Respect is not easy to come by these days when everyone is pitching their wares and crowding the marketing funnel. With so many ways to broadcast our messages today, content can feel like an overcrowded radio spectrum. All the channels are taken and nothing good is on.
We may fiddle with the dial and thumb through some amazing content, but we don’t have respect for what does not resonate. We simply skip over what we deem as noise until we land on what truly engages us.
Many times, it feels like a lot of the marketing noise out there is from the old school. They are the ones who know how to get attention, but they didn’t bother to ask whether people would read what was written or truly think through your position and thoughts.
Respect Starts with Trust
If I don’t trust you, I will mark you as spam, put you in my trash or ignore you altogether. We all have the same filtering tools and use them like any other red-blooded internet citizen.
There are those content pieces we like to receive and places we like to visit. We trust they are going to have valuable information and not waste our time. They are going to get us to think or motivate us to look at something in a new way.
That kind of trust is hard to come by and it is earned slowly and repeatedly.
With all the convenient means of blocking out unwanted information, we simply vote with our attention.
For the content we look forward to, we tune in. Reputation built over time goes a long way in helping us become a fan of something we know that can help us and is worth reading.
Did You Ever Bother To Ask
With all the fancy opportunities and new slick social media, the question begs to be answered … will people read it all? Do they want to read deeply and in a receptive way?
Ultimately, that is the respect that is becoming more and more scarce. But, it’s the one that matters.
Will someone read what you have to say and look forward to getting it?
That kind of anticipation and commitment is critical to the conversion process. It is respect for your ideas, advice and knowledge. And where there is respect, the conditions are ripe to move into a deeper business relationship.
I think with the maturing of information channels and Google systematically removing shady SEO practices, what is real becomes more valuable. If you waste your time trying to keep up with all the shiny new gadgets rather than trying to ask the more fundamental question of how to get respect and bring value continually, then you are wasting time and money which could be better spent on real assets that connect.
What would it look like if you played for respect with those that really care and want to read what you have to say deeply? A few of those kinds of people tend to change things much more dramatically than mere channel surfers.
