How to Bridge the Gap between Intention and Experience: WMFTM - Tamsen Webster

Sometimes showing us the subject of your message is the way to make it stronger. That's what we're talking about on this episode of What's Missing from This Message. I'm Tamsen Webster of TamsenWebster.com. I got an email recently from a fine gentleman by the name of Mark Harvey who wanted to introduce me to his side project, something he calls Two on an Island. As he says, it's a fun way to tell and save your love story. And he's developing it along with his partner as a way to help introduce romance back into your life. Now, his concern, as he said, is he didn't want people to think that it's something any more kind of salacious than that, but he really believes, they really believe that romance romance is a way to reconnect with your partner and restore some of the balance in your work and in your life. More on the life part. All right, so here is Mark's site, Two on an Island. And as we just land here and take a look, here are some of the things I noticed. First, a nice clean navigation: Welcome, About, Sponsor, Islanders Play. Interesting combination of words, so I'm curious. I see some great pictures of couples becoming warriors, Mark and Carolyn are Island Warriors 2018, featured home experts. Then it scrolls down and says Lovers, unleash your romantic superpowers and be the best version of your charming self. Play, join. An interesting video here. Quote from Marcus, I'm always thinking about pleasing her, my love runs deep. Aldania, hope I'm pronouncing that correctly, is my only addiction. Two-o, T-O-A-I, which I think is Two on an Island. It says it's a practice of intentional loving, easy and sincere romantic challenge A quote here from Aldania. One person doing it the right way can make such a difference in this world. Nothing is more viral than a good juicy love story. Question, what's the secret to a happy relationship? Answer, seduce your sweetie at least once per week. And then we've got Explore Home Wellness Feed. Join, get the guide, play romance, share your skills, path to love, love inspires us, our short and sweet love stories. Okay, play, join. Your Love Is Your Island. Okay, prologue, let's be friends. Okay, so my first big impression is I do not know what this is. And if I hadn't gotten the email from Mark, I still wouldn't, I wouldn't know what this is. And one of the things that is a little bit confusing about that is there isn't any statement right up top about either what problem does it solve or what question does it answer or what that answer is. And the information that is there is not clear enough, generally, for me to understand what's going on. Now, that said, I think there's some interesting pieces here that can be moved around, can be developed to make this message even stronger than it is right now, because there really is some great stuff to build on. Now, first thing is, I think there's something interesting here with this share your work-life balance tips. Now, one of the things that's a little confusing if you click on that is it takes you to an Instagram Instagram page, and the same thing is true for most of these images, that they link to Instagram. Now, most of the time, if you're clicking on something on a site, you're not expecting to go off the site, and you're usually not expecting to go to Instagram. So one of the things would be— that would be useful is just either to keep the links all within the page, or to make it clear that this is— these are ways to connect to something on Instagram. But even then, I would wanna know why we're connecting to something on Instagram. Now, like I said, this lineup at top about share your work-life balance tips, that's intriguing to me because it starts to hint at what this could solve. And if you dig deeper into the site, we can start to see some of what Mark was telling me in his email, which is that one of the ways to kind of feel more balanced in your life is to reconnect in meaningful ways with your partner. And they believe that that's through romance. So what I'd love to see is really a focus on that or on a very specific question or problem that, you know, I as a potential audience or reader, user, customer, etc., might have right up front. Is this a way to kind of feel reconnected to my partner? Is this a way to feel more reconnected to my work? All of the above. Tell me something about that before you give me pictures because I don't know what the pictures mean. So, I can infer a lot from the pictures. I see 3 happy couples, but I don't understand necessarily what the words on top of them mean. What does it mean to become warriors? And is that a message that without knowing what that means, does it work against this 2 on an island, this heart impression that I'm getting so far? Mark and Carolyn said Island Warriors. It looks like they might be near an island. Looks like they're happy kissing. Yay! And it looks like Alicia and Michael here are also pretty excited about stuff, but featured home experts. So where's that coming in? I don't understand that connection. So the next message here that we saw as we were scrolling down was Lovers. Unleash your romantic superpowers and be the best version of your charming self. So this is a great outcome statement, but what can be really powerful is making sure that I understand kind of two other pieces. One is, what is the problem that this is the answer to? Like, what, you know, so this is the benefit, great, I'm gonna unleash my romantic superpowers and be the best version of my charming self. What problem does that solve for me? Because I'm not, it's not clear that I'm looking for that out of the gate. The second thing that I want to know is what is it? Like, what is this? What is Two on an Island? Is it as an approach? Is it a series of engagements? What is it? Now, we would hope that clicking on one of these two would tell us a little bit more. If you click on play, it tells you, you know, you selected play to start our guided series. Your first challenge is to convince your mate to play Two on an Island with you. And then there's testimonials. But I still don't know what Tu'at An Island is, and I don't know how I'm supposed to do this, and I don't know what this means. So again, we need to know what it is. And sometimes we're so, you know, we get so used to our own stuff that we forget to tell people. But this is one of those times it was really useful to say, this is a guided series. A guided series of what? It's a challenge. Okay, how do I do that? What are the tools? This is one of those things that I think all the way through this site, one of the things that would make this message stronger is giving us examples, not just testimonials where people have told us it's great, but give us examples like what is this? What does it look like? Can you give us a sample? Can you give us sample questions? Can you have us do something that lets us see what this is like, just so that we get a better sense of it. Here's where we were before, where