However, many companies unfortunately spend so much time every day immersed in the verbal and written shorthand of their company, it’s often difficult for them to communicate about their business in a way that’s easy to understand and easy to comprehend what makes their company truly unique.

I’ve repeatedly had discussions with clients about communicating with reporters or drafting an initial press release about a new service or product. I repeatedly use the “cocktail party” example. You need to be able to explain what your company does as if you were meeting a group of people at a cocktail party and they ask you what your company does and they have zero technical knowledge. Some might call it an elevator pitch. Regardless of what you call it, it’s invaluable. If you can’t explain in 2-3 concise sentences the compelling reason for your service or product, in plain English that a technical newbie can understand, you’ve got a problem. You should spend the time necessary to perfect that explanation, because busy consumers and potential customers or users won’t give you a second chance.

On more than one occasion, I’ve gotten into serious disagreements with clients about the tone and style of press releases. Some business executives equate a stiff, formal corporate tone in a press release as somehow imparting gravitas to a company’s announcement. I just don’t agree. Stiff, formal corporate communications is simply a holdover from an antiquated approach to corporate communications.

Richard Millington, the founder of FeverBee Limited, an online community consultancy, recently wrote about this issue specifically related to companies communicating to their online communities. Take a look at Millington’s post for a hilarious – and painful – example of how one company tried to communicate with their online fans.

Warren Buffett, the unparalleled investor, has long championed plain English to discuss complex financial matters. In 1998, Warren Buffett wrote the introduction to an SEC document about how to write clear SEC disclosure documents. (As an aside, the SEC obviously has its limits on “informal” communications to investors. Revealed in Steven Levy’s new book about Google, In the Plex, the SEC wasn’t pleased with Google’s IPO filings because of the founders informal and unorhtodox letter to potential investors. The SEC ordered multiple revisions.)

Here’s a portion of Buffett’s intro:

“One unoriginal but useful tip: Write with a specific person in mind. When writing Berkshire Hathaway’s annual report, I pretend that I’m talking to my sisters. I have no trouble picturing them: Though highly intelligent, they are not experts in accounting or finance. They will understand plain English, but jargon may puzzle them. My goal is simply to give them the information I would wish them to supply me if our positions were reversed. To succeed, I don’t need to be Shakespeare; I must, though, have a sincere desire to inform.

No siblings to write to? Borrow mine: Just begin with “Dear Doris and Bertie.””

Takeaways:

- Can you explain what your company does in 2-3 easy to understand, yet compelling, sentences? If not, write, revise, and redraft, until you can.

- Is your insider knowledge of your company and industry creeping into your press releases and content on your web site? Ask a spouse or friend – in a completely different line of work – to take a look at a recent press release or website redesign and give you their feedback. Can they easily understand what you’re trying to say?

- Does your company’s press releases and external communications have a stiff, formal style? Question that style? Why are you writing that way? The goal of communicating is to be easily understood.

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AOL is hard at work building a next generation online content company. But, that content is going to be driven not by the traditional editorial meeting where a bunch of people try to discern the zeitgeist of the day and write stories based on their gut feel for what people are interested in. No. AOL is going to make the large majority of its editorial decisions on what to write about and what to cover based on powerful search data. What are people already looking for online? AOL’s writers and editors will then crank out content to satisfy the interest of those searchers and readers – and obviously sell a boatload of ads in the process.

I think Farhad’s mistake is in assuming that AOL is going to slavishly follow the business model of Associated Content – another company that generates content on demand. And, as Farhad painfully details, Associated Content churns out awful content that does nothing but clutter up the Web with useless words sloppily cobbled together to quickly game the search engines.

But, what if AOL decides to go in a different direction?

What if AOL uses the Associated Content model – content driven by what people are expressly interested in and searching for – but create high-quality content that fulfills a genuine need – informing and expanding on subjects that people are genuinely interested in. This is not a new business model by any means – About.com comes immediately to mind. Instead of focusing on short tail, timely topics, About.com guides for years have been writing about long-tail, niche topics. And, in many cases, About.com can provide some good, rich content. Two more recent companies have tried a similar model of providing and curating long-tail content – Jason Calacanis’ Mahalo and Seth Godin’s Squidoo.

As Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land has written about on more than one occasion, the rich content of the web can often show alarming gaps when there’s a breaking news story and people start searching for information on a topic that is trending. Sullivan has used the example of Southern California wildfires. During wildfire season, if you do a search for “california fires maps” you end up getting a wild variety of content, including outdated Los Angeles Times fire maps from previous years. Sullivan has written about the concept of living URLs to combat this issue. For example, a Los Angles Times living URL for “california wild fires” would lead to the Los Angeles Times’ latest news about wild fires in chronological order – freshest content at the top of course. Google just announced a new Living Stories experiment with the New York Times and the Washington Post along these lines.

What does living urls have to do with AOL’s new content strategy? Basically, that Aol. could be on the verge of a very interesting and potentially profitable business model as long as they emphasize quality content.

AOL content SWAT team

Around the clock, AOL identifies gaps between what content people are searching for online and what content currently exists. If there’s a gap that could be filled, Aol. throws a team of editors/writers at the problem and creates content – quality content – to fulfill that need.

There’s one thing AOL could do to make this business model even more powerful – create an AOL “cold case” team to compliment the work of their content SWAT team. In addition to the team of editors/writers hard at work creating content for the short tail searches, the AOL cold case team would routinely go back through the AOL content that’s already been created, add to it, strengthen it with more original reporting, and do everything they can to enrich the content. That way, AOL can still have high-ranking quality content when those short tail searches become long tail searches.

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