This Tone Analyzer Could Help You Sound Like Your Favorite Publisher. Brands now understand that the voice and tone of their publications will impact audience development. How do they know if they should model their voice after Vox or The Economist? (John is a former Vox writer, but he knows nothing about the complexities of insurance.) tone analyzer Building on the work of earlier psychologists who extracted nearly 18,000 words from the dictionary that related to human personality traits, Tupes and Christal reduced this list and lumped the remaining terms into five key groups based on recurring factors. Based on these articles, Vice scores 0.79 for expressiveness, 0.26 for formality, 0.28 for sociability, 0.15 for empathy, and 0.32 for emotion. tone analyzer Using the Big Five personality key, here’s what we can deduce from these scores: Expressiveness 0.79: A high score for expressiveness suggests Vice’s writing is imaginative and that writers are willing—and allowed—to take risks. The writer score Once we go through this same process for creatives, we can pair writers to a brand publication based on that company’s desired tone. It’s worth noting that the point of the tone analyzer isn’t to just find writers with the same voice. 1 Dillon’s formality, sociability, and emotion scores were significantly different.
A few days ago, I was on the phone with a marketer from a
popular appliance company when I heard an unusual request:
“We want to sound like Vice.”
As a content strategist at Contently, I hear this type of
editorial ambition all the time: Brand X wants to be like Vice,
Vox, The New York Times. Brands now understand that the voice and
tone of their publications will impact audience development. They
know that an influx of branded content across the web means their
voice and tone are often the most important competitive
differentiators.
Yet one of the biggest challenges companies face is deciding
what they want to sound like. How do they know if they should model
their voice after Vox or The Economist? Are they more
research-focused like The New York Times or listicle-based like
BuzzFeed? Even if brands decide on a tone, their publications can
still struggle to staff the right creative team to bring this
decided voice to life.
To address some of these identity issues, we built a tone
analyzer at Contently. Here’s how we began.
The tricky business of tone
If you’ve ever been in an argument, you know that tone can
determine the meaning of a person’s words and impact your ability
to find a resolution. Tone is what we use to interpret if “I’m
fine” actually means someone is upset.
In a single piece of writing, tone can be
described as the writer’s attitude or approach to the subject
matter. It can express a particular mood, feeling, or character.
For an entire publication, tone establishes the ethos of a company
and the values of its authors.
Sometimes, it’s easiest to recognize characteristics of tone and
style when they’re not quite right. Many brands come to Contently
because their previous efforts to sound authoritative and
professional come off as condescending or detached. Others want to
develop a more approachable personality if they have a reputation
for being unrelatable.
When deciding how to move forward with tone, our clients often
reference a blue-chip publication they want to emulate, but whose
editorial focus has little or nothing to do with what they offer.
For instance, a company that sells insurance may want to sound like
a notoriously colloquial political mag.
When that dissonance shows up, brand marketers need to be able
to
give guidance to their creative teams. Especially when working
with freelancers who write for a variety of publications, it is
crucial to prep creatives on the right tone for their audience.
Articulating that they want to be more Vox, less Wall Street
Journal is an important distinction—and one that writers will
understand.
But the result of these high-level instructions too often leads
to a road of strategic dead-ends. Lofty comparisons are full of
paradoxical concepts that make it hard to publish. When a
consumer-packaged goods brand wants to sound like an episode of
Last Week Tonight With John Oliver in its video product
launch, or an insurance company wishes to capture the je ne sais
quoi of Real Simple, what does this mean for the people creating
and measuring the impact of this content?
Time and again, there is a disconnect between creatives who have
the right tone but the wrong expertise. (John is a former Vox
writer, but he knows nothing about the complexities of
insurance.)…
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