You know ‘em. You’ve seen ‘em speak at conferences. I hope you haven’t let them in to see your bosses.
I’m talking about speaking coaches, and other sharpers who like to claim that it’s not the words we use or the veracity of the ideas we espouse, but the body language we employ, that makes most of the difference in communication.
Well finally, there’s a worthy response to all this body language b.s.: “Busting the Mehrabian Myth.” Have a look. Pass it on. And play it (wordlessly) for the next consultant who tells you your body speaks more loudly than your words. —DM
About eight years ago on another blog I wrote about a massively important problem facing the communication profession.
Why is it, I asked, that seven out of 10 professional writers place two spaces after a period despite the fact that word-processing programs automatically make more space after periods (and have done for more than 20 years)?
Luckily, the “search and replace” function allows me to remove all the extra spaces fairly quickly. But I’m terribly annoyed every time it says, “Word has completed its search of the document and has made 157 replacements.”
I’m annoyed because I don’t understand why professional writers haven’t been able to make this small adjustment in the three decades since we stopped using typewriters.
Well I’m happy to report that my qualitative longitudinal study has yielded a more favorable dubious statistic. We’re down to four out of 10 professional writers who are still kickin’ it old-school, period, space space.
Aside from being potentially bogus, the hopeful statistic also fails to recognize that the remaining two-space cadets are a hardened and hopeless crew. Hardened, hopeless—and powerful!
Just this morning, reformatting President Obama’s State of the Union speech for publication in our sister publication, Vital Speeches of the Day, I had to remove 350-some extra spaces.
Come on, guys. One space after the period. That’s change I can believe in. Period. —DM
I saw a note on Facebook last week that it was the birthday of the legendary PR man Chester Burger. I wrote to him: “Happy Birthday, Chet. I still remember our meetings more than a dozen years ago with reverence and fondness. They were formative for me.”
And so they were.
They came at a time when I was in a careeer crisis. I’d exhausted the editorial possibilities at Ragan Communications, but didn’t know how to further my writing and editing career. I was trying to help Ragan launch a consulting operation, and wondering whether that was really worth my while.
For the first and only time in my life, I went to a guru for advice.
Burger, who I’d met on a weird Air Force PR junket a few years earlier, was the nation’s very first television news reporter in the 1940s. He’d gone on to become an independent PR advisor to the CEO of AT&T, a little gig he held onto for 33 years until his retirement. Meanwhile he worked for the United Negro College fund during the civil rights era in the 1960s and worked on the International AIDS Vaccine Inititive in later years. In short, a ridiculously productive American man.
And generous. He met with this 29-year-old near his home on the Upper West Side of New York. I asked him what I should do with my life: writing, or consulting? Chet Burger was the sort of man to whom you would ask such a question.
He told me I should go into consulting, because as a writer, you only chronicle history, but as a consultant you could change its course.
In the course of our conversation, he gave me a tiny example of how he used his consulting skills to go about changing things.
In the early or mid 1960s, he was flown to Paris to join a panel review a proposed advertising campaign by the legendary adman David Ogilvy. The campaign was designed to encourage tourism from America to Europe. When Burger saw the ads, he was aghast. They showed Americans disembarking planes in European airports, and all the Americans were white.
But Ogilvy had flown Burger to Paris, and it would not do to humiliate him in front of this esteemed panel. Worse, criticizing Ogilvy’s ad would also get the Great Man’s back up, and cause him to dismiss Burger’s advice. So Burger opened up with an eleborate list of sincere compliments about the ads: the brilliant concept, the bold headlines, the direct and clever copy, the colorful layout, and on and on and on.
“You know, I might add a few people of color to that crowd of Americans getting off the airplane,” Burger said parenthetically. “You know, just to balance it out a little. But that’s all I can think of, because the campaign is just stunning.”
So substantively flattered by Burger that he now wanted to justify Burger’s good judgment by bowing to his suggestions, Ogilvy agreed wholeheartedly and ordered the changes immediately.
Not possessing even a fraction of Burger’s tact or persuasive genius, I failed miserably at consulting, and went back to humbly chronicling events and crassly commenting on them.
Burger and I later talked about it, as we kept in occasional touch over the years. He read a few of my pieces and said he liked them and we both agreed I’d made the right decision. Meanwhile, I complimented his photography of New York and we always hoped to meet again.
