and MasterCard equals priceless, what one word defines you?
I chose “transform.” I also considered “change.” But while many people are inspired by the idea of transformation and its possibilities for reinvention and growth, people resist change, as Rosabeth Moss Kanter summarizes so well on ten different levels.
People don’t always like to change. But they would eagerly transform their lives. And communication can connect the two in a powerful way that ultimately leads to sustainable change.
Pink also suggests summing up your pitch in a tweet. In 140 characters or less, what’s your Twitter pitch?
My tweet is I help people learn to love change.
And that’s what I’m exploring right now in my work and in this blog. And as that changes and evolves, so will my elevator pitch.
by Caroline Leach | Apr 30, 2015 | Corporate Communications, Leadership
What are our deepest human cravings?
To feel that we are important. That we have something valuable to contribute. That we matter.
Tony Schwartz summed it up well in an HBR blog post called, The Only Thing that Really Matters.
“How we’re feeling — and most especially whether or not we feel acknowledged and appreciated — influences our behavior, consumes our energy and affects our decisions all day long,” Tony wrote.
“Our core emotional need is to feel valued,” he continued. “Without a stable sense of value, we don’t know who we are and we don’t feel safe in the world.”
That reminds me of a great TED talk by Simon Sinek, called Why good leaders make you feel safe.
(And as an aside, if you want something engaging to do during your commute, get the TED app and listen to a playlist of talks on a subject of interest. Work Smarter, Before Public Speaking and How to be a Great Leader are favorites.)
Back to Simon. He talks about the importance of creating trust among people and fostering a safe environment as a way to build up people and organizations.
The result? “When we feel safe inside the organization,” Sinek says, “we will naturally combine our talents and our strengths and work tirelessly to face the dangers outside and seize the opportunities.”
He describes leadership as a choice, not a title. Looking after your colleagues makes you a leader, Sinek says.
That can sometimes mean acknowledging a hard truth. The principal of my son’s school wrote a poignant email to parents the day that people across the country heard of the horrible tragedy at Sandy Hook.
“The randomness and unfairness of this event remind us the deeply troubling fact that we can never fully protect our loved ones,” he wrote. He named our unspeakable fear. Which made it just slightly less awful, to be reminded that we can’t, in fact, control everything. Even if, as humans, we would like to. And we strive to.
What does this have to do with communicating effectively with employees? With winning their hearts and minds? With showing people that they matter?
It means listening – to hopes as well as fears. It means building trust. It means showing by your actions that people are important. That they have value. That they are needed. And that they have an opportunity to be part of an inspiring vision that is bigger than themselves.
Two people I know are really good at this.
First is Joe Bosch, DIRECTV’s CHRO and my boss. He gets the HR team together frequently, and a tradition is his presentation of a “Bosch toolbox.” For an individual who’s done something notable, Joe invites them to the front of the room and reads his personal note on the box, which is filled with fun tools.
Second is Andy Bailey, who leads employee recognition on my team, with a focus on our frontline employees. Andy’s mantra to “start every meeting with recognition” is something I’m proud to experience every day as part of our culture at DIRECTV.
When the Myers Briggs personality types came up in conversation yesterday, it reminded me how many thinkers, versus feelers, are in leadership roles (myself among them as an ENTJ). And thinking is good for many important activities – strategy, operations, analytics and metrics, to name a few.
But people have to deliver on those strategies. And they’re more fired up to take that next hill if leaders and colleagues are touching people’s hearts as well as their minds. So people know they are appreciated. That they have value. That they matter.
That you matter.
Recent Comments