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Office Talk -- Thanksgiving Day Special: The Gift of "The Ask"

On this very Happy Thanksgiving Day -- happy that it's here, happy that I have so much reason to be thankful -- I thought it would make sense to add a small item to my once-active weekly column, Office Talk.   Some of you will remember:   this was a regular rant that I contributed to my blog, focusing on the reasons why people people use odd words and phrases in the office.  As I have explained many times before, it's not a column about whether an office cliche is acceptable (that's not even close to the work I do).  It's more about why office people use the cliche in the first place.   If you are interested in cliches that I've already wrestled with, go here.   But in the meantime, the cliche today that's dominating discussion in my Puerto Rican household -- in the middle of frying up everything in sight -- is "The Ask."

If you are an office worker -- or if in your regular line of work you need to talk with office workers, even if for the most part you are clad in pajamas, like most of my readers -- it is very, very likely that you have encountered this phrase at least once in the past year.  That's roughly the timeframe, I am guessing, that the phrase --which originated in the world of fundraising -- has entered the mainstream office lexicon.   In fact, it was from a fundraising professional -- an in-law who I will see this evening for a Thanksgiving dinner in San Francisco -- that I first heard the phrase ... oh maybe 12 years ago.  At the time, he was heading up development for a large (well funded) law school, and we had the opportunity to work on a project together.  Along the way, I learned some of the secrets of his trade, most notably the great effort that's required to raise very, very large philanthropic gifts.  What I learned:  if you are on the receiving end of a such a gift,  it's unlikely that you have gotten there without a long, extended courtship between you and the gift-giver.  And it is only after the relationship matures to a certain point that you even make the the formal request for the gift -- and note that it is often you, not the giver,  who initiates the conversation about the transaction -- which is known as "The Ask." (For more detail on how this is done in the world of fundraising, see Laura Frederiks, "The Ask:  How to Ask Anyone for Any Amount For Any Purpose").

There are several things worth noting about this phase.  First, it should be painfully obvious to anyone hearing it for the first time that we have done something rather funny with language.  Quite obviously, by saying "The Ask," we have transformed a verb into a noun.  But this isn't just a trick, or a sloppy use of words.  There's something bigger going on -- what sociologists like to call "reification," which Wiktionary defines as "the consideration of an abstract thing as if it were concrete, or of an inanimate object as if it were living."  Asking for a gift in the world of fundraising has become such a big deal that the actual request itself has taken on a life of its own.   When you are in the word business, you can't help but notice things like this.  But I am betting you noticed, too, even if you aren't in the word biz.

But second, and far more interesting, is the role that we have ascribed to this thing -- the request for a gift -- to which we have given life.  You'll recall that in fundraising, the courtship precedes "The Ask," which very often precedes "The Gift."  It's worth noting what actually goes on during the courtship, where the receiver educates the giver on all she will receive as a result of the substantial gift.  In the case of philanthropic giftgiving, it is almost about the persistent contribution, to a persistent community, that will benefit everyone (think immortality) long after the giver is gone.   More precisely, it is about the bond that's created and sealed by the reciprocal transaction.   As Marcel Mauss, the great French sociologist, observed, gift-giving creates a bond with the giver and receiver that is far stronger than the typical cash-for-goods transaction.  And it's because a gift almost always implies that the receiver will give something big -- bigger than cash, to be redeemed later -- in return.   Which is what makes the role of "The Ask" so important.   The long courtship --  during which the nature of the bond and the reciprocal benefits are made clear -- needs to be consummated with a gesture as real and ceremonious -- imagine yourself ring in hand, on one knee -- as The Gift itself.  It's a big deal to Ask for such a large Gift, and if you do not approach the matter with utmost respect and decorum, you might find yourself hurrying back to the jeweler.

Which leads me to the third point, the reason why I have chosen this phrase for "Office Talk" on this Thanksgiving Day edition.   When we use the phrase "The Ask" in business, we are referring to situations where it's imperative to take great care in asking for someone's help.   Because in this increasingly busy, interconnected world where you can ask almost anyone  for any 'amount' for  any purpose, it's way too easy to become a nudge.  I was reminded of this recently, when talking to a client about getting  a celebrity to contribute a video to a communications campaign that we had recently undertaken.  The celebrity -- a friend and fan of the organization -- was already on board.  But our client was concerned that the kind of video we were requesting would require so much work that we'd essentially run out of credit with the celebrity.  "You only get once 'Ask' with this guy ... don't use it up," my client explained.  Indeed.  You only get one Ask -- with a capital A -- with most people today.  And though it's better to give than it is to receive, it pays to know how to start the conversation.  A bad Ask is an annoyance.  A good Ask is more like a gift.

