When Ignorance Is the Ghostwriter’s Friend

credit: Helga Weber on Flickr

What you do not know — or pretend not to know — about your client’s business, product, or service can be one of your greatest assets as you help your client communicate with employees, investors, customers, or prospects. Even though you have been hired to write in your client’s voice, it can be a mistake to write completely within your client’s mindset.

You may be crafting an important address that a company executive will be delivering (live, printed, online, or recorded) to motivate employees to adopt new practices and adapt to new conditions. You might be introducing a new product or service to the sales force, with the hopes that they will be able to effectively communicate the benefits of the new offering to prospects and customers.

Whatever the specific task, very often the main challenge to delivering the message with impact is not the client’s lack of communication skills, but their failure to look at the message from the perspective of the audience.

The people whose messages are at the heart of the communication, whether top management, internal experts, or product team members, have been wrestling with the topic for so long that they begin to assume that key points, new directions, and essential elements that they have developed over a period of time will now be instantly obvious to anyone.

A Language Lesson

Let me illustrate this with an analogy from quite a different field, namely, language learning. As teaching Irish Gaelic is an avocation of mine (see Gaeltacht Minnesota), I have worked with any number of students to help them put on workshops or get local study groups started.

One of the mistakes they usually make is to look at their little group of students and assume that the best Irish speaker should lead the group. For a workshop, they assume that if they can find a highly capable or even fluent speaker, that person should be in charge of the event.

Unfortunately, many fluent speakers are poor teachers. Why? Various aspects of the language come so easily to them, with all their experience, that they cannot understand why beginning students struggle with these concepts. And because they cannot see where the difficulties arise with their audiences, they cannot effectively communicate paths to overcoming these difficulties.

I have seen exactly the same problem with internal corporate communications. When it is time for a new product to be launched, the programmer explains the software, the engineer explains the equipment, the clinician explains the treatment. They go into excruciating detail about features that would fascinate another programmer or engineer or clinician.

But their audiences never grasp the benefits that the new products bring to the customer. Because the in-house experts have not been able to put themselves in the position of someone less knowledgeable, someone trying to figure out why they would consider the new product, no one learns to speak the language needed to attract prospects and convert them to customers.

Be the Audience AND the Communicator

One good way to put on your communicator hat is to make sure you are wearing your audience hat. Why should the audience listen? Why should they care? Is the information in the message too detailed, too specialized to have an impact?

Among the most valuable services you can offer clients, as you write their messages, is to play the role of the person who is not already immersed in the subject, who is not already an expert on the product, who is not already fascinated by the details.

Playing the role of “audience advocate” will not only help you craft a message that echoes the client’s voice, loud and clear. It will make sure that message is heard, loud and clear.

Photo credit: Helga Weber/flickr