The Brilliant Blog

Are you still reading? Unfortunately, those opening words often cause readers’ eyes to glaze over.

This time of year, many companies are working on their annual reports, one important element of which is the “Dear Shareholder” letter. The purpose of this letter is to summarize the past year, highlight key milestones and preview what’s ahead. The challenge is to tell a story that is compelling, engaging and most importantly, inspires confidence in the organization. Not an easy task, but keeping a few important best practices in mind can greatly improve your “Dear Shareholder” letter:

• Be concise – This seems to be a huge challenge for many companies. Yes, it’s tough to summarize an entire year’s performance in a brief letter. But remember – let the letter serve as a summary of performance, and get into more detail in later sections of your annual report. Although there’s no hard and fast rule, the best examples we’ve seen keep their letter to approximately 1,000 – 1,500 words. Take a look at Genentech’s shareholder letter – the company conveyed its story in two pages and went into greater detail in other sections of the annual report.
• Provide guideposts along the way – Even 1,000 words is a LOT of content. Break it up with bolded headlines that help guide the reader through your story. A nice summary paragraph or pull quotes can also help carry the reader along and ensure they are absorbing the content. Gilead included a summary paragraph right off the bat, so even if a reader went no further, they would leave with a sense of the company’s progress.
• Use a conversational tone and clear language – Yes, most of your readers are investors, but keep in mind that lots of other stakeholders will be reading this – including consumers, the media and anyone who is interested in learning more about your company. Pfizer did a great job of capturing their CEO’s voice and telling the company’s story in clear language.
• Design matters – Generous use of whitespace, graphics, pull quotes and paragraph breaks can make a big difference. Trust your designers to create a layout that will draw in readers. And take advantage of those graphics and pull quotes to reinforce your most important messages. Both Gilead and Pfizer did a nice job of balancing text with white space, graphics and pull quotes.
• Don’t be afraid to get creative – No, we can’t all be Warren Buffet. But as communicators, it’s our responsibility to push for a bit creativity, even in something as classically corporate as a shareholder letter. Rather than a traditional “Dear Shareholder” letter, Adidas included a Q&A-style interview with their CEO. It was a great way to keep the letter light and reflect the CEO’s voice.

Are you working on your company’s annual shareholder letter? What challenges have you run into? What are you doing differently this year? Let us know in the comments below.

@annmelinger

What do pirates have to do with writing skills? Everything, if you’re an organization known as 826 Valencia. Founded by author Dave Eggers (one of my favorites) and educator Nínive Calegari in 2002, 826 Valencia is a San Francisco-based nonprofit that helps advance kids’ literacy skills by providing after school tutoring, workshops and writing-based field trips.

826 Valencia’s writing lab is located, appropriately enough, at 826 Valencia Street in San Francisco, and here’s where the pirates get involved: to access the lab, you enter through a pirate supply store. What does one find in such a store? Everything you’d need to be a working pirate, of course, like peg legs, ropes, lard, eye patches, glass eyes and messages in bottles. It may sound silly, but the pirate supply store actually makes money, 100 percent of which benefits 826 Valencia. It also provides a fun, inviting atmosphere where kids can relax, get creative and enjoy the process of writing.

Brilliant Ink is a proud supporter of the work 826 Valencia is doing in the San Francisco community. In addition to sponsoring events, we’ll also be volunteering with the organization throughout 2010, and will provide updates about our experiences on the Brilliant Blog.

Are you interested in getting involved? Visit www.826valencia.org to find out how you can donate time or money. If you’re not in the San Francisco area, check out 826 National, which operates similar programs in Ann Arbor, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and Seattle.     

In the meantime, here’s an inside look at 826 Valencia: 

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-S2ee9fNBk

@lizkelly

After a restful holiday break, everyone is back to work (hooray, I think). With that in mind, doesn’t it sometimes seem like Friday is taking forever to arrive? Here’s a little something that we usually do on Fridays to inspire you to finish the week strong – a bunch of our favorite words. As always, don’t hesitate to send us some of your favorite words in the comments section below. And don’t worry; Friday will be here before you know it!

@janni10

braggadocious – overly proud, bragging in excess
taciturn – inclined to silence
voluble – characterized by a ready and continuous flow of words, talkative
mephitic – offensive to the smell
vim – lively or energetic spirit
multifarious – having many different parts, elements, forms
pugnacious – inclined to quarrel or fight readily
milquetoast – a very timid, unassertive, spineless person
vicissitude – regular change or succession from one thing to another
panacea –  a remedy for all diseases, problems, or evils; a cure-all

“For last year’s words belong to last year’s language, and next year’s words await another voice.” – T.S. Eliot

Happy Friday and Happy New Year, y’all! Here’s to the words, language and voices of 2010.

@lizkelly

Happy 2010! I hope everyone enjoyed the holiday season as much as I did. I got a few cool “word nerd” gifts for the holidays this year, and I thought it would be fun to share them with you. This probably would have been more helpful before the holidays, but maybe they can inspire some future gift ideas for your favorite word nerds (or just entertain you for a few minutes).

Poetry for Your Table

This desk toy lets you create “poems” by using blocks printed with various words. Check out one of my very first tabletop poems above – and yes, I know it’s not very good. There’s a reason I’m not a poet.

Pictorial Webster’s

The entries in this dictionary are all drawings, which gives it a great old school feeling. Plus it’s just fun to look at, and it’s educational. Did you know bacon comes from this part of the pig? I didn’t.

