Danny    Thompson,    Freelance    Copywriter

I’m not perfect. Neither are you. Our customers know this, and we know that they know.

So, what do we do about it?

For one thing, we stop trying to present this perfectionist image of you. I’ve said for a long time that no one cares about you. They only care about their own problems. They know you’re not perfect, so when they see that slick persona you’re putting on the screen, there is something incongruous there.

Look, the whole reason people started advertising was to reach a whole lot of people with a message. Because the space came at a premium, that message needed to be short. Easily understood. It needed to grab attention. And it needed to persuade them to take action. Now. Because who knew when you’d get a second chance.

Then TV came along. There were three channels. And by the 1950s everyone had one. You were guaranteed an audience. So, rather than urge them to action to BUY NOW(!), you could hit them with egregious repetition until they couldn’t think about that problem without thinking about your product. Buying your product was a conditioned response.

Branding was born. And still, space came at a premium. So commercials got smaller and grew in frequency.

People talk about the fracturing of the media with the advent of 15, then 30 and then 500 channels as the death knell of advertising. But it wasn’t. It actually enabled marketers to hone in on their targets with more precision. You couldn’t reach everyone anymore…but few of us actually needed to.

No, the problem for advertisers is the Net. And it’s not even that it’s fractious and uncontrollable. The problem is that we’re looking at it the wrong way. Companies have grown so adept at advertising—it’s so second-nature—that we’ve forgotten how to actually communicate. Genuine conversation with our buyers is so foreign and makes us so uncomfortable, we confuse it with weakness. We call it “unprofessional.” We ignore the conversation going on around us—about us.

Which is sad. Because online, space is not at a premium. Let me repeat that:

Online, space is not at a premium. In fact, it’s free. You can pay more to dress it up if you like…but at it’s purest and most basic, there is no limit to how much you can say without spending a dime.

But what do you do with all that space? If it’s not short and clever and punchy, why would they read what we have to say?

Simple: because what you have to say MEANS something.

Of course, if you don’t have anything to say that MEANS something…you’re in trouble. If you aren’t passionate about something that matters to others, then you aren’t going to move them. And people right now are more demanding than ever that your processes and policies (and not just your products) match their worldview.

As I mention on Business & Blogging:

“People aren’t settling for making decisions in a vacuum anymore…and they don’t have to. 15 minutes with their favorite search engine will give them all the information they need to come to a conclusion, one way or the other.”

They’re going to be looking at you. And if you’re not part of the conversation, their conclusion is going to be in someone else’s hands. How’s that for weakness? How’s that for unprofessional.

The point is, if you don’t stand for something, you’re irrelevant. Period. Something that goes deeper than “We believe in quality! In our people! In excellent service!” (you’re not fooling anyone). Don’t just stand there. Take a stand.

Your public is waiting.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 7th, 2008 at 11:00 am and is filed under Business Blogging, Success, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.