it said Lovers, unleash your romantic superpowers and be the best version of your charming self. Gives us two options, play, which is where we went before, and that took us to something that told us, hey, this is what our first challenge is. And then join, if you click on it, takes you to a private Facebook group. So again, both of those, so the join piece is another example of it flipping you out to a social platform that you're not expecting. So one thing that would be super helpful is tell us just in small text underneath what this is going to do. So, is play would be, I would suggest something that says, you know, experience a little, you know, experience a taste of what, you know, Two on an Island is all about, and then make sure that when you click on that, you're actually giving me something like that. And then join would be meet others who have made this journey and get to know them, either like before a decision or whatever, you know, we'll take you to Facebook or something, but let me know what these two things mean. Because here's an important point: when you're asking people to act, right, they need to have enough information to understand and agree and consider action worth it before they're going to. And if there's not enough information here for me to understand what this is about so that I can agree that this is going to be useful to me, and therefore if I don't know where the links are going and I don't know whether it's worth it, just means you might be losing people who otherwise might be super interested in what trying to do. So what I think would help this site overall, even just so far, is giving us a little bit more information, a little bit more explanation, a few more examples, other ways to experience what's going on so that I understand enough so that I can make those next steps mentally. Now one thing I do really like about this site is that it's showing a lot, right? It's showing us a lot of feeling, It's showing us some of the connection that we might be looking for. It's giving us, it's showing us the perspective of the founders of this site. And a lot of this is really, really attractive. It's one of those rare times where I want you to tell me a little bit more because by telling me a little bit more, now all that you're showing me is gonna make sense. It's gonna anchor into something that I'm more sure that I want or I want to try. "TOAI, Two on an Island, is the practice of intentional, loving, easy, and sincere romantic challenges." Like what? What does that mean? What would be an example? You know, so for an example, like, "Do X so that you could do Y." Something like that would be super helpful. Again, a lovely experiential kind of feeling here about what this is all about and what we might get. And then we've got here a question and answer. What's the secret? Answer: Seduce your sweetie at least once per week. Tell us what you mean by that, because one of the things that Mark had said in the email that he sent was he was concerned that people just thought that this was kind of about sex or even about porn, but that isn't what he's talking about, right? This is, this is very much about romance and reconnection. And so As much as I love the alliteration of seduce your sweetie at least once a week, tell us what you mean by that so that we're clear enough that you're actually, that you're starting to distinguish what you mean from what you don't mean. These 4 pieces, explore, home, wellness, feed, those also link to Instagram pages, so I'm gonna save us that. Again, I'm not clear on what explore, home, wellness, and feed are. If you dig further into the site, there's like 7 elements, and these are, I believe, 4 of them. But that's another example of something that on the homepage, I wanna understand what is, what does this help me achieve? What's the normal thing that we, that gets in our way? Where do we think the answer lies? Where does the answer lie? What do you, where do you believe, Two on an Island, where do you believe the answer lies? So what then do we need to do Kind of, that's some version of Seduce Your Sweetie Once a Week. Now, how do we do that? Okay, well, we've got these 7 elements. These 7 elements show up in these kinds of challenges. These challenges accomplish this thing so that I can go, "Oh, I get it. Now, give me an easy way to sample this so that I can figure out what that looks like." When you click on Try It, it takes you to a page where you can sign up for something. It defines here a type of couple, so dating couples, so there's a couple other things if you click on it. It says married couples. Again, these are the kinds of separations and the kinds of analysis that I would want to, to have more on the home page so that I can recognize myself. So you can say whether you're dating, whether you're married, or whatever, here's what this means. Or, you know, you're interested, great, are you dating? Go down this path. Are you married? Go down this path. Are you trying to reconnect? Go down this path. I think there's a really intriguing idea here. I think a lot of people are looking for reconnection, not just with their partner but with their life. And I think that's a really interesting path that a lot of people would respond well to, to say, hey, you know what, the first step to reconnecting with everything else is to reconnect with the person that I love and that I spend all this time with. And if site is a collection and a group of people who think the same thing, and these approaches that Two on an Island take are kind of simple, straightforward, and effective ways to do that, I think they got something here. But we really need to make sure that we know what that is. As I said before, what's missing from this message are the examples and the explanation that give me the information I need to know whether or not this is a fit for for me. Now there's really good, really good intention here, but we need to bridge the gap between what the intention is and what the experience is of the people who are interacting with this site. A lot of the fixes of this are really simple. It really means back up and say to yourself, if I knew nothing about this, what is it that would help me understand more? What would help me reconnect, understand? What are the questions I would naturally ask? If I landed on the page, what's the first question I would ask? What is this, right? What problem does it solve? How could it help me? How does it work? So simply by brainstorming from the questions that people would likely ask when they land on your site, you can often figure out exactly what kind of information and in what order to put there. So thank you, Mark and Aldania, for sharing Two on an Island with me. I hope it was helpful. To understand how to take that idea that you have and turn it into the information that people need in order to act on this great idea. So if you've got an idea or a message you want me to take a look at, send it to me at redthreadme@tamsenwebster.com. Thanks so much for watching.