Communication

Communications is made up of two halves, something like yin and yang. I call them the positive side and the negative side. In using a word like “negative” we immediately think it is something bad. But it isn’t. Both sides can be done well or poorly so the positive side, done wrong, can be very bad. The negative side, done very well, can be very good. Let’s see if I can explain what I mean.

What I call the positive side is essentially the message we want to get across. Sometimes this is referred to as marketing “happy talk” but that isn’t what it is unless it is done badly. Happy talk is empty. It lacks substance. It’s the kind of communication that tells potential customers your product is “cool” or “awesome” or “great” without ever saying why. In other words, it doesn’t explain the benefits – why a customer would want it. It’s actually negative communication because it’s characterized my absence.

Negative communication is a bit dodgy but it can be summed up this way: it’s all the material we don’t provide because it isn’t overtly about promoting the product or service. In terms of the positive side, it’s all the material that would have made the marketing communications you did substantive – it’s the material that would have explained why something was “awesome.”

Put another way, everything is communications – sometimes good, sometimes bad. Even no communication is a kind of communication. It tells customers you don’t care, or don’t know, or don’t have the courage to say, or that you are so slap-dash you forgot.

A good question to ask is, “What am I not saying?” One of the hardest things to figure out is what is missing in our communications. Are all the I’s dotted, the T’s crossed?

I came across an example the other day where a TV ad for a site made reference to something very specific (amongst several specifics). When I went to the site, however, I couldn’t find it, despite my searching. Eventually I found it – using Google. What do you imagine my impression of the company was?

This is what I mean by negative communication. It’s everything we neglect or choose not to say.

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It’s good to repeat yourself. By default I think we believe to repeat ourselves is a bad thing. However, if we’re trying to communicate it’s through repetition that it gets across. The trick is to do this without becoming redundant  — in other words, knowing when enough is enough.

The other trick is to repeat ourselves but not in exactly the same way. While this post’s headline may not be the best example, it is an example of sorts. Put a better, more lengthy way, we might answer a question with, “Repetition is good. When we say something once only, it is easy for its essence to be lost in all the other communication that goes on between people. Thus, to say it two or three times helps to break through the clutter and make it more memorable. The lesson, then, is that it is good to repeat ourselves.”

Okay. That may be a bit too long, too wordy and too tedious but I think you get the idea.

Repetition is one of the ways we remember. Why do football teams in practice run the same play over and over? It’s to work out the weaknesses, get everyone on the same page and also to ensure every knows it, learns it and understands what to do almost without thinking when the play is called in a game situation.

I went off on this topic after reading Why Twitter was inevitable? over on Julien Smith’s blog. He begins by talking about recalling things he had forgotten about radio culture, such as the necessity to, “… constantly repeat the thing we’re talking about …”

I worked in radio as well, years ago. It was in commercial radio. I remember coming up with my own rule about ads which was, if you’re forced to choose between creativity and frequency, always go with frequency.

Ideally, you wouldn’t have to make this choice. You could have a creative ad plus frequency – meaning it got played a lot, hopefully throughout the day, particularly at the high listening periods (morning and drive). One of the reasons you hear and remember those awful local car dealership ads is because they forego creativity (well, maybe they think their ads are creative) and go with frequency – ads that are run a lot, often concentrated toward the end of the week and weekends when it was assumed anyone buying a car might be out shopping for one.

The theory was simple and, I think, true: an ad heard once would not be remembered, no matter how good it was. There is simply too much noise to break through. Our minds recall the things we hear, see and do frequently.

Repetition is how we learn and that is because it is how we remember. That is what makes repetition a good thing. It requires some skill to avoid becoming obvious and annoying but the bottom line remains: it’s good to repeat yourself.

Roll credits …

I went off on this topic by reading an interview with Julien Smith over on Mark Dykeman’s blog (Broadcasting Brain). That lead me to Julien’s blog and the post I referred to above.

