carry oil for squeaky wheels.

Whenever there is an online backlash against a brand or product, one of the first things I hear (or usually read) is a reminder that those voicing concerns aren't a large part, and at times aren't even a significant part, of the overall audience / customer base.

The problem with that line of thinking is, given current technology, those who voice concerns are the groups with the most visibility, and are usually afforded the most credibility.  And that's ignoring the mainstream media's current fascination with anything related to Twitter.

If 4%, or even 0.4% of your customer base is whipping up a frenzy on a social network, it's visible enough to impact a much larger group of customers, or potential customers.

Angry people aren't quiet.  And anybody can be loud, today, if they manage to strike a chord with the right people.

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.

secrecy is not your friend.

No one can tell their friends about the amazing, completely secret thing that you’re working on.

Even if it doesn’t materialize, an ambitious and transparent failure is better than continued, unremarkable anonymity.

(All advice is given on the assumption that you aren’t actually full of shit. Infinium Labs, transparency will not save you.)

post-scarcity communication.

[My understanding of the relationship between scarcity and conflict has always been fairly straight forward. Conflict occurs when scarcity necessitates competition for a resource. This happens with land, with food, with money, significant others, etc. If there is one of something, and two people want it, conflict ensues. As such, I've always idealized the concept of a post-scarcity reality. While there are a bunch of ideas associated with the concept of the singularity, the hope of living in a post-scarcity society is the one that interests me the most.]

I recently started flirting with the idea that we have reached a post-scarcity state in the western world, in regards to human-to-human communication. (I'm intentionally not getting into advertising messages, here.)

With email, text messaging, twitter, facebook, blogs, phones, voicemail, call waiting, snail mail, email, instant messaging, skype, MMS, and so on, there are so many means of communication, instant or asynchronous, visual or auditory or both, tied to no specific location, that often the only justifications for not contacting someone are forgetfulness, avoidance or time-scarcity, which is more or less ranking other activities above communicating with the person in question.

This becomes clear when asked why you didn't invite someone along, or ask their opinion before making a choice - when pressed, often the only answer is 'I didn't think to' or 'I didn't want to', very rarely can one honestly respond that it was impossible.

Reaching a post-scarcity state in communication has the effect of intensifying conflict in relation to time-scarcity. By making a decision to not contact someone, you are in essence making the decision that other activities outrank communication with that individual.

This means that failing to respond, react, reach out and share concepts, thoughts and ideas is no longer excusable. If something is important, and not addressed, it is because you have chosen other tasks above addressing it, or you have simply chosen not to.

Post-scarcity communication means you aren't allowed to be too busy, or distracted, or out of reach when opportunity or crisis appears.

No one is going to believe "couldn't be reached for comment" unless you have a very unusual situation that can be clearly demonstrated.

Keep that in mind as you go about your business.

question five: list 5 books.

List the five books most influential to your view of communication:

1. The Rebel Sell

2. Here Comes Everybody

3. Understanding Media

4. Channel Zero

5. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

If you have read, or do read, all of the above, I probably want to be your friend. Just saying.

[This is the 5th in a 5 part series, answering questions I suggested be asked of any potential media hire. I haven't done number 4 yet, because I wanted to answer this one first. Out of order FTW.]

different, not right or wrong.

People are usually good at being right, sometimes good at being wrong, and usually terrible at understanding those aren't the only two options.

This came to mind when I was discussing different viewpoints on social media, in relation to the old guard.  Even if people admit that social media is important and can't be ignored, they often fall into one of the first two categories.

People accustomed to working with traditional media sometimes think it's their job to educate bloggers on how media works.  By educate, they mean: impose the behaviours of old media on new media.  Turn a new thing, into a new channel for the old thing.  This is "I am Right" thinking.

Almost as bad is "I am Wrong" thinking, where someone with a long history working in traditional media, and a large amount of expertise and wisdom, decides that they do not understand social media, never will, and therefore should attempt to stay away from it.  By assuming they are flat out wrong in relation to anything centered on social media, less of that hard won wisdom and skill gets put to use, and much of it is applicable.

It's harder to admit that things are just different.  That it's not about being right or wrong, it's about taking what you've learned and developed, and seeing what works with the new world order.

Different is harder because the only option is fighting to keep an open mind, while considering new information through the experience that informs wise action.  When you are used to either being right, or wrong, this comes across as a massive amount of work.

