Progress Toolbox

What's next?

Here is what may be the final post on this site, although I will leave it up for a spell. And hell, I may even change my mind.

My brief stint as a fixer for SEIU's Working Washington project went well - I took them from zero media coverage to exceptional media coverage in a matter of months, pushed existing staff to design events and actions with media coverage in mind, and built a solid team of outstanding communicators to continue the work.

I am now looking for a new gig, either as a consultant or in a business, nonprofit or advocacy organization. If you hear of anyone looking for the following, please let me know.

• Communications / Public Affairs / Public Relations
• Writing and editing
• Press and media relations
• Social media and online engagement
• Community and offline engagement
• Advocacy
• Event planning
• Fundraising

I will certainly continue to research best practices in communications and look to cognitive science, psychology and sociology for insight into how decisions are made. And I will of course promote the best articles, videos and explainers that I find, but I'll do it through my social media channels instead of through this blog.

Oh internets, you change so quickly!

With the new Facebook (which I love!) taking over web experience, Google+ opening itself up to all comers, and my longstanding Twitter addiction, it makes sense and saves time to use those platforms.

So...if we're not already connected, please find me here:

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/annemartens

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/a.m.martens

Twitter: http://twitter.com/glossolaliac 

Or search for me on Google+, Yelp, Digg, FourSquare, Quora, and the next new thing. It's not shiny-chasing if you call yourself an "early adopter."

If I change my mind and start blogging again, it'll be deeper content in fewer posts--and you'll be the first to know.

Here's what's going on

I know, I know, the blog hasn't been updated in ages and it's sad, stale and sucky for SEO.

Here's the truth: I love researching best practices in communications and writing it up for you. But, between getting outside to enjoy our very short spurts of Northwest summer and the massive workload that I've taken on for SEIU and Working Washington, I just haven't had time.

As a result, this blog is on hiatus until I have some time to dedicate to finding the good stuff.

Thanks for your patience and your support.

How the eye moves through content

Design makes a difference. MOMA exists to ensure that we all remember that.

Most people instinctively know that a wall of text is the equivalent of a blank page. Nobody is going to read it.

Marshall McLuhan and Brooke Gladstone have both argued that the methods of communication change our brains, and that as we change the tools, the tools correspondingly change us. We become suited to the tools available.

Here we are in a digital environment, with a new social network every day, more and more content and less time to read it. So how do people read? By skimming. In an rough F-shaped pattern.

Jakob Neilsen tracked people's eye movement as they looked at hundreds of web pages and used heat maps to show the results. Click through to see what the heat maps look like.

Top Takeaways:

• Nobody is reading your content thoroughly.
• Put the most important information in the first two paragraphs. Or in the first two words as you move down the page.

Make it easy for the reader.

Talking to working class white men

How do we define our audience?

First, nearly everyone in America thinks of themselves as "middle class" even if they are pushing the upper or lower limits of that term. There was a time when people self-identifed as "working class" but you'd be hard pressed to find that springing up organically anymore, without some political force using the label in a political way. And that may be part of the problem.

"Who Lost the Working Class?" by Andrew Levison looks at how we talk about class, and what happened to change perceptions of the working class - starting in the 1950's and leading up to Al Gore's presidential loss in 2000.

It's an impressive article for it's depth, history and analysis. It's also long, and has super small print. Don't let that stop you from reading the whole thing.

Is "working class" still relevant? Yes. Writing in 2001, Levison estimates that about 45 percent of white men work in jobs that are more manual than white collar. That number may have declined, but it didn't disappear in just a decade.

Top takeaways:

• Distrust of government (and of liberal middle class "movements"), is based on lived experience as well as media portrayal, and continues to be a problem.
• There are certain attitudes and values that correspond to class in America.
• For the middle classes, work means a stimulating career that has to balanced with family and home life. For the working class, work is just a job and the family is where they find meaning and satisfaction.
• Unlike the middle and upper classes reliance on experts, working people tend to blend three distinct kinds of information in analyzing an issue--information from the media, personal experience and popular wisdom or "common sense"--and to insist that conclusions have to make sense in terms of all three approaches.
• Statements described as "common sense" are in fact often expressions of basic values.

In sum:

Because of their limited time and resources, blue-collar workers generally do not try to evaluate competing sets of facts and statistics presented by political candidates. Instead, they pay more attention to what they often call the candidates' "philosophy"--the candidates' views regarding the kinds of policies they consider right or wrong and the general rules or criteria they promise to use in making decisions about specific issues.

