It has been a long five year break from this blog.
In the five years since my most recent post here (in 2012), I have learned a lot, and I have a lot to share. I also see that I have a lot of sprucing up to do. This old blog is a mess. The code is ancient, the design is a throwback, and it is about as mobile friendly as a dunk in the toilet. I will get to it soon.
While I was away, I have owned and operated the most charming bakery I ever imagined. I was fortunate to find many of you, dear readers from all over the world, walking through the door for a fantastic cup of coffee, an amazing pastry, and a fun chat. I thank you kindly for that patronage.
While I enjoyed the endeavors of these past five years very much, I have freed my body from those 90 hours per week on my feet in the bakery in exchange for a leisurely 90 hours per week on my rump at a computer.
For everybody I have missed, I have some awesome tales to tell about how social media meets brick and mortar. I look forward to catching up.
If you’ll still have me, this could be like one of those sweet movie scenes where they reconnect and have a great moment.
My grandmother is intelligent. She can grasp a complex concept if you communicate it nicely. If you insult her intelligence, she may turn into a vicious ninja.
My grandmother will turn 95 years old in a few weeks. In honor of my dear Grandma and other real-world people like her, I’m here to deliver a valuable reminder about effective marketing communications.
Let’s consider Grandma for a moment, and imagine how she communicates. She talks like a real person. She thinks and communicates in logical phrases. Grandma uses plain and simple language to make herself clear to others. Most people are a lot like Grandma in this respect. Most of them will also find themselves indifferent and even insulted if you try to talk over their heads.
I want to give you some yummy food for thought. That’s because “yummy food for thought” is more appetizing than “palatable incentive for continued exercitation of intellect”. Got it? Great … let’s dine!
What really got me thinking about this is my long and tedious research in the hunt for my next employer. It seems popular for companies to drone on with wordy hyperbole in their job descriptions. I suppose many people do that in their résumé, too. It is just one of those awkward formalities that has not adapted to the modern world quite yet.
Wordiness is like a dance to see who can sound smarter. Just read an average job description to understand why unemployment is so high. According to most job descriptions I’ve seen, it seems that companies can barely write a paragraph without floating in an extra 30 words of fluff to throw people off the real meaning. Here is an actual example of a job posting bullet point that I just found without looking very hard.
Organization and Efficiency – must have natural and impeccable organizational skills as well as the ability to multitask at a highly efficient level. Has proven experience working in a fast paced environment where quick and rational thinking was a daily requirement. Is nimble by nature and has proven experience systematically organizing their work and managing their time to maximize efficiency.
It seems that all they said was “We want an organized person who can keep up with a lot of things at once. They need to think fast, work fast, and prove a history of it.” Does it actually say anything more than that? If so, please explain it to me. They said it in 62 words and 399 characters, but my “less intelligent” version trimmed it down to 29 words and 136 characters.
Are you ready for the irony? This particular job listing is for a Marketing Director at a marketing company. This kind of language reminds me how often I see similar diarrhea-like communication in marketing.
Stop Abusing Grandmas!
Grandma and all those many people like her do not like it when you try to baffle them with frivolous words and phrases to try and seem smarter. If you want Grandma to like you, it is better to make her feel smart because she clearly understands and can relate to your ideas.
If you cannot make it easy and comfortable, Grandma is not going to become your biggest fan and brand advocate. It is also very unlikely that she is going to speak up and let you know what you’re doing wrong. After all, you have already done your best to show that you know it all.
I think the reason bad marketing communication makes grandma want to turn ninja is that while you may sincerely believe you are “proficiently communicating in a manner that is consistent with sound business practices and expected protocols”, you are actually talking down to her. If you keep it up, you will grate on her last nerve and the outcome is bleak.
Don't Speak to Grandma Like That!
Bridle Your Verbose Hyperbole and Expedite Your Simplicity
Let me give it to you straight. If you are “excessively verbose and embellish your communications with gratuitous hyperbole”, you will ignore and alienate the majority of any market.
