You're the voice, try and understand it

Just a quick…The renaissance of the QR code has been something magical. If were not already connected on LinkedIn, please, be my friend. I am a copywriter. Award winning. I’ve had ‘almost award winning’ in my LinkedIn bio for a year now, because last year I was highly commended.

But now it’s ‘award winning’. Sorry for the bragging, but it’s kind of my thing. And you might be thinking, copywriter, didn’t they all die out last year after ChatGPT came along and took everyone’s jobs? No. But we did have to diversify slightly. So, what I got my award for, this is the last time I’m going to say it, second last.

I’ve definitely got one more in me. Was doing a tone of voice guide, which is what I’m talking about today. I also write for Freelancer Magazine and run a podcast with my co-host Ben McKinney all about life as an indie business owner. I love plants, as evidenced by my jungle here, so I’ll stick a little cactus down there and I also make the best cheese scones.

When everyone else was making sour dough in lockdown, I was on the cheese scones I’ve mastered it, you can have the recipe at the end. Why am I telling you all this stuff? It’s so that you can live, laugh and love me. No, that’s not right. Know, like and trust me, which is part of a quote by a guy called Bob Burg who says all things being equal, people will do business with and refer business to those that they know, like and trust.

And that’s why I’m a massive fan of, as Ryan is, posting on LinkedIn and getting people to know who you are. And one of the ways that you can do that consistently, even as a solopreneur or freelancer, one person business, is by having a consistent verbal identity or tone of voice. I’ll come onto what exactly that means in a second.

But with the aforementioned AI apocalypse, you might be wondering if you need one, or whether you can just get ChatGPT to do stuff. And I’m not going to slag off AI because I know that a lot of people use it, and I don’t want to make you feel bad for that. I’m not angry. I’m just disappointed. And I will refer to this quote, though, by Rand Fishkin, about AI and its use because it’s really good at knowing what the next word’s most likely to be.

But often when we’re trying to build our personal brand or promote our business, that’s not actually what we want. We don’t want to be predictable. We want people to, to notice us and for us to stand out and sound ourselves. I’ve used very intentional font choice, I hope you enjoy it, as I show you some of the things that AI is guilty of.

It’s phrases like this. Copywriting… redefined. Goodbye creativity… hello, blah blah blah blah blah blah. So, there’s always like very tired, innovative solutions. If any of you googled innovative solutions, I think, Dave Harland does a post about this, about how like if you actually Google how many results come up, it’s not going to make you stand out.

Neither is synergies or creativity… reimagined. Reimagined reimagined is another one that people like to do instead of, in fact, I just think it’s actually on the Vulcan Works website. Sorry Vulcan Works. Let’s talk. What happens is you can end up if you keep using, purely using AI to generate your content, you can end up with this like sea of beige.

I don’t know if you can spot you, there. What we really want is for you to stand out by looking a bit different. So hopefully my little micro rant there has convinced you to try and escape. Run away from using unedited, boring beige AI. So about verbal identity, it’s about your voice and your tone. The two different things here, while the voice stays the same regardless of what you’re doing.

it’s your kind of personality. And the tone is how you adjust it to suit the situation. It should be consistent across all your assets. All the copy that you have everywhere, your micro copy, anything everywhere should be in your consistent tone, tone of voice. So, slogans, taglines 404 pages, cookie notices. I’ve got my little notes here because otherwise I’ll forget some of these, product names, jingles, brochures, website, social posts, bios, landing pages.

I won’t go on. There’s loads more. And by having it consistent across all these different touchpoints, you help to build this mental shortcut in your potential customers or your networks minds. It’s not just about finding people that you want to work with. It’s people who are your colleagues, your coworkers, your friends, your network that will support you.

And if you’re within a team, then having a clear verbal identity or tone of voice allows you some freedom to be able to go, right, here’s what we’re doing, here’s the guide of how to to say it, you go off and create stuff. So, it’s giving guidelines to have that freedom, and helps build your brand. So, focusing in on the ‘know’ part of know, like and trust.

As I mentioned earlier, if you have this as part of your tone of voice, no one’s going to recognise that. But I’ve got a couple of 404 pages for you to guess, Penni, you’ve seen these slides already, so you can’t answer because you know the answers. Just two little examples of some 404 pages.

404’s are such a wasted opportunity, if you’ve got a 404 page on your website and it doesn’t have a bit of personality, come and see me afterwards, we’ll workshop something this afternoon. So, who do you think, do feel free to shout out, who do you think this is? Jo, don’t you say either if you’ve seen the slides.

If you were looking for a page with nothing on it, you totally nailed it. Welcome. You did it. However, if you were looking for a psychotic, thirst-murdering tallboys and merch, click here. Any ideas what that brand is? It is Liquid Death because their tone of voice is a bit sarcastic, ‘nailed it’, and they use this language about what is essentially mineral water to have a really distinctive tone of voice ‘psychotic, thirst-murdering’,

and they don’t even call them cans, they call them ‘tallboys’. And then this one is one for the English students. Anyone recognise, ass-head, coxcomb, a knave, thin-faced knave, a gull. Any ideas who that’s from? That is the Royal Shakespeare Company. So they’ve used some Shakespearean words in here. Sadly, this little bit kind of loses it.

