Talk Normal

Sugar pill cynicism

ethics , marketing , pseudo science

Fri, 29 Jan 2010

Just a quick Friday afternoon update to say the Talk Normal massive is in favour ofthe 10:23 campaign: a bunch of protestors is going to take a massive overdose of homeopathic remedies tomorrow. It’s in protest at the spread of these sugar pills to parts of the world where they can have a genuinely damaging effect on health, but also at the decision of pharmacists like Boots to market them.

There’s no point in me going over the arguments again why something that is diluted so much that it doesn’t have a single molecule of the active ingredient in it might not work beyond the placebo effect. That has been covered excellently elsewhere, and if you can’t believe that homeopathy is silly you’re unlikely to be convinced by me; or, furthermore, to worry because I think you’re an idiot.

Boots makes a different argument: if the pills don’t actively harm people, and customers like to buy them, why shouldn’t Boots sell them?

Because, I say, Boots has a privileged position in the UK which allows it to make surplus profits as long as it acts ethically. To explain: when I was researchingScoring Points, my book about what Tesco did with its Clubcard data, I heard how Tesco discovered that its young female customers often stopped buying products from the pharmacy aisle for no obvious reason. Tesco did some more research, and discovered that they were going to Boots instead. What suddenly sent them to Boots? They were pregnant, and more concerned about their health. Even though Boots was, on average, 20 per cent more expensive, they valued it as one of the few retailers that they trusted to do more than just sell them stuff.

Which is why it’s ethically not good enough for Boots to admit to a parliamentary committee that there is no evidence that homeopathic remedies are effective, but continue to profit from them (“I have no evidence to suggest they are efficacious. It’s about consumer choice and a large number of our customers think they work,” is the quote). It’s an example of how customer service is mutating from “we’re here to help because sound advice is more important than short term financial gain for you and us” (the reason why the mums-to-be swapped from Tesco to Boots, or what banks used to do) to “If you’re paying, then we’ll give it to you”.

In the first case, the sort of brand trust that Boots enjoys has a meaning, and can conceivably justify charing higher prices than a supermarket. In the second, the Boots brand is just a label to help separate you from your disposable income.

Boots certainly isn’t the only company that’s going down this path, and maybe commercial homeopathy is small beer in the the face of the Great Branding Cynicism of the early years of the 21st century. When it comes to cynical marketing, it’s not as if Big Pharma’s got clean hands, is it?

Homeopaths seem, in my experience of them, to be pleasant people who believe in what they are doing. Good for them. Boots, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to believe in homeopathy as anything more than a source of revenue from gullible people – and for that it deserves any bad publicity it receives.

This year's revolution. Or one of them, anyway

buzzword bingo , marketing , news , technology

Fri, 22 Jan 2010

As we put our feet up and mix the first martini of the weekend, we turn our thoughts to what the next week has in store for us. If you’ve been reading the blogs you’ll know that we are on the verge of a revolution. Thanks to Apple’s tablet computer nothing will ever be the same ever again, except for the 10 million people in the UK who have never used the internet, the one third of Europeans who haven’t either, or the 4 billion people in the world who’ve never even used a phone (let alone used one to download an app to tell them where the nearest sushi bar is). But, in the developed world, we organise our revolutions around the availability of consumer electronics these days.

I thought I’d look into how good Apple and Microsoft have been at getting us to mount the barricades for their respective revolutions.

The first chart shows how well, over the last 10 years, the companies have been doing at converting claims that they are revolutionary into news stories that agree with the premise. I restricted this to technology news in newspapers. The line zigs about a bit, but as you can see Microsoft wasn’t making much headway until last year. Windows 7 seems to have got journalists a bit excited – although the line shoots up mostly because there were far fewer Microsoft press releases claiming a revolution than there were in 2008 (when it did nothing particularly revolutionary at all, but was twice as likely to claim that it did).

The second chart takes claims for revolution in any year and subtracts Microsoft’s coverage from Apple’s. If the dot is in the top half of the graph, Apple is winning. In the bottom half, it’s Microsoft. It shows that while journalists are more comfortable saying that Apple was starting a revolution (purple line: top half for the whole decade), Apple’s PR too (orange line) is becoming increasingly comfortable with this particular example of meaningless hyperbole. At the beginning of the decade Apple almost never claimed to be revolutionary. Now, perhaps encouraged by the willingness of journalists to pass on the message, it is three times as likely as Microsoft to claim its products are revolutionary.

In the interests of full disclosure, I’m typing this on my iMac while syncing iTunes with my iPhone. I just paid 59p for an iPhone app that displays a little red alien called Carl. In its own way this app is revolutionary: when I say things to my phone such as “Only an educated and productive people can be truly free,” or “Not a grain of sand will we yield to imperialism,” Carl says it back to me in a cartoon voice while waving his little fist. You can also tickle him.

I’m sure that in the old days we would wait until we had actually seen the product before we decided that something was going to cause a revolution (The Segway, of course, was an exception). Meanwhile if the breathless anticipation of Apple’s iThing continues in the press, Microsoft’s going to spend another year being less revolutionary than Apple. Maybe that’s what happens when you’ve been the status quo for ever.

