the market for communication is flooded.

[This post is something of a placeholder, transcribing notes I put together for what will hopefully be a somewhat interesting presentation.]

The market for communication is flooded.

Mass is dead or dying, when it comes to building actual relationships. There is no such thing as 'too visible to fail' in an attention economy. There is, however, 'too omnipresent to identify with'.

You might want to consider people.

You are a person, dealing with people. Technology has made it possible (unavoidable) to do a lot of this, ignoring limitations imposed by time or distance. Technology has also added a layer of separation. Meaning and nuance are reduced in comparison to face to face human interaction.

You should take this as a reminder: put as little as possible between yourself, and people you would like to speak, as possible. Things in the way often include: policy, management, NDAs, PR people, fear of transparency, voicemail systems, etc etc etc.

A flooded market means we can be picky. Most of us pick talking to / with a person.

I think there is still a need for communications professionals. But I also think that a trained, informed employee or owner is the best point of contact, not someone who is involved solely as a point of contact. I think it's time to stop pretending that media savvy isn't teachable.

Communications people should be hired for strategy, or input, and for insight. (And then, for connections and THEN in pursuit of coverage.)

The current cycle doesn't reward hype, or launches, or short-term thinking. It rewards community, observation, reaction, and sustained value.

It's not just engagement. It's interaction.

It's communication strategy, more than marketing or PR. Which isn't a chart of impressions, or a clip file, or ROI (Not that these aren't important things). Communication strategy is knowing your community, industry, issues and organization. Knowing what may come. And everyone knowing how to deal with it.

Because (cough, #amazonfail, cough) communication is realtime.

You can't wait until monday morning to let the people who trust you know what's going on. You can't put people, time, or fear between you and your community. You need people on the ground, ready, willing and prepared to act in response to public perception. Which means you need an informed, trained, prepared and updated team. All the time.

A flooded market means that someone else will speak, if you do not.

twitter-lepathy.

Twitter, hashtags, and mobile devices more or less equate to telepathy. No, seriously, hear me out on this.

This is something I realized at PodCamp Toronto. Searching tweets by hashtag or by location let me know what people were thinking in the sessions I was in, sessions across the venue, and the thoughts of people who couldn't make it to the site.

Twitter enforces brevity, sure. But it's also just about the right size to encapsulate a single thought. I find I only clash with the limit when I actually have several related thoughts that I want to express.

Most people think telepathy would be a curse. I've always disagreed, assuming that we could develop a half-decent filtering mechanism. Twitter deals with a few of those problems naturally; people don't tweet things they are uncomfortable with sharing, and you are only exposed to that you opt in to / search for. Telepathy via Twitter is easily sorted, and more noise only equates to more potential signal.

Telepathy would me mostly mundane. People's thoughts aren't always useful. But this is how we understand people - through the collection of their inanities. Sound familiar?

The big lesson regarding telepathy that I've gleaned from Twitter is just that - there's no such thing as noise, as long as it's coherent. People aren't being inane. They are giving you context and backstory. You don't learn anything about people from seeing them in their edited, presentable best. You learn about them when they are being stream of consciousness, being unedited.

Being people.

Enjoy your faux-telepathy while it lasts. I know I will.

explaining millennial arrogance.

This weekend, while doing some volunteering at OYP, I heard the now tired rant about my generation (the 'millennial' generation) and the apathy, entitlement, and arrogance that define us.  I'm going to do my best to explain some of that, if not justify some of it.

The internet is likely the biggest alteration to human interaction with information, since written language became commonplace.  I don't think this is hyperbole.  The written word allowed stories concepts, ideas and information to exist without being directly shared, and to have a life beyond the individuals, and even the cultures, that created that content.  The internet allows instantaneous communication, collaboration, and access to mankind's collective stored information, and has the ability to make physical and temporal distance irrelevant.  It has changed everything, and the millennial generation is the first one to consider it as a given and as a right, rather than as a tool.  The way we envision communication, culture and problem solving is based on this level of connectivity, which did not exist when current leaders learned how to solve problems.

Every generation thinks that it is living in the apocalypse times.  We don't have nuclear war (yet), but we have the strongest economies in the world collapsing, the spectre of rapid climate change, and asymmetrical insurgent warfare, on top of everything else.  We've inherited a pretty ruined world, and after a lifetime of being told we wouldn't have pensions, or steady jobs, or social security, we are being told that expecting a career, or a stable environment, is unrealistic.  We also can't help but notice that many of these issues are at least partially traceable to the generations preceding us.

