The Science of Communicating & Marketing Your Business

Stephane Hamel read yesterday's Thoughts on Blogging and offered a sage comment, that historically blogs were meant to be personal journals and thus are more apt to be opinion and emotion rather than researched information.

Stephane's comment caught me off guard. I always considered my BizMediaScience blog as personal, my AllBusiness.com blog as "business".

I've also had enough training to know that anything anybody writes is going to be a demonstration of their personality unless they've had lots and lots of training (no, don't worry, I know most of the people with that level of training and you're not one of them).

Way back when I was studying (when haven't I been studying? I mean "Way back when my study was more formal") we did an exercise where everybody in the class had to write a story from an opposite gender perspective; men had to write from a women's perspective, women from a men's perspective. We turned the stories in anonymously (this was back when you either typed things up or printed them out. Nobody used emails for class work back then).

The purpose of the exercise was to determine if we could determine a) the true gender of the author and b) who the author actually was.

Getting back to that class exercise, the true gender of the author was obvious to me, as was the author's identity. Nobody caught me or mine.

I cheated, though. I used a trick. I knew (at the time) that I couldn't rewire my brain from male to female orientation (now it's much easier. Still no piece of cake, simply much easier (something I demonstrated recently during a training in NYC)). One of my teachers often described ways of using "levels of awareness" and "levels of abstraction", something more colloquially stated as "Fake it until you Make it".

So I didn't write a story from a woman's perspective. I wrote a story from what's called "3rd person omniscient" perspective and added a twist -- one of the characters had never encountered a woman therefore everything the female characters did was absolutely correct, right and true.

Women in the class were convinced that one of their own had cheated, had written from a woman's perspective already being a woman. This wasn't fair on a number of levels. Whoever she was, she had violated a basic tenet of the sisterhood by not letting her sisters in on the deception. But they knew each other -- it was imperative that we knew a great deal about each other in order to be in the program -- and they knew (They knew!) that none of them would do such a thing.

I can't tell you the amount of respect I got from both genders when the truth came out. I won't tell you the number of dates I was invited on.

All of this plays into this thread (yep, I sew things up in the end).

I've always stated that I never hide my emotions, that I don't play things close to the vest and that if anybody wanted to know what I was thinking all they had to do was ask. Eric Peterson read one of my posts and jokingly offered that I wear my heart on my sleeve.

Too true!

But in answering the questions on Susan Bratton's blog and doing some research about the lack of readership on this blog I've come to realize several things about my brand of personalism.

One of the things I was going to write today for Susan is something she did today (I think it was today). She asked people to help her increase her readership in Rally for Suz: Help Me DOUBLE My DishyMix Audience. In my last post to her (not sure if she's published it yet) I left off with "This form of reafference brings us back to "direct address" again.

Direct address is something NextStage and others' research has indicated is a powerful motivational tool in social networks -- simply asking people to take part. Works 99.99999% of the time and is an element of what NextStage talks about in Full Day Training "Using the 10 First Contact Marketing Messages".

Funny thing is, when I first started writing this blog, I was explicitly told not to comment on readership numbers or such or make requests such as those.

And I tend to do what people ask of me. If nothing else, it makes for good research.

By the way, that story I wrote was nominated for a Nebula Award. I think it was a Nebula. Some science-fiction, speculative-fiction award. I'll run it here as a series of you're interested.

Just let me know.

And keep it personal.

PS) If you can count the number of gender-specific phrases I used in here, kudos to you! If not, go read my answers on Susan's blog. And tell others about it. We'll both thank you for it.

Please contact NextStage for information regarding presentations and trainings on this and other topics.

Sign up for the NextStage Irregular, our very irregular, definitely frequency-wise and probably topic-wise newsletter.