OG voice & tone guidelines

The unexpected impact of a 2013 guest post for GatherContent

When I worked at Domain7, I found myself leading content strategy projects for all sorts of organizations. I would help folks move through a process of competitive research, a content audit, a new site build, and then we'd hand over the keys to their new CMS. Inevitably, the lovely new machine we'd built would lose some of its cohesion, as new writers and editors arrived and began adding new content over time. I wanted to help give these content editors some guidance for how to use their new web-machines, and so intuited my way into creating "voice and tone guidelines" for my clients.

At this, there wasn't much to go on in this topic era. Some of the legendary leaders in this space had yet to publish their classic blog posts or seminal mini-books — "we are all just making it up."

Eventually, I connected with James Deer, who was founding a brilliant startup called GatherContent. The promise of this nifty web app was that it would help folks centralize their web content in one platform, while a new site was being built. As part of their own content marketing efforts, they wanted some writers, thinkers and tinkerers to share some of their guidance on the emerging GatherContent blog.

"I've been doing some voice and tone guidelines lately?" I offered. I could share some examples, and explain the process for making them?

So I did. It took me an afternoon's work; I included some helpful example tables. The kind folks at GC gave them a lovely design treatment. I used my Domain7 job title and profile pic at the time. We were up and running.

Turns out, the post I wrote became a lightning rod for GatherContent's blog over the years. It was one of their most popular articles of all time. When GatherContent was eventually acquired by Bynder, the article remained, as a contribution to early digital content strategy resources. You can see it here:

5 tone of voice examples and tips to improve your messaging

This became a core content piece for aspiring content strategists everywhere. I can see it cited more than 130 times by sources like Buffer, FastCompany, CXL, the Content Marketing Institute, Neil Patel and more.

Since time as gone by, the stewards of said article have continued to add to it. They grew it, remixed it, extended it like a Wikipedia article. Added examples, contributed more graphics, until it became the length of the average content marketer's summer dissertation project, a mega round-up of all things Voice and Tone. (The wonderful examples that cascade in the "Tone of voice examples that stand out for the right reasons" – CocaCola, Mailchimp, etc. — those aren't from me)

I'm pleased to have offered this contribution to the world wide web, and I hope it has helped people along the way write with a little more interestingness and coherence.