The TOTALLY TOUGH TONE OF VOICE CHALLENGE.
I’m in two minds about the concept of tone of voice as applied to marketing in social channels.
Succinctly describing a brand’s tone of voice is a distinctly advertising discipline.
And advertising disciplines are not always fit for social purpose.
“What is our message?” isn’t the most helpful question when it comes to social media strategy for instance.
In fact make that three minds.
Tone of voice is also the advertising discipline that is most prone to bullshit.
Worse than that it’s often vacuous, first-base bullshit born out of wishful thinking rather than reality.
Nonetheless it is worth interrogating a brand (and/or a culture) for personality and tone of voice traits that can be usefully applied or interpreted by the human beings at the sharp end of your social media strategy.
And, to this end, we came up with THE TOTALLY TOUGH TONE OF VOICE CHALLENGE (TTTTOVC).
It’s a workshop technique that’s designed to get internal stakeholders really thinking about their brand.
And it really is tough.
The toughness is the antidote to bullshit and safe, first-base thinking.
Here’s a word cloud populated by the safe, vacuous, first-base tone of voice words that I’ve most frequently encountered during my two decades plus of doing “this stuff”.

These words are all useless.
They’re useless because they accurately describe the tone of voice of every brand on the planet.
Name a brand that deliberately positions itself as UNconfident. Or UNfriendly. Or UNapproachable. Or UNtrustworthy. Or UNprofessional. Or negative.
Clients and complicit agencies gravitate to the tone of voice words in the word cloud precisely because you can’t argue with them.
And then the creative teams in the complicit agencies simply ignore the tone of voice section of the creative brief and do their own thing, safe in the knowledge that whatever they come back with will be seen as confident, professional etc……. because it can’t not be.
The tough bit of this totally tough challenge is that you’re not allowed to use these words. In fact you’re not allowed to use any word or phrase for which the complete opposite wouldn’t be a viable option for a competitor brand..
For example…
“Broadsheet” would be fine because “tabloid” is also a viable tone of voice option.
“Polished” works because “warts and all” would be a viable alternative.
Believe me this is really tough for most client stakeholders.
But it is also very rewarding once you’ve collectively broken through the pain barrier in a workshop environment.
Once one person in the group “gets it” and comes up with some rich, relevant, differentiated language there is a domino effect as the penny drops for everyone.
In our last workshop we got a few phrases that the group was palpably proud of. They were phrases that I couldn’t wait to share with the agency because they were accurate, pointed, dare I say “ownable”, and – unlike the usual tone of voice suspects – impossible to ignore.
Try it. It works.
And, if you liked this, check out the other techniques in this series.
Social media workshop technique #1 – Glass half full, glass half empty.
Social media workshop technique #2 – What have social media ever done for us?