Often the most effective communications are a little rough around the edges. It is the half-dashed email. It it the off-hand tweet. It is the scribbled note left on your colleague’s desk.
Think about it, what do you prefer to get from your lover — an email, an e-card or a hand written note? What gets your attention most?
Seth Godin calls this "keeping it human".
When it comes to communication, marketing or what ever you want to call it, sometimes the slick, polished piece of collateral, corporate video or TVC is not what you should be aiming for. And while it does depend on who your audience is, remember that we all like to feel that we are being spoken to by a person, not a machine. After all, no matter how many times you repeat a message, nothing appears to be quite so authentic as something written, given and created by hand.
This reminds me of how I avoided blogging, for the longest time, because I couldn’t get used to that “unfinished” nature of them. To me, as a trained journalist, blog posts didn’t seem complete, or polished, so I didn’t quite see the point.
Of course, now I have a totally new appreciation for the unfinished, the work in progress, the half-thought. What’s happened is that I’ve learned to embrace the *process*, and not just the product.