Measured Voice Blog

The White House announced a new open data policy today....

jedsundwall — Thu, 09 May 2013 16:46:12 -0700

The White House announced a new open data policy today. It’s an exciting development that you can learn more about on the White House’s very comprehensive Project Open Data site. John Wonderlich at the Sunlight Foundation has shared some great analysis of the policy as well.

We’re big fans of open government data (we’ve even helped create some), but instead of writing about why we love this new policy, we’re going to write about why we love the announcement of this new policy.

The video you see above is a beautiful example of an organization going direct. Instead of assembling a bunch of reporters to transcribe their announcement to be retyped in news stories later, our nation’s CIO and CTO sat down in front of a camera and told us directly.

The individuals responsible for the new policy told us about it, why they’re doing it, and what it means for us. They told us in plain language. And they did it in under 2 minutes – as is made clear by the countdown clock in the top-right corner of the video.

They honored their audience. They honored our intelligence and our time.

The White House’s new media team makes this look easy, but it’s not. The video works thanks to many nuances that may not seem obvious to most people – the music, multiple camera angles, good sound recording, a tight script, great lighting, shallow focus, and a friendly delivery.

Indeed, the White House is its own media entity and has the resources it needs to make great videos like this, but you don’t need to have a ton of resources to go direct.

Whether you’re communicating on behalf of a government organization or not, honor your audience. Whether you’re writing a blog post or recording a vido, use a human voice. Tell your audience what you’re up to and why. If it makes sense, pull back the curtain and show them your face. Your candor will be appreciated.

"The best approach is to write for just one person. Make an impact on just one person. Even better,..."

jedsundwall — Wed, 08 May 2013 16:26:07 -0700

“The best approach is to write for just one person. Make an impact on just one person. Even better, make it so they can’t sleep that night unless they choose to make a difference for just one other person by sharing your message with them.”

- Seth Godin, How to write copy that goes viral (via jessicaplautz)

Q&A: Bill Gates on Flying Cars, the Malaria Epidemic, and Article-Writing Robots

jedsundwall — Thu, 02 May 2013 15:53:05 -0700

Q&A: Bill Gates on Flying Cars, the Malaria Epidemic, and Article-Writing Robots:

Steven Levy: How do you get the media as excited about saving lives as they are about the next phone?

Bill Gates: We need a malaria epidemic in the blogging community! Either that or we need people who have seen the malaria epidemic to start blogging.

Emphasis ours. There is no way to hack the media to get it excited about issues that won’t drive ad impressions. The best people to provide excellent coverage of important issues are the people working on those issues. The world will be better informed as more experts learn to go direct and stop relying on the media to cover their work.

Why the Priceonomics Blog is So Good

jedsundwall — Thu, 02 May 2013 09:51:00 -0700

You may have found yourself reading the Priceonomics blog recently. Priceonomics’s deeply thoughtful posts about food trucks, diamonds, Japanese toilets, and Phish get shared thousands of times on Facebook and Twitter.

My experience with their blog reaffirmed one of our main teachings about content marketing: people fall in love with the writing first, then they fall in love with whoever wrote it. After following a few links to Priceonomics posts from Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr, I thought to myself “These guys are good.” I dug deeper and learned about the company behind these great articles.

Priceonomics is a service designed to help you find the right price for anything. From their about page:

We hate getting ripped off or over-paying for stuff so we built Priceonomics. We search and analyze hundreds of millions of listings on the web to build our price guides. We hope you can use these reports to get the most value for the best price.

It’s an excellent service – already invaluable for anyone looking to buy or sell any used goods online. I’m clearly a Priceonomics fan, and it all started with their blog.

I emailed Rohin Dhar, co-founder and CEO of Priceonomics, and asked a few questions about the blog and his team’s strategy for it. He was kind enough to share some great insights useful to any organization that wants to be liked.

Try hard. Do good work. Rewards will come.

MV: On your wonderfully informative blog stats page, you admit that you haven’t clearly defined what success for your blog is. Are you getting closer to knowing what success is?

Rohin: On our blog we’re not really over thinking “what is success.” We just try to make things people enjoy reading and hopefully prove some point that’s not immediately obvious. When we started, the original goal was to use our data to write blog posts and improve our SEO. Now it’s more “try hard to write good things.”

Can you tell us how blog readers convert into users of your price guides?

We don’t try to convert our blog readers into users of the price guides. What are the odds that at the very moment you’re reading an article about Phish you also need to find out how to price a used motorcycle? Pretty low. Eventually the user comes back when they need pricing information because they heard about us through the blog or do by doing a pricing related Google search.