Office Talk -- "Back in the Day"

(R. Crumb's "Mr. Natural," the boomer generation's take on "Father Time")

So, after more than a year-long hiatus, I have decided to revive an ongoing feature called "Office Talk": an almost weekly "Sunday column" -- not every week, not always Sunday, not quite a column -- on annoying office cliches. The purpose of the series -- which I halted, in part, because I was running out of material -- was to examine why we use these phrases, not whether we should use them. If I showed any contempt for the subject of my columns (the phrases, not the people), it was from the perspective of someone who really hates to be unaware why he and his peers keep saying the same things, over and over again. I do not like the conformist in me. But I know that he lives there for a reason, and I have attempted to make peace. I miss making peace with him. So much, in fact, that you can say I'm feeling nostalgic, in the "Mad Men" sense of the word (see below). Lately, I've been thinking a lot about the past.

But how do I restart the column after so much time has passed? It just so happens that I have found a new phrase to examine, and it has everything to do with the past. The phrase, back in the day, which first surfaced many years ago, has made a comeback. I have heard it spoken in the office (my office, other people's offices) at least a dozen times in the past few months. As I used to say -- back in the day, when I first began writing this column -- "what's up with that?"

First time I noticed the phrase (i.e., the first time I noticed the phrase was a cliche) was back on a warm April day, when I meet with a prospective client who ... how shall I say, has been around the block a few times. In an effort to check out just how experienced I was, she quizzed me on industry people who participated not just in the creation of the current bubble but the last bubble, as well. When she saw she was in good company (I've been around the block myself), she made the requisite bonding gesture by recalling what things were like for both of us "back in the day."

In earlier columns, I detailed the difficulties one encounters when trying to decipher the true meaning of an annoying phrase (the second reason I had halted the column). But in the case of back in the day, it was laid out before me at that April meeting in startling clarity. My interlocutor was acknowledging that we have entered a time (the Web 2.0 bubble) that resembles another time (the Web 1.0 bubble), and that it was great to be among those who have survived. It's a shared pleasure or pain, based on a past pleasure or pain ... just like nostalgia. But unlike nostalgia -- which the writers of Showtime's Mad Men beautifully describe as the thing that "takes you to the place where you ache to go again" -- back in the day is more like a war wound, which can have the effect of either helping one bond with other "veterans," or distancing oneself from inexperienced "civilians" (ask McCain). At a more recent business meeting, the host -- a partner at an interactive marketing agency -- introduced herself by listing some of the things she endured "back in the day." The cliche was not wasted on anyone -- everyone understood what she meant -- but it didn't bring out the warm and fuzzies for the young-un's in attendance. They were still building their resumes, and ready to do battle for the first time. Their day had just begun.

Office Talk: "The A-List" -- Why the Big Rump Trumps the Long Tail

In a much discussed article last year, Erika Brown at Forbes complained that Silicon Valley was becoming a bit too much like Hollywood. She blamed Web 2.0 for some of this, and I think she has a point. In a sense, Web 2.0 has resocialized the Valley -- and a great part of Internet life in general -- in a way where the haves and the have-nots are more clearly delineated. What's ironic about this is that Web 2.0 was supposed to be the great leveller. At least that's what many bloggers would like to believe. The emergent culture that the blogosphere is driving is supposed to be a democratizing force, not the "industry of cool" that -- as Brown laments -- has supplanted the wholesome geek ethic that built the Valley. We used to talk a lot about that geek ethic. Now we are more likely to talk about geek chic.

