Creating Thumb-Stopping Content in a (Formerly) Page-Turning World, Part 2

I was the keynote speaker at the Oct. 27-28 Anabaptist Communicators Conference at Bethel College in Newton, Kansas. I was asked to speak about the challenges facing communicators today, and some ideas for going forward. Below find Part  2 of my address, about the challenges; click here for Part 1, an introduction and exploration of some of the challenges facing communicators today. 

Part II: Some Ideas for Ways Forward

1. There’s no going back.

My grandparents were married in England in 1912.

It was a traditional immigrant story. My grandfather emigrated to Canada in 1911 to get a job and get established. Then he went back to England to marry his fiancée, and bring his new wife back to their new home.

He wanted to do something special to celebrate the wedding, so he tried to book passage on the most famous ocean liner of that day—the Titanic.

For some reason, he was unable to buy tickets for that ship. Instead, they had to travel on the Megantic, which left later.

I never met my grandparents—they died before I was born. But family lore has it that my grandmother refused to step on a ship again for the rest of her life.

But that’s not why I am telling you that story.

I’m telling you that story because all the way to Canada, my grandmother apparently cried. She missed her family so much—and she knew she’d probably never see them again.

We are like my grandmother, on a ship to a new world (hopefully, not the Titanic!).

Like her, we can’t go back. We will never set foot on those old familiar shores again. The old communications ship is never going back.

Family lore also has it that my grandmother’s inability to get over the loss of her old world made her life in the new world unhappy—for her, and for others.

What does this mean for communicators?

We older communicators especially need to avoid becoming like that. There’s no use pining for what was, or hoping things will reverse themselves. It won’t.

You’ll just make yourself miserable, and everyone else around you, too, pining for the good old days—and maybe prevent younger people from getting the support and space they need to come up with something new.

2. Say yes to the future. 

About 50 years after the invention of the printing press, the Abbot of Sponheim wrote in defense of scribes.

For centuries, scribes were integral to the preservation and dissemination of information. But then the printing press rendered them obsolete.

This did not please the Abbot. He argued that preserving their way of life was more important than making books more quickly.

Well, we know what happened to scribes.

What does this mean for communicators?

Early in my career, I received a bit of good advice: Whenever a new opportunity comes along, the answer is always yes.

Not always “yes we will do it,” but always “yes we will explore it, and consider it”—unless it is obviously unworkable or unsuitable.

Communicators today need the same posture for new ideas about their future: When a new opportunity comes along, the answer is always yes—let’s take a look.

After all, you never know where the answer you are looking for will come from.

Don’t risk losing it by saying no.

3. Ask the right question.

A question that is on the mind of many today is: What is the future of magazines and newspapers?

It’s an interesting question.

It’s a provocative question.

It’s a question that’s sure to elicit a lot of discussion.

The problem is it’s the wrong question.

It is akin to somebody in the 1960s seeing the decline of travel by train and asking: “What’s the future of passenger trains?”

The better question would have been: “What is the future of transportation?”

Why is that a better question?

It’s a better question because railroads weren’t the only way to transport people.

As we know, by the late 1960s the long-distance passenger train was mostly dead, replaced by airplanes and interstate highways. Today it is a niche player in the transportation system.

It’s similar for magazines and newspapers.

The better question in that case is: What’s the future of sharing information?

Why is this a better question?

This is a better question because it’s about the thing that won’t go away: Communication.

What does this mean for communicators?

For the past couple of hundred years, words on paper has been the way we have communicated with each other.

But like what happened to passenger trains, that form of communication is declining.

But while passenger trains, and news in print, are waning, the need for transportation, and communication, won’t disappear.

It will be replaced by something else.

In the case of magazines and newspapers, the need to read and get information will always exist, but the need for paper magazines and newspapers likely will not—at least, not to the same extent.

People will still read. They will just read differently.

Figuring out how they will read and get information is the Holy Grail. 

But before we find that answer, we have to ask the right question.

4. Think mobile.

Brodie Fenlon is Senior Director of Digital News at CBC in Canada. He was a speaker at this year’s Canadian Church Press convention.

In a wide-ranging presentation, he covered a number of topics about the digital revolution that is overtaking legacy media—both print and broadcast.

