Develop your online personality: Fun & playful (like Elmer Fudd)? Or solid and conservative (like Tiger Woods)?

It is important for all organizations to create a distinct, consistent, and memorable Web site or blog, and an important component of that goal is the tone or voice of the content. As visitors interact with the content on your site, they should develop a clear picture of your organization. Is the personality fun and playful? Or is it solid and conservative?

For example, on the Google homepage when people search they can click "I'm Feeling Lucky" which is a fun and playful way to get you to directly to the top listing in the search results. That one little phrase "I'm Feeling Lucky" says a lot about Google. But there is much more. For example, in the collection of more than 100 languages that Google supports from Afrikaans to Zulu there is also Google in the language of Elmer Fudd with everything translated into Elmer Fudd such as” "I'm Feewing Wucky." Cool (and a nice little viral marketing thing too). But that wouldn't work for a more conservative company—it would just seem strange and out of place.

Contrast Google with Accenture's home page. At the time of this writing, just under the Accenture logo was the phrase "High Performance. Delivered." There is a photo of Tiger Woods and the message: "We know what it takes to be a Tiger," with an offer: "See findings from our research and experience with over 500 high performers."

Both of these home pages work because the site personality is consistent with the company personality. Whatever the personality, the way to achieve consistency is to make certain that all the written material and other content on the site conforms to a defined tone that has been established from the start. A strong focus on site personality and character pays off. As visitors come to rely on the content found on your site, they will develop an emotional and personal relationship with your organization.

A Web site or blog can evoke a familiar and trusted voice, just like that of a friend on the other end of an e-mail exchange.

Comments

[gulliver]

A little constructive ante-upping...

> most marketers fail to understand the importance of
creating a distinct, consistent, and memorable site
personality, which can often be attributed to the tone or
voice of its content.

Excellent point - and one with which I'm in total agreement.

Not so with 'focus on your customer's problems' though...
which to me is almost as short-sightedly mistaken as 'be brief'.

Whilst excellent in principle it too often leads to dull
cookie cutter delivery and - in the extreme - those infernal
three-feet-long with! special! bonuses! pages peddling
ebooks/whatever.

Personally, I'm all-for 'expressive' 'copy which encourages
viewers to wander, explore and discover - or, conversely,
hightail it away almost immediately.

'Ya gotta do business on your terms, not theirs'... if you
express yourself with a familiar format, whilst you'll
undoubtedly get some business you'd otherwise have lost
you'll also firmly plant yourself in the 'comparison pool'
whereby similar offerings are considered, appraised and
rejected.

To stand out you have to differentiate - if you do the same
as all the others you don't create a memorable impression.
And the core of the offer - 'our it' - is the personality of the
operation... which brings us neatly back to where we came in
- personality.

'People don't have real relationships with websites... they
have real relationships with individual people.' This is
brand-building on personality - firmly based on
emotional and psychological stimulation in which long-form
rambling narrative is not only 'ok and acceptable' but
entirely strategic.

The best business is often build on differentiation - and
that often means 'extreme'.

'You say my kisses are not like his'... there's much to be
said for the 'a little unusual' approach in which viewers
are encouraged to 'listen to the lyrics as well as the
music'. And this is where we leave the hustle-hustle,
'why-you-should, benefit-rich power features' bullet-pointed
pitch... and adopt a relaxed and authentic hype-free
conversational style based on subtlety - in which we suggest
rather than state, inspire rather than inform: 'to sing not
shout.'

'Fright or delight'... to purposefully blow-away non-core
viewers... to have five strongly-in-favor I-love-this-stuff
users rather than five hundred 'that's interesting' casual
readers... that's the grail. And, if the price of those five
is alienating four hundred and ninety five others, then so
be it.

So what's wrong with teaching and openly expressing: 'If you
don't like or get what's here that's fine - you're among
that majority of 'quickly go somewhere else' people in whom
we're not interested.'

'Focus on your customer's problems' isn't something that's
accepted by the really cool enterprises - go tell it to
Jobs, Branson, Turner, Roddick, Peterman and others who
focused on 'doing cool stuff' and 'simply' telling folk
about it as honestly-and-engagingly as they could - in a
highly personal 'a little chatty' style and regardless of
the pixel-count length. They told tales - 'of who I am, what
I do... how and why I do it' - and in so doing engaged the
viewers imagination to 'illuminate' just why they might
think seriously about buying the stuff.

;-)