It is even true in the most intelligent circles that if you make it easier to read, more people will pay attention. If you communicate with people as if they are idiots and you are a brilliant word magician, you can save your breath. It often creates quite the opposite outcome and shows that you’re not smart enough to put things into terms people care about or respond to.
If you want to show off your intellect, try taking your complex concept and making it easy for people to understand. That is a much better measure to show off how smart you are.
People want to communicate with people, and not Scrabble robots. If you want to reach grandma or those many others who live in the “real world”, you will do best to use real world language that is comfortable for them.
The Solution: Make it Readable to 8th Graders
The best advice I can offer about marketing communications is to make it easy. I understand the temptation to use big words or complex phrases to make a point. Maybe you even talk like that when you are having beers with your buddies – but I doubt it. Let me make another example. I’ll let you tell me which one you think is better.
A.) What I wish to express is that when you use big words and complex phrases, you not only alienate people, but also stand to lose their attention.
B.) If you make it harder to read, you’ll lose people.
You can criticize me for my lengthy writing. I’m guilty of this “crime against Grandma” at times. There is a time and a place for it, though. Knowing when and where to use your wordiness is worth consideration.
If you are not already familiar, I encourage you to take a close look at popular readability formulas such as The Flesch formulas, Fry Readability Graph, or The Dale–Chall formula. It should not be shocking to find that they were each designed to be very easy to read and understand.
I’m back to my job search now. I’m hopeful there’s somebody out there who wants a real-world marketing executive that grandmas everywhere will understand – and love.
I'm Writing to You ... No Sharks, Please!
Every blogger and every user of any other social media platform has a goal. There is always something … an outcome that they hope for and work toward. Whether that outcome is making a friend, or making a sale, there is a goal.
Those goals are each different, and they are often not entirely clear to the individual, but one common thread is that we all want people to read what we have to say.
With any luck, they will subscribe, come back, read more, add their replies, and click “Like”, “Tweet”, and all those other buttons to share it with their friends.
Luck isn’t enough! They will need reasons, and everybody has their own … reasons. It is your task to find those reasons, and I have some ideas that I truly believe can help you.
Define Your Social Media Objectives
If you don’t know what you want, it will be pretty hard to achieve it, and even harder to match it with what others want. Why are you doing this? If you don’t know, how will anybody else know, and how will you measure it when it happens? I don’t think I have to remind you that it is not a perfect world, but let’s imagine for a moment.
In a perfect world, everybody will follow our website links to all the right things we really want them to read, and maybe even get to know us. Even if it doesn’t make us money, it makes us feel good to be useful, entertaining, or whatever kind of validation which makes up those goals I mentioned. Sometimes the most useful of all is that it lets us know if we’re on the right track … or not.
If it is a business endeavor, we generally hold hopes they will become a customer.
That’s a perfect world, but in the real world, it’s going to take more than just hope. It will often require some pretty extensive effort, and maybe even a little magic … such as building trust, fostering ongoing communication, and a good dose of creativity.
First of all, you must define your objectives if you ever hope to match them with their objectives. You know … them … those people whose objectives you hope to trigger.
Here … let me give you tiny bit of creativity in this video. We can work on the trust and ongoing communication after you subscribe.
Define Their Objectives … That’s What Really Matters
This could go into a huge topic of audience modeling, but that’s another article … and it’s in my archive with the rest of them. What I want to suggest here is that being likable, human, and considerate is like Shark Repellent.
One of the strongest most profound objectives most people have is to avoid people they don’t like or trust. Heck, I’ll avoid whole cities because there are people there I don’t like or trust. I’m certainly not going to read their marketing material or do business with them. I’d rather throw a hungry shark at them!
A flaw that I often see in business use of social media is the tone people use, and whether that tone is really just about them, or about the person reading. If you ever want to sell something … anything … the message should be about the ways it will benefit them … and not just you. Focusing on why you want them to buy something rather than why they want to buy it is not likable. It turns people off like a light switch. If you want their attention, you need to address their objectives.
