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“There’s nothing quite as insecure as a television anchorman.”
Kent Dana, the news anchor for Channel 5 (KPHO) in Phoenix, and previously anchor of Channel 12 (KPHX), retiring after a 30-years work in the news business.
“This is the biggest investment we’ve made in a national launch … “This is not your grandmother’s instant coffee.”“
Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks, on the launch of Via, the instant brew
“rather than submitting their images and videos to mainstream media organisations, they post them online on Facebook, Twitpic, or wherever their friends are likely to see them.”
Robin Hamman, visiting journalism fellow at City University, London, commenting on the social media use during disaster and tragedy.
“This whole things has been quite scary.”
David Letterman, admitting he had had an affair with an employee.
“It is a whole other universe of risk.”
State Rep Steve Farley of Tucson, on texting and driving, as Arizona considers a bill to ban it.
“… Which is another reason why news operations don’t publish all the good news we hear about. There would be no room for the rest.”
E.J. Montini, commenting on All the Good News Fit To Print.
“But you have to remember if you have a conversation on the wall, you could be opening up the entire conversation to the public.”
Robyn Itule, an account manager with Armstrong Troyky, a PR and Ad agency in Phoenix
‘Then out of nowhere this big wave, as tall as the sky, hit.”
A 21-year old woman in the Pacific Island of Samoa, on the devastating tsunami that hit the area, followed by an earthquake in Sumatra.
“There’s always truth in snark.”
Chris Brogan, during his presentation at New Media Atlanta, commenting on the back-channel tool, BackNoise, saying “always confront the thing you are fear most head-on.”
There’s so much news about Twitter each day that I’m surprised someone hasn’t created a Daily Show about the 140-character revolution.
The news that Threadless, the crowdsourcing T-shirt company has launched Twitter T-shirt contest. Check it out at twitter.threadless.com.
It’s an interesting phenomenon. First because it takes what’s essentially an online phenomenon and moves it into the analog space.
Excuse the horrible metaphor, but I had two amazing conversations today that made me think a lot more deeply about what we communicators do for a living.
We do not perform complicated surgical procedures, we do not step outside the space shuttle to fix a broken rudder, we do not stand atop a Humvee in Fallujah ducking sniper fire. All we appear to do is generate content and try to get some buy-in.
OK, I know we have ambitious strategic plans, and wear business development hats, sit at board meetings and what nots. But still…
When it comes to presenting something, especially something that’s somewhat complicated, slightly controversial, icky, we summon the best best tools from digital cameras to–as they say in the military– human assets. But we tend to lean heavily on ‘push’ tactics.
Speaking to these two senior communicators, I realized that 95% of their time appears to be devoted to understanding the audience, and 5% into the messaging. Without naming names, one is the director of an organization with multiple audiences, another the head of an outreach effort that involves a web site, with as many audiences as there are dots on the world map. Let’s leave it at that.
- The Comms Director was someone who’s finely attuned to considering what the audience was interested, using the web and as a listening post, as much as a publishing platform. “We appreciate your views in helping us grow,” he mentioned. I was not in his orbit, not geographically, or professionally close to anything that his outreach program was all about. And yet…
- The Corporate Director was someone who thought a lot about–some would say overly sensitive to — information overload, and losing the audience. “We shouldn’t come across as far too complex. We sound like we are trying to cure every form off cancer, when in reality, we may be just experts in lung cancer.”
I asked if she meant pruning down the content? More than that, she said. “How do we present the black lung?” The what? She remembered way back when smoking was being attacked on all fronts with logos, warning signs, ad campaigns etc, how one simple presentation in school made an impression. It was a canister with a black lung, and next to it a unsullied one. It was not the slick PSA copy in the campaign that made her decide she would not smoke. It was the black lung!
Which brings this to us. We tend to pack our communication tool kit with everything we’ve got, when all it takes is one memorable take-away. Not to say we need to drop everything. But perhaps we unintentionally clog up (pun intended) our message.
So I am formulating this black-lung theory. We all have this black lung problem. We present way too many bronchioles, blood vessels and pulmonary side shows as a stand-in for a real solution. In other words, sometimes it’s time to cut down that presentation deck from 35 slides to 5. Or … zero?
There are other ways to keep the black lung front and center.
- Use more visuals, less words.
- Speak for 35 minutes and leave 25 minutes for questions.
- Better still, start with questions and end with a presentation, counter-intuitive as this might seem
- Listen to the blogosphere, twittersphere, whateversphere
- Analyze leads, study your audience, use Google analytics
- I bet there are dozens more
If you have some great presentation examples (or even horror stories) I’d like to know. And so will my two unnamed sources.
If you like Twitter (and wonder why it was not overrun by spammers) prepare for this killjoy. I was alerted to it by an IABC colleague –through what else? Twitter– of a tool that could kill the golden goose.
This crappy service, Twitterhawk is a way to turn it into a marketing machine. One look at what it promises and I can see the end times. The company is brash enough to say that “We have many measures in place to reduce the liklihood (sic) of your posts being seen as SPAM, but instead look much more natural and real.”
Meaning: we can help you smile, and be a devil.
I can’t wait to see what the Amway / Quixstar types might do once they take hold of this! (Don’t kid yourself, they a lready use social media –chec this!) I don’t think it is the only robotic service out there, but if Twitter does not officially respond to this, we know where micro-blogging is gonna end up.
Google is a search engine. No it’s an advertising company. No scratch that, it’s a monitoring service. A software company. A brand monitoring service, a publisher and library a….
Most organizations have been schooled on the practice of identifying what their core business is; (as the ‘law of focus‘ goes) of sticking to one thing and one thing alone. But Google has been successful by doing precisely the opposite. It’s the brand that violates all banding laws. Even how it has fun at the expense of its own logo!
It’s hard to pin down what the Google brand stands for, or is moving into. As CEO Eric Schmidt said in April, ” All options are open. I don’t want to rule out or rule in anything.”
Imagine if FedEX said that and decided it needs to be in the passenger transportation business too? After all it is not just a delivery company, with Kinkos, so it has expanded its core offering. I believe that companies, like communication professionals, are starting to rethink what focus means.
Nice move by Coke in Beijing, to use hotspots, mobile phones and opt-in.
McDonald’s has an interesting online experience, “The Lost Ring” which is a sort iof immersive game, featuring one Eli Hunt, via podcasts.
Will a poster be influence the choice of the next president of the United States?
You can sense the cult-like passion these days for Brand Obama. The icon, the metaphor, the human equivalent of the iPhone for a lot of young voters.
The icon status is not accidental. Not that is contrived, either. Take this famous Shepard Fairey poster that’s showing up on the campaign -as you see here on a story about the energized voters at UT Austin. It was created by Mr. Fairey who was not involved with the Obama campaign.
It tells you something about the role of user-generated content that’s matured at a perfect time. Before the mother of all cult brands, the iPhone, was released, Apple fans raced to create designs of what they believed the iconic brand would look like.
Once upon a time presidents and prime ministers were more or less positioned and branded by ad agencies and PR strategists. The famous “Labor isn’t working” poster by Saatchi & Saatchi for Margaret Thatcher comes to mind. This year in the US elections, the branding -if you could still call it that– is in the hands of the people.
Sure, the Clinton and Obama campaigns pays big money for ridiculous he-said-she-said ads. But what’s remembered, talked about, spread virally (the “I have a crush on Obama” and “Yes we can” videos) have been created and launched by citizen campaigners on their own dime.
Speaking of shiny new objects, people camped out to catch a glimpse of, and vote with their pocketbooks for the iPhone. That same crowd –young people –seems all too eager to stand in line to vote for another “advanced communication device.”
Have you noticed how the word “No” has gained currency in advertising?
This ad from Shell has been running in some magazines and tells of how the world is full of nay-sayers and those who put down ideas as impractica.l “What does it take to turn no into yes?” it asks. “Curiosity. An open mind. A willingness to take risks.” Somewhat buried in the copy is a link to Shell’s microsite.
But close upon the heels of celebrating “No” is another great execution by BMW, featuring an ad and an insert in WIRED. This time it takes the opposite side, celebrating the word No. “No closes doors… but when used to break convention, it opens more,” the copy reads. As in: “No, we will not compromise ideas. No, we will not do it the way everyone else does it …the ability to say No for all the right reasons.”
To Shell’s credit, it’s not all ad copy. In a report last year, president John Hofmeister blames the oil and gas industry for the “public policy deficit” with regards to energy. “I do not blame the elected officials. I do not blame the American people. I blame the industry for not having spoken of this issue…” he says. At the site, they talk about the energy crisis as a “crisis of inertia.”
Say what you will about Shell, but at least its marketing is in sync with its president.
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