To their slight dismay, we don’t hand over a template, a guideline or a guaranteed-to-get-you-more-retweets-than-that-photo-of-Barack-and-Michelle trade secret. Because social media is different to other writing. You’re talking to people, so it’s even more important to sound like a real person when you write.

It’s probably no surprise that the best brands’ Twitter accounts often just have one person writing their updates. And they don’t just understand the brand they’re writing for, they put their own personality into the words too:

To find out your author name, simply take your first and last names, write a book, get it published and read the name on the cover.

— WaterstonesOxfordSt (@WstonesOxfordSt) October 9, 2012

This is a hard lesson for old-school branding folk to get their heads around because it’s almost impossible to replicate or neatly slot into a template.

But that’s not all. We’ve noticed that the more brands go off on tangents or say things that don’t necessarily sound ‘on-brand’, the more people warm to them.

Some of these examples have been doing the rounds on Twitter recently, so you might have seen them, but they help us show what’s going on:

We’ve had our own reshuffle. One Direction now run our fiction section. JLS get cookery. Take That are in charge of Mind, Body and Spirit.

— WaterstonesOxfordSt (@WstonesOxfordSt) September 4, 2012

Or take these tweets between O2 customer services and one of their customers:

@tunde24_7 Have you tried to reset the router ting fam, so mans can use the wifi and dat?

— O2 in the UK (@O2) October 9, 2012

This breaks every rule in the old-school marketing book. If O2 wrote like this or mimicked their audience elsewhere, it would be embarrassingly bad. But on Twitter it works. That tweet, by the way, was retweeted over 5,000 times. Not bad for a customer services’ enquiry.

And that’s the thing about social media: anyone can eavesdrop. The world and her dog have a glass to their ear, listening to your every murmur through the wall. When O2 were having problems with their network back in July we, like a lot of people, searched their Twitter feed to see how they were managing it. As it turned out they were doing a sterling job. Their deadpan replies, especially, made some of the more extreme abuse from angry customers seem uncalled for and unfair (although, importantly, they didn’t ignore them either).

@ashleyroberts61 She says no thanks.

— O2 in the UK (@O2) July 12, 2012

What happened next was just as interesting. Twitter’s eavesdroppers picked up on the conversations and joined in.

@vddn Back rub, sir?

— O2 in the UK (@O2) July 12, 2012

O2 showed that if social media is managed well in a mini-crisis, customer service doesn’t just help you deal with people’s problems, it can also help to show how good your customer service is. Full credit to them. This only worked because they gave the people dealing with the complaints enough freedom to give real, unscripted (and funny) responses.

And in the best examples, even if the response is scripted, it will work as long as it’s not the expected press release blah. Exhibit A, Bodyform’s reply to a comment about them on Facebook:

It’s much more all-singing and all-dancing than a little tweet, but it shares Twitter’s speed (it was made over a weekend, faster than any ad campaign) and humour. It’s brilliant because it’s so surprising for a brand to take off their suited-and-booted corporate mask and laugh at themselves. Hats off to the brave client.

These examples are still, alas, exceptions to the more empty-headed rule. Most brands still treat their Facebook and Twitter accounts as ticker feeds for rolling promotions, adverts and retweets of people saying how much they love them. If you ask an open-ended question you might well ‘start a conversation’ as the social media mantra goes. But if you’ve got nothing to say, the internet’s replies will always outsmart you.

Dialysis. RT @mcdonalds: Fill in the blank: Friday = _______.

— rob delaney (@robdelaney) July 22, 2012

And worse, if brands carry on as they are, and don’t react to what’s happening around them, they can be left standing around looking stupid. Or grossly insensitive, like this:

Seriously?! RT @gap All impacted by #Sandy, stay safe! We’ll be doing lots of Gap.com shopping today. How about you?

— Lucy Tobin (@lucytobin) October 29, 2012

Eurgh.

The sparky replies from the likes of Waterstones Oxford Street and O2 do it differently. Here comes the theory…

1) They’re immediate. With social media, fourteen rounds of amends and eighty editors just doesn’t work.