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I began thinking today about social media and all the tools we see. There is something of a digital cornucopia of “stuff”: Facebook, Twitter, iPhone apps, Twitter apps, aggregators and on and on. New ones pop up everyday.

Accompanying all of these is the hype. There is the marketing from the companies that bring them out, the reviews from the various “spheres” and the conversations we carry on about them, online and off. “You can do this with it.” “You can do that.” “You can also do these things too.”

It all sounds marvelous unless you are hearing from the contrarian perspective in which case the tools and apps are frivolous or any number of other negative descriptives.

What I was wondering about, however, was how we actually use them. Are we using them just because everyone else is and they are the distraction of the month? Are we using them to a productive end? How are we using them … or more to the point, I suppose, why? What, if anything, do we get from them?

I’m also thinking less about the business aspect and more about the general population that uses them. There are a number of ways we use them as far as business goes, some effective, some not so much. But how and why do people use them, that big consumer base that gets talked about so much? I’m sure there are a number of answers to this but I also wonder if they all don’t dovetail into one or two general answers, a theme that shows how those different hows and whys all relate.

Despite all the things that can be done with social media tools, from sending messages to playing games and grabbing weather information quickly, I think all the whys can be summed into a single word: people.

There are supportive words that follow from that one word: connection, communication and information.

Regardless of all the flim flam with video, audio, Flash and games, for people to find the Internet (and social media) to be of any relevance for them, those four words need to be considered essential: people, connection, communication and information.

Even a silly video involves those words since it is pointless without connection to other people which, when that occurs, communicates and even passes along information, at least to the extent that it says something about you. (Just as it says something about those who respond to it.)

Everything else, while amusing and entertaining, is just a passing fancy. In the world of social media, I suspect that if you don’t keep those four words paramount in your mind you run the risk of becoming quickly forgettable.

***

I should add that I don’t think I’m saying anything new here or something I haven’t either said or alluded to before. I’m probably repeating myself with this post. But repetition is not a bad thing since it is often through repetition that we best remember.

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I’ve completed my Saturday morning project which was to go through my posts from 2004 and find the ones I most liked. They aren’t necessarily written as well as they should but such are the hazards of blogs.

It was fascinating for a few reasons. First of all, I was interested to see how much more I was focused on writing, presumeably the reason for a blog called Writelife. I think that is why I have fifteen posts there even though I want to try to keep each year to ten or less.

The second thing I noticed is how focused I was on blogging whereas now my focus is social media (blogging being a subset of). But that was six years ago when blogging was really taking off and there was so much discussion about blogs and what they were, as well as the criticisms — more or less the same as now with social media.

Two posts were of particular interest to me. One of them was 12 rules for Web writing which was actually a repost of something I’d written around ten years ago, about 2000 or so. Back then I was a bit anal about the word web and capitalizing it. Now, I don’t care. The rules, by the way, are more or less obvious ones — there are no great insights, I think. What I find interesting, however, is that by and large I think they’re still valid. (Now that I think of it, maybe some of them weren’t so obvious back in 2000.)

The other post is Language as a communication barrier. For a very long time it was my most visited post. What is of interest in that is where that traffic was coming from — outside of North America to a great extent. Africa, Pacific Rim etc.

Finally, many of the posts from back then have character set problems due to the many Wordpress updates and the importing of the blog from another location. (That importing business is also why some of the internal links go nowhere. It is simply too time consuming to go through and fix the URLs.) Although I tried to clean up the fifteen posts here, my posts from back then often show code rather than an apostrophe, quotation mark and so on.

If you’re at all interested, you’ll find the fifteen posts on my Highlights page, just below 2009. Other years will hopefully be coming soon.

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I saw a rather disturbing comment in the letters area of the local paper (Fredericton’s Daily Gleaner). It went thus:

“The average New Brunswicker is not qualified to make the final decision concerning the sale of NB Power. We do not have access to those in the know and the massive amounts of information required to make a sound decision.”

