I am a big believer in the power of a good blurb. The ability to sum up your company, job, activity, event or entire reason for being in just a few simple paragraphs. If you can't do that without drifting into ramblings you've probably got some problems.
The rules of blurb are similar to the news of reporting, important things are "who, what, when, where, why". So for example something like:
"Evil Incorporated is a company at the forefront of evil schemes and plots, with a long history of campaigns that have very nearly taken over the world . The company was founded over 50 years ago by Ming the Merciless, Dr Evil and Mum-Ra, each a winner of the 'Evil Genius of the Year' award from the Royal Society for the Appreciation of Evil-Doers. Past clients have included The Daleks, The Zombie Hordes (1982) and The BBC."
Tell me what you do, how long you've been doing it, why you're good at it and what you can do for me. A similar blurb can be written for a person to go at the top of a CV and be ready to be plopped into anything that requires a biography. If you're running a specific event or project you should also be able to sum it up in just a couple of sentences. It's always embarrassing when someone asks what your project is and you're left "well, it's kind of a bit like... with um... stuff". Not exactly encouraging.
The tone of your blurb is going to depend a lot on your company. If in doubt, go for the formal, slightly stilted standard style. But if it works for your company and is consistent with the rest of the text you generate then a chattier, wittier, more laid back style can work really well.
Once you've written your blurb, spread it around. Make sure it's on either the front page of your website or a very clearly linked 'About Us' section. Make sure all your staff have it so that they can quickly insert it into any emails, press releases or documents they are writing. Have a version of it that doesn't sound ridiculous when spoken out loud so the staff can use it over the phone.
Never assume people know who you are. There's nothing more embarrassing than being stopped mid spiel by someone pointing out that they don't have the faintest clue who you are.
4 comments:
Interesting idea.
Can you define exactly what a 'blurb' is?
Sam
Sam,
I suppose the interesting thing is the extent of blurbs. We need to know what things are, and we need to know things quickly.
Have they replaced mission statements? You don't really see those promoted so much on company websites, but they were such a big thing back in the late 90's.
Whereas a few years ago the definition might only have been in publishing (or at least for publishing needs, theatre programs, press releases etc)... now everything has to have them.
I wonder where blurb ends and copy begins... ?
Sarah
I always think of mission statements as a more internal thing, so that they can be frank about issues such as "aiming to fleece our customers out of as much money as possible".
Blurbs should be short and snappy and just sum up the company really fast. Obviously you're going to want a longer description for something like an investor, but to go at the bottom of a press release or to sum up your company to a utitilities company it's good to have just a standard piece of text that can be thrown at them.
I think blurb ends as soon as you start a new paragraph ;0)
Sarah,
I like mission statements. However, its not the mission statement itself thats important. It is the process which one goes through to write it.
Working for a small business, we gave no thought at all to having a formal mission statement for the first 4 years of our existence. We all knew what we were trying to achieve and how we were going about it.
Or so we thought.....
A few internal discussions and some pressure from outside the company and suddenly I was getting answers I wasn't expecting to what I had thought were "rubber stamp" questions. I realised then that I wasn't exactly sure exactly what the directors were trying to archive with their company. And I wasn't sure they were either.
This fortuitously came along at the same time as a business review meeting and so we spent a couple of hours hashing through their ideas, and mine, about the company and we came up with our one sentence to define them.
It's not a perfect facsimile of those ideas, trying to condense 12 months of planning and 4 years of business decision into 20-odd words is impossible. The process of writing it however was invaluable.
Is the same true of a blurb?
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