Faint traces of buttock

CSR , ethics , national statistics

Wed, 20 Jan 2010

In September 2009 The Times Bugle podcast described an apology by the former CEOs of bailed-out banks in front of a UK parliamentary committee as “not so much half-arsed, as containing barely detectable traces of buttock.“

As the CEOs of the large US banks appear in front of their senior politicians to admit to as little as possible – while approving billions in bonuses from trading in a market created and supported almost entirely by central banks – it’s worth having a bit of a buttock rummage in the press to see what’s motivating our CEOs to do good.

What are we writing about corporate social responsibility these days? After all, when money’s tight, it’s a pretty obvious thing to cut back if money is more important than ethics.

On first look, there’s good news in the press coverage of CSR. The consistent rise in the number of stories about it since 2002 has continued. There are about four times as many articles about CSR now as there were in 2002, which suggests that interest hasn’t gone away:

What are these stories about? Business ethics in general have been in the news quite a bit in 2009, yet the number of stories that mentioned CSR alongside ethics or ethical behaviour, and didn’t talk about profit, dropped off suddenly:

Still, doesn’t look too bad; the long-term trend is slightly upward. And this is arough measure: it would not capture a story about how ethics are more important than profit, for example.

Now if we look at the similar graph for CSR stories that mention profitability but not ethical behaviour, we see the opposite effect in 2009: a sudden jump.

Note the scales were different; so to see what’s really going on, let’s overlay the two trends:

Gosh! Our search is not perfect, but in 2002 there were the almost the same number of ethics-not-profit stories as profit-not-ethics stories. Since then the number of ethics-based CSR stories hasn’t really shifted, and is now declining. But look at the coverage for CSR-as-profit! That’s really taking off.

A couple of possible explanations: maybe the only way to protect a CSR programme right now is to convince shareholders and CEOs that it is all about making pots of money. Or maybe we’re all just writing stories about balance sheets now, and find business ethics a bit irrelevant.

In the banking industry in the last 12 months – a sector that has been accused both of being ethically-challenged and far too motivated by profit – there have been 82 stories on CSR that mention ethical behaviour, but not profit. There have been 548 (six times as many) CSR stories that mention profit, but not ethical behaviour.

You might think that business, and especially the financial sector, has often been half-arsed about its social responsibility. If so, these graphs seem to suggest (in Bugle terms) that the press coverage of those responsibilities shows increasingly faint traces of buttock.

Cheer up: Blue Monday will soon be over

abuse of statistics , pseudo science

Fri, 15 Jan 2010

I’m not looking forward to 17 January 2010, which at this desk will be known as Crap Sunday, one of the unhappiest days of the year for Talknormalists. Why is this? Because Crap Sunday comes one day before Blue Monday, the arbitrary media invention of the most depressing day of the year, and so it marks the beginning of the (luckily short) season of pseudo-scientific stories which show that this day is, apparently, mathematically depressing.

I’ve written about rubbish equations before, but much to my surprise my blog post alone hasn’t solved the problem. And so this weekend we must hunker down for the annual attack of the idiots.

How the game-changing game has changed for game-changers

buzzword bingo , jargon , marketing , weasel words

Wed, 6 Jan 2010

It comes to my notice that Google has launched a phone. But not just any old phone: Google has launched a game-changing phone. I’m not sure that anyone has explained to me the specific game that mobile phone companies are playing (though if my recent experience with Orange Mobile Broadband is any guide, one version of the rules is called Shaft The Customer), but 147 articles in the telecommunications press recently have decribed Google as changing some game or other.

This is, lest we forget, after Apple has already changed the same game. The 249 articles which describe Apple in the same way peaked in 2007, so we must assume in this case that Google is re-re-changing the game that Apple re-changed after Nokia changed it after someone else invented it. Or something like that.

When we look at telecommunications in general, few games have been left unchanged in the last two or three years. Around 2002 or 2003 it was very unusual to find anything in the telecommunications press that claimed to change any game at all. We had 30 times as many game-changers in 2009, compared to what we would have expected had game-changingness remained at 2002 levels:

It isn’t just telecommunications in which companies are claiming to have altered the game as soon as the previous permutation of the earlier mutation of the last modification has taken effect. Here’s the trend in the business press, where we find companies that change games about half as frequently, but with a similar upward trend. In 2009 we got only about 20 times as much game-changingness as we would have expected, taking 2002 as our base:

Part of this is journalistic over-stimulation: the increasing resemblance of business reporting to a Mexican soap opera. So given that some reporters are willing to write up the opening of a jar of pickle as potentially game-changing, marketers are helping by using the term game-changing to play the most important media game of all: the game of Pump Up What Your Employer Does To Make It Sound More Important Than Selling A Product. You might say that their use of game-changing has, in itself, been game-changing. If you wanted me to slap you, that is.

Avoiding the question

MPs , public speaking , weasel words

Mon, 21 Dec 2009

People had excellent specs in the 1980s

I’ll be updating occasionally until the new year, but meanwhile click on the link to use iPlayer to catch up with Jon Sopel’s 15-minute nugget from Radio 4, “Avoiding the Question“, about how politicians do everything they can to avoid giving a straight answer to a straight question.