2) The Waterstones and O2 examples are arguably a lot more interesting than the brands they’re writing for (O2: blue, bubbles; Waterstones: slightly bookish but trying to leave their 3-for-2 days behind). It’s what makes them even more surprising.

3) The writers have the freedom to put their personality into the words.

4) It’s not direct mail – they’re not selling at you. Or when they are, they do it in an unexpected and witty way.

5) There’s no template.

6) They’ve actually got something to say.

All this reflects where branding as a whole is heading. Gone are the days of the logo being king, in one colour, in one place, with an accompanying 4,000-page guideline. Things are loosening up a little.

But the main reason these examples shine is that the people tapping away at the keyboard are good writers. If we had to boil everything down to one tip, in 140 characters or fewer, it’s this:

Hire a good writer, not a social media manager. Then leave them to it.

End of theory.

Big brands go to great lengths to convince you they’re part of your local community or high street. You see it on the community noticeboard of every Starbucks and supermarket chain, and CSR organisations like ‘Business In The Community’. But these sort of things rarely ring true: everyone knows that really there’s a head office and shareholders running things from afar.

KC, on the other hand, have been part of the area for over 100 years. So how could we show that KC were the real local deal, not another big company putting on a voice, just pretending to be from down the road?

Plusnet (a Sheffield company bought by BT) gave us a good case study of what we didn’t want to do.

Click to supersize me

We asked people from East Yorkshire what they thought of Plusnet’s tone and they said patronising. We don’t know anyone who talks like that, they said. People from Yorkshire don’t use ee-bah-gum and by heck speak anymore than Londoners use cockney rhyming slang. It’s a caricature. (And this tone jars all the more because it’s mixed in with direct mail sales patter, but that’s another story.)

So when it came to KC’s tone, we wanted to use words that people from Hull and East Yorkshire really say. And use language to show that KC is as local as chip spice. (If you’re from Hull you’ll be nodding at that bit. Sorry to everyone else.)

Here’s a sneak peek of what we’ve been doing for them and where KC’s words are heading next.

East Yorkshire has cream phone boxes not red ones. White Pages not Yellow Pages.

If you're not from Hull, it's Victoria Dock to you.

Old Faithful - Hull FC's traditional terrace song.

If you're not from Hull it's Princess Quay to you.

Mafting - a local word meaning hot or clammy.
'It's mafting in here!'

This project has been bit of a linguistic eye opener for us. There’s a fine line between taking the mickey out of people or how they speak and celebrating it. We tested all these to make sure they were all the right side of that line. Mimicking an accent for example was a step too far.

But what also interested us about this project is that we think this is the sort of tone only a proper local company can get away with. It’ll help them stand out against ‘vulgar outsiders’ like BT or Vodafone. We’d love to see more local brands being proud to celebrate their voice and put themselves into their words.

Here’s a list of questions people often ask. With some answers.

WHAT IS TONE OF VOICE?
Most brands have a logo, a colour palette and typeface. Tone of voice is pretty much the same thing, but for words and writing.

That’s the short answer. The long(er) answer is more complicated. For one thing, everyone writes. So you can’t be as strict about how to use tone of voice as you can about a logo (mind you, visual guidelines are getting less prescriptive, but that’s another story). On top of that, many writers and agencies claim to do tone of voice, but what a lot of them actually do is give basic and generic ‘how to write better’ rules, or come up with a tone that people can’t use.

Here are the nuts and bolts of a good tone of voice:
1. It fits with the brand – it’s why banks with chatty words don’t work.
2. It’s practical – anyone who writes needs to be able to use it.
3. It’s consistent – the same tone is used everywhere (from receipts and letters to signs and notices).

Ideally, a tone of voice should be distinctive as well. But that’s harder to pull off in big organisations with lots of people (especially if you want it to be practical). It’s why the handful of brands who have a brilliant tone of voice are either small, like howies, or act as if they are and have a small, full-time team of writers, like Innocent.

ISN’T TONE OF VOICE JUST GOOD WRITING OR ‘PLAIN ENGLISH’?
No, it’s more than that. It’s about helping a brand put across its personality in words. The Plain English Campaign has done a lot to get rid of gobbledygook, especially in the public sector. But it’s about clear writing, not about writing with personality. ‘Plain’ isn’t much of an aspiration.

CAN ONE TONE OF VOICE WORK FOR LOTS OF DIFFERENT AUDIENCES?
Yes. When brands mimic their audiences they sound like they’ve got a split personality. We used to do a lot of work for mobile phone companies. They’d try to write like Jay-Z when they were writing for teenagers and like an annual report when they were writing for business. It didn’t work. Customers got confused. We also worked on a project for a big art gallery. Oddly their best writing was for kids: it was clear and had lots of personality. But as soon as they wrote about conceptual art, the tone turned formal and the words became incomprehensible because that’s what they thought critics and academics expected.

It helps to differentiate between content and tone. To go back to the mobile phone example, teenagers want to know different things to business customers – but that’s all about content. You don’t need to start talking in text speak to teenagers or put on a corporate voice for business customers. The whole point of tone of voice is to find a tone that goes with your brand, and sounds like you, no matter who you’re writing to.

I’M WRITING ABOUT A SERIOUS SUBJECT, SO DOESN’T MY TONE NEED TO BE SERIOUS TOO?
Again, that’s the difference between content and tone. What you say can be serious, but how you say it can be just as clear as if you’re talking about what you had for breakfast.

We often hear a similar excuse for littering writing with jargon-y industry blah words. Something like this: ‘my clients are serious global such-and-such people, they understand our industry words’. Sometimes (at a push), you will have to use industry words but if every other word is in industry-speak it’ll be horrible to read. And don’t mix that up with using empty words like leverage or solution. They don’t actually add anything at all. In the end, no one has ever complained – or will ever complain – that something is too clear. And readers certainly won’t ask you to put more jargon in.

HOW DO I GET EVERYONE IN MY COMPANY TO USE A TONE OF VOICE?
It’s not easy. Companies often underestimate how much work is involved. You’ll need to invest a lot of management time to do it well and think of it as an ongoing thing, not a one-off. A lot like branding in general, actually. It helps if:
- at least one person in your organisation manages it.
- you give people hands-on training (trying it out is the best way to learn) and you keep topping that up.
- make sure managers use it and lead by example.
- make it something people aren’t scared to try (no school rules, no red pen).

HOW ABOUT PEOPLE WHO AREN’T AS GOOD AT WRITING?
Some people are bound to be better at writing than others. Tone of voice can’t change that. But it nearly always makes the standard of everyone’s writing better. And we’ve found that writing ability is rarely the problem. The biggest thing to get over is permission – giving people the confidence to write in a less corporate way.

WHAT ARE TONE OF VOICE GUIDELINES LIKE?
People like to close their eyes and hope that tone of voice guidelines mark the end of a project. But really they’re just the start. The most important thing is for people to write. Lots.

Still, we’re surprised how many big brands have pages about logo exclusion zones, but are happy to sum up their tone in a paragraph.

Our guideline guidelines:
- Give some overall principles, along with some linguistic tips that people can actually use when they write.
- Put together lots of examples of the tone being used for different things and in different situations. And explain how you wrote them. (If they’re rewrites it’s really useful to compare before and afters side-by-side.)
- Sometimes it helps to flag up some jargon-y words and alternatives, or write them up in a separate style guide.

CAN YOU COME UP WITH A BETTER NAME FOR TONE OF VOICE?
We wish. It’s better than ‘verbal identity’ which is what Interbrand call it. We’re certainly not wedded to it. Answers on a postcard.

MORE QUESTIONS?
Leave us a reply (at the bottom of the page).

Or take a look at our step-by-step guide to finding your tone of voice.

Or if you want more inspiration have a wander around our tone of voice hall of fame.

Over the last few years tone of voice has become more common in the branding world, but a lot of those so-called tones are just guides to writing in Plain English. They’re generic. And that’s not good enough.

A proper tone of voice is much, much more than that. It’s about thinking about how words can work harder for you, so people (customers, investors, competitors) sit up and take notice. It’s about stamping your own style on every word you use, so people can spot your words even if they’re out of context. And it’s about making sure everyone in your company, from the CEO to the call centre’s newest recruit, gets your tone and writes in it.

Here’s how to make sure your words fit your brand and make you stand out from the crowd:

1. READ EVERYTHING

Start with your brand. What do you stand for? Why are you different?

Then read your words. Read anything and everything. Leaflets, adverts, welcome packs, job ads, signs on the fridge, stories on the intranet, notes on the back of the loo door, emails, PowerPoint presentations, websites, Tweets, visitor passes.

Do they match? What’s happening? Is there a pattern? Do you sound formal in some places and chatty in others? What? Where? Why?

2. READ EVERYTHING ELSE

Who’s your competition? What do they write? Read as much of their writing as you can. How does it compare? What’s the same? What’s different? Find out.

3. TALK ABOUT IT

The best way to get people thinking about writing is to talk about it. Get a group of about ten people in a room (if you need to get more people involved, run more than one group).

Don’t just involve your top ten brains. Ask the CEO, maybe (if you need his or her buy-in from the start, or interview them separately). Invite someone from the board. But someone from the shop floor too. Someone who writes. Someone who tweaks and sends templated letters. Someone from marketing – but not everyone. Someone from customer service. Someone on work experience. A pick-and-mix bag of brains from across your company.

And get the powers that be and the sceptics involved from the start. (Being sceptical in the room is better than being sceptical in the wings.)

4. DEBATE IT

Ask the group what they like about your words at the moment. Get them to bring examples. What don’t they like? Why? What’s working? What’s not? Whose words do you admire? Could you sound like that? (You could love Innocent’s tone of voice, but if it doesn’t fit with making paper clips, forget it.) Which bits of your brand do you want to bring out in your words?

Make notes. Listen. Watch what’s going on.

5. MAKE YOUR RECOMMENDATIONS

A good place to start is to point out what’s not working, and explain what you need to do to solve it. Give clear, bite-sized tips that will help everyone write in the same way (whatever their level and skill as a writer). As a minimum, you want everyone to write clearly, like ‘normal’ people, not formal robots.

But that’s just for starters. If you want your tone to stop you sounding like everyone else, your words will need their own style and spark. And your recommendations will show people how to do it.

6. DON’T INVENT IT

You can’t pluck a tone of voice out of thin air (or if you can, it’s probably not the right tone). The answer needs to fit with who you are, what you’re like and how you work.  Your tone should feel right for your company today.

So if your company is proud of being ‘adventurous’, your words should show it – by writing bold headlines, by adding lots of pace to your words, by surprising people with one-word paragraphs…and so on. There are lots of different ways to do it, but only a few might be (or feel) right.

7. MAKE IT STICK

Everyone writes. Not everyone’s a writer. So make your tone of voice easy to remember. A sticky ‘hook’ (a phrase, sentence or even a picture) that stays in people’s heads, so even if they don’t remember all the detail, they  know where to start.

But a hook is too broad to cover the whole tone. So explain what you want people to do with some principles. Three or four work well, and again make them simple. Don’t overload people.

Explain each principle clearly, with lots of linguistic tips so people really know what they need to do with their words (eg ‘make your words personal, use we, us and you’). If you’re asking people to make things punchy. Show. Them. How.

8. WRITE LOTS OF BEFORE AND AFTERS

Take some writing you do now and give it a tone of voice makeover. Dazzle people with dreary befores and sparkling afters. Explain what you’ve changed and why. What little linguistic tricks have you got up your sleeves? How do they work?

Suddenly, it’ll click.

9. SHARE IT

Not with long, boring guidelines, barking ‘do this, don’t do that’. Not grammar lectures etched into people’s brains with chalk. No exclusion zones or brand police. None of that. If you want people to use your tone of voice, write something they’ll want to read.

WHAM! Go straight in with what your tone is, how it works and then add your before and afters (customer letters, presentations, memos – things people actually write), explaining why you’ve changed the words and exactly what’s going on.

Words are interesting, exciting, provocative…they’re much more than a set of guidelines on a bookshelf. So do interesting things to get people thinking about them. Tell stories, run word surgeries, write haikus…there are all sorts of things you can do to get people’s attention – and help change the way they write.

10. JUST WRITE

This is a whole other chapter, but it starts with letting people have a go. Make writing interesting, not a chore. A lark, not a law. Give people permission to write. And start now.

11. GET A HEAD START

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