Persuade Your Audience to Listen

Truth doesn’t change, but how truth is communicated changes and fluctuates with culture. Many organizations no longer communicate with the surrounding culture not because their message is outdated, but because their communication is out of style and out of sync. But the goal of marketing, sales, evangelism, etc. is still to persuade people to listen, to tell a story that compels people to take notice. What style works best largely depends on the age and the culture.

Attraction – Wait for People to Come

Attraction happens as we make something look good and throw it out so people will notice. Mass communication, mass/direct mail marketing, commercials and sales flyers are all attractional in approach. We saturate a community and expose our presence in an aesthetically pleasing way to draw people’s attention. Attraction is probably an element of every form of communication, but used alone, it depends on several factors. Your packaging of the message has to be attractive, unique, accessible, and it must spoon feed the audience with clear instructions.

Confrontation – Compel… Even Coerce Them

Used less but occasionally necessary, confrontation is putting your message in the faces of the audience in a bold and confronting manner. Our present culture is leaning more and more away from any receptivity to this style of communicating. The door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman was confrontational and we’ve started locking our doors more often.

Integration & Infiltration – Be One of Them

This works! Guy Kawasaki recently said he’d rather give up his cell phone for a week than Twitter. Why? Because Twitter represents the possibility of integrating a message into the everyday life of millions of users in a free system. The risk is, they’ll do with it what they will! But at least we’ll know if our message is acceptable or not.

How do you communicate your message by infiltration? It’s simple, really (almost too simple for those highly trained in the art of marketing)…

• Be honest and real. Authenticity counts.
• Don’t sell, don’t invite, just share.
• Be yourself, be a human being.
• Always have integrity.
• Connect. Respond. Answer. Be available no matter how big you think you are.
• Engage in the conversation, even if it’s about adopting furbies!