The best way to solve your tone issues is often with proper intentions. That is usually something people either have, or they don’t … but it can be developed and improved.
The tone we set with our words can tell a lot about us, but those words are often based on our intentions. Your words can help somebody feel like they would enjoy having beers with you, or your words can make them want to throw a hungry shark at you. Your intent will nearly always show through with your words, and so it holds true that your intent is often what makes you either likable or shark bait.
Get on Their Beer Side
The best way I’ve found to be on the beer side of their decisions rather than the shark side is to keep my intentions in check. When I know that is in check, the next thing is be a real person, and write to people just as I would speak to them in person, or how I would write if I was sending them a letter.
You may be writing to a lot of people at once, but as they each read what you have to say, they identify with it individually. Yes, I’m writing to you. Will you write me back?
I’m not going to claim that I have this just perfect. If you’ve read my blog for any time at all, you may consider me just a bit “crusty”. I tell things how I see them, even when it is not comfortable to everybody. That’s because I’m not trying to reach “everybody”, but hopefully the ones I do reach will keep their sharks for somebody else.
If you are likable and you avoid the flying sharks, all of those hopes and goals are a lot easier. For example, I am not ashamed or afraid to tell people the outcome I hope for. Of course, there must be a good balance between being useful to others and sustaining usefulness to yourself. I try my best to strike that balance, and from my experience, that balance is a lot easier when we’re feeling like having beers together, and nobody is throwing sharks.
Be Genuinely Human … Always!
I’m not out to make everybody happy … plain and simple. I have claimed it many times that “I am not out to please everybody, and that pleases some people very much.” What I do have on my side, and something I think matters a lot is that I am here to talk to you, directly, and to tell you just the way I see it. Even if you don’t like it, you will at least know where I stand. Being a genuine human makes that more palatable.
Yes, I’m human. I have my good moods, and I have my bad moods. I have my good ideas, and I have some that are flawed. Well, not actually flawed, but I just threw that in because some people like it better when I seem more humble. 😉
I am pretty sure that if you have a blog, use Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube or any other communications tool, you can probably relate to this in some way. You’ve seen the fake people. So, my thought today is to reflect on just how human you are, and how human those people reading what you say are, too.
Are you being conversational in the things you say? Are you writing for people, or are you writing at them? Are you inviting them for a beer, or are you making them want to whip out a shark and wing it at you?
I consider this often, and I hope you know that I am not just writing to write … I am writing to communicate. So, here it is … my letter to you. I didn’t write it in calligraphy and seal it in a sweet smelling envelope, but I did write it for you. Keep your sharks handy, if you must.
Dear Reader:
I appreciate your interest in improving your market share with better social media marketing. I hope you find my work useful.
I am pretty sure you didn’t wake up this morning jazzed to read about marketing, but I’ve got some reading material for you. I can’t make you read it, but I sincerely believe you will find real value in the information I am sharing with you.
One of the first things to note about social media is that much of what you will encounter sounds too good to be true. That’s because it is. The world has largely been enamored by the “new” trend of social media, and so there are a lot of people still in awe by the packaging, and still playing with the bubble wrap.
I think you will find that I tend to direct people back to some common sense and rationality. I believe in things which are objective and measurable, and I like to dispel the popular hyperbole. It is my job to make companies more visible and more profitable, not to waste clients’ money.
Social media is not new to me. I met my wife and mother of our three children by way of social media, a dozen years ago. We merged our respective companies and created one of the top wholesalers of Internet access and wholesale website hosting services in USA. Our growth was largely due to the same type of marketing services I provide for hire.
I would like to share some of the things I believe every company should know before jumping into social media marketing. The link I am about to share is to a series of articles that can provide a lot of understanding about what works and does not work, and how to make good decisions for your business (even if you don’t hire me to help you).
I hope that you will read it and put it to good use. If you don’t have the time right now, I hope that you will bookmark it and come back. If you subscribe for my updates, I’ll help to remind you.
