John Jantsch (00:08): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Christie Horseman. It’s over 10 years experience in the B two B and B two C SaaS based. She is the director, mother and teacher based in Vancouver, British Columbia currently serves as the VP of marketing at Thinkific, a software platform that enables entrepreneurs to create, market, sell, and deliver their own online courses. And she also writes about marketing for Entrepreneur Magazine. So Christie, welcome to the show.

Christie Horsman (00:40): Thank you so much, John. I’ve been a listener for many years, so it’s very exciting for me to be here.

John Jantsch (00:46): Well, I appreciate that. I appreciate you listening for many years. Many I

Christie Horsman (00:51): Know.

John Jantsch (00:52): So you recently wrote an article and it appeared in Entrepreneur Magazine, four Ways to Create Four Ways Creators Are Revolutionizing Marketing and How Big Brands Can Benefit. So let’s start there a little bit because we are really going to talk about change in marketing, change in B two B marketing. I want to bring in the whole creator topic. So it seemed like that just kind of teed it up for us. So talk a little bit about the primary point you were trying to get across in that article.

Christie Horsman (01:20): Yeah, I think that just coming from my career in B two B marketing and the way the B two B marketing has evolved over time, and one of the biggest, I think impacts to B two B marketing and how people are approaching it today has been through the creator economy and just the change in marketing because you have so many people that are able to open their phone and talk to their audience, talk to people, talk about their point of view, talk about their passion, their unique genius, and how companies are scrambling to get into that mindset of what the creator brings to their marketing tactics and their business and what that means for businesses that have typically been a little stiffer in their marketing.

John Jantsch (02:08): So let’s define a term there. You used the term creator economy, and I’m guessing it’s a pretty buzzy term, but I’m also guessing there’s a lot of confusion about what that means or misconceptions even frankly about what that means. So how do you define that or how do you define that as being maybe different than traditional economic models?

Christie Horsman (02:28): Yeah, so I think there’s a lot of, I’ve read, heard being in part of the creator economy ourselves at think of it, and there’s a lot of definitions out there of what it is and the way that we define it and the way that I kind of look at it is anybody who is out there really using their unique genius, their unique point of view to influence, to attract, to create either a community, a group of people, an audience or sell something through that community or audience. So it’s really just, I think a lot of people would say are creators, are you see these YouTube creators? Are they entertainers or are they educators? And actually think of it, we look at these two categories and define them as such. There are people that are out there that are just creating for the sake of entertainment purposes, which is amazing. And then there’s people out there that are creating for education, and that’s how we kind of look at the lens of the creator economy. I think last time I read, and I think it was in a Forbes article a couple of weeks ago, there was this estimate of what are the creator economy worth? And it’s somewhere between a hundred billion to 700 billion, which is depending on how you define those people that are within it, but it’s growing every day, obviously with the advent of social media.

John Jantsch (03:44): So I think for a lot of people, they see some of the folks that are really doing what seem kind of goofy things that are getting them a lot of attention and maybe making them a lot of money. And I’m sure that big brands B brands particularly are looking at that and going, well, that’s not for us necessarily. So what is the lesson that might come to play that would be practical, usable, relevant for that B two B brand particularly?

Christie Horsman (04:09): Yeah, and I think exactly when you look at, I always look at Mr. Beast for instance, and brands aren’t going to go out there and start trying to jump 1300 motorcycles in a row or something like that, and so do something crazy. But what the dilution, if you bring it down to it that even creator entertainers and educators have in common is it’s this human element. It’s this trusted element and it’s something that brands like big brands really have always been striving for, right? To be that trusted brand, to have that element of yes, come to us for the product or service that you want or need. And it really boils down to that human and that trustworthy element. They’re putting themselves out there so much. We know so much about these creators and they’ve created this humanity as part of towards their audience, as part of their brand that big brands really need to look at and say, how do I emulate this? How do I bring this into our messaging and our core values?

John Jantsch (05:11): So it seems to me there would be a couple logical paths if somebody’s saying, yeah, that’s kind of a missing piece of ours. Obviously they could go create their own connection of some form to their, they’re not fans yet. I guess it would be their customers even or their community. But also a lot of brands are exploring, let’s get one of those influencers, if you will, or somebody that’s a creator that has a big audience, let’s get them associated with our brand. Is there a better way? Are there pitfalls to one way or the other?

Christie Horsman (05:43): Yeah, I think the only pitfalls I see when looking for, I think hiring creator influencers to represent your brand is great. I think that it’s a great way to bridge and find a new audience. If you understand your core customer, where your core customer is digesting content and who they’re looking up to and the creator sphere, it’s a great way to bridge that and gain that new audience. I think where sometimes it falls flat. And this is where again, that kind of trusted component is a lot of the times creators, we always say, they say it’s an ad, they say it’s sponsored and everyone knows that it’s a sponsored deal. And that’s how creators, realistically, a lot of creators make the majority of their money is through these big brand sponsorships. And lately we’ve seen some of that fall off as brands have pulled back a little bit because they’re seeing that, yeah, it’s great for eyeballs, but maybe it’s not always driving the sales they want to see. And so I think that it’s definitely important to align yourself with creators that align with your values and that make sense for your brand. But I would also say that for brands to take the tactics that creators are using and try to employ them themselves to create more of an authentic humanized element for their brand without having to go through that creator or that third party. Right.

John Jantsch (07:05): One of the hallmarks I suppose of a popular influencer or creator is it’s basically personal branding. I mean, they’ve gone out there and established themselves as a voice that does this, or as a person that does this or a person who shares amazing information or how to stuff on a certain topic, how does a brand really adopt that mentality? Because I think that’s real tricky for ’em, isn’t it?

Christie Horsman (07:33): And I think that’s where people have gotten stuck a lot of the time. They think that, and especially I think when we think of B2B traditionally has been very broad strokes in terms of our marketing. We’re trying to capture a broad audience. We’re also trying to be a little bit elusive because we really actually just want you to talk to our sales team who’s going to get you more details. And I think that we need to go away from that and what the creator brings and what brands can start to emulate in terms of tactics are when we think about creating that human element and connection, it’s really about, I’ve seen companies use their employees in a lot of their advertising, for instance, and not just for hiring for actual campaigns. We did this actually last year with our Meet the CSS campaign and we wanted to humanize our customer service team, and we used actual customer service reps in the campaign.

(08:27): And I’ve seen other brands do this where they’re like, look, we’re not good at commercials and we’re not good about talking about this, but what we are good at is actually being customer service reps and here’s why. But it humanizes the brand because you’re bringing in that element of people. And that’s the thing that the creator does is they bring themselves the creator’s life story, their family, sometimes their kids, their dog. And the more that you can do that as a company with your employees to bring them to the forefront really humanizes the brand because it is a company, but it’s also a company that’s made up of actual people with actual lives.

John Jantsch (09:02): That’s one

Christie Horsman (09:02): Way that I see.

John Jantsch (09:04): We’ve certainly for the last few years, particularly as hiring has become more challenging for a lot of companies, we’ve really put their employee or employer branding on the forefront of marketing just because it’s a great marketing message too. I mean, the fact that you have employees that love where they work probably is a good marketing message as well. Not to mention that they obviously are on the front lines of really interacting with customers anyway. So I think a lot of people, I’m thinking makeup for example. A lot of makeup is sold directly to consumers through the creator economy. It’s probably one of the bigger categories. So that model has that model. As B2B folks try, I mean that’s typically a B2C play. They’re not trying to sell to stores. So as that model really something that is influencing or maybe even blurring the lines, there used to be the, oh, I sell only b2b. I mean a lot of marketers are like, I’m a B2B marketer, or I’m a B2C marketer. And sort of blurring the lines now because a lot of the same ideas are being employed, authenticity, personal branding, those things.

Christie Horsman (10:11): And I think the makeup one’s such a good example because it really did open the doors for people to say, this is how I apply this, this is how I do this, this is how I use this. And you can actually see a foundation go on in a video using real people. And I think the interesting thing that how I’ve seen it kind of manifest in B two B has been in the veil being lifted on the product or service that you’re selling. So for instance, I think I’ve seen a couple companies, ourselves included, we’ve played with this a little bit and I think that we have to get better at it. Everyone does, but it’s offering real people those customer stories of how they’re using the product, what does the product look like on the inside, showing more of the product upfront and having real customers talk about it in an unfiltered way.

(11:01): We’ve done this in terms of LinkedIn lives where we just have customers come on and talk about their journey and their company or their personal brand and then how they use the product. And we actually show the product being used. And I think that it’s bridging. We have to figure out how to open that door a little bit more. But it is, I think that’s the transition where we’re saying, look, we not having this, you’re not going to see the product until you’ve had three or four sales calls. We’ll finally show you the product. It’s like, no, we’re going to show you the product up upfront. It’s in our marketing, it’s right here. And it’s being used by real people.

