The good news is that your services are relevant, high quality and immediately useful. The bad news is that nobody cares about you or your services.

To the extent that you are the topic of your marketing strategy, (explaining what you do, establishing your credentials, describing your products, distinguishing yourself from the competition etc.) your articulate words are falling on deaf ears. One of the hard lessons of marketing and content creation is that your potential audience/clients want to see themselves in your words, not you.

Do you know what my needs are? Do you understand the issues I’m facing in my field? Can you articulate in one or two sentences what outcomes I am trying to achieve?

Can you put yourself in my shoes and describe the world through my eyes?

Regarding my own web presence, I can tell you that I don’t care one iota about the details of search engine optimization, the nuances distinguishing various social networking strategies, or how many megabytes of free space you’re offering me on your servers. From my perspective, all I want is to build a huge community who in short order become paying and loyal customers for my coaching and consulting services. I want conversation that translates into business, and I want it sooner rather than later.

While I understand that reaching my goal involves technical issues of search engines, social networks and adequate storage, instructing me in their importance simply isn’t going to endear me to you. While I believe that experience, expertise and credibility are important characteristics of any vendor I choose, talking up your credentials isn’t going to impress me.

I simply don’t care about you. It’s not personal. It’s perspective.

As the hungry service providers who wants others’ business, the burden of effective communication is on us. Right or wrong, fair or not, if someone else does a better job of describing how I can translate my content into audience and that audience into paying customers (the world through my eyes) then they will probably get the job even if you are more qualified.

Whether you are a service provider within the “New Media” industry (as in this example) or a content creator in an unrelated field for whom new media is a significant place of community building, information sharing and/or direct marketing, your audience will be able to “see” you to the degree that you communicate that you “see” them.

The sooner all of us who are service providers come to terms with whose perspective matters most, the sooner we’ll be on our way to making the sort of connections that turn into business. Now that’s good news!

Karl Edwards helps leaders play at the top of their professional game through personal coaching and organizational consulting. He has been helping teams design workplace cultures that empower, engage and get results for over 20 years. Join him and his partner, Claudia Rempel, for their weekly audio podcast “Working Matters” where they discuss practical strategies for handling your workplace challenges.