Trendy vs. Tried and True

I was sitting among 500 people in the master ballroom of a Vancouver hotel. It was day one of the IABC (International Association of Business Communicators) conference, and I had a pretty clear idea what was to come. This first seminar was about technology. I expected to get one or two data nuggets, but nothing revolutionary.

Two hours later, my brain emerged fully liquefied from an intellectual Cuisinart. The two presenters, one American, one Dutch, had covered blogging, Skype, RSS feeds, del.icio.us, Digg, Technorati, social media and Web 2.0—as several people around me, laptops like extended limbs, live-blogged about the presentation itself.

I felt like someone who had just experienced his first earthquake. Apparently, while I had been sitting comfortably in my padded Midwestern cell, the whole world had changed. I thought I was toast unless I could catch up. Immediately.

Fast forward two days. I’m now sitting in a smaller, partitioned room. The conservative-looking presenter paces and speaks, uses nothing more than an old-school overhead projector as a visual aid. After his recent tenure as the World Bank’s director of communications, what had he identified as the secret to effective communication? Storytelling.

Storytelling?! You mean, the thing that's been around since Cro-Magnon Man?

Yes. Case in point, when he wanted to convince World Bank leadership to move the organization from a lending institution to a global information broker, no one took him seriously. He presented compelling statistics, projected beautiful PowerPoints. Deaf ears. Nothing.

Then he told a story. A local government in Argentina had recently contacted his office wanting to know which type of asphalt to use for a certain kind of road-building. They connected this group with a similar group in Europe that had faced (and solved) the same issue. Connection made, problem solved. Imagine, he said, what we could accomplish just by being the string between the tin cans. It worked.

I find sales, marketing and communications people often caught between the two worlds of “trendy” and “tried and true.” One day, it’s pressure to find out what this social media thing is all about. (“Why don’t we have a Facebook page and a Second Life headquarters?”) The next day, it’s, “Why are we doing all this edgy stuff. We’ve lost focus... let’s go back to our bread and butter.”

It’s a tough line to walk—in fact, balancing tried-and-true principles (telling a good story) with trendy new technologies and media outlets (blogging) might be a communicator’s biggest challenge. But, needless to say, having the judgment to make that call—which requires equal parts open-mindedness and healthy skepticism—can be tremendously effective.