But, hours after posting my birthday message, I learned that Chet’s 91st birthday came almost a year after his death, which I somehow missed, last March 22.
A tardy godspeed, Chet Burger, and may your magnanimous intelligence and wisdom shine in the minds and out through the eyes of everyone who knew you or who benefited from the changes you made in the course of history. —DM
I resisted “content marketing” as long as I could. Maybe longer.
First, I ignored it as new jargon for an age-old practice (wasn’t this just another term for public relations?). Then I dismissed it as a fad that would never last (cautious corporations, as compelling publishers? bah!). Then I resented it as a threat to the public trust (will we soon be getting our news from The Wal-Mart Journal?)
I still have doubts about the power content marketing to transform our culture, and worries about what that transformation will mean, but my misgivings seem increasingly impotent and irrelevant in the face of an irreversible trend.
Still, whenever I run into a person who self-identifies as an expert or consultant in “content marketing,” I give the guru a good going over.
Especially if they are as smart and warm and honest as Russell Sparkman, a guy I’ve worked with a little bit this year (he served as senior judge in our Strategic Video Awards, which I chair) and with whom I’d like to work more in the future.
January 26 and 27, Sparkman’s company, FusionSpark Media, is hosting an intimate, intensive Content Marketing Retreat, the second in an annual event at the cozy Langley Center for New Media, located on Whidbey Island, near Seattle. I can’t make it this year—but on behalf of CW readers who may be having a similiar struggle with this concept—or at turning the concept into an actual practice in their organizations—I thought I’d give Sparkman my last best punches, just to see what kind of chin he has.
CW in boldface, Sparkman in plain type.
***
Content marketing: define it as concisely as you can.
Stripped down to its essence, Content Marketing is the investment of both human and financial resources in the strategic creation, curation and distribution of relevant, educational and/or fun content as the basis of building awareness, generating leads, closing sales and providing customer support.
Content Marketing requires the company or non-profit to “think like marketers, and act like publishers or broadcasters” in order to leverage content as the basis of engagement.
Content Marketing is an important concept to grasp today because content is now mission critical to almost all other flavors of marketing talked about today, from Social Media to Agile, from Inbound to Word-of-Mouth.
Now, using that definition. As a man of taste, of creative ability and vibrant soul, why is that activity worthy of your life’s work? Is there something lasting and good that comes out of successful content marketing?
I didn’t wake up one morning and say “hey, I’m going to become a Content Marketing evangelist” in hopes that the legacy on my tombstone would say “He Did Content.”
Rather, in 1997, I was a photographer who proposed a concept for original online storytelling, called One World Journeys, that fits the definition today of brand storytelling.
This work began as a vision for using original online content and storytelling as part of Cause Marketing related initiatives, partnering the Corporate Social Responsibility interests of business with the needs of Non-profits to promote awareness and support of environmental issues.
Out of this experience grew our appreciation for what we viewed as a better way for businesses, non-profits and even government agencies to meet their communications objectives by creating and sharing online content that had deeper meaning and utility than the more typical marketing and advertising fare you’re used to seeing.
When done well, enterprises that give of themselves by producing really great content in support of their product, their service or their causes really do build deeper relationships with their customers and constituents, which in turn leads to new business, new opportunities.
It’s this aspect of the content marketing approach that truly gets me excited, especially when we’ve experienced directly how it’s helped a small business client build a bigger client base, or a non-profit client succeed in their goals of increasing public awareness or raising funds, and so on.
In an earlier interview with me a few months ago you said that a reason content marketing is growing in credibility is that institutional communication we actually used to trust—e.g., the mass media.—is losing credibility. “I don’t think anybody holds the key to the truth anymore,” you said. And you said it with a sanguine air that I must challenge. Do we really want to live in a world where Exxon “content” is as trusted as a New York Times article (and a Starbucks environmental video is in an even he-said-she-said with an Ann Coulter book)?
As a local elected official in recent years I experienced first hand how truly biased a journalistic institution such as a local newspaper can be.
Specifically, I witnessed a local editor’s blatant disregard for best practices such as confirming facts from multiple sources or seeking corroboration of claims because doing so would compromise the story he wanted to tell. This experience, coinciding with my thinking about content marketing, awakened me to this reality that “no one holds the key to the truth anymore” in media.
The reality is that our mainstream media are corporations and businesses just like any other corporation or business. And just like any other corporation or business, some will adhere to a certain ethos of honesty, objectivity, transparency and fairness more than others.