Thanks and Have Fun Running the Country

This compilation of kids’ letters to President Obama was compiled by McSweeney’s literary journal and 826 Valencia, a San Francisco nonprofit that teaches literacy skills to children. There are some fantastic quotes throughout this little book. Here’s a sample from Catherine, age 6: “If I were president, I would tell people to not talk too much. It wastes time.” We’ll be partnering with 826 Valencia throughout the year to volunteer and sponsor some local events – more on this later.

New Anthology of Modern Poetry

My brother-in-law received this, not me, but I had to include it because I thought it was so cool. This is a 1938 edition that originally belonged to his step-grandmother, and it’s full of her handwritten notes and check marks beside all the poems she read.

Did you get any fun word-nerdy gifts this holiday season that you’d like to share? Leave us a comment below. Here’s to a brilliant 2010!

@lizkelly

In case you couldn’t already tell, we’re taking a bit of a hiatus from the Brilliant Blog while we enjoy the holiday season.  Here’s to a brilliant 2010!

The Brilliant Ink team – Liz, Janice, Ann and Tom

Astra Women’s Business Alliance is a network of women-owned businesses, corporate and government agency supplier diversity professionals and other partner organizations dedicated to advancing women in business. The name “Astra” comes from the Latin motto “ad astra per aspera,” which means “rising to the stars through difficulties.”

Astra offers a wealth of resources to women-owned businesses and companies who are looking for diverse suppliers, but their web site was outdated and in need of a makeover. That’s where we stepped in. Brilliant Ink provided a soup-to-nuts overhaul of the web site content, while web design partner Kennedy Consulting Services gave the site a sleek, new look.

From a content perspective, the revamped web site now includes member success stories, videos, a reading center, details about the many resources and events Astra offers, plus a whole lot more. Most importantly, the site now includes a consistent narrative about the value Astra provides to its members.

As a certified women-owned business, we’re proud to be an Astra member, and even prouder of the ways in which they’re helping women succeed. We’re also looking forward to continuing work with the organization next year as official editors of their new member e-zine, Capella. You can learn more about Astra at their brand-spanking new web site, www.astrawba.org.

@lizkelly

Have you heard of Yammer yet? Think of it as Twitter for business – it’s an online, information-sharing platform that enables employees across your organization to connect with each other.

Its popularity seems to be growing – according to an IABC study, of four fifths of study respondents who said their organization is using social media for internal communications, around 20 percent were already using Yammer.  Another 29 percent reported that they anticipate using it in the future. So if you haven’t heard much about it yet, just wait!  

What exactly is all the yammering about? We’ve been doing a little research to find out how companies are using it and came across a couple of interesting examples:

• Qualcomm is using Yammer to help employees connect across divisions and geographic regions. They say this allows better collaboration because it enables employees to find new collaborators they may otherwise have never met.
•  Bogler Laboratory at The University of Texas  M. D. Anderson Cancer Center keep collaborative discussions going via Yammer to help them successfully carry out their research.
• Alcatel Lucent uses Yammer to host organized conversations (similar to Twitter hashtag conversations), and recently hosted a live Q&A featuring an outside expert who answered employees’ questions.

 Are you using Yammer? If so, how? What do you think of it? Leave us a note in the comments below.

 @lizkelly

Hi everyone. It’s Janice Smith Collins, Brilliant Ink’s newest employee. I’m so excited to be here, and equally thrilled to be joining the conversation on our Brilliant Blog.

I’ve spent a number of years working in communications in lots of different industries, especially in technology and also financial services. Considering the mountain of government hearings and discussion about regulation (or not so much) in those arenas, I’m fascinated by the recent FDA hearings on online drug marketing and social media.

In a nutshell, the FDA recently listened to some 70 presentations over the course of two days from a broad range of representatives including a number major pharma companies, online search/content giants Google and Yahoo!, and a bevy of others from industry and public associations, communications and marketing firms, and more. (Now that’s one heck of a PowerPoint deck!)

Here are a few good summaries on what was covered at the hearings:

• FiercePharma
• Common Sense Media 

Or to see a bunch of general buzz and commentary on the topic, check out FDASM.com, self-described as “Everything about the FDA, Internet, and Social Media.”

The FDA will continue to accept public testimony on this topic until February 28, 2010 and then come back with a guideline (though no specific timeline has been set). To see a transcript of the hearings, as well as instructions on how to submit comments on the testimonies, visit the FDA website.

We’ll be interested to see where the FDA lands on this topic. Have thoughts on what the guidelines should include? Let us know in the comments section below…

@janni10

We recently came across a blog post about some of the best albums for beating writer’s block. I have to admit that I only know a few of the albums the blog author lists, but it got me thinking about listening to music when writing. Sometimes it can be helpful and sometimes it’s distracting, but if I’m working against a tough deadline or feeling a little scattered there’s nothing better than a little classical music to help me relax and focus. I thought I’d do an informal poll of my team to see if they like to listen to anything while working – here’s what they had to say:

• Ann – “I like music with no words to distract me from the task at hand. My top two albums are probably Miles Davis ‘Kind of Blue’ and George Gershwin ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ (guess I like blue).”
• Janice -  “I don’t listen to music but I like to have NPR on in the background when I write. It must be all those years of working in cubes and hearing other people’s conversations around me.”
• Tom – “Two words: Foo Fighters.”        

As for me, my favorite albums to listen to while writing are two movie soundtracks: “Legends of the Fall,” with music by James Horner, and “Last of the Mohicans,” with music by Trevor Jones and Randy Edelman.

Does listening to music while writing distract you or inspire you? What’s your favorite music to listen to while writing or working on the computer? Let us know in the comments!

@lizkelly