Empathy and Action vs. Clickbait
by David Dean Menzies
To quote the famous philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, "All I need is a sheet of paper and something to write with, and then I can turn the world upside down."
This continues to resonate today with the reliance—not preference, not proliferation, but pure reliance—on the internet for most every aspect of our daily lives. News, shopping, working, exercise, healthcare, keeping up with friends and family, blogging, anything and everything we touch at some point goes through our mobile devices or computer.
Don’t believe me? Think about the last time you went one whole day without going online.
As we all rely more and more on the online world for our information, the lines continue to blur between social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.) and online shopping websites, news sites, and other content generators. Thanks to interoperability and cross-channel advertising, tracking cookies, geofencing, and other purposefully intrusive tools to get words in front of our eyes, we are literally deluged with words. We are also provided with the ability to publish and disseminate our own words via these same online platforms.
Understand Your Audience
For fiction and nonfiction writers alike, we need to know our audience to be successful. Just as I wouldn’t submit a romance novel to a science fiction publisher, I would shy away from using humorous, lighthearted language in a press release about an important, serious topic.
Empathy is loosely defined as understanding someone else’s feelings, from their perspective. When writing, thinking about what an individual is going through with regard to a particular topic is important BEFORE communicating to that person. This way, you can ensure your words will have a meaningful impact and influence their actions, such as making a purchase or joining a cause.
Too often, professional communicators as well as everyday people do not show empathy to an audience before communicating.
Thanks to the aforementioned online advertising tools, people chatting about a particular topic on a social media platform may start seeing ads loosely related to that topic, even if it is for a cause or product the individual has real issues with. It’s as if the ad is saying, “Oh, you are talking about X, so you must be thinking Y.” This is not empathy. This is clickbait, something to attract your attention without knowing how you actually feel about a topic.
Similarly, those of us on social media have all witnessed (and perhaps even participated in) posting information without first considering its impact on others. The more high-profile the topic, the more clickbait dominates. Think about the recent events surrounding the George Floyd tragedy and subsequent protests and riots; the COVID-19 pandemic and quarantine; or the upcoming presidential election. How much content are you reading—or, maybe more importantly, providing—that offers insight into actions individuals can take to positively affect their lives and the lives of those around them, versus opinions of people you’ve never met or sensational headlines linking to useless content?
In professional copywriting, we look to understand our audience, give them useful information, and provide a call to action to make their lives better.
Now that we all have sheets of paper and something to write with, we need to decide if we want to turn the world upside down and, if so, how.
David Dean Menzies is a writer and marketer with a passion for innovative and inspiring people, places and things. He is also a published fiction author on Amazon.
