It’s easy to be misunderstood online. You need to choose your words carefully as apart bolding, italicising or maybe a smiley there’s no real intonation.
It’s bad enough in real life if someone has a deadpan sense of humour. You often can’t tell whether or not they mean what they’re saying.
Or if they smile whilst they’re telling you something that would otherwise be unpleasant.
But online there’s none of that luxury.
You need to be careful and precise with your words, otherwise people can misunderstand you.
That’s a plus or a minus depending on how you look at it.
Personally, I like to think of it as a plus.
Especially since I tend to often use what neuro linguistic programming (NLP) calls embedded commands.
They’re used by advertisers on a regular basis – you just need to know what to look out for.
But sometimes they’re hidden so well that even trained people have trouble spotting them.
That’s when you know the copywriter is good – when you feel driven to purchase whatever it is they’re selling. Whether it’s the idea of you clicking a link to get a free video or being subtly told that you have to click the buy button now, this minute, if you want to be able to live a full and happy life.
Of course, that’s rarely true.
But we’re happy enough to suspend disbelief at other times in our lives that we’re almost trained to follow those commands.
If they’re embedded in a story, so much the better.
Our defence system has dropped if we’re being told a story. Because we’ve been read stories since we were too young to understand the words and almost all those stories were fiction. Therefore, putting two and two together, all stories are benign and aren’t sales pitches at all.
Which is the kind of thinking that earns Disney quite a few dollars in merchandising revenue.
Anyway, back to the words we use.
They need to be precise if you want people to follow what you want them to do.
Like telling them to click the link or hit the buy button.
Equally, they should be fill-in-the-blanks woolly if you want people to put their own interpretation on your words.
Dilbert’s writer – Scott Adams – has done quite a lengthy interpretation of the words that Donald Trump is using in his current campaign. It’s an interesting read regardless of your politics or opinion of cartoon office workers.
Precision is good when you want people to do something precise.
And it can vanish for a while when you want people to stay on your page but let their mind wander for a while. That’s kind-of what made-for-Adsense sites used to do – they’d present little, if any, real information and you’d eventually get bored and either click the back button in your browser or (ideally from Google and the website owner’s perspective) click an advert.
Of course, those sites are less overt nowadays because Google’s advertisers made their feelings known and that, in turn, threatened Google’s revenues.
So made-for-Adsense sites have to try a lot harder.
Anyway, your words really do matter
They’re often the only thing your site readers have to go on.
If you come across as angry, even if you’re the most placid person in your town in real life, that’s how they will perceive you.
If you come across as a pushy salesman, again, that’s what your readers will think.
If you’re not sure, take a few minutes to read your post before hitting the publish button. Preferably out loud as even though most of us don’t physically read things out loud, we do read them out loud inside the privacy of our own head.
Hopefully you won’t be too surprised at what you hear!