 For a long time, we liked to kid ourselves that Tasmania is a ‘natural laboratory’ that’s home to a world-class research community. This is not and never was true. But it could be.
Sure, we have some top-notch researchers doing amazing stuff here. You don’t have to dig very deep to find them. Add to that our indisputable advantages in certain niche areas such as marine science, biotechnology, forestry, and health, and the potential is impressive indeed. Our state is geographically and ecologically diverse, clean and green, effectively self contained, and it offers a lifestyle appealing to many people. But we need to stop saying things like we’re an ideal base, and that we’re a hub of research activity, and instead prove it. This is eminently achievable in Tasmania, much more so than it would be in any other Australian region. The outcome would be unique and serve as an extremely solid marketing and promotional tool for our state. Our state could become a small-world network.  I have it on good authority that explicitly quantifying what you’re writing about in the title of your story leads to a higher click-through rate. That’s a shame, because so often the 'Six things you didn’t know about cataracts' or 'Eight reasons not to believe a digital marketer' stories can leave you feeling a little ripped off. You get the impression that somewhat less work has gone into that particular list than went into, say, the three laws of thermodynamics. In an article I saw recently, 'Seven ways to get a flight upgrade', the number-one tip was:
Be a frequent flyer. As if you can decide while you’re in the check-in queue to magically become one. You either are or you are not a frequent flyer with that airline, and speaking as someone with a bit of travel-hacking experience I can tell you that anyone who is not a frequent flyer need not trouble themselves with the remaining tips in that particular article. Smile all you like, dress to the nines, if you ain’t Platinum status you’ll sit where you’re bloody well told, you cheeky sod. Anyway, thanks for indulging me. To the point of my essay, which I could argue segues nicely from the frequent-flying gripe because it was a plane trip to Japan that prompted the idea.  I can see them now, a bunch of smug content-marketing ‘experts’ patting themselves on the back for coming up with such a deviously cunning strategy.
People are afraid of missing out, you see. They won’t be able to NOT click on the green button, because the red one represents a clearly negative statement about oneself, and who wants that? Your Eureka moment, the one where a big lightbulb goes ‘ting’ above your head, can quickly lead to thoughts of how to protect your newfound IP. But what does it take to get over the line? What sees a patent granted to one invention but not to another? There are some concepts I’d like to introduce to you.
A rather vigorous session on ABC talkback radio this morning highlighted for me the perils of not telling the full story.
Apparently (I didn’t hear the whole thing) a caller made an observation, something to the effect that ‘greedy baby boomers’ benefited from free education and cheap housing, and are now making life tough for the following generations because they’ve locked up all the resources and refuse to share. 'You're not selling a vacuum cleaner, you're selling peace of mind.'
In many settings sales is about tricking people, and for some reason those who practise such trickery think we're all stupid enough to fall for it. I could tell that Candice, the sweet but dopey real estate agent who sold me my house, had been to this school of thought, when, upon ushering me into a pokey dining room, dramatically announced 'imagine yourself reading the paper in the sunshine by the window while the children play in the fully-enclosed yard.' This isn't just a dining room, dammit! It's a lifestyle! I didn't have the heart to tell her that we don't have kids. These houses were built for war widows, which were then touched up and sold off. Real estate is a hard game. To top it off, agents are routinely required to write about their work and publish it to a newspaper or website with hundreds of thousands of readers, usually with no editorial assistance. It's kind of irrelevant that most agents aren't remotely intimidated by this. Enough to say that it's not surprising that a few errors get through. Here are some we picked up over several years of editing real estate ads (for a company who did appreciate the difficulty).
Nearly everyone I know works in an identical office, regardless of their job. We each have the same desktop, the same filing system, the same “typewriter” and the same messaging system. Peek over the shoulder of any office worker at his computer and I’m pretty sure you’ll be in familiar territory (just be prepared to look away again very quickly).
And that’s pretty cool. The capability that modern software provides means that any one of us can do just about every conventional office task using a familiar set of tools, from writing a letter to balancing a budget, albeit with differing levels of ability. Thanks to computers it’s even possible to run a successful business by yourself. But this newfound ability has come at a cost. Because it has become possible to do so many things at our own desk without the help of others, our employers expect us to actually do them all as part of our job. Up until the 1980s, a well-run office invariably had someone whose job it was to ensure that things ran smoothly. This person (let’s face it, usually a woman, I’ll call her Joan from Mad Men) would also be responsible for typing up the letters and generally keeping all the plates spinning, while the technicians and strategists and salesmen did their own thing, which usually involved lunch. Joan was the glue that kept the office together. She was very good at organising, and exceptional at communicating, not only with people within the office but also with whatever customers and suppliers formed the basis of the business. Joan had a terrific big-picture view of the organisation, and also had a pretty big say in what that picture looked like. Then came the desktop computer and it was bye-bye Joan. It was a sad but inevitable progression in the corporate world, as beancounters everywhere realised that for the cost of one Joan you could buy fourteen IBMs. So now here we sit, alone in our cubicles, with permission (the expectation, even) to do the job that was once Joan’s, particularly the endless writing that’s involved; when we're not writing, we're probably reading or talking about something that we'll have to write about later on. This highlights two problems. The first is that some people are generally crap at writing. I’ve found that just because someone is extremely clever doesn’t mean they’re necessarily good with words. The second problem is that when viewed as a whole, this inconsistency in the quality of communication among people in the office can not only look really bad (and unprofessional) from the outside, but can also cause major inefficiencies in process and workflow. Without Joan to keep us in line we do things our own way (and of course that’s the best way), which can lead to differences in quality and in many cases unnecessary duplication of effort. When it comes to getting our corporate message out there we are often guilty of not singing the same tune as everyone else. Since Joan left, astute managers everywhere have been collaring those of us to whom writing does not come naturally. They make notes in our performance appraisals that our writing needs improvement, and send us off to courses titled “writing for government” and “communication for dummies”. I know this because for many years I’ve run this kind of workshop. And what have I learned? Mainly that these sessions do little to improve the problem that the aforementioned astute manager has identified. A half-day course on how to write better will not significantly improve your writing ability, nor will it address the underlying sickness of poor communication practice in the office. So, let’s take a step back. I don’t care if you put the apostrophe in the wrong place, or that your spelling is bad, or even if you occasionally dangle your participles; there are plenty of egg-sucking forums out there that will explain the difference between your and you’re, should you want to read them. There’s much more to writing than spelling and grammar. The odd thing is that people who are good at spelling and grammar tend to think they are good writers but this isn’t always the case. The secrets to good writing are far more wide ranging than grammatical rules and are mainly based in common sense; there are plenty of beautifully-written works out there that don't say anything useful, and plenty of amazing ideas with typos in them. |
Serious stories about communication
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Bruce Ransley
I dig a little deeper than most comms folk. From science at university, to a cold-and-wet career as a commercial diver, to working underground, and for the past 17 years as a communicator-at-large, I've had my fair share of weird experiences in all sorts of situations. It's given me a fair-to-middling grounding in all things explanatory. 
This isn't my cat.
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