Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

We haven’t seen five heads this empty since the Spice Girls broke up

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I'll give you some of the headlines from the latest issue of an association's member magazine, and you tell me what kind of association it is:

"Moving in the Right Direction"

"Ready, set, innovate"

"Change on the horizon"

"All aboard for new business"

"Plotting a course for the future"

Obviously, those headlines could equally bore members of an association of accountants, long-haul truckers, structural engineers, HR professionals, or pornography executives.

In fact, the only association whose member magazine couldn't possibly contain these editorial wet blankets would be an association of professional communicators. Right?

Come on, IABC. Come on, Communication World.

Thirty years ago, communicators had built a “gargantua”; what do we have now?

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Studs Terkel called this the "United States of Alzheimer's," because we forget where we came from.

I always thought he was being kind.

More often, we don't even ask.

That's why, when IABC veteran Wilma Mathews told me over dinner recently about a long ago speech about the communication business that she still remembered, I asked her to fax it to me.

It was delivered on November 15, 1977, by Jacob Whittmer, then president of IABC, at a meeting of the association's District II, in Winston Salem, N.C.

The speech is dated in many ways—early on, he jokes that "the new definition of a ghostwriter … is a person who wrote an unsatisfactory speech for Idi Amin"—and comfortably current in others. Here's an excerpt, and then I'll share Wilma's remembered reaction to the speech:

All in all, I've been kicking around the communications business since 1935—that's a long time—when I served as editor of my high school newspaper back in Southern Indiana.

Frankly, I really wasn't much concerned with talk of "power centers" or even audience impact back in those days. In fact, I was a pretty naive country bumpkin.

My first exposure to the power syndrome business—if you can call it that—came a couple of years as a sophomore journalism/political science student at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. I distinctly remember hearing the cocky law students going around singing their favorite ditty: "Oh there's power, power, wonder-working power in the law, in the law. Oh there's power, power, wonder-working power in the Indiana law."

Even then there were, of course, some journalism professors and newspaper publishers who talked about the "power of the press." But no one took them very seriously—at least not in the same frame of reference in which we think of media power today.

As for industrial editing or business and organizational communications, it was practically unknown, especially to the journalism profession. Where it did exist, it was primarily a paternalistic device written in gossip column style—usually by the boss's secretary to keep everyone up to date on social and personal goings on. …

Over the years a gradual evolution occurred to give us the gargantua we have today—a billion dollar multi-media giant that rivals in importance and influence the rest of the entire communications industry in North America.

For example, organizational publications alone have a per-issue circulation today of more than 300 million in the United States and Canada. By comparison, the 1,888 daily newspapers in the countries have a combined circulation of only 66 million. A recent survey by Syracuse University of just IABC members indicated they have a circulation of 228 million.

And what about media such as management newsletters, newsboard or bulletin board programs, employee meetings, letters to the home, payroll stuffers, booklets and brochures, complaint and grievances systems, videotape, film, closed circuit television, cassette tapes, computer printouts, special direct mail, and on and on. The scope and variety is almost mind-boggling. …

No doubt about it, a new "power center" has come into being as the need for communications has become more intense and complex. And we as the business and organizational communicators are at the controls. We are the professionals being looked to by managements for the leadership and know-how to win out in the mounting competition for attention.

With that leadership comes the responsibility to maintain the highest ideals of performance ….

We are professional communicators representing our audiences as well as our employers. Our job is to listen, to research, to study, to consider, to interpret, to explain, to educate, to inform. By so doing, we help people to know, to understand, to work better, to achieve their dreams and expectations. Lofty ideals and objectives—certainly they are. But to set our sights lower would be to betray ourselves, our fellow professionals, our employers and our audiences.

I asked Wilma to remember what she thought of the speech and she reminded me that at the time IABC, seven years after a merger of two predecessor organizations, had 4,000 members, as opposed to around 14,000 today.

"Jake told us what our jobs where and our careers could be," Mathews remembers. "He helped us put into perspective the field  of organizational communication and he guided us to professionalism. This was a time when the role of 'house organ editor' was taken away from Suzy the secretary and put in the hands of college-educated, professionally trained writers and communicators. It was a big deal!"

Readers, what was the last big-deal speech you heard (or article you read) about the communication business?

Why aren’t IABC Richmond’s chapter meetings fun anymore?

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Last week communication blogger, Boots regular, new McMurry colleague and IABC watcher Robert Holland sounded an alarm that his Richmond, Va. chapter and others like it "need help—now!" from the mother organization, IABC International.

He said it's killing him to watch his beloved local chapter struggle to retain members and fail to cajole people to attend monthly meetings.

"As we recalled last night, coming to an IABC/Richmond meeting was [once] an
energizing experience. Now the chapter is struggling, but it is not
because of mismanagement or lack of effort by local volunteers.
Understanding the problem—and, more important, what to do about it—requires more resources and experience than IABC/Richmond leaders can
muster. And the Richmond chapter is not alone. This scenario is playing
out in many other chapters, especially in North America."

I have a couple of reactions to Robert's post:

First, I question Robert's contention that it takes an international organization based in San Francisco to understand why the bounce has gone out of a local club's bungee. Isn't that a little like demanding help from the Miller Brewing Company to explain why the Thursday night crowd has tailed off at the J&M Tap? 

Not that I don't think the mother organization should be motivated to understand why some chapters' membership is down while other chapters (like Chicago and Toronto) are thriving.

Overall, IABC is down a thousand members thanks to the economy (membership stands at about 15,500), and the association brass is launching a study to assess members' needs. Here's what I expect the study will find:

Where once IABC was the lock, stock, whole nine yards, kaboodle and barrel of all communicator networking—luncheon meetings for local chumming up, the big fat directory and the International Conference for national and international networking—LinkedIn and other social networking platforms have handled the basic national networking, leaving IABC's core value on the outer margins:  global, and hyper local.

I'm an IABC member, but I consider LinkedIn my go-to network. Why? Because even though my LinkedIn connections are only a modest 184, these are communicators I know all over the country (and a few more far-flung). So if I need to talk to a communicator in San Francisco or at in the auto industry, I'll probably turn to my personal network long before figuratively thumbing through a virtual IABC phone book.

But if I need a communication contact in Shanghai or New Delhi, I go to IABC, which not only offers me contacts there, but a useful introduction, too: "Greetings from Chicago! I'm a fellow IABC member …."

The rest of the value IABC offers is local. Without IABC, each city would need its own communication Grand Poobah to start a club and host meetings that appeal to locals and make a group culture all their own … wait a minute, each city does need all these things, even with IABC. IABC's central office only provides a framework. (And if it were too heavy-handed, those Richmond meetings would never have been any fun in the first place.)

If Richmond's IABC meetings are dead these days—especially in an economy where people are networking with one another other like beetles in the spring—I suspect one of two things is true:

Either Richmond's communication community is shrinking, longer having enough generous veterans to speak at meetings and accept résumés, enough up-and-coming pros to run the meetings, or enough eager beavers to populate them.

Or, the community is lacking a Grand Poobah with sufficient charisma and talent and energy to pull together good meetings.

Can IABC International do a better job of supporting IABC Richmond? Might San Francisco be a better clearinghouse for chapter-to-chapter survival tips? Might it be argued that IABC should divert some of the resources it puts toward national programs toward chapter support? Yes, yes, yes.

But the first chore, it seems to me, is introspection, at the chapter level. If we find out What's the Matter with Richmond we'll know what's the matter with IABC.

And I trust IABC Richmond veteran Robert Holland to answer that question in far more revealing and useful detail than some survey issued from California.

Don't you?