The question he asked us was: Is the content on your Facebook page or website “thumb-stopping”?

“You have to stop the thumb,” he said of the way most people get information today—on their phones.

Good content, he went on to say, “is no good if doesn’t work on a phone.”

Fenlon noted that we tend to view newspapers as a “legacy” media that was disrupted by the Internet.

But today the Internet itself—in the form of the Web on a computer—is now also becoming a legacy media that is being disrupted by mobile.

He noted that no communications technology has been adopted as quickly as the phone, with over 90% of people 18-34 now owning one.

“The war is on to win the audience on this thing,” he stated. “Over the next few years, the battle is to be won or lost on the smartphone.”

He said that already 63% of CBC’s audience comes to the broadcaster via a mobile device.

The CBC “still has a huge desktop audience, but future growth is phone,” he said.

What does this mean for communicators?

Like for the CBC and everyone else, the future is the phone.

What we have to say needs to fit into that small screen in someone’s hand.

Goodbye to long, pensive essays—for most people, at least.

So long to long articles that explain the intricacies of a drought or the scholarly reasoning behind educational changes.

There is still a need for that, and places for it.

It’s just not online—at least, not on mobile.

5. Think different for mobile.

Still with Fenlon, he noted that one of the problems we run into as communicators is that we design mobile content on desktop computers, not on phones.

The things we create may look great on those big screens, but look terrible on a phone.

What that means is if we design them on desktops, we need to check the posts later to make sure they display the way we intended.

We also need to think about headlines.

Our tendency is to use the same headline for a press release, a website and for social media.

For press releases, it’s important to share the most information in the headline to catch and hold the attention of journalists.

On websites, it’s important to include key words like names of people, places, organizations or groups so that Google’s robots can find them.

But on social media emotion is vital if you are going to get thumbs to stop.

What does this mean for communicators?

As Fenlon said: “You need different headlines for social media. You need to speak to the heart on social media, not to the robots.”

This means the sometimes there needs to be two different headlines and images—one for the website, and the other for Facebook.

It also means checking our posts on a phone to make sure they look OK.

6. For video, words matter.

A great way to communicate with people today, we are told, is video.

One thing we might not be as aware of is that more and more people watch video on their phones—with the sound off.

This is fine if it’s a video of someone falling off a skateboard in a spectacularly funny way; no words are required.

But if you are trying to explain the situation in Haiti following the hurricane—then not so much.

What does this mean for communicators?

What more organizations, political parties and businesses are doing is putting captions on the video, so people can read what is being said.

It might look clunky, but if it communicates what we are trying to say, then that might be the best way to go.

7. Don’t worry if you can’t see very far ahead

Looking back at history, we tend to see things as unfolding in an orderly and predictable manner.

But that’s not the way things work.

This was emphasized to me by a book I read this year titled The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe 1944-45.

In it, author Rick Atkinson noted that when people look back at that war, they see a logical and orderly march from the D-Day landings until the surrender of the Nazis.

It was, in fact, not like that at all. For much of the time, victory was anything but assured or foregone.

“War is never linear," he wrote, "but rather a chaotic, desultory enterprise of reversal and advance, blunder and élan, despair and elation."

What he was talking about is what is commonly called “the fog of war.”

That phrase was coined by Prussian military leader and theorist German Carl von Clausewitz who said:

"War is the realm of uncertainty; three quarters of the factors on which action in war is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty.” 

What does this mean for communicators?

As communicators, we are not in a war—and as Anabaptists, we usually don’t use war analogies

But I think it can be fairly said today that we are on the “front lines” of a communications revolution.

For maybe all of us today we feel like we are lost in smoke and fog, taking one step forward then two steps back, maybe making progress, trying this, giving up on that, sometimes gaining or sometimes losing ground.

Sometimes we are even unsure what the grand plan is—or if there even is one.

Internet guru Clay Shirky put it this way in his well-known essay, Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable: 

"This is “what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen.”

Fifty or a hundred years from now, someone will write a book and make sense of all the things we are going through in communications and media today—just as has been done about the Gutenberg revolution 500 years ago.

In the meantime, it’s all foggy. And that’s perfectly normal.

