The Twitter Funnel: Tweeting to Tighten Your Writing

If you're not a Twitter user and you read this blog, you're probably getting a bit sick of hearing about it lately, what with the Twitter Writing Contest I am running and other random mentions of the service speckled through my recent posts. I know I would be.

After all, you're probably thinking: 'Do I really need another time-sink in my daily routine, Daniel?' And I understand where you're coming from, I do. But if that's you, I urge you to consider what Joel Falconer so eloquently said about the subject in a recent post called How To Stop Wasting Time on Twitter Without Giving it Up:

Services are inherently just services. Whether a service is a waste of time or not is about how you use it.

In other words, web services, like everything else, are only as effective or ineffective as you make them. If you waste time on Twitter, you probably waste time other places too - Email? Facebook? Your IM service of choice? Bottom line: We can't blame web services for our own lack of discipline.

After all, as I said to Joel in a comment on that post, even notorious time-wasters like addictinggames.com might be part of someone's productivity arsenal - if a quick and disciplined game of Castle Siege gives them the energy needed to attack their tasks with gusto afterwards, why not, right? ... Right? Um... hello? ... Darn. I knew I shouldn't have put that link up there. Well anyway, for those of you who are still here, let's move on.

I was a Twitter holdout myself until quite recently, for the same reasons that you might still be. But once I gave it a try, I found it tremendously helpful in many of the ways you might expect (community building, link-finding, traffic-garnering), and also some that you might not (see below.)

The topic of this post would fall squarely into the latter category: Twitter has helped me learn to communicate more succinctly.

On Taglines and Twitter

A great case study for the use of Twitter as an idea-funnel is the creation of effective taglines.

Writing a tagline, be it for a company, a blog or a product, is no easy feat. It is up to the marketer to capture the essence of the mission, the promise and the brand in one simple statement. Oh yeah, and it should only be 6-8 words long, too.

For those who love to write, as I do, the part that's even harder to master is this: when it comes to taglines, clarity always comes before cleverness.

That means if you have to choose between using cool alliteration or wicked witty wordplay, and succinctly communicating the benefits you actually provide, you have no choice but to do the latter. It can be difficult to balance these requirements of clarity and brevity.

In any case, I recently volunteered to create a slogan for a charitable organization that will be launching a campaign soon. And to my surprise, I found Twitter quite helpful in getting this task done.

You see, when I was brainstorming for this project, I was looking at a draft mission statement with several goals, and trying to tie them all together in a way that made sense AND sounded good. (No easy challenge.)

So I hopped on Twitter to ask one of my followers there for some help coming up with a synonym in an arena he knows better than I (another great use for the service)... and then inspiration struck: Why not use Twitter as my blacksmith's oven and use it to mould that mission statement into something more pithy and to-the-point?

And that's what I did - I plugged all the disparate points of that mission statement into a single paragraph and pasted it into Twitter's "What Are You Doing?" status box, which kindly and automatically informed me that it was some 100 characters more than the 140 allowed in a Tweet.

From there, I melted and moulded words, combined thoughts and rearranged clauses until I had something that I felt reflected the essence of the original, only in bite-size, Tweetable form.

But 140 Characters is Just a Start

Of course, the important thing to remember is that Twitter can be the means but not the end in the pursuit of ultimate brevity. 140 characters may be brief, but it's still too long for a slogan, for example.

Case in point: as I was finishing up my own project, I came across two blog entries by my friend and former employer Mark Buckshon at the Construction Marketing Ideas blog about the tricky job of developing an effective mission statement for his company.

In his first post, Mark presents the Mission Statement that his company (a group of niche construction publications) is currently using: "The Construction News Group: Breaking new ground, building new bonds, and delivering news you can use every day."

He then proceeds to admit that, even though the statement was developed fairly recently to replace an older, staid one, he was having trouble remembering it! (By the way, I'm the one who wrote the thing, when I worked for Mark.)

In the comments, to his own post, Mark suggests that perhaps his firm needs to come up with a Twitter-friendly tagline to ensure it is shorter and thus more memorable. I smiled when I read that, and promptly plugged my Mission Statement attempt into Twitter to see just how over-wrought it was. 

The verdict? It passed the Twitter-test with flying colours, coming in at just 83 characters.

But all that means is that 140 characters isn't a perfect barometre, because I can see now that my blurb is too vague to be a true Mission Statement (a la paragraph on a plaque on a wall) and too wordy and unclear to be an effective and memorable tagline.

This is where the clever/clear dichotomy I mentioned earlier comes into play. The idea in writing the statement was to mirror the progressive steps of a construction project - the ground-breaking, the building and the delivery of a finished structure - while trying to reflect the three main goals of the company at the same time. Clever? Perhaps. Easy to remember? Not so much.

So the lesson to be gleaned here is that yes, Twitter can help you funnel your big thoughts into a small container, but you may have to do some additional work from there to synthesize it further in certain cases.

When's The Last Time You Flexed Your Brain's Brevity Muscle?

Nonetheless, I can attest that the very exercise of Tweeting regularly has helped exercise that part of the brain responsible for brevity (one that doesn't often get a workout.) 

And for those of us who seek to maintain a professional image associated with our online brand, that doesn't mean overusing annoying txt-spk, symbols and abbreviations, but instead employing better word choice, simple sentence structure, and a general lack of fluff-words to say more with less.

The ability to communicate with both clarity and concision is an art that is worth mastering.

A recent article by Jonathan Crossfield over at the wonderful CopyWrite blog reminded me of my favourite essay from undergraduate journalism school: Politics and the English Language by George Orwell.

You see, when Orwell wasn't postulating about the future Big Brother state and communist pigs, he was making an argument for simple, plain language.

In that essay, he outlined six rules for writing thus, to paraphrase: 1) Don't use cliche figures of speech, 2) Never use long words when short ones will do, 3) Cut out every word that can be cut out, 4) Always use the active tense, 5) English has plenty of words, so don't use foreign ones unnecessarily, and 5) Break any of these rules only if you absolutely have to.

Aside from the fact that the sixth rule is slightly (and somewhat ironically) superfluous, this essay has always stuck with me as an excellent guidepost on my writing journey.

And while Tweeting may not be the most academic of exercises, learning to convey your ideas in 140 characters or less is a good way to start honing your ability to communicate clearly and concisely.

So, have you exercised your brain's brevity muscle lately? If not, maybe you should give Twitter a try.

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P.S- A quick reminder that tomorrow (Wednesday) at 7PM EST is the deadline for the Smithereens Twitter Wit competition. Over $350 in prizes are now at stake, so get over there and throw your hat in the ring. 

P.P.S- If you liked this post, please Digg it using the button below, share it with your friends, or leave me a comment to let me know. Thanks!