So, what happened? As usual, I'm going to look at some of the verbal clues to this mystery, starting this week with the phrase the A-List. If you are blogger, it is very likely that you have encountered the phrase, and used the phrase to describe the elite group of bloggers who for any number of reasons are so much more visible and influential than anyone else on the Internet that they might as well belong to a class of their own. The question I'd like to ask is, "what do we call this class?" (and, while we're at it, "what does class have to do with it?"). I'm asking because when we use the phrase A-List, we are borrowing from our Southern California neighbors. The A-List used to refer to the handful of Hollywood stars who were deemed bankable, meaning that you -- if you were are producer -- could risk the $20 million fee (used to be $5 million) it would take to sign up someone on the A-List (because you were almost certain to get a return on your investment). As I said, in Hollywood, that's a small handful of people. It's the same thing in the blogosphere. The blogger A-List, of course, cannot be found anywhere, but we all know that it is very short, and that we -- that it, most of us -- are not on it. As F. Scott Fitzgerald -- a writer who squandered a great deal of his life in Hollywood -- observed, the rich "are different from you and me."

But back to my question -- why do we use this obviously elitist phrase when so many of us subscribe to a more egalitarian worldview? My guess is that we are not as egalitarian as we like to believe. If you have ever attended one the Silicon Valley parties that Erika Brown talks about, you will have noticed that we are not that different from other people. We enjoy our stars, and are more eager to be with them than to be them. Depending on your true worldview, this is either an embarrassing or sobering fact. We pay great lip service to the wisdom of the crowd, and the longtail, but we are more respectful of the rule of the few.

But, perhaps, that provides us with a better clue. Despite our weak and wanton faux Hollywood ways, we are still a geeky lot and more than anything we respect numbers. The rule of the few is nicely expressed in the power law in network theory, which, loosely speaking, holds that in any social network, a very few people hold sway over the vast majority of participants. As many of you know, the power law is expressed visually as that very plump bell curve directly to the left of the longtail. I believe that most Valley citizens are looking at both sides of this picture. But in our weakest moments -- after a couple of glasses of wine, at one of those Hollywood-like parties in the Valley -- the longtail may be the last thing on our minds. We are more likely to be thinking about the Big Rump that wags that tail, and admiring, but not envying, the few who shake it. Big can be beautiful, but it isn't always better.

NEXT ON OFFICE TALK: "JUMP THE SHARK"

Office Talk: What the ... (WTF)?

There are times when what you intend to write happens to align with the stars -- dark stars, in this particular case -- and you are caught by surprise. I was planning to post an entry today on Office Talk, and the topic was -- and still is -- the regrettable blogger expression, WTF. What caught me by surprise was the blogger meme today about Kathy Sierra's bout with hate mail, a situation so weird and creepy that practically every busy blogger felt compelled to say something about it. A common theme in many of these posts is that the blogosphere has become a mean and inhospitable place. I've been complaining about nastiness in the blogosphere for several years now. But this latest episode finally may have brought the problem to the fore.

What on earth does this have to do with WTF? As many of you know, WTF is shorthand for something unmentionable on many blogs -- unmentionable only because we rather not speak the words, not because we don't want to communicate the intent of the words. The intent is to signal contempt for the person we are calling out -- like, "hey Bruno, WTF?" -- when we are ready to write an especially pointed and opinionated blog post. What's remarkable is how many bloggers have grown accustomed -- inured -- to the phrase. It's a nasty way to talk to someone -- and I say talk only because so many of us are convinced that blogging is conversation -- and using shorthand does little to mask the hostility. Why even bother?

As a sign of respect to Kathy and others who have been victimized by bloggers in more extreme ways, I'm keeping this column short. But I'll end with what I think is a good policy for cutting off the mean, the nasty, and the stupid: if people post anonymously, and they have no good reason for posting anonymously, shun them. Over the past several years, I've learned that very few bloggers -- with the exception of the thick-headed and the psychotic -- will act nastily if their indentities were known. And as for silly, nasty euphemisms like WTF, just stop using them. Better yet, spell out clearly what you mean to say and see if you dare click the publish button. Be real, be yourself -- if you still like writing out "what the fuck?", because you are an asshole -- or you are trying to make a point -- at least people will know how to respond to you. Anything else, as law enforcement officials like to say, would be cowardly.

See also: Mathew Ingram, "The Dark Side of Anonymity"

Somewhat related: See Larry Sanger Raises the Bar for Wiki Citizens

NEXT ON OFFICE TALK: "THE A-LIST"

Office Talk: "It's All Good," "It Is What It Is," and "Good Problems to Have"

Those of you who know me well have heard me complain about a close relation of mine, a religious person, whose capacity to believe creates interesting problems for her. She's a Roman Catholic who (a) also believes in reincarnation and (b) also checks her horoscope daily. The problems she creates are with other people -- people like me -- who love to tease her.