This is great. Page not found could have added a bit of the voice there. ‘We’re sorry the page you’re looking for does not seem to be here. It may have been moved or combined with other information’. That’s just boring stuff. They could have added in a bit there, but they didn’t. But I appreciate this effort. So going back to the tone and the voice, if you’re not consistent across all your touchpoints, that’s how you can end up losing the trust, losing the trust.

And if you’re really bad at it, then not only does the trust fall to the floor, gets trodden on, and if you’re really, really bad at it, a dog comes along and pees on it. And that’s what happened with possibly my favorite love to hate situation. It’s not my favorite. It’s my favorite to hate example of a brand really messing up and going completely outside what their normal voice is, and that’s with Tampax, because they did this little kind of play on a meme type thing that was going on, a trend that was going on.

You’re in their DMs. We’re in them. We are not the same. Initially. Pretty funny. And then you go, ooh but actual. Yeah. Penni’s face says it all. We’re sexualising tampons? Are we really, that literal children have to use? So this got massive, quite rightly, this is pissed on by a dog kind of levels of trust in the gutter and some people were like, I’m never, literally never using them again.

If they’d had a really clear tone of voice guide that included, so when I write them, I include different kind of rules or guidelines for how you post on socials, because you’re not going to necessarily post the exact same way on Bluesky. I’m not going to say Twitter, as you would on LinkedIn. So there’s flexibility, that’s where the tone adjustment comes in.

But you can have things like, we don’t use any sexual innuendo, just that one line in their tone of voice guide would have stopped this chaos, which went down very badly. Rightly so. So this inconsistent verbal identity can, can break that trust that people have in your brand or your personal brand if it’s you.

And as with any talk, I’m going to lean on some historical figure for a quote, you might recognise it. I can’t not include a Terminator reference. Sorry. So this is a quote from John Connor he rings home, speaks to his foster mother, and he says, ‘something’s wrong, she’s never normally this nice’, so he runs it through his AI checker, who happens to also be AI, ironically, and for once this AI checker was actually accurate and said, and there’s like, no, something’s wrong, and absolutely correct because it was, the T-2, T-2000.

Just some film facts because some of you are probably of a similar vintage and like these facts, has anyone seen Candyman? Xander Berkeley here, he’s in that, he has a glorious death in that, that is a spoiler, but it was in the 90s, so you should have watched it by now. And the actress that plays the Stepmum, foster mum, Vasquez in Aliens.

Yeah, yeah. I’ll just let you look at that again and go, oh yeah, What! That is Jenette Goldstein. Fun fact. So your verbal identity should be solid, it should be protecting you, it should be consistent. But how do you actually get one? I’ve given you a little handout. You don’t have to do this homework.

I hope that didn’t, like, set off any anxiety in anyone who was an over achiever at school. Penni I’m looking at you. You don’t have to do it at all. It’s entirely up to you, but if you want to, there are a few little ways for you to start thinking about your voice and how you want to put yourself out there.

One of them is these dimensions where you, it’s literally going, where am I on this scale? Where am I from here to here? Funny, Serious? Where am I putting myself on this scale? Don’t just go in the middle every time because then that doesn’t get you anywhere. Try and have an opinion either way. Formal, casual, respectful, irreverent.

Irreverent’s the word that everyone uses for, I have to say it, Innocent Smoothies. I can’t get through a tone of voice talk without mentioning them because it’s the one that everyone knows, them and Oatly, so the irreverent, that’s the one that, almost every client will go I quite like them. Yeah, I know, they’re really good at what they do.

That’s why. And they have it consistently everywhere. Where you going to be, enthusiastic or more matter-of-fact? Another way to look at it, if you want to get really nerdy about it, there’s this book called Strong Language, and Chris West describes it as the fastest, smartest, cheapest marketing tool. Not sure about cheapest.

If you do things properly, it can be four figures. Five figures sorry, of work over like a six-month period. So it can be a huge, great big task, but it needn’t be for a Solopreneur. But his idea of looking at the world view, which is like the 10,000ft above, that’s your, like, core message, overarching message that you’re putting out to the world.

Then the personality level is the kind of 1000ft looking down. So you might have like 3 or 4 words that describe your voice and the nuts and bolts are the ground level stuff, things like your vocabulary. So you might have. So for example, and this is something I kind of noticed I was doing and then leaned into, like using the word ‘ace’ to say something’s good, using ‘coz’ spelt wrong because I don’t care, it’s got a Z on the end,

shouldn’t apparently, but I just got in the habit of doing that, I was like, I’ll just keep doing that. And just little, little, structure things like I might put a, an asterisk near the top and then a little bit to just kind of make people keep reading. And there’s a little kind of side note, those are the nuts and bolts and the grammar and the sentence length and all those little details of how you actually use, your voice and where.

