Checking Out:
The Imperative Voice in Social Media
The unintentional rudeness of brands and businesses.
“Listen to what I’m going to tell you now:”
—Ricky Roma, Glengarry Glen Ross.
Unless a fire is raging nearby—or a gunman poses an imminent threat, say—you don’t tell customers what to do when they are in your shop. You don’t tell them what to do, imperatively, when they are in your restaurant, your hotel, your car dealership, the lobby of your theater, your storefront mattress store, or other place of business. You don’t say to them: Look at this, Buy this, Recommend us, and so on. To do so would be off-putting, it would be rude, and it would not be conducive to an ongoing conversation, let alone making a sale. Try it sometime.
And yet businesses, brands, and organizations on social-media channels tell people what to do every day. Check out this awesome. Like us. Follow us. Watch this. Share this. Have brunch with us this Mother’s Day. Take this survey and win. Sign up now for our mailing list. All of which mean: HELP. HELP US.
Not: here’s what’s in it for you. Not: you look nice today. Instead, they all mean: here is what we need you to do, right now, for us. HELP US. PLEASE.
That’s the imperative verb tense. It’s a constant presence in tweets and posts, also constant in the right-hand-margin ads on Facebook. Telling people what to do. The nerve. It’s not past, present, or future tense: it’s a command. It’s “Kneel before Zod.”
And besides being inconsiderate and rude and arrogant and presumptuous and often desperate, social-media conversation using the imperative voice is marketing that has all the class and dignity of a 1910 sideshow barker inviting passers-by to enter the freak-show tent, or a guy in 1980s Times Square handing out leaflets for the all-night strip club: check it out, check it out, check it out, check it out, sir.
In Glengarry Glen Ross, both the play and the film, when master salesman Ricky Roma says, imperatively, “Listen to what I’m going to tell you now,” he does so at the end of a long monologue, not at the start. Over the course of six minutes leading up to that line, we see Roma approach a stranger eating alone in a Chinese restaurant; reach out to him; buy him a drink; make small talk with him; connect with him; buy another round of drinks; bond with him; get a read on him; and then—and only then—does he pull out a real-estate brochure from his coat pocket and present what he is selling, using the imperative voice as he makes clear his sales proposition.
Especially since it’s a Mamet script, the moment of the imperative command is a clear indication that Roma is able—only after all of that hard work—to take the dominant role in the conversation, having achieved the dynamic he needs to break through any resistance from the buyer.
If Roma had walked up to the stranger and said, off the bat,“Listen to what I’m going to tell you now,” the stranger would have had every right to reply, “Who the hell are you to tell me what to do?”
And so it is with all of us on Twitter and Facebook every day, being told to check out, like, follow, buy now, and the rest. All of those lame calls to action. We wouldn’t accept this voice in person. We would walk away. We do accept it in mass advertising, or we did for the better part of a century —before advertising lost its mandatory command of our attention. Online, we tolerate it, accept it as the norm, and most of the time ignore the command—after all, who is this business to tell us what to do?
These imperative voices have become noise, have become spam. The vast majority of us fans and followers do not give the business the engagement they are commanding us to give—look at the comments and replies following a commanding-voice post. At that moment, we viscerally experience the gap between the service and respect we experience in person — interacting with individual human beings — and the experience the average business gives us through its social media.