"Who's in charge?," I used to ask. "God, the stars, or the good karma you are creating for your next tour on earth?" She never took the bait, knowing well that my geeky left brain was no match for her boundless faith. Plus, I was a kid. What the hell did I know?

When I got to college, I learned a few fancy words that describe complex belief systems. One of those words was "syncretism," which is what you get when you combine a few belief systems into something seemingly whole and integrated. Anyone who has studied religion will tell you that most, if not all, world religions are syncretic, because over time they incorporated the beliefs and rituals of the cultures that embraced them. And as I learned after college, when I began my long and complex career as a communications guy, syncretism is not just confined to religious belief systems. It's a concept that can be applied to all belief systems. At home and in church, we can be sunny optimists, and pray confidently for a good future and afterlife.
But, alas, at work, so many of us are pessimists -- nay, fatalists -- with almost zero faith that things can ever get better. Call it the Dilbert Syndrome. But I like to call it the new fatalism, which has given birth to not one, not two, but three -- count 'em, below -- office cliches that capture the feeling. But these expressions arose in successive eras, and the meaning of the last of these phrases suggests that we are becoming more fatalistic -- more like Dilbert -- every day.

The first of those expressions, it's all good, arose in the early 1990's, in rap culture. The working classes soon adopted then adapted it as a semi-hip, ironic, Zen-like phrase to describe circumstances that are beyond repair or control. If you can't change the world -- or the workplace -- you can always change your attitude, a notion that fit very nicely with another annoying cliche from the 1990's, attitude adjustment. The hard-core pessimists in the workplace never picked up the phrase it's all good, and, of course, they never deigned to adjust their attitude, for they were pretty damn sure that it was all bad.

I believe that the hard core folks won this silent war, and forced a concession of sorts. By the turn of the millennium, a great many of us -- save the hard core, again -- started using the phrase it is what it is. (In fact, USA Today voted it is what it is the #1 cliche of 2004). It was a subtle but important evolution from its less-intelligent ancestor, it's all good. What we were admitting, in essence, was, "OK, it's not all good. But what can you do? We just have to deal with it." It was a small victory for the hard core, but the controlling concept persisted: the office was becoming an irreversibly dreary place, overrun by incompetent managers, and the only way to stay sane was to give up ... but with a touch of irony. These were the years that gave birth to "Office Space," and later, "The Office." Meanwhile, Dilbert's stock kept rising.

But that wasn't the end. The concept has further evolved, somewhat sneakily, into good problems to have. The first time I heard this phrase I was almost moved to strike the person who said it (and I am such a peaceful soul). But I was also impressed by the nuances in the phrase -- and the irony -- and the way it relates to its recent cliche ancestors. We began by foolishly proclaiming it's all good. Then we stripped down the phrase to make it more real -- it is what it is. Then we incorporated a new twist by acknowledging that, yes, the workplace sucks, we all have problems, but some of us are a lot more fortunate than others. It's a good problem to have is a more active way of kvetching about the workplace, and for that reason, it's gotta be a good thing. But, nevertheless, it is a cliche, and it's one that reinforces the new fatalism. The next time you feel compelled to use it, ask yourself if you are just being facetious or if you truly believe that we should have so many problems that we need to differentiate the good from the bad. The very fact that there are so many problems in the workplace today -- information overload, the lengthening workday, the relentless pursuit of higher productivity -- should be the #1 problem for business managers. So ask yourself if the cliche is consistent with your other beliefs. Yes, we are all syncretic, bending philosophically to the conflicting demands of a complex and fractured world. But that's not all good, and it doesn't have to be that way.

NEXT ON OFFICE TALK: "WTF"

Office Talk: "Community" -- Are You Being Served?

Alas, I am not the only one in "comms" -- we'll visit that corrupt, truncated word in the future -- who enjoys writing about the dumb words, phrases, and cliches that dominate our working lives. Over the past year, the overuse of the word community has aroused an unusual amount of contempt. My favorite ranters on this subject: Mike Manuel, Tara Hunt, and Tom Foremski, who has asked the comms world to "kill the sacred cow of 'community' and reveal the hidden commercialism." The trouble that many people have with the word community is that it appears to be a whitewash; marketing consultants love the word community because it's a feel-good term that masks the real interests (might make you feel bad) of their clients.

