The biggest tension between the people who get paid to market their organizations and the people they hire to help them do so is the tug of war between Focus and Inclusion. I've written about this tension many times, and it has, in fact, become a small obsession of mine.
It goes like this:
When you're paid by an organization to be accountable for its marketing and communications, most of the value is placed on quantity ("We want people to know everything we know about ourselves or product X, because then they'll get it"). When you're paid as a general communicator, on the other hand, most of the value is placed on quality ("Let's find the most effective message and say it in the most effective way").
It's the difference between opening a door (and revealing something shiny inside) and pushing someone in the room and locking the door.
The other night, I was watching The Colbert Report and waiting to see another academic make a good point badly. This happens often on Colbert and The Daily Show. Colbert and Stewart do academia a tremendous favor by temporarily making a Dartmouth professor as sexy as Jessica Simpson (oops, bad choice). But too often, these professors are painfully bad at communicating in the late-night talk show format. Why? Because they want to say everything that's in their heads and in their books. And instead of having the improviser's knack for saying "yes, and..." to every curve ball thrown at them from the host, they're easily caught off guard and stubbornly (and humorlessly) try to maintain their agenda.
What a surprise, then, when Robert Ballard appeared on Colbert. Here's a guy who has either been media trained or just has a natural gift for communication. Who would think that an oceanic archaeologist could be interesting in a mainstream way? But Mr. Ballard knew that he had the time and format to get basically one point across: It's more important to study oceans than outer space. And he succeeded wonderfully.
Watch the clip and notice how he finds ways to say the same thing in different ways (e.g., "We know more about Mars than our own oceans"), and how he seamlessly returns to that message time and time again.
Focus: 1
Inclusion: 0
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1 comment:
He's a natural. And he could be a client since he would meet the 3 criteria.
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