Last week we talked a lot with clients and internally here at Passle towers about how we are all getting fed up with robots and machines talking to us. I have just had yet another text 'conversation' with Vodafone telling me how much they care and are interested in my feedback on their service. They told me this via an automated texts so I am pretty sure they don't really care at all.
The same is true of how we communicate online. Machine-curated content in my inbox based on my 'buying persona' and 'historic choices' that has been created by an algorithm was interesting when it first got delivered in mid-noughties - now it just gets deleted.
I do not want another piece of content sent to me by someone I do not know. I want it to be personalised from someone I trust.
So for what it is worth please don't write like a robot and please do not use robots to write to me (or ghost writers who pretend to be you).
When I write I write for the people I know. I picture Emma, Adam, Oliver, Kim and Dan. I know them, I know what they look like and where they work... and with luck they will think what I write is interesting and might share what I write with their network - increasing mine.
I am not like Kim Kardashian or Stephen Fry - millions of people are not interested in what I have to say and frankly I cannot hope to influence that many people even if they were. More importantly I don't want to. I probably want to influence 100 people at most.
The article linked to below really struck a chord with me. Basically it is saying be yourself - your entire self - at work. Be true to who you are - be whole. Hopefully we can do this with the content we create.