Off-Piste

In case you missed it, yesterday’s Washington Post and MSNBC Online featured an article examining tortured souls who can’t control their addiction to smartphones. PeakTwo founding partners Mike Granetz and Jay Ferrari were two of the tortured souls featured.

The article kicked up plenty of online chatter. Feedback forums for WaPo and MSNBC, which uses Newsvine, had in excess of 100 comments. Stepping back from the controversy and critique, we found it to be a fascinating example of how content impact can evolve (maybe mutate is a better word) depending on audience.

Comparing three online outlets — the Post reader forum, the MSNBC Newsvine forum, and Facebook — it was interesting to observe trends in feedback tenor.

Readers at the Washington Post, which trend toward an older demographic, were tough. Jay was accused of negligent parenting. Mike was a detached husband. Many people were, to be blunt, just nuts. They worked in personal agendas and launched personal attacks. The animosity would have been unsettling to those who don’t realize those folks tend to be a bit ahem marginal upstairs.

MSNBC readers were on a bit more even keel. While the forum’s debate had a bit of personal vitriol, it swung between the dangers of this alleged addiction and the overall advantages of technology. Those readers trend a bit younger, a bit more savvy with online media. Not surprising that more participants would defend innovation and dismiss the stodgy hysteria that dominated WaPo.

Facebook was all congrats and smiles. Of course, we’re referring to our personal and company accounts — the classic captive audience. That’s important to note, however. We’ve built rosters of friends and followers who know us and can see past a one-dimensional depiction.

For this crowd, the placement was a big win for company awareness. Instead of being seen as negligent or absent, we were praised as being well-connected consultants and “hip” parents/husbands who went to great lengths to balance entrepreneurial and familial responsibility.

What does this demonstrate? You can count on a single message to change based on audience perception and agenda. What follows is a need to be present on as many platforms as possible, to lead the response when you can, and participate in the resulting dialog.

At times, you’ll be handing over your identity to fate. Make the front page of a major daily and you can’t be quite sure what will happen. The impressions, positive or negative, are invaluable. We’re sure happy about the SEO impact, for example, and will talk more about that in the next post.

Expert Labs director Anil Dash shares some great insights in this CNN piece discussing the design and intent of the Internet.

Money quote:

There’s no reason that organizations or individuals who want to use the Web to relay critical information have to rely on Twitter or Facebook or Google or any other giant of the technology industry in the first place. We’ve just forgotten a bit about how the Internet was supposed to work.

This calls for nothing less than unvarnished candor: You can’t write. You think you can, and you do a good job on your family’s holiday newsletter, or emails on company policy, or passable proposals. But when it comes to describing your business with precision, clarity, and eloquence, you’re yawningly mediocre at best and borderline schizophrenic at worst.

It’s not your fault. You’re busy running a business. It’s not so much about talent as it is about time. Practice your chips and putts every day, and you’re shaving strokes off your game before you know it. But you have to do it daily to keep the technique in tune.

Same goes for writing. You can’t decide to launch a new website or work up a clutch of new collateral, put all your budgetary muscle into the design, and then think you’re going to “knock out the content while watching the game next Sunday.”

It’s going to be an incoherent mess requiring as much, if not more professional intervention, editing, and proofing to make it work.

Not convinced? Write a reply to this post. Take one minute (a fair amount of time, actually), and another to read through what you wrote. If you’re absolutely satisfied, post your first-pass comment. We’re betting you’ll want to take a few minutes to clean it up before it goes public.

Save yourself the time and trouble. Put a skilled copywriter/editor on the task. Their job is to sift through the stacks of background material, interview the right execs and experts, and produce content appropriate to whatever medium you have in the works. If it’s for the Web, it’s going to be crisp, concise, at times as fragmented and blunt as a bumper sticker. If it’s for brochures or reports, it can be a bit more expository, but it still has to be written with active voice, prioritize key points, and flow with smooth, logical transitions.

Don’t tell us you’ll handle the content. Tell us what we need to pull it together. We’ll set up an editorial kickoff that helps your people understand the best way to share their expertise. We’ll wrangle the research. And we’ll give it the final copy perfect punch, tone and momentum.

You’ll save time, expense, and sanity — and you’ll be able to work on your short game.