Honor your audience.

Do you have an audience that you’re writing for? Hacker News readers? Your parents? “The consumer?”

We’re trying to create things that at least pass the bar of “do I personally find this interesting and intellectually honest.” Hopefully if I like it, other people will as well. There is no particular audience we’re writing for, but I definitely keep in mind Hacker News when writing an article even if it has nothing to do with tech. Whenever I write a sentence, I consider how the logic could be torn to shreds in a Hacker News comment. If I think it could, I know to tighten up the argument.

What impression of Priceonomics do you want to make on your readers?

That we use facts to make a point.

Be authentic.

You wrote over 4,000 words about Phish last week. How’d you choose them as a subject?

Basically my wife and a lot of her friends love Phish and spend a lot of money on going to see the band live. But when I listen to Phish, I get pretty bored. So to me that’s interesting. How can all these people who I respect love this band when I just can’t fathom why. So I thought I’d dig deeper into how do you reconcile the two viewpoints.

As Rohin said above, “Hopefully if I like it, other people will as well.” It’s a good assumption. The post about Phish received 79,000 views.

“Diamonds are Bullshit” is a glorious headline. Did any of you think twice before using such language in a post title?

Not really. We aren’t particularly profane in our blog posts, but there is no reason we need to adopt the stylistic practices of 100 year old newspapers. We’re just a little blog so we can basically make up our own rules of how to do things.

I can’t thank Rohin enough for taking the time to answer these questions. The lessons sound simple, but writing well takes serious time and effort. It’s especially difficult if you can’t draw a clear line between writing a great blog post and your business goals. But it pays off. If you didn’t know about Priceonomics before, you do now.

These lessons in blogging apply far beyond start up blogs. Any organization with deep expertise in complex topics can make a huge impact by sharing their expertise online. This applies especially to government and non-profit organizations. Priceonomics’s blog posts are popular because they provide understanding. They make sense out of complex topics in a way that no one else can, and thousands of readers are better off because of it.

"The “re-” gestures—such as reblogging and retweeting—have become cultural rites of cachet in and of..."

jedsundwall — Wed, 01 May 2013 16:00:26 -0700

“The “re-” gestures—such as reblogging and retweeting—have become cultural rites of cachet in and of themselves. If you can filter through the mass of information and pass it on as an arbiter to others, you gain an enormous amount of cultural capital. Filtering is taste. And good taste rules the day: Marcel Duchamp’s exquisite filtering and sorting sensibility combined with his finely tuned taste rewrote the rules.”

- Kenneth Goldsmith, Why Conceptual Writing? Why Now? (via ancdompanies)

More Informed ≠ Better Informed

jedsundwall — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 16:21:04 -0700

Jim Ray has written some excellent thoughts in response to Twitter engineer Nick Kallen’s explanation of why Twitter will never allow editing of tweets. This bit is key:

Kallen casually tosses out that a fire hose of real-time news makes for “a better informed citizenry” with absolutely nothing resembling a fact to back this claim up. I’m certainly unaware of anything that suggests the rush of breaking news equates to better democracy. In fact, everyone I know who seriously studies how breaking news affects news comprehension hypothesizes the end result is a net loss.

The fact is, we don’t yet know whether, as Kallen claims, “a real time account of events” actually does make for better citizens (and democracies) and probably won’t for some time. I suspect, though, that the proliferation of “slow news” we’ve seen as a response to the Chinese water torture of news-like updates is an indication that our fellow citizens yearn for, and deserve, better. And, let’s not forget, those stodgy old newspapers often still manage to tell the story best.

We place ourselves squarely among those in favor of slower media. We do not believe that an increased volume of available information creates a better informed citizenry.

Our goal is to help organizations with deep expertise share their expertise directly with the public. We’re proud to help organizations like the World Wildlife Fund, Department of Energy, and Government Accountability Office do that. But the way we do it is by creating a quiet space – set apart from the real time Internet – where they can think about what they have to say.

Organizations are different from people, and they communicate differently. An edit button might not make sense for Twitter, but organizations need to understand that their value on social media comes from being trustworthy. It takes thoughtfulness and time, but it’s worth it. It’s the only way to create a better informed public.

Somewhat related to this, the Knight and Gates Foundations are teaming up to measure the impact of the media and journalism.

dbreunig: The most endearing thing a brand can do these days is...

jedsundwall — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 17:51:26 -0700

dbreunig:

The most endearing thing a brand can do these days is reveal that there are humans inside.
This quirk is as good a sign as any that brands as we know them are increasingly obsolete. Their future is as a brand/human cyborg, more akin to a sports star playing for a team than as a pure icon.

