Marc Fest
By Marc Fest, Founder, Atlanticpoint.com
All of us are guilty of it: We can’t help but see the world from our own perspective. It’s part of being human, and it admittedly helped us get to where we are as a species.
I don’t remember exactly when it dawned on me, but some years ago I realized that much of what communicators do is help people overcome that ego perspective because it is one of the things that most stand in the way of effective communications.
It is easy to understand why: if we communicate from our perspective, we won’t connect with our audience, because they see things from their perspective. Dah.
So it is the “ego view” of the others that we communicators need to prioritize in order to communicate effectively. This means we have to get over our own egotistic perspective, and those of our clients’, too. One of my favorite manifestations of the client’s “ego view” occurs in news releases whose first paragraph often is all about the names of the organization and of people that only matter to the issuer of the news release but are totally meaningless to the audience, such as journalists and their readers / viewers. The “non-ego” and more effective way of drafting the first paragraph of a news release is by spelling out what is new, what is the impact, what will be different, and why it matters – all from the audience’s point of view. That’s what readers and writers will care about. In the second paragraph it is then OK and appropriate to point out who it is bringing about all this wonderful novelty in the world. But lead with the impact, and why it is important, rather than with who is doing all of it. Unless, of course, the “who” is an eye-catching household name, like Bill Clinton or Bono. But that, usually, is not the case.
So this was one of my aha moments: that communications is, in essence, very much about getting over our “selves” and naturally self-centric viewpoints.
Marc Fest is the founder of Atlantic Point, LLC, a communications consultancy based in Miami Beach, Florida, and the organization behind MessageHouse.org.
