London, 19 July 2011

It is thus that social media rumors and hoaxes start. Someone invents a story on a lark (or in this case, a pigeon), and soon what began as a joke gains followers en masse til it is believed true. Before you know it scores of guileless American tourists are fanning out through London asking where they can buy copies of The Great Love Tweets of William Shakespeare.

There’s a lesson or two herein, and given enough coffee and nicotine I will try to sort out it or them:

1. Information begets information. The more we tweet, blog, follow, like and comment, the more and the faster social media propagates, ad infinitum. If you could print and stack all this content it would, like one of those Facebook user statistics, reach from here to Mars.
2. Social media has a gnat’s lifespan. Our hunger for new content instantly pushes aside the old. One moment Blake Lively is ubiquitous, then Bret Favre, Tony Weiner and now Voicemailhackingate. It doesn’t matter that nothing ever disappears on the Internet. Most of whatever causes a stir there is soon supplanted and forgotten.
3. What will social media’s legacy be? Five centuries hence, when archaeologists dig up the great servers of our time and peruse the trillions of communications recorded, how will they rank it among civilization’s great achievements — between the hula hoop and the pet rock? Only time will tell.

Meanwhile, as directed by the powers that be and know, we blog and tweet anon. In days of yore, writers kept skulls on their desks as a reminder of the transience of life and follies of mankind. For me, my father’s old telegraph key — a remnant from the day when “ham radio” was the social media du jour — has the same effect.

Shouldn’t all that we create, even in the mundane realm of business, operate on this principle — to inspire an audience?

Today, in the world of corporate social media, we are surrounded by pundits who urge us to churn out “content.” The spirit of a single piece matters far less than the purported collective impact of multiple ones. And so we must blog, tweet and connect on Facebook consistently and on schedule. It’s a routine, like brushing your teeth or coming your hair, and just that interesting.

Those who produce such “content” are much like factory workers in a smokestack industry. They stamp out the words on a digital drill press, embellishing with hypertext that invariably leads to a corporate sales pitch.

Inspiration’s got nothin’ to do with it. Ninety-nine percent of corporate social media comes straight off an assembly line. Content marketers are the absolute worst. When I hear the expression “content marketing,” I think “mass production.”

Anybody want to read or view that stuff? Not me. So why “produce” it?

I was going to leave you with a few bullet points, but somehow the idea of presenting rules seems counter-intuitive here. Instead I’ll pose three questions:

• When you write, or make a video, or whatever — are you creating something or merely hammering together familiar words, phrases and images?
• Will your audience share in your original enthusiasm?
• Will it inspire them to do something as good or better?

The world is full of hacks. Those that inspire are rare. China’s T’ang dynasty poet Li Po may have best expressed the difference between the two in these lines:

A CONFRONTATION WITH TU FU

When the gods so please

they fling incense and wine

onto the simmering forge of my mind

which, catching the coals of ideas,

blazes forth a fragrant breeze.

You, Tu Fu, who chisel and polish verse,

your wit attending your purse –

and all for the pleasure of the Empress –

will never understand this.

Many managers stage their entire professional existence around meetings, which become self-justifying — in both senses. These people are forever in or en route to a meeting.

As you may surmise, I view most meetings as a waste of time. Maybe you should, too. To apply a sort of Napoleonic Code of justice (“guilty til proven innocent”) and save your day, try greeting every meeting invitation with the following seven Qs:

1. What is the purpose of this meeting?
2. How much time do you require?
3. Who’s in charge?
4. Why do you want me there — and what do you expect of me?
5. Do you have an agenda?
6. Do you have content you wish to share with me?
7. What is the expected outcome?

It’s amazing how many proposed meetings evaporate when “met” up front by this drill.

Monetizer (left), Curator (right)

The job’s highlight came in June: covering the annual convention of the Pharmaceutical Sales Representatives Association (PRSA) held in a Motel 6 or Holiday Inn outside Cleveland. Because most pharmaceutical sales reps of that era seemed to be former high school and college athletes dreaming of bygone glory, presentations tended to begin and end with Vince Lombardi anecdotes and quotes.  [When I die and go to hell, the punishment for my sins will be a front row seat at Eternity's motivational festival.]  Since the motel had a decent swimming pool, I alternated between listening to the positive thinking palaver indoors and working on my tan while I typed up story notes. Yes, Virginia, that is what trade reporters really do at such events.

I made sure to catch the last day’s Vince Lombardi Paean delivered by a Wayne Dyer knockoff named Dwayne hired out of Poughkeepsie. With the final “leaders aren’t born, they are made” homage to the old ball coach, the audience leapt to their feet and cheered. The group’s president, a college linebacker gone to flab, rushed toward the stage to open the Q&A session.