Note: this kind of thing should only be done by organizations that want to appear “endearing.”

The Official White House Tumblr: The White House, Tumbling Things

jedsundwall — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 12:30:21 -0700

The Official White House Tumblr: The White House, Tumbling Things:

The White House is now on Tumblr.

"My rise to internet fame started as many climbs to prominence do: I had something to say, and I..."

jedsundwall — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 10:45:23 -0700

“My rise to internet fame started as many climbs to prominence do: I had something to say, and I thought enough people on some small corner of the Internet would be interested in my views. In 2006, as I surveyed the New York City blogging scene and noticed a glaring absence of transit coverage, I started Second Ave. Sagas. At first, I viewed the site as my own personal outlet. I wanted to keep writing creatively in a job that wasn’t in journalism, and construction on a long-awaited subway along New York City’s east side finally kicked off. I followed along.”

- How to be Internet Famous by Benjamin Kabak on Quartz

"A natural, caring organization designed to create passionate customers stretches and bends. A rigid..."

jedsundwall — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 14:06:38 -0700

“A natural, caring organization designed to create passionate customers stretches and bends. A rigid business bureaucracy looks to nail every T on policies, procedures, and practices—customers be damned.”

- When Empathy Becomes Insulting by David Heinemeier Hansson

—

If you want to empathize with your customers (and vice versa), your organization needs a sincere voice. David’s point about stretching and bending is essential. As we say, your voice is like a river.

No One Knows What Organizations Should Do on Social Media

jedsundwall — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 11:12:00 -0700

Earlier this month, the SEC formally approved the use of social media tools for official corporate communications. Marketplace’s Sarah Gardner interviewed Joseph Grundfest, a former SEC commissioner, about the new rules. This exchange about how corporations are using social media to broadcast news updates stood out:

Gardner: at what point can you still call it social media if these sites are basically another distribution channel for corporate news? Are we taking the social out of social media, and it’s becoming corporate media?

Grundfest: There is a sense in which Facebook and Twitter are becoming new forms of doing corporate press releases. But even if that’s true, what’s the matter with that? These are channels that began as social media, they’re now social media and more, and I think that speaks to the great success of the medium.

This is important. Gardner’s question betrays confusion of social media as a genre rather than a medium.

Social media’s power is based on interpersonal sharing and conversation. Interpersonal being the key word – it makes it very easy for people to spread information by sharing and talking with each other. Organizations can fit into those conversations, but they do best when they understand what they have to offer and how to do it. For many organizations, issuing news is exactly what they should be doing.

In general, it’s not worth spending much time worrying about how social media is “supposed” to be used. Everyone has different goals, and there aren’t many rules that can be applied broadly to all kinds of organizations.

One thing is certain, however: most people will not want to chat with most organizations in any way that resembles chatting with family and friends. That doesn’t mean that they don’t want to hear from organizations. When organizations use social media to distribute news worth sharing, people will gladly spread far and wide.

One poignant example: as I write this, the Boston Police Department’s tweet announcing the arrest of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has been retweeted over 143,000 times.

"[…]in the last year or so, many have started finding work as journalists inside companies. That new..."

jedsundwall — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 14:26:49 -0700

“

[…]in the last year or so, many have started finding work as journalists inside companies. That new appetite for “corporate journalism” makes it easier than ever for journalists to leave their posts. Intel, IBM, GE, Oracle, and countless others have hired reporters. Some companies have a blogger or two; others are building full-fledged news organizations.

The result is that these days a lot of good journalism is being committed outside the walls of traditional media companies.

[…]

My theory is that in the age of the internet, it’s what you write, not where you write it, that matters.

”

- Dan Lyons on why he left the media business.

—

If you’re a writer who wants to write about interesting stuff, you can do well by working for an organization that does interesting stuff.

In February, Quartz co-founder/editor-in-chief Kevin Delaney...

jedsundwall — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 10:00:47 -0700

In February, Quartz co-founder/editor-in-chief Kevin Delaney visited Yale, his alma mater, to talk about the changing business of news. Emmanuel Quartey took some great notes.

This bit on culture stood out to me:

[S]ay you’re the manager of an already established media team that is a bit stuck in its ways – how do you help your team adopt good new media habits?

[…]changing the culture of an institution is a difficult problem to solve. One thing that has worked for him is identifying someone who ‘gets it’, creating a space where that person can experiment, and then prominently highlighting the successes.

