I once worked with a guy who was the king of earworms. Every once in a while, he’d try to see how long it would take him to get the whole office humming the same tune. He’d either walk down the hallway a few times, humming a few bars, or maybe he’d just scrawl a few potent lyrics on the whiteboard in a few conference rooms.

That’s all it took, usually. And before lunchtime, we were all tapping our feet to the same jaunty beat.

We all have the power to drive change like that. The trick is to decide what song it is you want to put in people’s heads, and then find a way to get it out into the world.

The Style Guide Trap

Content folk will often turn to their style guide to try to get people in their organization all singing the same tune. Usually when a company gets around to creating a house style guide, it’s because they’ve discovered they have too many different people creating too much disparate content, and they want it to sound more like they’re all singing the same song. Style guides are widely considered to be great tools for getting your team to start doing just that.

So why do we have such a hard time getting people to use them?

Maybe you’ve already noticed that the only people who actually read and use most style guides are the people who created them in the first place. Yeah, it’s really just us. No matter how many times we urge other people to check the style guide, most of them don’t.

And I truly don’t blame them. The fact of the matter is that most people don’t like or even understand style guides—what’s in them, how to use them, why they even exist. Telling people to “use the style guide” is a bit like telling me I should keep a scientific calculator next to me at all times. Even if I were to follow such bizarre advice, I wouldn’t know what to use it for, or even how. Honestly, its very presence would stress me out.

This is how most people feel when we remind them there are “writing rules” they need to follow. To most people, these rules are strange, oppressive, arbitrary, and unclear. The very fact that they exist at all stresses them out.

That’s why, when we present ourselves as the Keepers of the Writing Rules, we tend not to get invited to things. We’re a constant, visceral reminder that there are rules to this whole content situation, and that most people are probably breaking twenty of them at a time. Nobody likes having that person at their party, or meeting, or brainstorming session—that person is, frankly, a drag. Most people aren’t at all sure what we’d have to offer besides sitting there and correcting everyone’s grammar at will, which is a downer—and not even helpful most of the time.

So a major step in gaining control of our destiny has to be finding a different way of getting people to sing along with our song. And that means we need to learn to let go of our beloved style guides.

Nobody Cares about Your Style Guide

Style guides are not teaching tools. They’re sets of rules. People don’t like to follow rules, because rules are not fun. But you know what’s extremely fun? Writing great content. The trouble is, most people don’t see the connection between the rules and the content.

Teaching other people to learn and apply the rules of writing is like insisting people learn to read musical notation instead of just helping them burst into song. You might know that it’s key to making a strong composition, but they’re pretty sure they’d rather skip right to singing a rock anthem at the top of their lungs.

They’re not wrong. That’s how people learn to love, support, and even make fantastic music themselves. You have to love it so much you can’t help dancing along. Do you know how many great musicians never learned to read music? Let’s start with Eddie Van Halen, Dave Grohl, Paul McCartney, Jimi Hendrix—shall I go on?

You need to find a creative way to get folks to sing along. The key is to find some lovable way to regularly get your song in front of them, all of the time. Whatever you can do routinely and do well—use that as a vehicle for your catchy style-guide tune. Some possibilities:

• Posters. Create a bunch of memorable posters for your office with visuals and text that show people what your voice and tone look like in action.
• Wallpaper. Create a series of delightful Zoom backgrounds for your distributed team. Replenish the supply often, so they never get stale.
• Internal newsletters. Never underestimate the power of an email newsletter, especially one that includes pictures of your adorable coworkers, their children, and their pets.
• Blog posts. Write about life at your company, profile some of your best customers, interview members of the leadership team.
• Instagram posts. Offer a peek into a day-in-the-life of a new employee, a user, the beloved barista who works down the street.
• Curated playlists. Use the power of music to quite literally get your team singing the same song.

If you look hard enough, you’ll find a format that works for you, your goal, and your company, too. Do something different, something that doesn’t exist today, for your team. If your company tends to wallow in words, use photography or illustrations to grab their attention and make them look up. If your company already has an internal newsletter or playlist, just start your own.

(And remember: you don’t have to ask permission to start humming in the hallways. Often the unofficial, underground, guerrilla marketing methods are best.)

It all depends on where your strengths lie, and what your organization will respond to. Just do whatever you think will work best in your world. I used to joke that the right batch of temporary tattoos could do the job, and I stand by that. Content is content. Come on. You’re good at this stuff.

And that’s the key, really. It has to be good. It has to be something people want to tune in to. They need to enjoy—love—it, want to sing it out loud in their car. Remember, this is meant to be their content rock ballad. Make them want to turn it up to eleven.