“Dwayne,” he panted earnestly, “can you example what you were talking about?”

In that moment, as if the Archangel Michael himself reached down from the heavens and touched me, I knew my life’s mission, or one of them anyway.  I stretched an arm into the aisle and grabbed the mic from president Flubadub.

“Excuse me, Flubs, but did you just use ‘example’ as a verb?”

I’ve been on a tear ever since, outing pompous, inflated and/or inappropriate use of language. It’s a never ending job in the tech sector, where The Word is ruled by experts in verbal inflation.

My current peeves: “curate” as a catch-all verb and “monetization” for making money.

I’m not the first to pick on the expanded use of curate as verb.  The New York Times did the best job back in 2009, noting how those who like “to curate” are indulging in a harmless form of self-inflation. Since then, use of “curate” as a verb has expanded to include any kind of managerial function, e.g., the act of selecting, commenting on and regurgitating somebody else’s news in a blog –which somehow seems a tad removed from the original function of a curator as caretaker of the soul, or of a museum.  Nonetheless, the blogosphere is rife with self-styled curators.

On another front, merely making money from a product simply won’t do anymore. One must “monetize” it.  Again, the blogosphere overflows with advice on how to “monetize” social media.  In the telecom sector there’s a movement to “monetize bandwidth.”  Translation: Make a buck.

“Monetization” sounds so phony that I was surprised to find it’s an actual word dating from the late 19th century. But its specific meaning is to legalize or coin an object as money — not profit from.

In all fairness, what appears strange to me may seem normal to many others.  Those that like to curate and monetize might be right in asserting that I’m over-educationalized and given to pedanting. I’ll mull that while I curate the barn stalls and daydream of monetizing what I muck there.

What is it that’s so hard about blogging? We all know we’re “supposed” to do it; a stream of expert commentary has become a cornerstone of business promotion and outreach. But again and again even the largest — i.e., well-staffed — companies find it nearly impossible to write so much as 500 words a week. And, sadly, the slower the rate of production, the less excitement surrounds the whole effort; one blog post doesn’t beget another, and would-be readers have time to forget you exist between updates. When a post finally does land on the website, the deafening silence reinforces a sense of futility.

Blogging is pointless, you think. What a friggin’ waste of time.

And unless you can upgrade both expectations and efficiency, you would be right.

Blogging, like any creative PR effort, has an exponential rate of return; one little toe in, even if it’s dipped religiously, once a month, is simply not going to cut it. If you want to use a “content factory” to drive interest in your business, respect for your innovation, and loyalty from your customer base, you’re going to need to take a few elementary steps in attitude adjustment:

1. Kill crisis by committee. It’s a blog post, not a legal treatise. If the approval process takes longer than the writing process, you need to streamline it, and either learn to trust your employees or hire some employees you can trust.
2. Design a campaign. It doesn’t have to be in minute detail, but your blog is a part of your identity branding, and it pays to know what features you want to highlight. Lay out topics that are important to what you do, and outline a plan to hit them repeatedly and with fresh content.
3. Implement accountability. Bloggers need to blog, whether that’s the CEO or a team of PR flacks. Set expectations, lay out simple guidelines, and crack the whip — on yourself, if necessary — if the ball gets dropped.
4. Let writers write. Not every blog post is going to be a brilliant specimen. But it’s blogging — a writing medium in which quality matters but quantity counts.  As long as they’re in line with company objectives, let writers run with their concepts; they’ll feel impassioned about the topics, and their enthusiasm itself can be a reader magnet.

In short, oil the gears and get the thing humming. Like any process, public relations obeys the law of conservation of energy: you get out what you put in.

1. Concentrate on Your Niche. Pick the 2 – 3 topics your company is best known for and concentrate on these in your social public relations. Large diverse companies often make the mistake of blogging and tweeting on everything they do or know about. Result: Their social media identify looks like a case of multiple personalities.
2. Showcase a Personality for Each Topic. Hand in hand with too many topics, companies often feature too many bloggers. People follow leaders, not masses. Individual personalities are what make social media “social.” Showcase your company’s lead visionary — someone that followers can readily identify with.
3. Talk Like a Human Being. How many posts have you read that read like a brochure? When that happens it’s likely because the blog started out in the marketing department. It’s fine to source ideas from a company brochure or white paper, but remember that blogging is a personal medium. Sound real. Write like you speak.
4. Speak to Your Audience. Relate to your audience by focusing on their needs and interests, and by integrating close understanding of key industry trends into all social pr.
5. Keep it Short. If site visitors wanted to read a book or view a full-length feature movie, then they’d do so. Spending more than a few minutes with a post is not what they have in mind. Keep text, video and audio posts brief. People often click right through a text post that takes up more than a screen. Ditto for videos and podcasts any longer than a minute or two.
6. Optimize. Provide links to other useful content on your site that sheds additional light on the topic. Links to product lit are okay if written objectively — but not if they’re a sales pitch.
7. Re-purpose for Publishing. Professionally produced content can have a second life. If it was good enough for your site, it may be good enough for online media looking for guest pieces. If you’ve already posted a piece to your site, be up front with editors about that — some won’t accept content that’s been used elsewhere, but you may get around that stipulation with some judicious editing. Many editors now accept informative company videos, too.

