Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

Rocking social media isn’t enough. You have to rock the world.

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In the course of my correspondence with Mark Ragan yesterday, he mentioned a blog post titled "25 Women Who Rock Social Media."

Among the social media-rocking sisters was one Lauren Salazar. Here's why Lauren rocks:
Lauren-salazar-150w

"Her experience as a writer and editor for The New Yorker and New York Magazine have helped prepare Lauren Salazar for her current role as the Social Media Manager for Weight Watchers.  Lauren uses the same personal touch with the community management at Weight Watchers that she does with her own Twitter account.  She does a great job of creating a true engagement by finding a way to really connect and relate to her audience. …"

It used to be that writers and editors came to corporate communications when they wanted to get married and have kids after 10 fun years at the Virginian-Pilot.

E.B. White, on the other hand, edited an employee newsletter at a silk mill—for a few weeks, before quitting out of fear that the job was too easy and would make him soft.

And once a young David Murray, then editor of The Ragan Report, interviewed for a job in employee communication at Aon Insurance. The corporate communication director tossed a copy of The Ragan Report across his desk and said: "You write this. Why would you want to write our shit?"

I've always seen corporate communication work as being exactly as honorable and worthy as its practitioners. I've known more than my share of whip-smart communicators, and I've seen some profoundly good communication.

But now here come the best and the brightest, fresh and enthusiastic, from the most respected publications in the world, to "connect and relate" to the the customers of Weight Watchers. Well, they damned well better rock social media. I hope they use their brains and energies and hearts to rock their employers, too.

Update: And thanks to Writing Bootista Liam Scott, who was so distressed by this item that he dug into Salazar's background. It appears that "25 Women Who Rock Social Media" blogger Lee Odden may have pumped her up a bit when he said she was a "writer and editor" at The New Yorker and New York Magazine. According to her résumé, she spent "Fall '06" as a "creative services intern," where she "developed integrated campaign pitches, executed special event marketing … and provided copywriting support for advertising sales staff."

She did more editorial work at New York Magazine; among other responsibilities, she did "beat reporting for citywide retail, fitness, restaurant, and nightlife venues."

So I guess we can't expect Ian Frazier to be rocking social media at Zappos anytime soon. But we do expect Lauren Salazar to punch above her weight at Weight Watchers.

Why I’m not at the IABC confab: I’m too old for this sort of thing

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Taking place this week is the International Conference of the International Association of Business Communicators. It's the most important professional conference for the most impotent professional communicators. And it's in San Diego.

Do I wish I were there?

I do not.

(Yes I do.)

I remember my first IABC conference. It was in Boston, during one weird week in June, 1994. On the way from Logan Airport to the hotel, the Ragan editorial entourage was caught in the Boston Gay Pride Parade. "The fucking Gay Parade?" bellowed our incredulous senior editor, to an equally mystified police officer. (Back then, it was news to most people that gay people lived in Boston; we thought they were all in New York and San Francisco.)

The first night we were there, my roommate Steve Crescenzo and I consumed an unfathomable amount of clams, and Guiness beer. The former had their effect on me, causing an unspeakable hazmat situation in my bed. Think, Exxon Valdez. The latter had its effect on Steve, who required an emergency wake-up call notifying him that the keynote speech he was there to cover was underway.

The same week, another editor's wife had an aneurism and nearly died, I got married, and in my honeymoon bed listened to live radio coverage of O.J. Simpson being followed around Los Angeles in a white Bronco.

That's what I think of when I think of IABC.

But we could handle it. We were in our twenties.

But we got older, and IABC never conferences never got any saner. In Toronto one year, Steve fell out of a parked airplane straight down to the tarmac. In Los Angeles another year, I made such an angry, drunken fool of myself at a dinner, that the next day I needed to create an alter-ego named "Mickey" to blame it on. There are IABCers who still know who Mickey is, and recoil at the name.

Steve created an online communication community where there was none, by galvanizing just about everyone in the business in a common rage—against him. They were reacting to "Fear and Loathing at the IABC International Conference," an article I had commissioned him to write, for the Journal of Employee Communication Management. I can't remember much about the piece now, but it was 6,000 words long and began with Steve threatening to strangle a flight attendant with his seat belt.