We were raised specifically in rebellion to the discipline and sacrifice taught to our parents by the Greatest Generation.  Most millennials have been told from childhood that they are valued, they should expect to be heard, that they have valid ideas, and that expecting fulfillment in one's work is a bare minimum.  The education system in many areas has been shifted to one that doesn't consider failure an option until the early teens, and in my experience we've created a culture where we expect that 75% of students can be above average.  This inherently results in apathy regarding results, as expectations are absurd, and/or grading criteria are meaningless.

Now put this person in the workplace.

They have ideas, they are excited and motivated to finally have a chance to do something that MATTERS, that will be judged on functionality, not an artificial standard.  This is not the reality of the working world.

The people in leadership positions, in most corporations, are people who don't like being presented with entirely new ideas, especially not by people who are considered untested.  Most business structures are still operating on a pre-internet base, or at best with a thin veneer of new technologies applied to old structures.  Old structures are resistant to new ideas.  And millennials in the workplace quickly realise when they are in another situation where what comes before is dictating the options available to them.

We don't subscribe to the idea of paying dues before you get to make change, because in our minds, everything has changed, and the people who have the status necessary to influence things don't understand it.  If you'd like proof, the best example I can give is record industry execs admitting that they didn't hire anyone to help them with technology, because they wouldn't know who to hire.

To a millennial, every industry looks like that, or will soon.

We were raised to think this way, we have been presented with a well and truly ruined world, and when we actually try to do something about it, we are told we will have to wait a decade or so, to establish the credibility necessary to get anyone with influence on our side, or we are shown by others to strike out completely on our own, and make the change we see as necessary without support from older structures.  While being told to wait a decade, we are also hearing that we have a decade or so to change everything before the world falls apart.

We can see how bad things are, the world over, in more detail, and more personally than any other generation in human history.  And we keep getting told that the only thing we can do, for now, is business as usual.

Not sure if you've noticed, but business as usual has failed.  Miserably.  And doing the same thing, with hopes for different results, is the definition of insanity.

Of course we come across as arrogant, as entitled, as apathetic.  The entire world has changed, the way the human race interacts has fundamentally changed, since the current leaders of the world have entered the workforce.  Speaking to close friends and family members even ten years older than me is astounding, because they cannot speak 'internet'.  And we're being asked to wait, and to stick to failed structures.

You'd be arrogant, entitled and apathetic, too.

on impositions.

I was watching the Obama infomercial last night, when I received a call from a charity hockey game, asking if I was interested in buying tickets or taking donations.  I generally follow my father's example in these situations, which more or less means being polite, hearing them out until I know what they want, and then saying 'No, thank you' ad infinitum until I feel justified in hanging up.

The first thing the woman said to me was 'It's nice to hear a pleasant voice, everyone either hangs up or yells at me.'

This would have been said, but she was essentially opening everything with an imposition at 8:05pm.  Irritation is acceptable. But it's difficult to build an outreach and awareness campaign without any imposition whatsoever.  'Permission marketing' is a good idea, but it's also based on existing awareness of a product or service, or a transactional 'for permission you get this newsletter/trinket/exclusive widget' model.  People need a core reason to hunt you down, merely offering things for them to learn about or try isn't enough.

Options include being remarkable, indispensable, or controversial.

Another option is to, carefully, impose on people.  It's irritating, bothersome, and increasingly being screened out.  But the funny thing is, a carefully targeted, remarkable / indispensable / controversial imposition is rarely considered as such.

If someone had called me at that time with a request for funds related to someone I care about deeply, or to ask if I was interested in receiving a package with information on something I care about, I probably would have considered talking to them.

This is why it all comes down to targeting for me.  Targeting offers the chance to make impositions, on a consumer level, obsolete.  Given, of course, that what you have on offer is of sufficient value to offset the irritation of a ringing phone or unsolicited email.

it's not your fault, and you can't fix it.

Continuing on the subject of radio ads, the ads for a product called Evercleanse have been inescapable.  They are also hilarious, but they make an interesting point when to comes to selling people products related to healt, wellness or fitness.

Evercleanse, in brief, is a product that contends your intestines and colon are filled with waste that is making you fat.  The waste is diet proof, immovable, and compared to 'spackle or paste'  That's right.  Evercleanse wants you to know that you aren't fat.  You don't need to diet or exercise.  You are merely filled with secret poo.

The genius part of this, for me, is that the ad opens with a condemnation of men: we're overweight due to fast food and overeating.  With women, it's a matter of secret poo, so diet and exercise won't do anything.

