The beauty of brevity

Knowing when to keep it brief is always in your best interest. You know the type of person I’m talking about; you ask them the time and they give you the history of the wristwatch.

In these days of reducing attention spans, it's vital to understand the importance of the short, simple answer.

If you want to be effective, eliminate the unnecessary.

Sipping is the best way to enjoy an amazing glass of wine. Slugging it out of the bottle in gigantic gulps is like drinking from a fire hose and not a pleasant experience. The recipient gets overwhelmed trying to decipher the message.

If you master the art of brevity, you are much more likely to have "stickiness" - having your comments remembered, re-tweeted, re-posted.

Your audience rarely has the time need or desire to listen to detailed arguments and responses, no matter how insightful. You’ve got them for ten seconds. We’re looking for the “hook” that will get the audience to read or listen or watch the rest of the story on our website. That’s where you’ll be able to get your entire message out to the masses and hopefully get them to use your product, buy your book or follow your Tweets.


See also http://blog.commpro.biz/?p=3440
By Skip Mahaffey, Broadcaster, Media Coach

What information should go onto a corporate email?

If you're a UK private or public company, or an LLP, the relevant legislation is the Companies (Trading Disclosures) Regulations, which carry a £1000 fine for non-compliance. This has been updated recently, so it's a good opportunity to revise current policy.

The key thing to remember is that although email is regularly used for one-word replies, which traditional business letters never were, emails are still business letters. And business letters need to have four key pieces of information:
1. Your company's registered name;
2. The place of registration in the UK;
3. Its registration number; and
4. The address of its registered office.

Interestingly, an invoice, which most of us take greater care to ensure has all of our information on it, is not a business letter, and does not require all of the above!

If you're creating a standard email signoff (or email footer), what else might be added?

Include your contact details: name, job title, company and telephone number; It's good form to add your email address too, because, although people can just click "reply", they might look up this email message in the future just to find your email address for a new correspondence thread, to which they wouldn't want to click "reply". If your email address is included, they can just click on that.

It makes sense to include your company website address for a bit of publicity, but it's a real waste if you're not using this space to make more specific offers. You have the attention of someone you're doing business with – surely there's something you have of relevance to them?

Finally, how many of the emails which you receive contain paragraphs of automatically inserted legal jargon at the end?

Usually, the larger the company, the more likely their emails will have all this garbage added, but that's because the larger the company, the more chance there is of someone being involved in policy-making who's scared that other companies know something they don't. The only reasons that these disclaimers exist is because people see other companies using them, and because lawyers (if consulted) have no interest in coming clean and admitting they're pointless.

You can't impose a contractual obligation on somebody if they haven't negotiated it. That means you can't send them an email and at the same time tell them what they can and can't do with it.

The whole thing – like so much to do with the legal world – has just come about through fear and ignorance. You probably get just as many emails from other companies which don't have "disclaimers" in the footer. Are these companies all heading for legal problems? Have they had them in the past? Of course not. The only difference is that these companies have got better things to do than employ the sort of people whose contribution to the business is to insist that all outgoing emails have long disclaimers at the bottom.

If you're in a large organisation, you'll have more important things to do than to track down whoever long ago ordered the IT department to put this rubbish in every email, and ask them if it was really ever necessary. But in a small to medium sized business, you can put a stop to it.

Does anyone insist that you put the same "disclaimer" stuff at the end of every printed letter your company sends out? Emails and printed letters are no different. If a company is forced by law to append something to every communication (as the financial services industry is, about giving advice), then it will go on both. If you need to say that the contents of the message are covered by non-disclosure agreements, then that statement should be added, whether it's a printed letter or an email.