Conversational or the ‘new’ way of writing?

So the biggest argument for moving away from the traditional style of writing is that its very cold and unemotional and that its better to write like you’re writing to a friend or like you’re talking to the person beside you. A lot of the time I’ve seen it to be very upbeat and full of personality.

Photo from Alex Barth

Some Criticisms I have: I can see it very easily causing miscommunication especially as companies are trying to reach a larger more international audience. Writing isn’t the same as face to face communications you can’t completely express tone and emotion and everyone can have their own interpretation of things.  You can  also easily go overboard as well with  poor language, use of slang  and the appropriateness of subject matter ( ex: will someone be offended by a joke). My personal criticism of moving away from the business style of writing is that it can get too cutesy/expressive and not quickly get down to content .

Corporate or the ‘old’ way of writing:

In my opinion there was a reason that corporate writing became the norm. It standardized things and got right down to the point. When done right there is little ambiguity and the reader can quickly grab the information they need. It also made sure that nothing that was said would improperly anger anyone or put businesses in legal situations which could cost a company a lot of money in the courts.

Photo by PinkMoose

When it can be used poorly: This style of writing has also been known as being cold and very political. When there is pain being felt such as during a crisis event a corporate style press release or letter does not show much sympathy. On the other side of things it can improperly  show a company’s excitement for a new initiative or company win.

So here’s my look at both types of communications  and the benifits/drawbacks of both. I’d like to suggest a hybrid of both styles as they each communicate well in a specific way.  What are your thoughts? Is informal writing in  or is  business communications not going away?

Experiment 2:

My second experiment involved messaging and how much interaction cans a personality or twitter brand can have with its followers. Yet again I decided to take a twitter alias(@socialmediabot2)  as I’m far from the average twitter user. Going to wefollow I decided to follow 50 people (close to the average of 69 )  and posted intermittently hoping perhaps for some interaction with who I’m following … a bit of a downfall of this experiment lack of true connection with people.

Afterwards, starting on the Monday morning I started posting messages from another account. 1 for every half hour for 7.5 hours for a total of 14 with the messages ( TEST #_ )  to see how this would be viewed on my feed. I wanted to see how the everyday  messaging from the people I followed would fit with the planned ‘corporate’ messaging and whether it would overload my feed and possibly cause me to want to unfollow the account

The Result:

Twitter Overload

As you can see there are portions of my feed where the messaging overlapped, for a casual user of twitter this may just be too much!  Especially for accounts with little customer interaction (  just sharing links, company news etc) a strong consideration will have to be  made regarding how many times to post daily will work to allow you to build and retain your audience.

Overall Takeaways:

Twitter is still a difficult area to get solid data from and you can’t just jump on twitter hoping for success in your campaigns or awareness.It takes planning and organization but even then trial and error is needed. I think something that is often missed with twitter  for heavy users like myself  is we forget that the vast majority of people don’t follow hundreds of people or have the equivalent # of followers .

They follow friends and organizations that they are close to and that needs to be considered when planning out a campaign. While heavy twitter users may be able to withstand messaging it probably would be seen as spam to these casual users. I think an excellent example of how to avoid this sort of twitter spam is from Best buy and their Twelpforce where they have once central account but many separate support accounts.

Have any questions/comments ? Contact me at kevin@kevrichard.com or send me a twitter message .