Blog more
Empower people to blog (or communicate more)
Know what type of presentation you are doing
Plan loosely
Also, (more direcetly from Turnbull’s defra blog)
Show the thing. Be brief. Be clear.
Write for humans. Write like you speak.
Don't be ambiguous. Say what you mean.
Writing is easier when you get help from colleagues.
If you want people to read something, give them something readable.
If you want people to pay attention to your talk, make your talk interesting.
If you want people to watch your video, keep it short and make it watchable.
Communicate in small doses, frequently. Allow your story to develop over time.
In the small amount of time I am not thinking about investing, I am currently thinking about performance-lectures. While researching ideas on performance-lectures from the non-theatre non-artistic world. I happened on a book on Agile Comms by Giles Turnbull who used to be involved heavily with the Government Digital Service. I bought it on a whim.
It turns out I think the ideas in the book have a lot of relevance to start-ups and corporate communications, and content and communications as well as to its audience of agile comms thinkers.
The book argues for the benefits of blogging, over 20% of the book talks about this.
This is something I believe and chimes with thinkers from many other domains. While Turnbull mostly argues the point from a team, product, organisation view - I think much of what he has to say is relevant for individuals as well. Particularly if you are a creative worker or knowledge worker, but also for anyone. One point Turnbull makes is about how a blog becomes an archive of thoughts. I started blogging in 2005 (as part of the first wave of theatre bloggers that has now been documented by Megan Vaughan in a book, so I’m a tiny piece of history! ) and I can now look back at some of that archive from 2005 to 2010. I restarted more seriously again in 2017 and more recently I essentially have started a version of what Turnbull calls weeknotes, but essentially a form of weekly (not always) newsletter blog. It’s an excellent discipline and shows yourself how your thinking evolves. You can’t lie to yourself as easily either. I did say X, I know think Y and this is what has changed. He has some “rules” I’ve not seen articulated like this, and I like them, and think they help you if you consider blogging again - or a team blog for agile comms -
Rule 1: There are no rules
Rule 2: let posts be as long (BY: or short) as they need be
Rule 3: Make the most of the lack of rules
I would add the sub-rule / advice - which is play with the form. Do different things with your blog and posts as your fancy takes you. I think I learnt that last one by keeping an artist's journal/sketchbook from the age of 14 to 20. The best artists make art every day, they often draw, but they keep making. A blog is a form of writing-making.
The Agile Comms part is mostly useful for teams and organisations, but I think are uniquely helpful for start-up teams which work in public. Some of those teams/start-ups might be using “content-as-marketing” which is more obvious but I think would gain a lot of value by essentially empowering everyone to do weeknotes or a form of blogging. Sure, this intersects with Twitter etc. but is more than that. I see a lot of start ups that could benefit from this way of thinking and communicating.
Turnbull has some good thoughts about using layers for comms (tweet → blog → technical paper), how to present, use video, how leaders can empower comms; writing in human words / plain english, and in short, simple ideas (one blog = one idea) and although Turnbull suggests his one big idea is to have leaders empower agile comms, I think the detailed heart is how impactful blogging can be.
Book available here (GBP15+pp)
Some ideas (that I only just found via google) you can see in early form that Turnbull posted on defra gives you a sense of the book. (now put those bullets up top)
And, Turnbull’s site and blog!