I had lunch yesterday at a new Embassy Suites two blocks from my office. Across the street is a restaurant that’s been there just about forever. As I headed back to the office I noticed this sign on its mansard roof, facing the hotel.
Sometimes a simple message to the right audience is all you need. Among the hundreds of hotel guests who look down on this banner from their rooms, I have no doubt that many check out “the best breakfast in town” for a nice little 15 percent discount.
Simple. Direct. Targeted to a very specific audience. I love it.
Annie Dillard has said that day by day you have to give the work before you all the best stuff you have, not saving up for later projects. If you give freely, there will always be more. This is a radical proposition that runs so contrary to human nature, or at least to my nature, that I personally keep trying to find loopholes in it. But it is only when I go ahead and decide to shoot my literary, creative wad on a daily basis that I get any sense of full presence, of being Zorba the Greek at the keyboard. Otherwise I am a wired little rodent squirreling things away, hoarding and worrying about supply. Arthritis forms in my hands and in the hands my mind is using to shape things, in the hands of that creature in the cellar who wants and needs to use all of his favorite rags in the ragbag he works from.
You are going to have to give and give and give, or there’s no reason for you to be writing. You have to give from the deepest part of yourself, and you are going to have to go on giving, and the giving is going to have to be its own reward. There is no cosmic importance to your getting something published, but there is in learning to be a giver.
Besides the fact that there really is no cosmic importance to getting something published when everyone is a publisher (certainly not the case when Lamott wrote those words 15 or so years ago), I’m struck by how aptly it describes what we experience every day in social media.
Giving is one of the great givens, a prerequisite for success in social media. Others expect you to give freely of your time, knowledge, expertise and advice, with no obvious expectation of return on your investment.
While Lamott may have been writing about the return one derives from investing oneself fully in her writing, she could just as easily have been talking about the investment you make in your social media efforts. We’ve seen time and again cases in which the investment of giving has paid rich dividends to the giver.
If there’s no reason to write other than to give and give and give, then I think much the same can be said for participating in social media. For many business folk this may be an alien concept, but for nonprofits it nicely complements our mission-driven, social-benefit, collaborative natures.
Learning to be a giver is one of the keys to social media success. Hoarding and worrying about supply simply lead to arthritis.
As the first step in a complete overhaul of my nonprofit employer’s website, I’ve engaged the services of Brain Traffic to help us develop a content strategy for the site. BT President Kristina Halvorson literally wrote the book on the subject. (Or one of the books on it. Anyway, I got a lot out of it.)
Here’s a presentation Kristina did on the subject at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York City. One of the most compelling statements contained herein is this:
Online, we don’t just see or read about your brand. We use it.
That should be one of your big takeaways. If your mission as a nonprofit is to get people to do something, then your website should be a tool for doing. No doubt you give visitors the “opportunity” to make a donation or volunteer their time. Good for you. But what else? Does it also offer less self-serving tools that help them advance the cause? Are you enabling your employees and volunteers to do their work more effectively?
If joining your mailing list and giving you money are the only things your website makes easy, you might want to take another look at the tool delivery opportunities available to you.
I caught this parody of news reporting over on Kevin Roderick’s L.A. Observed. Check it out, then tune into any of the national evening news reports and see how closely they hew to this tired formula. God save us from by-the-numbers hack journalism.
Ah, the power of communication. A new Stanford study of consumer behavior at Starbucks shows that posting calories on the chain’s menu boards lowers customers’ calorie counts without substantially affecting revenue. Sounds like a win-win to me.
Based on transaction data from Starbucks locations in New York, Boston and Philadelphia, the study found that calorie postings led to a six percent reduction in calories per transaction. Interestingly, almost all of the change related to food purchases; average beverage calories remained pretty much unchanged. Hard to break that Grande Caffè Vanilla Frappuccino® habit, I guess (430 calories with whipped cream, by the way).
Since changing behavior is a huge part of marketing, you might ask yourself what simple communication steps you might take to move the needle. It doesn’t have to cost much, and even modest results could have a dramatic impact on your organization.
Many thanks to Jim Mitchem for bringing this ad to my attention. Absolutely, simply beautiful and moving. More importantly, it makes me wonder why I ever did anything so idiotic as to not wear a seatbelt when I was younger.
This is the kind of public service advertising that makes such a strong emotional connection that it actually gets you thinking about the everyday decisions you make in your life, and how they impact the quality of that life. Imagine if you marshaled that kind of powerful messaging on behalf of your own cause.
I’ve been a writer since high school. It started with some really lame attempts at humor for the school paper, followed by some slightly less lame attempts at news and feature writing for the college paper. Since then I’ve held a series of positions in which writing has been an integral part of the job description. I’ve done annual reports, newsletters, brochures, direct mail and all the other projects that come with a job in marketing or communications.
I’ve always taken pride in my work. That isn’t to say I’ve been satisfied with everything I’ve written. Far from it. But I’ve been pretty conscientious in my efforts to turn out high-quality results. And my employers and clients have almost always been pleased even when I’ve been less than satisfied.
