Camp Fire Pearls
I've been struggling lately to develop a guiding
aesthetic for corporate bloggers and I've finally got it. Camp Fire Talk.
We've been conditioned by a
million years of camp fire talk to accept its steady, unadorned,
agenda-free tone as trustworthy.
Around the fire, after a day of grubbing for grubs or dancing
between the legs of a woolly mammoth, our ancestors didn't harangue
cavemates about how their new improved spear thrower would jump-start
their
sex life. You can't fool anyone around the fire, because you've all
been
doing the same thing all day, your frailties and strengths on display.
During most of our history, there hasn't been much
conversation except camp fire talk, and I'm
not sure we accept any talk that doesn't pass the camp fire
test. It's a tone that's
almost impossible to fake, and it's certainly the only tone that one
willingly endures for more than a few minutes. Camp Fire Talk is part
of us, grafted onto our nervous system so thoroughly that speakers
stray from it at their peril. We all know what it is and, better, what
it isn't. Blogging is forcing us to remember how to do Camp
Fire Talk.
Blogs are so constant and
frequent and informal that we're being forced at last to drop the
stridency and
expert tone and false eloquence that orators, and their progeny,
corporate communicators, have felt obliged to use.
Maybe it's Demosthenes' Fault
Demosthenes
was the Greek who became a great orator by overcoming his speech
impediment. He put pebbles in his mouth and harangued imaginary
audiences of credulous Athenians, standing on the shore, out-talking
the sea's roar (for what it's worth, the Greeks listened raptly, but
ignored his counsel). Oratory is a great metaphor for PR and marketing:
overwhelming the public consciousness while ignoring the ruling
criterion for a human nervous system to make up its mind: a natural,
unvarnished voice.
Maybe that's why advertisers complain that half their message
works, but they don't know which half; no one's applied the
under-appreciated camp fire talk metric (the emerging CFT compliance
standard?).
Guiding the Aesthetic
I've been inching toward the CFT metric because the
intersection of blogging and Corporate Communications has become so
active that even I have been doing some informal consulting to a
Fortune company on how to introduce blogging, internally at first and
then rolling it out to external stakeholders (notice the non-campfire
phrasing there). Every form of communications has a guiding
aesthetic–the habits of mind and expression most suitable to
getting heard and heeded. Demosthenes might have started us out on the
path of formality trumping authenticity because he was among the first
broadcasters, casting his broad vowels over the heads of his stilled
audience. Oratory is stirring, like its peer, epic poetry. They both
helped sell people a lot of goods over the years. And they led to the
formal voice of politicians and advertisers who, even though they've
learned to imitate informality the last few decades, still ring hollow.
Until now, politicians and advertisers never had to
compete with a back button or a Tivo remote, and that's why messages,
for which there's no demand, must now yield to camp fire talk, for
which there's always a welcoming ear.
Everybody's a narrowcaster now.
7:16:58 AM 
|