And it’s also things that you wouldn’t say. It’s not just like we say this, it’s also really useful to go, I would never say this, I would never say ‘solutions’ or ‘reimagined’, for example. Just going to do you a little micro case study, this is the last time I’ll mention it, but I did a tone of voice guide for these people, and that’s what won me my award.

And actually, at the end, I’m going to give you a QR code that will take you to the page that has that, and another one so you can look through from start to finish the full, brand tone of voice guide. So I started working with them using Nick Parker. He’s a copywriter. Nick Parker’s product called Voice Box.

If you’re regularly working with clients, helping them with their tone of voice, this is a worthwhile investment. But if you’re just looking at kind of your own, your own voice, he also does a shorter thing, which is a course about his 11 primary voices. So he’s identified that pretty much every brand will fit into one or more of these.

Say for example, Innocent because it’s just an easy one. It’s an easy, quick reference everyone knows. Warm friend and playful child. So each of these have their kind of persona. So they’re kind of a mix of those. BrewDog would be Energizer where they’re like enthusiastic, but also a bit of a Firestarter, Firestarter’s tend to be the ones that swear.

So this is just quite, quite a nice shortcut to starting to think about these things. With Voice Box, one of the processes that Nick advocates going through is looking at all these different words and trying to kind of identify which ones relate most to your brand, or personal brand or personality. And it’s really important that you don’t just go, oh, well, I’m elegant, if you’re absolutely not, and you turn up to talks in trainers like, don’t kid yourself, you’ve got to try and be like honest about who you actually are because people can smell insincerity a mile off.

These aren’t the exact words on your sheets, but they’re similar, similar things. So with Confetti, part of the process was getting all these little cards on the table, and it was quite fun to watch them arguing with each other about which ones are most appropriate to the brand and why. And because they’re rebels, even though there are hundred odd cards, they were like, well, we want to say risky, but it’s not on the cards.

So it’s like, well, you can have it on a Post-it note instead. I’ll feed that back to Nick, who developed it. And through this kind of process, there was also another thing that came out that, they used to be known for being where all the cool kids went. And there was this shift that had happened over the last 5 to 10 years, where it became the place that weird kids go there.

So throughout this process we identified this broader brand messaging issue, which is why getting someone in to do tone of voice work, if you work for a brand, can be really useful because it’s that arms length look, from the outside looking in, that can help identify these issues. So we did a bit more work on the positioning, and they decided that what they want to do is focus more on celebrating that weirdness.

So it became like, above all else, stay weird. Proud to be weird became this kind of intentional message they started putting out there. So if you’re looking to create your own, tone of voice guide or, do some examples for a wider team, or if you’re delegating work, it’s really important to be ultra specific and use examples.

So as I said earlier, we would say this. We would never say this. Friend of Cowork Crew, Tom Garfield, his company Brand New Notebook, I did their tone of voice guide about 18 months ago I think. And so it’ll include, it can include stuff like this, so, actual practical guidelines like, we use emojis: on emails, rarely. On our website,

never. He doesn’t always stick to this. On socials, sometimes, but sparingly. So it’s about having those practical guidelines as well as the kind of overarching, personality stuff. And swaps, again, you might notice, just solutions and synergies, I just, whoever actually says those words out loud. So, have swaps in there. This one’s from Confetti,

this like, don’t say it like that. This is better. This is the gold standard. So, they wanted, because they have like leading experts in, they’ve got a lot of their lecturers, are actually working in the industry. It’s music and creative arts and stuff. So they have the chops, they’ve got the creative chops. So I was like, well, you need to use the specifics so that a kid, a 16 year old looking at where to go, oh, they use the same stuff as Charli XCX.

That’s more relatable than cutting edge industry tech. And one way to get in touch with your own voice, I realise I’ve been talking for a while, so I’ll wrap it up. Is this idea called Morning Pages where you just free flow write, I think you’re meant to do like three pages, write, doodle. Just get everything out of your brain in the morning.

That can really help you get in touch with your natural voice. If you’re speaking as a an entrepreneur, solopreneur. I hate that word. I don’t want to keep saying it. Freelancer. Self-employed person. It can really help you to get in touch with your natural voice. I would say go brain-to-fingers. Just go brain-to-fingers.

And one of my little playgrounds was Twitter. This is me on Bluesky. Ryan, come on, let me tempt you over. Just do it. Just do it. It’s very similar, and getting that like, I call them brain farts, getting your brain farts out is a really good discipline of just getting in the habit of sounding yourself, and just not over sanitising it.

Penni’s on Bluesky. You should come over. Come on. I’ll keep working on you. In summary, because everyone’s hungry now, having a really clear tone of voice, or verbal identity helps your customers, clients, network to get this kind of mental shortcut of who you are in their minds, builds your brand, gives parameters to allow the freedom within a team, and helps you to get people to know, like, and trust you so that you hopefully stand out.

I’m here all afternoon. If you go to the next QR code that I’m going to show you, just ignore that, because that should say Cowork Crew. You will get these examples of actual tone of voice guides. My amazing cheese scone recipe. That is the QR code. Thank you so much for your time. Let’s go have lunch.