After reading quite a bit of Tuned In, I was really intrigued by one of the questions posed by the team at Pragmatic Marketing. Is your website talking about your company or is it talking about your customers?
Though it’s important to justify your authority in your space, it’s much more important for you to speak to what you’ve achieved for your customers. I posed the question on Twitter and it got some attention from quite a few folks, including Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim.
I decided to put myself to the test… am I talking about myself more on my blog than about the readers? I wrote a Tuned In Calculator to find out! The calculator parses your feed and measures the volume of I, me, we, you, you’re, us, etc. in the content of the feed. It weighs titles greater as well!
Here are the results for my blog, a 9 out of 10:
This basically means that I talk about you the majority of the time! Interestingly enough, I put the feed addresses of some major A-listers and the results were all over the scale! Give it a shot! If you find any Narcissists (A score of 0), let me know! I had some fun with the titles of the results.
And be sure to pick up a copy of Tuned In: Uncover the Extraordinary Opportunities That Lead to Business Breakthroughs. It’s an outstanding book on effectively communicating with customers and prospects in order to grow your business. My favorite feature of the book is that each section provides real-world examples of Tuned In companies!
I didn’t do so well. 60% about myself. But I’m not sure I understand this. It’s my blog. I’m not necessarily trying to talk about my customers. I’m trying to talk *to* them which inevitably makes me use words like “I” and “me”. If I were to punch in the copy for the rest of my web site, the “me” factor would probably drop to 10% or less.
I agree, Patric. It’s just a nifty little check to see whether or not you always talk about yourself. Even when we do speak about ourselves, I think it’s important to put it in context FOR the audience. I speak about myself a lot on the blog, but I try to communicate why it’s important for them!
Cool tool! I scored the same as Patric. As a guideline, it’s helpful, though I agree there are a lot of variables that affect the significance of a particular score. Measuring your blog over time, following a trend, might be more valuable than looking at a specific number.
On Marketing Pilgrim, we talk about “you” 60% of the time. I’m happy with that, because folks read the blog in order to here “our” opinion on marketing news and how it effects “them.” So it’s a good balance.
Now, when you’re actually selling a product or service, 90% should be a goal to aim for.
Nice tool Doug!
I agree, Andy. I think an important element of a blog IS to speak about yourself so that visitors can build a relationship with you personally as well as professionally.
Doug,
Glad you enjoyed the book. This is an awesome first step in assessing where you are at on the Tuned In spectrum. Thanks for sharing it. We’re also looking at similar ways to assess how good we are at market sensing, creating products that solve real market problems and launching solutions that resonate with buyers. I look forward to sharing them with you and your community.
Phil, Craig and David
Phil,
Thanks so much for stopping by! I really did enjoy the book and appreciate your team’s transparency – it apparent that you folks really did take your wealth of knowledge and years of experience and put it all under a single cover. Great job!
Doug
Thanks for the tool Doug. I scored 50-50. For a blog site that would be a fairly nice balance much like Andy has said.
For many ecommerce sites, we have to think of them as more than just an online brochure on the company. Certainly the more “you” or “your” words that appear in a site (direct mail or whatever ad) that offers a product/service is going to be a better marketing piece than one that has more “I’ and “me” in it. These are the basics concepts behind great copywriting.
A good copywriting book for people to start of with is the classic book by Claude Hopkins, Scientific Advertising. This is a MUST READ (if you haven’t done so already) and many of the most successful business owners have used it to transform their business marketing to boost sales. Even for those who have read it, it pays to read it a few more times.
What a terrific tool. Thanks for creating it. I’m happy to say my blog scored a 9. (Big sigh of relief – imagine if one of the guys who wrote the book was a crappy score…) Take care, David
Me Points: 85 Other Points: 91
Considerate (5 out of 10)
Hmmm… Guess I still have some work to do on mine.
Exactly tool though thanks
Interesting… In just 48 hours, my blog has gone from a 9 to an 8. I gotta figure out why!! David
Douglas, Thanks for sharing your Tuned In Calculator. I’m a big fan of the book Tuned In and am all for tools that help us become more aware of our short comings.
I’m interested in finding out more about how you come up with the score. Have you posted information about the metrics you use to calculate the score? I will definitely use your calculator to improve my score. Knowing how you derive the score will help even more. -Michael
Thank Douglas great tool and post – apparently mine scored 10/10
(Me Points: 1 Other Points: 80) I’m guessing I should focus more on me…
Maybe you will get a chance to stop by my blog sometime – http://www.kasumiseo.co.uk/ – I blog about SEO and Online Marketing (surely that will give me an extra point!!!)
Out of interest what to you think is the ideal result for your calculator?