There is also a link to my bio, on that page, as well as my blog archive with hundreds of articles dealing with online marketing, including a lot of useful information about search engine optimization. It will certainly not all interest you, but it can help you with good direction for your marketing.
If you will take the time to read some of this material, I am confident that it will benefit you. If you know somebody else who can benefit from it, please share it with them, and note that I pay quite generously for referrals.
Feel welcome to contact me any time. If you decide that you want to have a beer with me, let’s put that in our calendars!
Best Regards,
Mark Aaron Murnahan
P.S.
I just want to add one more thing. Thursday is Thanksgiving in USA. Since I am writing and publishing this in between Thanksgiving-related cooking tasks, I thought I’d share this with you. Yes, it is three pounds of bacon shaped like a turkey with a Thanksgiving wish from The Murnahan Family. Cheers!
Stop Boring Your Audience
A thought came to mind today about the frequently very low attention span of Internet users. When they come to your website, you would probably like to fix that. I will share some thoughts and handy tips to help you do just that. First, let’s consider why it is this way, by looking at how we use the Internet, ourselves.
We often must scan through a lot of dis-interesting information in order to find what we seek, so we each do a lot of scanning when we use the Internet. Just considering all the advertisements we dodge on a daily basis, it is amazing that we ever find our way. Then, adding in the huge volume of obviously false, overtly misleading, and downright dishonest drivel, it really has our information filters working overtime.
It makes a lot of sense how we can become excessively dependent on a quick scan-and-click defense of our time. Let’s face it, most of what is on the Internet is worthless, offensive, or irrelevant to any given individual. The majority is just plain boring. Otherwise, we would want to read and fully absorb every link we can get our mouse on. Of course, this is all subject to the perspective of the reader. Even toupee maintenance and Acetaldehyde dehydrogenase will be interesting to somebody. Here comes my first tip: know who that interested “somebody” is. I’ll get back to that.
Once we find what we are looking for, we make a quick jab on the brakes and we slow down enough to try and learn something. What seems obvious, but is easy for many people to overlook, is that this scanning and filtering is not just something we do … our potential customers do it, too. That’s right, they are not so different in this respect, and it is entirely possible that you are not as immediately interesting to them as you could be.
Be More Interesting, to More People, More Often
This is a prominent goal of many marketing efforts, but being more interesting, to more people, more often is easier said than done. It comes with some challenges. If not, more people would drive down the street tossing hundred dollar bills out the window because their marketing made them so filthy stinking happy.
In the Internet marketing field, when somebody just pops in and takes off without reading, we call that scan-and-click ratio a “bounce rate“. I like to call it, a “Yawn Rate” … or the rate at which people encounter a big yawn and dismiss it as useless and boring. It usually happens within only a few seconds.
The “yawn rate” creates a great challenge for online content producers. Whether it is a product description for an ecommerce website, an “about us” page, or a blog article, it is a challenge that must be recognized in order to overcome it. I have some tips that may help, but there is still no perfect answer. If you intend to be astonishingly interesting every time, it will take practice … plus a good amount of magic.
Today, as I often do, I want to offer you some marketing ideas you can put to work immediately.
Sometimes It’s The Timing
Sometimes it is just the timing of your message that fails. Not that you created or released it at the wrong time, but that a reader has discovered it at the wrong time … for them. Maybe it just wasn’t what they needed right then, but maybe they will need it later. Be sure to make it easy and desirable for them to come back later. Create Action to Avoid YawnsIt is important to create a welcoming call-to-action to remember you. Maybe they will bookmark your website, maybe they will “Like” your Facebook page, or follow you on Twitter. Be sure you give website visitors good incentive, and a reminder to subscribe for more … later, when they are ready. Something is better than nothing, so give them something … a reason, a reminder, a cue for further action.
If they don’t take action, at least you have tried to help them. It is pretty unlikely for them to go away horribly offended by your effort at continued communications. If so, their neurotic episodes probably extend to other areas of their life, too.
