In an age of information overload and a shortage of attention, reaching the reader who matters to you – for example, a potential client – with a given piece of content has become especially difficult. Many people feel overstimulated and select the content they will devote their attention to with great care and caution. That is why it is so important to create content that takes into account the needs of each individual style.
What kind of content does Style S look for online?
S is the most Socially oriented of all the DISC styles. This style cares most about the respect and acceptance of others. Style S looks for substantive content online, but often gets swept up in side topics and drifts toward low-value content – gossip, for instance.
Style S is also susceptible to so-called clickbait – punchy, attention-grabbing headlines that most often conceal low-quality content. Disappointed by such content, Style S vows never to fall for anything like it again and… unfortunately, after a while, clicks on a piece of clickbait once more.
One weakness of Style S can be their naivety, which is preyed upon not only by soulless clickbait creators but also by genuine online scammers. Sensitive and always ready to help, Style S is moved, for example, by the photos that until recently were common online – babies hooked up to IV drips with tubes running from their tiny arms – and would transfer money over the internet to support a child who often didn’t actually exist. Or, as a last resort, if they didn’t have enough money of their own (Style S often doesn’t, or lives from paycheck to paycheck), they would „share” the moving post or photo – posting it on their own social media profiles or sending it to friends. Someone I know with an extreme intensity of S traits has a Facebook profile made up almost entirely of these kinds of sharing posts – reposts of other people’s misfortunes.
Where does this come from? Style S is a very sensitive and empathetic style. At the same time, this empathy is not entirely selfless – through it, Style S wants to show what a good, noble, empathetic, and sensitive person they are. This matters a great deal to Style S. Style S wants to be seen as a person of dialogue: agreeable, kind, and noble. In conflicts – including online ones – they either don’t take part at all or express themselves so diplomatically that it’s often hard to tell what they actually mean…
Style S is, however, a very good consumer of online content. They like to read, they read a lot, and often across many different fields. That reading doesn’t translate directly into their purchasing decisions – Style S has to think every such decision through very carefully. Once they’ve made it, though, they’ll defend it to the last.
Style S likes to feel looked after. They like the sense that the author of a piece of content is deliberately attending to their problem. Online, they will avoid content that is unpleasant, controversial, over-the-top, or uncomfortable. They will also try to steer clear of content containing profanity, and of vloggers who use it. Of course, Style S will never tell the author of such content that something offends them – they will simply stop being part of the audience.
Style S will fairly regularly open incoming mailings. They will also give likes to content they consider worthy of it, though they’ll be rather sparing with these online tokens of affection. Why? It’s a little complicated, and it ties in with another S trait. This style is very fond of planning and anticipating. They like to be prepared for upcoming events. Of course, not every event can be predicted, and we can’t control everything. So Style S constructs their own scenarios (most often gloomy ones) about how future events will unfold. For example, returning to work after sick leave, they imagine that any moment now the boss will call them in for a meeting and hand them their notice, because they were off sick for a week.
They can torment themselves all night over this imaginary conversation and go to work exhausted and in poorer shape. Of course, no such conversation takes place, so Style S dreams up yet another gloomy scenario – this time about their poor state (a sleepless night), which they’re sure the boss hasn’t failed to notice and which, combined with the aforementioned sick leave, will surely be reason enough for the boss to initiate a conversation ending with a dismissal. And so on, and so forth. Style S can wear themselves down mentally with this kind of „forecasting.” Even the fact that these scenarios never come true is no argument for them to stop worrying.
This mechanism also carries over into how Style S behaves online. Most people representing this style are fairly reserved in their online activity. Modest Style S individuals often don’t post their own content or photos on their social profiles, settling instead for sharing other people’s posts; they frequently don’t even have their own profile picture. Because they can’t stand being judged, don’t want to be controversial, and are genuinely quite afraid of negative comments online, they rarely publish posts expressing a definite position on any given matter. Often Style S has no social profiles at all. As one Style S mother, who became a mother for the first time in her forties, explained: she doesn’t want to set up a social media account, because then she’d have to post photos of her child and information about her life – and if she left something out, someone would take offense (? I didn’t understand that part either), and besides, if she posted a photo of herself and the child, someone would immediately ask whether she was the child’s mother or grandmother…
How does this relate to liking posts? Well, another Style S told a good friend outright that he wouldn’t like his posts, because other internet users would see that he was liking his posts all the time and would conclude on that basis that he was liking them out of friendship, out of affection, rather than because they were valuable… From the point of view of D and I, this kind of thinking borders on paranoia. But for Style S, it’s perfectly rational.
Style S is a very distinctive style. They can lead a rich social life (they’re very kind and polite, speak little and listen a lot, so as a rule they’re well liked and often invited to various gatherings), but often that social life is really just „being social.” Style S doesn’t decline invitations for one simple reason – fear of becoming the subject of gossip and unpleasant comments (what will they think, what will they say about me?). As a result, Style S experiences the most inside their own head – that’s where the scenarios take shape, situations that Style S believes could potentially happen if they took a particular action. But because these scenarios carry some risk, and because they are mostly gloomy anyway, Style S takes no action at all, hoping that in this way they will entirely eliminate from their life the risk of failure or stressful events. Unfortunately, life doesn’t work that way…
The height of madness for Style S might be browsing an online store while filling a virtual cart with dream products, and then, just before proceeding to the „checkout” option, that telltale „cart abandonment” – for example, by shutting down the computer…
Focused on their own inner world, Style S craves other people’s opinions as parched earth craves rain before making a purchasing decision. Other customers’ reviews are crucial to them in deciding whether to buy. By verifying a product’s quality on the basis of others’ opinions, they ensure, in their own estimation, that they’ve minimised the risk.