John Jantsch (11:36): It is probably an antiquated terminology, but I think it still means something. But a lot of B two B brands used to spend some money sampling, for example, spend some money on getting directly to the consumer, even though that consumer was only going to go to the store now and ask for the product. So we used to call that pulling sales as opposed to pushing sales. So does the idea of this creator economy that way apply, in other words, get exposure for your product even though you’re then going to tell them go to Macy’s and get it, or whatever, wherever it’s sold?

Christie Horsman (12:08): Yeah, I think that it’s one of the, it’s for me, I think that’s one of the best things about the creator economy is that they’re bringing that audience in. They’re pulling people in and bringing that audience in, that’s the right fit audience. So again, finding the right creator to pair with based on your brand, your objectives, your product service. But from a B two B perspective, it’s even, I think more important because a lot of these companies have such a core ideal customer profile that if you know it, you can go out there and really pull people in with interesting content through these creators because they’re talking about it. And I think about, for us, we talk a lot to people in customer education and these roles and people that run these communities where customer educators are living and talking about their day-to-day problems of how do I make this content? How do I create these programming? And so we’re going out there and trying to pull those people back in into the conversation through those creator communities that they’re building with these really engaged audiences.

John Jantsch (13:13): Alright, let’s talk about R O I or metrics in general. I think because initially sort of a creator economy plays have kind of focused on engagement and building community and things that sometimes are hard to measure. I think that those have obviously, I think people are putting metrics to those, but what do you say to a B2B person that’s just like, how’s that going to move the needle?

Christie Horsman (13:37): Yeah, so I think even I have struggled in the past with, we love working with some of these creators, but to your point, the measurement of the metric that we’re trying to move is brand awareness, which we all know is you can try and try to put some numbers to it, but eventually that there’s something there that you can’t quite measure. So what we like to do is when we’re working with creators or we’re thinking about working with these communities, for instance, we love to think about depending on what it is, but for instance, we held a community kind of roundup event where it was like a mingle event and then it was a bit of a, let’s talk about round table kind of topics and the R O I on events like that. For me, obviously there’s an element of just getting the brand out there and having those conversations, but it’s also about how many people are coming in and actually wanting to have a conversation.

(14:33): So thinking about how many conversations the sales team was able to capture, how many net new names do we get on to our list? And then going all the way down is obviously how are we making that into a sale and tracing that back into these events that we hold. A lot of it’s around influence pipe that influence pipe number for b2b. And then a lot of it for some of our creators is we have a really excellent affiliate program, so we entice them to bring people in and sign them up with the product on our self-serve side. And we have really great payouts on that affiliate side. So that’s kind of the two sides of it. There’s definitely, again, that middle layer of brand awareness. How do we measure that? And obviously we look at things like media and share of voice, but we try to think about that influence pipe on the B2B side and then thinking about that we have those hard numbers on the affiliate side of how we’re driving signups.

John Jantsch (15:25): So think if it naturally was created as a tool for the creator economy. I mean a lot of influencers, a lot of creators needed beyond YouTube, they needed a paywall and they needed ability to have courses and to expand access to them in a paid way. What are you seeing? So I think that it’s well established. That’s a great tool for that. So what are you telling or what would you tell B two B brands now who are like, well, we don’t courses. Does that make sense for us? What would you tell them in terms of their creation?

Christie Horsman (16:03): And to start on how Thinkific was our founder, we actually have a really great founder story, a creator himself. He has a course that’s still today, you can take it, it’s an LSAT prep course. That’s how it started. And he wanted to be able to educate the massive sounds

John Jantsch (16:15): Awful.

Christie Horsman (16:16): Yeah, I know. But that was how we started. And so we really have been through the pandemic, we went through this boom and then we started thinking companies really could benefit from having courses to expand their reach to their customers. And I always think about this when we talk to companies on sales calls even and say, look, do you want to have customers or do you want to have fans? Do you want to have people who are extremely loyal and engaged with your brand? And the way you can do that is through customer education programs, you’re educating your customers to better use your product. You’re creating exclusive communities sometimes in this case. So you’re creating these fans that are incredibly loyal to your company and your brand and that eventually are going to a create more word of mouth and better referrals for your company. But also you’re creating a very loyal group of customers that are fully educated in your product, which is some B2B SaaS. One of the trickiest things is getting people to make sure that they’re using your product when your customers buy it. So

John Jantsch (17:22): More features they use a less churn. Right,

Christie Horsman (17:24): Exactly. And I think in today’s economy too, we see that acquiring customers right now is tough. And so you want to keep the customers you have. And one of the best ways to do that is through customer education programs. We’ve got really good example is Hootsuite, which is a social media management software, and they have Hootsuite Academy and they have built Hootsuite Academy from just a few courses on social media certification to this is a standalone revenue set for them outside of their core. So they’ve got a secondary line of revenue and they’re driving customer loyalty, customer education within the product, but the actual users, end users of their product. But they’re also, they’ve created this certification where it’s like, Hey, I’m Hootsuite certified. I am ready to be your social media manager. So it’s this twofold. And I think for me, when I see companies like that be so successful, and we have a lot of really great customer stories around that, I’m like, why aren’t all companies doing this? Take this education piece that’s happening and bring it into your B2B customers. It just makes sense. And you see that success.

