You Can’t Handle The Truth
Mar 26 2009

Brian Clark at Copyblogger did a post recently called How to Tell the Truth that was just spot on.  I LOVED it because it is so true.  It’s a short post and I was trying to think about how to summarize it, but I just can’t because it’s so perfect.  So I hope Brian doesn’t get upset with me for quoting it verbatim here:

“Everyone wants the truth, right?

Ask your spouse or your boss or your employees or your customers… they’ll tell you all they want is the truth.

But that’s a lie.

We hate the truth. Our reaction to real truth is hostility and fear.

Do we really want to hear the truth about why we’re fat, or why we’re broke, or why our kids are under-achieving? Tough stuff to process for most.

And yet telling the simple raw truth is one of the most effective attention and persuasion tactics available. Especially these days, with people sick to death of being lied to and betrayed.

But if people reject what you say, truth or not, you’re back where you started.

Guys like Buddha and Jesus had this problem.

The solution remains the same.

Tell a story.”

I sent the post to my friend, Robb Lanum (a screen writer), and he liked it too and added “Don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story.”

My big problem is that I have a tendency to tell the truth good or bad, and I don’t always have a great story behind it.  It usually turns out great if the truth is good (e.g., our product is awesome and will save your life, you look great, you did a fabulous job) but if the truth is not so good (e.g., our product is good but you need to have xyz to make it work, I screwed up, you screwed up) it’s hard to recover.  Sometimes I wish I could keep my mouth shut but fear, Southern Baptist guilt, and feeling like I should do and say the right thing (because I would want to hear the truth) usually overcome me.  A strong conscience sucks to deal with sometimes, but I selfishly hope my kids inherit it without having to feel the hell, fire, and brimstone in their minds!

This is probably one of the reasons why I’ll never be a great classical marketer.  As Seth Godin recently wrote in a post called Is Marketing Evil?, the best marketers know how to create a great story about their companies and products and then they know how to get it out to the universe (usually with a reasonable budget!).  He ends the post with:

“Just because you can market something doesn’t mean you should. You’ve got the power, so you’re responsible, regardless of what your boss tells you to do.

The good news is that I’m not in charge of what’s evil and what’s not. You, your customers and their neighbors are. The even better news is that ethical, public marketing will eventually defeat the kind that depends on the shadows. Just ask Bernie Madoff.”

So ‘eventually‘ with any luck my tendency to tell the truth will keep me out of jail.  Now I just have to learn how to spin a fairytale captivating story!  Here’s a video clip of “A Few Good Men” starring Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson that shows how most people can’t handle the truth…most notably the one (Jack) telling the truth:

Author: | Filed under: marketing | Tags: , , , , | 2 Comments »

I Wanna Write A Blog Post, But I’ll Settle For A Haiku
Nov 12 2008

And I wanna be a cowboy too, but given my crazy self-inflicted schedule of two, three, four, five (yes each kid, the husband, and the house are also job-like at times), I can’t seem to find the time to get all those deep and meaningful posts written.  So, I’ll have to settle for a haiku and hope I win a MacBook Air.  Copyblogger is running a contest where the person who writes the winning Haiku on twitter will win a MacBook Air.  The second and third prizes look interesting too, but winning the MacBook Air will impress my husband more than the Epson printer I just wrote about. 🙂  

Not being one who writes haiku’s often (i.e., probably not since 5th grade), I had to rely on these examples from the Copyblogger post:

“Haiku is a form of Japanese poetry. It consists of 17 syllables broken up into three phrases of 5, 7, and 5 syllables respectively.

Here are two quick examples found on Twitter Search with the tag #haiku:

Been up way too long / Need about a week’s more sleep / Might not be enough

~ @MFlanders

The furnace is fixed / breath invisible again / how much is the bill?

~ @badboc

Got it? Obviously, the more clever, comedic, or compelling your haiku, the better your chances of winning.”

So here’s my haiku:

Working day and night / To change the world for parents / One diaper a day

I was going to write at the end ‘one diaper an hour’ but since it’s late and my brain isn’t at 100%, I wasn’t sure if ‘hour’ would be read as one syllable or two depending on what city/state/country the judges were from.  So I changed it to ‘a day’ to avoid any controversy.  Plus it can be a stinky (wish you could change that diaper more often) experience in a a start-up/small business/Internet endeavor so I figured if the diaper shoe fits…

Author: | Filed under: blogging, Just For Fun, twitter | Tags: , , , , | 5 Comments »