This is one of those things that everyone in communications has to talk about at some point, preferably early on. I like to think of it as smashing your looms, after the fictional General Ned Ludd, but what it really means is that automation kills communication. Well, it wounds it gravely, and your messages will ultimately limp rather than leaping like they should.
Other things which are dead: this analogy.
Automation can be your greatest ally when communicating with large groups of people or when using a lot of different media, but it is an ally of the most insidious sort. It breeds a level of laziness which can poison your efforts in the long run. Today I will prove that this is the case. That is my mission.
Automation is easier, but not more efficient. When sending messages, always keep your goals in mind. Automating a message, whether it’s a mass email, a Facebook post, a tweet, or on some other medium is only useful if it helps you accomplish your goals in that space. And it is a space, not merely a tool. It can mean that a lot more people read your message, because you don’t have to personally tether it to the legs of each carrier pigeon, but can instead fire it machine gun style out of your pneumatic tubes and drop it on people like shells on the Maginot Line. But your goal is never just to have more people read your message. I’m going to say that again, just so we’re perfectly clear: your goal is never just to have more people read your message. You want them to act on it. There is a thing you want them to do, whether it’s vote for your candidate, attend a meeting, stop parking in your space, or take the rumblings you’ve heard out of Mordor more seriously. You want them to be engaged, and unless you’re running a Turing test, people aren’t going to want to engage with something automated.
Let’s use the park analogy again. Social media platforms are spaces occupied by people. So are email inboxes. They’re like parks. If you have a message that you want to get out, one way you can do it is to put up a loudspeaker in the park that broadcasts your message all day long. Now, if you’re in that park doing whatever it is you’re doing, do you really want to listen to it all the time? Another way is to have a spot with flyers. But if everyone is at the park for their own purposes, how many of them will pick up and act on your flyers? Some, certainly, but not many. What if you had a person there? Someone passionate about your message, who passed out your flyers and talked with people about it, addressing their questions and getting them excited. Someone who can be sensitive to people’s concerns, and who they can empathize with and understand? Most importantly, someone who can listen and report back to you what they found. Those people can be tough to find, but the implications for their presence seem straightforward.
It’s not that people are opposed to automation. Quite the opposite. We’re all busy, and we know that you save time wherever you can. We all do it to one extent or another. What that means is that we get a lot of automated messages, and see a lot of automated content. How many emails do you get in a week from mailing lists and other automated notifications? Not just spam, but actual things you have signed up for? It is possible for every message to be automated now, and lots of people are taking advantage of that to great effect. Sometimes it works really well. I like getting an email whenever someone follows me on Twitter, because it encourages me to hop on Twitter and say “Hi” to them, and see what they’re about. I don’t like getting sixty emails a week from Facebook telling me about every comment, post, like, and share that everyone anywhere ever has performed. But let me ask you this:
When was the last time you got a letter?
I mean a real letter, written by a person. Not a card, or a thank you note, but a real letter. Did you reply to it? If you didn’t, do you feel that you should have? That feeling is the feeling you want, and it’s the feeling that automation removes. If something is automated, it’s a license not to care about it. There will be more of it. But if you get a request or hear a message from a real person, whose humanity you recognize, it means more. It means someone took the time to talk with you personally, rather than you as a demographic.
You notice that. It catches your attention. You’re smart enough that you can tell the automated stuff from the real thing, so give your audience the same credit. If what you’re making is worth their time, then take the time to personally let them know why. Talk to them as people, rather than as a demographic. Sometimes this is unavoidable and understandable. If you’re marketing a product to a thousand people, or several million, it can be hard, but you should still take the opportunity every chance you get. Next week I’ll talk about how to be personal and its advantages, now that we’ve established that automation can be a problem.
