Who Are the Masses? What Do They Want To Hear?
Every day the impact of blogs on corporate communications and corporate reputation becomes clearer. Fortune’s cover in January and BusinessWeek’s cover this week aren’t about the fact that blogs exist; they’re about the impact of blogs on corporate reputation about a paradigm shift that we’re only beginning to understand.
Why are blogs so powerful? Because real people write them and real people read them. As BusinessWeek says in their tips, “PR Truly Means Public Relations.” It means talking to the public, not in a Norma Desmond, “I’m ready for my close up” way, to be sure, but in a way that each corporation must define.
Talking to regular people means saying things that regular people want to hear. This, unfortunately, is a challenge for those of us in the technology business. (If you disagree just think about leveraging paradigmatic shifts to achieve platform independence blah blah blah. . . )
“Disciplined” may not be the first word that comes to mind when you think about a politician, but people in this business know that, in order to succeed in communicating with voters, the message must be very simple, and must be said over and over and over again. This is pure torture for technologists. No matter how in love our CEO, CTO, product manager or even head of sales is with an idea, some other idea comes along and it’s “Hey look, there’s something shiny over there.” And the message is lost.
We have to learn how to tell a story that regular people will understand. And to tell it enough times that it makes sense. Why? Because everyone (consumers, voters, your parents) now knows who we are and where we live –we’re the ones who lost so much of their money back in 2001 and they use all of the stuff we make much more than they did ten years ago. So they’re watching us – and having feelings and opinions about what we do. And many of them are connecting to each other online and sharing those feelings and opinions. (See above.)
In the new world of true “public” relations, only the multilingual will survive. We have to talk to all of our audiences – business partners, regulators, shareholders, end users, CIOs, with the same message and the same story – but translated in a way that they’ll understand.
When I worked at Sun we were lucky enough to have a former USA Today reporter on our staff (here’s a shout out to Mary Smaragdis!). Mary edited every single press release about the Java technology according to USA Today’s rules. No acronyms, no industry buzz words, no technology described in a way that someone’s grandmother wouldn’t understand. This worked. The truth is, just because we understand our own messages doesn’t mean they’re good.
And while we’re at it, let’s cut out the inside baseball. Well, not all of it because it’s fun, but let’s change the ratio. I love a good architecture war as much as the next person, but let’s realize what the rhetoric is, understand its function in our business, and put it in its proper place.
Let’s not try our audiences’ patience so much anymore. If we don’t, we’ll pay for it eventually. Much of what we say and do is incomprehensible to our newly empowered constituents, and we often don’t pay attention to or understand how they perceive our way of doing business. It seems that most Valley leaders didn’t think for a moment that Enron’s egregious abuse of stock options would ever come home to roost here. That was an avoidable mess if there ever was one.
Finally, as I say to every person I media train, “Your audiences do not find you, your company, your products nearly as interesting as you find yourself, your company, your products.” If we can keep this essential truth in mind as we figure out how to describe what matters to us to the people who matter to us, we’ll make a lot of progress!
--Lisa Poulson
Managing Director, Technology Practice
Burson-Marsteller San Francisco
Lisa Poulson is a member of the Guidewire Group Sounding Board.
Posted by Lisa Poulson at April 26, 2005 10:40 AM
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