When you look at documents written by lawyers, politicians and crisis-management consultants, it’s often hard to figure out what they’re trying to say.
There’s a reason for that.
They don’t want you to understand what they’re saying.
This is called obfuscation, which is defined as “the action of making something obscure, unclear, or unintelligible”.
Obfuscation is deliberate.
It’s used when people are trying to hide stuff from you.
I’ve been around long enough to remember what marketing was like before the arrival of the web.
Back in the 1980s I was a print copywriter, writing ads for magazines and newspapers.
I loved the craft. And I worked with an art director who was equally passionate about his work.
Our ads were highly polished. We spent days or sometimes even weeks on a single ad. The final results were as near perfect as we were able to achieve.
Truth be told, we cared more about the opinions of the next industry awards committee than we did about the opinions of our readers.
In a very real sense, we lived and worked in an adland ivory tower.
But that was then. And now is now.
Take off your marketing hat for a moment.
Think of your experiences as a regular consumer, buying stuff for yourself and your family.
Would it be fair to say that you’d be unlikely to buy from a company you don’t trust?
Doesn’t sound like something you’d feel comfortable doing, right?
OK, now put your marketing hat back on, and answer me this, “How hard do you work to earn and hold onto the trust of your prospects and customers?”
If you tell me that the trust of those people is super-important to you, excuse me while I go through all your marketing materials.
Because everything you do as a marketer either builds trust or burns it. Nothing is neutral.
In this post I get to interview Tim Washer… speaker, creative director and comedy writer whose credits include Late Show With David Letterman, and Saturday Night Live.
I met Tim at a conference in Austin, Texas. We were both speakers, but he was way, way funnier.
He gave this great talk that held everyone’s total attention. Everyone in the audience was totally spellbound.
I remember how Tim clearly cared about the people in the room.
And how he used humor to connect with people, engage with the whole audience and make us all feel we were his friends.
Imagine being able to harness that kind of attention as a marketer.
No wonder Tim is on my must-interview list.
Let’s get started…
I was taking part in a mastermind group a while back and someone asked the question, “Do you like your customers?”
BOOM!
Amazing question.
It had a huge impact on everyone in the room. We all had to pause and think about our own feelings about our customers and even our prospects.
Did we like them? Did we respect them?
Did we even think about our customers in terms of liking or respecting them?
Or did we just see them as anonymous specs within a demographic group? As data points?
The best time to build expertise in any area of digital marketing isn’t necessarily at the very beginning.
For example, sites like MySpace were heralding the birth of social media back in the early 2000s.
But it wasn’t until 2006 or so that the big players like Twitter and Facebook took hold.
And many of the big names in social media marketing didn’t get established until about 2009 or 2010.
But after that… well, everyone else who wanted a slice of that market had the play catch-up.
And like I say, playing catch-up sucks. It’s sucks because you’ll always be trying to make yourself heard in a market where the voices of the earlier adopters dominate.
It’s the same story with conversational copywriting right now.