Don’t Be a Twilight Fan with Your New Hero
Remember to breathe.
Gatekeepers have always been part of life. To get to the spine surgeon, get cozy with the receptionist. To get to the editor, make nice with the intern who rejects 95 percent of the manuscripts on the slush pile. To talk with the famous professor, approach through the administrative assistant, or see if you can locate which of the three official offices the professor may be in when you go to chat. But for the sales rep, the writer or prospective student—and everyone else—that world is quickly changing.
Distances compact as people play with new technologies. Surprising conversations now beckon with folks we would have never dreamed of contacting last year. Suddenly access is open to people previously hidden behind protective ranks of gatekeepers. They blog their thoughts about the news. They comment on other people’s posts. They tweet about last night’s dinner. They are approachable—possibly more approachable then they realize.
There’s a new democratization at work here. Technology plays a part in making this possible, but there’s a new attitude afoot. People are making pieces of themselves searchable to the public: their twittery/bloggy/commenty voices can be located and absorbed. And not just our heroes, because we are all developing voices and we want to use those voices. And we’re developing an appetite to hear those voices. And we are also hearing new voices and developing new heroes.
So let me be cautious in my contact.
Without the gatekeeper to set up my query, I must quickly frame up the context of my communication so I can approach that surgeon/editor/professor with a brief, tactful query. I don’t want to be like the star-struck Twilight fan who forgets to talk—or breath—and so lose an excellent opportunity.
The impetus is on me (on us) to grow in this framing, this contextualizing skill. Otherwise we run the risk of being just another screaming fan. And that’s just not conducive to conversation.
###
Is Print the New Luxury Buy?
Wow—You Own a “Copy”?
As I write another check for the rapidly-shrinking StarTribune, I’m reminded how our lives will be diminished by the absence of the printed daily news. I see this day coming. I look at news aggregators all day on my computer and I am thankful for the information. But there’s something about settling into a chair at the end of the day with the funnies—a computer screen just doesn’t duplicate the experience. A Pocket PC screen certainly doesn’t come close. Makes me sad.
I was showing the gorgeous San Francisco Panorama to a journalism professor recently. It is a kind of newspaper on steroids. Fabulous writers. Intriguing topics. Big old art and photos. It will be big (broadsheet: 15 by 22 inches), full (380+ pages) and pricey (I thought I read it was $35, but now I can’t find the reference).
In short: a luxury. Kind of like The New Yorker (which I ordered recently only because I had a gift card), only more so and originating from a different coast.
Was print always a luxury? Maybe. But the daily paper never really felt that way. It was always the way we saw what was going on in the world, even if we understood it was as subjective as anything touched by humans. That’s all changing. I suppose there will come a point where the newsprint dropped on our porch at 5:30am every day will just not be worth it. I’m hanging on, but it’s feeling like a luxury, which binds it to the question: “Do we need this?”
So far the answer is still “Yes.”
###
Don’t Hold Your Breath for an “FDA-Approved” Logo for Your Medical Device Social Media Efforts
Can "trust" enter our discussion?
The lock in the corner of your browser indicates the website is legit. Go ahead and transact business with your credit card number and personal information—your information is secure. All is well. That is, until it isn’t. If it hasn’t happened already, that little lock can be duplicated and put to nefarious uses.
Same thing with an FDA seal of approval logo to place on your blog or website. Pharmaceutical companies are suggesting such a graphic as a way to set their audiences (and their corporate lawyers and the teams of regulators, their board members and shareholders) at ease. Seeing a logo would be an admission that the contents included are all good to go.
That’ll never happen.
That‘s because while the FDA may approve a device or drug for market, they work hard at not becoming responsible for the results the product. And for a set of folks who want to read every word in a document before it hits the street—people who care about the font size of your disclaimers (5 pt? Too small! 6 pt? OK.)—granting a seal of approval to the wild west of social media would be like arming the inmates and locking the prison doors behind them as you shoo them out (may I mix metaphors?). Aside from the fact that even a word-guy can duplicate a logo and affix it to anything, there is simply no way the FDA will be responsible for watching all the dialogue that must—and will—take place. Hiring staff for such Big Brother activity would break the bank (wait—banks are already broken).
Somewhere in the future, the dusty notion of “trust” may well rise up again. I know it seems quaint, like a whiff from centuries past, but it simply is not possible to regulate every part of dialogue. Just ask East Germany. Or watch “The Lives of Others.”
Dialogue is not about guarantees. It is about exploring. Perhaps the best we can do is to voluntarily adhere to a growing body of disclosure best practices.
