Musings from the CU Suite

Written by Anthony Demangone

We live in a wonderful age of information. You want it? You can get it. Often for free. But...

There's always a but, isn't there? The information out there often doesn't hit the mark. It might not be written for us. Or it is written in a format that is far too dense and difficult to consume. Or the author never connects the dots for us. 

All of this is swimming around my mind after reading this article from Entrepreneur. When it comes to communication, less is more. Period. In the article, Steve Tobak makes some great points. 

If people see too much of you, they get sick of seeing your face. More to the point, they become sort of numb to your presence and stop paying attention to anything you have to say. The same thing happens if you spam them with stuff they could care less about and waste their precious time.

The way to avoid that is by blogging, posting, tweeting, updating, emailing, texting, calling – whatever form your communication or marketing takes – only what matters. Not what matters to you. What matters to them.

If you don’t know what matters to them or even exactly who “them” is, then you don’t have much of a marketing or communication strategy and you probably shouldn’t be sharing anything at all until you figure it out.

In addition, here are some tips that I'd give you when writing.

1. Know your audience.  Until you answer that question, how can you begin the conversation? Or conversations?
2. Give them what they need. What do your members need? And can you give it to them better than someone else?
3. Don’t waste their time.
4. Make it as entertaining as possible. This may not be fair, but life often is not. If I had a choice between fantastic information in a dull format, or good information in an entertaining format, I’d choose the latter. Seven days a week and twice on Sunday.
5. Be consistent. If you want to grow the audience, you have to consistently deliver content that hits on all of these rules. Quite a few blogs start posting quite a bit, but then fall off.  Or, they start to “outsource” postings to other parties in a way that detracts from the blog’s focus.
6. Create a Czar. Someone has to own the blog, Facebook page, etc. One person. They have to worry about these rules and follow them. Be careful who writes for your blog. Without energy and focus, postings will start to become dull. And there’s enough dull information out there.
7. Acknowledge that it takes work. Writing a good post isn’t easy. Following issues closely for Twitter isn’t either. It takes a good deal of time and resources. You won’t build a huge universe of followers overnight. Again, it takes time, sweat, and typing. Unless your credit union owns this fact, you may not devote enough resources.

I guess it all comes down to value. If what you write provides true value, people will read it and want more. But creating value in today's crowded communication channels is not easy.

Today's homework: Measure your credit union's newsletter, blog, Twitter feed and Facebook page against these rules.  How do you measure up?

 

Kate is a very efficient writer. This was on her door recently. A lot of depth and information in two words, eh?