One of my great talents with clients is my ability to fall in love fast and hard with their organization as well as their audience. I’d even go so far as to say it is my superpower.
Why? Your audience responds to authentic feelings. If you hire a mercenary that doesn’t necessarily care about your organization and what they do, then they will feel it. And if that person also doesn’t respect your audience, it’s game over. Generating actual, real feelings for everything your organization does and who they help will just naturally make the content better.
So can you learn this superpower? Possibly. Keep an open mind and try some of these tactics I use to fall in love with clients over and over again.
Don’t let negativity in
Something I tell my clients when I first start working with them is to never be negative about their organization with me. That’s not to say that I don’t want them to tell me the negative things I need to be aware of for social media. This is more like, if they suddenly hate something about their organization for a personal reason, I don’t want to know about it. I’d rather they remain neutral with me. Even one seed of doubt can poison any kind of love I’m developing for the client.
Questionnaire
I give all of my new clients a questionnaire. Most of the questions are standard and information you’d expect I’d need to be able to do my job. However, I add in several that are seemingly soft balls. To me, those are the most important questions. They probe at why this organization is so special. They ask about those little details. And they invite the client to tell me why they love the organization.
That’s where the germ of my love will start. I absorb the information they give me and turn them into my own feelings. I have an easy time of this, but this is most likely where most social media professionals might fail. But if reading about why someone loves something doesn’t make you warm, that doesn’t mean you can’t fall in love with the client. You will just have to find another way in.
Read through the website
When I first start with a client, I’m trying to become as knowledgeable as possible as quickly as possible. That means combing through their website.
A thorough look of a website is such a gift, both for me and the client. For the client, I can look for any glaring holes based on my initial research, and I can look for any edits that need to be made. For me, I can look through the different angles they use to talk about the organization and find the one (or more, hopefully) that really speaks to me. All it takes is one to plant that little seed. It doesn’t have to be something big. It could just be a little aspect that you find interesting.
You do need to go into this with an open mind for anything to strike you. And you have to be open for love. So if you’re having a bad day or just feeling closed off for any reason, it’s not a good day to take this on. Do research or some other task that doesn’t require you to catch feelings.
Get to know the audience
Look at who is already commenting on the client’s social media pages. Find the influencers in the space, regardless of whether they are currently interacting with your client. Read their comments, get to know the content they are posting and get that connection you need to start a relationship.
At this point, it’s just one-sided, so it’s not really a relationship yet. Even if they are currently interacting with your client, they aren’t interacting with you as your client. You are just looking for those spots that would make you want to get to know more about this person, so you can start making it a true, long-term relationship for your client. But even more importantly, so you can find more things to fall in love with about your client and their audience. How is your client helping them? And why is that important? More importantly, why is that special?
The more time you engage with this, the easier it is to fall in love. And the more likely you are to be able to do your job effectively.
Be open to it all
In so many ways, our society is telling us to close off and always be looking out for the next best thing. This requires a completely opposite approach. Be open and know that you are with the best thing.
And if you haven’t figured this out already, most of the activities I’ve told you to do to fall in love are normal pre-posting activities. You can do all of those activities closed off and not develop even a single feeling. But if you leave yourself open during the entire process and let everything pass through you, you will fall in love. To me, that’s the ultimate goal of a lot of that pre-posting work.
That openness can turn you into a true believer in the client. And no one posts better than a true believer who knows what they’re doing on social media. So don’t be afraid to leave yourself open and to fall madly and deeply in love.
How have you fallen in love with a client organization?