His master's tone of voice

This recent Marketing Week post on corporate tone of voice caught my eye. This figure is particularly striking — "brands [globally] spend $13bn (£8.7bn) a year on visual identity and just $2bn on verbal identity" — but it's encouraging to read of brands like O2 and Nationwide taking the war on jargon more seriously (especially as I'm a customer of both).

I wouldn't say O2's 'be more dog' billboards tell us anything useful about the clarity of the company's communications, though: the test is how easily customers can read small print and speak to call centres, not what they take from an abstract ad campaign. Attending to those small details might not win many headlines or awards, but it will help a brand quietly build a good reputation. Equally, we shouldn't assume that because a company's outlook is irreverent and unfussy it necessarily produces clear, consistent messages or makes the most effective use of communication channels. Corporate mission statements that read like Facebook status updates tend to grate.

A common complaint is that the language organisations use is often shaped by backroom technicians rather than frontline communicators, who end up having to work as translators so the public can understand what their colleagues are on about. If it's not possible to involve sales and marketing staff in the terminology process from the start of a project, it can at least help to have a comprehensive style guide that acts as a jargon-to-plain English dictionary.

This is all particularly true on social media. Corporate communicators are nowadays encouraged to speak to customers in their own language online; this is sensible, but it requires a solid grasp of who those customers are and what their language is like. As with every other aspect of the internet, risks and potential rewards are both magnified.

A final related point is that marketing folk tend to be more aware of the need to avoid jargon than senior management, who often need to be persuaded of the value of both plain English and social media. The best managers are instinctively open to such developments, won't treat them as tick-box exercises and will both invest and take part in relevant training: but this is more proof that good external communication depends on good internal communication.

Brands that aren't aware of these issues often end up annoying the public and losing customers. Now, why not have a look at a fellow comms guru's advice on a few things firms can do to avoid annoying journalists and losing press coverage?

The open society and its enemies

Thrill-a-minute hedonist that I am, I've spent the week reading Facts are Sacred, the Guardian's new book on data journalism, and The Signal and the Noise by clever clogs Nate Silver. The usual low standards of Guardian subbing are met, but ignoring that there's some interesting content. I note that the New Statesman, New Scientist and several marketing magazines have also devoted recent front covers to big data.

Nate Silver is impressive on the limitations of data; what he really advocates is an approach combining both quantitative and qualitative analysis, as well as a Bayesian method of improving one's probabilistic forecasts as the evidence changes. His advice — again, equally applicable to anyone in business, politics, communications or journalism — is to be consciously aware of your own biases if you want to overcome them and see the situation objectively. You hardly need me to add to the mountains of textbooks already written on how institutional groupthink and inertia have brought down many once-mighty companies. The challenge is to constantly apply this scepticism to your own positions.

At the risk of coming over all Blairite, there is also an open/closed distinction at work here, and the point applies as much to mindsets as datasets — and it cuts completely across traditional left/right or even liberal/conservative lines. As a recent Economist piece put it: "Our ideological sympathies are not good predictors at this point of how we feel about issues of digital privacy and electronic freedom. The fact that these issues don't have a clear ideological colouration yet is important because they are among the most crucial issues of the 21st century."

I would summarise this as the division between those whose instinct is to make information more widely available, and those whose instinct is that it should remain the preserve of responsible gatekeepers of knowledge — between:

• insiders and campaigners exposing malpractice, and those who find it more convenient not to confront such issues
• those of us who believe a free society must protect the right to get things wrong if we want to get anything right, and those who believe newspapers should only publish stories approved by committees of self-appointed guardians of truth and decency
• those of us who value freedoms over feelings, and those who think that their right not to be offended trumps everyone else's right to think, investigate, publish and leak without fear

We could list more examples, but the point is that this battle against banal illiberalism will define the era of big data and big brothers. Those of us working in communications are at the frontline, so we might as well get ourselves on the right side. If you're a journalist: understand how data can be used both to find and to illustrate stories, carefully craft and submit FOIs,¹ resist the lure of churnalism; if you're in PR or marketing, convince your bosses to make openness and clarity an integral part of your brand, develop a responsive social media presence that makes this a reality, and never let the cover-up eclipse the crime.