I sympathize with Tom, Tara, and Mike. But I'm not convinced that whitewashing is the cause of this lexical epidemic. Believe me -- I am usually among the first of my peers to sniff out a secret or unconscious desire to manipulate a word to meet the needs of marketing (watch out!). In fact, that's what this column is set up to do. But if you troll and tramp about the various neighborhoods where this word is getting play, I think you'll find that community has become a catch-all for all the various group experiments that are in great need for a general name; if there is an unconscious reason for using the word community so wantonly, it is probably benign. We -- in the comms world -- have been so preoccupied with communication in the post-blogging world that we cannot help but want to reify what we talk about. Community is communication made tangible. And we need things that are tangible, even if we haven't found the right words yet.

But even this insider perspective begs the question -- is it right to use the word community when in fact we might be talking about something else? Here's a simple set of rules you can follow before you commit to using the c word in public:

(1) First -- ask: "whose interests are being served?" The defining element of all communities is the "shared interest." But it's also the defining element of most groups, and as critics of the word community have noted, not all groups are communities. Communities have something else. But how do you divine that something else?

(2) Second -- determine whether the group in question has been formed around shared group interests, shared self-interests, or a third party who shares your interests. The distinctions are important.

Take the first -- a group that has been formed around shared group interests. We are all familiar with these types of groups; they are the kind that immediately come to mind when normal people say community (at least until Web 2.0 came along). The defining thing about these groups is that, ostensibly, they exist to benefit the cause that brings the group together. By coming together, of course, the group also benefits the individual people in the group, but only insofar as they are members of the group.

That differs subtly from groups that are more directed toward serving self interest. Good examples of groups in this category include MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social networking sites, where the environment is designed to support the social needs (personal or professional) of its members. To the untrained ear, the word community may sound permissible in this context, but it ought to sound strained. I am not suggesting that true communities do not serve self interest. As many students of social networks have noted, you cannot expect to build a sustainable community wihout suppporting self-interest. But if that's all there was, the word community would be meaningless. Go ahead and use the word in this context, if you must. But be prepared; you are likely to get an odd look from a smart colleague.

Finally we have groups that have been formed by a third party who shares your interests. Good examples of groups like this are the recent initiatives at Yahoo! and Dell to collect Digg-like consumer feedback to help them design better products and services. We can expect to see many more of these experiments, for they represent what may be the next big thing in social media -- co-creation, a subject that Patricia Seybold nicely explores in her latest book. But it's more than a stretch to call this kind of group a community; it's way off. The host might ultimately serve the interests of the group it has pulled together. But the group has been pulled together at the behest of the host, and it is the interests of the host -- at least in the short term -- that are being served.

(3) Third -- follow the links. In All the President's Men, Deep Throat urged the reporters at The Washington Post to "follow the money"; it was the best clue to solving the case. Deciding whose interests are being served -- and whether it makes sense to use the word community -- can be a tricky thing, because in reality, most successful group experiments on the Web involve an intermingling of self, group and third-party interests. But if you have the skill and the time, see if you can follow the links of communication between the various constituents of the group. If the links between people are many and frequent, perhaps it's OK to call the group a community. But if the links point mostly to the host, then it would be hard to call the group a community (not with a straight face).

Not that there's anything wrong with groups like this. As I said, they are probably the next big thing in social media. But words used imprecisely, or ambiguously, can lead to unpleasant results (recall the "To Serve Man" episode of The Twilight Zone; there are at least two ways that you can be "served"), and it would be wrong to imply that a group's interests are being served if they are not.

NEXT ON OFFICE TALK: "GOOD PROBLEMS TO HAVE"

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[Photo Credit: From "To Serve Man." This image is a screenshot from a copyrighted film, and the copyright for it is most likely owned by the studio which produced the film, and possibly also by any actors appearing in the screenshot. It is believed that the use of a limited number of web-resolution screenshots for identification and critical commentary on the film and its contents qualifies as fair use under United States copyright law.]

Office Talk: "The Meming of Life" -- A Tale About Tailgaters, Baiters, and Aggregators

Several years ago, before this blogging thing became commonplace, I became sadly aware of the fact that Google was becoming the scourge of perceived originality. I'll explain why I am using the word perceived in a moment, but let me first explain what I mean about originality. I am not talking about just big ideas. I mean any idea. Next time you come up with something that sounds truly original, just type it into the Google search box and see what you get. There was that dark day, I believe in 2003, when I tested my originality for thinking up a string of bad names for ethnic restaurants (Dim Sum and Then Sum; Thai Me Up, Thai Me Down; Makes Me Wanna Challah). Only one of the search terms got zero results when I checked on Google (guess which one?). The experience led me to believe that we were entering an age of disbelief that anyone can come up with anything that's truly original.