Over time, people get a sense of what earns you recognition in the workplace, and they become emboldened by the explicit institutional support for that sort of initiative to become more creative in their work. In summary, reward risk-taking.

I don’t think it’s possible to understate the value of having executive support when adopting new modes of communication. If bosses are only happy with press mentions, media teams are going to seek press mentions.

One of the great challenges of social media communication is figuring out which new successes merit highlighting. It’s nice to get likes, and shares, and new followers, but driving up those numbers might not be a worthy goal in and of itself. Indeed, many bosses switch from seeking press mentions to seeking a rapidly growing follower count. In many instances, however, the goal should be to build a devoted audience, which comes from consistency over a lot of time.

Because of this, it’s important to highlight Delaney’s call for a place to experiment. Experimentation allows for many failures on the path to success. A good boss understands this and will reward consistent effort in addition to more obvious successes.

"Writing is improved speech. It is harder because it is better. It takes longer because it can carry..."

jedsundwall — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 15:51:23 -0700

“Writing is improved speech. It is harder because it is better. It takes longer because it can carry more meaning. It requires more concentration because it carries more weight. It is more permanent because it is tested and refined. Writing is harder than talking because it counts for more, not less.”

- Thinking About Writing

Tumblr’s Storyboard: A Lesson in Going Direct

jedsundwall — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 18:08:00 -0700

Tumblr shut down its short-lived Storyboard blog last week. In Tumblr’s own words, Storyboard was an initiative to “tell the stories of Tumblr creators in a truly thoughtful way – focusing on the people, their work, and their stories.” I don’t know why Tumblr shut it down, but Storyboard was a good idea. It was a great channel for Tumblr to go direct and tell its own story.

The need to go direct

Tumblr needed Storyboard to fill a gap in its media coverage. Tumblr is enormous. It powers over 100 million blogs. With so much activity, Tumblr is impossible to pigeonhole, but media outlets regularly try to define it as a place for memes, or teen diaries, or animated gifs. Tumblr certainly has a lot of those things, because, as its founder, David Karp, has said “whatever you find [on Tumblr,] you’ll find a lot of it.” It’s inevitable when you power 100 million blogs.

So, instead of waiting for journalists to report on the breadth of its service, Tumblr hired a bunch of journalists to do it for them. It makes perfect sense. Many good journalists are looking for work, and journalists have the perfect sensemaking skills to explain the wide world that exists on Tumblr.

The approach to Storyboard was a twist on what Ezra Klein calls “revenge of the sources,” which is his explanation of how journalists are being displaced by the people they used to write about. Instead of paying journalists to write about a person’s work, why shouldn’t media outlets ask the person write about it herself? Countless professionals are happy to write in exchange for exposure (why do you think I’m writing this right now?). Forbes’s “contributed content” model is a perfect example of this trend.

What Tumblr did, however, was hire journalists to tell its own story on its own turf. Instead of churning out press releases for journalists to turn into stories elsewhere, it just hired journalists to go ahead and write good stories about Tumblr on a Tumblr blog. If Tumblr is going to take its brand beyond “that meme and gif site,” it needs to make sure its full story is being told, and Storyboard was a way to do it.

Case in point, our co-founder Lee Vann is featured in a Daily Dot story explaining that his more conservative consulting clients have been reluctant to adopt Tumblr. It’s supremely ironic that the Daily Dot story was written for Storyboard, but didn’t make it up before Storyboard was shut down.

The awkwardness of going direct

Charlie Warzel, deputy technology editor at Buzzfeed.com, told the New York Times in its piece on Storyboard’s closure, “It is always peculiar when a social network branches out into publishing, it just seems odd to bring on even excellent editorial talent to cover what is already going on organically.”

Yes, lots of activity is happening organically on Tumblr, but no one is covering it adequately – or how Tumblr would like. The problem isn’t redundant coverage. The problem is that readers don’t know what to make of Storyboard’s strange hybrid of journalism and public relations work. It’s not clear who the audience is. The @twitterstories and Facebook Stories blogs take the same approach and run into the same problem. It will be interesting to see if Medium’s About Medium ever takes the same approach.

But this news-not-quite-news writing isn’t confined to social networks and it’s not going anywhere. My friend Scott Lewis loves showing off the strange “news voice” that the NFL uses in its stories on NFL.com. Here’s a line from a story last month:

NFL.com’s Albert Breer obtained communication from the NFL threatening teams with possible tampering investigations if they enter into agreements with free agents prior to Tuesday’s open-market launch.

