Crafting Stories that Stick: Be brief or go long?

Posted on October 15, 2009 by rgeller

We are in an era dominated by 140 character sound bytes and countless information sources clamoring for our attention.  As such, it has never been more important to keep your communications brief, interesting and on target if you want to be heard above the noise.

But can there be such a thing as too brief?

On Harvard Businesss, David Silverman wrote in his post When Clarity is Not the Same as Brevity:

While it’s true that shorter is often better, the soul of good communication is clarity. Cutting content may toss out the bathwater of wordiness, but it may also eject useful information into the electronic abyss.

In Don’t Tweet About Health Care, NY Times op ed  contributor James Othmer wrote:

The president’s old friends, Twitter and Facebook, helped him get elected and then betrayed him. Social media help stir up excitement for “change we can believe in.” They are a much less effective tool for articulating the extraordinarily complicated details of health care reform.

I have written about the importance of story telling in communications.  Telling a story often takes more than just a few words.  That has been one of my objections to the social media release, which aims to “strip the BS out” and reduce news to a series of bullet points.  (Incidentally, Search Engine Watch blogger Greg Jarboe, who got lots of attention two years for calling SMRs “meatball sundaes” revisited the topic recently by posting about research that showed that search engines and news sites can have problems with the format too).

My advice is to strip the story down to its barest essence.  Find ways to tell it, using metaphor or imagery that require fewer words and paint a picture if that helps.  You need to find the fewest possible words without watering down the message in the process of trying to streamline it.

CIO Magazine’s website had a great interview with Carmine Gallo, author of Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs, which included the following relevant passage (this also relates to my post from last week on product categorization).

CIO.com: What’s one thing that Jobs does, which very few people notice, that is critical to his presentation success?

Gallo: Jobs describes every product or new feature with a one-line description that can fit in a Twitter post. By doing so, he helps you mentally categorize the product. He gives you the big picture before filling in the details. For example, when Jobs introduced MacBook Air in January 2008, he could have said something along these lines: “Today we’re excited to launch a new, thin, light ultra-portable notebook computer with a 13.3 inch wide-screen display, a full keyboard, a backlit display and five hours of battery life.”

Instead he simply said, “MacBook Air. The world’s thinnest notebook.” If [a person watching] wanted to learn more, they could visit the Apple website after the presentation, but if they only remembered that one thing—world’s thinnest notebook—it would tell them a lot. Now, Google for “world’s thinnest notebook” and you will find more than 30,000 links to the phrase.

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What to do when your innovation doesn’t quite fit – 3 tips

Posted on October 9, 2009 by rgeller

A New York Times article (It’s Brand New, but Make It Sound Familiar) discussed the importance of picking the right product category when it comes to marketing and introducing products.

This was Ironic, as I saw the story right after a client PR kickoff meeting in which we spent much time debating the appropriate category for the client’s tech.  The client does indeed have a unique offering, and wanted to forge a new category to describe what they do and help develop the market for it.

It was a very lively discussion, and we were privileged to hear the views and war stories of the client management team, serial entrepreneurs with long track records involving some of the most well-known enterprise tech brands.  They brought up the names and work of Al Ries and Jack Trout, marketing geniuses who pretty much wrote the book on product positioning.

As the NY Times article said:

Humans instinctively sort and classify things. It’s how we make sense of a complex world.  So when companies develop innovative products and services that don’t obviously fit into established categories, managers need to help people understand what comparison to make. Without that step, potential customers might just walk away wondering, “What is it?”

As a starting point, it helps to understand some basic traits of behavior. When people encounter something they don’t recognize, they make sense of it by associating it with something familiar.

“What category you place something in has a huge influence on how you view its basic properties,” says Arthur Markman, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas in Austin. “The category signals not only a set of features to expect, but at a more basic level, when and how you should use the novel item.”

Problems can arise if consumers can’t place innovations into familiar categories.

So, what do you do if you are a company with a product that doesn’t neatly fit into an existing category?  The question is complicated by the fact that most people only recall a limited number of competitors for a given space, with one name typically occupying the leadership position.  In their book Positioning: The Battle for your Mind, Ries and Trout talk about the importance of owning your category, or at least occupying the leadership position.