Additionally, the audience for one news corporation may be totally different than the audience of another. Audiences hold very different belief systems and values, therefore they judge “truth” through very different filters. Look at the dichotomy of the Fox News and the CNN audiences, for example.
So, I’ll put a stake in the ground that yes, even an Exxon can “tell the truth” through their own publishing (as a very extreme example, perhaps), but that truth will not only be in the eye of the beholder, but it will also be subject to being only one or two clicks away from being called out as total bullshit.
And whether we want to accept this or like this situation is moot.
The train has left the station, in terms of any corporate entity being able to function and act like a publisher or broadcaster to share their side of the story directly, unfiltered, with an audience. And just like traditional corporate media, some will be capable of doing this better than others, in terms of fairness, objectivity, honesty and transparency.
Quite literally, corporations that do move into more content marketing-like communications have no choice but to approach it as credibly as possible. The power of the consumer to organize online and override attempts to mislead, misguide or profiteer has just become too strong, and is getting even stronger.
I think that there’s a certain Yin-Yang poetry here.
***
Readers, what do you think? Let us know. Or better yet, treat yourself to the Content Marketing Retreat, and explore all these issues on your own. Tell me what you find out, okay? —DM
As we step uncertainly into another year in our moral business, ContentWise thought it appropriate to offer “The Communicator’s Prayer,” from the Oxford Book of Prayer:
God and Father of all,
who from the beginning came to bring light and truth and love to man
by the Word, grant to us who deal with words and images
such a reverance for Thee that through careful and honest work,
we may keep the coinage of our language sound.
Give us humility to realize that we are called
not to be perfect but to be clear,
not to be infallible but to be fair.
Direct those who, in this our generation, speak where many listen,
who write what many read, and who show what many see,
that they may do their part in making the heart of our people wise,
Maybe you’re wise enough to take some downtime between Christmas and New Year’s. But it’s hard, not doing any work on a staycation. For one thing, work is your only easy escape from your family. Yet, you don’t want to cheat yourself by spending your downtime toiling for the man.
So do what you ought to do: Spend some quiet time sifting the work you did this year, and look for the very best stuff you produced. The podcast interview that actually made the CEO sound human. The video that made everybody think differently about what the communication department is capable of. The kick-ass pull-quote that made a strategy story irresisble.
Behold those mini-masterpieces, and pat yourself on the back in a constructive way: Enter the stuff into the Magnum Opus Awards, the prestigious program that “recognizes writers, editors, designers and communication managers who do great work in every area of content-delivery in print, online, in traditional media and social media alike.”
Go ahead, do a little work over the holidays—but make that work work for you. —DM
My Kent State PR prof pal Bill Sledzik could bring rationality and a sense of constructiveness to a 15-car pileup.
Which is exactly what he did last week when he led a discussion on his blog about the Public Relations Society of America’s cockamamie attempt to use crowsourcing to redefine the term “public relations.”
The whole thing reminded me of one of the very first assignments I had when I was a cub reporter at Ragan Communications. Quiveringly, I had to call all the giants of the PR business—Denny Griswold, Harold Burson, Jack O’Dwyer, Chester Burger and even Ed Bernays himself, who was only about 143 at the time—to ask them their definitions of public relations, for a story for The Ragan Report.
They were all amazingly gracious about getting back to me—at the time I didn’t realize that PR people, if nothing else, do habitually get back to reporters—and their answers were so dull that even my tape recorder fell asleep. Relationships with publics, blahblahblah, mutually satisfactory, blahblahblah, two-way symetrical, yadayadayada.
Twenty years later, I can tell you my definition of PR: PR is good, PR is bad, PR is ineffective, PR is cunning, PR is fatuous, PR is wise, PR is publicity, PR is action, PR is sinister, PR is craven, PR is a dirty window, PR is useful, PR is a noble instinct and PR is a stinking excuse.
With it you’re damned, without it you’re doomed.
PR is what it is—whatever it is—and it is all these things every day, all day and everywhere, in agencies and in communication departments and in practitioners’ hearts.
To “define” PR—or any other communication, marketing or advertising discipline—is to write a hopeful epitaph for your career.
Which is fine for a Sunday afternoon, but Monday morning, it’s back to selling brassieres, the best way you know how.
So a guy starts a discussion in a LinkedIn forum on employee communication.