8. Be ready to go back to the Future

We all know that old media is dying today. Newspapers are closing. TV news stations fear they are next. Journalists everywhere are losing their jobs.

In its place we have new media—digital. Facebook, Instagram, Vine, etc.

Out with the old, in with the new, in other words! Sorry for all those lost jobs, but there’s no stopping progress.

We are going boldly forward into the future.

Or are we?

Maybe what is actually happening is that we are going back to a much older time—back to the future.

So instead of thinking about what new things we need to be successful in the digital age, maybe we could see what we can learn from the middle ages.

That’s the idea suggested by British historian Andrew Pettegree in his book, The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself.

In the book, Pettegree makes the point that what we see today as old media—newspapers—is relatively new in human history.

The modern newspaper, and the practice of journalism itself as we know it today, only goes back about 200 years.

Before that, few people would have had access to news from far away. Almost all news was local—you would know what was going on in your town, and maybe in towns one or two over.

So how did people get information?

They got it personally, delivered by friends and neighbours, some of whom had travelled to other places.

Reviewing Pettegree’s book in The New Statesman magazine, veteran newspaper editor Peter Wilby wrote: 

“In the medieval world, news was usually exchanged amid the babble of the marketplace or the tavern, where truth competed with rumour, mishearing and misunderstanding.

“In some respects, it is to that world that we seem to be returning.”

What does this mean for communicators?

These days, fewer and fewer people are reading newspapers or watching TV news or getting information was traditional sources—including our organizational websites.

It’s not that they don’t want information. It’s just that they are looking for it in other places.

And what is one of the fastest-growing sources of information? Facebook, or other social media.

And who provides them with that information? Their friends.

Or, to put it another way, Facebook today is the equivalent of that old middle ages tavern or marketplace.

It’s the place where people gather with their friends to exchange information about what’s happening in their “town.”

Now, this is a change from the way things have been for a very long time.

In place of trusting only your neighbor,  we learned to put our trust in a neutral third party that had no stake in the outcome.

And so we grew to trust the New York Times and other media, to see them as authoritative.

Today, however, we live in an anti-establishment and anti-authoritarian time.

The traditional things people used to trust—government, the church, the police, the media—are under intense scrutiny and suspicion.

Today people are more likely to trust their friends—maybe not the best policy, but there it is.

They see their friends as more trustworthy because they know them.

They are people from their own “towns,” both real but also virtual—communities on social media that are made up of people that are defined by relationships or shared interests.

Facebook is the new local tavern, in other words.

For communicators, this means we need to be part of that local tavern, sharing news with our friends who can then share news with their friends.

We need to develop relationships with them, but just ask them to trust us because we have some sort of authority.

And if that means having a beer with my donors and readers, I’m all in.

9. Don’t offer the full meal deal

The Canadian government is reviewing its website standards. A couple of analogies are being employed to help civil servants make websites that visitors find useful.

The first analogy is that of animals hunting for food.

Users, civil servants are told, are “informavores” who “forage” for information.

Like animals, the look for an “information scent” online.

When they find one, they ask themselves: “Am I getting closer to the prey?” and “is it an ‘easy catch’?”

The closer they get, the more they want to know: “How ‘rich’ is this hunting ground?”

If they lose the scent, or don’t find their prey, they quickly leave.

The second analogy is that of snacking.

In one section of the new guidelines, web content writers are encouraged to “Be a Snack” and to “avoid making readers/visitors sit down for a full meal!”

Most people today are web snackers. They are not looking for 1,000-word essays on topics.

An article in Adweek put it this way: “Forget news reading. Today, it’s all about ‘news snacking,’ meaning people are checking the news more often and typically on mobile devices.”

What does this mean for communicators?

It means a few things we already know.

First, keep it short. Be the snack. 500 to 700 words is maximum. Shorter is better. 

(People who know the inverted pyramid style of news writing have a head-start in this regard.)

Second, make sure you leave lots of information scents throughout the Internet.

Ask yourself: Are you easy to find?

Are you using words that Google recognizes to help it find you?

Third, remind yourself that you are not doing anything wrong by keeping it short or using keywords your colleagues find too simple.

Don’t let them cause you to doubt yourself. Just because they are brilliant in their area of expertise doesn’t make them brilliant in yours.

