When Your Audience gets "Fire Alarm Syndrome"
Tuesday nights I’ve been taking Tina aka Teenie aka Beanie to doggie class.
It’s mostly rewarding, occasionally frustrating, and always cute.
Turns out she can totally understand me…so long as there’s a treat involved!
Alas, when I just need her to stop doing something extremely annoying…
Her powers of comprehension suddenly vanish. Weird right?
Jack the dog trainer says I am giving her “Fire Alarm Syndrome.”
That’s what happens when I say a corrective phrase (uh uh, hiss, hey, leave it!) repeatedly to no avail.
The message loses power. Tina tunes me out. I’m like a fire alarm that goes off so often without a fire, people stop reacting as if their lives are in danger. It may be loud as hell, but somehow they just roll their eyes and carry on with their business.
This got me thinking about copy. Messaging. Subject lines. Headlines.
The way we attempt to be heard and understood on the Big Bad Net.
On one hand, it’s absolutely true what many of my wise mentors and colleagues say: Repetition leads to recognition.
Usually people need to hear things a loooooot more than once before they’ll buy in. For sure!
But sometimes, I posit, members of our intended audience may develop Fire Alarm Syndrome around the things we’re repeatedly saying or trying to say…and often through no fault of our own.
I was already thinking about this when The Brand Scientist, N. Chloé Nwangwu said the following in her recent Visibility Clinic (highly recommend):
“Being the loudest voice in the room isn't always the way to capture attention, and in fact, sometimes you train other people's brains to filter you out. And our brains are extra hyper-vigilant these days…”
Now my wheels were really turning.
I wondered…what sort of things trigger my brain filters and cause me to start tuning out information that might be in service to me?
To start, I came up with 3 things:
When I’ve heard this buzzword too many times before.
For example, if I were an emerging thought leader or expert in mental health, wellness or self-care…my challenge would be to rarely ever use those words.
The fire alarm on “mental health” has been ringing across the web for so long, I’m very rarely going to read anything that leads with it — which doesn’t mean that I don’t want to hear from therapists on how I can have closer relationships or more authentic creativity or less days where I’m down in the dumps.
Unfortunately I’m not eager to generally “prioritize my mental health” unless you can make a refreshing, specific case for why I actually want to.
There are plenty of such buzzwords flapping around, croaking. Can you think of any others?
When an overarching idea or theme is in its “laggard” phase.
I imagine ideas go through a life cycle just like new trends and technologies. First you get buy-in from early adopters, then early majority, then the late majority, and finally, the sweet laggards of my heart.
We often hear, “what’s old to you is always new to someone else” — which is true, but what if eventually there are only so many someone else’s left? What if the majority of an audience has grown as much as they could from the existing body of work and checked out of the conversation because they feel like they already know this stuff?
In the world of algorithms and overstuffed inboxes, it can be harder to grow and fascinate a new audience without buy-in from the existing one.
When ideas are packaged “inconveniently.”
I know. Sad. On the bright side, this isn’t usually the case for people who know you face-to-face or heard you on a podcast and became super interested in everything you have to say. Friends and fans might open your emails even if the subject lines are nothing flashy and it takes a while to get to the good part (at least for a time?).
But as all the loose ties out there, it needs to be as quick and easy as possible to get to the heart of what you’re saying. Most people are not going to invest the time to consume our ideas if they can’t figure out why they should.
That’s why the packaging and delivery (opening words, formatting, style) matters as much as the substance of what you’re saying. It’s why people hire copywriters (ehem) to write headlines and hooks. And it’s why I would avoid tiny fonts on info-heavy instagram graphics at all costs. Those are highly inconvenient.
Alright GEE, thanks for the WOMP WOMP Rebeca!
Is there anyway to avoid or cure Fire Alarm Syndrome?
I’m no doctor, but here are some ideas from my humble garden hose:
Think about where the conversation — the dream, beliefs, concerns, perceptions — has changed, and how your work intersects with those changes. What do people need to hear from you now? Sometimes we need the old ideas in new shapes and forms to open our thinking back up. And that’s what Thought Leaders help us do: think new thoughts that lead us forward.
Take buzzwords, jargon or stale messages and do a simple exercise to remix them. “I want you to have [buzzword] so you can ______.” Do it a dozen times or more. Take the 3 most thrilling things that pop up in that blank, and about THOSE.
Throw absolute curveballs into your subject lines or social posts. Just be a little weird! Why not? Dance like nobody’s watching amIright?
Work with a genius like N. Chloé and get scientifically precise in building a brand that can break through those brain filters no matter what.
Work with me to Stir the Pot — to bring the buried zingers in your brain-soup to the surface. I help find the ideas that feel a bit uncomfortable and scary, and package them with the utmost convenience so they can spice up the conversation.
Speaking of spicy, scary ideas:
Discomfort can be a very good sign that you are poised to break the spell of FAS.
Discomfort means your idea pushes into new territory.
As my mentor Kelly Diels talks about in her forthcoming book on social media: sometimes the people who present the most pushback and resistance to your ideas end up hiring you!
Every so often comes the time to raise a new challenge. To question a new norm. To go out on a shaky limb.
Sometimes that’s the only way to shake people — and dogs — out of whatever patterns they're stuck in.
Barking at people in the hallway may be Tina’s comfort zone…
…But we’ll all sleep more soundly if I can inspire her to leave that life behind.
Wish me luck!