You don't offend, you don't attract

I said this at a roundtable and somebody told me to put it on a T-shirt. Which I took as a compliment.

The context was a room full of people admitting they don't post the things they actually think. One woman described herself as a foul-mouthed exec with hot takes, and then said she never puts any of them out. Another had a mate who writes on LinkedIn exactly like he writes in a WhatsApp group, and it works, and he still called it rolling the dice.

Everybody in that room knew the safe version doesn't work. Everybody was still doing the safe version.

So I went and looked at what the research actually says, partly because I wanted to know if my T-shirt slogan was true. It mostly is. It's also more specific than I'd assumed, and there's a bit where it stops being true that I didn't expect.

Go and read your own about page. I'll wait.

Professional but approachable. Passionate about results. We're a true extension of your team. Every agency in Britain has written this, which means it identifies you as an agency and nothing else.

The problem isn't that it's boring. Boring at least implies a reaction. The problem is that it produces no reaction whatsoever, and the research on what gets passed around is fairly blunt about what happens next.

Berger and Milkman analysed every New York Times article published over three months to work out what made things get emailed on. What they found was that arousal does the work. Content that provokes a high-arousal state gets shared, and that holds for awe on the positive side and for anger and anxiety on the negative side. Content that provokes low-arousal, deactivating states like sadness does not travel, even though sadness is a perfectly strong feeling. It held up when they controlled for how surprising, interesting or useful the thing was.

That's the bit worth sitting with. Sad is not a weak emotion. It just doesn't activate anything, so nobody forwards it.

Middle-ground agency marketing is a deactivating emotion. Nobody reads your about page and feels anything they'd act on. There's nothing to argue with, nothing to agree with loudly, nothing to send to a colleague. It goes in and stops.

Here's why the T-shirt holds up.

Both reactions are the same underlying event. Somebody read your thing, worked out what it implied about them, and had a response. The person who loves it and the person who's annoyed by it have both done the identical piece of cognitive work. They've placed themselves relative to you.

The one you actually want to worry about is the third person, who read it and placed themselves nowhere, because there was nothing to place themselves against.

Which is why my client who hates partner managers is right, even though it's an absurd thing to build a public position on. He genuinely believes it's the most useless job in existence and he says so constantly. Everyone's invited to my event except partner managers, they can sort themselves out. Partner managers are not his buyers. What he's actually broadcasting, every time, is that he says the thing other people are thinking. Which is the entire proposition.

The cost is real and he pays it. He's just decided the people he loses were never going to sign anything.

Now the part that stops the T-shirt from being a licence.

Chen and Berger looked specifically at whether controversy makes people talk. It does, up to a point, and then it reverses. Low levels of controversy increase the likelihood of discussion. Past a moderate level, more controversy reduces it. Five studies, field and lab.

The mechanism is two things fighting. Controversy raises interest, which makes people want to talk about it. It also raises discomfort, which makes them not want to be seen talking about it. Below a certain point interest wins. Above it, discomfort does. They also found context moves the line, so people will engage with more controversial material anonymously, or with friends, than they will in public with strangers.

Read that last bit again and then think about LinkedIn, which is the least anonymous place most of your buyers go all week. Their boss is there. Their clients are there. The person they're quietly interviewing with is there.

So the ceiling is lower on LinkedIn than it is anywhere else, which is inconvenient, because LinkedIn is where you've all decided to do this.

It's salt. Under-seasoned is the most common failure and nobody ever sends the plate back, they just don't come again. But there's a point where you've oversalted it and there is no recovering that dish. You can add salt. You cannot remove it.

Which is roughly what happened recently when a founder with a very large following took a cold email he'd received, posted it publicly, and named the rep who'd sent it. The room in Edinburgh brought it up unprompted and the reaction was uniform. Not that it was rude. That it was somebody with an audience aiming it at a junior person's actual job. The discomfort swamped the interest. People stopped wanting to be near it.

I'm not naming him, which is the whole point.

The line isn't rudeness. It's whether the discomfort attaches to an idea or to a person.

This is the caveat that kills most agency edgelording and nobody mentions it.

Aronson, Willerman and Floyd ran an experiment in 1966 that's now called the pratfall effect. People listened to a recording of somebody doing a quiz, and at the end some of them heard the person spill a cup of coffee on themselves. When the person had answered most of the quiz correctly, the blunder made them significantly more likeable. When the person had performed averagely, the same blunder made them substantially less likeable.

Same coffee. Opposite result. The variable was whether they'd already demonstrated they were good.

Aronson's read was that competence at a distance reads as slightly inhuman, and the mistake closes the gap. If there's no competence to humanise, all you've done is confirm the suspicion.

So when you post something spiky and it lands, that isn't the spikiness working on its own. It's the spikiness working on a foundation of people knowing you're good at the job. Post the same thing off the back of no proof and it doesn't read as confident, it reads as somebody covering.

Sarcasm works for me because there's a body of work sat underneath it. Take that away and I'm just a bloke being rude on the internet, and there are already enough of those.

Last one, because I'd rather you heard it from me.

Luo, Raithel and Wiles looked at brand rating dispersion, which is the gap between how much people love you and how much people don't. They ran it across more than 730,000 brand-day observations and found the effects pull in opposite directions. High dispersion depresses returns. It also reduces the firm's risk. And it's asymmetric, so the downside end of dispersion moves the numbers harder than the upside end does.

Polarisation buys you something and it charges you for it. Anyone selling you a version where it's all upside hasn't read anything.

For an agency I'd still take the trade, because you don't need broad affection. You need forty people a year who are certain. But go in knowing it costs, rather than finding out later and blaming the tactic.

Write down who you want to repel. Actually write it. If you can't name a type of client, a type of pitch or a type of belief you're actively trying to drive off, you haven't got a position, you've got a description.

Then check it's an idea and not a person. Attack how agencies price. Attack the retainer model. Attack the thing everyone in your category pretends is fine. Don't attack a named junior on the internet.

Then make sure the proof is visible. The pratfall research is clear that this only works from a base of demonstrated competence, so if the last twelve months of your feed is opinions and no work, fix the ratio before you turn the volume up.

And accept the arithmetic. You're going to lose people. That's not the tactic misfiring. That's the tactic.

The alternative is being professional but approachable, which is not safe. It's just a way of losing to indifference instead, which is slower and much harder to notice.