Before you try to write witty corporate or marketing content, know your ideal reader intimately. Otherwise, don’t even bother.

Witty? Says who?

Well, that’s really what it all gets down to, then, isn’t it? Who says your writing is witty? And who gives him/her the authority to judge it?

“Give me a place to stand, and I will move the Earth,” wrote Archimedes, and if you have been writing for very long at all, you know exactly how to paraphrase him:

Describe to me the ideal reader, and I will make him laugh.

It is, of course, your ideal reader who deems your writing witty. The more you know about that person, the more you can appeal to his sense of humor. If you don’t understand what makes that ideal reader tick, how can you expect him to read what you’ve written and find it engaging?

Witty content in a business context is a rarity, almost as rare as witty content about Catholicism. But consider IBM’s series of deadpan “Art of the Sale” videos, or just about any nun joke. The essence of their wittiness is The Great Unexpected, and you too can take advantage of that essence.

Consider a few content channels in our Web 2.0 world, and their likely receptiveness to witty writing.

Wit in Corporate Writing – Maybe

• Blogs - If you’re reading a blog, you deserve what you get. You expect to derive some eventual value or information, but the channel is so informal that you could land on a real gem of inspiration in a hilarious wrapper. I think this is the best place to start. And, when your blog is new and undiscovered, you can write just about anything you want, secure in the knowledge that nobody will be reading it. Yet.
• Customer success stories – Depending on the customer and the success (and the customer’s lawyers), you might be able to make this work. Your reader would be deep in The Great Unexpected when he came across a closing line like “We liked working with Acme’s new line of optical routers, and we have a good relationship with them. We just need to figure out what to do with all this extra pizza.”
• Web pages – Here is another place where witty content can thrive. Imagine an organization that describes certain aspects of itself and its history with good-natured self-deprecation. It would be a breath of fresh air, like hearing a head of state say something funny. Most organizations relegate such content to blogs, though.

Witty Corporate Writing Need Not Apply

• White papers – Face it: even with the evidence as you lay it out, these are an attempt to get ideal readers to think for themselves and draw their own conclusions at a certain point in the sales cycle. Wit in a white paper would probably feel like bumps on a smooth road. I would like to read a white paper infused with wit, but I cannot imagine what it would look like.
• Annual reports - Probably not fertile ground for wit. If you publish an annual report, your ideal readers are analysts, investors, chartered accountants and people who will drop your stock like a hot potato at the first sign of The Great Unexpected. Still, if your stock has already tanked this year, what do you have to lose?
• Social Media answers (e.g., LinkedIn, Yahoo! and other collaborative forums) – I’m not convinced that anybody who posts questions in these is really interested in the answers, which means that the ask-er is probably not your ideal reader. If you want to turn your wit loose on the answer-ers, however, you might get noticed.
• Twitter - Can you be witty in less than 140 characters? Will anybody care? One fellow has over 900,000 followers, but I don’t know where he’s leading them (us, really), if anywhere.
• Press releases – Don’t even bother. Journalists are always under pressure and they’re looking for extractable facts, not wit. If you want to flex your wit on these ideal readers, take them out to lunch sometime.
• Brochures, sales collateral – Again, you’re asking for trouble. By default, these pieces get used when casting a wide net, and it’s too difficult to define the ideal reader.

In short, if you don’t know your ideal readers or can’t get enough information on them, you’re skating on thin ice by trying to use wit. But when you do know about them and what will appeal to them, give wit a chance.

As usual, I’m happy to be proved wrong. Send me samples of witty corporate and marketing communications.

John White of venTAJA Marketing posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it.

photo credit: nukeit1

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“Basically,” he said, “Mrs. Correia doesn’t want us to use words like ‘very’ or ‘like’ or ‘many’ or ‘lots of’… words that don’t really add any value. She also doesn’t want us to, like, begin sentences with ‘basically.’”

Like basically, I agree, so I’m getting dead words out of our copy – cold turkey.

There are probably 2700 blogs with lists of words to avoid in business writing, so plenty of us have thought about this already. Dead words can turn decent copy into fluff. If you want to make a science of it, collect the boilerplate paragraph from the press releases of middle-tier technology companies and lump them all onto a single Web site: museumofnonsense.com.

Herewith a few:

• Best practices – Why would we mention the worst practices? I hate this expression, and I was encouraged when an engineer agreed with me in a meeting last week.
• Solution – The most overused word in technology writing. I’m galled that it occurs 12 times in a 10-page paper we published just a few months ago, but I plan to refrain from using it from now on.
• High-tech – There is no high technology anymore. It ended about 2001 when everybody got a computer.
• Leading provider – You wouldn’t want to work with a trailing one, would you? Throw it away.
• Today’s – I’ve decided I’m not going to read any piece that begins with this word, as in “Today, content professionals are tugged in multiple directions…” or “In today’s socially networked world…”
• Embraced – There’s too little embracing going on in the world right now, so let’s use “adopted” or “accepted” and be more accurate.

Runners-up:

• Resources – I don’t like this word, but it’s pretty hard to work around it. Usually, though, what we mean is “money,” so perhaps I should be more frank in the future.
• Support – Long in the tooth, but another tough one to get around. If there were a better way to say “Windows XP supports remote desktop management,” I’d use it.
• Business-critical/mission-critical – In other words, “Pay attention to the next noun – it’s important!” I think I can get away without these; if not, I’ll post and let you know.

So, I’m notifying my writers that I’ll assume they have a writer’s disease and deduct points if they use these dead words in copy they send me.

Also, I don’t understand why people pronounce it “processeeze.” Does that make it high-tech?

Basically, that’s another post.

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I was on the call because I had tried unsuccessfully for several months to get the VP to review and approve the draft of this case study that hadn’t gone all that well, so I dragged the ops manager onto the call to see whether we could unstick things. After a few telephonic slaps on the back and promises to look the piece over, they started talking about business.

“So, how are things going for you in this slowdown?”

“Not too badly somehow. How about for you?”

“Miraculously, we’re about where we were at this time last year. We’d like it to be better, but in the current climate, this isn’t so bad.”

“Yeah, we’re seeing that as well. It’s too bad, after all the quarters of growth we had, but at the moment we’re happy to be flat instead of down, the way a lot of companies are.”

“No kidding. We’ve been saying that ‘flat’ is the new ‘up.’ It’s not as good as the old ‘up,’ but it will do for now.”

I liked that: “Flat” is the new “up.”

The twenty-dollar bill is the new single.

Fifty is the new thirty.

It’s a clever turn of the phrase, one that should resonate with you as a marketing manager. See whether you can use it or one of its relatives in the next piece you write.

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