John Jantsch (18:33): Yeah, I think you make a great point. I’ve been using for years when I talk about the customer journey, for many people it stops at buy, but certainly content stops at buy quite often. And I think you’re right. I mean even if it’s just orientation and onboarding and then obviously through what you said, repeat business and referral business, those are great reasons to create content. And obviously that’s a whole category of content that most businesses aren’t even thinking about. You also mentioned a couple times, and I think that B2B brands are really waking up to this idea of community. I think a lot of brands are waking up to this idea of community because for the reason you said it’s sometimes tougher to get eyeballs or keep customers and community is one of the greatest ways to do it. How would you use a platform like Thinkific really as a community model? I mean, there’s a lot of community tools coming up. Circle is one, for example. How is Thinkific addressing, because I believe you were created as a pure content creation and not necessarily as a community tool. How are you addressing that engagement amongst members?

Christie Horsman (19:40): So because we saw when we were, to your point, coming up through content engagement, online education, really that learning management software tool, we saw early on that community was such a hand in hand thing with these groups of people that were wanting to learn together to take courses together. And even if in an on-demand setting, you’re by yourself, community was a way for people could talk about it and learn more and discuss. So we launched our own community product last year and it’s been such a great add-on for both our creator educators, which we call our B two C side, as well as some of our B two B customers, which we call ’em think fake plus because it does bind those people together and it gives you a place where you as a company or you as a creator can kind of moderate the conversation and create more engagement post courses.

(20:35): Because a lot of the time you’re taking an on-demand course, you’re sitting your home by yourself, you don’t get that engagement. The community is a way to bridge that engagement aspect. And it’s been really exciting to see. I actually love our think of a community. I’m in it almost daily talking to our creators because it’s just such an interesting place to be. And one thing for us being obviously B2B and B2C SaaS, we launch a lot of products in there. First we’ll put stuff in there and then we make that exclusive feeling for our community, but also we’re getting such amazing intel back from them as the end users of the product.

John Jantsch (21:12): Yeah, I’m sure more and businesses will wake up to this, but I’ve certainly seen it firsthand. We certify agencies in our methodology and they go through and they love it. They get a lot of great training, but we have agencies that have been with us 10 years and they’ll tell you point blank, I stay for the community. I don’t need John and his team anymore. I stay because I’ve made friends here. And I think that’s a huge element for business, isn’t

Christie Horsman (21:35): It? It’s that peer to peer communication that they get that’s hosted by, if you’re smart, it’s hosted by you. The other thing is, I think a lot of companies don’t realize is there are communities out there about their product or service, and if they’re not in the conversation, it’s happening without them.

John Jantsch (21:52): Yeah, absolutely. That’s great point for good or bad. Right. So Chris, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by the show. You want to tell people where they can connect with you and find out more, a little more about what we talked about today?

Christie Horsman (22:03): Yeah, so I’m obviously on LinkedIn. It’s Christie Horseman, VP of Marketing at Thinkific. If you’re looking for Christie Horseman’s and you can always come over to thinkific.com, you can check out the products and service there. And also we’ve got links on there to our social and our communities, which all of my team run. So I’m always hopping in our community if you need to, you want to join there as well.

John Jantsch (22:24): Awesome. Again, I appreciate you taking a moment and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road in beautiful Vancouver.

Christie Horsman (22:32): Thank you so much, John. Appreciate the opportunity.

John (00:09): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Ann Janzer. She’s a non-fiction book coach and author of multiple books on writing and marketing, human behavior and cognitive science fascinate her and she is always searching for clues to improve our communication. We’re going to talk about our newest book, the Writer’s Voice Techniques for Tuning Your Tone and Style. So Ann, welcome back to the show.

Ann (00:38): Thanks for having me back, John. It’s great being here.