“What’s the best employee newsletter you’ve seen/used/created?” he asks.
A safety manager at a Fortune 50 company answers:
John, the most effective newsletters I’ve seen are laid out like this: Page 1 is a message from the president or boss on the state of the company. Pgs 2-3 are photos of the employees who are driving the business results. Page 4- are the business results (revenue, cost, profit).
Wow, sounds like an irresistible read!
The straight-ahead safety manager reminds me of the story about the company where surveys revealed employees didn’t trust management, so they launched a monthly newsletter called, Trust. Or the company I consulted with that hoped to turn employees into ambassadors for the organization, and so created an employee newsletter called, The Ambassador.
Maybe it’s the serial comma that gets you down. Or maybe it’s, like, all the extraneous words the kids are using today. Or maybe you’re ready to end the day of the next linguistic laggard who says, “at the end of the day.” (Or at least give him a wake-up call.)
Well, I certainly understand.
In fact, I’ve had a few of these little issues myself.
How do I deal with the anger that a language-lover feels in a slovenly-spoken society? I let it out!
And so should you. In fact, we’re inviting you to!
Post your most hysterical (or quietly seething) language rant to YouTube and send me the link, at david.murray@mcmurry.com.
I’ll post it here, and we’ll have other CW readers judge the winner.
But of course we’ll all be winners. Because it feels good to let our feelings out, rather than bottling them up.
To my amusement, I recently ran across some rather puzzling correspondence that I had a few years ago with a veteran speechwriter concerning a column she was going to write for the newsletter I edited at the time, called, The Influential Executive.
I had invited her to write a guest column and she suggested as a topic: how to help your leader become a thought leader. (Wikipedia: “Thought leader is business jargon for an entity that is recognized for having innovative ideas. The term was coined in 1994 by Joel Kurtzman, editor-in-chief of the Booz Allen Hamilton magazine, Strategy & Business. ‘Thought leader’ was used to designate interview subjects for that magazine who had business ideas that merited attention.”
“I can tell you from experience,” the speechwriter told me. Executives “are thirsty for content on how to be thought leaders. They’re honestly clueless and willing to listen to anyone they think actually knows what they’re talking about. Being ‘thought leaders’ is a corporate obsession. I promise.”
Okay, I said, you had me at “thirsty.” I gave her a word count and a deadline, and she agreed.
The deadline passed; I wrote to check up.
“David, I would still love to do this but am just overwhelmed with work that came out of nowhere. I promise I didn’t forget. I’ve sat down to write it a couple of times, but always get interrupted. … I still have many thoughts on the topic to share.”
Another deadline passed.
“This article has been on my mind constantly, but I haven’t had a single chance to sit down and finish it. … my mom is sick, my car is in the shop ….”
Another.
“Look for it later tonight. I’m writing as we speak.”
I got the article, which wandered like a drunkard, somehow in the course of 800 words managing to get off topic in three different directions.
I asked her for a revision, telling her, “My readers are going to come to this article greedily wanting what we’re promising: ‘So your client wants to be a thought leader.’ I think we have to address the requirements and the tactics directly.”
She replied:
“But I truly don’t have a list of tips and tactics to offer. Read back to our first discussion in this email string. What I was thinking about is the concept of true influence and what separates it from visibility. My thinking about it all might be a bit out there. I don’t even advise clients who really want to be true industry thought leaders to do traditional EV plans–not even keynotes unless the conference courts them. My alternative is that, if they’re going to speak at conferences, stay in the trenches with a really forward-thinking break-out topic. I know, that’s pretty radical. But talking head keynotes are becoming … pedestrian … for people who really want to set themselves apart. Are you okay with those kinds of ideas?”
Ah, yes, to the extent that I understood them, sure.
“Perfecto!” she wrote. “That’s exactly what I had in mind.”
“I was so bummed when I first started to research this … waaay back at the first of Dec.,” she added. “I Googled ‘thought leadership’ and ‘executive influence’ to see what new and nifty things other consultants were doing that had maybe flown under my radar. And there was zilch! People have Web sites calling themselves leadership experts … but with ’success stories’ reporting they wrote and placed an editorial in a medium-market newspaper. Shriek!”
That was three years ago. Since then, silence. The Influential Executive is now defunct. But we still hear a lot of useless talk, don’t we, about thought leadership.)
How to make a souffle: First, get a stove.
How to be a thought leader: First, get a thought. —DM
