"Hey! You got Seth Godin in my peanut butter!"
"Well, you've got Virginia Postrel in my chocolate!"
I had read about thirty pages in Virginia's book The Substance of Style this morning, put it down and picked up Seth's book All Marketers Are Liars. I got twenty or so pages into Seth's book, ran into a common topic between the two books and instantly thought about PR guys.
The common topic is authenticity. Virginia, in the realm of aesthetic meaning, contrasts an objective ideal of authenticity against a subjective one. The objective view uses standards to judge, an outside in approach. The subjective view begins from within the self, an inside out look. Seth talks about the need for marketers to have authenticity. He says, "...no marketing succeeds if it can't find an audience that already wants to believe the story being told."
My Reese's moment came when I thought about how people try to pitch us bloggers, especially those of us who write product or service reviews. For perspective, I only receive a handful of solicitations per year. I can't begin to fathom how many an insanely popular chap like Merlin Mann lands per year. Enough to say that he must have an interesting opinion on authenticity as well.
"Hey, I really love your blog. Will you please consider reviewing my client's new book, The Mindset of The Blogging Millionaire?"
"Thought you might like to review Bobbing For Bloggers before we appear on the Oprah show."
I think most of us who write online have the propensity to spot a visitor with inauthentic intentions faster than a candy bar going to goo inside a car parked in the Florida sun. Ben McConnell writes a great post instructing folks who wish to contact us and how to do it properly.
To be authentic, to be worthy of trust and belief, people must be real and human. Even corporations can be authentic. Afterall, machines do not author press releases and corporate communications, people do. Lose the nauseating corporate rhetoric and speak the language of humans. Let the verbiage melt in your mouth and not on your keyboard.