In your area, you are the expert—not them. We won’t tell them how to manage water projects, teach a class or address injustice. That’s not our area of expertise.

They need to resist the urge to think they are experts in our area, too.

Because from what I can tell, it’s better to be short and read, than not read at all.

10. Learn why a story goes viral

Why do some things posted on social media go viral? What do they have in common?

That was the question raised by Maria Konnikova in the New Yorker in 2014.

In the article, Konnikova referenced research that analyzed about 7,000 articles that had appeared in the New York Times in 2008 to see which ones were shared the most.

The research found that two features predictably determined an article’s success: how positive its message was and how much emotion it provoked.

It wasn’t just happy thoughts that made something go viral; stories that made readers angry or anxious—about a political scandal or a risk for cancer—were as likely to be shared as one about cute kittens.

How a story is framed also affected its virality.

A story about someone who was injured that focused on the preventable cause of the injury was shared less frequently than one that emphasized how the injured person was overcoming that injury—even though it was the same story.

What does this mean for communicators?

It means we need to think of ways things can go viral. This means understanding things like:

•    Timeliness & immediacy. Are we posting about something that is happening now?

•    Currency. Are people talking about this?

•    Impact. How many people are affected? A lot of just a few?

•    Proximity. Is it close to home or far away? If far away, can the distance be shortened?

•    Human Interest. How does it affect real, live people?

Of course, there are lots of things about virality that are beyond our control. Who would have thought dumping ice water on your head would go nuts?

These include things like the mirroring effect. People don’t just share something because they think you will be interested in it; they share it because of how it might make them look to you. Before they share something, they wonder: “How will this make me look if I share it? Will I look smart? That I care?”

So: All you need to do is write short, well-written stories that are positive and arouse emotions—those are the ones that go viral.

Good luck with that—especially if you work for an international relief agency which has so many sad stories to share.

And whatever you do, don’t let programmers or people in the international programs or policy departments get their hands on it.

They will surely drain the story of all emotion and personality by the time they are done with their edits.

And that will certainly never go viral.

11. Tell stories

Speaking of stories, that’s still the key to our work.

That’s what ESPN has discovered.

ESPN built its brand on sports news. But on social media, straight sports news isn’t a hot or appealing commodity.

"What is least shareable is the final score, or how many points each team has,” said Nate Ravitz of ESPN.

What people want to read and share, he said, are the stories that make athletes relatable or exceptional.

"It’s stuff that is outside of the day-to-day construct of sports,” he said “It’s Rob Gronkowski’s cat. It’s a coach dancing in the locker room. It’s the moments we have conversations about, and we want to tell it the way you would tell your friend at the bar."

What does this mean for communicators?

While it is tempting to share the “score”—how many people are made hungry in a drought, the cost of a disaster, the number of incoming freshmen, the number of churches involved in a project—that’s not what garners attention on social media (or many other places, I’d wager).

What people want to hear, and what they will share, are the stories of people who are hungry, who lost their homes, who overcame an obstacle to start college, or who are dealing with disease.

Ever since people gathered around the first campfire, they asked: Tell me a story. That’s still true today.

12. On social media, have the right stuff.

Remember the movie (or the book) The Right Stuff? It was about the men who flew in the first space flight program in the U.S.

Back then, only men who were strong, tough, macho and brave were seen by NASA to have “the right stuff.” 

Today, it’s a different story—people who have “the right stuff” know how to use social media.

That's what I conclude about how NASA conquered not just space, but the social media universe during its mission to Pluto.

When NASA’s New Horizon’s spacecraft began to beam back photos of the former planet, after a 4.8 billion kilometre journey of over nine years, it took social media (and most other media) by storm.

How did NASA end up the darling of the Internet? And what can non-profit communicators learn from them?

First off, it helps to have access to some of the coolest photos in the universe, and the drama of exploration in space.

But even that is not enough. After all, there are no people on those spacecraft—they’re just machines, and machines have no personality.

Or do they?

That’s one of the first lessons NASA learned, back in 2008 with the Mars lander.

Back then Veronica McGregor, head of social media at NASA, decided to give it personality by Tweeting in the first person.

“Atmospheric entry has started,” she posted. “Time to get REALLY nervous. Now I'm in the ‘seven minutes of terror.’"

