Archive for the ‘Dialogue Marketing’ Category
Oh to be an Introspective French Firm.
People have conversations. Do companies?
On Tuesday the head of France’s national railroad apologized for trundling 20,000 Jews to Nazi camps in 1943-1944, as reported by the NYTimes and carried locally by the StarTribune. US Lawmakers, survivors and descendants had moved to block SNCF from winning US contracts had the company not acknowledge their role. The official word from the firm said the apology was part of “the company’s longtime effort to examine its past and denied that it was prompted by the company’s U.S. ambitions.”
There are at least three striking things about this story.
One: It defies logic to disconnect the company apology from looming loss of revenue from possible US contracts. To insist otherwise cheapens their communication. One clearly connects with the other.
Two: Applying economic pressure to force a company to tell the truth about their role in administering a great evil is a marvelous use of our capitalist instincts. There is a fair amount of both optimism and boldness in this move, especially since official spokespeople nearly always sidestep words that link their brand with anything other than blue sky, sunshine and happy smiling faces. Bravo, lawmakers, survivors and descendants!
Third: To think that a company has a “longtime effort to examine its past” strikes me as, also, beyond belief. Companies incorporate for economic muscle. They organize to move forward, they look for opportunity, hone in and exploit. Companies make money. Companies don’t sit at an outdoor café examining past failings. I’m hard-pressed to think of any introspective executive who would free a budget line item for “Company Introspection.” Please, please let there be such a leader in this world. But maybe French companies have a soul?
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Where Does Insight Come From?
How do I discombobulate without getting fired—or hired?
Over at the Philosopher’s Playground, Steven Gimbel wrote recently of his need to discombobulate his students (with their “naively smug beliefs which they’ve never thought very hard about.”) to help them begin the work of philosophy. I wonder if the act of getting discombobulated is the beginning point for producing any insight.
A few days back I had coffee with a friend who is a human resources executive and coach and thoughtful person. We were talking about what makes an organization dialogical, that is, willing to enter into conversation internally (versus the usual barking of orders from one management level to the next). Carol, as it turns out, had a keen interest in how dialogue works and was able to identify four stages in a verbal exchange required to produce insight:
- Awareness of a problem or issue
- Trigger: something in the exchange triggers a reflective moment. Insight often falls from the reflection
- Insight: the Aha moment, when suddenly I understand something previously opaque to me
- Action: Do something with an insight or it is gone. Write it down. Tell someone. Do anything.
Gimbel’s discombobulation seems to help with the awareness phase. We need to understand how what we thought certain or easy is neither certain nor easy. Sometimes I use a classroom exercise to help create the trigger/reflection step for my students. But just as often, in ordinary conversation, my discombobulation finds relief when my friend asks a question and I lapse into momentary reflection which often leads to an insight. Sometimes I feel like an “Aha” addict: there’s nothing like suddenly realizing a new truth—nothing like that “click” when a critical piece of how life works suddenly falls into place. That’s a big part of why I write.
Perhaps the key to those four stages is the action part. We need to do something with an insight. Right then at the very Aha moment. Otherwise it’s lost.
But corporate conversations routinely detour around discombobulation. It’s partly a time issue but mostly the politics of a department: a boss or manager or VP rarely seeks out discombobulation, especially from subordinates. The person in charge would much rather pay a high-priced ad agency or consulting group to come in and discombobulate them. I’ve been on both sides of a number of those meetings.
I’ve been trying to help my students become active discombobulaters in their workplaces: from wherever they land, my hope is they ask the impertinent questions that poke through the malarkey and point out deviation from mission.
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Social Media in the Workplace
Check out this video about social media I saw on Chris Brogan’s website. Very worthwhile.
Who Cares What You Think?
Hearing from your non-target audience is critical to moving forward
I look forward to chatting with a friend and HR executive about how or if her organization encourages dialogue internally. It’s going to be a tricky conversation and I’m not at all sure I can verbally explain what I mean.
What's out there?
Dodgy Questions
I’m working backward from the notion that target audiences and publics are no longer willing to suffer monologues, sermons and sales pitches from companies trying to get their dollars. As I talk with clients and friends, I realize the unwillingness to engage in dialogue with their target audiences actually comes from a deep place of control that leaders want to maintain. Dialogue looks like brazen and reckless openness that offers little or no payback: sort of a personal, self-inflicted Wikileak that will most certainly sink the ship.
