Advertising to Googlized Readers

A few days ago I had a little spare time and I sat down and *gasp* read an actual magazine. I wanted to feel smart, so I read The Atlantic, which is kind of like The New Yorker, only with pictures. The articles tend to be in-depth, and as such they report on things already covered months ago in the weekly periodicals. They pride themselves on actually digging into a story and giving the reader many paragraphs to chew on.

The irony did not escape me when I read the article called, “Is Google Making us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr (Were you expecting a hyperlink? No way- I’m not sending you off this page till the end). It was an in-depth analysis on how people that use Google frequently are running into problems trying to read and understand anything more than a couple paragraphs. Google, says Carr, is not only changing the way we find information, but also the way with think. We can no longer read long books or even lengthy articles about information we seek. We simply hop from page to page on the internet hoping to find the answer in one quick snippet.

Stay With Me

Carr pointed out that Google won’t be happy until they already know what you are looking for and can connect your brain directly to the information you want. OK, scary, but we get the point. They are continually refining the Google algorithm to mimic our behaviors and find us more relevant content. While helpful, this drives us to smaller and smaller attention spans.

According to Carr, you are already tired of reading this article, so I will stick a bold statement here to wake you up! Carr touches on some very important principles for the small business owner. Consider your advertisements, fliers, brochures, blogs, website, and everything else your customer sees. As owners, we usually try to convey everything about our company to try to convince prospects that we are special.

But, without broken up snippets, your readers:

Won’t Read The Information
Will Get Bored
Will Tire of Trying to Figure Out What You Do
Won’t Remember Anything About You

Look at your advertisements:

Keep it Brief
Have a message
Break it up
Use Pictures

There you have it. If you are Googlized yourself, think about how you read advertisements and fliers. If you wouldn’t read it, chances are that no one else will either.

Mike Freeman
I still read books sometimes.

Here is that Atlantic article. But if you buy the magazine, you’ll feel better about yourself.