Sometimes It’s The Delivery
This is a tough matter for a lot of people. Most people are only a fraction as good at creating interesting or useful information as they think they are. Before you start feeling defensive about your website, consider asking for advice from others.
Have you ever watched a talent show like American Idol, X Factor, or So You Think You Can Dance? Much like the many humorous failed auditions that make these television shows so interesting, many people with a couple dozen visitors to their website think they have amazing marketing talent, and refuse to accept good advice.
Don’t take it personally if somebody offers you a suggestion. Ian Benardo thought he could sing and dance, so he refused to listen to criticism. Don’t be an Ian Benardo!
If you are willing to face the truth, ask somebody else for their unbiased opinion. Maybe you need to hire it out to a professional (usually the best option), or maybe you don’t. In either case, you should be willing to listen and accept good advice.
Fix Your Yawn Rate With Audio Feedback
This is a favorite, for me, and it is a staple of providing read-worthy information. Knowing the way somebody will read what you have to say can be invaluable. When people read your website, it is like a little voice in their head, silently speaking those words you produced. Shouldn’t you know how that quiet little voice sounds to them?
Reading comprehension is not the same for everybody. There is often a language barrier to overcome, even among readers of the same native language. Something I find helps me a lot is to hear my words in audio. If I don’t have my editor handy to read it aloud, I record it and listen to how it comes across. Many times, I find errors in the flow of material just by reading it aloud, but they come through even clearer when I record and then listen. Try reading your website aloud and pretend you are speaking to the person reading it. Does it sound awkward? Would you still express it the same way verbally, or would it be better to rephrase it?
I have found the value of using a conversational tone to be useful for decades, but it became even more obvious when I started providing all of my blog articles in both text and audio versions. If you try this tip and listen to your words, I think you will agree that it can be very beneficial. I believe it is much better to have somebody else read it to you, and I thank my lucky stars to have an awesome editor, but even if you are self-editing, it is worth the time to hear what you are saying before publishing it. A Yawning Gator ... Now, That's Interesting!
Don’t Pre-Judge or Dismiss Visual Appeal
I am a word guy, so I sometimes resent the fact that a picture can say things I cannot say. Well, I guess I could say those things, but if a picture is worth a thousand words, as they say, my blogs would be even longer … and that may seem impossible, but it is true.
Visuals count, and as much as I stomp my feet and pout about it, they still have a strong value in making the information you share more interesting. I often consider this one of the hardest parts of producing website content. I guess that is because the words come a lot easier than hunting down a cool graphic to represent those words. It is worth it, and I think of it like setting the tone of that voice I explained. Be creative with this and see what happens. I think you may be surprised how much it can help grab and keep a reader’s attention.
Do You Feel More Interesting Yet?
Far beyond the suggestions I made here, it is critical to understand that everybody is not your best audience. In fact, I highly recommend reading the article titled “Everybody is Not Your Target Market!” to emphasize the point. They will not all love what you are promoting, and some people may even dislike it very much. That’s a good thing, because the ones who do like it will probably like it even more.
You will never get it perfect, and there is always room for improvement. It can take a lot of effort and adjustment to make it optimally effective, but isn’t it worth it? When you get it all just right, you will find that more people will read to the very end … and that’s when they take action on your words. Don’t we all want that?
What do you have to say about this? Do you have suggestions, or did you like my ideas? Please take a moment to express it.
I must have heard nearly every conceivable absurd notion a person can come up with when it comes to marketing. There are a lot, and I have heard some really bad ideas about marketing practices. One silly thing I encounter a lot is when people say “It’s not about you.” A few people may really know what others mean when they say this, but I think the majority of people are just giving you hogwash.
It seems to me that this message has been mutated in so many ways that it has actually become a scare tactic against marketing, rather than good advice.
