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.