That’s because attention on social media is no longer a sliding scale.

It’s gone from being a spectrum of how-much-attention-are-they-really-paying to being virtually binary — people are either paying attention or they’re not.

‘Wow, gee Clare, way to lead with the good news stories.’ — I know, I know, that was a heavy start. Yikes.

BUT, it’s important. Because the opportunity that binary attention creates is this: as marketers, we get to do more interesting work and tell more interesting stories, because the only ones that are going to work are the ones that are meaningful to our audience. The ones that take a risk, that have genuine heart. That’s our job now. Which is pretty freakin’ great.

Through storytelling like that, our audience gives us permission to be on those channels. We earn the permission to be in their space — which takes time, and is a privilege. We earn the privilege of talking to people who want to hear from us.

Seth Godin, legend of marketing and the most iconic glasses wearer around, defines audience permission here:

Ask yourself — if you didn’t publish today, if your blog post or piece of content didn’t go out into the world, would your audience miss you if you didn’t show up? If the answer is no, then you do not have permission — you are merely being tolerated.

But if you have permission, you have an asset. And that asset is priceless. It is the priceless asset of attention.

That means that we get to give ourselves permission first — permission to do work and tell stories that are going to impact our audience — to make them laugh, to feel inspired by, or to be motivated because of.

Which is lots more fun than just trying to get likes on the ‘gram from cat pictures (OK OK, cat pictures are awesome and we all LOVE them, including me. Bad example).

Anyway, with that in mind, here’s some helpful stuff to aid you in being the legendary storyteller and permission-getter that you are.

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