The one hour joke

I tend to title my jokes, and there’s one that I call “the one hour joke”. I call it that for the simple reason that it takes an hour to tell, and I feel that people need to be warned before I start. If they decide to listen to this joke, they need to know that they’re making a big time commitment. To hear a joke. You’d think that would be enough to scare anyone away.

But it isn’t.

You see, the really funny thing about this joke is this: people – people who barely know me – have asked me to tell it upon hearing of its existence. Usually this happens after a drink or two, and in almost every instance there’s been a campfire nearby. Somehow, long stories just seem right around a campfire.

As I start the joke, everyone becomes silent, and simply listens to my words coming out of the darkness as they imagine the adventure I’m narrating. There are scary bits, funny bits, stupid bits and bits that focus on clearly irrelevant details – yet people never hurry me along or cut in or leave. They just listen. And when the lame punch line finally comes, rather than beat me up, they usually ask for more.

Why?

Because people love hearing stories. It’s that simple. We’re hardwired to (but that’s another blog entry for another day).

More than that, I think that we humans are all pretty good storytellers. We tell our spouses about our days, make up tales for children, and tell friends about our vacations – and when we do those things, we display a sense of narrative. We know what to emphasize and what to leave out. We know where the story begins and ends. We know what elements of character need to be portrayed.

Yet when we do presentations for work … well … we forget all that – and despite the fact that humans have a long tradition of listening to (and enjoying) long tales, we somehow manage to put them to sleep.

Why?

I think it’s because we forget that we’re supposed to be telling stories. We think that presentations are about facts, and are under the illusion that facts speak for themselves. They don’t. We have to speak for them, and make them relevant and interesting … and that’s all about story.

I made the video below as a little reminder of things we all intuitively know about good stories, yet seem to forget when we’re asked to present. Frankly, it’s not as good as the one hour joke, but hopefully you’ll find it useful when planning that next presentation.

…and Twitter doesn’t cause cancer

Once upon a time, I was a smoker. I will move to the next paragraph as I let your horror and my shame sink in.

..

Now, admittedly, there are very few good things one can say about smoking. It is a strange and pointless thing to do. It stinks. It makes you unpopular. It increases the odds of every disease known to man, with the possible exception of athlete’s foot fungus. It kills you. But, despite all that, I did discover one good thing about it at the time, and it happened like this:

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Social media and the web 3.0 frontier

On 24 September, the Los Angeles chapter of the Public Relations Society of American hosted a half-day workshop on social media. It was an informative day, full of creative ways to incorporate digital technology into marketing and public relations campaigns.

Emanuel Rosen gave the first address. He stressed ways that social media helps word-of-mouth campaigns. Serena Ehrlich’s provided participants with a toolbox of resources and tactics for launching an online campaign, and Peter Shankman made it all personal and relevant over a lunch discussion.

Thank you very much to the workshop’s organizers, Keith Pillow and Bianca Dickerson-Williams, as well as to Rita Tateel (PRSA-LA, President) and Barbara Shore (PRSA-LA, Executive Director).

Public relations goes underground with digitally enhanced guerilla tactics

Breakout session: Social media basics & core training

Serena Ehrlich, Social Programs/Viral Weaponry Leader at Startup Army

Serena’s interactive presentation style made this session of the PRSA-LA workshop on social media highly informative, but difficult to document. Thankfully, she uploaded her slides to docstoc.com, so you can see for yourself what she talked about.

It’s all personal. And personal is very public: Four tips for better online outreach

“It’s not web 2.0. It’s not web 3.0. It’s simply life.”

Peter Shankman, Social Media Expert

At the PRSA-LA Social Media Workshop, Peter Shankman returned to themes first introduced by Emanuel Rosen. Throughout his entertaining stories, he repeatedly  illustrated the foothold the individual is gaining over traditional marketing and public relations efforts thanks to the developments in technology. Celebrated reviewers of services, restaurants, media, and other such venues are increasingly  less effective and credible.

Moreover, each our personal networks is fluid and changing. The relevance of connections fluctuates throughout the day. Those seeking to use social media effectively for branding or influencing will need to work within established but changing communities.

Grassroot PR: Everyone loves the soapbox

“The anatomy of buzz revisited: Lessons in word-of-mouth marketing”

Emanuel Rosen, Social Media Expert

No matter how many reviews we read, when we make purchasing decisions these are not the resources that tip the balance. More often than not, our friends and family influence our personal choices about what to buy, where to eat, or what to read. Emanuel Rosen believes that stimulating those conversations and using personal, face-to-face referrals to create buzz is the key to successful promotion. During his one-hour presentation, he showed why.