“Parachute must open next. my signal still getting to Earth which is AWESOME!”

“I've landed!!!!!!!!!!!!! Cheers! Tears!! I'm here!”

Today, NASA has the 104th most popular Twitter account in the world, with over 11 million followers.

"I was a little worried that the space community would think that was silly,” says McGregor of what she did with the Mars Lander.

“But the minute I did a tweet in the first person, suddenly all these people started writing back. We have a voice now that we didn't before."

What does this mean for communicators?

When communicating about programs, try to infuse them with personality.

Don’t just re-hash press releases or share dry statistics.

As one author put it in an article about the Pluto mission:

“On social media, people share things that make them feel really big, crazy feelings. ‘Look at this awesome or amazing photo.’ ‘Watch this incredible video.’ ‘Read this astonishing essay.’”

This personal voice gets at the heart of how social media functions: It makes people care.

It also speaks to a deeply evolved brain function.

Psychologist Paul Slovic of the University of Oregon wondered what caused people to give to one need but not another.

During the research, he told people about a young girl suffering from starvation and then measured how much they were willing to donate to help her.

He told another group about the starving little girl, but also noted the millions of others like her who are also suffering from starvation.

What did he find?

"People who were shown the statistics along with the information about the little girl gave about half as much money as those who just saw the little girl," he said.

On a rational level, this doesn’t make sense. 

You would think that talking about the hundreds of millions of people who are also hungry would bolster the argument by showing the seriousness of the situation.

The problem, Slovic says, is that the numbers de-motivate people.

By adding the statistics, people felt overwhelmed by the enormity of the need, “that nothing I can do will make a big difference," he says.

Slovic's research suggests that the way to combat this hopelessness is to focus only on one person. This gives people a sense that their intervention can, in fact, make a difference.

In academic circles, this is known the singularity effect.

Through the singularity effect, people are more motivated to help a single person in need than millions of people.

This response occurs at an unconscious level; it’s what our brains automatically do.

Says Slovic: "As the numbers grow, we sort of lose the emotional connection to the people who are in need."

For communicators, this means not forgetting the big picture, but also remembering that when it comes to connecting with people, it’s the little personal pictures that seem to work best.

13. Listen to your audience

For a long time, media outlets depended on reader surveys to tell them what people wanted to read, hear and watch.

Also for a long time, they heard that people liked things like international and political news.

Then the web came alone, and overnight the media discovered they had been lied to.

All those years when people said they wanted deep, important and thoughtful stuff, they were actually mostly reading sports, gossip and advice columns.

It’s not that people were not telling the truth; they were just fudging it on surveys.

What they told the media is what they believed they should be paying attention to.

They were giving them aspirational answers, in other words—what they knew they should be doing, but not what they were actually doing.

And so when I ask my editors at the Winnipeg Free Press what stories get the most clicks, it’s always sports, followed by Miss Lonelyhearts.

International news is way down the list.

Two years ago BuzzFeed released a review of traffic to sites within its partner network, including the New York Times and The Atlantic. 

Of the 20 most viral stories across those sites, just three dealt with recent news events.

What was in the top most shared items? Quizzes, lists, and emotional poppers. 

Iraq, Afghanistan and the economy—three important topics—didn’t rank high at all.

In an article in Atlantic Online, titled "Why Audiences Hate Hard News and Love Pretending Otherwise," Derek Thompson put it this way:

"Ask readers what they want to eat, and they'll tell you vegetables. Watch them quietly, and they'll mostly eat candy."

Audiences, he went on to say, "are liars, and the media organizations who listen to them without measuring them are dupes.”

Before the media could precisely determine what people pay attention to—before there were eyeballs on our eyeballs—it was hard for them to know exactly what we were doing.

But now the media knows. And what they know, as Thompson put it, is that “readers lie.”

What does this mean for communicators?

We also have to be careful when we do surveys.

We also have to be careful not to take our cues about what we publish from within our organizations.

It is easy for the voices of our colleagues, and the voices in our own well-read heads, to drown out the desires of our audiences.

We may think they need vegetables, and should eat them, but anyone who has little kids knows that it isn’t easy to accomplish.

Just because we like broccoli—things like Christian education, foreign aid, missions or a hundred other things—doesn’t mean others are.

