Can you write me a 2,000 word blog post?
There’s a growing online trend for championing longer form content. An anti 140-character, blog post brevity brigade.
With print media, asking for a specific word count made sense.
But online, it misses the point.
Say what you need to say and move on. If the quality is good, I don’t care if it’s 20 words or 2,000.
If word counts are dictating what you write online, challenge the dictator.
A presentation I gave this morning for a PRCA breakfast briefing.
Book review: “Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone To Take Action” by Simon Sinek
Thirty years ago, Colgate had two brands of toothpaste. Today, it has 32, excluding the four they make for children.
Does this mean that Colgate is selling thirty times more toothpaste that it did in 1970?
If you go to a supermarket or pharmacy, you’ll find at least one of the 32 types of Colgate toothpaste are on promotion or special offer. What does that say about the company?
In his book “Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone To Take Action“, Simon Sinek calls this a manipulation: ”There are only two ways to influence human behaviour: you can manipulate it or you can inspire it.”
This idea of manipulation, so Sinek says, has been a tactic used by marketers (and leaders and human beings) since the beginning of time:
“From business to politics, manipulations run rampant in all forms of sales and marketing. Typical manipulations include: dropping the price; running a promotion… When companies or organizations do not have a clear sense of why their customers are their customers, they tend to rely on a disproportionate number of manipulations to get what they need.”
Manipulations work, of course they do, but they weaken a brand. They are a short-term fix for longer-term issues: “Manipulations are a perfectly valid strategy for driving a transaction, or for any behaviour that is only required once or on rare ocassions.”
I first came across Sinek through his TED talk (see below) which is currently flying high in the most watched TED league table.
In the book, the manipulation/inspiration segment serves as an hors d’oeuvres to the meat of the matter – the golden circle – and it is this that is also the prime focus of the TED video.
The concept behind Sinek’s golden circle is fairly simple. Companies like Colgate that define themselves by what they do (make toothpaste) and not why they do it, focus all their innovation on products and services – make more, make it better:
“If you are curious as to how Colgate finds itself with thirty-two different types of toothpaste today, it is because every day its people come to work to develop a better toothpaste and not, for example, to look for ways to help people feel more confident about themselves.”
The golden circle is an awful name but, in his defence, comes from the fact it stems from the golden ratio. The chief concept, which Sinek bangs home throughout the book like a leitmotif-cum-sledgehammer (with capitalisation for added pushing-down-your-throat) is that “people don’t buy WHAT you do, they buy WHY you do it.”
He talks about how a sense of why appeals to your limbic brain – the part of the brain that doesn’t have the capacity for language, but is responsible for feelings. We might rationalise with the what and the how part of the circle but it is the why that appeals to our limbic brain and gives us the sense of something just being right in our gut, but hard to put into words.
Colgate is just one of the many case studies that appear to illustrate this central point although Apple is the one that Sinek keeps coming back to. For me, this is a bit disappointing and becomes almost tiresome. It is very easy to see how Apple fits into the golden circle (as does Martin Luther King Jr. – another of his go-to examples) and it’s possibly too easy for it to really resonate.
The book is advertised as more of a leadership than a marketing manual and it is in the latter stages of the book that this really comes across. The circle becomes a cone and the what/how/why illustrate parts of an organisation with the leader at the top (e.g. Steve Jobs and MLK) driving the sense of why throughout the organisation:
“Great companies don’t hire skilled people and motivate them, they hire already motivated people and inspire them.”
From a social perspective, I like how Sinek refers to the cone as becoming a megaphone:
“An organisation effectively becomes the vessel through which a person with a clear purpose, cause or belief can speak to the outside world. But for a megaphone to work, clarity must come first. Without a clear message, what will you amplify?”
I bang on about employees being a company’s best advocate when it comes to social media and Sinek’s cone/megaphone illustrates the point that, if you make this a priority, then you need to ensure that your employees are pulling in the same direction. You need to ensure they are motivated and inspired to communicate your sense of why to your audience.
Overall, I think there is a lot for businesses and marketers in the digital age to learn from this book. Having watched the TED video, there is sometimes a sense that most of the meat of the argument is contained in it and at times the book becomes slightly repetitive.
But I think there is enough added value contained within it to give it a read.
Next time you go shopping for toothpaste – or have an interaction with any brand come to that – think about whether you have a clear sense of why this brand exists. If you struggle to find what it is then you’ll probably also find your sense of affinity to that brand is equally weak.
Today I gave a presentation on Digital PR at the PRCA’s Careers Conference at the Natural History Mueseum.
It was a great event and I had some really good discussions after. It’s a tough time being a graduate at the moment and I wish I had the answer to getting a job, but there’s no silver bullet.
Instead I tried to explain why I believe PR is on the the edge of a PR revolution, why we should rip up the PR rulebook and why now is the best time to be in PR…
“If the mainstream media are unable to address news stories that are freely available elsewhere, we will look increasingly irrelevant”
Paul Dacre, Mail Editor at the Leveson Inquiry
This week, the FA sacked their manager Fabio Capello. Pretty big news.
