Don’t think about the following. Just make a snap decision.
Given a choice between reading or watching something serious or funny, which do you choose?
I don’t know. Maybe this hiatus subject is on my mind because we’re in the west Texas desert with extremely spotty internet access, and the joke is on me.
Maybe because the world lost a great humorist last week.
Either way, it’s important to know that a Visible Authority does what is right regardless of what people might think about him or her.
That includes dealing with the third rail of marketing: Humor.
But why is it the 3rd rail? Do not the wise men say, “laugh and the world laughs with you.” Does not Stevie say “make the world laugh, and they’ll love you.” (or would if I could get him to stop painting campaign signs reading “Donald Duck for President”.)
Yet when it comes to marketing, using humor can be like walking on eggshells.
There are innumerable ways to offend, but not too many ways to delight. Most fall flat. Maybe it’s because generating large sums of dinero is such serious business that most marketers lose their sense of humor, assuming they ever had one.
Obviously I don’t believe it has to be that way. If you want to make a sale, and still serve up a side of delight, you should. It will add memorable energy to your content.
I know, I know. They say not to be funny or clever, but rather be clear and simple.
Well, sure, if that’s the choice. But who made up the law that says that’s an either/or choice? I know I didn’t vote for him.
If you’d like to be funnier without losing your money mojo, use the tips in this blast from the past to put a lighter touch in your future marketing pieces.
Here’s a link to the title generator used in this video.
4 replies to "How a Light Touch Can Trigger Your Marketing Mojo"
Everything in this video is so true. The things I see in Steven’s video’s are permanently embedded and remembered when needed. Pushing my chin down with my finger for example. I think of that every time I begin to shoot a video. Steven’s humor is one of the reasons I enjoy watching his videos and also what makes them so effective. Thank you Steve for everything you do for us.
Thanks, Lucien. Watch for a new travel kit video as the next phase of this journey begins. 🙂
When I re-watch your videos, Steve, I enjoy the lightness of touch each time. When I re-watch my videos, however, I usually feel I’ve diminished my authority.
Now the authority I want is not an authority to command. Rather, it is the authority I need in order that the right people listen and converse with me. So it’s nothing untoward. Which means it matters for the right reason.
So what I wonder is: do I feel like this about my own ‘lightness of touch’ because I’m too close to it (and my viewer isn’t, which means my humour works for them, whatever I myself might feel re-watching the video for the 54th time), or because I’ve well and truly mucked it up?
This isn’t answerable. I’m just thinking aloud: it’s a tough call to judge oneself.
(The teachers I remember with greatest fondness and admiration from school were mostly serious and firm, whose faces sometimes – sometimes: when it was justified – lit up with humour and pleasure.)
Without seeing one of the videos in question, it’s difficult to say what the real state of affairs might be, but I will say that watching the same video 54 times might be a sign that you may be overly worried about it.
Videos can be ephemeral in their staying power. Many are meant to be useful for just a couple of weeks, or even days, at the most, and so they are a jumble of circumstances that existed in the moment and brought together in a primordial soup of expression.
Even Hollywood movies don’t always age well and I think they’re often trying to make something that will keep paying off for years to come.
I think this comes down to a few basic skills, applied as best we can in the moment, and then released into the wild. After that it’s matter of incremental improvement, studying the previous examples only for items to improve on next time.
Everything we do is a work in progress, because try as we might, perfection is just a hypothetical goal that if we actually reached it, would give us nowhere else to go!
And, as you intuited, your audience is way more forgiving than you anyway. So, given you are always going to be applying small improvements as you go, which is the job you’ve accepted, really, what is there to worry about? 🙂