Convincing, and promising to customers that they are blameless, as opposed to those other people, is useful.  Convincing them that the effort they weren't going to put forward anyway would be wasted, is useful.

Where it falls apart for me is the suggestion that Evercleanse serves a need that no one else can serve.  Being a solution, or the best solution, or the only logical choice, is great.  Telling me you are the only possible solution leads me to question your credibility.  That, and the secret poo.

dear facebook, beacon is evil.

I know I've just recently berated anyone who whines about Facebook's new setup, but I've been seeing rumours here and there that the Beacon system might be coming back.  I hate Beacon, and I think my rage directed at it is more justified than those raging against the live feed option, or the new layout, or what have you, for one reason.

Facebook catalogues and organizes your social information.  It does this based on what you decide to tell the site about yourself, filtered through your privacy settings.  You might not like everyone you are friends with seeing what you do or say on Facebook, but you have decided to do and say those things, on the Facebook platform.

Beacon is problematic because it follows you around after you leave Facebook, and then tells everyone you have identified as a friend what you are up to outside of the Facebook platform.  To me, this breaks the implicit contract that Facebook users have - that Facebook stays confined to Facebook.  Telling people I'm said 'Happy Birthday' on a friend's wall is very different then telling them I googled the release dates of 35 mens fashion magazines, or watched several videos centred on the history of the bow tie.

What makes me odd, is that I don't have a problem with Facebook tracking this information, and using it to better target ads to me, assuming it is stored in a double-blind system, and kept for a limited amount of time.  What bothers me is that information, which I did not tell Facebook to collect, being distributed among individuals. 

Social networks are about projected identity, not actual identity.  If you remove the user control over the identity presented online, then yes, you are invading their privacy to an extent.  That, I have a problem with.

in (further) defense of public relations.

The Long Version:

Newsmedia, and Journalism, isn't the paragon of ethics it pretends to be. This massive concentration of power is in the hands of business interests, like anything else. Journalists are influential, intelligent, and often have an agenda, whether based on personal opinions or editorial mandate. A careful twisting of an off the cuff statement has the potential to do massive damage to a reputation and business, without necessarily crossing the boundaries of libel or slander. PR has an image problem. PR has a lot of catching up to do with developing media, and the changing way people get information. PR will be necessary as long as there is a concentration of influence among media outlets that may be biased, because individuals will always try to protect their personal interests, including their image.

The Short Version:

Everyone thinks the world would be better without Lawyers, too, until they actually consider what the law would look like without individual representatives.

a small note from personal experience.

I meet /  know a lot of people more or less my age who are facing a crisis of identity - i.e., they want to find themselves.

For some reason, this usually manifests itself in wanting to go on an exotic vacation, or move to another country where you don't know anyone, for a little while.

I'm of two minds on this.  My recent, short, wonderful vacation has resulted in my being notably more driven, and having greater focus on how to achieve the things I want.  More or less, being in Jamaica gave me enough distance to evaluate my life without my usual bias.

But I think this was based on my having some clue what I wanted, and being fairly certain who I was.  I'm not sure I would have gotten any closer to a positive outcome if I hadn't known those things.

Where you are is part of who you are.  So, going somewhere else to decide who you are will probably result in, at best, a temporary definition that doesn't fit as well when you get back to real life.

As a round-about way of tying in to the stated purpose of this blog, you don't define a brand by changing everything first, and figuring out what it means second.  Figuring out what a company is, is the same as figuring out who you are - you should do the hard thinking and honest answers part before you get to the radical changes.

Otherwise people will just assume you're trying anything that keeps the hard questions at bay.

perceived barriers and consumer behaviour.

The perception of a barrier is more important than the realities of that barrier.

This is equally true of whether or not you can get someone to pay for a product or service, whether they will pay twenty nine dollars but not thirty, whether they will change their behaviour around your product or service, or whether they will watch / eat / do what-have-you in a new location.

The issue isn’t simplifying the barrier, or even minimizing it.  The issue is the existence of that barrier.

The reason itunes is important is it carefully removed the perception of barrier from the music buying experience.  You use the same program to buy music that you use to play music.  Once your details are logged, you just click through.  In the same window you use to play your music.

Buying a song has the same fundamental user experience as playing a song you already have, or subscribing to a podcast.

So, to dispute a point I made earlier, it is still logical to attempt to make money selling music.  Assuming the manner in which you sell music is not too divergent from what your market would be doing anyway.  It’s not the price point that matters (25 cent MP3s are just as expensive in terms of time and effort as 99 cent ones).  It’s the perceived barrier.