John (00:40): So let’s talk a little bit, obviously voice and style, tone and style, writer’s voice. I know prior to you writing your own books, you started writing other people’s books, basically writing in other people’s voices, right? And tones. Would you say that that kind of developed your fascination with this idea of voice?

Ann (00:58): It was actually. So I haven’t done ghostwriting for books. I’ve done one book, but it was my marketing career. I was a freelance marketer and every week I’d pop over to a new company and try to figure out how to write in their brand voice. And sometimes actually fairly often with the small companies, I would define the brand voice for them. And then as blogs came out, I started ghost writing for executives, blog posts and interviews and all kinds of stuff. So that definitely piqued my interest in writing voice and it taught me a lot and it got me interested in the topic. I think it’s the most neglected and misunderstood part of the writing craft, but there are four groups of people that pay a lot of attention. Ghost writers, obviously poets care a lot about voice fiction writers because they’re trying to get their characters voices and marketers, marketers because they really care how they show up to their customer as part of that relationship with is the brand voice.

John (01:56): So would you say that you feel like, yes, I have a voice, I know what it is, maybe I haven’t perfected it, but I mean I know when I’m doing it,

Ann (02:06): I feel there’s a lot of talk about finding your authentic voice and I think voices are like shoes. There are shoes that fit us really, really well, but I wouldn’t wear my hiking shoes to the opera. I think we should be able to pull on the right one for the right occasion, and we almost know how to do that instinctively if we’re intentional about it. So yeah, when I first set out to write my first book, all of a sudden I was writing in my own voice and not the customers and the first draft started coming out just too much like a corporate it. There was some. So I had to keep going back and it wasn’t really until I got the second and the third edition of that book that I really got comfortable in. What’s my writing voice for a book? What part of me do I want to be? How do I want to show up for people there? What do they need to hear from me?

John (02:56): And just as a writer, would you say that that’s something that matures in people? I know I started really first writing seriously 30 years ago, and I look back at some of that now and it’s awful. And not to say that my writing is brilliant today, but it’s certainly changed.

Ann (03:16): I do. I think even if you were writing in a voice that feels authentic and comfortable for the situation, we change, we develop our speaking voices age over time. So why wouldn’t our writing voices change as well? Yeah, I do think so.

John (03:29): For me, I’ll just use myself as an example. I became more authentic when I became more confident in my writing because I wasn’t as worried about using big words or whatever it was I was trying to do. So let’s talk a little bit about some of the early mistakes somebody might make when they’re trying to find a voice.

Ann (03:45): Sure. Yeah. So one thing we do is we try to write the people around us and then we’re not really comfortable. It’s like wearing shoes that don’t fit quite right. I think other people can tell we’re walking funny because our shoes aren’t fitting quite right. So I keep going back to the shoe metaphor. I don’t know why. But yeah, so people think, well, I want to be an expert, so I’m going to show up with the big words. That’s the most common thing I see. And that just backfires so badly with the reader if they’re not familiar with those words or you’re just making them do extra cognitive work. And I’d rather have them focused on my ideas and not my sentence structures or not my vocabulary. So that’s a really common mistake. I think too often people think, oh, I’m going to write a book now, or I’m going to write this important essay and I’m going to put on my serious writer hat and I’m going to try to think back to what I did in college and I’m going to do long sentences and I’m going to really try to uplevel it.

(04:40): And that almost always backfires. It’s not comfortable. It’s hard for the reader and it doesn’t give them really good sense of who you are because you’re putting on something that may not feel legit to who you are,

John (04:53): Right or wrong. There’s a lot of advice out there, particularly in writing for business circles that talks about writing at the eighth grade level or something like that, whatever the level is supposed to be, somewhere less than you might write your college essay type of work. Does that show up in voice, first off? Is that valid? And secondly, does that show up as part of voice?

Ann (05:13): So first, I think it is valid in the sense that most marketing writing, it’s not that your customers are dumb or don’t have college degrees, but they’re reading it on their phone while they’re in line for a Starbucks, for heaven sakes, how

John (05:24): Much don’t make me work,

Ann (05:26): Don’t make them work too much. And this is so true. If you’re writing an email, my goodness, just highlight the things you want people to do with it. So yes, so I think the eighth grade thing is valid. The really interesting thing, and there’s a chapter in the book on this, is that most of those grade level things are based on two factors and two factors only. How long your words are, how many syllables there are in a word, and how many words there are per sentence. And so if you just go to some shorter words and shorter sentences, your grade level goes, and so you think, well, is that a legitimate measure? But I think it is because longer sentences make us keep more working memory involved in a sentence before we can close it and compute the idea. So I think that’s legit. So that was part

John (06:08): One. Anyone who’s edited my work over the years, I use a lot of parenthetical phrases and they just are always cutting those out. Darn it.

