The Intersection of Culture and Voice

I'm currently in the process of making some changes to the RJMetrics voice used in marketing communications. I feel like we're too conservative in blog posts and white papers and don't make effective use of humor, which in my experience is one of the best tools for content marketing.

This exercise has me thinking a lot about corporate voice. How does a startup decide how to present itself on its marketing site, blog, 1:1 emails, in conferences, etc.? ​

There is a lot that goes into answering this question, and most of it I don't want to touch on here. The often-overlooked element of voice, though, is this: your startup's voice should reflect the essential culture of your company.​ (If you haven't read Ben Horowitz's post on company culture, there is none better. Read it.) This is a hard thing to do for the same reason that getting your culture right is a hard thing to do—it's just not that damn obvious.

Which is why I give a huge amount of credit to Bob and Jake at RJMetrics. While I think they have erred on the conservative side of voice for marketing communications, they got the culture part right. Take a look at this gem found hidden within our Voice document on Google Docs:​

We apply our focus on data to other areas of our life. We analyze the lyrics of our favorite songs, understand the business models of our online dating sites, and try to optimize our commutes.  Whether we are talking about RJMetrics, data in general, or our personal lives, we use the same voice because this is the way we actually think.  

I hope they don't mind that I'm pasting internal company docs onto my blog; I just thought this was so great. We speak like data geeks because we are data geeks.