If you hear people say “It’s not about you”, you should never accept that as a reason to hide who you are, what you stand for, and what you are seeking, only to sneak it in once in a while. Tragically, I believe that is the way many people have taken this message, and it is often completely contrary to effective marketing.
Stop Letting Knuckleheads Control Your Marketing Assets
When you think of your social media marketing, and especially blogging, let’s consider some things. It is a whole lot easier to spread a message if it is useful and interesting to others, rather than just a sales pitch. That should be obvious. If you are just telling people how awesome you are without relating it to how it benefits them, your ship is sunk. Nobody wants to hear about that, and nobody wants to talk about that.
It is comparatively easy to spread a genuinely useful message far, and spread it wide. When it is done just right, it can get a lot of people talking about it, and you may even benefit from many other websites linking to it. This is also a primary factor to being listed better in search engines. It works in perfect synergy, and it grows like a downhill snowball. It all looks shiny and grand, right?
Here’s the kicker: When something is implicitly “not about you”, it comes with a big risk of people never knowing you, your brand message, or your call-to-action (what you want for them to do next). Until you show them who you are, and what your call to action includes, it is just guesswork for them, and missed opportunities for business.
If you think that being useful and interesting means you should carefully hide your call-to-action … the thing that actually provides benefit to your business … then why are you doing it at all? Who ever suggested that you should be playing Mother Teresa and Gandhi with your marketing assets? If somebody suggested that, perhaps you should give them a big hearty slap.
Finding Your Marketing Balance
There must be a good balance to your efforts, and in that balance is where much of your success is locked up like Fort Knox.
You can take the approach that those useful things you do on your blog or social networks will make up an overall better presence for your brand, and this is very true. It is a very important principle in online marketing. At the same time, you cannot expect people to go hunting through pages of information just to discover how to pay your company a profit. They won’t do it! No, they really won’t … and the numbers show the truth! This means you must create a good balance, and that balance should include letting them know what it is that keeps you in business so you will be there when they come back for more.
Sure, it is fine to give the whole world a nice pat on the bottom and a kiss on the brow, but if you are doing something valuable for others, you deserve the benefit of growing your business for it.
Where is The Voice of Your Brand?
When it comes to market research and learning who will give your brand a second glance, it is not about your company or yourself. It is about them … your market … the people who will become your loyal customers and brand advocates. With this information, it becomes about you and them, and where the two parties meet in the middle and do business.
Beyond the research, when it comes to building a brand, you would be foolish to invest in the marketing hogwash that “it’s not about you”. Yes, it is about you, but with some checks and balances. The balance comes somewhere between the value you provide, and the value you ask for, so you need to get that part right.
If the people you are reaching are the right audience, they want to hear from you, and they want to know what you’re all about … whether you represent a company or an individual. That sense of “You” is what they connect with, and what gives them the confidence in who they are considering doing business with.
I’ll explain this in real and vivid terms, and I stand behind this. First, I’ll give you a bit of background, and then I’ll explain the direct benefits to you. I hope you can apply this to your business.
I’ve been in marketing my entire adult life. I have provided marketing consulting and training to successful companies when I was as young as 15 years old. I was raised into it by some brilliant parents, and they taught me a lot. They mentored me.
I was actually raised for my job, much like the six year old girl playing piano in the video above was raised to be a concert pianist. I was fed all of the best books about marketing, success, and motivation. I was taken to conferences of all types and sizes. I was hidden behind phone lines and fax machines to work with clients who simply wouldn’t understand it if they knew their new marketing campaign was largely being constructed by a kid.
I was on a stage talking to people about marketing before I was old enough for a driver’s license. Back then, I could barely wait to be 40, so people could take me more seriously. Today, as I approach 40 a couple months away, I question whether that was my best goal. In any case, I suppose that turning 40 with 25 years of marketing experience and business ownership has its upsides.
I grew up a lot faster than I would ever wish for my children, but I had good mentoring for this career. My parent-mentors trained me to understand how to make something marketable, and how to see markets as systems. That means seeing more than just “the dots”, but rather being able to connect the dots between companies and their consumers. I don’t know why I was raised that way, but my parents had their reasons, and must have seen something in me.
