Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.

~Mark Twain

If you’ve ever stopped by any of my online imprints (Twitter, Facebook, my blog – RedheadWriting), it’s evident from the get-go that I have a certain affection for blue language. Grandmothers and god-fearing folk the world over blush and click away when they land in the Danger Zone, and occasionally the hate mail flows (more on that in a bit). When Radian6 reached out to me to pen a guest blog on the use of profanity on the interwebz, I knew two things right off the bat:

I was going to have a s**tload of fun writing this post.

and

My branding message was clear to those who watch me do whatever it is I do on any given day.

A simple glance at my Twitter bio will tell you what I do for a living – I work with companies to help them develop clear and distinct personalities. When companies meet me, they’ve usually stopped by my online presences and blog and either love what they see or want to run screaming – and that’s exactly what I want them to do. Love me, hate me…just don’t be indifferent. And whether you decide to use profanity in your online communications is a choice only you can make, but in this post, what I hope to do is show you how we can:

1)    Talk about profanity without using it.

2)    Explore reasonable considerations (and consequences) as you ponder the linguistic line in the sand.

3)    Have tools to make better decisions about your brand’s personality, whether you’re an army of one or 1,000.

Know Who You Are

Strangely enough, I remember the day I dropped my first f-bomb on Twitter. I expected crickets. I watched the screen for a potential backlash. But the opposite happened: I got retweeted. Four times, even! I’ve never been one for saying things in conventional ways and what I’d inadvertently done is built an audience who appreciated my true vernacular.

No matter what the size of your brand, understanding who you are as you enter the social web is imperative. I’m frequently asked by clients whether I’m going to drop the f-bomb on their blogs, Facebook pages or in their Twitter streams. My answer? It depends. Does that fit who you are? Every brand has a personality. If we admit that from the get go, we understand why we don’t expect headlines about Berkshire Hathaway to mention the shizzle in your nizzle and on the contrary, why Slim Jims aren’t being hawked by an iconic Clorox mom.

This is, quite possibly, the most important consideration as you determine whether profanity has a place in your communication repertoire.  Know who you are and know before you go. That makes the process of building your audience and understanding them a boatload easier.

Know Your Audience

It’s the part B of the equation: whom are you trying to reach? I’m looking for other upbeat, short-fused, irreverent souls like myself who are out to make a difference on this big blue sphere. If you ask yourself about your ideal audience (and honestly), the question of using profanity will pretty much answer itself. Brands looking to build community have to be a part of the community they wish to create. That means adopting a vernacular that those people will find familiar. And yes, sometimes that means dropping a word or two that others might find uncomfortable.

Embrace Offense

Words have incredible force, no matter how few letters they contain. I spoke at the onset about hate mail, something I’ve come to love and cherish. Here’s the bottom line: no matter whether you use profanity or not, people are going to take offense at something you have to say. What brands have to understand is that not everyone is their target customer and if you tick a few people off along the way, that’s okay!

There are few things in this world that have the ability to polarize an audience like politics and profanity. In your personal life, you have your views. Brands should have views and voices as well. Don’t be hypocritical – we think it’s jazzy when we hear bleeped-out lyrics slip through our car speakers as the latest pop ditty plays from the radio. In my opinion, radio stations do a half-baked job of walking that middle-of-the-road line: we all know what the lyrics are, and bleeping just makes them seem more taboo. I’m sure radio stations get more hate mail than anyone, but here’s where there’s a lesson to be learned: you’re never going to please everyone and there’s always the option to (gasp) change the channel.

The Consequences

A public relations colleague of mine has consequences down-pat. During media training with new clients, she talks about roadkill. You’re safe on the left shoulder…the right shoulder. Wander out into the middle of the road? You’re going to get killed. Successful brands pick a ditch to die in. This applies not just to the decision to use profanity in your communications, but to communications in general. Middle of the road voices fade into the ether while outspoken ones – ones with distinct personalities – shine brightly. Profanity is a character trait of a more comprehensive branding strategy, not a defining characteristic.

Sure, you might find some prospective audience members peeved about your choice of words. That’s fine – they’ll go elsewhere. But along with this exodus, you’ll find an influx of advocates who are picking up what you’re putting down. For brands that have to justify messaging to a larger internal audience, it goes back to personality. The voice you use online might not be how your CEO sounds in the boardroom, but if it’s true to the personality of your brand and product, no one is going to argue with the results that a powerful online presence can create.

Go Bleeping Be Something, Would You?

While profanity can be clever, using it as a tool to get to where you need a brand to go is even smarter. There will always be the people who want to tune you out. Heck, I’m irritated that every time I get to partake in an In-N-Out Burger delight, there’s a Bible verse on the bottom of their cups. And while that’s not profanity, I consider it pretty ballsy. Yet, it doesn’t keep me from going back for something I dig – and perhaps your decision (or not) to use profanity in your brand will ultimately attract the right audience – and deter those who will be better served elsewhere.

Radian6 adds: What do you think? Agree or disagree? Is there a place for periodic profanity in your brand’s online profile? Please leave your thoughts and comments below!

In social media we talk a lot about being engaged or becoming an engaged brand. But engagement isn’t just for interacting with your customers. Engagement starts on day one of your social media training by making sure that as a group you are communicating clearly. But how in the world do you stay engaged internally and externally in ways that will work for you? Let’s take some time today to walk through a few things to keep in mind.