Don't discount the older guy who says Twitter is a waste of time, even though we all disagree with him.  He probably knows a thing or two about how to make 140 characters impactful, or engaging, if you can express why everyone would benefit from his expertise.

[I suppose this could be considered the counterpoint to my post on millennial arrogance.]

ambigrams.

An ambigram is a piece of stylized text that is still legible (either the same text or different) right side up or upside down.

Walking to work this morning, I think it might be the best way to consider communications - something that has a clear, valid message regardless of which angle you approach it from.  If you are betting the success of a campaign on the idea that your messages will be interpreted only from the perspective they were conceived, you are ignoring the way the world is.  Once you release a message, you relinquish control.

Control goes to the hands of anyone interested in interpreting, re-interpreting, dissecting, disseminating, remixing, mocking, re-purposing or otherwise using what you've created.  Everything has multiple readings.  Everything can be interpreted from multiple viewpoints.

Make sure you get the message across upside down or backwards.  It increases the chances of your meaning remaining visible, despite the presentation others may give your messaging.

journalism is the harbinger (or, say goodbye to sleep).

One of the attempted fixes the newsmedia has tried to bolster profits and smooth the transition online, is to basically to work journalists to death.  On top of the many, many facets of the actual job, the research, the interviews, the investigations and the writing, some journalists are expected to maintain a blog, create smaller pieces for websites, and generally add another separate job's workload to their day.

This is going to happen to all of us.

In a society where social media is well and truly mainstream, where transparency is a given, and where each individual within a company is seen as a potential representative, lots of people are going to find a social media element added to their duties.  Posting on a corporate blog, or updated a company focused next-generation equivalent of a twitter account, or flickr, or facebook page, is going to become a standard part of everyone's workday.  There will be a point where a lack of 'humanizing content' on behalf of a company or representative will seem as odd as meeting someone who refuses to use contractions.

The issue is, maintaining a meaningful social media presence is a lot of work.  Many of us are busy enough that we don't really know how to fit everything into a work day already.  I'm lucky enough to have a job where my use of social media on the job is accepted (and quickly becoming industry standard).

We should all get ready for the double shift.  It's coming.  And for the people who wouldn't be doing it anyways, it's going to be uncomfortable.

the big changes.

As far as I’ve seen, the internet makes a few major changes to human culture, and extrapolating from those tells us where the future is going.

Time and space bias are becoming less and less important.  When and where no longer limit information, entertainment, communication or conversation.  Any business model based on exploiting time and space bias, or enforcing time and space bias, is officially on deathwatch.  Business based on making time and space bias entirely irrelevant will probably find an audience, and success.

Potentially everyone can publish.  This doesn’t mean that everyone has an equal voice, but it does mean that people will learn the responsibility of their works.  If your words, your ideas, are put in front of the world, you become responsible for them in a way you can’t be without an audience.  People fear an audience because it forces evolution and improvement.  People cherish an audience for the same reason.

Knowing about something is going to become less and less valuable, as information is rapidly becoming accessible from everyone, from everywhere.  Knowing how to do something is going to remain essential, because skill requires more than information.  Discovering information about something will always remain valuable.

If something exists, there is less and less resistance against it becoming ubiquitous.  This is currently true of information, and will likely be true of physical creations in the coming decades.

These are all fairly obvious at this point; I’m not breaking any new ground by writing this.  But I’m finding it next to impossible to come up with a recent world-changing development that isn’t explained by the logical progression of one of these factors. 

If I’m doing something that doesn’t address or leverage one of these issues, I can usually do it better by asking myself why.

 

idealistic communications rant.

Communication is about new ways of talking.

Communication is NOT about old ways of talking on new platforms.

This is an important difference, and a common mistake.

Twitter ≠ RSS.  Don’t use it exclusively for linking to your blog.

Blogging ≠ Infomercial.  Strategic ‘authenticity’ is still inauthentic.

New ways of talking create problems.  The first instinct for both writer and reader, is to apply the standards of old ways of talking, or to ignore the lessons of old ways of talking completely.

Writing emails as formal letters is an example of the former.  Ignoring the freedoms we have for sampling and remixing text when developing limitations of creative freedoms with video or audio is an example of the latter.  Both, upon reflection, don’t make a lot of sense.