In a sense they are right: telling what we know and offering it in exchange for discussion and relationship does seem like giving away the store. But it isn’t exactly that and it will become less like that over time. Dialogue today is more a recognition that the audience that once packed your lecture hall is now making its way to the stage, each with their own microphone and their own index card of questions.
The willingness to engage in dialogue is much, much more than turning on another marketing channel or sprucing up a communication strategy. It is a deep-seated willingness that runs counter to the way many of our businesses are organized.
Talking to the Other
I’ve been tracing the notion of the Other back through Derrida to Levinas and Hegel. I’m trying to understand exactly what is at stake when we open ourselves to true engagement with another person. In particular, engagement with people outside my demographic, outside my target audience, outside my belief set. What are they talking about and how have I excluded them and what have I missed through my exclusions?
I’m eager to know what a company that opens itself in this way looks like: who are they internally? How do they talk with each other in a way that allows them to be open to talking with others?
So—this conversation. Are you interested ?
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“The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains” by Nicholas Carr
Maybe a Break is in Order
We can do research, entertain ourselves, communicate and think without the Internet, of course. It’s just that the addiction-like rewards of constantly seeing something new—along with the web’s ubiquity (given our groovy gadgets)—keeps pulling us back. Again and again. Carr’s book makes at least that point. One surprise is how plastic even the adult brain is (no one’s brain ever stops growing and adapting it seems). Combine that plasticity with the very old argument that the tools we use, while extending our reach and ability, also subtly limit us (make that “self-limit” because we naturally begin thinking of what we can do in tool terms), and you’ll understand the basis for Carr’s argument. What’s fascinating in the book is the conversations he has with himself and with a variety of authorities and thinkers about how and why we love the clicking life of the finger.
Carr’s much-reviewed book really has started a number of conversations among people who care about books and publishing, as well as among folks just curious about how we think and communicate. Carr builds a strong argument for taking a closer look at our own habits and even to consider taking a break from our 24/7 connections and the mesmerizing screens.
At least that was my reaction: to begin to take intervals of internet silence (small intervals—let’s not get carried away). As far as experiments go, that’s a good one, because if nothing else, the interval is perspective-producing (if uncomfortable). Carr described his own withdrawal from constant connection in a move he made from NYC to Colorado in terms that would put any junkie at ease.
I’m preparing a class on Social Media Marketing and The Shallows, plus Hamlet’s Blackberry A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age by William Powers (which I’m reading and enjoying now) both provide a useful counter to the always-connected expectation. There is something refreshing about an hour or two of focus on a single task.
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My Raw Argument for Conversation
The Practice of Dialogue Rests on Solid Ground
I’ve become intrigued by trying to boil Listentalk down to the most elemental forms. Intrigued because there is a firm foundation for which I can build things on. Here’s what I know so far:
you really should
- There is a performative aspect of language. This performative aspect allows language to actually do something out in the world, to make things happen. It is not just that speaking something makes it true. But there is something closely related that is less about true/false and more about perception/reality: when we speak something, it becomes public, it becomes known, it becomes the story we’re going with—unless immediately debunked by those involved in the hearing and telling. So…stuff happens when we speak it. It becomes true…or at least truish. JL Austin, John Searle and others go on and on about such speech acts. I intend to hear more from them.
- We do right by others when we treat them as people. Obvious? Yes and no. Martin Buber suggested we often treat each other as objects rather than as people. He talks about “I-Thou” relationships where we treat the person before us as fully-human, whole people. Beings with many facets, interests, parts of their character. We talk and (especially) listen to them as we respect the dignity of their being human. But too often we treat others with an “I-It” sort of connection. That is, the kind of connection we have with an object too often becomes the model for the way we connect with people. We use a hammer to pound a nail, a George Foreman Grill to press a Panini for lunch. It makes sense to use tools in that way. But we mustn’t treat people as if they were objects. We devalue them. People are people. People are not objects placed on earth for the sole purpose of carrying out my personal (sometimes diabolical) will. There’s much more to say about this (in particular from Emmanuel Levinas), but that is the basic argument.
