It’s so tempting to write for everyone.
But everyone isn’t going to read your work, someone is.
Can you tell me who? Precisely?
What did they believe before they encountered your work? What do they want, what do they fear? What has moved them to action in the past?
Name the people you’re writing for. Ignore everyone else.
The end of the trail is usually difficult, but without the long and winding approach, there isn’t much of a mountain.
The greatest hits reel and the stunning photographs leave out most of the hard work.
There’s a lot to be said for showing up, one foot in front of the other. In fact, those are the only people who make it to the steep part in the first place.
If you have a series of tasks to do, it’s easier to ignore this question and simply get back to work. Doing the tasks is more efficient than coordinating the help.
But if your work is a project, a bigger mission that involves making a change happen, it’s much more productive to accept help.
When we have a project, part of the work is to enlist others in figuring out how to make the change we seek.
Google made a fortune and honed sponsored search results into an art form. The theory is that people who want the traffic the most will pay for the clicks, and of course, if the advertisers don’t have something you ultimately want, they’ll just waste their money. Let the market work it out–the dollars become a self-fueling sort of search algorithm.
Google was a miracle, and it also offered smart organic results and clearly labeled ads, so most of us accepted this.
Now, though, hotel listings don’t even bother to pretend they’re sorted in any order but “what makes us the most money.” Yelp requires us to wade through fast food franchises and other lazy advertisers to get where we’re going. And recently, Amazon has jumped the shark by selling out their customers to the highest bidder.
Add smartphones to the mix, with their tiny screens and low impulse control, and the ads stop looking like ads.
Not only are the ads a worse experience for the user, they are also creating a tax on all the advertisers, and thus, on us. If the only way to get Amazon traffic is to buy the ads, then the only way to pay for the ads is to charge more…
We’ve been hooked on free media for a century. But newspapers and network TV evolved to be ever more clear about what’s content and what’s an ad. The internet, as in all things it does, hypercompetes for the last penny, costing all of us time, trust and money.
The oxymoron of “sponsored results” is that if they’re sponsored, they’re not results.
It contained some of my best writing. Cogent, clear and powerful.
I found it.
It wasn’t nearly as good as I remembered. In fact, it was hardly useful.
The opposite happens with the things we fear. When they show up, they’re likely to be a lot less fearsome than we imagined.
In the very small business, the freelancer knows each customer. By name, by volume, by preferences.
And in the huge business, expensive software, data analysts and relentless margin seeking pushes organizations to increase their yield.
But most businesses (and non-profits and groups) are somewhere in between.
We don’t think of our customer list as a spreadsheet, but it is.
Perhaps you know names, addresses, emails and purchase history–but it’s likely that the customers you pay attention to are the noisy ones, or the ones that left in a huff. We’re distracted, though, because they’re not the majority, or the profitable ones, or the ones that really matter in the long run.
Tools like numerous.ai were inevitable, but seeing it work is still something of a miracle.
Here’s a list of email addresses. Guess the first name of each customer.
Here’s a list of recent purchases. Do an analysis of which customers are the most loyal.
Here are our donors. Find out which ones respond to this sort of project.
Here’s a list of zip codes. Please build a table or graph to show us where are customers are clustered.
Here is our membership list along with recent attendees at our meetings. Who has dropped off in attendance and how should we contact them to see what’s up?
At a big company like Amazon, this is all used against the customers, creating dark patterns designed to extract more ad money while denigrating the user experience (but not enough to get people to leave).
At a small organization, though, it can be a breakthrough. It uses the smaller size of the organization to your advantage, because the insights can actually be put to use by a human. Used to make things better for the people who count on you.
This is worth the effort. And if you’re not doing it, you can hire a freelancer to do it for you. And if you’re looking for a new gig, this is the sort of project you can build a business around.
I came across this (ironically) anonymous quote recently: “The offline world is full of sticks, but the internet only has carrots.”
When we come together in groups, it can bring out the best in people.
When those groups are anonymous, porous and transient, though, the opposite can happen.
And mobs never helped anyone, ever.
Nobody asks you to design a bridge, write a sonnet or do open heart surgery. We leave these essential tasks to trained professionals.
But many job descriptions carry the unstated addendum, “and write.” Write memos, proposals, and even instruction manuals.
The local supermarket is reducing its hours for the summer (well deserved). The sign they put on the door to announce this is 100 words long.
The folks who manage the building where I work regularly send complicated and off-putting emails and texts to residents, when simple and powerful language is just a few keystrokes away.
There are two options:
The first used to be the only one. Get better at writing. You might not think you’re a professional writer (you’re a doctor! you’re a manager! you’re a teacher!) but if it’s an important part of your job, you are a professional, or at least we expect you to be.
Now there’s a second option. If the writing you’re doing doesn’t need to be in an idiosyncratic voice, take your memo, paste it into claude.ai and say, “please rewrite this to make it clear, cogent, positive and concise.”
And now you can go back to work.
It doesn’t matter how hard you try, you’re not going to change the direction of the wind. That doesn’t mean you can’t get good at sailing, though.
And yes, if we do try, we can change the conditions in our household, community or workplace. It might feel like wind, but it’s caused by us and can be influenced by us. Not easily, and not right away, but knowing it’s possible is the first step.
The conflict is real.
“Jean-Michel [Basquiat] called,” Mr. Warhol wrote in his diary on Sept. 5, 1983. “He’s afraid he’s just going to be a flash in the pan. And I told him not to worry, that he wouldn’t be. But then I got scared because he’s rented our building on Great Jones and what if he is a flash in the pan and doesn’t have the money to pay his rent?”
Every publisher, promoter, impresario, and family member worries about this, at least a bit. The good ones acknowledge the conflict and dance with it.
Conflict of interest is real. And as Fred Wilson says, if there is no conflict, there is no interest.
