Sweet Harmony – The Guide to Good Communication
Depending on your age (and musical tastes) this either reminds you of a particularly lovely early 90s single by The Beloved, or… it doesn’t.
But, as I recently found myself in a large room filled with social media experts, all debating the knotty subject of Digital Content, Deep Data and Home Runs, I was reminded of sweet harmony for rather different reasons than a saucy video on Top Of The Pops.
The event was Our Social Times, 2013 Social Media Marketing conference – see the #SMM13 trail on twitter for a bit more background on this excellent event.
The speaker line up was filled with luminaries of the digital world such as Doug Kessler (highly recommend his refreshingly honest slide-share on digital content “Crap“), Dave Chaffrey (take a look at Smart Insights, if you haven’t already) and comedian/professional tweeter David Schneider – who definitely won in the laughs-per-minute awards.
It was fascinating. And it got me thinking.
One of the key factors that every session touched on was the importance of building empathy and sounding real in your social media.
As marketing communication aficionados and trainers, it’s a sentiment we share. But we like to call it CONGRUENCE. It’s an NLP (neuro linguistic programming) term that describes “when behaviour (words, tonality, physiology, etc.) match the words and actions a person says and does*”.
Over time, we have built it into our communication strategy work and have even developed a useful mnemonic that describes the stages and elements to work through when creating a communication programme.
We’d like to share it with you.
It’s all laid out on the Prezi** we’ve created below. Have a play (just click the little arrows at the bottom of the screen to scroll through) and feel free to share.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on it too – find us on twitter @win_the_crowd or email me directly henny@winthecrowd.co.uk. Happy playing!
*Definition courtesy of NLP World
** If you haven’t come across Prezi before, it’s a neat little tool for creating animated presentations. It’s free and you can even use it on an iPad. Bonus.