Once in Dallas, another colleague and I found our midnight way to the grassy knoll, and the moment we found the Zapruder viewpoint, a black limosine passed slowly before us, left to right, and then disappeared under the overpass. So mystical an experience was this, that Ed and I were later nearly arrested for singing the National Anthem at the top of our lungs, in our hotel room.

As I look back over the IABC conferences I've attended, I remember late-night pool swimming-pool sneak-ins, crying rookie writers and a weird all-night TV-watching session with Steve, during which he compared the two of us to "the old grandparents in the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory."

And afterward, always: The inevitable confrontation titled, The Crumpled Receipts, and the Grumpy CFO. "You stupid asses," he would begin.

And I haven't even brought up the annual Sunday night shenanigans at the Canadian hospitality suite.

"It was midnight on Sunday, June 4, in Vancouver, and people were dancing with foam moose antlers on their heads," began my Ragan Report coverage of the 2006 show, one of the last I attended.

People were signing International Association of Business Communicators' Chairman Warren Bickford's T-shirt, with Bickford in it. And a woman was standing before PR consultant Charles Pizzo with a pleading look on her face and a big red wine stain on her Edmonton Oilers hockey sweater.

The notorious annual party at the Canadian hospitality suite was in full swing, and the IABC's 2006 International Conference had officially started. Over the next three days, almost 1,500 communicators would spend three days communing, kibitzing, laughing and even crying together. It was the usual IABC love fest—at least as emotional as intellectual, as important as a symbol of professional togetherness as an honest-to-goodness professional development opportunity.

"Cold water," Pizzo advised the woman.

I could use some of that right now.

Next year, the IABC show is here in Chicago.

I'll be able to walk there (in my Writing Boots).

It's walking home that'll be the trick.

Somebody set internal communication back 30 years. But it wasn’t me.

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When I was editor of the weekly communication trade publication The Ragan Report in the 1990s, all I had to do to get a raft of letters was refer to an employee publication as a "house organ."

The operative phrase was: You just set employee communication back 30 years!

Silly, I know, to think you could set a whole profession back 30 years just by using old terminology.

But I do miss the underlying assumption, that this was a profession progressing. Progressing in all sorts of ways—from top-down to interactive, from "babies and bowling scores" to strategic, from corporate platitudes and stilted language to human candor.

These days, if you were going to set the profession back 30 years, in which direction would you push?

Aussie communicator Paul Murton remarked on a blog the other day that he was talking to a colleague, and they came to a discouraging conclusion:

while the importance of ’strategic’ internal comms (linked to business strategy and engagement) started rising in management eyes (say) 5-10 years ago, it now seems it’s now more often taking a back seat to tactical communication that just keeps people informed as an afterthought. External comms, PR, investor relations, marketing comms are still where the investment goes and internal comms teams are being depleted (and paid less in less-senior positions) in companies all over the place.

Is it just two people in Sydney who think this, or is it more widespread?

Ah, yeah. It's more widespread.

In 1996 on Ragan Communicaton' behalf I launched a thing called the Journal of Employee Communication Management. In my first editor's letter, I called it "The Harvard Business Review for internal communication." It came out six times a year, and each issue contained six practitioner-written essays, of 3,000 words each. These case studies, confessions and clarion calls would generate rebuttals, spark year-long debates and serve as the bases for keynote conference sessions with titles like, "Employee Communicator's Manifesto."

Sounds like 1896, doesn't it?

The journal thrived in the first few years of publication, remained profitable for a number of years after that, and lasted until about 2008, when it died, not because the Internet made such journals obsolete (the Harvard Business Review is still coming out). Mostly, it died because there weren't enough people in the whole world who were actually thinking about employee communication to write 36 decent essays every year, let alone read them.

And now I see the former publisher of that journal promoting its 20th annual Corporate Communicators Conference by promising, "No abstractions. No pie-in-the-sky theory. Only: practical tips and strategies that you can use tomorrow."

Reminds of what my dad used to say, when the family seemed at a standstill, "Let's do something, even if it's wrong."

But he was joking.

Communicators, where are you going?

And for the love of house-organ cheesecake*, why?

* A free tube of Preparation H to the first geezer who can tell us to what I am referring here.