And, when browsing some of the coverage, I was suddenly struck by the role that Twitter played in the reporting of the story. It was as though every article or news broadcast pulled in comments that someone football-related had made on Twitter upon hearing the resignation.
I know this is nothing new, the number of news articles that are almost entirely based on a tweet is soaring by the day. It’s a fascinating change to the status quo.
In the pre-Twitter days, journalists would get comments directly from sources and they would then reveal these comments to their audiences through articles or VTs.
Today, these comments are made directly to the public with the ‘celebrity’ in question often having a audience of tens of thousands themselves. The traditional media are therefore left to report on the tweet itself, even though many readers might have already already seen it.
It’s not hard to see how this marginalises traditional media.
And again, yes, none of this is new.
But it is perhaps more interesting in light of some of the leaks this week from Sky and the BBC concerning the way their journalists use social services like Twitter.
Now, despite the extent of the fascist enforcement you believe these two media corporations are engaging in, these reports seems to be pretty telling.
There is not but a little irony hidden away here. For these are not easy times for traditional media outlets. Journalists with swathes of Twitter followers and enthusiastic communities can be a massive benefit. But it is not hard to see how the money-people and those who live and breathe on page views might think differently.
For those of us that work in PR, this dichotomy is nothing new. It’s perfectly conceivable now for a brand to have a bigger social community that the journalists that it has sought to influence over the last however-many-years.
And that’s a pretty liberating possibility.
I’m off to an event tomorrow at Social Media Week London entitled “Twitter, the Butterfly Effect and the Future of Journalism” and I’m sure it will touch on some of these themes.
It’s a tough time for traditional media. But I can’t help thinking that laying down rules isn’t necessarily the answer. The status quo won’t work IMHO.
Brainstorming. Anyone that has worked in marketing will be familiar with the concept. You get a ton of people in a room and get them to try and be creative for an hour or so to come up with ‘ideas’. I’ve even been on ‘brainstorming training’ where tips and tricks for better brainstorming are unveiled.
I have to admit that it is a process that never seems particularly effective. Can you really force creative processes?
So an article on C.Design by Cliff Kuang entitled “The Brainstorming Process Is B.S. But Can We Rework It?” really stood out (via Gill), especially as I’ve been doing quite a lot of thinking about the ‘creative process’ recently.
It is worth reading the full thing but here are my key takeaways:
Writing in the New Yorker, Jonah Lehrer talks about an “experiment, conducted in the 1950s, which found that when test subjects tried to solve a complex puzzle, they actually came up with twice as many ideas working alone as they did when working in a group. Numerous studies have since verified that finding: Putting people into big groups doesn’t actually increase the flow of ideas. Group dynamics themselves–rather than overt criticism–work to stifle each person’s potential.”
And author Susan Cain agrees:
People in groups tend to sit back and let others do the work; they instinctively mimic others’ opinions and lose sight of their own; and, often succumb to peer pressure. The Emory University neuroscientist Gregory Berns found that when we take a stance different from the group’s, we activate the amygdala, a small organ in the brain associated with the fear of rejection. Professor Berns calls this “the pain of independence.”
Another key strand of the article casts doubt on this commonly quoted phrase:
Lehrer goes on to point out that other studies have shown that the presence of criticism actually increases the flow of ideas. One experiment compared two groups: One which brainstormed with a mandate not to criticize, and another which had the license to debate each others ideas. The second group had 20% more ideas–and even after the session ended, the people in the second group had far more additional ideas than those in the first.
Kuang also quotes Brian Uzzi, a sociologist at Northwestern, who ran an experiment on Broadway that found the worst-performing productions were the work of two groups:
“Too much familiarity bred groupthink. Too little meant that they didn’t have enough chemistry to challenge each other. The most productive groups were those with a baseline of familiarity but just enough fresh blood to make things interesting.”
That idea of ideas being sparked by other people and your circumstances is similar to the Adjacent Possible concept I’ve blogged about previously. And Kuang moves on to discuss how workplaces can increasingly be designed to help breed creativity in the workplace - the aim being that employees are encouraged to meet and interact with those they might not normally work with.
All this makes me wonder whether brainstorming really is the most effective way to create and the most efficient way to come up with ideas. I believe that everyone is creative but is creative in different ways. A one-size-fits-all approach rarely works.
After reading this blog post by Jed, I came across a great little concept called the adjacent possible.
It’s a term used by writer Steven Johnson in his book Where Good Ideas Come From (which I haven’t read but is now on my Amazon wishlist. I have read his previous book – Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, which is great).
In a Wall Street Journal piece, in which Johnson explains the concept, he reveals how ‘good ideas’ are:
“inevitably, constrained by the parts and skills that surround them. We have a natural tendency to romanticize breakthrough innovations, imagining momentous ideas transcending their surroundings, a gifted mind somehow seeing over the detritus of old ideas and ossified tradition. But ideas are works of bricolage. They are, almost inevitably, networks of other ideas. We take the ideas we’ve inherited or stumbled across, and we jigger them together into some new shape.”
