Turducken

We recently added a new communicator in our Red Cross regional office. He’s a great guy, assigned to support the Hurricane Recovery Program. I’ve known him a while and respected his work, and we recently had a chance to collaborate on promoting one phase of the long-term recovery efforts.

He wrote a brilliant release that we were going to distribute through our network of chapters: after all, it is important that those with the local media relationships should maintain them. It was at this point that we recognized a potential pitfall. “How do we make sure the chapters actually send the release?”

It’s not enough to just send the document with marching orders — you have to earn some degree of buy-in on the part of the local communicators. We found our inspiration in turducken, the strangely Cajun amalgam of nested birds. Our release was sent nested in an e-mail, that included the basics of a holiday pitch to newsrooms. The pitch was equally useful for an e-mail or a phone contact. All of this was wrapped in another e-mail, with instructions and a plea to help spread the word.

My colleague had come from a job that involved direct media relations, and took just a few moments to grasp the concept: sometimes, when you are counting on others to carry your water, it pays to wrap it in a pretty bow, before your mixed metaphors spill everywhere and run fowl.

If you think about it, this is really the genius of the 2.0 Social Media Explosion (it’s been in all the papers.) The average guy has only average skills in carrying a message without impedance, mistranslation, or signal loss. If you can take the need for expert coding away, and provide a two-click interface, you can create a new YouTube. Now, anyone and everyone can be a carrier for your meme or message, they’ll be more likely to do so, and once received, the message will be more or less what you meant for it to be.

If you look around, you can see similar instances of taking the intermediate into account. Take CPR, for instance. (No, really… it would be cool if you did take CPR…) Every few years or so, the guidelines change regarding the ratio of chest compressions to breaths. It’s no coincidence that those numbers tend to be rounded to 5’s and 10’s. Let’s say, for instance, that the optimum formula was 18 pumps to 2 breaths. Even though that might be best for the cardiac arrest victim, it does that victim little good if the responder is hesitant to start for fear of only doing 17.

Round numbers make people feel more comfortable, and are easier to remember. So a person confidently applying 20:2 will do more for a dying man than one who doesn’t do 18:2. It’s for this reason that some researchers have argued for the elimination of rescue breathing, opting for “compression only” resuscitation.

The trick is factoring in that variable — the messenger — and finding the optimum “wrapper” that gives your message the greatest chance at being understood properly. If you’re really good, that “wrapper” has a flavor or nuance all its own, like the outer layers of a turducken.

[tags]Communication, Ike Pigott, Occam’s RazR[/tags]