Hold on, I’m going to get both literary and philosophical, but it won’t last long and could help you create better content…

George Eliot, the 19th century novelist, described the human condition as being like a candle placed on a scratched silver tray. The tiny scratches seem to encircle the candle. Move the candle and the ring of scratches moves too, encircling the light in its new position. The point is that we are egotistical creatures who think the world revolves around us.

This can make it very hard to be objective about the right tone of voice and forms of address in your content communications. I was reminded of this recently when I downloaded a piece of content marketing produced by WorkflowMax and Hubspot.

Entitled ‘How to Be More Productive’ it promises ‘tools to increase your performance and improve your time management’. So far so good. This is clearly written for an individual to use to address their own development needs. But beneath the title on the cover page is a different proposition, stating that the contents are: ‘Tools to Increase Employee Performance’.

I’m confused. Is this a guide for managers to help them manage employees, or is it a guide to be used as professional ‘self-help’. The accompanying text clearly suggests the latter and this creates an unpleasant friction between the direct ‘increase your performance’ and the third person ‘increase employee performance’.

We all know that we’re employees but we don’t like to be addressed in that way. It’s like talking about someone who is in the room as though they weren’t present. In this case it is not just clumsy and confusing, it may be counter productive.

You or me?

I saw another recent example on a corporate time management site [ check ]. Once logged in the user could click through to their own dashboard by hitting the ‘Your View’ link. ‘Your View’ remained as the label for this section of the website where the employee would spend all their time.

One can understand the thinking. ‘Your View’ sounds personal and distinguishes the pages from the general, non-specific parts of the site. But the use of the word ‘your’ has implications. Where there is a ‘your’ there must be an ‘our’. An alternative would be to label these pages ‘My View’. Again this gives a personal feel but feels less alienating: the ‘us and them’ distinction is not implied in the same way.

Head space

Getting away from our subjective views of content consumers is key to marketing success. We must be able to walk a mile in our audience’s shoes to understand where our content can help them and so be of worth. We must see the world (and imagine consuming our content) through their eyes.

This is easier said that done. As content creators or commissioners we lose objectivity very quickly. What is needed is a fresh pair of eyes, preferably from the target audience. Testing, as always, is vital. Think of that candle on the tray and seek different perspectives. In this way we can ensure that a simple phrase does not get in the way of our position as a trusted partner.