Raise Your Voice

When you start creating this catchy content, stay away from telling people about the rules at all—at this stage of things, at least. Don’t even make this content about content. Whatever vehicle you choose to get your message across, use it as a means to show good content in action, not to dissect how it was made. You’re trying to build a karaoke machine, not instruct the masses in musical theory. Make it look easy. Make it look fun.

I like to use an internal newsletter as my karaoke machine. But that’s just because (1) I love writing newsletters, and (2) I have the honor of writing one at my company. It’s called the WIN, which stands for Weekly Internal Newsletter, which is just what it is. Among other things, it’s meant to be a lovable earworm that promotes our fantastic culture—who we are and what we believe, honor, and support—which extends to our company voice and tone.

The WIN is simple and streamlined, lighthearted and fun. Because our house style is to create content that’s simple and streamlined, lighthearted and fun. That’s the song I want to get into everyone’s head.

Maybe your house style isn’t lighthearted and fun. Maybe your challenge instead is to get your organization to create clear, unbiased content without a glimmer of spark. That’s okay, too. You can demonstrate how clear, unbiased content doesn’t need to be boring (and, in fact, shouldn’t be—content can’t be clear if you’ve put your audience to sleep).

Maybe your company is already drowning in internal newsletters. That’s okay, too. Create content that those newsletters will want to include. Interview some employees. Profile some customers. Find a way to tell a story people will want to hear, and do it in a way that shows your house style in action. I do love an internal newsletter, and I put it to you that even if you have loads of them already, it’s quite possible yours will leave them all in the dust. So don’t knock it till you try it, is all I suggest.

It doesn’t even need to be that much of a lift. Here’s how it works for my newsletter:

1. Every Wednesday, I send out a quick reminder that everyone is invited to submit to the WIN. This is usually just a fun illustration that matches the season, or something positive and unifying going on in the world, like reminding everyone that they love rescue puppies, or springtime.
2. Other people in the company will respond with a link to something they wrote that they want to promote—usually something that’s just gone live on the company wiki. I don’t know about your company, but we live and breathe on our internal wiki. (If it’s not on the wiki, it didn’t happen.) So if somebody wants to make sure the thing they wrote on the wiki has a fighting chance of getting seen by everyone at the company, they send it in to the WIN.
3. I add the link to the WIN—I’ve imposed a fairly arbitrary limit of just nine items, tops—with some zippy copy to promote it.

This last step is the key ingredient of the WIN, often forgotten when people start their own internal newsletters: I don’t write any of the content that gets linked in the WIN. It’s purely an act of curation on my part. This radically trims down the amount of time I have to spend on it, and makes it much more a snapshot of the company at that moment in time. It’s not about me—it’s about the people around me. All I do is write the copy that entices readers to click through to the submitted wiki post. That’s it.

But that’s everything. Because, honestly, most people don’t click through. They just read my zippy copy. And that’s okay, too, because that copy is written relentlessly in our house style, voice, and tone. It’s brief, lighthearted, inclusive, optimistic, and fun. People read it, they get it, they internalize it over time.

And eventually, they realize that it has something they want.

What a Hero Wants

Remember: everybody at your company is a hero in their own story, too. And as we already know from crafting narratives, every hero has to want something.

What they want might not be to sound more like you (although they might say that when they email you after enjoying your catchy content for a few weeks or months). What they want is to reach that goal they have in their head. Hit their monthly sales target. Attract more great leads. Connect with customers more clearly. Win some executive buy-in. Writing in the voice and tone you’ve demonstrated is just a means to an end.

And what happens next, which absolutely will follow like night follows day, is that people very much want their content to sound more like that voice. They can’t put their finger on it, but they know their content doesn’t quite have that hook. And they want it to.

1. Does that sound too good to be true? I’ve seen it happen in all kinds of organizations, on all kinds of teams, in a wide variety of industries with different needs. I’ve seen it work for the dozens of people I’ve coached through the process.
2. We tend to forget—or at least grossly underestimate—that content created by someone who knows what they’re doing will stand out from the crowd. When a talented writer puts strong content in front of people who need it, those people will take notice. And they will want to learn how to capture those skills for themselves.

Have Fun Storming the Castle

Instead of hammering at the rules, you built an attractive Trojan horse for your style, voice, and tone. Now you’re quietly tiptoeing into everyone’s inbox (or whatever) and getting them to sing along to something they actually enjoy, all while you slowly, stealthily get your brand voice and, yes, even style rules stuck in their head. As long as it’s content they want to consume, they will start to internalize it, mimic it, and embrace it, en masse.

And that’s exactly what you wanted to happen when you started this whole thing. It’s all going according to plan.