Happy Halloween - or why content strategies needn't be scary

I woke up this morning to a deluge on Twitter of things vaguely related to Halloween. Once I’d got over the photo of a pumpkin carved to look like Yoda, (and retweeted it, obviously) I noticed a couple of scary-themed tweets from some more serious-minded companies like Mintel, Penguin and Salter Baxter. The latter, a corporate reporting agency, announced it planned to tweet scary sustainability facts throughout the day.

Really? you might say. And yes, this kind of thing only works if it’s done properly. But it did remind me of a conversation the previous week: a big B2B brand, the kind that tends to make money rather than headlines, who announced to me, “we know we need to say more but we just don’t have very much news”.

On the one level, their comment was right – few people want to read about deals signed between companies in a specialist field. On another level they were totally wrong – they have a lot to say, because what this company does has a direct impact on most people’s lives. They just need to find the right format to say it – and the right hook to get people reading.

This company is not alone. Lots of companies have things to say on themes that people find interesting, without necessarily having ready-made news hooks like an acquisition, a brand new product or an event.

There are ways to get round this, and PR professionals have been working some of the formulae for years. But in the era of social media and webzines, even B2B brands, have an opportunity to engage with customers, suppliers and other stakeholders directly, on specific subjects that interest them. Take data security, which has become extremely newsworthy as a result of the NSA debacle, and Adobe’s embarrassing admission that as many as 38 million of its customer accounts may have been hacked. Traditionally unglamorous IT companies can use the spike in interest to promote their own views in an engaging way, direct existing customers towards white papers, feature the issue in a webzine…

This is not to say you can create news where there is none. Tweets, blogposts and articles must remain relevant to their audience. But thinking in terms of themes rather than one-off events provides a solid foundation for a content strategy- and has the additional advantage of encouraging brands to focus on the core story rather than disparate events.

Of course if you got this far, you will have spotted the trick. I used the Halloween hook to get you to read about content strategies. However, as you’ve got this far, here’s a reward. That pumpkin carved to look like Yoda.

Translate the desired effect, not the words

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the limits of translation. I don’t mean those moments where you realise there isn’t the right word for something in the other language. Rather, I mean those times when you come across a whole phrase that is so imbued with one country’s culture that its translation into the other will result in something that is frankly bizarre.

Take educational attainment. In France, most people will begin their CV or corporate bio with which business school or grande école they attended. Little matter that they subsequently became the chief exec of a CAC 40 company / prize-winning novelist / President of the Republic. No, the important thing is that they graduated from ENA or HEC.

This speaks reams about the French system and how it works. But if you try to translate it into English, those cultural references don’t carry across. Over the age of 25, beginning your English corporate bio with where you went to university is at best slightly odd, and at worst, tacitly implies you’ve achieved very little since.

This is why, every time I have been confronted with the issue, I have advised French executives to move any reference to what they did when they were doing when they were 20 to the end in the English version, but keep it at the beginning in the French. For me this results in an accurate translation, one that is based on a ranking by value of what the person has achieved in the eyes of each country’s readers.

This is a very simple example, but you can take the idea much further. Take speechwriting, for example. A British or American executive, for example, needs to speak in short, clear sentences to be authoritative. Ideally, there should be humour, to show his “human side” and to convey the impression that he is sufficiently at ease to joke in front of the audience. In France, excessively short sentences make you sound cold, and jokes are definitely an optional extra.

I’m a big fan of translation that raises its hat to cultural assumptions. In fact I practice it myself. My English CV begins with the fact I have 15 years’ experience in corporate communications. The French? “Diplomée de l’Université d’Oxford…”