You are competing with everything
Are you trying to reach people? To get them to come to your website, buy your products or services, read your newspaper, view your ad, or remember your message? Good luck. It’s a crowded world out there. In fact, it has never been harder to get your message across than it is today. There was a time, not long ago, when we all watched the same TV shows and listened to a half dozen radio stations. During this time, your town may have had one or two newspapers and a really big movie theater with only two screens. The only big barrier to reaching people was money. Getting your message out in today's world requires that you first acknowledge that you are competing with everything in every medium—the entire Internet, not just your competitor's website, your customer's favorite iPod playlist, the entire catalog of On Demand movies, the 20 different reality TV shows playing at any given moment. Absolutely everything. What you are competing for is a few precious minutes, not of someone's time, but of their attention. And while people will sometimes allow you to waste their time, they are very protective of their attention, and they boycott those who waste it. So, now it's not enough to be able to buy commercial time or a full-page ad, you have to be interesting, too…interesting enough that someone will choose to give you their attention. And interesting enough that after having given you their attention, they will be glad that they did. How interesting is your message? Are you even trying to be interesting or just accurate?