###
Adland: A Global History of Advertising [Book Review]
The storied lives of creative talent.
The marvel of the Mark Tungate’s history is in how interconnected are so many of the storied agencies. The formula gets repeated again and again: agency hires young creative talent who eventually finds the place too stuffy and goes to start his or her own firm. I like hearing the backgrounds of many of who are now household names: Ogilvy, Burnett, Chiat, Hegarty.
Every local advertising scene has its own particular nuanced and storied development. Certainly this is true of Minneapolis (of which there is no chapter in Adland). While there are certainly national and internationally known agencies in the area, the surprise to me is how little of a creative dent local agencies have made with one of the main exports: medical devices. Certainly budgets have been smaller and consumer advertising for these firms has been nearly non-existent. But it is also true that larger medical device firms are wooed into the unexceptional pockets of agencies on either coast.
I expect a particular creative knowledge to rise from the creative milieu that is the Twin Cities—in much the same way that older established medical companies spawn one company after another. Perhaps creative applications of social media may help establish the Twin Cities communication agencies with the knowing and much-needed human voice in the dialogue between medical device firms, clinicians and consumers.
###
What’s Your Favorite Book on Social Media? Please Retweet! #WriteForCommunity
Here they come!
I’m researching and writing lectures for my class “Writing to Build Community using Social Media” at Northwestern College, a Christian liberal arts college in Saint Paul, Minnesota. The class will be composed of college juniors and seniors who are writers, communicators and folks focused on doing ministry after they graduate. My curriculum includes on overview of the changing face of marketing and communication, the newly generated opportunities to hear and be heard, bits about the kind of leadership required to build communities today and tomorrow, as well as a brief theology of communication and solid rhetorical strategies and tips for writing for interactive media, including blogs, Facebook and Twitter.
I like Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody for a whole bunch of reasons, including how he encapsulates the new opportunities and attitudes surrounding how we connect. He makes clear how the social tools make organizing easier, which helps me make the case for strategic copy that engages. The original The ClueTrain Manifesto (by Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls and David Weinberger) amazed and provoked me. Today I’ll go find a copy of the 10th Anniversary edition. What Would Google Do (Jeff Jarvis) continues to provide useful fodder for thought, as does Seth Godin’s Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us.
What books about social media would you recommend for these students?
###
Is It Time To Start A New Magazine?
What's old is new.
Um…no. Or would that be, yes? In a world where old is suddenly new, the correct answer is: Maybe.
Gordon Atkinson (Real Live Preacher) talks about Generate, a “yummy beautiful” magazine to which he actually—yes—subscribed (sounds like he purchased it with cash money, right?). Glancing through the sample pages he shows made me think, “Hmm. Yes. I want to look at that.”
And that is just the way with old stuff that comes around again with a post-modern twist. Sort of like Pink Martini, old music from my parent’s generation recast for today (or maybe tomorrow). I listen to be reminded of melodies and words long forgotten. But I also listen because I get the joke: it’s old but there is something of today happening in the connective tissue of the music. And I listen because no one sings like China Forbes.
In the writing classes I teach at Northwestern College, we’ve been talking about how old communication vehicles can suddenly become extremely effective when composed today with a vigorous nod to today’s aesthetic. Pamphlets are finding their way back as a short form of communication. Brochures and Slim Jims can be repurposed so they suddenly don’t fit the category you thought they did when you picked them up—possibly resulting in not a small amount of delight. And who can keep from actually reading through a personal letter delivered by the postman (I don’t mean that generically—ours really is a guy).
Starting a magazine when most are dying doesn’t sound like a winning endeavor. On the other hand, one of the lessons of social media is that audiences can be found and they can find our project if it is repurposed to become ”yummy beautiful.”
###
A Beautiful Bit of Honesty: Butte’s Berkeley Pit
ago we passed through Butte, Montana and paid the two bucks required to go out to see the Berkeley Pit, one of the larger collections of toxic waste that also functions as a tourist magnet.The Berkeley Pit is an open pit mine on the edge of Butte that had gobbled up neighborhood after neighborhood for years. In 1982 the mine ceased operation and began filling with water. But not just filling with clean swimming pool water. The water in the pit is highly acidic and so full of minerals that today it (yes, the water itself) is “mined” for copper. It may be a myth that migrating birds die instantly if they land in the water, but vigorous hazing activities include a houseboat that moves around the lake to get birds off the water and to collect those appearing to suffer ill effects (they dump the birds in an on-board five-gallon barrel of fresh water and release them from fresh-water).
