A friend of mine does the “education minute” for our BNI chapter. Â He does a great job and often makes one think about things in a new way. Last week, he recommended when we ask for referrals, we run it through the “Google” test. In other words, if you are asking someone for a referral, can you enter that request into Google or Bing and get a small number of targeted results, or would you get thousands of unrelated results?
That got me thinking, how else can you use today’s technology to test out your messages? There’s nothing like doing it for real, but can you communicate your value proposition in 140 characters? My experience on Twitter is I often don’t use all 140 characters. And the value in the communication is still there thank you. There’s discussion as to who really said it, but I’ve always been told it was Mark Twain who apologized for not writing a more concise letter as he didn’t have time. It takes time and effort to get a message down to that size and still get the meaning through. But, imagine – you have a 60 second window to communicate your value. Your value proposition is 140 characters. That leaves a whole lot of the 60 seconds to tell a story or add something else compelling. And the person gets a lot more information from you than the next guy.
What about keywords? We are all so used to keywords, when you are communicating with people, what keywords should they hear? Or say it another way – when they walk away from you and want to find you, what terms should they have gotten out of what you said that will allow them to find you? Search Engine Optimization is only necessary if the person doesn’t know who you are. If you’ve talked to them, you should make sure you have specific keywords you target in each conversation.
As you use technology in your daily life, see how it can help you refine your message for all contexts. How do you use technology to do that?
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