Field Notes Inside an Integrated Communications Agency

With rapidly changing technology channels, it seems every crisis or natural disaster ushers in new ways to communicate. The devastating earthquake in Haiti, while being one of the most catastrophic disasters in recent memory, is no different in this respect. From mobile video and photos shared in tweets to eyewitness reports via Skype, our early news came through new communications.

With all the new ways of communicating, one relatively low-tech communication stands to have the biggest impact on the crisis in Haiti - text. In the hours after the crisis, the Red Cross and others mobilized to offer individuals an immediate way to contribute - a text through their cell phone to donate $5 or $10 that will be added to their monthly phone bill. News of this option is rapidly spreading on social media with people posting information on how they donated.

Text is a great way to mobilize a mass audience. In fact, with the fragmentation of traditional media, text, may be one of the last true "mass media" left. Text does not require special downloads or a special phone. The technology is available on 98 percent of mobile handsets and 86 percent of the US owns a mobile phone. Nielsen mobile projects that there will be 100 million text messaging users by the end of 2010 sending and receiving more than 75 billion texts each month. That's a lot of thumb-typing.

Text users aren't all kids either. Nielsen mobile says the media age of a text user is 38. This is a generation that has grown up with mobile technology. So it stands to reason that these text messaging users would be open to making a contribution via text. A short message for a truly worthy cause.

At an interesting panel* at SXSW 09 , YinYin He demonstrated a device she created, dubbed "Patches," that was designed for touch via the Facebook "poke" interaction. This little patch, easily worn on your clothing, has sensors inside it that vibrate or "buzz" when you're poked on Facebook. After a Facebook user "pokes" you, a message is sent to a server and them to a microcontroller on the patch. A text message is also sent to your mobile device.

The patch is made of snaps, conductive thread, fabrics, and grey thermocromic ink (the same stuff mood rings are made out of).  Pretty cool, huh?

So for those of you that always thought the good old Facebook "poke" was pretty pointless, maybe we're on our way to a more interactive experience via touch technology.

*Touching Me Touching You: How We Feel Technology

I am a slow adopter of new technology. My last (and first) blog posting was on the wonders of Capstrat's Intranet and Wiki. I now ponder the wonders of Facebook.

A few days ago, my sister, also a forty something CPA, admitted she had a Facebook account. My mother was threatening to join. At Capstrat’s February staff meeting, our president made reference to updating her postings over the weekend.

Why would I need to be on Facebook? My only justifiable reason was to check up on my daughter and her 995 closest "friends". My daughter recently informed me, "You don't know what being friends means." Apparently her definition is similar to what I would call an acquaintance, or an acquaintance of an acquaintance.

Although I don't understand why you would want all those folks knowing your every coming and going, I am slowly warming to the idea of joining Facebook. The chatter keeps rising - from my teenager to my family, from my friends to my co-workers. Maybe my Mom can tell me how to set it up.

I bought an iPhone a month ago. Now I join the wanker ranks who are always checking something. Weather in Singapore, got it! A cheap hot dog joint downtown, bingo! Email, check! Texting? Ha! LMAO! Heck, I even check the GPS while driving to work. I know exactly where I am and I know where my office is, too. I guess I want to make sure the iPhone knows where we are.

 

So here’s my dilemma: I’m compelled to destroy my old phone?

It’s the worst phone ever. Half my calls never come through and it has all the convenience of cute little piece of Styrofoam. Mostly I’m tired of being ridiculed like, “Barbie called, she wants her phone back.” Or, “Dude, is that your Hello Kitty lighter ringing?”

With hundreds of cool iPhone applications available, not one will destroy my useless, elfin phone with due flair. Give me some great suggestions and I’ll document it here. *

 

 

* I realize I can donate it. Should I pass along my aggravation?

Communicating complicated ideas with others can present a lot of challenges - especially when you don’t share a common language to build on. In my role as a technologist at Capstrat, I can assure you that the toughest part of my work isn’t doing technical stuff, but rather creating understanding between technologists and non-technologists. You have to be able to communicate about technology so you can communicate with technology.

But how do you do that without all the techo-jargon mumbo jumbo? Should you even try? In my work, I’ve stumbled across a common bear-trap which I call the French Menu Syndrome. It goes something like this:

Suppose you run a fancy French restaurant. You’re going for discerning diners and elegant haute cuisine. You hire classically trained French chefs from Paris, and give them the equipment and ingredients they need so you can offer the best in fine French dining. Authenticity is the key.

The French chefs construct a painstakingly-crafted menu of carefully chosen, wonderfully creative and enticing dishes. The menu is like poetry; a sonnet sung in honor of fine French cooking. You welcome your guests and proudly present them with the menu your chefs have so lovingly authored. There are some raves, but you’re surprised when the majority of your guests aren’t as impressed as you thought they’d be.

Your fancy French chefs composed their opus in French (naturellement). But it turns out there are lots of folks who like French cooking and fancy French restaurants who don’t actually know any actual French. No problem - we’ll just translate our menu into English, and that way people will know what to order.

Except that most of the French dishes have proper names that don’t translate into English.

OK, no problem again. We’ll just include a little description of the dish in English alongside the name, and all will be well.

Except now, your guests are just as confused by all the cooking jargon, and some of the ingredients don’t translate cleanly either. Turns out that around here, not everyone knows the difference between a bechamel and a bearnaise.

In an effort to embrace your full audience, you eliminate anything that could potentially be confusing. Before you know it, you’ve changed the name of your restaurant from “Chez Jacques” to “Jack’s Place” and your menu reads like, “Beef cooked French-style in a creamy sauce with veggies. Yum!”