Really? Great scoop Breer! Are we to believe that NFL.com writers have to court sources at the NFL just like every other hack out there? It doesn’t take long to see through this fiction once you notice it, but there’s something more palatable about NFL.com’s approach because its stories read more like the news stories we’re used to reading.

Going direct isn’t going anywhere

As traditional news sources disappear, organizations will have no choice but to tell their own story. This is a good thing. It enables organizations to create deeper relationships with their patrons without needing media outlets to act as a broker.

This is especially good for organizations with small or widely distributed audiences that were poorly served by traditional media in the past. For example, the Argonne National Laboratory has been great at telling its own story to fellow and future scientists for years.

But, as we’ve seen with Storyboard, going direct is hard. Most organizations have never had to communicate directly. They don’t have the staff, the operations, or even have their own voice.

Storyboard may have been before its time. Over time, all public relations departments will behave more like newsrooms and the shape of what people consider “news” will change. For now, perhaps Tumblr should hire a couple more writers to simply tell stories on its excellent staff blog.

And as technology empowers more people to do more things, one thing certainly won’t change: our need for writers to tell us stories and make sense of our world.

Also posted on Medium.

slavin: Just saw this. It’s some of the only advertising for...

jedsundwall — Sun, 14 Apr 2013 19:06:00 -0700

slavin:

Just saw this. It’s some of the only advertising for gov/social causes that I’ve ever been impressed by.

Excellent example of how data, plain language, and clear data visualization can come together to create a very compelling message.

Roger Ebert's Twitter Rules

jedsundwall — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 11:13:59 -0700

The world lost a great voice yesterday when Roger Ebert died.

Ebert was tremendously beloved on Twitter. While he didn’t have as many followers as some other celebrities, his followers really listened to him. Ebert was revered for always being interesting, always having something worth saying, and always saying it well.

He shared his rules for Twitter (we’d call them guidelines) in a long article in 2010. They’re great rules:

My rules for Twittering are few: I tweet in basic English. I avoid abbreviations and ChatSpell. I go for complete sentences. I try to make my links worth a click. I am not above snark, no matter what I may have written in the past. I tweet my interests, including science and politics, as well as the movies. I try to keep links to stuff on my own site down to around 5 or 10%. I try to think twice before posting.

Ebert showed us the bridge between “old” and “new” media: thoughtful communication. If you care about your audience and seek to edify them, you will thrive in any medium. He made it look easy, but he was a pro.

May his influence as a writer live on for many many years to come. RIP, Roger.

"How can reporters get people to read their stories and examine their graphs? I believe they can only..."

jedsundwall — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 15:33:14 -0700

“How can reporters get people to read their stories and examine their graphs? I believe they can only do this in a lasting way by consistently providing content that is interesting, accurate, clear, and useful. If they do this often enough, they will become a trusted source.”

- Stephen Few – What Makes a Chart Boring?

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What Few says here about graphs applies to all kinds of content. If you want to become a valuable source of content to people, focus on creating valuable content consistently over time. Using gimmickry to attract clicks might provide some short-term success, but it won’t earn loyalty.

Amtrak made a bold move today when it tried to cheer up a...

jedsundwall — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 15:10:51 -0700

Amtrak made a bold move today when it tried to cheer up a disgruntled passenger with some jokes on Twitter.

It’s great to see Amtrak make this kind of effort. Humor is hard to pull off, and it can backfire. What’s more, many major services like Amtrak may steer clear of social media precisely because of complaints like Raelynn’s. Countless factors beyond Amtrak’s control can cause train delays, so why open yourself up to complaints that you can’t respond to?

Amtrak’s jokes provide the answer. Customers are going to complain on Twitter if you’re there or not. An official presence on Twitter gives you a chance to let customers know that they’re heard and that you care about them, even if you can’t solve their problem. If a customer is having a bad experience, you have a chance to make it a little better by reaching out to them.

Now, your mileage may vary. Like I said, humor is hard to pull off. It’d be weird if Amtrak tried to tell train jokes to everyone who complains about them, but this was a good showing.

Christina Cacioppo shared this screenshot of an exchange with an...

jedsundwall — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 09:58:21 -0700

Christina Cacioppo shared this screenshot of an exchange with an AT&T customer service representative with this simple commentary: “at&t. you are terrible.”

As we say, your voice is the most important part of your brand. Our focus is to help organizations figure this out as they use social media, but examples like Christina’s highlight the need for maintaining brand voice to be a high priority across entire organizations.