Brand voice guide

Produce one voice guide that a drafting agent loads before every post and a reviewer uses as the approval checklist. The guide is built from what the company has already published, not from a blank page.

Assumptions

• The company has some published material: a website, at least one long-form asset (guide, white paper, deck) and some social posts.
• One channel is in scope at a time. Start with the channel the company posts on most, usually LinkedIn.
• A person at the company will confirm the open items the guide raises.

Inputs

If the social channel needs a login, ask the person to sign in. Never enter credentials yourself.

Settings to confirm before drafting

Ask these first. Each one changes the output.

1. Spelling variety. Match what the company already publishes, even when it differs from your own default. Mixed spelling across posts reads as careless.
2. Units and date style for posts.
3. Channels in scope.
4. Format and location of the finished guide, so it lives where the drafting agent can read it.

Method

1. Read everything before writing anything. Note recurring phrases, sentence length, how the company talks about competitors, how it signs off, and which posts got the most engagement.
2. Write the positioning in one paragraph: who it is for, what it is, how it differs, and why the team is credible. Follow it with the one belief every post should reinforce.
3. Map the audiences. For each one, what they care about and what the company leads with.
4. Define four to six voice traits. Each trait gets a one-line meaning, a "sounds like" line and a "not like" line. Take the "sounds like" lines from the company's own best writing wherever possible.
5. Set a starting content mix by theme, with a review point after 90 days.
6. Write the post mechanics: opening line, length, structure, call to action, link placement, hashtags, emoji and exclamation policy, how to name founders and products.
7. Choose three to five on-tone examples. Use the company's strongest published posts first, lightly corrected, then write one or two new drafts to cover themes the published posts miss. Explain why each one works.
8. Write one or two off-tone examples. Invent them. Never use a real post as the bad example, because the guide gets shared. Cover the two most likely failures: generic hype, and overclaiming or attacking a competitor. List the specific reasons each fails.
9. Add a "drift to watch" section listing patterns in recent published posts that pull away from the voice: stock openers, filler bullets, typos. Keep it factual and short.
10. Build the words to use and avoid table with a reason for every row. Reasons are what let an agent handle words that are not on the list.
11. Write the agent rules: human approval before publishing, a source for every statistic, no customer names without permission, no unannounced pricing, dates or terms, no criticism of named competitors, approved wording only for certifications and safety or regulatory claims.
12. Add a pre-publish checklist a reviewer can run in under a minute.
13. List open items for the company to confirm. Look specifically for inconsistent product or program names across sources, unconfirmed taglines, unit or spelling mismatches, and claims that need approved wording.

Use templates/voice-guide-template.md for the structure and examples/example-voice-guide.md for the expected depth.

Hard rules

• Never invent proof points, customers, statistics or certifications. Quote only what the sources state, and name the source.
• Never put a real post in the off-tone section.
• Never include pricing, funding, order volumes or internal program terms, even if a source mentions them.
• Keep the guide to what a drafter needs. If a section would not change a draft, cut it.

Outputs

• One voice guide document in the agreed format and location, versioned and dated.
• A short summary to the person: what the guide is built from, the drift found, and the open items that need their decision.

Verify

• Read the finished document back from its saved location and check formatting survived conversion (tables, bold labels, special characters such as emoji in the off-tone examples).
• Check the guide against its own rules: spelling variety, no em dashes, product names consistent throughout.