We spent a lot of time talking about the right message for Mercury Grove’s splash page before there was much to show for it.

I think that this particular task took on serious significance for Scott A. There’s a lot riding on this call to action and so it needs to be just right. We need to hit the right chord with potential customers/ community members, find our voice and phrase it smoothly enough that readers won’t give it a second thought. It’s a lot to expect from 50 words.

With several discarded drafts, it’s easy to lose site of the progress being made – however incremental. Our meeting at Dunn’s was valuable – there’s nothing like blueskying over smoked meat on rye – but the more business-minded contingent of the group shot our idea to pieces before I was hungry again. First comes frustration, then comes perseverance.

Later that night, it took a shift in thinking and a 45-minute conversation with Scott A. to brainstorm a new direction. We still had nothing concrete, but we knew what might work. Scott wanted to bounce the idea off a few people.

Working this problem through has been purley collaborative. There are a lot of really strong writers working together so a bit of a defined approach might tighten up the way we work through drafts.

That said, all this stop-start contributes to an intimate appreciation of who we are, what we do and how we’re going to tell people about it. Try having the same high-level conversation 20 times over, but explaining it in a different way with different vocabulary each time and you’ll see what I mean.

I understand Mercury Grove more today than I did yesterday. And I’ve been saying that since day one.

Since we are getting really close to the official re-launch of the MG site and the re-design of the MG blog, Jeff Meldrum, Scott Annan and I got together to go over the final messaging for both sites. Not having a background in communications, this process was a bit new to me. It was great to listen to Jeff because he is a pro and does the communications for some many big wigs around Ottawa. Even though we are talking about maybe two paragraphs of text, those words mean something and it is a lot of work to write exactly what you mean.

Like most MG meetings, this one was full of “thundering brainstorming” and the ideas were flying back and forth at a high rate of speed. We chose, Dunn’s Deli in downtown Ottawa for the meet. It’s a pretty old school place which is good for these types of discussions because no one thinks any different of three guys in a heated / passionate discussion over a smoked meat sandwich. Check the sites out on Monday and you should see the fruits of our labour.

UPDATE: Scott Annan is obviously working on the weekend because when I saved this post, the new design was up.

If you want to see more pics of the meeting or other MG pics, check out our flickr site

So this is almost unheard of but the images attached to this posts are our task lists, including delivery dates for this project. We wanted to share these right from the beginning so people could see what we’re doing and when we think we will be “getting stuff done”.

It takes a lot of guts for a company to be this transparent. MG has already committed to developing four applications in four months, and now we’re making public the most secret list that any software company has.

Personally, I think its about time. Lots of software companies exist under this veil of secrecy that doesn’t really benefit anyone but themselves. When you ask simple questions like “How long will that take?” - You get a response that equates the development process for the creation of heaven and earth. As far as Im concerned that is BS. We’re professionals and we make commitments. We should have no problem saying what we are going to do, then doing it.

Communications strategies always have key messages – the five to ten salient points that should be communicated over and over again. Key messages provide an organization with the foundation to speak with clients, media and each other. They’re the glue.

In this naked marketing arena, much of who we are is being defined as we go. We don’t want to sound canned, but we also can’t sound scattered and inconsistent. Everyone’s speaking at once and we’re not managing the message with the same rigour that you’d often see.

So here’s the challenge: suggest messaging that can keep people on point without stifling the flood of ideas that stem from having to stop, reflect and share every step of the process.

I’m going to step back and create “a key concept checklist”. Staying away from actual messages will prevent us from looking like we’re plagiarizing off of each other. Hopefully, we can all measure our messages against this checklist, not lose our unique voices, and convey the same high-level messages.

I think we’ll be a stronger, more articulate organization for the exercise.

I’m working on capturing messaging and tone for Mercury Grove.

I’ve recently developed an approach that makes writing for other people much easier. I record conversations and then I build my first draft from the transcript.

That way, I can record ideas, concepts and language immediately, when they are there for the taking. It makes getting things started and finished much easier.

I turned the mic on myself to write this blog. For years, I’ve had brainstorming sessions with colleagues and friends only to spend the next hours trying to recall the fluid and articulate brilliance that was shared during moments of valid and impassioned inspiration.

There’s a point to all of this. I’m starting to take this approach because we have become so jaded by marketing that we don’t respond to the contrived. We seek out the genuine. The authentic. The live concert over the studio album.

Traditional communications approaches cannot respond to this change. The days of telling companies how to sound are numbered. The model needs to be reversed. Communicators need to harness the ideas, language and passion of the people that make up an organization and use their words to tell the story.

I’m going speak to the other project members and I’ll capture their exact phrasing and their exact terms so that there is no change in tone from the web site you visit, the apps you use or the people you speak with.

Regardless of the medium, it’s us. Word for word.

First draft - recorded May 8, 2008
The sound quality is poor. I didn’t have my voice recorder and had to pull the ideas off of my answering machine.