How to announce a partnership
Partnership posts are the most reliably empty announcements published, and the cause is structural rather than editorial. Two companies have to approve every sentence, and the only sentences both will approve say nothing.
Two owners, and the surviving sentences are the empty ones
This is the only announcement written by a committee that spans two organisations, each with a legal reviewer and a marketing lead who did not choose the other. Anything specific enough to be useful is specific enough for one side to object to, so the editing process systematically removes information and keeps adjectives. That is why so many of these posts read identically regardless of who signed them. The way out is to decide, before drafting, what a user is now able to do that they could not do last week, and to protect that one sentence through review. If no such sentence exists, the arrangement is a logo swap, and a logo swap announced as a partnership is read as one by everybody who has seen a few.
The rule for this one
One sentence on what each side does, one on what a user can now do, and one on what has not changed. Protect the middle sentence through review.
What the category publishes, and what the rule produces.
The first draft is a composite written to match the register the ranking pages for this query actually publish. It quotes no company and no real post. The second obeys the rule above and nothing else, so anything that changes between them is the rule doing it.
The version everyone posts
We are thrilled to announce our strategic partnership with Acme. Together we will unlock new opportunities and deliver even greater value to our customers. This collaboration brings together two industry leaders with a shared commitment to innovation and excellence. Stay tuned for what is coming.
The version that obeys the rule
Acme handles invoicing. We handle the brand work. From today you can push a finished campaign into Acme without exporting a folder of files first. Nobody pays anybody for this and neither company is reselling the other. If you use only one of the two, nothing changes for you.
It never says what the two companies do together. Strip the two names out and the post is indistinguishable from any other partnership announcement, which means it carries no information at all.
7 of 10 measured dimensions moved.
Both drafts were read by the engine behind our free brand voice generator. It is arithmetic over the text rather than a judgement, which is the reason it is used here: every figure below can be checked by counting the draft printed above it.
| Dimension | Before | After | Moved |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sentences | 4 | 5 | Yes |
| Words | 45 | 49 | Yes |
| Average sentence, in words | 11.2 | 9.8 | Yes |
| Longest sentence, in words | 15 | 17 | Yes |
| Contractions per 100 words | 0 | 0 | No |
| Speaks to the reader | No | Yes | Yes |
| First person (we, our, us) | 4 | 1 | Yes |
| Second person (you, your) | 0 | 3 | Yes |
| Vocabulary richness, out of 100 | 84 | 84 | No |
| Contains a stock phrase | No | No | No |
Read across all fifteen moments the pattern is sharper than any single page: the hub has the corpus numbers.
What earns the post
- The concrete mechanism, at the level of a button, a file or a login.
- Whether money changes hands, which readers assume and rarely ask.
- What happens for somebody who uses only one of the two products.
When not to post it at all
Skip it when the arrangement is an intention rather than a shipped thing. Announcing a partnership before it does anything sets a clock running that you will be asked about later.