Hold on a sec, wasn’t the whole idea here to be fancy and authentic? Didn’t someone mention discerning diners? Come to think of it, those rave reviews have dried up and the discerning diners don’t seem to come around any more. Not only that, but now your fancy French chefs shout curses at you (at least you think they’re curses) whenever you get near the kitchen.

Even at a strategic communications agency, we get caught in this same paradox when we’re not careful. Our government relations, graphic design, PR, video production and technology teams have all occasionally had our respective varieties of jargon end up in front of people who need our services, but only understand those services in layman’s terms. Even worse, we sometimes create communications in broad, general terms that leave our clients’ in-house experts (like their internal IT teams) with too many questions - not least of which is, “do these guys have the chops to do the work”.

So where’d we go wrong with our fancy French restaurant? At what point do we stop looking for baseline common denominators? How do we satisfy our discerning diners who expect authenticity without narrowing down our clientele to just a few fickle foodies?

If you’re running a fancy French restaurant and you’re not in Paris, how about this: throw away the menus. Hire chefs who can also come out of the kitchen and meet guests. Invest in some really fancy, really talented, super-knowledgeable fancy French waiters. Don’t compromise on authenticity, but realize that the biggest part of your task isn’t being authentic, it’s helping your guests experience and appreciate the joy of fine dining. You may not win over the Golden Corral crowd that way, but c’est la vie.

The point is that there’s no shortcut. There’s no menu in the world that can connect with each guest and gauge their respective comfort levels with french and cooking jargon like a person can - any more than a single proposal, project plan or statement of work can serve as a one-size-fits-all channel for communicating an idea or a solution that has some kind of specialized expertise behind it. That’s why when you work with Capstrat, you’ll probably end up face-to-face with the graphic designers, user experience designers, web developers and other specialists who’ll be working on your project.

And they’ll speak English.

Many years ago I was traveling in the UK, and found myself in a little pub in Wales making friends with some locals. Wales is an awesome place to visit, but if you don’t know any Welsh, the place-names can be tough to work out. They look like unpronounceable jumbles of consonants - some of them might as well be in Chinese. After a few drinks, I built up the courage to ask my new Welsh friends, “so what’s up with the way y’all spell stuff?”

The answer, they told me, was that centuries ago it made it a lot harder on English invaders when they couldn’t actually say the names of the places they intended to invade and occupy. Basically, they were telling me, they spelled stuff that way to intentionally screw with English-speakers. And it’s a plan that clearly works on modern-day invaders as well.

I’m not sure whether that’s actually true or just what they tell tourists in the pubs. But I’m reminded of this because I’ve been reminded so often recently of how difficult it can be sometimes to communicate with clients and colleagues about technology.

I belong to the technologist tribe. I spend at least a little time out of every day doing technical stuff, writing computer programming code, and discussing technology with fellow tribespeople. At the risk of dating myself, I’ll just say I’ve been at this for quite a while. So if you’ll take my word for it, I’ll let you in on a little tribal secret. All this technology stuff isn’t even a tenth as complicated as you think it is. No really, it’s not that hard. What’s hard is talking about it.

Everything hard about technology is in the language: learning about technology from manuals and experts, describing it to people who are unfamiliar with it, asking for what you want, understanding what you’re being asked for - all of it really, really hard.

As someone who’s been in the tribe for a while, I can tell you that becoming a productive technologist is a lot less about the ones and zeroes than it is about simply learning how to communicate with fellow technologists, especially when it comes to teaching it to those who know less than you and learning about it from those who know more than you.

Communicating with people who don’t know any of the ones and zeroes stuff is an even bigger challenge. They need technologists to build technology for them, but they don’t have the language to ask for what they want in a concise way. Sometimes they have a hard time describing what they want in a vague way. How big a problem is that? Try this experiment: think of a popular song. Now find someone who knows how to play guitar or piano. Describe the melody, but don’t tell them anything else about the song you’re thinking of. Do it without reciting lyrics, humming or using any musical jargon. Unless you can get creative about how you communicate with your friend, then it’s not a question of whether you’ll succeed, but who’ll be first to get too frustrated to continue.

With that same kind of barrier between technologists and non-technologists, it’s not surprising that folks who are decidedly not in the technologist tribe can often get frightened, confused, frustrated and even a little pissed off when confronted with Klingon-sounding technical jargon. There might even be the slightest suspicion it’s not Klingon, but Welsh: that technologists’ language is intentionally obfuscated and dense, crafted to keep the magic within the tribe.

For the most part, that’s not true. But what is true is that both technologists and non-technologists are complicit in perpetuating a communication barrier that extends beyond just acronyms and technical terms. You have to be patient (and creative) if you’re going to get your ideas across that barrier. Understanding how and why the miscommunications happen, and how we’re each complicit in making them happen is key to getting there.

So why do technologists use so much jargon? Wasn’t the word “blog” jargon just a short while back? How and when do we get ourselves into these language-barrier predicaments, and how do we get ourselves out of them? In the next couple of articles, I’ll discuss some of the specific challenges we technologists face in discussing technology with our colleagues, our clients and each other, and how to overcome the urge to reject anything and everything that sounds like Klingon (or Welsh).

One of our most important goals at Capstrat is to be a step ahead. To a senior developer, part of being a step ahead is knowing what the tools are capable of. As we craft a story, some of us are constantly looking forward to how an idea will be built. While limitations of technology may close down some ideas, the capabilities of technology open up new ones. The ideas and the technology often play off each other and drive ideas forward in exciting and new ways.

Adobe, Apple, and the open source community are out there creating tools for this new media landscape. This software allows "creatives" to develop innovative communications. Good tools have been, and always needs to be, a step ahead of the people who are a step ahead. They allow us to be creative, make promises, dream big, innovate, and deliver.