- God created and interacts with people. Lest you think I’m writing some humanistic diatribe, both the performative nature of language and the treatment of people as beings of dignity flow directly from the Old and New Testaments. Look at the role of “Word” from Genesis 1 to John 1 to Revelation 22. Words are performative so often it will make your head spin (If your head is subject to spinning) (You might want a doctor to look at that). Watch how the Eternal One allowed for the possibility that words spoken could be rejected. Even the words of the Creator. Even the Word that was a person as well as God.
- We’re at a new time when gatekeepers no longer control the discourse. Social media is part of the deal, but not the whole deal. New attitudes about who is in authority, who we can trust and who we cannot trust are in operation. Technology is opening doors.
Those are “Listentalk’s” four building blocks.
What did I miss?
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Talking through the Troublesome Ten Percent
Brilliant Technicians can be Eloquent with the Right Topic and Right Audience
Say you have this friend. And your friend is a genius. She invents stuff all the time—important stuff people want. People buy this stuff and are even willing to spend significant money for it. And the stuff she invents works…mostly. It works, but it needs help. It works 90% of the time, but needs 10% adjusting and tweaking and, well, help. Your friend knows this. She knows she is brilliant at putting the technology together to meet a particular need. But she also knows she and her team work like demons once their unique idea is in place. They work like demons because each of their unique ideas requires constant adjustment as they are put into place, adjustments peculiar to the customer that bought the solution.
This last 10% is the source of significant pain and long hours for your friend’s team. This is because the customer bought the unique solution—knowing it was a unique solution—but secretly thinking the unique solution would work right out of the shipping crate. And no matter what your friend said to the customer, that assumption that it would work right out of the crate persisted in the customer’s mind.
That last 10% is a technology problem but it is also a communication fail. The customer perceived one thing and received another—whether or not the customer’s perception was accurate. In fact, the last 10% has much more to do with conversation than it does with technology. How so? Because conversation between those who understand the solution and the problem must take place before the solution becomes a fully realized solution. Because conversation is the give and take between people as they listen and offer suggestions, over and over again.
Let Others See the Process
Introduce Your Brilliant Friend Around
Conversations are not magic (or…are they?) but they accomplish much more than we can understand. They are great at connecting, where people begin to understand each other. They are great at diffusing tense situations simply by passing words between people. They also can inoculate against tense situations before those situations occur. All of this through the regenerating power of relationship that happens when people connect. I and have argued that letting people into a process earlier only helps the process.
Helping your brilliant friend talk about the solution she is putting together, even to engage the customer in the last ten percent may be the most productive thing you can do for your friend, her company and her customers.
There are ways to do this. Painless ways that lie outside of the old media channels. Ways that can do far more good than you may realize.
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Why pay medical waste costs for your messages?
Start moving your messages where they will be heard.
I just got off the phone with a friend at a medical device company. This friend helps prepare technical information for clinicians. His team works at moving IFUs (“Instructions for Use”) and other labeling concerns across regulatory and legal hurdles to be ready for clinicians. Their challenge is to reduce medical waste for their customers (getting rid of medical waste costs more than the usual garbage fee) by reducing the amount of paper they put into the system, that is, reducing the clutter they send to clinicians with products. So they are taking the necessary steps to move documents online where they can be used or downloaded to a computer or PDA, or even, yes, printed. It makes sense: people don’t read documents. People don’t store documents. People want the information they want right now and paper is becoming a bit of a nuisance.
they must find us
Getting the right information to the right people at the right time is always a work in progress. I’ve been advocating the power of search for some time, which means putting information within the reach of your intended audience’s search engines. That information needs to be there before your audience realizes they want it. Right now this is a choice companies make, with most sticking to their old corporate sales monologues and the tools that send the monologues forth, from sales rep to potential customer to waste bin. Companies anticipating the search need are the heroes of the moment.
My friend pointed out that engaging in conversations is not just for consumers, but even more for experts deep in a technical conversation. Generations grow up and Facebook, already a burgeoning economy of its own, is the model for how next-generation clinicians will expect to learn how to program a defibrillator, for instance. Companies will do well to help pave the way for this to happen.
Getting our messages to the right people at the right time trims all sorts of waste: less paper wasted on unneeded documents. Fewer brain cells wasted on fighting off unwanted sales pitches. And more freedom for finding.
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conversation is an engine 