The letter essentially argues for the need for experts. And I certainly agree experts — their knowledge and opinions — have value but if I may take a tangent for a moment …

If I recall correctly, in the 2005-2006 NHL season the experts said the Detroit Red Wings would win the Stanley Cup. They were the team that placed first overall in the regular season. As it turned out, they were turfed in the first round, 4 games to 2, by the Edmonton Oilers who squeaked into the playoffs just ahead of the Vancouver Canucks. The Oilers, who the experts said would have their butts handed to them by Detroit, went on to the Stanley Cup final where they lost in the 7th game to the Carolina Hurricanes.

My point? Experts are fine but I ain’t bettin’ the farm on what they say. I’d also like to add what I left in the comments area of the online letters area. It reads:

“The NBPower deal involves many things such as economics, the energy industry and legal aspects and ideally we would all be experts in every area required to make an informed decision. However, it is a false argument to say that expertise leads to a correct decision.

“To the best of my knowledge, we have many economic and financial experts throughout the world and yet we are in an unprecedented global recession. This would not be the case if we could depend on experts to always get it right. Experts, like all of us, make mistakes so it is appropriate to ask questions such as: how did it come about, what will its impact be, what are the legal and economic ramifications, long term? The average person is also qualified to decide whether the answers to the questions are sufficient or ring of obfuscation.

“Much of this NBPower debate could have been avoided, I think, had any of the experts consulted had a background in communications but I guess that’s the one area they just winged it.”

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I’ve been going through my posts from 2009 trying to identify the ones I think are the better ones. I suppose was making a kind of Top Ten list, despite my recurring griping about lists. It is not a “best of” list, however. It is a list of the ones I liked, though some may not have been all they could or should have been. It’s a favourites list, I suppose. It goes like this:

1. What Star Trek did to me
2. The class system is alive and well and now online
3. Readers have responsibilities too
4. I wonder what she’ll say today
5. Generations, transitions, moving pictures
6. Literacy is a prerequisite for independence
7. Monetizing meaning: what is content anyway?
8. Is usability kaput?
9. Who are we not hearing from?
10. The first draft is the outline

It has been an intriguing exercise. As I go through the posts I see the themes that have preoccupied me. I’ve been aware that there was some redundancy to my posts as I keep returning to certain subjects but I think this is likely true of anyone with a blog.

Here are some of the themes, observations and comments I see popping up over and over:

• What I perceive as a belief among many that social media, and the Internet generally, is ubiquitous and of a democratic nature and how that is a false belief.
• Sometimes the act of communication is more important than what is communicated.
• Social media is not tactile. We’re all in touch with each other online but we never touch each other – there is no physical contact to technological connections.

Those are the three big ones I keep seeing myself writing about. As far as the topic of writing went, my focus was a bit generic. I seemed to write more about that vague thing we call content – what is happening to traditional news, how blogs have evolved, managing social media content and so on. I was all over the map which is not unusual for me.

As an aside … I rarely make lists like the one above. I decided to do so this time as a first step in a process of going through all my posts, back to 2004, and identifying the better material. In my inept fashion, I’m trying to do a bit of online housekeeping.

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(This was originally posted October 23rd, 2005 on another one of my blogs, one that is on hiatus. I’ve edited slightly to make the terminology more current.)

I came across a post about blogging and social media and know exactly what it’s talking about when the blogger asks, “Why do some write about every, little, single, humdrum, minute aspect of the everyday?” It can be annoying and irksome at the best of times. I feel like she does. On the other hand, I do the very thing that bugs me.

It got me thinking about blogging again and, surprisingly, I came across a song by Emmylou Harris that I think of now as the social media song. It’s called Can You Hear Me Now?