I consider writing to be a craft that, while many can manage competence, few are really good at it. It isn’t that the many couldn’t do a better job of it, it’s just that, for whatever reason, they choose not to invest the time and energy into improving the quality of their prose. Writing is easy; it’s the rewriting that’s a bitch. Turning the lathe until the shape is just right takes practice, and most people obviously don’t consider it worth the effort.
That’s fine by me. As long as there are those who value what I do and are willing to pay for it, I’m OK with being an ant among the grasshoppers. Unfortunately, the number of those who prize high-quality writing seems to be dwindling rapidly.
When did good writing become such a devalued commodity? The explosion of the internet as a communications ecosystem is a major culprit. Now that everyone has access to the printing press, we’re flooded with writing that no one in his right mind would ever pay to publish. That may be one of the reasons that most writers find it difficult to earn a living wage these days.
Worse yet, there’s a whole cottage industry of coaches and blogging “experts” whose own writing frankly doesn’t compare favorably to the lesser published writing guides. Say what you will about that dinosaur book publishing industry. At least they have editors. And fact checkers. And writers worth publishing.
Seems to me that there are two problems and no immediate solutions. First, the instantaneous “press Publish” nature of online writing has encouraged greater laziness even among those who know better. We’re seeing a lot more first drafts and far fewer fifth drafts.
Second, while bad writing has always been with us, the web makes it far more visible and accessible. Remember that saying about not sharing every thought that pops into your head? Thanks to the web, you can record the thought, share it with the world and revisit it for all eternity.
P.S. This was pretty much a first-draft effort. OK, maybe second-draft. Just imagine how great this post would have been had I invested the time and effort it deserved. But hey … it’s just the web.
If you’re interested in effective communication, I’m sure by now you’ve read Chip and Dan Heath’s Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. One of the most compelling concepts explored in this fascinating book is the Curse of Knowledge. Here’s what the Heaths have to say about it:
People tend to think that having a great idea is enough, and they think the communication part will come naturally. We are in deep denial about the difficulty of getting a thought out of our own heads and into the heads of others. It’s just not true that, “If you think it, it will stick.”
And that brings us to the villain of our book: The Curse of Knowledge. Lots of research in economics and psychology shows that when we know something, it becomes hard for us to imagine not knowing it. As a result, we become lousy communicators. Think of a lawyer who can’t give you a straight, comprehensible answer to a legal question. His vast knowledge and experience renders him unable to fathom how little you know. So when he talks to you, he talks in abstractions that you can’t follow. And we’re all like the lawyer in our own domain of expertise.
Here’s the great cruelty of the Curse of Knowledge: The better we get at generating great ideas—new insights and novel solutions—in our field of expertise, the more unnatural it becomes for us to communicate those ideas clearly. That’s why knowledge is a curse. But notice we said “unnatural,” not “impossible.” Experts just need to devote a little time to applying the basic principles of stickiness.
JFK dodged the Curse [with “put a man on the moon in a decade”]. If he’d been a modern-day politician or CEO, he’d probably have said, “Our mission is to become the international leader in the space industry, using our capacity for technological innovation to build a bridge towards humanity’s future.” That might have set a moon walk back fifteen years.
Every industry, every field and every endeavor has its secret language: the jargon, the technical terms, the acronyms and shorthand that enable us to communicate quickly among our peers and colleagues. But what about the poor schmuck who has no clue what the hell you’re talking about? That poor schmuck may be a customer, prospective donor or other would-be stakeholder you’ve made feel inadequate, confused and slightly stupid.
If you want to communicate with the outside world, the first step is not assuming anyone knows what you’re talking about. If I don’t live in your world, you’d better make it simple for me. Lose the jargon. Break down the technical language into something anyone can grasp. If you’re not ruthless in identifying and eradicating everything that stands in the way of my understanding you, then your “communication” may be a wasted effort.
Sorry if that sounds like a cheap come-on, but I was intrigued by research I recently came across on how physical beauty involves more than good looks.
Three studies conducted at the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that people perceive physical beauty differently when looking at those they know versus strangers.
While there have been countless studies that focus on specific facial features, waist-to-hip ratios and other physical qualities that influence your perception of others’ beauty, these studies focused on how we might see physical beauty differently over time as we get to know a person’s other qualities.
In the first study, participants rated the physical attractiveness of people’s high school yearbook pictures (now there’s a scary thought). In the second, members of a college sports team and strangers rated team members. The last study asked students in a summer archaeological excavation course to rate one another both on the first day of class and again six weeks later.
“In each case, non-physical traits known only to familiars, such as how much the person was liked, respected and contributed to shared goals, had a large effect on the perception of physical attractiveness that was invisible to strangers,” said David Sloan Wilson, an evolutionary biologist at Binghamton University and one of the researchers.
I think the implications for social media are pretty obvious. As researchers Wilson and Kevin Kniffin conclude in their paper on the studies, “If you want to enhance your physical attractiveness, become a valuable social partner.”
Personally, I’ve always preferred to be judged on the quality of my character rather than any physical traits. That’s why I use a profile shot that’s been deliberately uglified. For the curious, here’s what I really look like.
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