Your Readers Already Think They Know You

In 1956, sociologists Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl published a paper about something new they saw in television audiences: viewers were forming relationships with the people on their TV screen.

By 1955, more than 64% of American households had a television, and the set was on almost five hours per day. If you lived in one of those homes, you felt you were getting to know the host. You trusted the newscaster. You looked forward to an evening with a performer the way you'd look forward to dinner with a friend.

Horton and Wohl called it para-social interaction, or intimacy at a distance. Today we call it a parasocial relationship.

It runs one way. You feel you know them. They don't know you exist.

Seventy years later, that's not a curiosity of early television. It's the operating system of the internet.

You already have this relationship with people

Think about the podcast host you've listened to for years. You know the sound of their voice and how they laugh. You might know whether they're a dog or cat person, or the names of their children.

You've never met. They've never heard of you. And yet it feels like you know them.

In the late 1990s, I was in traffic in Silver Spring, Maryland, when I spotted Mike Tyson in the passenger seat of a passing car. I smiled, waved, and gave him a nod. He made eye contact, smiled back, and gave a friendly wave with the back of his hand as the car went by.

Mike Tyson and I have never met. He has no idea who I am. But I'd followed his career since the 1984 Olympic trials, and I couldn't help feeling that I'd just bumped into a guy I know.

That feeling does more than make a good story. It shapes who we trust. When someone we feel we know recommends a book, we buy it. When they say a product is good, we believe them more than an ad, a review site, or a stranger.

That's not a flaw in your judgment. It's how human trust works. We trust people we feel we know, and we feel we know people we've spent time with, in person or through their words.

Why this matters if your name is on the business

If you run a consultancy, an agency, a practice, or a niche company where customers are buying partly because of you, you're already in this game. The question is whether you're playing it on purpose.

Everyone who encounters you is forming an impression from your posts, your website, your talks, and your emails. Each one is a small deposit of familiarity. Or a withdrawal, if it's careless, generic, or sounds like it was written by committee.

Most business owners treat this as marketing, something to squeeze in between real work. But your prospects are already buried in marketing. What gets through is a person: your expertise, your opinions, your answers to the questions clients actually ask.

That's what builds trust in you, and trust in you becomes trust in your business. For a business built on a person, this is the real work. The relationship your audience has with you, before they ever buy, is the biggest factor in whether they buy at all.

Newsletters are the purest form of it

Of all the channels where this happens, email is the most intimate. It's not an algorithm-driven feed your readers scroll past. It arrives in the same inbox as messages from family, colleagues, and friends. Readers open it one at a time, usually alone, often with a coffee.

A good newsletter reads like a letter from someone the reader knows.

Over weeks and months, it builds what Horton and Wohl called intimacy at a distance, a familiarity that makes readers feel like you're almost friends. They'll come to know how you think, what you care about, and what you won't compromise on. By the time they need what you sell, the decision has mostly been made. They're not choosing a vendor. They're choosing you.

What do they think they know?

Your prospects are forming an impression of you whether you write or not. You can leave that impression to chance. You can polish it into someone you're not. Or you can make it accurate: your real thinking, in your real voice, often enough that they come to know the person they'd actually be hiring.

The first is how capable owners lose clients they should have won. The second works until a reader becomes a client and meets the real you. The third is what I write about here.

If your business runs on your name, your readers already think they know you. The only question is what they think they know.

---

References:

Horton, D., & Wohl, R. R. (1956). Mass Communication and Para-Social Interaction: Observations on Intimacy at a Distance. Psychiatry, 19(3), 215–229.

Television Bureau of Advertising (TVB). (2022). National Television Penetration Trends: Total & TV Households. Source: The Nielsen Company. Available at: https://www.tvb.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/National-TV-Household-Penetration-Trends.pdf

Treyz, O. E. (1956). View TV 4 hours and 57 minutes each day. In Radio Annual and Television Year Book, (p. 63). Available at: RA-1956-All-OCR-Page-0067.pdf