Author: Jim

In today’s world, you could do worse than looking to Seth Godin for inspiration. He’s a marketing genius, author, new media whiz, and occasional zen master. After yesterday’s post, I think it might be time for a quick “buck up.” Something positive, something uplifting, something inspiring. And, like I said, you could do worse than Seth Godin.

Recently, Seth posted a very short blog post about lies that resonated with me. Resonated because they are lies that I’ve told myself from time to time, and lies that I hear far too often from government communicators who see the work that I and other social media folks do. Seth’s four lies are as follows:

The first lie is that you’re going to need far more talent than you were born with.

The second lie is that the people who are leading in the new connection economy got there because they have something you don’t.

The third lie is that you have to be chosen.

The fourth lie is that we’re not afraid.

I don’t have any special talent or tool that allows me to do this stuff. I plugged away and failed–sometimes spectacularly–but picked myself up again, learned from it and tried again.

Similarly, no one handed me any of the rights and responsibilities that I have now. I got here through nothing else but hard work and a willingness to embrace some new paradigm fully. I have only one quote posted to my wall at work, and I read it weekly:

If it isn’t worth risking total, complete failure over, it probably isn’t worth doing.

And as for being afraid, I’m afraid. I have a growing family and the hopes and dreams of a health department on my shoulders. Failure scares the hell out of me.

What gets me through is exactly what Seth closes his post with:

The connection economy isn’t based on steel or rails or buildings. It’s built on trust and hope and passion.

The future belongs to those that care and those that believe.

Be inspired, take a leap of faith and succeed. Or fail and make the next leap that much better. There are so many reasons to, and only one reason not to: fear. And I’ve already said that we’re all afraid, so what’s stopping you?

I’m a huge advocate of getting away from traditional (read: boring) messaging techniques like fact sheets, text-heavy websites, the “general public,” the list goes on and on. And yet, we’re still not great at it. For lots of reasons, not least of which is we don’t really know what to do. We’ve always done things this way.

While I’ve tried to impress that you can change things up pretty easily with video shot in your office on a personal smartphone (and edited with a $5 app) with my video posts, using a new social media app like Instagram or Vine, talked about podcasting and iPhone reporting, sometimes you need to get real, live inspiration from your peers and not some yahoo blogger. You need something colorful, fun, interesting and chock full of good information. Something like this video, Ways to Survive, from the City of Bellevue, Washington.

It’s catchy, visually stimulating, and includes oodles of good information. This isn’t like some hurricane video that goes out of vogue for nine months of the year.

These are the ways to survive, gotta stay alive, have supplies and a master plan.

Full of good recommendations addressing kit development, winter supplies, earthquake response, CO safety, see something say something, among others. And, most importantly, it feeds into an opportunity to learn more, by directing folks to WaysToSurvive.Org.

I spoke to Sophia Le, who told me a bit about the background of the video:

This is in line with our new public education strategy, and took inspiration from Denis Mileti’s eternal comment “You need to sell [preparedness] like Coca-Cola.” This video is part of our new engagement focus–in the past, we’ve been pretty light on social media but think this is a great jump start into engaging content.

Some of the things we really like about this video are that it allows us to use social media to touch more people than a public educator usually could. It’s using song to get a message stuck in a person’s head, and it’s inviting citizens to come learn more about our programs.

I love the idea AND the execution. There’s just one thing, and it’s a problem not specific to this video. Similar to an overarching problem I have with most government campaigns: there’s not connection to reality. The video is awesome, and I’m going to pass it around to friends around the world, but what about the Bellevue, Washington EMA website? It looks, and I mean it exactly like this, like a government website. Text-heavy, small font, jargon-y, uninteresting. It’s the complete opposite of what the video is.

And maybe that’s where the problem with this type of thing comes in. Awesome efforts tend to highlight how poor the rest of our efforts are. And that’s frustrating.

But here’s the thing. Now that Bellevue has this great video, and they’ve established some kind of a brand associated with their efforts, they can remake their website and social media and other presences. They are THAT much ahead of where you are. The Ways to Survive video doesn’t point out how government-y their website looks, it highlights how government-y your efforts look.

We live in a world of super-crafty people who want to do good work. And every time they do something cool, our reliance on the old ways of communicating look more and more out-of-date. Places like Bellevue are leading the charge into real, engaging content that takes the best lessons from the private sector and are bringing it to government. Don’t get left behind!

There’s this really interesting phenomenon going on in digital media right now. People who are active on social media have seen it, and people who are really active on social media have even done it. But there are few things that engender a generational divide as wide as this behavior. I’m talking about the selfie. That close-up picture of someone’s face seems to be the mascot of today’s digital world.

Have you used your phone to snap a picture of yourself and send it to a friend, or post for everyone to see it? Did you make a duckface? What about your kids?

The reason I say that the selfie exposes a huge generational divide because kids seem to do it all the time. They know exactly where to position the camera to get a great shot of themselves and take multiple pictures, all ready for posting. Older folks seem to see the selfie as vanity and over-sharing run amok and if they do post images online, it’s always with the camera facing outward.

Why the divide? I think it’s because of how different generations view online sharing (and I believe I sit right on the cusp, personally, which is why I think I can distance myself from both groups). Older folks tend to feel that sharing online is a special activity, reserved for special topics or insights, and should spur meaningful conversation. They don’t want to waste others’ time, nor do they want their time wasted. If you want an example of what I mean by this look at, oh, I don’t know, ANY government agency social media account. All business, no time-wasting there. Real, insightful and dripping with importance.

Younger folks (the duck-faced, one might call them), on the other hand, have grown up sharing things online. Sharing isn’t some special thing that happens after serious consideration. They share like they breathe. Selfies, and pictures of people’s lunches, and vague Facebook posts aren’t intended to spur discussion or pull people over to a particular argument, they’ve been shared because it’s what that person is doing and sharing is just a natural part of doing.

In fact, the NY Times published a great article recently on the art of the selfie and says that this isn’t some fad that will be going away soon:

In fact, I’ve even noticed that the occasional selfie appears to nudge some friends who I haven’t seen in a while to get in touch via e-mail or text to suggest that we meet for a drink to catch up, as if seeing my face on a screen reminds them it’s been awhile since they’ve see it in real life.

Dr. Pamela Rutledge, director of the nonprofit Media Psychology Research Center, says that’s how the human brain works.

“We are hard-wired to respond to faces,” she said. “It’s unconscious. Our brains process visuals faster, and we are more engaged when we see faces. If you’re looking at a whole page of photos, the ones you will notice are the close-ups and selfies.”

So, what does that mean for us? Should we replace our focus group-tested, subject-matter expert-approved messaging with dozens of selfies? Should we trade in our fact sheets for Instagram accounts? Probably not.

But we should be seriously considering what the growing popularity of this new, very personal form of communication will mean for our communication efforts moving forward. Should we be more personable? (Yes) Should we integrate images more often? (Yes) Should we spend some more time on the minutiae of our day-to-day work? (Yes) Should we maybe try to humanize ourselves a bit? (Yes) Should we take a selfie every once in a while and try out our duckfaces? (Probably)