Late last year I was doing a couple of day’s worth of workshops at a client’s site. As I waited in the foyer waiting to be shown to the seminar room on the first morning, I did what I normally did and read the various policies and statements of commitment on the walls. The sustainability policy said all the right things, but when I say all, I mean all – this A3 poster must have had a couple of thousand words on it.

As an experiment, I asked delegates in each session if they knew the policy, or had even seen the poster. Nobody had, except for a receptionist, who said she knew it was there because she sat looking at it every day and she thought she’d better before coming to the workshop.

It is well understood that presentations shouldn’t cause ‘death by bulletpoint’, but green communications doesn’t seem to have got past ‘death by poster’. I’m not a communications or marketing expert, but I believe very strongly that messages can and should be boiled down to a very simple message. The 140 character limit imposed by Twitter is a challenge, but perfectly achievable. And as us Twitter addicts do with shortened URLs, you can always append directions to a source of more information if the reader wants or needs it. But the headline needs to be sparky enough to attract attention.

So, keep it short and sweet – ideally less than 140 characters (like this).