Of course, we have to post harder stories on our websites and social media feeds—we need to. We owe it to our partners, and to our mission.

But we also have to trust our web analytics. They tell us the truth about what people want.

And what most people want is not broccoli.

14. Stop Thinking Like a Publisher

The Winnipeg Free Press is not a newspaper.

It used to be, editor Paul Samyn said recently. But not today. 

“We are a news engine that produces a newspaper—and a website, a Facebook page, video, livestreaming, and a salon,” he stated.

Today, he went on to say, the Free Press is “trying to shake off the print legacy. That legacy doesn’t work any more.”

“We are not a newspaper, but we publish one.”

This change is being forced on them, he went on to say.

“The biggest change is the pace . . . we used to make people wait 24 hours to get the news from us. People don’t want to wait that long any more.”

One thing they no longer think of are “print deadlines,” he stated. “If something is ready, we post it.”

This is different than in the past, when a newspaper would wait until it had all the information before publishing.

“Now, we know we can do more digging later,” he said.

Samyn’s comments reminded me of what Barth Hague, Chair of the Board of The Mennonite, said a couple of years ago about changes at that publication.

The Mennonite, he said, had moved “from being a magazine to a content distribution system," he said of how it now offers a traditional print magazine, website, blogs, podcasts, video and a weekly information e-mail.

"The traditional methods of sharing content are waning—it’s rapidly becoming digital now," he said. "The media are being transformed."

What does this mean for us as communicators?

Just like the way the media is being transformed, non-profits are changing, too—or should be.

Like with the traditional media, non-profits also need to stop thinking about the channels we use to share information—and about things like deadlines and issues.

When something is done, up on the website it goes; no waiting.

Like I said earlier, it’s the time of the great unbundling. That means your production schedules, too. 

15. If social media is the problem, maybe it is also the answer.

Quirky is the name of company that builds products dreamed up by amateur inventors.

From its office in New York City, it invites all sorts of slap-dash doodlers from around the world to send them ideas for overcoming challenges and problems—no matter how strange, weird or fantastic.

Quirky then takes the best ideas, giving them to skilled engineers who take them through the design, manufacturing and distribution process.

This new way of solving problems is called “combinatorial innovation”—taking the idea of crowd-sourcing beyond its traditional use of raising money and using it to create new products.

Says one of Quirky’s founders:

“There are tons of creative ideas out there. The greatest thing about digital technology is that it’s easier than ever to get lots of eyeballs looking at our biggest problems.”

What does this mean for communicators?

What if together we created a way for people to share their ideas with us about better ways to communicate? What if we joined forces to find some new and unexpected answers?

Opening up the conversation in this way could be a game-changer.

Not just because you’d have more shots on goal—to use a hockey analogy (I am, after all, Canadian)—but also give different shots from surprising angles. Shots from people and places you never expected, or never would have imagined.

This kind of thing isn’t new in the Mennonite world.

Thirty-two years ago, a couple of Mennonite visionaries named Barth Hague and Burton Buller saw the potential of video—then a new technology—for the church.

They didn’t have the Internet back then. Instead, they held a conference.

They created Video-Comm ’84, a conference where theologians, church leaders and communications practitioners could dream up new ways of using the new technology to communicate with the church and the world.

The result? By the late 1980s, Mennonite church agencies were leaders in producing video for congregations, and for major U.S. networks.

I attended that conference, as a newbie communicator. It opened my eyes to new possibilities, providing ideas, inspiration and encouragement to try new ways of sharing information.

Maybe it’s time for us to do something like that again, maybe online this time. This time it could be called Web-Com or Social Media-Com or Where-the-heck-are-we-going-Com.

And anyone can participate. All ideas are welcome.

Because you never know who has the next big idea for how to transform the way we share information about our organizations. And it may not be anyone in this room.

16. And finally, start where you are.

The situation we find ourselves in today reminds me of the old joke about the traveller who is lost in rural Ireland.

He stops a farmer and asks: “How do I get to Dublin?”

“Well,” the farmer replies, “if that’s where you want to go, I wouldn’t start from here.”

But here is where we are.

Where we go next is anyone’s guess.

Let’s hope we don’t go there more-with-less.