Wow, its been a LONG time since I’ve done one of these. In this video, I’m talking about messaging about our government agencies, and whether we have a responsibility to our larger fields in addition.
I’d love to know what you think, so please leave me comments below.
Implicit in a lot of what we talk about here is speech. Language, words, messages. We talk, we converse, we respond. (Well, if we’re good we respond.) Like I said yesterday, we tell stories.
But should we? Should we always talk? Is quietness, silence sometimes better? Sometimes, yes. Sometimes we can be too clever, too ready to throw our two cents in the ring. And a good dose of silence can be just what the doctor ordered.
Take for example, this article about insensitive tweets:
[During the most recent 9/11 anniversary], I watched a lot of brands [rise] up on the anniversary of 9/11 to get a word in, to seize the moment, to chime in on tragedy. I’m not talking about the stories of horribly misguided advertising. I’m talking about the brands, however well intentioned, that felt it necessary to say anything at all. The butter brand, the laundry detergent, the car dealership vowing they will “never forget.”
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Tragedy is not a commodity or a social currency. It’s not something to leverage, tap into or harness in the name of ROI. It’s not a “like” generator or something that makes your brand more relevant to your consumer. What I want brands to know is that it’s okay to take a step back sometimes. It’s okay to take a time out. Tragedies aren’t a time for self-promotion or proving a point. They’re a time for people.
Sometimes silence can be golden. And we can be too clever.
But quietness doesn’t just have to be useful in emergencies. Sometimes it can be used to help ignore something. Denunciation maintains the story:
The Aerogram’s readers probably noticed that we didn’t do a post on the racist tweets that polluted the #MissAmerica hastag after Davuluri’s big moment. There’s an important reason for that and it can’t be said enough: Racist tweets add nothing to the conversation. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Zero. While the BuzzFeeds of the world thrive on page views and controversy, sometimes it’s important to take a step back and ask what a post that consists of a handful of sentences followed by an endless stream of racist bile brings to the table.
And sometimes, being quiet helps us get through a conversation without doing more harm:
Too often, media spokespersons fall victim to the “tell them everything you know” syndrome. They wrongly believe that their primary role in an interview is to provide the reporter with an in-depth education instead of remembering that their main goal is to influence the story and get the quotes they want.
Mr. Phillip’s recommendation?
Your main task as a spokesperson isn’t to give the reporter facts. If you merely spout facts, you’ll be no more valuable than a Wikipedia entry. Your job is to give those facts context and meaning.
While this advice is good in interview situations, it actually applies to the other two situations as well. Your job is to give facts context and meaning. What meaning are you giving with cheesy disaster related tweets? What context are you giving to racist online remarks? What benefit do your readers, does your audience, gain from that? None. Because you haven’t added anything, you haven’t provided meaning, context or information. Just blather.
Maybe Mom was right, if you don’t have something useful to say, don’t say anything at all.
I never wanted to be a communicator. Nobody does. Most people, when small, want to be a doer. A doctor, a police officer, an inventor, a teacher, a carpenter, an astronaut. (I used to joke that I wanted to be a philanthropist when I grew up.) The one thing that connects all of those things is that they change the world. Each of them takes something tangible and remakes it in some way that makes the world–even just a little bit–better, healthier, safer, more beautiful.
In the last few decades, we’ve seen that we can change some small bit of the world, a person, a house, an experiment, or we can do something bigger. This era of a “small world” has made a few of us realize that we can make bigger changes, influence more, make the world a much more beautiful place, save many more lives, by talking instead of doing.
Seth Godin made this point quite eloquently earlier:
More than ever, though, folks grow up saying, “I want to change the world.” More than ever, that means telling stories, changing minds and building a tribe.
For years (decades?), we tried to influence the world, to have an out-sized effect, by telling facts. Telling people to lock their car doors, to wash their hands, to get their vaccines, to have a preparedness kit, to invest, to take school seriously. But, telling people to do those things doesn’t always work. In fact, some people rebel quite stringently against it. And yet, we continue to tell people what to do, and why. Up to 300,000 people end up in the hospital every year from flu, so get your shot! A car is broken into every 20 seconds! Higher BMIs are associated with higher risk of chronic disease!
But increasingly, research is showing that it is stories, not statistics that drive action:
The researchers found that if organizations want to raise money for a charitable cause, it is far better to appeal to the heart than to the head. Put another way, feelings, not analytical thinking, drive donations.
The ad men have been using this idea for years to sell things to people:
The truly great storytellers have long embraced the fact that the most powerful stories happen in the mind of the audience, making each and every story unique and personal for the individual. They also understand that stories are important because they are inherent to the human experience. Stories are how we pass on our accumulated wisdom, beliefs and values. They are the process through which we describe and explain the world around us, and our role and purpose in it. Audiences have always known this and asked for stories—they’ve never asked for content.
So, why have we in government not understood that? Why do we still have closets full of tri-folds full of statistics? (Probably because we bought them ten years ago, and have still yet to run through our original order.)
But hope is not lost. There are folks out there that are working to collect stories in the hope of giving (at least public health) departments the types of stories that can change minds and hearts (hearts figuratively and hopefully literally). Both NACCHO and ASTHO are currently working to develop resource libraries of stories of success. While these story collecting efforts aren’t yet directed at the public, it’s a step in the right direction.
So my request for you is: tell me a story, about stories. What story has moved you? What will move others?
Public Health Affairs 