What sets successful initiatives apart from flops? Often it’s simplicity vs. complexity. When a thing functions simply and cleanly — think Apple iPad — it’s not only great, it’s “magic.”

Any time you see a business where blogs appear slowly and infrequently, feature executive authors who almost certainly didn’t write them, and toe the corporate line on messaging without offering an original thought, it’s a clear sign of social media atherosclerosis. Same holds true for book-length blog comments and Twitter or Facebook posts that regurgitate a press release. Typically such posts appear only after they are deemed “safe” by the PR, Marketing and Legal departments — the gray heads who understand the business but are completely clueless on social media.

Other common symptoms of Blogheimers Disease:

• Inability to distinguish between tags and key search words.
• Refusal to research either.
• Using lists of marketing terminology instead, and not checking the search rankings.
• Lists of search terms that reach into the dozens or hundreds.
• Thinking “optimization” means dropping marketing terms into social media and hyperlinking this internal jargon to company sales literature.
• Using social media to overtly sell a product or solution.
• Rewriting corporate white papers (sales jobs) as blogs.
• Co-sponsoring webinars with analyst groups and media and using the time to pitch a product.
• Lack of organic social integration across PR, advertising and marketing — they report up the chain via separate stovepipes and rarely speak to one another.

Blogheimers Disease flourishes in “command and control” environments with strict hierarchies that resist change. As Kate Schackai observes in her recent post, Social to the Core, these companies tend to tack on social media to existing one-way communications programs, with poor results. The great successes are companies like Groupon, which build their culture and identity around relating to and interacting with the customer. They don’t use social media as a tool, they’re social all the way.

A word about Kate’s blog and, for that matter, everything she posts to White Hat PR: I never review or “approve” a single word she writes. Kate runs that show and I never lay a hand on it. In fact, by intent, I don’t read any of her posts until they appear publicly.  There are sound business reasons for my decision:

1. She’s the resident expert on social public relations — Nothing I say or do will add one iota of value.
2. She’s wildly popular — a recent blog by Kate that posted to Customer Think attracted over 4,000 reads in 24 hours. Whenever Kate posts, our web site traffic triples or quadruples.
3. As a moderately smart businessman, I know not to mess with a good thing.
4. I trust her judgment on all matters relating to social media and social public relations. Again, she’s the expert.

Trust is the operative word here. Prominent social media experts such as Chris Brogan have made much of becoming a “trust agent” in order to win the confidence of key influencers, customers and the public at large. I would add add that trust begins with your own people. To be sure, senior management has invaluable experience in every aspect of running the business. Just not in social media and social public relations. Here they need to stand back and give the new generation of experts free rein. Micromanagement is death to social media, and it’s easy to tell a corpse from the real live thing. Back off and let the young people who really understand social media go wild. You’ll be surprised, amazed and delighted with the results.

The problem with many social media practitioners is that they’re clueless on plot lines. People love stories. What are movies, TV shows and even the news itself all about? — stories that let our imagination take wing. Creating and telling a story are all the more important in the at times dry corporate arena. A great story lifts your company above the arid plain where most enterprises dwell.

As in all such matters, it’s helpful to take a page from the founders, in this as in so many other cases, the Greeks. Here’s a story on story-telling, and where it all began, that still holds value today.

Once upon a time, years before there was an Internet, a PC, a phone, a car — heck, the wheel itself was still something of a marvel back then — there lived one of the world’s first and greatest practitioners of social public relations: Homer. Though blind from birth, Homer had a rare gift that more than compensated for any sensory shortcoming — the art of storytelling. His great epic poems, The Iliad and The Odyssey, have enthralled audiences since 800 B.C.  But of specific interest, I believe, is why they were so popular in their own time and might be called the social media experience of that long distant past.

Homer’s poems were oral works recorded only to his memory. They were composed for live recitation before an audience, and thus one of the earliest communal communications venues. People came together socially to hear Homer speak — not in a theater, but around a fire or in a nobleman’s hall where they could engage with the performer and the experience.