It's not about facts. It's about trust. 

And the kicker:

During the 1930s, union organizers were taught never to blame the workers if an organizing campaign failed. "It's not their fault for not understanding," the organizers were instructed. "It's your fault for not explaining it clearly enough."

Hang that one on your wall.

Metrics for media

How do you measure the tangible change a story creates?

Metrics for Newspapers from Håvard Ferstad on Vimeo.

This video speaks for itself. The takeaway is that media has a responsibility, and that change happens one person at a time.

Speaking of The Matrix

You know you love it.

How to make a movie

Not really. Just some tips from a screenwriter who knows a thing or ten about telling a story. An appropriate post for Harry Potter's big opening weekend.

In Top 10 Tips I wish I'd had 25 years ago, Allen Palmer makes us all feel better about ourselves for not knowing everything already. 

Top takeaways:

• If you're trying to get people to do a particular thing, start by looking into why people usually do that particular thing.
• Every great epic story is a Joseph Campbell monomyth. Star Wars. The Lord of the Rings. The Matrix. Harry Potter.
• Conflict and contradiction are what make it interesting.
• Keep your ideas simple. You should be able to explain yourself in 27 words. Tell lots of people your ideas so you can find out whether they suck or not.
• Write every day.

There you go. Don't worry, you can still pitch stuff the old fashioned way, "it's like Die Hard on a bus but with midgets."

Because your thesaurus is lame

Write much? Buy this: The Synonym Finder

It is not a thesaurus. It has four times the number of words as a thesaurus. It is not your online or preprogrammed list of four words that might mean close to the same thing. It is a true synonym finder; it is a big ass book that is laid out like a dictionary and could potentially knock you out if someone were to wield it like Col. Mustard in the Conservatory.

It is awesome in it's power to help you find exactly the right words. It is one of my favorite writing tools.

The medium is the message

Actually, Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore thought they were being clever by titling their book, "The Medium is the Massage."

Oy. Kills me. 

Let's say Andy Warhol and Philip K. Dick got together on speed with a TV, a camera, and some New Yorker magazines. The result, I imagine, would look much like the mess of font, prediction, image and graphics that is this classic (1967) communique.

Top takeaways:

• Media is an environment, an ecosystem. Society is shaped more by the media environment than by the content of communication.
• Literacy via books promotes detachment, privacy, individualism and non-involvement.
• Social media, what he calls "the instantaneous world of electric informational media," involves everybody all at once, promoting participation.
• We can no longer build serially or linearly, because all factors and experiences are happening all at once. We need to use not a single, but multiple models for exploration.
• Humor, because it works with immediate experience, is the best guide to changing perceptions. (Thank you Jon Stewart.)
• Propaganda ends where dialogue begins.

Tell you the truth, I don't know what to make of this book. It strikes me as right, but also right over the top. If you have some insight, I'd love to hear it.

On the decline of political civility

Also, you kids should get off my lawn!

A good communicator recently posted on Facebook about propaganda, which led me to reply that "propaganda is just messaging that you don't like."

Meanwhile, this "Beyond Civility" article by James Vega in The Democratic Strategist has been in the hopper, so let's check it out.

Vega worries (you can feel him wringing his hands and pacing as you read the post) that talking points, message discipline, and competing frames are just fancy words for propaganda, thought control, and brainwashing. He despairs that politics is manipulative, cynical and has rejected any attempt at fairness or objectivity.

All of which is true.

But it's not necessarily bad, nor is it new, and Vega's negative labeling of legitimate tactics is really just his attempt to manipulate you into accepting his own competing frame. Or, in a word, horseshit.

Attempts to convince people to believe one thing or another are not different today, they are no different than they have ever been (check out The Influencing Machine for on that). Government is a powerful tool, so people fight to control it. Politicians, journalists, advocates and judges are all human - and humans have never been objective. What's changed is that we've stopped pretending to be.

Sure, you can read Orwell's 1984 and Hofstader's The Paranoid Style and Arendt on Totalitarianism and you can point out all the ways those books are prescient and relevent. They're worth reading. But those analyses and illustrations of tactics and movements don't claim that there was once a time in which we were all civil and politics wasn't a fight to move hearts and minds.

What those books show - and what we all know - is that people are susceptible to persuasion and manipulation, and like every tool or tactic, persuasion/manipulation can be used for any multitude of good or bad purposes.

Tactics like persuasion, talking points, message discipline and competing frames are tools to help you get to a goal. In determining whether something is good or evil, the intent and the goal matter far more than the tactic itself.