I offer three possibilities below, with advantages and disadvantages of each, and cite examples from the world of tech.

Option #1: Position your product within an existing category

Advantages – Less education will be needed than if you are trying to establish a new category.
Disadvantages – You may need to deal with any baggage the category has, and justify the need for a new entrant in an established space.  It will be harder to convincingly position a new player as a leading one in an existing playing field.  Also, this would not make sense if the product truly is a first of its kind.

Option #2 – Invent a new Category

Advantages – Doing this will make it easier to be the brand leader because you are defining the category.
Disadvantages – It will take time and effort to establish and educate about the new category.  Since it won’t neatly map to established reporter beats and analyst coverage areas, it might be hard to determine who the right influencers are, and to get them to care.

An example of a company that did this successfully was Cisco – before they called their devices routers, PCs and servers handled the task of routing Internet traffic.

Option #3 – Modify an existing category

A good middle ground could be to modify an existing category.  DEC did this when they introduced the minicomputer.  This helped them carve out a leadership position for their subcategory, amidst the larger world of computers, which had been dominated by IBM at the time.

The caveat is that people will not necessarily buy into your attempts to engineer positions and categories.  The more explaining you need to do, the harder it will be to get people on board.  People will call it as they see it and might dismiss your efforts as marketing opportunism.

For further reading on product categories and positioning, you might want to see my earlier posts:

New eBook by Rebel Brown on Market Positioning

Assume the Positioning: Words that work in Tech PR

Words that Work in Tech PR: Part 4

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FTC Rules on Blogger Endorsements: End of Everything? (or monetizing conversations, anyway)

Posted on October 7, 2009 by rgeller

I am amazed about the sheer volume of buzz about the new FTC rules that cover paid (or otherwise compensated) blogger endorsements.

Although much of the focus has centered on product reviews, reading through the articles, Tweets and posts shows the range of issues and people potentially effected.

I have had many conversations with Anne Giles Clelland of Handshake 2.0 on the topic.  See my previous post on paid blogger plugs, and her post yesterday, which references the website’s legal vetted authenticity policy.

CNET’s article from Monday includes an interview with an FTC official, who emphasizes that the rules will apply to other forms of social media, e.g. Facebook fan pages.

PR Newser has a post on 5 Popular Types of PR Tweets.  Number three on the list is “non-disclosure” Tweets:

This is when someone Tweets about some a new product, service, or
campaign, but fails to disclose it’s their client. This now gets a lot
more risky with the new FTC guidelines.

I am coming to the realization that these new rules are jeopardizing the vision many marketers have of monetizing conversations by tapping into users’ social graphs (see my related posts on social graphs, If it Ain’t Social… and How the other Half Networks).

Oh well, off to see my accountant and then shrink, to have some of the only types of monetized conversations that will still be allowable once the new rules take effect in December.

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David Letterman, Stand up Crisis Manager

Posted on October 6, 2009 by rgeller

The media and everyone else continue to buzz about the Letterman affair(s).  I thought I'd take a few Letterman_david moments to share my perspective on it.

From a professional communicator's standpoint, I think Letterman has handled this masterfully.

In crisis communications, the  best thing to do is be up front and get the story out.  Otherwise you suffer death by 1000 paper cuts as it emerges in dribs and drabs.

Letterman told his side of the story last Thursday night, using his show as a forum to confront the crisis.  In doing so he took some of the edge off.  He had a supportive audience, a forgiving environment for this kind of disclosure (the titters were nervous laughter – people were obviously surprised and perhaps not sure if this was real or shtick).

He was up front, and matter of fact (one quibble: Letterman did not point out that he was not married at the time of the affairs, which is apparently true, although some might see this as a technicality).  He struck just the right tone. He deftly mixed self-deprecating comedy with serious-as-cancer realism.  Despite the forum and strained attempts at humor, it was clear that Letterman was being sincere and taking the steps needed to deal with the situation head on.

Last night, in his first public comments since last Thursday, he took a little more time to fill in some of the blanks by issuing an apology to his wife and staff.  Letterman killed with his monologue, with joke after self deprecating joke.  He is a likable guy to begin with.  Using humor in this way inevitably makes him more endearing and forgivable.

