articles of interest

The rise of the digital storyteller

[This is a blog post I wrote for Marketing in Australia].

The decline of the mainstream media in the face of the expansion of Internet-based communications has been well documented. Less well known is the concomitant declining quality of news stories themselves.

At its heart, the news is a product that media companies sell and to which people have assigned their trust.  Traditionally, the news has been produced by standards-based journalism that is, at least in theory, motivated by the pursuit of truth, resourceful in the use of research, informed by facts, governed by standards and edited with balance.

The rise of digital communication has put the traditional news media at the eye of a perfect storm.  On the one hand, declining attention spans and ever-shorter deadlines increase the need for news outlets to report ‘the facts’ as rapidly and succinctly as possible.  On the other, declining advertising revenues impact the ability and willingness of news companies to hire top-flight reporters and editors.  As an unfortunate result, sensationalism, speculation and speed trump research, analysis and accuracy.  This decline in editorial quality is driving a parallel decline in the trust of media.

Ironically, in an era of around-the-clock broadcast news channels and ‘always on’ commentary via the likes of Facebook and Twitter, we have a lot more content noise but actually far fewer news stories.

Stories are fundamentally important when it comes to educating, inspiring and persuading people.  Stories provide a way to tap into the subconscious mind and touch the feelings and emotions that drive daily purchasing and behavioural decisions.  At a time when brands are increasingly expected to act like people, stories form the fabric of human communication and, when used effectively, are very powerful motivators of attitudes and behaviours.

Leading brand strategists have long recognized that messages woven into a narrative are more compelling and attract higher recall than messages pushed at an audience via overt communications such as traditional paid media.  And yet the marketing conversation still tends to revolve around advertising and the role it has to play in convincing today’s new connected consumers.

Public relations practitioners, meanwhile, have spent their careers trying to persuade executives that they should invest more in ‘earning’ editorial media coverage of their brands in news stories rather than ‘buying’ paid coverage through advertising.  Because people can readily identify ads when they see them – and we tend to think that ads are supposed to be present during times and places we expect them to be – they attach less credibility to their claims.  But if they see a product featured in a news narrative, people are less likely to be suspicious and more likely to trust brand messaging that isn’t visibly purchased.

As trust in media declines, though, the traditional wisdom is turned on its head.

If it is true that a declining media business can no longer generate an ample supply of compelling story content then what is to prevent companies from generating that content themselves? If it is true that resource constraints (i.e. too few journalists with scant time to prepare stories) are reducing some media outlets to automated and uncritical conveyor belts for pre-packaged marketing information passed to them by PR people, then what is to prevent companies from filling the void and telling their stories directly to the public?

The ability of modern corporations to build and enhance their reputations is no longer constrained by the traditional news media model.  The modern corporate storyteller has access to a range of digital communications platforms that can reach audiences in many different ways and draw them into the brand experience in a way that traditional media could never hope to replicate.

In many ways, the rise of digital storytelling is simply a natural progression for PR people.  We finally have the freedom, the tools and the channels to communicate in the way that, at heart, we have always dreamed about.  Now we need relationship connections not just between dozens of journalists but among thousands of people. Public Relations has always been about the artistry of relationships but because digital is by definition about data, now PR is evolving into an evidence-based science where results can be measured as never before.

When I started my agency life 21 years ago, the work of PR primarily involved pitching and placing publicity through interaction with journalists. This will continue to be of central importance to the profession. But these days we also need to know how to think like the media producer in programming content for scrolling social media streams while thinking like the researcher in applying an advanced mastery of analytics to campaign planning and accountability for results.

Where data meets design is the ‘sweet spot’ for digital storytelling. Information overload means we must tell complex stories in a simple yet compelling way in the blink of an eye and thus the rise of the infographic as the most transformative trend in PR at the moment.