That might have been my best idea of the year, and had I known what was coming, I might have searched the idea on Google. For what was coming was the age of social media where the impossibility of being original is a given. In fact, as many an eager blogger has learned, you can get further ahead in the blogosphere not by contributing anything original, but by practicing a few blog-tested rules for getting people to link to you. Which brings me to this week's subject for Office Talk, the word meme, in the sense that the word is used and understood in the blogosphere.

If you have not yet been subjected to the word meme,it's a clever neologism invented by new-world atheist Richard Dawkins in an 80's book titled The Selfish Gene. Dawkins was looking for a metaphor to describe social viruses (a phenomenon that would later inspire Malcolm Gladwell to write The Tipping Point) and he came up with an apparently original idea based on an analogy: gene is to biology and evolution as meme is to communication. As the article in Wikipedia notes, a meme, like a gene, is a "self-replicating unit of transmission." It's no wonder that the idea became so popular. Self-replicating messages -- it's a marketer's dream come true.

But it took some time for the word meme to take hold (Wikipedia does a great job in chronicling that history). It was not until the Internet evolved into a socially efficient platform for this kind of transmission that meme could take off. I'm talking itself about the blogosphere, of course, which has embraced the idea so deeply that one of the most popular sites for tracking content has incorporated it into its own name. In these early years of blogging, the social rules of transmission appear to dominate. To see that this is true, just study how certain posts climb their way up the ranks on sites like Techmeme, Digg, and other sites that monitor transmission. For the sake of simplicity, I'll list a few of them here -- in order of effectiveness -- but there are others:

Tailgaiting: I first became aware of this practice while helping a client deal with a competitor who had the fascinating marketing strategy of posting a comment on every single blog post (positive or negative) that my client inspired. My client was enormously popular, and I had to remind him that this thing -- let's call it tailgaiting, illustrating the competing company's longing to appear at the tail-end of a conversation -- had no negative effect on his business. In fact, the buttmunching might have hightened the perception that my client's business was on the rise, and that his competitor's business was in trouble. Which turned out to be true. Tailgaiting, I concluded, doesn't work. I still hold that opinion.

Baiting: In case you missed it, Stowe Boyd recently pissed off the PR blogging world so much that he earned the top spot on Techmeme on a Sunday morning. How did he do it? By questioning the intelligence of the PR blogging world, which, in case you didn't know, has a lot of members (see below -- "aggregating"). Result: lots and lots of people chimed in, including people who hate, people who hate PR people, and PR people who hate that they are hated. Whether Stowe meant it or not, the phenomenon here is called baiting, and it kind of works, if you know what will get people to bite. But, for the record, baiting PR people is easy. It was not the first time they've been called stupid.

Aggregating: I had a college roommate who managed to cope with a bad case of freshman-year social anxiety by studying the freshman facebook and building an impressively wide but shallow network of connections. (He executed his vision with the kind of discipline that would have made even Dale Carnegie proud). And yes, this was way before the days of Facebook, the company. Had I gone to college in the post-Facebook era, I would have told my roommate that his habit was not aggravating but aggregating. As Chris Anderson wrote in The Long Tail, everyone wants to be an aggregator, because it works. A recent case in point: Todd And's list of popular marketing blogs. Before Todd wrote the list, he appeared close to the bottom. Now he's approaching the top third. And it's only been a few weeks.

Yes, aggregating appears to work. But ask anyone who does it (I've done a little of this myself) and if they are honest they will admit that it is deeply unsatisfying. Google may have convinced the world that there's no such thing as orginality. And, yes, the blogosphere may have convinced the world that it's better to get link love than real love. But we are failing ourselves if we give up on being original, because that's the only way to win real friends and influence people. And remember, even if Google tells you that someone has already come up with your idea, it doesn't mean that your idea is not original (though it may be seen or perceived that way) or that it doesn't deserve to be heard. It certainly beats repeating what you have heard, or plying the tricks of the trade that have resulted in the cheapening and meming of life. And in the end, the meming of life may not work at all; as a people, we are quickly developing antibodies to even the most clever ruses invented by communicators.