By its nature,  it is hard to predict where this type of story will go next.  What salacious detail will surface?  Who were the affairs with? Did he use his position of power to intimidate?  And of course Gerald Shargel, Halderman's counsel, will continue to throw stones.  Shargel claims that Letterman is a master at manipulating audiences.

As the NY Times reports, all may be well advised to settle the situation with a Halderman plea.

In the meanwhile, Letterman has proved that his show can be a powerful forum for telling a story, and staying ahead of one.

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Signal vs. Noise: A Cadre of Content Creators does not a Social Media Strategy make

Posted on October 2, 2009 by rgeller

There seems to be a growing notion that Tweets or blog posts by the pound are an effective way to gain attention and drive website traffic.  The corollary to this is the old saw that “content is king.”  Just hire bloggers or Tweeters to crank out content and you will be well on your way to accomplishing your marketing goals.

I was the PR suit in a sales kickoff meeting for a client recently.  When the topic turned to promotion and PR, one of the participants mentioned an acquaintance who was in a business that hired cheap interns to go out and Tweet on their behalf, resulting in quadrupling of their website traffic (I am skeptical, besides this on its face this could just mean an increase from one unique visitor per day to four).

I have a cousin who has done some very impressive Web marketing work to boost his real estate brokerage business.  He told me that his most recent move was to hire a former journalist to launch a blog to help drive traffic to his site.  When I checked in with him to find out how it was going, he said he had not really monitored the effort and was pretty much letting her do her own thing.

Time Magazine had a story that described the growing number of companies that are hiring people to Tweet about their brands.

The online world presents many challenges to marketers.  Where once we had more control over the message, and there was an orderly way for getting it out, today it is the Wild West by comparison.  There is much more noise, many more distractions, and anyone can be a publisher or influencer.  Amidst these changes, it is tempting to find easy answers.

To be successful I believe you have to reverse roles and put yourself in the shoes of the buyer.  As I often say, it is not a content game, content is a commodity these days.  It is an attention game.  You  need to be where your buyers are.  But that by itself is not enough.  You need to boost signal to rise above noise.

To better understand signal to noise ratio, recall the old vinyl records.  The music represented the signal, and the snaps, hisses and crackles from the scratches in your record and hum from the amp represented the noise.  Companies such as Dolby developed technologies to amplify signal and suppress noise.

Similarly, a way to get attention and boost your “signal” is to be vocal about issues that your customers care about – issues that reflect a knowledge of a market space – and impress customers that they can learn, solve problems or improve their experiences by listening to you, or consuming your content.

With all the distractions these days, and based on years of conditioning from email, consumers have a sixth sense about Spam.  They can easily discern the Tweets and blog posts that can actually help vs. the ones that just add noise.  The latter will do nothing for you, in fact they could tarnish the brand you work so hard to build.

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Billion Dollar Baby (Twitter and the Value of Buzz)

Posted on September 25, 2009 by rgeller

Twitter is raising new money in an effort that would assign a value of $1 billion to the company.  This, for a company that seems remarkably unconcerned about beating a path to any realistic business model. 

What does such a valuation mean? As the NY Times reported today:

For context, that is almost double the market capitalization of Domino’s Pizza,
which has 10,500 employees and had $1.4 billion in sales last year.
Twitter has some 60 employees, and although it is experimenting with
running advertisements on its Web site, Biz Stone, a Twitter founder,
said this week at an industry conference that the company had no plans
to begin widely running ads until 2010…  In its three and a half years, Twitter has become a magnet for media attention

To me there is no clearer demonstration about the sheer value of buzz and media coverage – not that there is not intrinsic value in Twitter and it service.  The value from a bottom line business standpoint is based on the intangible good will of enthusiastic users – a community that growths with every article, news mention and celebrity Tweet.

Posted in In the News | 2 Comments

Press Embargoes – Just say No! (or “No Thank You”)

Posted on September 24, 2009 by rgeller

Well, Arrington has once again voiced his disapproval for embargoes.