Homer understood the value of relating to his audience in a way that induced interaction. During a performance, he deliberately selected and delivered passages specifically focused on the illustrious exploits of listeners’ ancestors. The audience could relate personally with what they heard because they were related to the protagonists. Members might even leap up and retweet, “That was my great-great-grandfather leading the Acheans at the walls of Troy!” Outbursts up to 140 characters were acceptable but anything longer, frowned on.

Researchers speculate that in Homer’s time adults still possessed an ability that is common in children today but seems to disappear in modern man around the onset of puberty: the gift of eidetic imagery — seeing detailed mental images that appear as tangible as reality. Homer’s tales were the 3-D of their day — as visually real to an audience as Avatar, but without the special glasses.

Homer didn’t need to post flyers in the neighboring hamlet to alert audiences on his next tour date.  The word spread virally, just as it does via social media and social PR today. Long before Homer arrived, people knew he was on the way.

Of course, Homer likely had competitors who took advantage of the same antedeluvian social media tools. What made Homer stand out — a great story. Story still matters, whether the setting is a skyscraper. . .or Medinah.

Some years ago I was wandering one evening in the marketplace of Casablanca. The Medinah held all the usual attractions: snake charmers, jugglers, singers, dancers, even the fantasia — a wild charge of Berber horsemen firing traditional muskets. But the entertainer drawing the largest crowd was the old blind man reciting the Koran, a story that still enthralls listeners.

Does your story do that? You’ve just finished a story that tells how. Long after you’ve forgotten some bare bones list on the importance of building community, relating to an audience in a way that prompts interaction, using text and images that create a vision in the audience’s mind, and leveraging viral communications to promote your story, chances are that the same elements, related here in a tale, will remain vivid in your thoughts.

May you all live happily ever after.

The End.

To illustrate the point. . .

Recently our own Kate Schackai posted a blog on Customer Think, a well-known site that showcases thousands of blogs yearly by experts in customer relations, marketing and social media. Her topic: the need for a different measure of social media’s impact based on KPIs versus the usual ROI formulas. The editor informed Kate that he selected her blog as one of the week’s “10 Best” to be featured in the Customer Think enewsletter sent to more than 100,000 subscribers. Concurrently, a comment on Kate’s blog posted on an article in Ad Age generated the highest-ever number of visits to our web site. None of this surprised me. She’d created great content. I can cite five reasons for the immense appeal and success of this post and its re-publication:

1. Hot Topic. Nearly every major company investing heavily in social media faces increases scrutiny from corporate financial types demanding proof of ROI. Contrary to popular notions that social media is “free,” this endeavor of course places extensive new resource demands on companies. Now that the gold rush fever of social media has died down, bean counters naturally want accountability. Kate’s blog hit on an issue that is top of mind with everyone.
2. Authoritative Voice. The author did a deep dive into the subject, backed by extensive research. Readers knew from the start and throughout that this was not a sales pitch or wandering point of view, but rather, a studied, carefully reasoned examination of the topic. She spoke with authority.
3. Solution. This was neither the usual “throw up your hands” study of social media pointing to the impossibility of applying old metrics to a new field, nor the obverse: that accurate measurement of social media hinges on applying obstruse mathematical formulas. Kate offered an accessible, common sense approach to measuring social media via KPIs. Readers came away with immediately usable “to do’s.”
4. “Carrier Grade.” The blog stood out as a professionally written piece. Artful and well-crafted, the blog informed and entertained. Editors know good from humdrum.
5. Popularity. The same applies to readers. For all the above reasons, this blog resonated with the public. As of today, it has logged 984 “reads.”

In contrast to this example, I cite the current tendency of many companies to view social media as a quota-based mission elevating quantity over quality.  This “content factory” thinking commonly takes two forms:

1. The Un-Managed Subject Matter Expert. SMEs with a fixed point of view but little skill in presenting it churn out poorly written blog posts. The company publishes them as is, just to have fresh content up on its site. Dead giveaways: (1) the piece is a reverse engineered sales pitch that presents the company’s own product or service as an objective argument or solution; (2) you know this for a fact when multiple page links in the blog land on other corporate sales pitches.
2. The Outsourced or Canned Blog. The company hires an outside firm to produce short daily posts, typically a rewrite of current news with a corporate plug at the end. Inexpensive and prolific, such services provide a mechanized and largely hands-off method of churning out great volumes of content. Nobody’s fooled. Site visitors see some slight variation of stories they’ve already read at the source, and click right through.