Digital storytelling – and, by extension, brand storytelling – is not about pushing messages, it is about building relationships.  The scattergun approach doesn’t work here.  Instead, companies need to invest the time and resources to evaluate the relationships that drive their business, use the available channels to listen to the online conversation and then engage in a manner that is transparent, authentic and, above all, human.

18 reflections after 18 months away from PR

by Bob Pickard

Last year, when I elected to leave Edelman (where I served for six fiscal years, most recently as its North Asia President), it was time to come home to my native Canada and reconnect with friends and family after 13 years overseas.

I wasn’t sure whether I would ever return to the public relations business. Even with the exciting advent of social media and a plethora of stimulating industry sectors and consulting services from which to choose, PR can sometimes be a simple and repetitive occupation. I was feeling the need to hit the career ‘pause button’ and take stock of whether there’s enough meaning and fulfillment in the business where I’ve built a two decade career.

Early in 2010, I will be starting my next international PR adventure. I’ve been fortunate to build businesses living in four countries during the past two decades, but before we ship out for the fifth and hopefully foremost experience, I want to share some reflections after this, the third year-plus sabbatical of my career:

1. First impressions matter (‘how to start’) but so do the last impressions (‘how to leave’). There is a troubling tendency in the PR business for the quality of people to be judged by how much damage their departure inflicts on an organization, but I think the better measure of true executive timber is how well the organization succeeds afterwards owing to sound fundamentals built over time plus effective succession planning.
2. It is really important to take time for mid-career breaks to do some serious reflection, because like most modern information workers, PR people don’t have enough time to think — reflexive ‘doing’ often eclipses reflective thinking, and so critical skills either atrophy or remain underdeveloped.
3. At the same time, clients are underwriting advanced PR thinking with larger budgets than ever for ‘big brain’ consulting…whereas the economic basis for the basic commoditized PR of tactical order-taking is shrinking.
4. It’s more fun to have the money chase you than to spend a career chasing the money, so there’s a strong incentive for all professional communicators to increase the value of their time by growing the size of their PR brain through a relentless commitment to continuous improvement and lifelong education. That means reading books, fostering relationships with opinion-leaders, and learning new ideas from other disciplines.
5. With the flight to premium quality consulting gathering momentum, there has never been more commercial potential for insight-driven communications; recommendations rooted in research, assertions backed by evidence, strategy informed by analysis. Especially compelling is the PR firm that understands the psychology of persuasion, the power of digital storytelling, and client expectations for intelligent issues management.
6. PR really is becoming more of a measurable science than an intangible art…digital technology makes all forms of PR more accountable, and clients will rightly demand that agencies take responsibility for results.
7. At the same time, there have never been more ‘PR maven’ poseurs and ‘communications guru’ wannabees; too many ciphers who ape the rhetoric of the business, devaluing the PR industry currency but also increasing the stubborn determination of clients to tune out the ‘noise’ and find the ’signal.’
8. A lot of the self-styled social media ‘PR 2.0′ punditocracy who occupy a center stage that owes much to their just having been online using the new technology first — to be much admired from a pioneering perspective — weren’t in a lot of cases really on the PR industry stage before then. They weren’t ‘PR 1.0′ people or even practitioners during earlier analogue days in the early/mid-90s. There are some exceptions, but much of this crowd is so into the technology, they can’t map the latest cool new app to the real consulting world.
9. Then, on the other hand, a lot of the more experienced true-blue PR pros just don’t have the innate grasp of the technology, which changes in a more nimble way than the manner to which they have become accustomed. Most of these folks know that social networks are important, and may even be skilled at making exciting speeches about the brave new social media world, but they aren’t personally comfortable with the pace or the processes demanded by digital communications.
10. Because many of the people within these two solitudes often don’t talk to each other or understand what the others are really saying at the ‘unconscious’ level, there is an urgent need to bridge the generational divide in the agency business.
11. The most important thing in PR life is to work with bright, interesting and fun people who share a passion for being the best they can be, accomplishing new things that have never been done before, aiming at setting the highest PR standard. I know that sounds like management rhetoric, but I agree with the philosophy that the journey is just as important as the destination.
12. It’s essential to believe in what you are doing and to sincerely articulate your company’s point of view, but equally imperative to maintain a balanced perspective and not get too caught up in the synthetic artifice of hyped organizational myths.
13. The global PR industry is a small town (the biggest firms are only approaching half a billion dollars in revenue), so while we need to be unafraid of advocating our unique mission in marketing, individual egos and sales claims should be scaled accordingly.
14. Especially in light of the disintermediation effect caused by the rise of social networks online, it is vital for PR people to know how to ‘meet and greet the public’ offline, in-person, face-to-face. PR remains a highly tactile social undertaking, a people business. Particularly valued is the idea of contacting people when you do not need them for something, because when you do, they will remember your interest in the broader mutual relationship, not just in a narrow selfish transaction.
15. Because they are so rare and retro, old style analogue communications techniques like hand-written thank you notes, phone calls instead of e-mails and personal visits have tremendous impact.
16. Arguably more than in other fields, there are too many ‘politicians’ in PR, folks who will say they are your friend to get what they need for their careers, or be two-faced and say different things to different people in a vain attempt to be liked by everyone, but in the end this approach always fails to earn respect because it’s true that ‘what goes around comes around.’
17. Principles matter, and so is practicing what you preach. PR people are getting more powerful (because we now program media content in addition to brokering journalist relationships), and so the ethical dimension of our work demands honest reflection, not merely glib lip service.
18. Money is the vital energy of the PR industry; numbers keep score, but aiming at the quality first drives the revenue, whereas aiming at the revenue excessively can result in mediocrity.

