Editing Engineers

I had a frustrating meeting the other day with a very engineery startup. They are making some of the coolest stuff I have seen in a while. I just couldn’t convince them they need an editor to help make their technology more understandable… accessible… market-friendly.

I won’t say who they were… but I do run into this a lot. The way many companies describe themselves makes it really tough to go from seeing how cool their stuff is to figuring out what problems it will solve. Mostly because the examples they give are so incredibly technical and theoretical. Editing the examples will make a huge difference.

Sometimes it reminds me of my first job after college. I was a reporter for a community newspaper. I had an actual editor who taught me a lot. But perhaps my most important editor was the guy who ran IT. He was transitioning several newsrooms from an ancient publishing system to a new one using PCs and standard desktop publishing software. Because I had worked during college in the desktop publishing department at a Copymat (helping people format their resumes etc.) the IT head recruited me to help sell his new system internally. He asked me to create examples of the graphics that were possible with the software for a presentation he was to give to the board of directors. I excitedly created a slew of squiggly lines and shapes and patterns. No go. The IT head said “nice squiggly lines, but this will have no relevance to the board.. we need to show clear examples of how the technology can save the company money, make the company more nimble and efficient…” I was geeking out.

The IT guy (an engineer, BTW) was editing me.

One ironic thing about my recent frustrating meeting is that the CEO is a huge (gushing!) Apple fan. A fan of their technology.  He seems to miss that they are a great company ALSO because they are brilliant communicators.  Look at the picture of the Mac at the top of this post. An engineering-only company might have written what engineers are trained to write when they create a new program: “hello world”

Somebody edited the engineer.

Removing one word made the computer friendly, human, approachable.

BTW… here’s another post about how important one word can be. It also happens to be about Apple. And if you’re into the idea of editing, here are a couple more posts: Where Blood Tasted of Blood and Honey of Honey and Less is More.

Untoward

Strollers.. photo credit "skeddy in NYC" via Flickr and Creative Commons

Did you see the Op-Ed bit in the NY Times a couple of days ago about forward-facing baby strollers vs.  the other kind — apparently called “toward-facing” strollers?  The piece highlighted the author’s research into whether parents talk to their kids less when the young ones face forward (vs. toward their parents) — therefore possibly slowing childrens’ language/communications development. It was an interesting article, a nice kind of Gladwellian view on the long- and wide-range impacts of seemingly little things.

Me.. personally.. I liked the idea of my kids facing forward to the world and soaking it all in. My view is they learned a lot about communicating by seeing others interacting. Lord knows they probably would have gotten pretty sick of staring at my face for all those hours in the stroller.  Plus there were many times when we’d stop, I’d turn the stroller toward me in a cafe and we’d get a coffee. (Well, I’d get the coffee… I’d get them something else.) And we’d talk.

UPDATE: lots of letters to editor at Times here.. and a funny graphic too

Communicating a Fraud… The Flaws of Perception

As many have written, Ponzi schemes are usually built on trust  … on tight social networks (in the pre-Facebook sense). From the perpetrator’s perspective, there is an inherent communications decision here.. using social networks as communications channels. You don’t market your product via a TV ad or newspaper or web ad.. your ads are people who take your messages into their trusted social networks.  And everything about these people communicates.. their clothes, their language, their jokes, their friends, their hair, their cars.. very subtle social/cultural cues that build trust.

In the massive alleged Madoff scheme, communication was gilt-edged… it took place in glamorous, elegant settings, sheathed in layers of wealth. (The NY Times has a very interesting piece on how Maddoff allegedly communicated and distributed his product in this way).

Potential customers clearly WANTED to believe. If they saw clues that something was seriously amiss, they looked past them. In retrospect there were clues. This image of the offices of Madoff’s outside auditor (how hard would it have been to find this office before dropping a few million dollars or euros into a fund?) gives a VERY DIFFERENT image/message. That naked cinderblock with the oozing cement IS the reality. It’s sheathed in NOTHING.

More photos at Yahoo News

Seeking a New Kind of Genius … Mashing Up the “Ultimate Insider” and the “Ultimate Outsider”

A couple of weeks ago I attended one of the most interesting conferences on media (media writ large, not the narrow ad-agency definition) that I have attended in some time. I have written a bit about it since (just poke around the blog).. but I wanted to devote a week of blogging to it now that I have had some time to digest. So… welcome to Day One of “Monaco Media Forum Week” at everythingcommunicat.es — a highly-subjective kind of Cliffs Notes.

One of my favorite panels featured two people. One was billed as the “ultimate insider” — Maurice Lévy of ad agency conglomorate Publicis Groupe. The other was billed as the “ultimate outsider” — Niklas Zennström of Kazaa, Skype, and now Joost — and his venture firm Atomico. The two were interviewed by Financial Times editor Lionel Barber.

The twain shall meet!

After setting up the insider-outsider schtick, Barber said: “Mr.  Zennström, as we know, has helped to destroy the music industry, the telecoms industry and he is now trying to destroy the network television industry… and Maurice and I are here to…”

Almost without missing a beat, Lévy said “stop him.”

Barber finished: “you said that without my lips moving.”

(BTW.. I’m not sure Barber is quite as old-school as he made himself out to be in this exchange. The FT’s digital coverage is some of the most solid (and least breathless and hyperbolic) that I have read.)

I was interested in what Lévy and Zennström had to say, of course, but actually more interested in what they didn’t say — what you might call the “negative space” of the panel.

I really wanted to know what each secretly wants to know about the other — what he feels the other has that he does not — even if this is totally subconscious.

Each of the two is clearly brilliant in his own way. Levy speaks of the sensual.. of feelings that communications can evoke. Zennström speaks of platforms.

Zennström’s platforms, of course, carry very sensual, emotional material. Kazaa carried songs, Joost carries video, Skype carries voice and video data and, as such, is the new way to “reach out and touch someone.”

And Lévy knows a thing or two about platforms. His emotional/sensual communications have been pushed over platforms — like TV networks — and made consumers on the other end laugh, cry and buy. Plus.. he actually started at Publicis as an IT guy!

But still…

Communications, branding, advertising and media today needs leaders who are, in effect, mashups of these two guys. People who are A NEW KIND IF GENIUS– a genius that understands both platforms and emotional content.

This hasn’t been the case for a while. Platforms (like TV networks) became so established that the underlying technology became basically irrelevant to content creators. And that made sense.

But  we are in too crazy a time right now characterized by emergent platforms/technologies.. each different.. each with very (or subtly) different characteristics. … a time where the platform cannot be separated from what is carried on it.

As emergent forms of media settle down and achieve scale, there will again be a time for people who understand one half really well. For now though… we need people who know both.

If you wish.. the panel is here: