Joanne | Griot Communications

Want deeper creative connections? Ditch the bio, share your story

Leave a Comment / Uncategorized / Joanne

When you’re balancing a creative practice with funding deadlines, commissions, and trying to get your work seen, it’s tempting to take the quickest route possible. You copy and paste the same bio you’ve used a dozen times. It lists your accomplishments, awards, performances, residencies. It’s what a promoter, grant officer, or collaborator expects to see. […]

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10 must-dos before launching your stand-out brand

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Are you ready to launch your brand and business? Whether you’re building your brand from scratch, looking spruce up your existing website, you’re incorporating a new service or growing your business, you don’t want to get caught in the headlights. I’ve put together a list of 10 things to do beforehand to ensure your brand

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What Inventing Anna tells us about authentic storytelling

1 Comment / Uncategorized / Joanne

A few months ago I watched Inventing Anna, the Netflix true-crime docu-series that illustrates well the dangers of constructing a bloated personal brand fuelled by deception. It opens with the face of the fake German heiress, Anna Delvey-Sorokin (played by Julia Garner), plastered on the cover of Manhattan Magazine, as it runs through the printing press. Cut to her

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Are you making the most of your brand story?

Leave a Comment / Storytelling, Storytelling / Joanne

In a time where most of our interactions are mediated by a screen, what we’re craving most is an authentic human connection with brands that we trust. Here’s what I’ve learned about the power of storytelling that can supercharge your brand story. We were a dozen wanna-be storytellers in a circle, steeling ourselves for those

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How to overcome your writing monster

Leave a Comment / Content writing, Copywriting, Storytelling, Website copy / Joanne

About three months ago I was commissioned by the Community Programme Manager at the Old Royal Naval College to write a poem for an exhibition uncovering the history of Black British mariners in Greenwich. It wasn’t completely out of the blue. We’d been meeting up during the summer for socially-distanced walks to share, among

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Vitamin or painkiller?

Leave a Comment / Copywriting, Storytelling / Joanne

A few months ago I dug out my blister pack of vitamin D supplements that had been languishing in my bathroom cabinet for, well, years. I’d heard the initial reports that black and brown people are 4x more likely to die of COVID-19. And I listened to the advice from the NHS to take

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How to connect with your audiences in times of crisis

Leave a Comment / Blog, Content writing, Copywriting, Storytelling, Website copy / Joanne

If developments last week around attempts to contain the spread of the Coronavirus have taught us anything about communications, it?s how a sudden change in context can have a massive impact on the way we connect. I?ve been reflecting on this in my recent work with a client to help them develop a content

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5 ways to slay your blog writing: keep doing the writing

Leave a Comment / Content writing / Joanne

You’ve done your outline. You’ve done your research. You have an idea of your audience and how you want to solve their problem. It’s time to get to the writing. For some people this will be the most challenging part. I’m not gonna lie, it does require the most time and effort. But I want

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Planning: your blog’s new best friend

Leave a Comment / Content writing / Joanne

Let me tell you about a time when planning saved my life. I’d used various planning tools to help me in my communications and marketing roles, but it wasn’t until I was training to be an English teacher for speakers of Other Languages that the power of planning really came home to me. We were

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Finding your voice

Leave a Comment / Blog, Content writing / Joanne

In today?s digital marketplace everyone has a voice, and everyone?s using it. So how can we, as entrepreneurs and business owners looking to grow our brands, differentiate ourselves and make our voices heard – especially when there are so many others out there doing the exact same thing that we are? The way to do

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