Choosing the right PR firm

by Bob Pickard

During the past few years, and especially lately, I have been repeatedly asked by young people how they should determine what kind of PR firm to try and join (especially, in the case of students, after they graduate). Let me be transparent in admitting that I’ve been doing some of this thinking for myself recently, and soon I will be embarking on my next PR adventure.

My usual counsel starts with this critical question: is the PR firm going up, treading water, or going down? In every case, I obviously suggest trying to join the agency whose best days lie ahead, because its economic advance will help create the rising revenue tide of client work that propels young careers forward through richer learning, higher earning and more express routes to promotion.

It’s easy enough to advise that much, but the query that follows is more challenging: “How do we know if a PR firm is poised to grow in the future?”

There is no easy answer, and every agency goes through the peaks and troughs of a business cycle. But let me offer a few observations rooted in repeated personal experience gained in several countries and a few firms over the years. In my opinion, these are some key factors that help shape which way an agency is about to go:

What is the track record of the firm’s leader and is s/he still strongly motivated? Even at their largest global size (approximately half a billion U.S. dollars in revenue), compared to other industries, PR firms are pretty compact organizations and so the leader looms relatively large (and I mean global, national or local leader, depending on the recruitment context). Past results are strongly suggestive of future success, so knowing the size and shape of the firm today compared to when that person first assumed office is a fundamental issue. Still, past performance is no guarantee of future success and so some educated speculation should sensibly be considered. Looking at where the leader is on the career timescale can also be an indicator of results around the corner. Does this person still have fire in the belly because there are important wars yet to be won, or is there a satisfied complacency evident because what the leader set out to accomplish initially has already been met or even exceeded?

Who are the senior people and what is their motivation? Looking at the top executive guns in an agency’s arsenal and assessing their caliber is hard for a newcomer. How long they’ve been there is one telling measure; generally, assuming there is at least some new blood in the senior ranks, if most people have been with an agency for a long time, it means good things. It signals that they probably like working together and have co-created success through mutual trust and collaboration. There are exceptions to this ‘loyalty’ tendency, however. Sometimes senior people have suffered for a long time making compromises in an unhappy situation, because in the end they expect that there will be a considerable financial reward for their career sacrifice. So, while there may be shared interests around commercial objectives, disillusionment can also be a common bond. It’s not easy to find out if a company is a happy place or not, but I do know that in professional services, the happier firms with higher morale are the places to be. My own view is that the PR journey should be as enjoyable as any financial destination, and I do believe in this respect that it’s possible to have your cake and eat it too.