New ways of talking mean new rules of talking, but they don’t necessarily mean the lessons of older modes of communication should be ignored.  If we’re using English, a beautiful phrase will likely still read as a beautiful phrase.

Phrases can have beauty online, as much as they can in a novel.  There can be art and underlying meaning to communication anywhere, if we decide not to drown it in shit.

[inspired from a lot of places, more recently Lawrence Lessig's Remix, which is very much worth reading.]

pr as arg.

To me, the future of PR is in the mass narrative.  Not the official company line, or in the image generated by a specific piece of coverage, but in the collage created by every mention a company gets, whether from the New York Times or a rarely read WordPress blog. 

To work with this future, a company needs to do whatever it can to use it’s stance as a source of information and the authority on itself, to influence the attitudes and associations that the community attaches to the brand itself.

I’ve asserted before that I don’t consider myself someone who works in a media role, I consider myself someone who works with narratives.  This isn’t to say I craft narratives like an author, my function is more of a curator – I take facts, elements of a story, and make them available, either publicly or to specific interested parties in the media.  Through this, I exercise a small amount of influence (but not control) over the public perception of a brand.

I don’t write words on a page.  I encourage the development narratives across society, traditionally through media outlets.  (Or at least, I do when things work well.)

My vision for the future of PR is communication strategy modeled after an Alternate Reality Game.

I’ve spoken about ARG’s before, as a method of advertising and building engagement with a brand or product.  However, I think the same concepts can be shifted slightly, and put to use to engage the public, and share information with them, in a way that is mutually beneficial to community and brand.

I’ll add to this in the future, but here are some starting concepts:

Information Seeding:  Giving information to engaged parties instead of just widely read media outlets.  I wouldn’t suggest massive exclusives, but any company that would share information about upcoming offerings through a forum they did not own, and for no reason other than knowing the community there would care, stands a decent chance of building loyalty and interest in the products / services they offer.

Cumulative Narrative:  The whole story comes from learning about the individual elements, rather than an official line published somewhere, that omits defining information.  If people want to learn about what you do, they should be able to look at any element of your business and understand the core values that drive the overall brand.  Be defined by every part of your reality, not just the parts you think of as ‘media friendly’.  (This also suggests that you should have a reality you are comfortable with from every angle, not just the ones you consider ‘media facing’).  More importantly, people who care SHARE information.  The main thing that PR can learn from ARG’s is that a community that informs itself is more efficient, and generates more engagement, than official sources alone can.

Discrete Sub-Narratives:  Create more points of entry, and explore the stories within each story.  There’s no reason to share any information that would damage your business, but why shouldn’t every key feature of what you offer have it’s own point of contact for interested parties?  Off the top of my head, a ‘production blog’ for each key team building part of an interesting whole allows a community a better chance to find something that interests them, and a greater understanding of why they should care.  As mentioned before, each of these elements builds into a greater whole, which, if necessary, can be summarized (think social media optimized press releases).

‘Playing Fair’:  This is more related to any mystery story, but it’s a key point.  Narratives that play fair offer enough information that readers can come to reasonable conclusions.  A narrative that doesn’t play fair comes to a conclusion that no amount of rational speculation would have come to.  Playing fair encourages speculation.  While companies like Apple can generate speculation through secrecy, leaks drive the interest of the crowd.  If you control the flow of your own information, you can create a connection with the community.  And they can make themselves a part of your narrative.

Players Direct the Game:  The best narratives build and change with the ideas the crowd generates.  I’m not suggesting changing your brand at the whim of the crowd, but if people are interested in a specific element of what you do, release more information about it.  If there is a large concentration of interest in a specific geographical area, arrange a small event and spread information around discreetly.

The core concept of all this is to learn from the best example we currently have of telling a directed narrative through (and not TO) a large number of interested parties.  I’m going to try to go deeper into this, and expand on each element I mentioned (as well as a few others) in the coming weeks.

lessons in human failings.

The main thing I learned in the last month is that no matter what I am dependent on a mixture of my memory and my hearing.  This is one of the reasons my preference is for email, or another form of written communication.

I am addicted to having a paper trail.

The problem is, that having a paper trail in many cases demands repetition.  And people (myself included) have very little tolerance for repetition, especially in cases where technology is involved.

