…More Mr. Nice Guy
It’s been proven: cocky and funny doesn’t work for everyone!
“Guys, the secret is: you gotta be cocky, and you gotta be funny.” How many times have you heard that before? How many dating e-books have been sold based on this single concept? Date coaches have built entire careers on the idea, coyly revealing this “secret” as if they’re bearing some coveted yogic wisdom.
And, why not? Girls tend to go for overly confident jerks, right? Especially the ones who are funny enough to get away with it. We’ve all seen guys who possess that perfect balance of wit and mild-aggression that sends tipsy barflies careening into their arms every Friday night. And we’ve all seen guys that screw it up one way or another and eventually come off as d-bags.
At Virtual Dating Assistants, we’re not in the personal development business, we’re in the scoring dates business. The real question we ask is: does the “cocky and funny” approach work for you? And more importantly, does this technique work for you in the unique world of online dating?
As fun as it may be to speculate, we at ViDA like to inform our online-dating strategies with solid proof. To this effect, we track 19 variables relating to each and every initial contact email we send on behalf of a client, including a variable that measures the approach or tone of the message. There are a number of different approach categories, but the two we want to compare here are nice/interested versus cocky/funny (aka C&F).
A C&F message is one that playfully teases the recipient, maybe throws her off her game a little, then capitalizes on that slight sense of uncertainty by making her laugh. By contrast, a nice/interested message is generally less daring in its approach. Now we obviously don’t craft messages that are submissive or overly complimentary (think niceness in the context of strength). In fact, there’s no reason a nice/interested message can’t be a little playful, a little challenging and a little funny, but the overall thrust is that the messenger is a genuine guy who is both nice and, obviously, interested.
Looking at the numbers we found that both approaches were certainly successful, but nice/interested was 7% more effective than C&F! So why might this be?
First off there is the possibility that C&F simply doesn’t work as well online as it does in the real world. This ain’t the bar scene. Girls are often going on these sites because they’re tired of all that. Internet interactions are also fraught with issues and concerns surrounding trust and privacy, adding the burden of having to “prove yourself” as normal when messaging people for the first time. This is made even more complex by the fact that the tone of an online message is very easily misinterpreted. Remember that when your C&F message pops up in her inbox, she can’t see your devilishly cute smile. In fact – she can’t see any body language at all! As a result, C&F techniques that work in the real world might come off as slightly creepy in the online arena.
But this isn’t the whole story. All of our dating agents can clearly recall C&F techniques that have proven successful over and over again; and C&F was by no means a poor method of eliciting positive replies. In fact, it fared much better than many of our other approaches. But when we delved deeper, we began to see that it worked better for some clients and WORSE for others; we began to see that it was really a matter of congruency.
Congruency is one of the most important (but often also one of the most overlooked) aspects of your online dating presence, and is a topic that really deserves an e-book chapter or two to itself (which, don’t you worry, we have covered in our new e-book, “Click Magnet: How to Master Online Dating and Meet More Women”)…but we’ll introduce it briefly here.
Simply put, congruency means making sure that every aspect of your online dating presence is consistent with the image you are trying to project of yourself.
Many of our clients are genuinely nice guys with personalities that just don’t fit with the C&F attitude. When we showed these clients the types of C&F messages we’d be crafting for them, they often approved the text. But when we started sending these messages out, the responses didn’t come back as we’d expect.
That’s because women – as you may have already figured out – are pretty darn perceptive. They read the message, and then check out the profile and photos. If the profile and photos are that of a nice guy and the message seems uncharacteristically C&F, they will begin to doubt whether this guy is really being sincere. And doubts about sincerity, especially online where women have to be sensitive about their safety before moving things offline, are killer.
So next time you try an all-out C&F approach on a girl whose profile you’ve been ogling all week, think to yourself: “is this really me?” Despite what other dating coaches say, the C&F approach is not a silver bullet. It can’t overpower a girl’s detection of sincerity. Although let’s be honest…few things can.