Ann (06:17): I am also a huge fan of the parenthetical and you know what, you do what you need to do in your first draft and then you can tune it and revision.

John (06:25): So I’m curious about this idea of selecting voice. I tend to think I write the same voice no matter what I’m writing, but that may or may not be true. But is there kind of like I’m going to choose this voice today, I’m going to choose this voice today dependent upon the situation, or are we really that flexible?

Ann (06:41): Well, we are flexible to some degree. I mean, if you were writing something to a third grade classroom, I’m going to say you would write it differently a little bit. I mean, our relationship with the people we’re communicating with voice is just, writing is just another kind of human communication, and we have some native skills for that. What I want people to do is think about being intentional about the choices they make about how they’re showing up just because this is comfortable way for you to write and it’s the way you’ve always written. Is this what the reader needs from you in this situation? Do they maybe need more encouragement and less expertise or vice versa? I mean, what does the reader need? And then you can lean into that part of your natural human communication skills.

John (07:23): I was going to talk about the reader. Obviously every reader would probably interpret voice differently. I mean, somebody reads Cormick McCarthy, for example, differently. Probably not everybody gets the same thing out of that. So how much responsibility do we have to start with the reader?

Ann (07:38): Yeah, well if we think about it, the voice is reconstructed in the reader’s head. It doesn’t really live in the page. It only lives when it lands in the reader. And to some extent, that’s a little bit out of our control. Someone can show up in a really bad mood and just say, your voice sounds like this or that, and we’ve all had bad reviews of something. Maybe it’s like, wow, okay, I never saw that in there, but okay, you did. So we can be intentional and try to help the reader find it in the way that we hope that they will, that will be most helpful to them. I cited a study in the book, which I think is really, really interesting and it would be interesting to reflect on is when you read silently, a lot of people, they kind of have a little inner reading voice. They’re actually narrating to themselves silently and quickly, but they’re narrating. And I’ve talked to people about this and some people are like, oh yeah, I think it’s my voice. Or if I know the author, it’s their voice. But people kind of hear a voice. So your voice in writing doesn’t really belong to you. It belongs to the reader, which is a crazy thought. And

John (08:41): It is interesting. I know sort of along the lines, reading your own writing out loud changes or maybe you put the inflection that you meant to be there, but it certainly can change or it’s a good test almost, right? Does this sound like what I want it to sound like? Because that’s maybe how the readers or the listener’s going to experience it.

Ann (08:59): Yeah, reading your own out loud, reading other people’s writing out loud can tell you something about what they’re doing, which is always really fun. And then getting the computer to read your work out loud because they don’t know what you were trying to say. And you might find out where somebody perhaps won’t put the emphasis where you thought, and maybe you want to reconstruct that sentence to make sure that it’s crystal crystal clear. So those are all good techniques to get at how the voice lands.

John (09:24): You want an interesting experience? I’ve done this over the years, read a book and listen to the author at the same time. And that is a really immersive way to hear voice. Yeah,

Ann (09:35): Yeah, I’ll bet it is. Yeah, that’s a great idea.

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Ann (10:50): Yeah, absolutely. There’s a bunch of things that we can do. There’s stylistic choices that we make that we can use and experiment with in the book The Writer’s Voice, I have people experiment at the extremes. Sometimes try to write something using only one syllable words so hard, but really fun because it makes you think about the words that you choose. We can also try to plug into an emotion or we can try to plug into an intention that is not our normal one and really experiment. I think that most people find that their range of writing voice is much larger than they actually use most of the time. And they may find that as they push out to one side or the other, they find something really fun that they can bring in or that might be a nice addition to the way that they normally write.

John (11:37): Should you fight for some of your voice and style decisions? I know that one of the things that I think it’s intentional now in my writing is I will list three things and I will leave out. And so instead of this and this, I’ll say this, this, this, and it’s intentional, but it drives your Chicago style guide editor crazy. So are there things that once you know they’re intentional, and I’m not saying that you always just say it my way or not, but I mean are there things that you might do that are a part of your voice that you say no? That’s just like a little trait.

Ann (12:12): Absolutely. Think people use, that’s something that you do. People can use punctuation. We can legitimately use sentence fragments if we are using them well and know what we’re doing. So a good editor should never smooth out your voice, should never eliminate your voice. They might clear things that are in the way of people hearing the voice and that’s legit. But if in your case, if you were submitting to a publisher and this is your thing, just say, this is part of my style guide. This is the John Chach style, this is what I do with list the three. Deal

John (12:43): With that. Okay. You heard it. You heard it here first and said I can stop. I can start sentences with a preposition. Okay, so there,

Ann (12:51): Yeah, absolutely. Go for it. Just say it’s intentional. This is my personal style.