What is the ownership structure of the firm and can people earn equity as they rise through the ranks? I’ve worked for a publicly traded group and privately held independent agencies, and I can say there are pros and cons to each. The public firm can offer a fantastic breadth and depth of integrated group resources that deliver the full might of marketing where PR can be amplified by the powerful resources of a whole constellation of partner firms, but there can be impatient stock market pressures, corporate bureaucracy and sometimes PR can seem the junior partner. The privately held agency can provide a laser-like focus on PR, enjoy greater marketing freedom and act more agile with an entrepreneurial zeal, but private owners — and I’ve been a minority shareholder with two agencies — can act capriciously in what can be ‘messy’ unstructured environments where more systemic accountability, better corporate governance, and less random management would be ideal. Public or private, the key thing is that star players have a pathway to owning shares and increasing their equity position in return for consistently well motivated strong performance.

Who are the employees of the firm? Generally I would suggest that the most diverse consultancy has the edge. The more multicultural, the better, but I am not just thinking about ethnicity. PR is becoming an overwhelmingly female profession, and while I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that, having run several offices across cultures, I can say that around the world, work life seems more fun and business can be more dynamic in mixed environments. The same goes for age and marital status. Having a blend of grey haired experience and youthful vigour makes a more complete operation, and offices where some are married and others single can be more exciting shops than ones where everyone is the same. Again, it’s hard to know these things from the outside looking in, but there are cues available online and if you ask around.

What is the staff turnover at the company? In general, there’s high staff churn in agency PR, but in some firms (and in some offices), there can be a constantly revolving door. Statistics are hard to come by, so trying to connect with former employees can yield valuable insights. Especially useful is knowing how successful the person to whom you would be reporting has been at recruiting, training, developing, and retaining talent. Does this person attract or repel strong people? During the job interview, if the person asking you questions seems to have thought about you and your career path rather than only what the company needs at the moment, then that is an encouraging indicator of it understanding the no-brainer truth that managing people well today is the key to generating profits tomorrow.

What is the character of the firm? Does it live its values, or just talk about an idealized image? Most PR firms list similar values, so knowing where these are practiced and not just preached can spell the difference between a delightful and disappointing PR firm experience. For example, if an agency seems to excessively emphasize integrity in its communication, does that mean it is sincerely the most ethical firm, or is honesty a sensitive area for some reason? Let’s look through another lens; everyone and their uncle say these days that their firm is a ‘thought leader.’ My advice is to look at a firm’s intellectual capital and consider its purpose. Is it being applied to help create positive business outcomes for clients, or does it look as though it is there primarily for agency marketing, to create the image of being the thought leader? Is the company synthesizing things that have been said by others, or is it actually articulating something new? Is it paraphrasing the same themes year after year, or is there a progression of fresh content that’s breaking new ground? The answers to these questions say a lot about a firm’s personality.

How does the company communicate itself? I am a big believer that ‘PR needs more PR,’ and so I think looking at how firms communicate their own story is strongly suggestive of their consulting quality. I would be skeptical about firms that don’t communicate much about themselves, but equally concerned about consultancies that communicate too much. Is a humble story being told, or is a boastful myth being sold? Self-congratulatory claims of superiority often reflect an arrogant hubris, so I suggest assessing such hyperbole carefully. Each firm should show the marketplace that it can handle its own PR in a way that inspires confidence worthy of being entrusted with conducting clients’ communications campaigns. I’d also look for content consistency as a plus and contradiction as a worry. Does the firm offer advice in the media about how clients should do their own crisis communications, but then bungle their own crisis handling? In general, PR firms are notoriously bad at managing their own internal communications (like doctors making lousy patients I guess…), so finding out how key people milestone announcements are made — and how succession is handled — can often be quite illuminating in seeing an agency’s executive competence in its true light. The PR firms that do their own internal communications well are often the best managed and highest quality consultancies overall.

