Sounding Like Stephen

I’m a big fan of this guy:

Stephen Colbert delivers killer comedic punchlines, whilst maintaining relevance in his edutainment sketches on the Late Show and previously the Colbert Report. The appeal and virality of his shows are primarily down to his biggest asset… his personality. His sarcasm, humor and wit all pander to his targets audience’s funny bone. It is a special combination of news with jokes or maybe jokes with news. And as we have seen with so many examples this semester of how difficult it is to consistently translate personality from a in-person, audio/video format to a written one, Stephen does it well.

His authenticity and personality translates very well from Youtube to Twitter. When reading his posts on Twitter, his (or his Twitter handler - you never know these days) writing style matches his tonality and on-show delivery, so much so that when reading his tweets it like one of those movies where a character is reading a letter and there is narration in background with the writer reading it. This is something a lot of us can learn from.

In addition, Stephen does a good job of continuous engagement. He achieves this through engaging in “conversations” with his audience and giving them outlets to interact with him.

Moving forward, I will start to emulate a couple of these aspects to my Facebook and LinkedIn game to develop a personality, definitely not as funny as Stephen, but nonetheless an attempt at witty, humorous and insightful. In addition, I have never really ran any polls with content that I’ve shared on social media. It would be interesting to see if I get any responses. Stay tuned!