This issue has arisen for us recently as a multi-client communications consultancy. Developing communities of like-minded individuals or organisations with shared interests is obviously central to the twitterverse. We would like to help promote some of the interesting things that our clients are up to on twitter, promoting success and giving credit when it is due, but should we declare when we are assisting/promoting a client or service that pays us? Obviously this could only ever be voluntary but is it the right thing to do?

Of course, as ever, the issue is where do you draw the line. Should employees be encouraged to declare they have an interest when they tweet “the company line” or support their organisations’ latest campaign? So is it when someone has a direct financial interest?

Or are people intelligent enough to see through when someone is self-promoting or hard selling?

So what do you think? Answers on a….tweet (@madano).

Your best friend’s voice

Communications trainers speak of the most trustworthy “voice” being your best friend’s voice. Someone who knows you well and with whom you feel relaxed. This is the best voice to use when telling stories.

The primacy of stories

Part of the primacy of stories comes from our cognitive wiring. We cognitively expect information to come at us with a beginning, a middle and an end (call to action). Stories also follow only about 7 basic plots such as the quest and the redemption. These are delivered through a basic structure that is familiar – laying out the challenge, options to resolve the conflict, setbacks and progress, the denouement and the resolution. Even business presentations can be structured this way.

Stories are about people

Stories also work because they’re about people. One of the most startling pieces of information about audience reaction (revealed by a television study) was that people find another person telling a story with emotion to be the single most compelling thing they see on the screen. Not violence, sex, action or beautiful pictures, but people talking with emotion.

Using stories to deliver your presentation

It is a lesson well worth remembering when preparing business communications. So many times, we are shown deathly dull powerpoint slides, chock full of graphics, arcane statistics and way too many words. What’s completely missing is any sense of presenting a story – why the fund is worth investing in, what the product could mean to a firm and how it addresses their needs. In contrast, a business story with a beginning, middle and end, told by a person with the ability to add his or her own personal stories related to the presentation, makes the story more believable and infinitely more interesting.

Show a bit of humanity

In the end, it is this willingness to share; to bare a little bit of ourselves and our humanity, and to relate this to the discussion at hand, that sells, persuades or moves. We so seldom do this and even the smallest attempts repay big dividends. Remember audiences are rooting for presenters. They want you to succeed and deliver them from another boring 40 minutes. Telling stories is the best way to do that.

Beware the “fake” corporate narrative

One caveat: there is in vogue right now the notion of the corporate narrative or story and how these can be wielded to produce external differentiation and internal engagement. But there is a world of difference between the authentic corporate story, well told and backed up by lots of personal employee and client stories – and a corporate narrative that is a mission statement simply fattened up for Christmas.

Remember people see through the insincere. They yearn for authenticity. And the best stories can’t be faked. That’s because they have a special ability to draw us together. To make connections. To bring our emotions into play. And in so doing, to become memorable.

I know these stories aren’t new, but over the last few weeks they seem to have picked up pace. It’s been reported extensively that five of Johnson Press’ daily titles – Halifax Courier, Peterborough Evening News, Scarborough Evening News, Northampton Chronicle and Echo and Northamptonshire Evening Telegraph – will become weeklies, although their online presence will be beefed up.

This isn’t just a UK phenomenon. I came across an American website called The Newspaper Death Watch which lists papers that have closed down in the States although The Leader News in El Campo, Texas which I briefly worked on, still seems to be going! Interestingly, the site claims that newspapers are the fastest shrinking U.S. industry. Online publishing, however, is one of the fastest growing industries.

Is it just a sign of the times on both sides of The Atlantic? Inevitable progress in a digital age? Perhaps it is, and I have to admit that I like to read The Times on my Kindle in the morning, but it still feels strange to me.

It is said that The Halifax Courier broke the news of the sinking of The Titanic, while The Northampton Chronicle and Echo serves a town with a population of around 200,000 people that boasts a top flight rugby team, a county cricket side and a professional football club. Obviously a place in journalism history and being a primary news provider in a large, busy town doesn’t make you immune from budgetary and circulation pressures and a younger population who consume information electronically as the norm.

Maybe online will be the saviour of local news but I think the demise of “paper” will have a significant impact. The newspapers, not just in their content and editorial stance, but in their design as well, reflect the nature of their town or region. When I go online to check regional stories I’m struck by how similar the websites seem. This is undoubtedly due to so many local papers being part of big groups and achieves the necessary convenience and economy of scale for the owner, but it does little to give them an identifiable personality.

Could there also be a knock-on effect for the quality of national journalism? Britain, despite the odd hiccup, is rightly regarded as being at the forefront of reporting. Will the loss of regional and local papers, a traditional training ground for national print and broadcast journalists, mean that the next generation are missing some of the skills and experiences that have always been considered vital?

Only time will tell – but for all media watchers, consumers and practitioners it’s going to be interesting. Now let me just check the latest on The Leader News’ website.

A series of creative postcards and an interactive animation based around the theme of heroes and clones, successfully drove traffic to the Orion and generated numerous new business meetings.

Reproduced from PR Week magazine with the permission of the copyright owner, Haymarket Business Publications Limited.

To see the full Madano note click on the following link:
Queens Speech 2012

Published on Bloomberg, two weeks before the iPhone went on sale, it dubs the iPhone as “nothing more than a luxury bauble that will appeal to a few gadget freaks.”

My first thought was of course that hindsight is a funny thing and that this journalist and the analyst he quotes probably should have invested in a crystal ball.

But beyond this being an amusing read, the article is a startling reminder of just how far communications and our attitudes towards communications have come in the past five years.

Although Apple didn’t invent the first smartphone, the iPhone kick-started a technical revolution that took the smartphone out of corporate offices and into homes as the ‘must have’ consumer product, providing constant and on-the-go access to email, news and perhaps most importantly, social media.

Back in early 2007 Facebook had around 20m users (compared to just under 1bn today) and Twitter was only just reaching its tipping point, hitting 60,000 tweets a day (in comparison to 340m in March 2012).

The need for 24-hour news has long been a challenge in the media and comms world but the rise of the smartphone has spawned a reliance on social media and instant news that requires a whole different kind of communications strategy. The 2011 Japanese earthquake and the Norway shooting are stark proof that Twitter can break a global news story long before a traditional newsroom can.

We know that companies and their communications teams can no longer rely on traditional media to feed the ever hungry need for news, and a digital/social media presence is fast becoming ever more important for success.

Who knows where social media and mobile technology will advance further over the next five years; we certainly shouldn’t be broadcasting our predictions. The important thing is that it will advance, developing a way to make information even more accessible and with this will come interesting new challenges and exciting opportunities for communications.

Click here to view the article on Bloomberg.com

Have we really reached a parallel dimension where news happens before events, so when the events happen no one knows the outcome? I sometimes yearn for the simple times when you actually had an event, a proposed course of action and then it was debated – don’t you?