Change

“You’ve never seen Alan?!,” my husband, Tom, asked me. “Alan” in this case is a Saturday Night Live sketch, but one that was “cut for time.”

So, it’s not Tamsen saying hi today, but Emily Hansel, Tamsen’s content coordinator and walking Red Thread Content Index. Today I’m dusting off my long-form writing skills to weave a Red Thread of how your Core Message, Core Case, and Core Story connect with the best practices in web design.

When you’ve got an approach, initiative, or offering you know will bring much-needed change, you also know you can’t do it alone. You need people to become invested emotionally and intellectually so they’ll invest the time, energy, and money to bring about the impact you imagine.

No one starts a change expecting it to fail. Whether you’re a leader of an organization that needs to change the way you do business or an innovator that wants to change how business gets done, you want—and maybe even need—that change to succeed.

The goal for a lot of my clients is to get people invested in their ideas and initiatives. Sometimes that’s an emotional or intellectual investment, sometimes that’s an actual investment (which requires the other two). Securing that investment requires written or spoken communication of some sort. After all, words are the currency of ideas.

My mouth is a dental paradise. Not for me, mind you, but for legions of dentists and orthodontists over the years, whose houses my mouth has helped renovate and whose children I helped put through school.

Welcome to the second-and-a-half installment in your step-by-step guide to building The Red Thread® of your message or content.

First things first: I’m not Tamsen. I’m Alex Denniston. I’m a senior strategist who often works with Tamsen to design messages for our founder and thought leader clients.

Three years ago, when I was mired in the midst of not-writing my last book, I asked my friend Ann Handley for advice. After all, she wrote a book called Everybody Writes.

You probably already know that “positioning” is key to creating any kind of change, whether it’s at the organizational or market level.