As YouGov's Peter Kellner says: "knowledge is not only preferable to ignorance in principle; it also makes for a healthier society in practice". Encouragingly, one of the 10 design principles on the new gov.uk site is: "Make things open: it makes things better." What we really need is for this message to filter up to ministers and senior civil servants, and down to middle managers.

The point isn't that we need to be anti-capitalist or anti-government in principle; just that, to make both of these essential parts of our society work better, we need to keep a close eye on them from inside and out. As citizens we have to hold public bodies and global companies to account every bit as ruthlessly as we hold producers to account when we choose whether or not to buy their goods and services. As employees we need to fight institutional cultures that prioritise the organisation above the consumer or the public.

Erring on the side of this openness is good for society; whether it's good for individuals is an entirely different question.

---

1 I recently did this in my capacity as an elected member of Dowanhill, Hyndland and Kelvinside Community Council, and after waiting nearly a month was told by Glasgow City Council I'd need to pay a fee of £90 to get the answer I was looking for. But don't let that put you off. ;-)^↩

Hearts and minds

Victoria Macdonald at Channel 4 News had a good blog post on jargon in healthcare communications yesterday. She suggests that the political challenge of reorganising the NHS might be a lot simpler for managers and civil servants, if only they communicated with a suspicious public in something nearer plain English:

"Those speaking for change did not argue their case particularly well and at times seemed either exasperated or even patronising. I know they did not mean to come across that way but years of reporting the NHS has shown me that often those working in the health service do not know how to speak plain English and regularly fall back on jargon as well as making assumptions that people and patients know as much as they do about complicated statistical models of health care."

As well as helping to win arguments like these, taking clear communication more seriously could save lives. The approach of a senior manager at one of my employers — "if you can't convince them, confuse them" — seems, sadly, just as common in the healthcare sector as everywhere else.

Save the data

This week we learned that Glasgow (my home town) has been volunteered to host a pilot project to collect and use urban data more efficiently. The idea is to link up real-time info about transport, traffic and energy to make delivery of related public services more responsive. Even in a medium-sized city like ours, the amount of relevant data my fellow citizens generate would seem to make this a huge job.

According to some data I just found on the internet, 90% of all the data that exists was created in the last two years. The challenge of sorting through all of this stuff, and condensing or consuming it for some useful purpose — for research, for commerce or just for fun — is becoming one of the great communications challenges of the age. Essentially, the job of any professional communicator has always been to sort through a lot of data and transform it into useful information: in journalism this means bringing out the salient facts of a story, in marketing the key selling points of a product or service, in PR a bit of both. But how do we go about sorting through the deluge of data that exists now?

  

JISC's rather good newsletter has some ideas about how we as individuals and institutions might go about this daunting task. I liked point 6, though it doesn't seem a particularly risky claim to suggest the visualisation of information will increase. The project to display interactive information about every bomb dropped on London in WWII, explored on the next page of the newsletter, is a fascinating example.

It's worth remembering that not all of this is new. This Economist article from 2007 on the history of graphic displays of information contains some examples that are just as impressive and eye-catching now as when they first appeared centuries ago. It's hard to think how today we could better illustrate the disaster that was Napoleon's campaign in Russia than by Minard's chart, while Playfair's beautiful depiction of wheat and labour prices seems to anticipate the Manhattan skyline. The dismal science can be fun too.

The JISC piece also leaves out the problem of institutional bottlenecks: right now I'm trying to explore visual.ly and easel.ly, but the browser on my work computer is obsolete and my attempts to get IT to upgrade it have so far proved futile. The potential for big data is exciting, but any big organisation generating the stuff is also liable to be sluggish in working out how to deal with it.  Big is not always beautiful, as this Guardian article explains. Mountains of data are of little use if your local council only consults 42 people about a major planning decision, then ignores them and does what it wants anyway.

One final point: as with all technology, the information revolution merely magnifies existing trends in society and human nature to produce new opportunities and new dangers. Might the disturbing extent to which American politics has become polarised be at least partly a feature of the ease with which readers, viewers and listeners can now avoid accessing opinions they find unfavourable?