Had an great conversation while attending the conference on the value of simplicity. Many organizations, including mine, can be accused of complicating their message and making it difficult for their employees, their customers, their prospects and their community at large to understand what they do.
An attempt of this for Ivara would be as follows:
“Ivara provides business intelligence software to improve physical asset performance and reliability in capital intensive industrial companies”
While this is a very valuable exercise I would caution against over-simplifying. Twitter is a great tool BUT if it takes you 160-180 characters to appropriately state your message that is not the be all and the end all. The point is be able to articulate to your community what you do in a memorable, repeatable, accurate statement so when you get a couple minutes to introduce yourself in the elevator or at the conference people will get it. Another great exercise is to do this with your Executive team and ask each of them to do this and compare. The variation in what comes forward will provide evidence of how clouded your message may be in the market. By the time the message gets from Exec to employees to customers to prospects, etc, etc imagine what a mess it can be if it is not crisp from the start. It’s like a bad game of “telephone” from when you were a kid!
Couple to-do’s for you as you look to grow your community:
- Send me your “twittered” messaging and let me see if I can clearly understand it and would remember it
- Ask your co-workers to do this and send it to you via email within 15 minutes. Significant variations will tell you that a follow on meeting to clarify this statement is required.
Send your messaging and let me know how your to-do’s go. Clarity of messaging is key for all stakeholders and community members.
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