Busy as Hell and Taking Time To Break Up Content

Busy? I bet my last dollar you are. Shopping, kids, phone calls, emails, appointments, the shit just keeps coming right? I sometimes think that there’s someone, or something, sitting above me waiting for me to clear a few jobs before dumping a load more of shit on me from a big bucket with a label on it ‘Torment’. Yep, I definitely got this one right, the ‘Sh*! Demon’. I can hear the little sod laughing as I type, no doubt planning to drop more on me any minute now!

There’s an old saying that goes something like “If you want something doing, give it to someone busy”. Let me tell you now that this is extreme bull crap. If you give your shit to me don’t expect it back until the day after politicians stop lying through their irritatingly smug faces.

We are all too busy to take in the detail, so give people the gist of your message

We all have it, a relentless stream of stuff to do and no time to do it in. The result of this is that when we are online, we systematically scan stuff at speed, make nanosecond judgments, and label 99.99999999999% of the stuff presented to us as irrelevant shod. Bam, it’s gone forever, move on.

And that, my evil marketer friend, is why putting headlines in content is now more essential than the most essential thing in Most Essential Land.

People Only Remember the Gist Of Things

According to a study by Poppenk, Joanisse, Danckert, and Köhler [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18528855], people remember the gist of conversations and not every word. Now just like me, the phrase ‘no shit Sherlock’ just flashed through your mind.

In psychological terms, this is known as the ‘Verbatim Effect’ - the ability to paraphrase and condense material that you have heard into just the general idea or gist of what was said. Put simply, you can repeat the meaning but you cannot repeat the description word for word.

In business leadership terms the Verbatim Effect principle is what is known as a ’SOBO’ - a ‘Statement Of the Bleeding Obvious’. It’s so obvious in fact that most marketers, including me, overlook it, presumably because we are so fecking busy it just gets forgotten. So here’s a little reminder on how to use the Verbatim Effect to help your content get remembered.

So Make Your Content Memorable >>

For Written Content - highlight coherent phrases using titles and call-outs

Highlight certain words and phrases. Make them stand out from the crowd. The important thing is to make the words form a coherent string when you read only them. So Start at the top of your masterpiece and read out loud just the words and phrases you have highlighted. It should still make sense?

For Video Content - add full-screen captions at key points

At various points throughout your video, add a caption screen with a key point on it. So if you are outlining a number of rules, for example, start each section of your video with a blank screen that says ‘Rule 1 - Do this’, ‘Rule 2 - Do that’, etc.

For Audio Content - add sound bytes at key points

Similarly, break your audio stream up into sections and begin each section with a clear sound byte.