Meow about Emotional Intelligence and Content Strategy

There are many kinds of emotional intelligence. The ones people talk about most often in terms of leveragibility for content strategy are lunch order, past lunch orders, business lunch order, and exclamation points. These can be valuable metrics for consciousness-mining and other data-collection strategies, but these will not set your brand apart. Here are six things you can do to ensure you're drilling deep, injecting those fissures at high pressure, and extracting goo so rich that it does not interact with light.

Find out what your audience likes

Where I work, everyone is assigned an office cat. These are real cats from outside. My manager lets them back out every night, but they are at the door every morning. Is this because of fish juice or because we know our cats?

Before I answer this question, I will tell you about the cat in my snack drawer. I don't know their name and they don't know mine. I do know that we do not enjoy the same snacks. How is this helpful? If you sell snacks, this is not a question you have to ask.?

Some might say that cats do not have thumbs, and they would struggle with most packaging. So shouldn't the first question be, "How do we get thumbs for cats?"

Find out what makes your audience uncomfortable

Speaking of cats, I saw a movie once. We watch a lot of movies at work while we are cleaning up after the cats and making fish juice. You really need to be looking at a fish to ascertain whether it's been thoroughly juiced, so I mostly only heard the movie. Near the beginning or middle, one character says something to another that sounded like, "The new box has smashed itself," then started crying. The cat who lives in my snack drawer during the day (henceforth CWLiMSDDtD) responded to this. Even though they were across the room, I knew it was CWLiMSDDtD, and they sounded like they were processing trauma.?

Can I guess what you're thinking?

"Could CWLiMSDDtD's real name be something that sounds like, 'The new box has smashed itself?'?"

But I put it to you: What if their mother's name smelled like that?

Learn to speak the way your audience talks to itself

"Language, banguage, sangwige," My dad used to say on Saturdays. He made fried pepperoni sandwiches and ate them by himself. We didn't live with him anymore. We hadn't for a long time.?

One thing people in content marketing are often afraid to admit is that sometimes there is no appropriate thing to say. The reason your A/B testing isn't helping you find the right keyword is because there is none.?

How might your newsletter open rates change if you just put them out without a subject line? Fish juice is not odorless, but it is invisible.

Put your picture in the psyche of your audience

The corporate world can feel cold and humanitarily antithetical. Sometimes people get fired or laid off. Sometimes these people are cats. One of my coworkers had to let go of the cat that slept in their wastepaper basket (CWSiTWB). CWSiTWB faxed brochures of an ad campaign before it had launched. No one saw them do it, but they had that look about them.

Security removed CWSiTWB from the office and placed them on the elevator. They took a picture of CWSiTWB before pressing the button.?

We put prints of this picture in every bathroom stall. Has it impacted productivity? The office is certainly much quieter. And someone keeps shutting the lights off after lunch.

Open the channels for conversation

Most strategists have to engage in rigorous improv training. Before I could qualify for my promotion, I had to organize a game of Zip, Zap, Zop with all of the in-office cats. Have you ever heard the expression, "Like herding cats?" Maybe we should change it to, "Like hearing cats."

If you really listen to a meow, it's not that hard to emulate. Especially after one gargles a bit of fish juice. Cats do not meow to each other, only to or at humans. In order to communicate with several cats, one has to become a cat, then go back to human, then cat, and so on, like an Animorph.

Make things weird for everyone

Your clients nor your clients' clients may not be cats. They may not even be a type of organism I have heard of. But you can herd them, as long as you can hear them.?

Remember how special radio call-in shows used to make you feel? What if you could infuse your content strategy with that kind of exultancy? People don't like reading magazines or looking at their phones anymore. Look at the bottom of any lake and you'll see a bunch of that stuff down there. People like sitting in parked cars and kissing. If they hear about your brand while they are kissing down by the lake, then they might develop positive associations with your fish juice.