Sell & Tell

The main point of communicating (I told you I’d be back on the old topic) is to get a point across to an audience. If the point you’re trying to make is uninteresting, then you probably won’t have an audience, so there’s little point in making it, because you’re probably wasting your time as much as that of any passer-by who happens to be caught in the maelstrom of your communicative attempt. This applies equally to standing on a soap box & writing a blog.

If you are a deaf & blind man preaching from the pulpit, then you are probably doing so for your own benefit. Writing a blog is like that. I could see this act as cathartic, or else an attempt at linguistic self-gratification (& yes, I could have used another word there, but declined). Without an audience, I’m the only one getting anything out of it.

You can create an audience. Sometimes you can start without one & attract attention to your communication by making the content interesting or directing the content at people who might be interested. Don’t talk about social reform to the local conservative party hack, take it to a group of communists for further discussion - if that is what you want to talk about. In general, there is too much communication pollution, & we waste resources creating communication that we just don’t use, & the internet is becoming just a big landfill where truckloads of rubbish are piled on top of yesterdays leftovers, with no-one having the time or energy to sort out the recyclable stuff from that which is best left to find its own half-life.

If you don’t want your words to be relegated to such a scrap-heap, then you need to find your audience. In fact, you need to sell not just the words themselves, but a desire to hear the words. You have to create the audience, sometimes, because it may not be there yet. No-one may give a toss about the plight of the spotted dik-dik except for a few very strange people who go on about God’s creatures yet quite happily go home to cook a piece of cow for dinner. What you need is a growing crowd of supporters to hang on your every word describing the declining fortunes of the species due to a combination of environmental changes, human intervention, hunting, poaching, & inconsiderate tourists.

You have to make people love to hear your words. You have to have them hanging there in suspense, waiting for an update on little Albert, the new-born dik-dik, & his struggles for stability on four legs & being left alone to fend for himself while his mother goes out foraging increasingly farther afield as the drought sets in.
Now you’ve got a story to tell. Now is the time to concentrate on what you’re saying - how you’ll keep that audience so carefully brought to your bosom, & nurture it, & understand its needs. The audience wants you, & you can’t let them down. You’ve sold them the idea of the story, & they’ve bought it, so now it’s time to deliver.

The big question is, do you drop the idea of telling the story if nobody cares? Plenty of people do. The majority of academic papers are produced on the basis that there’s a conference that needs to be submitted to, & an audience that can only be gotten to through selling an idea to someone who probably has no interest in your content. Such critics, gate-keepers, supposedly represent the tastes of the audience that you want, in the same way that a restaurant critic may be barring you from a full house, or a movie critic stopping your latest production’s survival at the cinema. Sometimes you have to sell to these people first, & they will on-sell. They are communication middle-men. They don’t necessarily add value to your content, but they do provide distribution to the audience.

If you start thinking of them as the retailers to your wholesale communication product, then you’ll probably go batty trying to work out who pays the GST, so its best to stop going down that metaphor.
Critical success factors:

• have a story worth telling
• find an audience for the story
• thrill your audience

It’s all rather simple when you think about it.

I do hope you enjoyed this installment, as I promise there will be many more & I can only get better at it. Past copies are still available in the recycle centre that is this particular blog, but I am well aware that yesterday’s news wraps today’s fish.