I wish the spokespeople that I meet would not try to copy the politicians that they heard on the radio that morning. Please stop doing this, not least because you’re not very good at it. In my experience it goes like this:

Spokesperson: While this type of tittle-tattle may be of interest to a small group of journalists back in the real world what we should be talking about are the enormous strides that we have made this year in delivering a world-class inkjet printer cartridge replacement service under enormous and frankly unreasonable pressure from people like yourselves.

Me: So you’re not going to tell me your job title then?

Two reasons to listen: Dr Peter Bull, a psychologist from York University, has identified 35 different ways that politicians use to avoid answering a question. And Daniel Finkelstein recalls the story that Dr David Owen once fell asleep on TV. The interviewer asked what he thought of the point that Geoffrey Howe had just made. He woke up and said:

"That’s not the real issue in this election."

changed the subject, and carried on. Now that’s a class act. Just please don’t copy it.

My Katie Price Boob Job Shame

happiness , public speaking , thought leadership

Fri, 18 Dec 2009

Though Radio 4’s Thought for the Day is still out of bounds to those of us who don’t have a religion, the god-botherers at the BBC can’t censor Talknormalism’s Christmas Message to you:

As this is a time of year when we buy things we don’t need, it is the perfect time to tell the story of Katie Price’s decision to acquire larger breasts, my influence on her decision, and how those iconic breasts inspired Talk Normal.

Many years ago, Jordan (as she was then) was an up-and-coming young topless model, and I was asked to appear on the same TV programme as her. It was an after-the-pub Friday night show put out by Meridian TV, and my job was to explain how to log in to the internet to watch amateur webcams, empowering a generation of drunk men to scour chatrooms for an internet friend who might take her shirt off after hours of pleading. For some reason the researchers had called the editor of Guardian Online for advice on this noble pastime, and the Guardian (understandably not wanting to soil itself, but correctly assuming I’d do it for £60 cash plus train fare) suggested me.

Jordan had been booked to do some flirty links for the show while wearing tiny clothes. It’s a good job they didn’t get our scripts mixed up, though she could probably have done a decent job with mine.

Anyway, someone had broken something on the set, so we all sat in the green room for a few hours while men with hammers fixed it. There was a glum American stand up comedian and a guy who rode muddy motorbikes for a living. Jordan’s Gladiator boyfriend Ace was there to keep her company while we tucked in to the free booze and crisps backstage. Comedy, motorbikes, muscles, partial nudity, chardonnay and modems. That was the 1990s for you. Crazy, crazy days.

And so it came to pass that, after a few glasses, Jordan asked us all her opinion on whether she ought to have a boob job. At that time her breasts were what a certain type of web site calls natural, though it wasn’t the first adjective that popped into your head when you met her. She was thinking about it, she said, because a newspaper had offered to pay for her breast enhancement on the condition that they got an exclusive right to photograph the results. It seemed like a good offer to her. Ace stared furiously at the Doritos and said “I always tell Katie she’s got quite enough already”.

When it was my turn to speak, I planned to say, “What are you thinking? You’re hardly out of school! The tabloid press will turn you into a human freakshow! You already look like a pencil with two tennis balls sellotaped to it! Are you mad?”

Instead, when she pointed herself at me and said “what do you fink? Should I have them done?”, I looked at my feet and said, bravely:

Oh I dunno.

I don’t know who paid for her boobs in the end, but the next time I saw her in the newspapers she was a much bigger woman. Maybe, in reflective moments, when she contemplates the sadness of being made to eat bugs in the jungle by vengeful reality TV viewers, she thinks, “why didn’t that bald nerd I met all those years ago in Southampton warn me it would come to this?” I’m sorry, Katie.

It is this failure of nerve that resolved me to do what a blogger should do at all times: to speak truth to power, no matter how many product marketing managers, marketing communications consultants or brand ambassadors I upset. That is why without Katie Price, we wouldn’t have this fragile and precious thing we call Talk Normal.

We all have times when we talk crap to avoid saying what we know to be true. My Christmas wish for you is that, the next time you are faced with what philosophers call the Jordan Boob Dilemma (JBD) in your work, don’t mumble about challenges and facilitation and win-win scenarios while thinking “that is a truly terrible idea”. Honour Talknormalism by saying what you think, as I should have done all those years ago.

Happy Gifting Season.

The end of days

happiness , marketing , news

Sat, 12 Dec 2009

All together now

buzzword bingo , jargon , media , weasel words

Tue, 8 Dec 2009

I’m in the middle of writing a book about the epic fails of capitalism (a project that’s got much bigger in the last 12 months), and in the part of the book that deals with mergers – a rich source of epic failure – there’s one that stands head and shoulders above the rest: AOL and Time Warner.

When we were doing the research into the press coverage of the merger, one thing stands out: the number of reporters who faithfully wrote down that the two businesses would capitalise on their synergies, without really asking what those synergies might actually, you know, be.

Synergy is a weasel word for making people redundant and selling the buildings that they worked in, and also a vague placeholder for we want some of their stuff to make our stuff work better. In the first case, using it avoids awkward words like redundancy that make people glum, and in the second, it avoids actually telling us what they are going to do.

It’s now pretty clear that AOL-Time Warner needed a lot of the first type of synergy, because there was bugger all of the second type.

I went back to the Factiva database to see whether there are more businesses claiming synergy these days, and there are, big time. I searched in the European and North American business press, and compared the number of articles mentioning mergers with the number mentioning mergers and synergies too. M&A volumes may be at their lowest for five years but the synergy bubble never bursts. Mentions of synergy are 402 per cent up in the last 30 years, and the rise has been wonderfully consistent:

In just over 30 years it has become five times as likely that a business will describe a merger as providing synergies (or, at least, that this lazy rebranding will be reported in the press).

It might just be that synergy has just become a vogue word. But I think it’s also due to positive word bias, which is far more of a problem.

To explain: every M&A deal has some rationale beyond a pooling of capital and saving on letterheads. The benefits can be difficult to explain, easy to question, or impossible to measure accurately. Three reasons not to go into too much detail if you want to push it through quickly – especially if you’re directly or indirectly incentivised to make the merger work. If you want to create momentum in the media or among shareholders and employees (and in your own mind) it helps to give the benefits a positive-sounding, catchy, go-for-it name.

That name is synergy: code for the things we don’t really want to talk about right now. It won’t make your merger work any better, but it might make more people believe that it will. And if your reward comes more from the deal than the messy aftermath, it pays to talk about synergy.

Black letter law

Mon, 7 Dec 2009

I don’t care what you think: I like several lawyers. They can be witty, interesting people. They hold conferences in nice hotels and sometimes ask me to speak. Usually they’re polite afterwards. But if you’re editing copy for them, they don’t half make you earn the money. Lawyers write like badly-programmed jargonbots. Here’s a paragraph that I was asked to fix up a while ago for a business magazine:

"Section 217 of the Companies Act 2006 provides that (except in the case of a bona fide termination payment) it is unlawful for a company to make payment to any of its directors by way of compensation for loss of office, or as consideration for or in connection with their retirement from office, without particulars of the proposed payment (including its amount) being disclosed to, and approved by ordinary resolution of, the members of the company."

No, I don’t either.

I’ve learned that it is basically pointless offering advice to lawyers on how to write like a journalist. Maybe that is because they’re earning ten times as much as me, so it’s understandable if they don’t really see an urgent need to adapt to my way of thinking. It’s more useful for me to pass on a few tips on how the rest of us can write like a lawyer:

1. If you don’t want to be easily understood, Latin is always better than English.When writing for a general reader I can tell you a priori that inter alia it’s your erga omnes right to stick in a few phrases in a language that they don’t understand, just so they know who’s the daddy. After all, nulla poena sine lege. I have no idea what I’ve just typed.

2. Qualify every statement no matter how meaningless. A rule of thumb: never use less than four clauses in each sentence, and don’t use full stops when there are perfectly good commas going to waste. If you used short sentences then people would be able to read your article out loud to peasants; and then poor illiterate people would understand your argument and your status will be forever compromised.

3. Ultimately, sit on the fence. Real advice has to be paid for, so make anything written for non-payers look like you’re going to help them right up to the last sentence – then don’t. Useful final-paragraph phrases for appearing to be helpful while being no bloody use at all include telling us that we should keep a watching brief rather than actually do anything, or that we might also give careful consideration to something you haven’t previously mentioned, or that we could usefully keep abreast of whatever it is that you’re supposed to have made us abreast of in the preceding six paragraphs. Not many people will complain, because few of them will have made it this far anyway.

4. Use the passive voice where at all possible. It will be seen that this may possess utility. Paragraphs should be drawn up by the lawyers concerned only after careful consideration of this advice. Articles composed in this fashion will be credited with education and poshness – by other lawyers, anyway. Other people ask why you are writing in this weird way. Ignore them! Or should I say: endeavour to ensure that they are ignored.

5. Favour obsolete words. Keep a stock of aforementioneds, hereinafters, forthwiths and herebys, and use them to give your prose the authentic feel of the 18th century.

6. Most important: never take advice on this subject from people who are not lawyers.

Pizza Muco Caldo

Airline food , citizen journalism , pretentious foreign menus , translation

Mon, 7 Dec 2009

Talknormalism also takes in the appropriate naming of foodstuffs on menus. At least, it does now:

Fine dining on Delta

This is what Delta Airlines rather fancily calls a quattro formaggi pizza (that’s four cheeses). Maybe someone at Delta thought the name was exotic. I checked on the back of the packet, and indeed it does have vanishingly small amounts of four different cheeses listed on the ingredient panel. So Delta is not breaking any laws, unless it’s against the law to serve foul-smelling warm goop to starving passengers trapped in a small metal tube thousands of feet above freezing water who don’t have any choice.

As you can see, I still ate it. Don’t blame me. I’d been on the plane for seven hours.I was institutionalised. I’d have eaten a microwaved gerbil if they had served it to me. In fact, I’d probably have chosen it in preference to this.

If I named this pizza, I’d have gone for something more honest like pizza muco caldo*.

* Translation available here.

Worse than nothing

abuse of statistics , citizen journalism , media , national statistics

Mon, 7 Dec 2009

For a feature I’ve just written for Research Magazine I’ve just been chatting to David Spiegelhalter, Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk at the University of Cambridge about how we present statistics. He admits he shouts at the TV when they use statistics that scare or confuse you without helping you.

The professor would rather we stuck to presenting statistics, where possible, as what would happen to a set of people (10, 100, or for rare events, 1000): for example, according to the Office for National Statistics, for every 1000 people who died in 2008 around 330 died from circulatory (heart) disease – and only five in transport accidents. 

I don’t understand why magazines and newspapers – and marketing departments and think tanks – don’t have a house style on how statistics are presented – for example, insiting that spokespeople qualify “up by 20 per cent” statements with what the expected outcome would be in terms of death, or Euros, or gnus (plus a confidence limit). Newspaper style books have pages about the correct title for a judge and whether you can use aggravate as a synonym for irritate, but I’ve never seen one with instructions on comparative statistics. Maybe it’s because the people who compile style guides know a lot about the meaning of words, but less about the meaning of numbers.

It’s not as if the “for every X people” stat isn’t visual enough. For example, I can give you the interesting (and true) statistic that for every 10 people who come to Talk Normal from a search engine, two have searched for either naked or naked people:

Try this article from Joanna Blythman in The Herald called Scientists must not dictate on public health matters (better leave that job, it seems, to Joanna Blythman). While complaining about Professor David Nutt, she tells us that scientists think their knowledge "is superior to other types of knowledge we might bring to bear on our decisions, such as intuition, experience, observation, or even common sense."

Even when they have used all four, plus scientific method too. She’s a skilled polemicist: "The huffing and puffing of Nutt and his indignant allies has obscured the fact that whatever the rest of society thinks or knows about cannabis…"

Note: thinks or knows. As in, if Joanna Blythman thinks something, and has used intuition etc, then she knows it, so it must be better than anything a scientist has boiled up in a laboratory. Especially if she agrees with you.

It doesn’t stop her throwing around a few stats at the end to make her point that the only scientists who know about statistics are the ones who produce statistics she likes. For example: "Now we learn, once again from bona fide scientific research, that pregnant women taking folic acid supplements are up to 30% more likely to produce babies with asthma. Yet still the folic acid lobby is arguing that we should press on regardless with blanket fortification of bread and continue to advocate supplements during pregnancy…"

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how to use statistics to confuse people. Quite apart from the fact that she neglects to point out that the research isn’t from a random sample and shows a weak correlation, that a lack of folic acid causes spina bifida and other problems, we don’t have a chart that shows the effect of this up to 30% as an outcome for 1000 babies born today. We can’t draw one, because so far this research doesn’t tell us enough with enough certainty. On the other hand, we know a lot about the damage caused to babies by poor nutrition during pregnancy.

One of the problems with the presentation of statistics in the press is that you can always slice the results to be more dramatic then they really are, and that suits a speak-your-branes columnist like Blythman. Even journalists who don’t know much about numbers know how to do this. And so I can’t help thinking that in-house standards for newspapers on how they present statistics about are far more important than pages of rules on how to refer to the wife of a marquess or an earl*.

* marchioness and countess, respectively. Pointless as it is, the second one’s good for pub quizzes.

Thought Followership

buzzword bingo , jargon , thought leadership , weasel words

Fri, 23 Oct 2009

As one of the blogosphere’s true thought leaders, I was wondering who else claims this attribute. In my mind I imagine the world of thought leaderhip is something like this graph, where the people who think the most talk the most about thinking, and the circus chisellers who haven’t had an original idea in years mostly shut the **** up about it:

First stop: the top 10 of the BusinessWeek Most Innovative Companies 2009. Searching for mentions of thought leadership on their corporate web sites I was sadly disappointed. Toyota, Nintendo and Nokia had no mention of thought leadership at all. Google, a company that often seems so enthusiastic about its cleverness that it could eat itself, had but a single mention, as did HP. Research in Motion managed four thought leaderships. Apple clocked up 32 mentions – but then I found out that they were all the titles of iTunes Podcasts, and so they don’t really count. Microsoft upped the average with 96 mentions.

Only IBM goes big on claiming thought leadership, with 887 mentions of the phrase – but that’s because it’s a job title in IBM. But cut IBM some slack! That’s only one mention for every five patents the company was awarded in 2008 (the most patents in the US for the gazillionth year in a row), or 177 for every Nobel prizean IBM employee has won. That’s quite a lot of thought with which to lead, I think we can agree.

I note also that, while innovation leader number 10 Wal-Mart couldn’t find any actual mentions of thought leadership on its web site, it helpfully suggested partial matches – the top one of which was an excellent Transformers Revenge of the Fallen Autobot ($35 plus postage, in stock). We can only marvel at its desperation to make a sale, no matter how irelevant, to absolutely anyone who visits its site.

So, to reliably find people who will claim thought leadership, I needed to lookfurther down the innovationary league table. I went to the natural home of the barely innovative: that’s right, I searched for thought leaders in the last couple of days of posts on PR Newswire. Bingo! You can keep your Nobel prizes IBM, here’s the motherlode. A few highlights:

You’ll be delighted to hear that thought leader Bentley Introduces Timely Value-Creative Subscription Innovations to Help Sustain the Infrastructure Professions.

When we think about thought leaders in pharmacy benefit management, of course we think of Prime Therapeutics LLC, which Receives 2010 TIPPS Certification for Adherence to High Transparency Standards.

If you are a thought leader in the hotly-contested wound care field, the newly-announced Systagenix Medical Advisory Board is for you.

The comprehensively-named Everything Channel has announced that it will launch a new sub-group group within Channelweb Connect. “We hope that this new group will help drive conversation with thought leaders in the solution provider community,” it says. A must for fans of sub-group groups.

So you might find this graph of innovation against claim to thought leadership is a more accurate reflection of the world in which we live:

Note that I’ve marked an area which combines minimum thought and maximum bragging as the STFU zone. If you’re in this zone and are thinking about farting out another press release about thought leadership, take the hint.

The Vincenator

conferences , MPs , public speaking

Tue, 6 Oct 2009

Hail to the Vince. Let’s give thanks for the continued presence of Vincent Cable, MP for Twickenham, and 2008 Parliamentarian of the Year.

You might say that it’s not a vintage crop of parliamentarians right now; but I’ve noticed a new question in the last 12 months from the people on my media training courses. How can I sound more like Vince Cable?, they ask me, dolefully. The obvious answer is that you need to get a PhD in economics, work overseas and at a high level in international business, get elected to parliament while developing an independent set of opinions, work hard, mostly in obscurity, for a number of years, and then arrange some kind of global crisis in which you are an expert, but about which almost everyone else knows nothing.

Of course, if it was that easy, we’d all be doing it.

I was thinking about the Cable effect on Wednesday when I was listening to him speak at the Association for Qualitative Research Trends Day. He spoke for 45 minutes with (no notes) about the economic crisis, why British people are obsessed

Cable: in real life, surprisingly athletic

with pets and houses, the role of markets and the nature of identity. Most conferences I go to make me want to stab my hand with a pencil. But we keep going back to these PowerPoint-crazed snoozefests, because every now and then a Vince Cable shows up.

So, to the original question: how do you sound more like the Vincenator? I came up with a list while I was listening.

1. What’s the problem? It’s more important to identify a problem accurately than to pretend you have all the answers. I think there’s got to be a some element of peril if you’re ignored. So when he warned us that the next British parliament might be run by a conservative government with no Scottish MPs, in conflict with a nationalist Scottish parliament and tells us “it’s an unsustainable tension”, you start thinking. He wasn’t saying there will be a war or anything, just waking us up. At least, I don’t think he was.

2. Not the usual stats. Did you know that in the recession, employment in the UK among pensioners had actually increased? That in many parts of London the average house price is 100 times average earnings? Neither did I. I could have looked the second one up, but Cable saved me the effort.

3. Now I get it. His stats don’t just sit there, they are part of a story. So he points out that UK public spending is 49 per cent of GDP and that taxation is 35 per cent and sinking: “Scandinavian type public spending supported by American levels of taxation.”

4. Small-BIG-Small. Take a small point, explain the big picture, then explain how that affects something else personal. Moving between big and small is the mark of someone who really knows what they’re talking about. So Cable riffs on bonuses and MP expenses, gives some insight on how we rightly feel the world is unfair, and warns it will seem even more like that when entitlements that we expected (free university education, for example) are denied to our children.

5. Bite the hand that feeds you. You only root for an underdog when your underdog bites a bit. “After I made my speech advocating a mansion tax I went to the press room and there were about 50 of them and they were like piranhas. Then I realised almost all of them have £1 million homes”.

6. You sow before you reap. Any bugger can tell you now that liberalised markets and the pursuit of risky profits were destructive for Northern Rock. But only Cable can say that he was leading a campaign against demutualisation of building societies 10 years ago. Anyone can be wise after the event, but the high ground goes to people who were wise before it. To do that, you have to have opinions today that don’t follow the herd. This is thought leadership, not what everyone else pretends it is.

For all this, I'm awarding Mr Cable one of my Talk Normal mugs to celebrate his achievement: a reward that makes others seem mere trinkets. Of course, if he doesn’t say thank you, I’ll put up a post saying how over-rated he is. He’s a politician, he’d understand.

Self-styled experts like me

conferences , weasel words

Tue, 6 Oct 2009

A few years ago I wrote a book about counterfeiting and piracy called Knockoff. Since then I’ve acquired two regular gigs: people interview me when there’s a counterfeiting story for their TV shows or radio programmes; and I get invited to counterfeiting conferences to say things that the people who attend the conferences won’t say to each other, even though they tell me afterwards that they agree with me.

This week there’s an example of the first one – I’m one of the experts on Black Market Britain, ITV, 10.35pm on 6 October. I’d love to tell you what I say, but it’s been stuck in legal for such a long time that when they called me to tell me the transmission date, I’d clean forgotten the interview.

It won’t make what I’ve said obsolete. The anti-counterfeiting/anti-piracy business has a sort of Groundhog Day consistency. The people whose job it is to market anti-counterfeiting (at least 30 organisations, last time I counted), all say the same thing every year. Their figures are pretty consistent, because they’re more or less made up by these organisations for the purpose of lobbying. The terrific work done by journalist Felix Salmon here and here to highlight this deserves to be recognised, not least by other journalists. “The fact is that the statistics AREN’T generated, as opposed to simply conjured out of thin air,” he told me.

I used some of these stats in my book, and I now know I should have asked more questions. What troubles me more is what goes on at the conferences organised by the people who come up with the stats, and the law-makers that they lobby. It’s not that they’re making agreements in secret that are undemocratic, unaccountable and might have negative impacts for developing countries – they have the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement for that. It’s what’s never mentioned that bothers me.

Almost all anti-counterfeiting and anti-piracy conferences I have attended, and it’s quite a few by now, are from the group hug school of conferences: experts quote their own figures (and each other) and lament the state of the problem, but no one involved will blame anyone who might be in the room, for example. And so it goes on: an identical conference, with the same people involved and a different sponsor, will be held a few months later in a different hotel.

Talk Normal’s going to get on to the appallingly low standard of trade conferences as soon as I get the time. But for now I’m thinking about something that Felix Salmon said to me: "It never ceases to astonish me what the press will print if it’s asserted with enough bravado from a self-styled expert."

It occurs to me that on this subject I’ve occasionally been both the credulous hack and the self-styled expert. I’m hoping that I’m neither on Tuesday night.

Citizen journalism isn't always A Good Thing

citizen journalism , communities , news

Thu, 1 Oct 2009

From an excellent story in this month’s Atlantic Monthly magazine: “The collapse of journalism means that the quest for information has been superseded by the quest for ammunition.”

Mark Bowden, the reporter, investigates what happened when Judge Sonia Sotomayor was nominated to the Supreme Court. Immediately all the TV networks possessed the same package of video of her seeming to make extremist comments. Bowden tracks down the blogger who unearthed the videos and the advocacy groups that disseminated them. On the face of it, blogger does the legwork that journalists don’t and gets a story is a good-news story about internet culture. Anyone who complains about citizen journalists doing their job must be a bitter old-school journalist, you think.

I say: not so. Bowden makes two points: 1. When journalists do not have the time or the skills, someone else will step in to provide ready-made stories. The lack of resource in journalism means these stories go straight on to the page or the screen, and so are effectively endorsed by the publication. 2. The people who do it have their own agenda: “Work formerly done by reporters and producers is now routinely performed by political operatives and amateur ideologues of one stripe or another, whose goal is not to educate the public but to win. This is a trend not likely to change.”

And that’s the important difference. Most citizen journalists, advocacy groups, public relations companies are not motivated by the desire to get to the truth, but to deliver a point of view. No problem: it’s their job to work backwards from a conclusion (Or, for citizen journalists, it is their vocation). It is the job of the reporter to check whether that conclusion has any value. And so professional journalists must take some responsibility. For years we have been pleased to have stories fed to us like baby food, complete with partial research, friendly quotes and conclusions. We can’t suddenly complain when we realise that it has made us into the advocacy industry’s gimps. Now, thanks to forces beyond our control, many newspapers, news stations and magazines are no longer set up to check the stories they report. Judge Sotomayor was confirmed, but the damaging news clips of her led on every major news station. In his feature Bowden checked the context and discovered that the clips, far from being the secret confession of a deranged idealogue, contained little of interest and nothing new. That is, until they were taken out of context by a politically-motivated blogger and presented to the media, who didn’t bother to check them. If you’re in the business of winning approval for your clients, this is good news. But in the long term this culture of advocacy is dangerous. We no longer have any idea who is shaping the news at any level, and as citizens we can never know enough to separate good research from carefully-disguised bias when we watch or read the news. Bowden concludes about this type of media that: “Today it is rapidly replacing journalism, leading us toward a world where all information is spun, and where all “news” is unapologetically propaganda.”

When that happens, ultimately we all lose.

If I become unhinged it's the Boston Globe's fault

buzzword bingo , jargon , weasel words

Mon, 28 Sep 2009

As a follow up to my post on how we’ve replaced problems with issues, someone pointed out this article from the Boston Globe’s The Word column – a sort of Talk Normal with education that people pay to read on Sundays – in which Jan Freeman dismisses a complaint from Mr G. B., similar to mine, that people are using the word issue more often than before.

She says:

“Mr. B. is a victim of the Frequency Illusion, to use the term coined by linguist Arnold Zwicky. He’s listening for issues, so he hears the word often, and imagines that it’s everywhere. In fact, in the specific usage he objects to – having issues instead of having problems – the problems version is still way, way ahead of issues.” Her evidence: she did a Google search for each term. On this basis she dismisses the idea that we might be uncomfortable describing problems honestly.

You’re wrong, Jan Freeman! I know they don’t pay much for columns these days, but an analysis that took more than 30 seconds on a search engine would have showed this is probably not a Zwickian illusion at all. Which makes her snobby putdown that “Mr. B.’s analysis is more puzzling than his failure to check the facts,” doubly unfortunate.

Her conclusion: “…issues aren’t always problems; they are also anxieties, conflicts, and disagreements. And if the word is meant to make those conflicts sound less dire, isn’t that a good thing? After all, anyone who’d rather have problems than issues is welcome to them.”

On the first point, I agree. There are lots of things that really are issues. On the second, absolutely not. I’d rather have been an astronaut than a journalist but, if I started turning up for interviews in a space suit, people might point out that I wasn’t facing up to the reality of my situation. It’s the same thing: when we can’t utter the word “problem” at work, we’re living a fantasy.

The power of free

free stuff , jargon , mugs , weasel words

Fri, 25 Sep 2009

The issue issue

issues , jargon , weasel words

Fri, 25 Sep 2009

I don’t think I have issues, and I don’t think you should either.

Just as the US government rebranded the War on Terror as The Fight for a Better World in 2005, so many of us have abandoned the real, truthful yet uncomfortable word problem, and substituted the blandly depressing issue instead. It’s the worst type of weasel word.

What’s my evidence? I did a bit of fishing around on Factiva, the database almost all published articles in the English language. Around 1988 the word issue popped up about as often as the word problem, which is not surprising – there are many legitimate uses of the word. But like a linguistic grey squirrel, issue has been quietly taking over. Here’s a graph of the number of times, in UK-based corporate, industry and economics news sources, that the words problem and issue occur every 1000 articles:

The sample size is getting on for a million articles a year, so it’s pretty reliable.

In case you’re looking at the graph and thinking “the curves aren’t that steep”, look at what experts will one day call the Phillips Weasel Index (PWI) – the ratio of times that the weasel word “issue” is used compared to “problem”:

As you can see, in 10 years the ratio has more than doubled. There are now almost three and a half issues per problem. Twenty years ago, the issue/problem PWI was 1.18 – slightly more than one issue per problem. And this is in magazines and newspapers, where people are employed specifically to delete this type of language abuse. In everyday language, I’m guessing the PWI is much higher.

There are several possible explanations. Perhaps there are more issues now, and fewer problems. No, I’m not buying that either. Perhaps we are more interested in writing about our issues now, and less interested in our problems? There’s no evidence for that in the subject matter: we’ve never been more obesessed with the problems of doing business. Maybe it’s the declining standard of copy editing that’s to blame?

I think what’s occurring is a stealthy rebranding: the word problem has become too emotionally loaded to be uttered in polite company in case we think bad things about the companies responsible. So software bugs are now issues rather than problems, even if they stop our computers working and ruin our day.

We now have performance issues with staff who fall asleep on their keyboard, or brand issues with companies that nobody likes, or, worst of all, balance sheet issues.

Rebrand the language all you like to make yourselves feel secure, but on the first anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, let’s remember: whether your company admits to balance sheet issues or problems, it still might be time to send your CV out.

A recent engagement

buzzword bingo , jargon , weasel words

Fri, 25 Sep 2009

I have lovingly saved this in the Talk Normal vaults. I promise I don’t live in a flat piled high with old newspapers, pointing at stories about words and shouting SEE WHAT I MEAN!! to the guy from Tesco who delivers my shopping. I’m saving that pleasure for my retirement.

This one from The Telegraph, October 7 2008 (I think):

So it’s a year old, but I wasn’t writing a blog then. Oh how I’ve waited for this moment.

This set me thinking: when did we start talking about stakeholder engagement? I resolved to find out. Don’t worry about me mum. I know how to enjoy my leisure time.

So I looked it up. Guess: when was the first time you heard about it?

The first mention I could find was in a magazine article from 1996 in which, in the first sentence, negotiators in the medical industry were described as lightning rodsthat take heat and keep things on track. Like a grammatical godzilla sowing the seeds of a paradigm shift, this triple mixed metaphor seems to have created a wormhole that sucked stakeholder engagement into the published language.

Being both ugly and hard to understand, the phrase took time to catch on: there are only 10 published mentions anywhere in the world before the millennium – and two of them were in a story about a magazine for Balkan immigrants.

After the year 2000 it really caught on:

The initial impetus, and most of the coverage through the middle years of the decade, came from the new discipline of sustainability reporting: oil, gas and energy magazines were the big users. The energy companies might still have been despoiling the environment, but at least they had found a fancy phrase for the process of asking us what we thought about it. Later the phrase began to spread out to other industries such as gambling and public relations, eventually reaching Harrow Council – until it was stopped.

I’ve only looked at magazine and newspaper articles. In meeting rooms and conference calls there are no copy editors to act as lightning rods and take the heat to keep us on track.

For the record: I like new words. I enjoy change and am down with where the kids are at. I don’t smoke a pipe. I also feel that sustainability reporting has done a lot of good. But by giving bureaucrats this new phrase with which to confuse us, sustainability reporting has also caused its own special type of pollution.