We all like to to be helpful, contribute meaningfully and participate in conversation. The problem is, most of us lack the gift of relevant gab. Buzz, says Rosen, fills this gap by giving us the opportunity to tell stories and be creative.

Book Review: Marketing to the Social Web

BOOK REVIEW

Marketing to the Social Web: How Digital Customer Communities Build Your Business.

By Larry Weber, 2009: John Wiley & Sons

IBSN: 978-0470-41097-4

Take Away Message:

The digital consumer is not content to be a passive receiver of marketing messages. Therefore, marketers need to think about ways to use social media tools to become aggregators of content that serves the immediate information needs of each digital consumer.

REVIEW

Unlike other books on the subject, this one is not saying that the professions of marketing and public relations are undergoing a radical transformation. No. Larry Weber’s objective in his book, Marketing to the Social Web, is to provide a sketch of a specific market segment: the digital consumer.

Marketing: The next generation

In fact, Weber illustrates how the principles that shaped traditional methods for reach potential consumers still hold. Effective marketing speaks directly to the needs of the consumer, solves their problems. Good public relations influences opinions and shapes conversations. The goals have not really changed for marketing or public relations professions.

The only difference is that mass marketing is no longer likely to lead to a sale. More than ever, it is essential for the marketer to understand not just their niche, but the exact position the product offering has taken in that niche.

Going viral inside the firewall

Despite the obvious impact of social media on the Internet and on how people interact, there is still a lot of resistance to the idea that these tools have any value in an enterprise context. When I do presentations on using web 2.0 tools inside the firewall, I am often met with skepticism. Some believe that these tools are inherently social, a waste of time,  and cannot be used for real work; others, who see the potential benefit of the broader collaboration these tools enable, feel that using them would lead to additional work… work that they simply don’t have time for.

The reality, however, is that well designed Web 2.0 tools are productivity enhancing, and allow people to interact more efficiently. This is the point I was trying to make in the following video (The man who should have used Lotus Connections 1), which I posted on IBM’s internal instance of Lotus Connections in late August:

Book review: The New Rules of Marketing & PR

The New Rules of Marketing & PR

By David Meerman Scott

ISBN: (978-0-470-37928-8) This revised edition was published 2009 by John Wiley & Sons.

Take Away Message:

The Web allows real-time, many-to-many interactions between the public and the organization. Therefore, marketers need to think like PR pros and PR pros need to think like facilitators who engage the public in an ongoing dialogue.

REVIEW

Rules are tricky things. I tend to see rules as fixed, unchanging and rigid. So any book about rules, especially one about rules for marketing or PR where success usually comes by bending or breaking the rules is immediately suspect. But David Meerman Scott likes the rules he outlines in The New Rules of Marketing & PR.

Since the old rules, listed on page 12, guiding marketing and public relations are now obsolete thanks to the Internet, new ones are needed. I think for Scott, rules are designed to shape fair play. Since the game board has moved from analogue to digital, the rules of fair play must also change (and he presents new rules on page 25). Yet, rules have no meaning without authoritative enforcement, and the web remains a lawless frontier despite efforts to regulate and police online activity.

So why pretend? Scott needs rules to frame a more meaningful argument: that the professions of marketing (i.e. sales and branding) and public relations (i.e. image development and protection) are no longer distinct. Tactics that worked when television and magazines held sway are not going to be effective in the digital age. Scott’s rules serve to guide PR and marketing professionals through a new domain—he is a tour guide trying to explain the Wild West to Japanese tourists.

Revisiting an origin story

Ten years ago, Neal Stephenson published an essay about the evolution of computer operating systems from a cultural perspective. The literati of the computer world consider this treatise, titled In the beginning there was the command line, essential reading. It is also a good starting place to think about the evolution of social media and collaboration tools, which are now as ubiquitous as operating systems. These tools may also be as poorly understood.

Stephenson’s argument: the open-source model to software development generates more reliable products. Why? The collaboration process that drives Linux, for example, is transparent, iterative and immediate.

At the midpoint of the essay, Stephenson compares Windows, Mac OS, and Linux to power drills. While the first two are Black & Decker and Stanley drills that serve most D.I.Y. types, Linux is a professional’s drill that is as ugly as it is stupid. The Linux user needs know the end goal and be skilled enough to maneuver the tool efficiently toward that point. Where we can be sloppy with our Goggle search terms and in our use of Windows or Mac OS, Linux needs precision.