The solution is fairly simple - I would pay through the nose for a service that delivered automated transcripts of my phone conversations, or even of face to face conversations, to my email inbox.  Being able to point to the exact moment of communication breakdown would be essential, especially since it has become unavoidable that I conduct fairly important conversations over several media.

An increased dependence on technology means an increased demand for accuracy.  unfortunately, the rust between the gears is always human falliability.  Plan accordingly.

slideshows.

I'm obsessed with the art of presentation.  I've always cared more than most people about public speaking, but now I'm starting to get into powerpoint style slideshows as more than just a tool.  I'm fairly convinced they are one of the least utilized and most versatile forms of digital media available.

A slideshow can be expressed in a massive number of ways, using the exact same designs and words.  Taking the slides and using them as images, with the read text printed as words, and you have a magazine style article.  Take the slides themselves, and you can save them as individual images, a slideshare prezo, PDFs, or even printed copies that create a take home that will jog the memory of an audience.  Encode an MP3 album in iTunes format, with each slide being the album art for a 30 second vocal track.  Make a YouTube video that's just the stills and the audio.

This is all without the major use, standing in front of a group of people, regardless of size, and shaping their attention and time into a learning experience.

I'm obsessed with slideshows for the same reason I'm obsessed with memes.  You can throw a fully formed idea out there, in discrete units, and let it propagate on it's own, throughout a nearly endless list of forms.

More important than any of that is the fact that a good slideshow is one of the most impressive, interactive and multimedia things that someone can do on a computer with minimal ability, next to no equipment, and infinite repeatability.

I don't make enough slideshows.

adding a social media layer.

I've had a very social media themed day.  I'm not going to go into the details, but I'm solidly in the headspace, so I'm going to talk about something cool I saw on PSFK recently - the addition of a social media layer, melded with competition, on top of vapid reality TV.  

I don't particularly like the Hills, but I'd be very happy to see this added to streaming TV online on a wider scale.  Lately I've taken to sitting in front of the TV with my iPhone, twittering, tumbling and IMing my way through whatever I happen to watch (normally about one show a week, considering bittorrent is my favourite station).  If I'm watching most things on my laptop screen, I'd like that comment layer.  More useful would be the ability to tie it into the social media services I already use - TV show based chats with my Facebook, MSN, Twitter, etc contacts would be interesting and beneficial.

The scoring part is something I find less useful.  I know many people are excited by the idea of getting voted up or down in a Digg comment thread, but I'd prefer to actually have a conversation.

That said, I'd love watching a deep-tagged episode of the Hills with the highest voted commentary popping up at the times it was made by each individual viewer.  Crowdsourced criticism is easy to see entertainment in.

more rabid iphone love.

This time, I think, I've centered on why the iPhone impresses me so very much.  It's not just a phone with mobile internet.  It's the first thing I've used that has actually incorporated nearly all of my mediated communications into one package, that fits into my pocket.

I got interested in computers and the internet right about the time I realized livejournal and ICQ were better ways to speak to my friends than a telephone was.  Part of my stance on this was that I was a 13 year old boy, and phone conversations seemed like a lot to ask.  A larger part was that I could incorporate ICQ and LJ into my workflow (although that isn't how I thought of it at the time).  I could have conversations while doing other things.  This very quickly became the whole point of computers, and the internet, for me.

A list of communications tools I use on my computer: gmail, gtalk, msn messenger, skype, blogger, twitter, tumblr, facebook, linkedin, google reader.  (I'm definitely missing a few)

Communications tools I use on my iPhone: gmail, palringo (msn and gtalk), tumblr, google reader, twitterific, facebook, linkedin, sms, voice calling, voicemail, blogger, etc etc etc.

The iPhone impresses me not because it's the best phone I've ever used (it is) or the best mobile internet experience I've had (my laptop wins that one), but because it's not just a phone, it manages to facilitate the use of nearly every communications tool I use, from anywhere, without much hassle.  I never have to say 'if I was on msn, I could get in touch with _____', or 'I'll have to send _____ a facebook message when I get home'.

I joked with friends a few weeks ago that we'd say to our kids 'when I was your age, we had the internet in our hands, not our brains, and we were damned lucky to get that!'  As time passes, I'm fairly certain I'm going to point to the iPhone as the first palpable outbreak of the hyperconnected future.  Because it's a medium agnostic communications tool, rather than a phone or PDA or computer.  And every time I start using something like that, my life changes a little bit.