And I’m reminded of two quotes. The first is Eduardo Galeano in his Book of Embraces. I’ve lost the exact wording, but it was along the lines of, “Everyone has a voice, something to say that needs to be heard by the others.” (I’ve pretty much butchered it, but that’s roughly what he said.)

The other quote is possibly from Martin Luther King, though I may be wrong. But it goes something like, “Violence is the speech of those who have no voice.”

And my point with both of these is the business of a voice. Technology aside, social media and most things on the Internet are about communication and communication is about people and voices and having someone on this silly rock just listen to you.

I send out my S.O.S.
A message in a bottle set out to sea
It just reads “Soul in distress”
And nobody ever got back to me

Can you hear me now?
Can you hear me now?

Not that everyone online is in distress. Most aren’t. But the point is people need to chatter and they need to feel someone, anyone, is listening to them chatter. I’ve always thought this was one of the biggest mistakes people make in relationships – not understanding that part of your job when you’re in one is to be a sounding board.

And sometimes not understanding that you really only need to appear to be listening because, often, when people sound off they don’t necessarily want a discussion. Shit builds up during the day and they need to let it go, like steam. Part of the art of listening is knowing when you’re supposed to listen and interact and when you’re really just supposed to sit there and nod.

I guess my point is that people need an outlet and this is one of the things social media provides – outlets. But people also need a sense that there is someone listening, even if what they are saying is nothing worth saying. The act of communication is often more important than the content of the communication. And this is why we see things online like – I changed my pants, I brushed my teeth, I petted the dog and so on.

Can you hear me now? Can you hear me now?

People are looking for an ear.

Not long ago, I came across one of the saddest blogs I’ve encountered. It was from a year or two ago, a woman in Toronto, and it was a blog with single post. Her husband of a certain number of years had been having an affair she had been unaware of. Now he had left saying he not only didn’t love her, he never had and now he had finally found someone he did love. She was blind-sided and alone and … well, you know the story.

One post. Who do you talk to when the house is empty, you’re alone and this is what you’re dealing with?

How did the load get to be so heavy?
I used to wear my trouble like a crown
A bad flood’s pounding on the levee
And I’m gonna need some help to hold my ground.

Anyway … blogs aren’t all sad – the exact opposite. I read a lot of blogs because they’re so damn funny.

But I think I mainly read them because I find people who feel about things the way I do – and sometimes very trivial things. But you get a sense that you’re not alone. You realize how freakin’ big the world is, how many people are out there, and that someone, somewhere is listening.

Can you hear me now? Can you hear me now?

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I’ve recently started a project that requires a certain amount of reclamation work. By that I mean my memory is pretty awful so I’m doing some work to reclaim my memory by going through my various blog archives. It’s been something of a revelation.

I have three blogs: this one, another devoted to movies and a personal blog that is currently on an extended hiatus as I decide what to do with it. Writelife (ostensibly about writing, social media and so on) and the movie blog both have a specific focus (and sometimes not so specific). To some degree, they are self-censored in that career-related people, companies and whoever else can see them and I don’t want to come across as too much of a raving blog lunatic. (I’m not always successful in that regard.)

The third, the personal one, is pretty much me uncensored. In fact, it’s on hiatus right now as I consider the wisdom of this, consider the wisdom of trying to manage three blogs and I try to figure out what to do with the blog name, which is a stupid one I dreamed up at the spur of the moment a few years ago. But all that’s an aside …

Here’s the thing: Of the three, the most interesting is hands-down the personal one. It is the one where, when I’m on my game, I have the best writing. It’s easily the funniest. And when I use the word “censor” in connection with it I’m not suggesting there is anything that needs censoring. I use the f-word more frequently there, in the older posts, more so than I would now. But other than that, it’s largely tame stuff. The censor business was simply considering how I appeared to others online, at least in the first impressions sense. From a career perspective, was it a good idea?

Going through the archives (and those of the other blogs) I see certain themes recurring. (That is my diplomatic way of saying I’m repetitive.) And I see that there is one thing in particular I’m interested in above anything else: people.