Talk about it
It might seem silly to have a discussion about being engaged, but the first place you need to start is figuring out the methods that will work best with your team. Have a conversation. Find out the ways your team likes to communicate, list the different ways you plan on communicating and about what. By starting the conversation early on everyone will have a voice on how to stay involved.

Write it down
We often talk about having an external playbook, which is basically a place to house everything you do as far as guidelines in the social media space. But what about internally? Have you ever considered recording everything you do as a team to communicate internally? Walking through the process of writing down the ways you communicate and encourage internal engagement may help to expose areas you are missing.

Don’t be afraid to change it up
Just like any good external engagement strategy, it’s important to keep your internal engagement strategy up to date and always shifting to your team’s needs. Try picking a monthly time to review the ins and outs of how you talk to each other.

What ways are you fostering internal engagement as your team learns and grows? What stumbling blocks have you hit a long the way and how did you overcome them as a team?

At Radian6 we live and breathe social media. Online interaction and sharing are a part of our daily lives. We share stuff related to our hobbies and personal passions, but it’s part of our role here to share as much, if not more, business-related content and connect with folks who are interested in social media monitoring and engagement and/or our platform.

When it comes to online engagement, we have loose guidelines and policies in place that we follow while we’re “on duty”, but since the social web never turns off, those guiding principles follow us even when the work day is done. All this is to say that, in our world, our social media engagement is significantly impacted and driven by our work.

The thing to recognize here is that we’ve consciously chosen this path early in the game. But, as time goes on and social media becomes deeply engrained in more corporate cultures, will the integration of these highly open communication channels take the fun out of it all, so to speak? Will we see a forced openness from widespread corporate social media adoption that (ironically) pushes us to be more private with our lives and controlled with our outreach?

If you’ve heard Radian6′s CEO Marcel Lebrun speak, you know that he often likens social media to email. When email first appeared on the scene the business world was in an uproar over how to integrate it into their processes and what it would do to business communication. Obviously, we can now confidently say that email is so deeply rooted in business communication that many of us wouldn’t know how to work without it. As a company, we strongly believe that social media will eventually become so much a part of business communication and collaboration that, much like email, we won’t know how to work without it.

The inherent difference between email and social media, though, is that email is relatively private by default. Okay, so maybe we accidentally hit the “Reply All” button once in awhile, which never feels good, but the very home email lives in is secure, whereas social is significantly open. With email, you can’t passively observe what your friends and acquaintances are doing this weekend; you have to actively be invited into that conversation.

Right now, for most of us, all these factors play into how we communicate on fairly separate personal and business levels. But as more of us are asked to engage in social media on behalf of our companies, or, at the very least, be aware that we’re representatives of the businesses we work for, these factors will play into how we communicate on every level, and the lines between personal social media engagement and professional social media engagement will blur.

This begs the question: Will we start to pull back as we’re asked to speak more? And if so, what will that mean for our quest for transparency? How will that impact the work we’re doing to better reach our customers and garner their attention? What say you?

I was eavesdropping on a fascinating conversation last week with some incredibly smart media makers, including Julien Smith, Chris Brogan, Hugh McGuire and Mitch Joel.

[Pause now to go and subscribe to Mitch's podcast and other brilliances over at Six Pixels of Separation. I'll wait.]

They were discussing the future of media and how, in particular, print publication and consumption of the written word is evolving in the face of social communication. Each of them was drawing on examples from their own experience about why they felt reading, writing, and publishing was changing, and how. Do listen to the episode; some amazing insights in there.

At the end of the show, Mitch put a challenge to the crew: stop talking in terms of “I” and start looking at things outside personal perspective. There’s interesting implications in that challenge.

Personal Perspective
That’s what we have to draw from. I can only make statements and observations about things from my perspective because, well, that’s the one I have.

I can *speculate* about what it might be like to look at something from a different point of view. But I’m not sure there’s a way to completely remove the personal lens. True objectivity, by the very nature of human intelligence, is impossible.

You can do everything possible to remove or downplay bias itself, but the fact is that every observation comes from a distinct and singular point of view, regardless of how well we attempt to level that difference. You can only consider what the view might look like through someone else’s eyes. You can never experience it for yourself.

The Value in Shifting Viewpoints
What I realized is that Mitch hit on something that’s been nagging at me for years in terms of the way we were taught to communicate as brands.

We characterize our brands in the terms in which we’d like others to see us. We craft a vision, or an idealized perspective of our brand, hoping that others might be influenced or intrigued by that viewpoint. Maybe see things our way. We even give them things like taglines, or brand attributes, or magic marketing terms.

But social communication and the power that companies now hold to capture the conversations around their brands changes all of that. Brands aren’t viewed from a singular viewpoint (they really never have been), and now that brand is a composite of everything. As David Alston is fond of saying, a brand is now the sum of *all* of the conversations that take place around it. Branding isn’t myopic any longer. And that multi-faceted perspective is searchable, shareable, and visible to the world at large.

So while I still think you can’t necessarily completely immerse yourself in someone else’s perspective, there are massive amounts of information out there today that allow you to at least *observe* and absorb that perspective, in the words of the people that impact and drive your brand.

Another reason listening is so important: hearing how the community is describing you, in their own unedited words, so you can learn from their perspective. As a brand, it’s the ultimate evolution from looking from the inside out, to seeing things from the outside in. Putting the illustration of your brand in the hands of the people that know it best: the people that interact with it every day. What insights that can give.

What say you?

Image credit: S.Su