As Jed explains, the phrase wasn’t coined by Johnson but by the scientist Stuart Kauffman to describe this very idea. As Johnson states, the adjacent possible:
“…captures both the limits and the creative potential of change and innovation. In the case of prebiotic chemistry, the adjacent possible defines all those molecular reactions that were directly achievable in the primordial soup. Sunflowers and mosquitoes and brains exist outside that circle of possibility. The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.”
To crystalise this concept in a phrase, Johnson states that the adjacent possible is the “premise that innovation prospers when ideas can serendipitously connect and recombine with other ideas”.
This phrase particularly struck me as I’ve been doing a lot of thinking recently about creativity/inspiration, the role it plays for us generally and in the work we do in business (and for me personally in business, marketing and PR). As a professionally trained musician (in a previous life) I’ve always thought of myself as quite a creative person and yet often I find that, in the routine of the day-to-day, it is easy to lose sight of the need for and importance of being creative and innovative. And, if we pull that firmly back to business, it seems amazing that so many businesses fall into a rut of ‘this is how things have always been and always will do’ and seem afraid to innovate and try new things.
It is why I love working with startup/disruptive companies. Companies that are not afraid to try to do things differently. It doesn’t always work but, when it does, the results can be phenomenal.
And I guess I have a toying feeling that the PR industry suffers from this inability to innovate and be creative too. It is easy in PR to get tied up in the routine, in the day-to-day or traditional ways of doing things. Whereas other marketing disciplines such as advertising bet a great deal of money, resource and reputation on creativity and ideas, the same just often doesn’t happen as much in PR.
[And as aside I must just say that I'm not just talking about billion dollar ad campaigns and/or wacky stunts. I mean creativity and innovation in its broadest sense - creating something new and original.]
So, to bring this back full circle, if you buy into the idea of the adjacent possible, you see that it is only by opening ourselves up to ideas, innovations and developments that we too can be creative and innovative ourselves.
That means sharing ideas and being inspired by the work of others. Even taking concepts from elsewhere and adapting them to be used in other ways.
So in business, as Johnson states, the idea of closely protecting your innovations and developments is perhaps not the most fruitful way to secure further innovation.
And in PR and marketing, being open to and learning new technologies, ideas, ways of working can and should inspire.
Finally, in a wider context this is all just a realisation that, as humans, we learn best from others and from external influences. Like magpies, we acquire and reuse ideas, techniques and technologies to create and develop new things and new ways of thinking about things.
So rather than sitting around searching for that elusive ‘big idea’ in splendid isolation, we should be opening our minds to other ideas and influences as a way to create and innovate ourselves.
It’s a New Year and, to celebrate, I’ve got a new blog template! In fact it’s a template that I’ve spent a few weeks over Christmas putting together. It is the first time I’ve created a WordPress template from scratch and it was actually pretty straightforward.
I’ve played around with website coding since I was pretty young and even built a (albeit primitive) website when still in my early teens.
So I was interested today to see numerous tweets doing the rounds encouraging followers to learn how to code in 2012. The initiative is being launched by Codecademy – a code-teaching website – and encourages anyone to sign-up to a yearly course that will deliver a weekly email with a different module. The idea is that, in time, you’ll be building your own apps and websites.
It’s a good PR campaign for the website and, if the tweets in my feed were anything to go by today, is getting some good viral traction. A counter on the website shows that 98,014 have signed up so far – good data capture return if nothing else!
I sent this round the office today with a note saying that I think PRs of the future (and arguably today) would benefit from knowing how to code. I’m not saying they’ll need to be able to build a website or application, but having an even basic knowledge of the main web languages certainly helps me on a daily basis and I’m sure would help others too.
In addition I think that, generally in the future, those with a wide range of skills will be far more employable, especially in the PR industry (a post for another day). And this is also pertinent at a time when jobs in the PR industry are more sought after than ever. Digital skills are becoming commonplace amongst graduates (something that was really brought home to me recently) and, increasingly, expected by employers.
So what are you waiting for….
“Only division can cause progress” – Christopher Hitchens
I’ve admired Christopher Hitchens for some time so was very sad to hear of his death last week from cancer. While he probably inspired and appalled people in equal measure I was constantly intrigued by his position on issues that often set out a radically different outlook to the publicly accepted ‘norm’.
Many have argued that this is a celebration of free speech and the ability for anyone to say anything in the countries in which he lived. It is.
But I think it goes a step further too. Free speech is all well and good, but I firmly believe a tolerant society needs people like Christopher Hitchens who take advantage of free speech to offer viewpoints that upset the apple cart and make us think.
It’s the same reason why I think it is important to have outspoken people like Nick Griffin. In a startlingly honest and moving interview between Hitchens and Jeremy Paxman broadcast some time ago but repeated on Sunday (available temporarily here), Hitchens says the above quote. And it really resonates.
It is only when we are challenged that we fully realise how we truly feel. It is when we are confronted by something that we have previously accepted wholeheartedly that we are able to either confirm current beliefs or begin to accept a new way of looking at the world.
A contrarian viewpoint is frequently scary. But it is fundamentally important.