On the sales page for my Most Valuable Email course, I once wrote:
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People love stories that show vulnerability — from the guru who’s already made tens of millions of dollars. But stories of vulnerability from the panhandler in front of the supermarket? People don’t love that so much.
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Turns out I was wrong. People do love stories of vulnerability from people who haven’t achieved anything — as long as those people make their plea on Facebook or Twitter. From an article I just read, “The rise of pity marketing”:
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Two weeks ago, at the start of the Edinburgh Fringe, an actor named Georgie Grier posted on Twitter to say only one person had turned up to her one-woman preview show, attaching a picture of herself crying with the caption: “It’s fine, isn’t it? It’s fine…?”
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Within hours, Grier had thousands of replies to her Tweet, including from other, more successful comedians, encouraging her to keep going and saying they had bought tickets to her show. The next night, Grier played to a packed room.
The article I read gives other good examples to make the case that being a pity-seeking loser on social media is now a viable business strategy. The article wraps it up with the following observation:
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Is it real success if you had to publicly declare yourself a failure to achieve it? Those who opt in to pity marketing seem unconcerned, given it can yield major (if short-term) returns.
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Phew. This gives me a bit of a lifeline.
Because I find pity-seeking revolting, both in myself and in others. I want to continue my war on it.
But how can I, when it clearly works, and I was wrong to say it doesn’t?
Well, I’m shifting my angle of attack. My hope lies in the key phrase above, how pity marketing can create “major (if short-term) returns.”
Because there’s no way in hamfat that pity seeking can truly be a reliable strategy for the long term.
In the current moment, pity seeking seems to be viable in general.
And in the current moment in your career, whatever it is that you do, you might post on social media that you have no readers/audience members/customers/clients/sales/whatever. And if you also post a video or a pic of yourself, red-eyed and teary, you might draw sympathy and maybe even a short-term spike in business.
But it’s not something you can do every day.
No, for every day, you need another strategy.
Because the pity reservoirs in most people get depleted pretty quick.
But the reservoirs for being amused, surprised, taught something cool and new, benefited directly and indirectly, well, those reservoirs run very deep.
There might be multiple strategies that allow you to tap into those deep reservoirs over and over again.
I know of one such strategy, which I can personally recommend. It’s my Most Valuable Email trick. In case you’d like to find out what that is, so you can start using it today, tomorrow, and the day after to grow your audience and influence and income while making yourself into a better and more skilled person: