Inspirational Communications
Flicking through my RSS feeds on the wonderful early edition app for iPad (see here) I came across this sentence from a highly timely and poignant post from twistimage.com
"If more Marketers focused on feeling, emotion and attempts to stir the human condition, more and more people would not only embrace advertising and marketing, they would actively seek it out"
I have been feeling this lately, that in all the rush of pitching, seeking out and actually trying to run the business of pour existing accounts, we marketeers can get awful caught up in figures, function and forward feature schedules and forget all about making people actually feel anything. This is particularly a trapping for those of us who work in PR as we are far less concerned with artworks, creatives, concept etc. But ignoring this, particularly in the light of "social communications" could not just be to our detriment, nut our ultimate downfall.
I think we need to drastically rethink our PR - are we just there to get product messages in front of consumers? Or communicate the latest retort by a company in a crisis? - Or are we truly there to touch people on an emotional level. A level where we are not just made to "know" something, but FEEL something.
Get Inspiring!
It will pain many PR people to accept that we need to draw some inspiration (more on that in a minute) from our cousins in the advertising world, and return to creating not only "creative" (a pet hate word of mine - it appears no one really knows what it means) ideas, but ideas that inspire those who receive them to share, create, or innovate something new as a result of being touched by them. Creating spreadable ideas should form the core of everything we do, particularly in the world of social comms as the ability for that creation and participation to happen is greatly amplified.
When it comes down to it, I think the thing that gets people moving, wakes them up, feel alive again is Inspiration. Inspiration is the something that helps us to see something new in ourselves or those around us, inspiration helps us to explore who we truly are. Inspiration is not something that can be formed in a boardroom or a brainstorm – Inspiration comes from seeing the potential in someone or something that sparks a new beginning in us, something that leads us to pursue who we are meant to be with meaning and purpose.
Wouldn't it be nice to see a little more inspiration in our marketing and a little less "tactics" or even "creativity"?