Ten years after I left school at 15, I was able to retire early, as a 25 year old “know-it-all”. Some years later, I went back to work and merged two companies and grew them to the pinnacle of the wholesale Internet services industry. I have also created similar success for clients who had the fortitude and desire to grow their companies, and called me to build and manage their marketing strategies.
That’s a small portion of my career history. I am not ashamed to tell you, nor afraid that it offends you. That does not make me dis-interesting to the right people, and it does not make this all about me, either. If somebody is dis-interested in my career history and qualifications in marketing, they may be the type who will listen to the first slick-talker to tell them what they want to hear. I’m not that guy, and I have a robust brand message that confirms it. I am a guy who strongly understands that it takes willingness to make sacrifices in order to build a successful company … and my clients do, too.
Here’s How You Benefit Knowing This
I offer a lot of reliable information on this blog, the majority of which is based on things I have witnessed in my career. The benefit to you of knowing about my history, who I am, and what I’m about is that you may have more confidence in the things I write. If you have good reasons to trust my integrity, you can see that my efforts are intended to be helpful, and not based on hype.
You can learn a whole lot about my industry, and gain a lot of useful information on this blog … and I provide it for free! If you want the other 99.7 percent, and you want it implemented exceptionally well, I welcome you to contact me to see if we’re a good match. That’s what I’m paid for, and I’m not a bit apprehensive to ask for your business.
Oh, but there is another point I want to make about one of those early lessons I learned in marketing … just to drive the point home.
The Lessons of Two Ears and One Mouth
Early in my marketing career, I received constant reminders of why I was born with two ears but only one mouth. That is a really tough lesson for most kids to master … and some never do. They explained that it was because I should be listening twice as much as I talk. Of course, a critical part of marketing is to listen to the customers. That’s how you come to understand them, and their desires. It is critical, and it is what market research is for.
I think this is the part where the notion that “it’s not about you” totally confounds a lot of people.
Another lesson I learned that was equally valuable is that when people are considering a purchase, they also appreciate a story of how well the product or service worked for others … or how it could work for them. In order for them to become a customer, they must envision having whatever it is you are offering for sale, and they must envision it with a favorable outcome.
This means, you must be more than just a listener. You also need to know how to tell a story. Sometimes it is a story of a customer, your product, your brand, or your experience, but that’s what people connect with and understand. If you have a story from your experience in business, tell it. Yes, it is about you, and that is a good thing! That is a whole lot better than letting people guess, and it is a lot more genuine than just telling somebody how great your product or service is. That piece of “you” is what becomes valuable … so in this sense, I’d say yes … it is about you!
A question that sticks with me is this: “Would you rather be an interested introvert or an interesting extrovert?” I think we all want to be a little of both, but if you put this in terms of a customer and a seller, I would have to say that I want them to be interested and I want to be interesting. That doesn’t mean turning off the listening, but it does mean you’ve got to do some talking.
People don’t want to hear your hyperbole, but they do want to hear what makes you who you are. If you hide that because somebody told you “it’s not about you”, then you are covering up your best asset. When it comes down to actually doing business, those things about you are what makes up a large portion of their decision.
Just as there are more followers than there are leaders, I believe there are a lot more introverts in the world than there are extroverts. This may be partially because in order to be an extrovert, you put yourself out there on a limb. You are taking a risk to be the one doing the talking. Don’t worry though, because even if you try really hard, you will never make everybody like you … and it is counterproductive to even try.
I say go for it … talk about yourself enough so we can know who you are and what you stand for. If you don’t, all that your would-be customers have to base their buying decisions on is facts and figures. Unless you are the best and the cheapest, all at once, somebody else can nearly always beat you out on at least one of those measures.
That’s my piece. It’s your turn, and it’s all about you, now. Go ahead and add your comments to tell me I’m wrong.
