Archive for October 2009
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?
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Please, Back Away from the Controller.
It’s about interest, not control.
It’s not like you can just adopt this new channel, buy space and you’re good to go.
It’s more like learning to be a friend again. I described the equivalent of “winning the lottery” in a dialogue-based medical device marketing context, but Seth Godin takes the next step with his Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us. Instead of focusing on the tools of social media we all find so interesting (or not), he posed the provocative question “Who is it we should be leading?” His question presupposes this inward-looking beginning point for any who care to begin dialogue: “What change am I passionate enough about to lead?”
I like that Godin helps me see that the coming dialogical world is much broader than today’s set of bloggy-twittery-searchable tools. The questions we ask when moving from monologue to dialogue have more to do with what we all care about together. Finding what we care about together is a necessary stop on the journey. And knowing what we care about together is a step beyond carefully controlling the conversation with fine-tuned messages.
What we care about together as humans has always been different from the one-dimensional messages with which we’ve surrounded our product messages. The secret to dialogue is what we learned years ago when our first friend showed up that summer day: we look for common interests. We expect give and take, and a willingness to hear and try something new. Friendship is formed when we stop claiming to know all the answers. Inviting marketers to rethink friendship is a step toward dialogue and a step away from monologue. Inviting marketers to find their place of leadership within friendship and within dialogue is a step toward freeing them to be the leaders they secretly want to be. The tribe-formers we need them to be.
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Medtech Using Social Media #5: Winning the Lottery
Our conversations help individuals lead groups forward.
Working on a client’s factory floor yesterday, I heard a guy describe how his troubles would be over if only he won the lottery. It’s a common enough thing to say and I’m sure we all think it from time to time. I happen to think winning the lottery would be more like trading one set of problems for another. Without the life disciplines that build on any skill (including making money), without a bit of thankfulness, suddenly receiving lots of money may not change all that much about a person’s life. Maybe for the moment more expensive toys enter the picture. But without discipline, the money eventually runs out and even larger debts take their place.
In marketing communication, just like in every other area of life, we search for the perfect tool that will solve everything. The perfect strategy of engagement. The perfect ad or the perfect media buy. The perfect social media tool. But deep-down we all know that perfect tools don’t exist. Or perhaps the perfect tool for the job does exist, but it gets corrupted when interacting with us.
The vision for engagement using these new social media tools is a vision for engaged contact with a group of people who believe in what you are talking about because you are talking about what they believe in. The vision is precisely not sharpening the perfect tool for the perfect kill (that is, the perfect sale, or the perfect implantation of our message in some consumer’s brain along with the instruction to “Buy!”). And even though lots of folks are—for the moment—listening to the social media channels, with Twitter and Facebook making headline news daily, newer channels will arise and suck away attention. The enduring lesson is that we all do better when we talk things through—no matter what technology enables that talk.
The equivalent to winning the lottery for a medical device firm using social media is a group of committed friends, colleagues and fellow-travelers making a journey together. It is a group where questions are shared as freely as answers. It is a collection of conversations where your brand is given legs and flesh as the brand promise works its way out through conversation after conversation. Winning the lottery is about building a fierce loyalty along the way.
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