Part 2 – Paying to be ignored OR how I learned to stop worrying and love the angry letters:
People who write angry letters (or E-mails or tweets or posts) are an interesting breed. I’ve met a few, and I don’t think there’s any unifying personality type there. I think, generally, they’re just people who’ve taken enough interest in a given topic to complain but not enough to propose a workable solution. Actually, I don’t have a single angry letter (or E-mail or tweet or post) in my files where someone genuinely expected a response to their concern from someone who could address it.
I suppose I should take a moment to say that I’m talking about people who write angry letters to companies with which they have an issue. Not to the Consumerists or to legal counsel. Those people are out for blood.
Anyway, one thing I can say about angry letter writers is, “To whom it may concern. Thank you for your interest. You make my job worth doing.”
The thing is, when you reach out to people for a living, there’s a real emptiness that sets in when you don’t solicit any response whatsoever. At the very least, when I do something on behalf of a client, I hope they receive an angry letter or two. After all, the law of averages in a world with a population of over six billion makes it a given that you can’t please all the people all the time. And if you’ve displeased a few, you’ve at least made a few happy.
If you’ve ever communicated in such a vapid, innocuous way that no one was even remotely impassioned by what you had to say, that’s a real problem. You’ve just wasted time or money or both. Simply, you’ve made a conscious decision to be ignored.
So, if you’re not tracking the effectiveness of your communications in any more formal fashion, at least be glad for those angry letters. It means you said or did something in a way that was worth the effort.
Cheers,
jae
Post a Comment