Helping you win loyal friends through your communications
Even if you’re not a football fan, you can learn a lot about social media from the New England Patriots.
The Patriots have many ways to win, as Jackie McMullan points out. Her colleague Ben Volin says in the Boston Globe:
No team mixes up its game plan from week to week, or even quarter to quarter, better than the Patriots.The only thing opposing defenses know is to expect the unexpected.
There are 8 million stories: why yours?
An old TV show used to close with the line, “There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.”
Today, the Internet is the naked city–and there are way more than eight million stories out there. When you write a blog, post a post, tweet a tweet, that’s just one of them.
How can you be sure anybody reads what you write?
The only way is to make yourself useful to your readers.
The Question You Need to Answer
The reader you’re trying to reach will look at your post for three seconds before deciding to delete it or read it. In three seconds, they will ask the WIIFM question: “What’s In It For Me?” You need to give them the answer. Are you:
These are ways to make yourself useful to your readers. They are also the ways to get read.
It’s Not About You
Please understand: no one, not even your best friend, has to read what you write. It’s their choice–and they have many other choices. So, what you want them to read doesn’t matter. What you think they ought to want to read doesn’t matter.
All that matters is making yourself useful to your readers. Or else you won’t have any.
Does your Board love your newsletter, website, blog, or social media?
That might be a bad sign.
Your Board includes some of the people who care most deeply about your organization.
Your communications should appeal to the people who have taken an interest but don’t love you yet. Woo them.
Your Board knows your organization and its programs really well already.
Your communications should touch people who don’t remember your agency’s name…but care about the difference you make. Tell them stories.
Your Board may obsess about whose name is mentioned, whose face is in the photo, or whether you write in paragraphs. Or sentence fragments.
Your communications should ignore those issues as much as possible. Be useful to the people you want to reach.
If you inform, educate, and entertain your audience, they will know, like, and trust you. They will become your loyal supporters. They will give time. They will give money. And that’s what your Board will really love.