John (12:55): Alright, so you use both these words, tone and style, and I’m curious if you could help us define those or at least differentiate those.

Ann (13:03): Yeah. So style to me, and they’re so often used interchangeably. The style to me is actually the set of tools that we use to put things on the page. So I have the Chicago manual style. The addition I have is like four inches thick or something. So many style decisions, right? Semicolons not

John (13:24): Get drunk and white.

Ann (13:25): Yes. Yeah,

John (13:26): Much shorter.

Ann (13:27): Well, it doesn’t tell you what order things need to go in a book. I mean, this is the bible of stylistic decisions. So there’s thousands of decisions and we do most of them without thinking about them. And that’s fine, but it’s the tools that we have and tone is what those tools create. So style is maybe the painter’s brushstrokes tone is the picture right, and the picture is perceived by the viewer tone of your reading. Is that the tone as interpreted by the reader? So I use stylistic things to project a certain tone and hope that it worked, cross my fingers and hope it works.

John (14:05): So we’re going to get into the format of the book itself, but I’m curious, I know you did some research kind of led you to your decisions about what went in the book. Tell me a little bit about that project.

Ann (14:15): So I did two things. One is that I interviewed a bunch of people about how they felt about their writing voice and what they thought about it. And I really found this again, sense that it’s something that most writers just don’t really give that much thought to. And yet when you ask them questions about what they would change, they all have things that they would want to change about their writing, which I think is interesting. And then I was working on this book and I started creating exercises to play with the different ideas. And I got a group of people, bless their hearts, let me send them these exercises once a week. Crazy things to do. Some of ’em I really found out were way too hard or too involved. So I dialed them back and I just tested them on people as well as myself of course.

(14:56): And that it was interesting because John, I said out to write a traditional book, it was going to be a book and maybe there would be an accompanying work. And I was halfway through it, all this research, I may have maybe 23,000 words of a draft. I mean, I was really in the book and I said, you know what? Reading a book about writing voice and hoping to be a better writer is reading a cookbook and thinking that’s going to make you a better cook. It is not. You got to actually do the cooking, you have to actually do the writing. So midway through, I just abandoned it and I merged the workbook and the book together, cut a lot of the traditional parts of a book out, put in a lot of the exercises in the book, said write in this here. I made it really welcoming for people to pick up a pen and write. And I’m really,

John (15:44): Because showing a picture, it’s big old workbook, right? It’s

Ann (15:47): Big. It’s workbook format. I really want to just get that idea that my gosh, you better pick up a pen when you get this thing and it’s okay to write in it because that’s how you’re going to get the value from it is doing the ideas in it.

John (16:00): Yeah, actually, one of the books I wrote had prompts in it every day and you were supposed to write, and I can’t tell you how many people wrote back to me and said, oh no, I can’t write in the book. You need to produce a workbook.

Ann (16:10): Precisely. I’m one of those people. It’s like, I must’ve gotten my hand slapped for writing a book when I was a child because it’s like, even if there’s prompts, it’s like I’m not going to write in that. What are you nuts?

John (16:18): So talk a little bit about some of the exercises maybe. I mean, there are many, many exercises. So maybe pick out a handful and say, well, here’s what you’ll encounter on this exercise just to give people a flavor.

Ann (16:31): Yeah, so sure. So I’ll give you two really radically different ones. One of them, which I really enjoy, is just to strip out everything except the punctuation. And it’s something that you’ve written and it’s so interesting because it tells you something about your sentence structures.

John (16:45): Wait a minute. So we’re just left with periods and commas, is that what you’re saying?

Ann (16:48): Periods, commas, semicolons, dashes, just the punctuation kinds

John (16:52): Of exclamation points for me,

Ann (16:54): Exclamation points you get to see. It’s like, wow, I really do use a lot of exclamation points. And I did this and then I did the same thing for other writers that I admire in different genres. So for a literary writer author who I’m on his email list, I did it for one of his posts and his punctuation was much more free flowing than mine. It was very interesting. So that was kind of fun. And then on another extreme, one of these exercises where I asked people to test their extremes. I have an exercise called fancy or folksy, and to take the same thing and write it in asite or obscure or fancy, just, I mean set the dial to 11 on that. I mean, just go be crazy, be nutsy. Just do something super out there. And then to do something that’s super folksy or slimy or just way more than you would ever do. And I had so much fun doing these, first of all. So it’s like a warmup. It loosens things out and it also makes you think, wait, there was that thing there. My metaphors got looser when I got folksy. Or, it’s very interesting. You test the extremes and then you find maybe your center could be a little one way or the other. So those are two of the kinds of exercises. That’s fine.