Who are the clients and how long have these relationships been going? The continuity of client relationships anchors any agency and I think looking at who the customers are — whether they are leaders in their sectors — and how long they have been working with an agency says a lot about whether or not it is a client-centric environment. Client centrism and a focus on results rather than the appearance of activity is a critical augury of a firm’s fortunes.

These are just a few factors that I think play a role in deciding an agency’s future trajectory, a key issue in deciding which firm to join. What usually happens is this: the agencies that rally the most potent combinations of talent to build clients’ businesses — sustaining team cohesion and continuously improving quality — are the best places to grow one’s career. If you can find such a career sweet spot, embrace it and treasure it because such planetary alignments are altogether too rare and too temporary.

Thinking about public relations

by Bob Pickard

When I worked at Hill & Knowlton in the early 1990s, I knew that there was a John Hill and a David Knowlton who founded the firm in 1927, but for most of us employees then, the history of the firm didn’t loom very large. In general, I find this to be the case across wide swathes of the PR industry. I don’t think most practitioners know enough about their own company’s past or indeed about their own occupation’s roots.

PR people have been called the ‘world’s most powerful information workers,’ so especially if that mighty moniker is true, then we have a responsibility to take more time to actually think about our profession, to consider where it comes from and where it is going, and to be less ignorant of our own history. All too often, we are just swept along in a quotidian current of disposable information with scant opportunity to survey the whole picture and map our actions against broader contexts.

PR people aren’t just suffering from ‘attention deficit’ or ‘information overload’ or ‘continuous partial attention’ (multitasking is a myth as this NPR report shows). Regardless of how media of all kinds these days are now compressing forests of information into trees and increasingly twigs (with programming edited for flea-length attention spans), we still possess what has been called an ‘executive mind’ that is able to switch between different sources of information. The main problem is that we tend to switch between too many things too quickly. Therefore, to understand concepts more complex than a soundbite, we need to make a deliberate decision to use that mind and force its focused attention for ample periods of time on important issues that should command our interest.

Especially because we are in a position through our work to readily grasp things like the fragmentation of the public mass media commons into atomized private streams, we have a unique perspective to share; we need to illustrate a deeper and more profound view. Perhaps owing to legacy factors such as the PR industry’s past modest scale subservient to advertising, a service solicitous of journalists and gratified by client praise for the resulting publicity, I think we PR people sometimes have a tendency to be too conformist, too intellectually incurious, too timid about asking bigger questions. Then there’s the tendency to parrot (or just ‘Re-Tweet’) trendy-sounding but simple rhetorical explanations about our business from glib boasters or slick sloganeers.

“What’s past is prologue” said Shakespeare, and this is an apt expression for the modern public relations industry because I sense a lack of memory and of thinking (as opposed to just saying ‘yes’ to any passing fad and reflexively ‘doing’). Some trends that are actually old seem new again, but if we don’t recall history and apply its lessons, then it seems to me that we aren’t getting any wiser.

Recently I experienced an epiphany on this. I have been giving a presentation on PR campuses (next up is Humber College on January 20th) on the ‘digitization’ of persuasive storytelling, and emphasizing how the unconscious mind (or the ‘emotional brain’) is key in marketing and how metaphors can be marshaled when content is communicated as a ‘conversation’ to make PR narratives more compelling.

I include several contemporary sources in this speech, but also cite Dale Carnegie, whose 1936 book How to win friends and influence people remains a relevant classic. I don’t include any material from Edward Bernays’ seminal 1928 book: Propaganda. Most PR people who know of it are repelled by the book’s equating of public relations with propaganda, but I think it is largely unknown to most modern practitioners. It includes a chapter called “The Psychology of Public Relations” that contains some chilling parallels — written 80 years ago — with what some depict as modern communications practice.