Incidentally, even that term -- the meming of life -- has already been used, in a very fine article by Dominic Pettman. But before writing this post, I refused to do the Google search, because I had vowed to focus on what I mean before I meme. I'm asking everyone I know -- in my private little facebook -- to do the same.

NEXT ON OFFICE TALK: "COMMUNITY"

Office Talk Resumes Tomorrow

We're having a busy Winter, but I'm ready to post on the OT tomorrow, and I've got a good topic: "the meming of life," i.e., the silly things we do to get attention in the blogosphere. Come back tomorrow .... promise to make it worth your while.

UPDATE: Damn -- got pulled away again. But I've just posted the column.

Office Talk: "Transparency" -- Or Spinning the Spinners in a No-Spin Zone

This is a tale of two Malcolms, with something else in the middle.

Back in 1998, when most of the world had not yet heard the name Malcolm Gladwell -- or blogging, or Google -- the highly accomplished social-science reporter published a piece about the public relations profession entitled,"The Spin Myth." In this much-overlooked article, Gladwell (that's him, above, in a photo from the old days), among other things, asks whether the art of spinning is still effective. It might have been effective years ago, when Edward Bernays -- the so-called father of public relations -- first practiced his black magic. Like persuading Americans that "beer is the beverage of moderation." Like convincing the public that bacon was an essential part of a "hearty" breakfast (and minting the phrase "hearty breakfast" in the process). Like seducing publishers into believing they could sell more books by getting home architects to build more book shelves. But if you look at the marketing that has been most effective in recent history, it is not spin -- which Gladwell nicely defines as the art of "telling stories even when there is no story to tell" -- but plain talk. The father of this style of marketing, says Gladwell, is not Bernays, but Lester Wunderman, a direct-marketing wiz whose first career high was the Columbia Record Club, a finely-tuned mail-order campaign that achieved modest fame in the 1960s. Wunderman's success was based on a very bloggy but pre-blog concept: listening to the customer. It was also based on a very googly but pre-Google concept: carefully measuring and calibrating marketing according to what the customer tells you.

Much of the apparatus of modern-day marketing--the computer databases, the psychographic profiles, the mailing lists, the market differentiations, the focus groups--can be seen, in some sense, as an attempt to replicate the elegance and transparency of this model. Marketers don't want to spin us. They want to hold us perfectly still, so they can figure out who we are, what we want, and how to reach us.

Gladwell concludes his article with the punchline, "we are all Wundermanians now." Many people may have doubted that in 1997 (after all, Gladwell's stock in trade is the counterintuitive). But few today would dispute it. But was Gladwell going too far in his pronouncement that spin is dead? For Gladwell, spin is/was something that PR people and reporters -- the only people who need to tell a "story when there is no story to tell" -- care about. The result is that spin gets trapped in an echo chamber. Customers just want facts, and details about the product, thank you, which is probably why so many PR agencies today find themselves competing for the same budget that goes to Google ads.

Which brings me to this week's topic for "Office Talk": a word that has been subjected to a lot of Big Spin -- "transparency." You've encountered the word, I am sure. In the general world of business, it refers to the practice of disclosing your financial interests. In the world of blogging, where many conversations about PR are happening today, it refers to a specific kind of financial interest -- that is, the company who is paying the bill for the blogger and the blogging. Transparency, the word, was meant to stand for common-sense ethics. But like all fancy words, transparency is open to manipulation. Which appears to be what was bothering PR blogger Mike Manuel when he wrote a post was entitled, "A Failure to Be Honest."
"Okay, it's official, transparency is now the universal PR euphemism for honesty," wrote Mike, linking to Richard Edelman's apology for the 2006 Wal-Mart blogging scandal (you can read about that episode here). Richard had apologized for agency's "failing to be transparent." Not quite the apology that Mike was looking for, or expecting.

This small scuffle between Mike and Richard -- if you want real drama, read B.L. Ochman's commentary -- is instructive in at least two ways. First, there's the irony of using the word transparency in a non-transparent way, i.e., to gloss over the transgression with a word that evokes more of a business standard rather than an ethical rule. Fair or not (I believe Richard was sincere in his apology), it feels like the same kind of verbal sleight-of-hand crooked politicians practice when they apologize for a "lapse of judgment." And in a world where being open and direct is the number-one rule, the use of a euphemism for dishonesty is hard to forgive. Which is one reason why bloggers like Mike Manuel, B.L. Ochman and many others reacted so harshly. Edelman appeared to be spinning the spinners in a no-spin zone.

