Shut up – “Quiet-time” for marketers.

I recently filtered out the emails I used to get from Border’s Bookstores and removed a number of feeds from my Bloglines account. The reason is simple: no matter how often each of these deleted sources tried to put something in front of me (and it was painfully often), they never offered me anything that mattered to me. Instead of providing me something useful or something that I care about, they pummelled me senseless with message after message, hoping that maybe I would care about one of them. TV-style advertising using repetition and volume to elicit a response still works when repurposed as email or RSS. It just elicits the wrong response. It makes me stop listening. As I mentioned not too long ago, trying to be louder in an increasingly loud world flat-out fails. Maybe silence is golden, after all.

Personally, I’ve been very quiet for the last several weeks here in this space. Three reasons contributed to the inactivity.

1. The first was a quasi-planned experiment to see what would happen to my blog’s traffic during the quiet period. Suprisingly, it didn’t drop off near so much as I thought it might, though it’s not the sort of thing I’d recommend if feeding your family depends on your site’s traffic.
2. The second was due to a series of real-world intrusions into my virtual-world life.
3. The third, and most important in this context, was that I didn’t have much to contribute to the dialogue. I wouldn’t describe it as writer’s block, because I had plenty of ideas, many of which may find their way into this space over the coming weeks. It was that those ideas weren’t fully-formed enough to make it worth my readers’ time. Better to flesh them out, then let them see the light of day

As marketers, when planning a message to our audiences, we need to think about whether or not our audience will actually care about what we’re saying. If they will, then go ahead and publish or send at will. If not, maybe we should reconsider what it is we’re saying.