Orchestrating One Clear Message From Many Voices

The World Wide Web. Email newsletters. Mobile phones. Text messaging. Facebook. Twitter: Never before have there been so many methods for communication distribution.

With such diverse tools at your disposal, however, the challenge comes in keeping your message consistent.

The key to message consistency and coordination lies in using your web site as your message hub. But while it may be tempting to try to save time and trouble by reproducing your web content verbatim in your other channels (your email newsletter, Twitter and Facebook), we believe that's a mistake.

Each of your communication channels reaches at least a partially different audience, but for those who follow you in more than one medium, repeating the same verbatim message is like watching the same TV commercial two or three times in a row - the message loses its effectiveness and become tedius. And the way your message is received and displayed varies from channel to channel.

Thus, it behooves you to create a separate series of messages for each of your communications channels, each conveying the same idea, but in separate ways that allow you to take advantage of the "personality" of email and the social media.

Think of it as translating your message into other languages. It's preferable to find a good writer who is fluent in those other languages, rather than reproducing a stilted, verbatim version from English.

Bottom line, if your business benefits from reaching people via email, Facebook, Twitter and other communications channels, then it will benefit you or someone at your organization to learn to become fluent in the nuances of using those particular channels. Or, as an alternative, contract with a trusted third party to provide that service, or the appropriate training.