Recently I came across The Century of the Self, a BBC documentary that looks at the roots of 20th century mass marketing (especially things like the unconscious mind and the psychology of persuasion), and was reminded that breathless digital jargon aside, many of the concepts that are being trumpeted as ‘new’ today go at least as far back as the First World War.

I certainly don’t agree with everything this TV series says, but I do think that getting alternative viewpoints helps us gain perspective on our profession. In that regard, The Corporation and Manufacturing Consent are two classic documentaries of the genre. These videos cast PR in a pretty sinister light, in an exaggerated, misleading way relative to what I know is current practice.

Even though it makes some of us feel uncomfortable to admit it, it is pretty clear that PR shares a common history with propaganda. However, I feel that there has been a clear divergence between these concepts. I’ve repeatedly chimed in with this point of view before, in The Japan Times newspaper and in BusinessWeek some years earlier.

When it comes to PR industry credibility, it does the profession no favors to pretend that all we do is “share perspectives” or “create relationships” or “listen to stakeholders” or “engage in dialogue.” It’s true that PR people do all of these things, but we’re not doing them for academic purposes or just for the heck of it. We’re in a persuasion business, trying to get people to do or think what we are hoping they will do or think.

In that sense, very little has changed in PR since its birth. What has changed is we’re transparently letting people know what we’re doing, and while deliberately misleading and manipulating people for nefarious purposes is now seen as the province of propaganda, PR has earned its distinction as a practice of ethically sharing information openly so that people can reach their own conclusions.

Digital storytelling in public relations

by Bob Pickard

Recently I read Buyology, Martin Lindstrom’s colorful book about neuromarketing, which posits that people tend to remember products when they are woven into the narrative – the story – of media content, and that they tend not to remember brands that don’t play an integral role in the story because people can see them as being ‘just ads.’

Well, this contention certainly makes sense to me, because like most PR professionals, I’ve spent much of my communications career trying to convince skeptical executives that they should invest more in ‘earning’ editorial media coverage of their brands in news stories rather than ‘buying’ paid coverage through advertising. The idea is that because people can readily identify ads when they see them (and we tend to think that ads are supposed to be obviously present during times and places we expect them to be), they attach less credibility to their claims. But if they see a product featured in a news narrative (that might result from a PR person’s pitching of a story to a journalist), they will probably assume that a company did not ‘pay for the play,’ and so are less likely to be suspicious and more likely to trust brand messaging that isn’t apparently manufactured artifice.

I learned a long time ago that the news is a product which media companies sell, but people have attached a value to it because it’s been produced by a journalism industry that – whatever its systemic biases and flaws – is supposed to be motivated by the pursuit of truth, resourceful in the use of research, informed by facts, governed by standards and edited with balance so that people know that the glass is half full and half empty.

The problem now is that the economic basis of that kind of journalism is crumbling, and so the quality of the editorial product is declining. As a result, I think people trust media stories less than they did before. There are fewer good reporters around, and not as many exacting editors. Battles about editorial ethics versus just going with what a company hands you for content are less frequent as money is the only thing that seems to matter.

So there are fewer eyeballs reading a shrinking number of trusted news media stories. Media companies have tried to make the news more entertaining (‘info-tainment’) and opinionated (e.g. FOX News), and the result of this debasing of journalism is a further reduction of news’ credibility. But if Lindstrom is right and a brand’s involvement in a story is still the best way for a product to get noticed, then what do marketers do about the fact that there are fewer trusted news sources producing a shrinking number of stories that will be credible enough to have commercial impact even if there is product mention?

Well, we see great efforts towards making advertising seem more like media stories. The ‘advertorial’ is an old trick for this purpose, but everyone recognizes such a blatant approach (thus its low impact), so now we see many more movies and TV shows where the plots are explicitly scripted to sell product surreptitiously. In other words, to sell unwitting people products embedded within story lines. Simple product placement has been going on for decades, but this scripting trend takes commercial penetration of the public media mind to a new level.