For the uninitiated, embargoes and exclusives are deals that PR firms strike with media regarding advanced notice about news and timing of publication for related stories.

In his post on TechCrunch he refers to similar WSJ policy and states that he will no longer entertain any type of embargo proposal.

It occurred to me that in all fairness to my readers (and their PR firms) I really need to come out with a firm statement on the policy for exclusives and embargoes for Flack's Revenge.

And here it is – I just won't do it.  In fact, I'll go one better than Arrington – I won't just eschew embargos and exclude exclusives, I will evade any PR tactic starting with "e".

So, meet with your clients at events? Forget it.  Respond to email pitches?  No way. Write about early stage companies? Not a chance. Cover product entroductions? Hah! You know the answer.

What's this you say?  You are a large and important vendor?  Your news is just too big to ignore? 

Did you read my policy?  I am serious about this.

OK, I'll do it, just this once.

In all seriousness, Arrington's post is just the latest salvo in an ongoing debate on news embargoes and exclusives.  If you are a PR professional, you may well be wondering what this means – what are the implications of these policies for your clients and campaigns?  How should this effect the advice you give them?

I go into more detail today on the topic and attempt to answer these questions in my post on the Fusion Forum blog.

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Slang vs. Tech Jargon: So different? (I’m Just Sayin’)

Posted on September 22, 2009 by rgeller

An article in the NY Times last month described how the Internet is the shortening the shelf life of slang. According to the story:

The number of slang dictionaries is growing, both online and off, not to mention social networking media that invent and discard words, phrases and memes at the speed of broadband. The life of slang is now shorter than ever, say linguists, and what was once a reliable code for identifying members of an in-group or subculture is losing some of its magic… The Internet “is robbing slang of a lot of its sociolinguistic exclusionary power,” said Robert A. Leonard, a linguistics professor at Hofstra in Hempstead, N.Y… widespread understanding is the opposite of what slang is about. 

This got me wondering whether the same thing might be happening with tech jargon (to understand what jargon means, refer to the cyberglosssary of Fortinet).  After all, don’t we industry folk use jargon as “a reliable code for identifying members of an in-group?”  One could also argue that tech jargon runs through the mill much more quickly these days.

The great big elephant in the room in tech is that words are used to exclude and impress.  People have conversations and feel each other out in terms of what they know and what they can get away with saying.  It is equal part bluffer’s game, showboating, and obfuscation.

Charting the trajectory of specific words is not easy, according to the article.

Tracking a word’s arc from hip to lame is notoriously difficult,
especially because different social groups grab hold of different terms
at different times.

It described words and phrases that are in decline:

And the site Gawker recently tried without success to ban the phrase “I’m just sayin,’ ” which has become ubiquitous on blogs and Twitter
as a way of defanging – disingenuously, perhaps – a potentially
confrontational statement.

I reflected on a conversation I had with my daughter the other day about pop music.  It seems that many lame songs these days have over-produced sound effects thrown in that are very irritating.  I told her that, just like good steak, songs that are really good should not need such spicing up.

Similarly, marketers with quality products should not have to rely on jargon or marketing speak to jazz up what they are selling. 

Instead of taking pains to ensure you are using the jargon d’ jour, why not just speak plainly? Would this be such a bad thing?  I’m just sayin.

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The Pro, the Shmoe and the Joe: Icons Behaving Badly

Posted on September 18, 2009 by rgeller

We had a couple of weeks packed with celebrity meltdowns and rehabilitation attempts.

By now everyone is familiar with tennis pro Serena William’s meltdown at the US Open, rapper Kanye West’s MTV VMA outburst, and South Carolina Congressman Joe Wilson’s rant. There’s already been lots of media coverage this week about these episodes and the efforts of each at redemption.  My focus as always will be on the PR side of things.

Some cynically call the tirades calculated PR ploys.  The NY Daily News wrote:

“Is rude the new normal?” No, PR is the new normal.

Kanye got so much publicity out of his stunt that it eclipsed the solemn homage [at the MTV VMA show] by Madonna and Janet Jackson to Janet’s brother Michael.

There’s no question that the episodes captivated us and I suppose there was a ratings bonanza for some shows as a result.  The NY Times wrote in a recent story “The Swift-West Spectacle, Stoked on Screen:”

The story played out across three days on three networks, a publicity
windfall… Viacom got the first and
in some ways least dramatic act, when Kanye West snatched the microphone from Ms. Swift’s hands at the Video Music Awards on MTV on Sunday. Monday night it was NBC Universal’s turn, with Mr. West’s contrite appearance on the premiere of “The Jay Leno Show.”

…It’s clear by now that all the participants in the contretemps — Mr. West, Ms. Swift, Beyoncé, MTV, NBC, ABC — are net winners.

But what did the outbursts do for the personal brands of each celebrity?

I had always thought that Serena was a class act.  I remember a major tennis match in which she handled a series of unfair calls much more gracefully.  Her press conference and statement were jokes (see Zen and the Art of the Sports Cliche’).  There is no question that her image has been sullied.

Joe Wilson has been variously called a racist and folk hero in the days following his interruption of Obama’s address to Congress about health care.  Both parties have benefited from improved contributions (someone please explain to me the thought process driving people to support parties and politicians following situations like this one, and why there’s a linkage).

And Kanye “It’s not my party but I’ll cry if I want to” West?  I just don’t see how his display of rudeness has helped his image.  The normally unflappable Obama was overheard calling Kanye a jackass.

“There’s no such thing as bad PR” is a sad and untrue cliche’.

Posted in In the News | 2 Comments

Interview with Gilad Lotan (“Retweeting the Iranian Revolution” Dude)

Posted on September 16, 2009 by rgeller

MIT Technology Review covered an effort by developer Gilad Lotan that visually charted the spread of Iran Twitter buzz caused by the recent unrest in Iran.  According to the article:

During the Iranian elections in June, microblogging site Twitter became a
way for protesters to communicate with each other and with the rest of the
world. Stories of oppression, police brutality, and violence spread via
140-character tweets despite the government’s efforts to filter
Web content and control
Web traffic inside the country.

A new visualization tool developed by Gilad Lotan, a programmer and designer at Microsoft Startup Labs, shows just how information related to the elections spread through
Twitter, via the most popular Twitter conversations and retweets.

I found this to be fascinating on a number of levels.  It illustrates the ability of social media to play a starring role in events (and influence them) as they unfold. Also, the tool he developed shows what is possible when it comes tracking the spread of buzz.

I have been blogging about improved tools for tracking online info, and the story definitely caught my attention.  So I sent Gilad an email and had the following exchange with him.  Please read and enjoy.  And feel free to comment if you are aware of any metrics, analysis and reporting tools for Twitter.

Q (Bob Geller): I know your effrot is a work in progress and possibly won’t be packaged or commercialized.   Are you aware of any existing commercial products or Web utilities that report on and help analyze Tweeting and Retweeting activity?

A (Gilad Lotan): My work is definitely in progress and will not be commercialized. I’m looking at the possibility of releasing the code to other developers or creating an online service where people can subscribe to personalized queries, which would be free. However, I would need to change the UI quite a bit, as this project is designed to fit the Iranian Elections content. An actual tool would need to be much more functional, and probably not written in JAVA.

There exist a variety of web “trending tools” that follow twitter and highlight retweeted messages (i.e. http://www.retweet.com/), however none that I found do the type of analysis that my visualization enables. None make matches between similar texts and highlight differences in words authors used to portray the same message.

I imagine that with the upcoming rollout of Twitter retweet API support, it will be substantially easier to follow retweet trails to the originating tweet, and have similar analysis, without the need for the more complex set of Natural Language Processing queries that I am performing.

Q: I found a site called Retweetist.com that could help too.  In addition to the advanced functionality you cite – visualization, NLP content matching – it would be great to find a dashboard that enables basic Twitter metrics, and provides reports on who replies, Retweets, how many followers they have, etc. to see the reach of Tweets, replies and RTs without jumping through hoops.  Are you aware of any such tool?

A: I am not aware of a tool similar to what you’re describing. I feel like I have stumbled upon subscription based tools that do some metrics/analytics, but none attempt to tackle any of the NLP problems.




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