Adapting to the TL;DR audience

Gerry Breislin

Gerry Breislin is the communication director at Imagination. He has 25 years' experience working in internal and external communications for global clients including Coca-Cola, IBM and Kimberly-Clark.

Tl:dr is an new internet abbreviation that literally means 'too long; didn’t read'. It’s used on nerdy forums when someone wants to say your post was, well just too long to be interesting.

While the acronym may not be as commonplace as IMO or LOL, it is an indicator of how attention spans seem to be shortening in direct proportion to the growing abundance of available information.

From Facebook posts to Twitter’s 140 characters to Snap Chat’s ‘gone in 10 seconds’, it seems the law of diminishing attention spans is being tested to the limit.

When it comes to communicating important messages I’m all for brevity and a beautifully crafted piece of writing to sharpen your point of view….”Ask not what your country can do for you…..” , but I worry that in the mad rush to gain a tiny piece of our audiences’ limited attention, we risk dumbing down everything to hackneyed slogans and ever-shorter bites of meaningless information.

(Right now you’ve probably itching to find who that email was from that just buzzed in, so let’s change tack).

The continuously connected, instant feedback world we live in is changing the way consumers, employees, suppliers and partners engage with organisations and with each other.

Marketing teams have been grappling with the rising expectations of empowered consumers for a while now. They have also been trying to develop ingenious new ways to stay relevant to consumers, who expect bespoke communications and mass customisation.

These consumers are media savvy. They no longer want one-way messages, but rather a two-way dialogue. They are just as eager to share their experiences online with friends and whoever else is prepared to listen as they are to tune in to what you or your company is saying.

So what does this mean for corporate leaders and communicators challenged with engaging their employees? How do we get them to gather around the serious stuff like a new business strategy, transformation program or corporate vision?

The first thing to remember is that employees are consumers too. They search, read reviews and buy and sell stuff on line. They keep in touch with family and friends through social channels. When they want to know something, they ‘Google it’ and they’re doing all this increasingly on their smart devices. Naturally they bring all these expectations to the workplace.

So corporate communicators need to get smart when it comes to employee engagement and start adopting the same creative and multi-channel strategies used in the best integrated marketing campaigns to engage consumers.

Think messages and experiences created for specific audiences. Digital channels that enable people to interact and tailor their own experience. Content that’s designed to be shared and amplified across social channels. And how about incorporating some meaningful game design and encouraging user-generated content to cross fertilise ideas and promote collaboration?

In the world of corporate communication nothing beats face-to-face, and even here there’s a lot of room for improvement. With so much information easily available and accessible, the traditional town hall meeting or roadshow now has to deliver something exclusive; something audiences can’t get anywhere else. An experience that makes them feel part of something bigger is important, something that inspires them and adds value to their lives.

So as your CEO meanders through his or her annual state-of-the-nation, 45-minute PowerPoint presentation on the company’s latest business strategy, don’t be surprised when the heads drop and the texting starts.

Tags: strategy