About stories in the news media that contain a PR-earned product mention, some people might ask: “Is this really the news?” Nowadays, regarding stories in the entertainment media that contain scripts written to sell products, surely more people will be asking “Is this really entertainment?”

That’s assuming they notice the products. But I think people are increasingly sophisticated and will see through such insidious marketing technique. Maybe more will want their marketing interaction straight-up, honestly transparent?

Richard Edelman – one of my mentors and an articulator of trends extraordinaire – is fond of saying that these days, “every company can be a media company.” If a declining media business can no longer generate an ample supply of compelling story content, and especially if owing to resource constraints it is becoming an automated and uncritical B2C conveyor of pre-packaged marketing information passed to them by publicists, then why can’t corporations fill the void themselves and communicate stories directly to the public? Certainly they have the money and the talent to create the content, aided by a massive and accelerating ‘brain drain’ from journalism. I am certain that helps PR agencies – including Edelman, which I served for six years, latterly as North Asia President – do a brisk business selling their ‘master narrative’ corporate storytelling tools, the bricks and mortar for everything a persuasive marketer needs…from the speech module content for executives to succinct elevator pitches for ‘spontaneous’ encounters with stakeholders.

But wait a minute: people would immediately see that a company is using such techniques as advertising and so they won’t trust it, right? I disagree. Increasingly, it seems people think marketing can be credible if they are involved, not just reading someone else’s story, but feeling like they are part of the plot themselves.

Old-style advertising assumes a passive person just sitting there consuming information. Individuals can follow cues and do what they are told, but they are atomized and feel insignificant alone. Therefore, as people trust traditional institutional sources of top-down vertical information less and less, we’re seeing them create their own horizontal peer-to-peer communities of trust, which can now involve friends, family, peers plus even corporate PR people who engage them in conversations, asking them for ideas or opinions (‘crowdsourcing’ is one current buzzword), thereby making them feel personally important as ‘co-creators’ of a brand’s experience.

Going back to Dale Carnegie, we know that making people feel important is the precursor to persuasion, and so once these PR-driven interactions foster that feeling, then stories are sold as conversations. Much of this is calculated illusion, with the objective of getting people to commit themselves in writing to a brand online (i.e. publicly, in front of others).

For those of us who have read Robert Cialdini (and I am a fan of his material), we know that when people commit themselves in public to something, they have created a new image template of themselves – including, for example, ‘as the kind of cutting-edge person who uses this cool product’ – which they will advocate to others within their personal networks of trust – Trojan Horse-like – as a credible peer. They will do and say whatever is necessary to conform with their new public image, and to evidence complete consistency with what they’ve said in ‘conversations’ online.

So it’s no surprise that these days there’s also a lot of work being done at PR firms in the area of ‘conversation communication’ and ‘digital storytelling’ and where the two meet allows persuasion marketers to tap into the power of metaphor (an area where reading Gerald Zaltman is a must). Conversational communication enables the easy application of metaphors used in everyday language for the development of marketing narrative to convince consumers about a product brand with story ‘frames’ that their minds have already developed at the unconscious level, which is where most marketing decisions are made.

Recently I posted on my Facebook page this article from The Boston Globe that delves into the psychology of metaphor, and my astute friend Michael Ferrabee summed up the situation nicely with this posted comment: “They [metaphors] force us to form mental pictures that are like glue to our memory and mainline directly to understanding.”

If almost all the public media time and space is embedded with product marketing messaging, then people who don’t trust anything in the public ‘media commons’ could become so cynical as to believe nothing and become more susceptible to the programming spectacles and short-attention span editing that critics of corporate power say are deliberately designed to keep people from seeing how they are really being manipulated. But now that our private media minds are being mined for marketing in such a scientific manner (including the use of the brain scans outlined in Buyology), it’s important for people to pay attention so that we retain conscious awareness of the increasingly sophisticated techniques intended to get us to do and think what marketers want us to do or think.