Why is the personal one more interesting than the other two? Because it is specifically about people: me as a people (obviously) and others as people. That’s also why it’s funny, at least to me.

The other two blogs come at the subject of people sideways. Here, on this blog, by discussing marketing, social media, marketing, communication and so on. On the other blog, via movies which, when they are good movies, are always good because they are good stories and good stories are always about people.

I found it interesting that among the posts in the personal blog archive there were a few that sounded very similar to recent ones posted here. The critiques of social media today are very similar to the critiques of blogs from several years ago, prior to the proliferation of social media tools and when personal blogs were either at their height or beginning to fall from that height.

What is most interesting to me, however, is the writing (to me) is so much better. I don’t think it relates to the writing as writing but to what the writing was about and how it went about it. Posts about events and topics that, on the surface, were utterly trivial, were actually the most engaging.

So once again, as often happens for me, I’m rethinking what I rethought a while ago.

As for the project I referred to above, my fingers are crossed that I have the tenacity to complete it. That is always the hardest part.

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“… It’s nice to know that if I do post about my dogs or something, it’s not a total faux pas.”

That is from a comment left yesterday by Tzaddi, from ThriveWire, to my post I wonder what she’ll say? And I thought, yes. Dogs are a great example of what I’m trying to get at.

From the perspective of career, from the position of being a business or part of one, you would not think that tweets and status updates and blog posts about your dog would be appropriate and, strictly speaking, they are not. But …

As I tried to suggest yesterday, the seemingly trivial and inconsequential are a part of what humanizes what you put online because, online, life is no different than life offline and people aren’t any different either. The primary connection you make with people online is not what you put online, it is you.

And it is them.

Let’s go back to the dog and an example. I do occasional work with a guy and his company from Michigan, the Detroit area I believe. We met (online) through a mutual acquaintance about some potential writing work. He was looking for a writer. I was the writer he went with. Why?

The truth is, he could have gone with any writer. It’s not like we are in short supply. And no matter how big an ego I might have there is no getting around the fact that lots of people can write, lots of people can write as well as I do and many of those people can probably write better than I do. I am good but the reality of the world is that as good as you may be, there is always someone better. So why pick me?

Because, at a certain point, how good you are isn’t an issue. How comfortable someone feels working with you is. In this case, there was some sense of ease because someone he knew, the friend who introduced us, had given me a thumbs up. But what sealed the deal, in my opinion, was my dog.

We communicate primarily via email, though occasionally by phone. In our first phone contact, I had to apologize because my dog had started barking at something.

“You have a dog? What kind?”

He had a dog too. Since that call, almost all our communications make references, however briefly, to our dogs. Through the dogs he was able to get some sense, verbally by phone and in text via email, of who I was. And as minute as it may be, it was some degree of comfort. The way we communicate, about our dogs, gave him some sense of me as someone he could work with.

Walking with my dog in the park twice a day, I meet people and talk with them. They are people who would walk by me and that I would walk past with, at best, a nod of acknowledgement except … we have dogs. So we stop. Our dogs sniff each other. And we talk about our dogs and get to know each other. Because of my dog, I have friends I would not otherwise have.

Dogs are simply an example of the seemingly inconsequential elements of a life that opens doors, dismisses barriers and allows for people to communicate with ease. Another example? How about Star Trek? You wouldn’t believe the number of people I’ve gotten to know simply because we both like Star Trek.

Dogs and Star Trek. They have nothing to do with the work I do. But they do facilitate the relationships necessary to allow for the work.

So every so often I tweet, update and post about my dog, about Star Trek, and about a million every day mundane, banal, trivial things because it is who I am and being who you are is what lets people in. Taken to excess, yes, it definitely shuts down all those doors. But excluding it means they never open in the first place.

It may be digital but social media is about people and people don’t change. You have to have the skills to do the work but it’s who you are that gets you the work.

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