What Siege Engines Can Teach You About Modern Communications

Let’s face it. Catapults and Trebuchets are just plain cool.

There’s something visceral about launching large items great distances. That’s the easy part, though. The hard part is hitting your targets.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

To better facilitate targeting, siege engines needed a way to hit the things that were “in between” the settings afforded by the ratchets and gears. Setting “A” would launch 200 yards, and the next notch at “B” will go 260. Sure, you can play with both elevation and power to find your range, but true fluid targeting couldn’t happen until there were better designs. The right range required the tools and a new kind of calculus.

It wasn’t easy, either… because greater precision was often a result of using smaller ratchets and gear teeth. And the smaller the gear, the more likely it would grind to nothing or slip completely. We’re talking about the need for better materials, better technology to help us safely reach those previously unattainable gaps.

Desire sparked innovation.

New Tools, New Rules

As communicators, we have a range of tools that were not available even just a few years ago. Deployed properly, they can help us find the gaps we used to ignore.

Take one of the oldest weapons in the PR arsenal — the news release. Sometimes it was an aimed and targeted weapon, but it was designed to have mass effect. For decades, corporations and organizations had a few notches from which to choose:

• Meet with stakeholders in person
• Direct mail
• Editorial boards
• News releases
• Letters to the editor

Yet, in each of the above, there was no way to calibrate once it was done. You launched, and you hoped. Tools that allow for feedback and conversation give you greater opportunity to course correct on the way, much like wire-guided missiles, or those with on-board navigation. They also allow you to target a more specific area-of-effect.

For example, a company might have debated whether to send a particular news release, on the grounds that it might be stirring up concern among people without an already existing interest. Today, there are other means of electronic publishing and tools for targeting that allow you to communicate in a similar fashion, without the “formal” nature of a news release.

But you can’t consider it if you’re still stuck in the Yes/No of the traditional gears.

Facebook’s Continual Continuum

If you want another example of how thinking “continuum” reaps rewards, just look at Facebook. From a critical standpoint, Facebook has grown by leveraging a couple of different human vices: Narcissism and Voyeurism. These are classes of activities that we wouldn’t like to be caught engaging, yet we do. Why? What has Facebook (and Twitter and other sticky networks) done to numb us to these behaviors.

They’ve created options, giving us a continuum of sharing.

You see, if I publish something and stick it up in everyone’s face, that’s considered more than a little gauche. (Think Advertising.) However, if I put it out only in front of those people who have “opted-in” to seeing my blatherings and updates, then it’s somehow something less than One. It’s still more than Zero, it’s on a continuum.

Now to the Voyeurism side.

There’s something inherently sneaky about stealing someone’s diary and reading their innermost thoughts. There’s something a little less sneaky about reading something that’s online, and even less subversive about seeing something you’ve been given permission to read and watch. It’s still a little voyeuristic, because the watched is never really sure they’ve been watched – but it’s closer to Zero than One.

What Facebook has done in particular is to drop the Voyeurism and Narcissism factors far closer to Zero than we might have expected. Much of that is based on illusion, such as the December “Privacy Settings” initiative that opened most status messages up to the world. Mark Zuckerberg has been pilloried for his vision about changing the standards of privacy for the world. Well, it’s too late. He’s already done it, because he’s figured out how to make the gears smaller.

The Invisible Calculus

Somewhere, there is a small room where behavioral psychologists and quantitative regression analysis geeks are downing lattes and running the numbers behind yet another iteration of experiments. In one, they’ve changed the order or definition of a privacy setting, to see if on the aggregate those who see the modified version are more prone to share. Likewise, they are making subtle changes to the presentation, to give markers or other visual cues that give the appearance of something personal without triggering our societal more about being too much of a snoop.

The illusion is that we are sharing more than we think we are, and we are looking over our neighbors’ shoulders more than we ever would have considered. We’re not at Zero or One. We’re at 0.3, but are acting as though we’re at 0.2. Who knows what the real scale or measurement is? It might be measured in “lattes” for all we know.

But it exists, because every tweak of the network will be tested for how “sticky” it makes the experience for the end user. Make us feel comfortable sharing as much as possible without triggering our fear for our privacy, and make us feel okay with seeing the minutiae of hundreds or thousands of other people, without triggering shame.

Math, The Ultimate Weapon

Now, once you see that new tools can give you options along a continuum, consider this: what happened to the armies that refused to adopt the new weapons?