John (18:03): Alright. Because nobody’s going to listen unless I mention AI today.

Ann (18:06): Yes, yes.

John (18:07): Where do you think will, I mean there’s lots of opinions about AI and writing in general, but where do you think we land with style and tone and voice?

Ann (18:16): So this is so interesting because as I was writing and working and researching, AI was really chat. G P T was evolving in crazy ways. And a part of me first thought, oh my gosh, if you can just ask chatt to make your writing funny, it’s going to do it and maybe no one needs this book. And I’ve completely switched. I think that AI actually is making us think about voice more than we did. So it’s very interesting. I think the book is timely in a way I didn’t expect with that, which is we read something first and we go, oh, that was written by ai. There’s no human there. So we’re aware of when voice is off or missing or generic, and I think we recognize the value that there is in a real human voice connection. What’s really who we are, that human connection

John (19:05): Theoretically. Wouldn’t machine learning be able to read enough hemmingway to produce hemmingway voice?

Ann (19:10): Sure. I mean, you can ask it to write something like this author, that author Hemmingway and people are, so if that’s what you want to do, if you want to upload everything yours and say, write in my style, you could do that for little transactional writing and things. But I think that the reason that we connect with someone, if you’re writing as a solo printer or small business owner, I think your value is yourself, is your personality. And I abdicate that, is to give up something that is important to your brand. I think that AI could be an incredible tool as part of the writing process. And I’m working still on how I integrate it into my writing process. Yeah,

John (19:52): It’s a great assistant, but I’m with you. I think where the real edges of voice or I might say something like, well, that was a load of crap. I mean, I might write something like that. I don’t think AI would ever write that. And I think that’s the edges of our voice that it’ll never be able to pick up because it might be how we’re feeling that day.

Ann (20:12): That’s right. It’s not. It’s for the most part, trending to the middle, trending to the norm, language patterns, that’s what i’s looking for is language patterns. So I don’t want to advocate that. And I think when I read something from you, John, I can see your voice. I can see your written, I can picture you, and I don’t want to lose that. So if AI helps more people get things out into the world that are authentically their ideas and their thoughts, then it’s great. But I just would be really careful about asking it to write for you,

John (20:42): Have it write metadata on your webpages all day long. Title tags, go for it.

Ann (20:48): Please, please. And it’s a lovely non-judgmental brainstorming buddy. You can give it an idea. It comes back with ideas and you’re like, yeah, that’s okay. Actually, that metaphor is kind of lame, but it made me think of this other one, which I think is better. So I use it for those kinds of things. There’s a lot of uses, like I said, it’s a tool. We can use it well, we can use it poorly. I think the great writers will learn how to use it well and be more effective and

John (21:11): Efficient. And that’s a great point. I mean, I think even for marketers, it’s not going to replace marketers, but somebody who is strategically focused, who is using AI might replace marketers. That’s the key. It’s like you almost have to be using these, but you have to be using them in the right way.

Ann (21:30): That’s true. And so that’s a learning curve. We’re all climbing still.

John (21:34): And of course a year from now you and I’ll be having a totally different conversation about too. Right? Exactly. That’s part of the climb, right? And you want to tell people where they might connect with you and obviously pick up a copy of the writer’s voice or any of your other works.

Ann (21:48): Sure. The easiest thing is just to look for my website, which is my name Anne with a silent e janer.com. I have an email list that I share writing practices every other week, and once a month I do a drawing for writing related book. And it’s just entertaining if you want to be part of that. And the book is available in any place you can buy books. If they don’t carry it, you can order it from them. But it’s called the Writer’s Voice.

John (22:13): This seems like a good workshop. Are you doing a workshop with this?

Ann (22:16): That is in my fall thing to figure out because yeah, it is practically that workshop built into it, right?

John (22:23): Yeah. But doing it with a cohort I think would be kind of fun.

Ann (22:26): I think it would be a lot of fun to share those exercises with people. So I think you’re

John (22:30): Right. Well, Anne, it was great catching up with you and having you spend a few moments at the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. And hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days soon out there on the road.

Ann (22:38): Yes, thanks a lot, John. It’s great being back.