Signal this week from Kenzie Collins - audience psychology, brand strategist.

There's a post about my dad in my drafts. It's Wednesday morning and I've got it open again, same as most mornings for the last three weeks.

The words are fine, that's not what stops me. It's one thought, and it turns up the same way every time: someone I used to work with, who hasn't been in my world for a couple of years, opens their phone and there I am, crying.

That's not how you want to be let back into somebody's life.

Then I remember it's exactly how I got let into somebody else's.

Grief puts you on an island. What got me off it was other people's posts. A stranger describing the exact feeling I was having that day, in words I hadn't yet found.

Not the tidy ones written from a good day. Or a year later with a lovely little lesson on the end.
The ones written from real human emotion.

If they'd tidied that up, it never would have reached me. It reached me because it hadn't been sanded down for anyone.

There's a name for what we're all doing when we sand things down.

Audience tuning.

You adjust what you're saying to fit whoever you picture listening, which is normally useful, it's why you talk differently to your mom and your accountant.

The trouble is the audience you picture when you go to press post… or go back to edit V4… it’s almost never the audience you need. You get on a 1:1 call with me in Skool. You name who you’re for. And then you go post for a bunch of other people.

It's about 30 people. The old colleague, the person you used to report to, someone from school, the competitor who's further along than you.

You know their names. Not one of them has ever paid you.

And here’s the concerning part - it doesn't stop at the post. Tune your message for a year and the tuned version becomes the one you believe. You end up living by a watered-down copy of your own point of view with no memory of agreeing to it.

Someone in the AuthorityOS community named the fear perfectly. She said she hadn't expected posting to be this vulnerable… to bring up old wounds like it is. She's weighing up leaving her job, and her ego is whispering to her everyday: “Once you do, you’ll need this content thing to work, or it’ll be clear to everyone that you’re failing.”

So every post carries that weight. What she's afraid of is being seen in the middle of the process, before it's worked.

The biggest shift I've watched anybody make this year went the other way. A 1DS Client dropped his production quality on purpose. No characters to hide behind, no voiceover, no format doing the talking for him. Direct to camera, far less apology, his own stories at the forefront.

His engagement went up. Because you can feel his passion and conviction, and most importantly, you can tell who he's talking to. Nowadays, it’s the easiest thing in the world to determine: “Is this post for me?” The answer: yes.

Being that specific about one person is also the reason everyone else leans in.
“This is for men” makes women stop to listen, too.

None of this is an argument for bleeding all over your feed. The test is narrower. When you soften something, work out who you softened it for. If it's a customer, fair enough. If it's someone who was never going to buy from you, you just paid them with your own reach.

The discomfort right before you post is the most useful signal you've got. It means your content is specific enough to be recognised. You owe that to your people. So do I.

The post is still in my drafts. It's going up this week.

YOUR MOVE //
Before your next post, name the three people whose faces come up when you hesitate. Write them down. Then write the next post for somebody who isn't on the list.

P.S. AOS is $27 a month locked for life for the first 1000 members, then $197. You fill in a form, we help you land on your positioning, the things only you can say, and how to say it to make your audience feel seen. Then you post, and we give you feedback on everything you put out. It’d be silly not to. [JOIN]

Head of Communications, 1DS Collective

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