Face to face contact negates that. If I’m out of my depth, I can’t conceal it for long when we’re face to face..
Max O

‘Being human’ is a phrase that’s being bandied about a lot at work at the moment in connection both with our own PR and with our client work. I’m not sure what people think it means but I know the result they want – they want ideas and copy that will ‘grab’ people, that will effortlessly mean something to them, that will, in that horrible word, ‘resonate’. They want personality.

Finding a tone that will both reflect a set of very precisely defined corporate values and at the same time convey some kind of personality (without sounding fake and patronising) is a difficult trick to pull off. I think we’ve got some way towards doing it though, and the important factors have been encouragement, trust, bravery and as little interference in the minutae as possible.

The bane of the copywriter’s life is writing by committee – you know how it goes, you craft one thing, it has a particular flavour, then it goes through approvals and it comes back with several alterations that totally change the essence of the thing.

The same applies to any communications, especially social media. We know that behind the scenes, any corporate social media programme is going to be very closely monitored and hopefully subject to advice from people immersed very deeply in that world.

That doesn’t change the fact that if you want to be human, trust a human to do it and trust them to be matter of fact, honest, cheeky, cynical or any other trait that defines who they are. In other words, let personality shine through.