- Enjoy the view.
Standing on the viewing platform, the scale of the pit is amazing. And the chamber of commerce runs a brave Orwellian soundtrack complete with patriotic, upbeat music that describes all that is going on to clean up the mess and how nobody needs to worry about the toxins seeping into the ground water for a variety of reasons. So just enjoy the view. [Addendum: The level of the water in the pit is carefully monitored so the toxic mess does not seep into the groundwater. The number of people and groups watching the pit is quite amazing. ]
The beautiful bit of honesty came from a resident I spoke with. What was her impression of the Berkeley pit and what did other residents think of it?
“We know we live next to a lake of battery acid.”
No spin. No soundtrack or patriotic music. Just winsome honesty. And let’s get on with life.
###
Building Content: Share Your Research—Even if Incomplete
A few days ago I talked with a company about their research efforts into a growing subset of a particular business process. This firm’s business is all about helping other companies make personal connections with their customers. Over the years this company has built a strong reputation for their expertise even as they continue to grow and adapt. They already know the benefits of being perceived as experts. Now they seek to add to the already strong understanding of the tools, process and attitudes needed to help companies remain connected.
One of the new opportunities before all of us is to provide leadership around a topic and invite others to talk with us about that shared passion. Seth Godin talks about it in Tribes. This company I had been speaking with has already caught the bug for growing themselves and helping others along the way. But one of the things about research is a commitment to doing something new. By definition, research means you are answering questions and finding things out fresh. Naturally we want to apply our new understanding to the problems and opportunities before us. That means we might not get it just right all the time. We may make mistakes. And don’t mistakes force a slip in our perception as experts?
I’ve been arguing all through these articles that what we gain in authenticity more than makes up for momentary slips. Social media is about real time communication, so if we read our research at some future point and realize something happened that changed everything, we’ll understand that we knew what we knew when we knew it. “Now we see things differently,” we might say to ourselves at that future point. I’m arguing for grace. I’m also arguing we’ll understand the nature of social media in this way.
This topic has a personal application for me. I’m currently writing out a book-length project that develops a theology of communication. But I’m reluctant to chunk it out into a blog format because every part of the book changes as I move forward. What I thought was true in the first three chapters is actually changing as I write chapters four through six. I’m certain change will continue all the way to Chapter 12. Do I have the courage to make mistakes in public?
How do you approach sharing your research? I’d love to hear.
###
Tale of a Communication Fail that Lost a Sale
We stood looking at the broken window. I wanted an estimate. But the window salesman was unspooling a monologue about the wood in windows these days: something about 80-year old trees, then 50-year old trees and 35-year old trees. Then came sealant rates, the attributes of vinyl, why his company of craftsman were utterly dependable and more than just sales guys, and then another round of features so precise and minute I would need to plot them on a spreadsheet to begin to understand them. Most of what he said was entirely unverifiable—especially at the rate he was spewing it out.
The sales pitch is dead. Long live dialogue!
I suddenly realized it’s been some time since I’ve heard one of these old-school sales pitches. And I remembered why: I hate listening to sales pitches. I’ve been writing about the switch from monologue to dialogue so much that perhaps I had convinced myself the sales pitch was dead.
Not so.
For all the reasons I’ve been writing about, from lack of curiosity to the absence of questions to simple lack of insight into his audience, his sales pitch did not address my central question: Will you give me an estimate on replacing this window and, even more, can I trust you to do the job effectively?
It’s too bad, really. I used body language to say “I’m not interested” and “I don’t believe a word you are saying.” And two or three times directed him to the question of the estimate, even so, the pitch soon came tumbling out again at full speed. I despaired of getting back to work. He seemed to not get that the pitch was not working, nor that it was affecting me negatively. Maybe he didn’t care. He clearly seemed to not care that I didn’t care.
Even Mrs. Kirkistan, in later conversations with the window pitchman, found herself attempting to cut through the monologue to force an estimate. In fact, long before the actual estimate came, we decided we could not trust this guy or his company.
Two things about the pitchman and his monologue:
- Dialogue is a way of establishing trust. It proves someone is listening. By way of contrast, monologue proves someone is not listening. Do I really want to work with someone who is not listening?
- Feature-laden promises delivered at a rate that makes them unverifiable (even if we cared, which we didn’t) have “scam” written all over them. Maybe the pitchman and his company were legit. His monologue led me directly away from that conclusion.
Dialogue helps disperse skepticism.
###
conversation is an engine 