But there's something else. In the "Spin Myth," Gladwell poked fun at media critic Howard Kurtz for castigating PR people who are so adept in the art of persuasion that they can spin candor as a weapon. Kurt offers the example of a moment during the Clinton administration when the White House won points for turning over mountains of evidence in the Whitewater scandal in an effort Kurtz called "Operation Candor." Gladwell dissects this episode and concludes that the only people being spun were the media, not the public, so no harm done.

But I believe that Gladwell missed the point on this one. In today's world, it is not easy to separate the media from the people, and when the spinners spin, they accidentally might be spinning not just CBS, but you and me as well. The euphemistic use of words like transparency is an affront not just to the Media-Spindustrial complex (Randall Rothenberg's term), but to the literate world at large. It's a perspective that even Gladwell might agree with today (that's him, below, in a more recent photo). In his most recent article for The New Yorker, he lays blame for the Enron debacle not only with Enron managers, but with the public for failing to understand the information that Enron openly disclosed. The new information age requires we all get smarter.

Gladwell may have been right about us in 1998; perhaps we were all Wundermanians. But a lot has happened in the last ten years -- Google, blogging, and the so called "you" economy. Today, ideally, we are all Manuellians -- people who are not just listening, but capable of coming right back at you. Careful who you spin.

NEXT WEEK ON OFFICE TALK: "THE MEMING OF LIFE"

Office Talk: "Hit the Ground Running"

In early December 2006, I copied my business partner Rebekah Mitchell on a proposal that I sent to a prospective client. In the proposal, I used the unfortunate phrase, hit the ground running. Rebekah replied, "is that a military term, or possibly the next subject for Office Talk?"

I learned several things from this experience. One, my partner is capable of being a real smarty-pants; good to know next time I am reviewing material for this column. Two, I am as likely as the next person to use an office cliche (which I knew already, but it was nice to be reminded -- not). Three, I was quite concerned about the month of January, a time I was certain would be challenging for the agency because practically all our clients would be coming back from vacation with big plans for the New Year. I had written the new-business proposal knowing it would be difficult to begin the new year with a brand new client unless we could start the work with them in December.

Hit the ground running is one of those office cliches that suggest we have fantasies that our work is physically -- if not just professionally -- perilous. In the first few months of writing this column, I explored the secret life of the marketing person, whose typical day involves drinking from a fire hose, putting out fires, causing the earth to quake beneath his client's feet. Fires, earthquakes, brainstorms ... it's a dangerous life. And it conjures up fantasies of the truly heroic professions of our time -- firefighting and disaster recovery (disasters, of course, that we cause). So it is not surprising that we should fantasize about another heroic profession -- paratrooping, which appears to be the origin of the phrase hit the ground running (though some people believe the phrase was once used to describe less heroic, though romantic, pasttimes like jumping off trains, and running errands for the Pony Express). Hit the ground running captures the excitement of being called into battle, and it's the kind of excitement that's missing in the life of the average office worker.

But I find this analysis unsatisfying. Office workers -- particularly marketing consultants -- are all prone to daydreaming, true. But there aren't very many Walter Mitty's among us; daydreaming of that kind would be hazardous to one's professional health. A more plausible explanation of why we like the phrase hit the ground running is that the life of a marketing consultant guarantees he will almost always be moving at a different rate of speed from each of his clients. And, in the age of globalization, a near-perfect metaphor for expressing that different rate of speed is the spinning of the globe. When you drop in on client territory, and are forced to adapt to the speed at which things are progressing (or not progressing), you might very well get a sensation of the ground moving beneath you. And if you are unprepared, you will not be able to catch up with the folks on location. Which is why we always ask for time to prepare (my request in December).

But, by the way, have you ever actually tried to hit the ground running? Most of us, of course, will never get the opportunity to do it from a plane. But next time you are on a carousel, skip off the platform early -- as early as it is safe -- and give it a try. Not only is it difficult to hit the ground running. It is difficult to maintain your balance. As I said, we're in a dangerous business. Maybe not heroic, maybe not romantic. But dangerous indeed.

NEXT MONDAY ON OFFICE TALK: "TRANSPARENCY"