As you look ahead to 2011, consider the following random thoughts:

• GigaOM reports that 90 percent of the world’s data was created fresh in the just the past two years. At some point, all of this data transits a network and is viewed by someone.
• Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan, once said that he sees most daily news and information as “noise,” and as a result rarely bases an important decision on any of it.

Today’s immense volume of data totals one exabyte — a million terabytes. Think of it as your competition for mind share.

Your social media and PR: Is it just more noise, or does it have that rare quality that keeps people tuned in and coming back for more?

Best known as the author of Animal Farm and 1984, Orwell also was a prolific essayist. My personal favorite: his 1946 essay, Politics and the English Language, a look at the state of prose across many fields — science, philosophy, psychology, the arts, journalism, and, of course, politics. Among Orwell’s observations:

Prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.

That was exactly the problem with my client’s brochure. The freelancer wrote in units of catch phrases and buzz words: wave of the future, key to the future, key to success, the next level, get positioned for, in the run-up to, a vital first step on the journey, achieve market penetration, close the gap, opportunity and challenge, work in real time, take full advantage of, falls off quickly, require greater agility, Indeed, In general, In fact, In the beginning, In the end and on and on. That was just page 1. The striking aspect of such writing: The author isn’t creating anything new, he’s simply gluing pre-fab phrases together. I suspect that many business clients are so accustomed to this sort of prose that they’ve given up hope of expecting better.

Orwell knew the difference. In Politics, he lists common tricks of lazy writers, i.e., those that prefer to manufacture pre-formed prose without the bother of thinking about it:

• Dying Metaphors: Worn out phrases, e.g., toe the line, stand shoulder to shoulder, ride roughshod over, play into the hands of, grist to the mill, Achilles’ heel, swan song. Authors who fill their pages with such drivel aren’t writing, they’re just typing.
• Artificial Verbal Limbs: Adding lengthy phrases to pad a sentence. Examples: render inoperative, play a leading role in, make contact with, exhibit a tendency to, serve the purpose of, and so on. Dead giveaway: Such phrases replace simple verbs.
• Fake Profundity: Using the “not un-” formation to make the banal sound important. Example, with passive tense thrown in: It is not untrue that executives are not unappreciative of the value of social media. Amid the double negatives, all sense is lost.
• Pretentious Diction: Any word or phrase that dresses up a simple statement without adding any real meaning — epoch-making, historic, unforgettable, age-old, inexorable, veritable.  Foreign words used to add an air of sophistication — deus ex machina, mutatis mutandis, status quo.
• Meaningless Words: romantic, plastic, human, living quality, natural, vitality, and even democracy, freedom, patriotic, realistic and justice. Orwell argues that such words carry multiple definitions depending on the author and audience, and thus have no precise, discoverable meaning.

The word from Orwell: If your writer’s work exhibits any of the above traits, he’s producing — and you’re accepting — rubbish.

Orwell had sound reasons for insisting on solid prose and excoriating anything less: As a man with strong political views and a keen eye for the discrepancy between the words and actions of leaders, he linked corrupt language with government malfeasance. “In our time,” he wrote, “political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible,” an observation that applies equally well to our own era. Consider the actual intent of the following current phrases:

• “Nation building” [military intervention]
• “Troubled Asset Relief” [financial bail-out of the criminally inept]
• Forecasts of “greater operational efficiencies” [major layoff coming]

Like Orwell, I find it wise to apply an editor’s version of the Napoleonic code in such instances: All public statements, and their authors, are deemed guilty until proven innocent. Whenever the mighty pontificate, I look for the lie.

Orwell did hold out hope. He believed that writers could improve if they made the effort, and offered six guidelines for doing so. Because no writer — including this one — is immune to churning out bad prose in the name of expediency or some other evil, I return to Politics at least once a year for a refresher course.

Orwell’s Code for Creating Great Content:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

I’d only quibble with rule #6.  Always say and write exactly what you think, barbarous or not. Glossing over the raw truth to make it more palatable is another abuse of the language — what Orwell would call the use of words to conceal and mislead rather than express. Orwell returned to this theme with the publication of 1984, where the state orders the lives of citizens through the manipulation of language. In Big Brother’s “Newspeak,” every word and phrase carries an intent other than its true meaning. “Barbarous” best defines the result: iron rule by the state.

In such a world, corrupt leaders retain authority with the full acquiescence of their subjects. The irony in today’s corporate environment: Many in power willingly accept, without question, sub-standard portrayals of their company — and pay for it. Wherever you find consensus on the deliberate misuse of language, mediocrity holds command.

Jim Crawford is the president of Crawford PR and author of Black Box Blog, an expert perspective on PR success.