Are you ready for a fantastic 2017? What do you hope to achieve in the coming year with your message? I got a great book for Christmas by Chip and Dan Heath called Made to Stick. It’s a great book. And I’d recommend it to anyone who writes for an audience bigger than our families. How do you create memorable messages in the coming year?

Here are a couple of key concepts from the book to help you create better, stickier ideas in 2017. You can be more memorable messenger in the coming year!

I don’t recommend many books to my serving leaders communities, but you want to pick up a copy of this book before you start writing and sharing your ideas in the coming year. This book helps you and your ideas become more memorable. The authors share six core concepts that can help you create messages that stay with your readers and listeners for a long time.

In a social messaging-driven world, serving leaders need to create more powerful messages that impact people the moment they read them. These messages are designed to make it easy for your community to share repeatedly.  If you’re not ready for these secrets, come back next week when I share several technology trends that change our world in 2017. Now get out of here!!

That’s one of qualities they share in this book. Use unexpectedness as a tool to make yourself and your ideas more memorable. With people reading and being exposed to so many messages every day, it’s critical that you get at and keep your people’s attention. One of the best ways to do this is to be willing to do the unexpected. Be willing to take an opposite point of view. Be more provoking to get others’ attention. Be aware, you may become less memorable if you don’t think out your position completely.

It’s one of the qualities that should be used, but not too often or you can become a cliché. Clichés are not a positive way of being memorable.

The next quality I love of their’s is simplify to be memorable. For many of us, we write to fill space with our readers. They suggest that you invest the time to simplify your ideas more. With so many deadlines it’s easy to make our ideas more complex. If you learn to simplify your concepts, people are more likely to share them with others. Many times, we think complexity makes us look like we have a better handle on the material.

Simplifying your message makes your more memorable. It takes time to simplify our messages. This means we need to plan our topics in advance and work out what we want to share before we do. Simple is hard, but it can make a huge difference in how we impact others with our ideas. This is a great reason for having an editorial calendar for our writing and content creation.

Chip and Dan give several great ideas on how to make the complex simple. I ‘ve bought and given this book to my clients whose products are early in the product life cycle. The one with the simple message many times becomes the market leader based on how they share their stories with early adopter clients. Simple is a powerful tool in emerging technology markets.

Finally, want to be memorable. Learn how to tell better stories. I bet you already know the power of stories in making yourself memorable. We’ve talked about this several times over the past year. The question is how do you find the best story to make your point to a given audience. There are several ways memorable stories impact your listeners or readers.  The book takes you through several interesting scenarios that you may find fascinating on how to identify and build stories that stay with your audience. That is not enough today, they need to be sharable with others. The tips the Heaths’ share can help you with this idea.

Now that you have several new ideas that can help make you more memorable, it’s time to get a copy of Made to Stick by Chip Heath & Dan Heath for yourself. If you follow their advice, 2017 will be a very memorable year for you and your business.

Happy New Year! See you next week.