communication. community. cognition.
Video is increasingly important for a variety of reasons. First, we’re just now getting a handle on how persuasive you can be when better engaging the visual cortex. There are some stories that play better with visual and emotional information. And lastly, Youtube is now the second-largest search engine, right behind its parent company, Google.
So I thought I would share an example of how to use Youtube in all the wrong ways.
(Listen to Ike read this post: How not to use YouTube)
The Transportation Safety Administration posted this video the other day, as a means to quell the unrest over its new backscatter machine and the updated pat-down procedures. It’s a direct message to the traveler from TSA Administrator John Pistole.
Please, watch the video, if you can.
Now, here are the problems I have with it.
John Pistole is a nice enough man, but he doesn’t fit the right template for a spokesperson who alleviates fear. He’s a rather tall gentleman with large hands. He’s not the type who would be cast as Santa Claus.
This message would be better delivered by a woman, and a slightly older one at that. We’re talking about a message designed to defuse an emotionally-charged environment.
It’s a video, because it’s on YouTube, but it might as well have been an audio message with slides. Where are the clips showing the allowable and contraband items? Where is the clip showing the new pat-down procedure, and what it looks like? Where is the video showing us how professional the TSA agents are, and how you can expect to be treated?
If you want to replace one set of expectations with another, video is a great way to do it. This was a missed opportunity.
Pistole is an administrator, not a presenter. But someone should have been coaching him about his gestures. Many of them are empty waving, with his hands clasping and unclasping at seemingly random times.
“Hands together” needs to happen at a time of appeal to unity.
“Finger woven” needs to happen at the moment of strongest appeal to unity.
“Hands 1-2-3″ can emphasize the points you want people to remember, but Pistole does them left-to-right from his perspective, not the viewers’!
He does a lot of right-to-left gesturing as he moves through his sentences, and again they are empty gestures. Given the way we read in the United States, too much “right-to-left” can be a subliminal signal of reverse progress.
Midway though, Pistole starts describing the decision-tree of what will happen, and your options if you’re one of the ones chosen for the AIT (backscatter) machine. However, there are so many if’s and then’s rolling through that paragraph, it’s easy to get lost.
Also lost in that is any sense of probability. Only three-percent of passengers are selected for the AIT/pat-down? That needs to be added into the message here.
Go back to the 1:09 mark of the video:
We very much appreciate your involvement, cooperation and assistance in assuring the safety of you, the traveling public.
This single sentence, and the delivery, is a powerful bundle of mixed messages.
It’s so far into the script, that you can tell Pistole is reading it directly off the prompter. Had there been video or charts or pictures covering up the edit, you could have come back to him for a more heartfelt delivery of a statement with real emotional connection! Let him ad lib the sincerity, at least!
But this wasn’t just a failure of editing. Look at the language on the page:
…the safety of you, the traveling public.
Rather impersonal, don’t you think, readers of my website?
Also… the last time I checked, it wasn’t just the ‘traveling public’ that was at risk from terrorists who take over planes. Most of the victims were on the ground in buildings, minding their own business.
I am doing my part as a patriotic American to share this video. It might be the only way you find it.
It was posted on Friday, November 19th by TSA HQ Public Affairs, and as of Tuesday morning was showing 26,000 views. It’s filed in the “Travel and Events” category, and there is not a single tag.
It was posted on the world’s second-largest search engine, and had no tags, and no description. Personally, I would have looked for “TSA” or “backscatter” or “pat down” or something along that line.
They disabled the comments. Have you ever seen what goes on in a Youtube comment thread?
Wise move.
Overall, I am glad government is “getting it,” and being innovative about how they share information. But video is a funny animal, and when done wrong, does more harm than no video at all.
Bob LeDrew’s take on TSA’s failure to keep up in other forms of social media.
Rich Becker’s more expansive look at security, liberty, and mixed messages.
Speed Saves
A gunman fired several rounds in a University of Texas library today. (I don’t think I have to recount the very sensitive issue with you… the rest of the media is sure to dredge up the story of the sniper in the tower.)
The interesting piece for me today is how technology changed both the event and the reporting of it. [Read more...]
o114.mp3
We had an issue a couple of months ago, that was localized to a specific subdivision. Someone posted a complaint online to a social network, then went to the office.
By lunchtime, we had already reached out to that person (in person, and based on a previous phone conversation, not through social media.) His concern was resolved.
Then, he got home and found a dozen comments on his original status update. He commented back that he spoke with us and was satisfied, but the comments kept rolling.
The next morning, the comments exploded even further, and the volume of the comments triggered concern for those who were monitoring. Even worse, the conversation managed to circumvent our standard monitoring and triage process, and landed on the radar of some executives. So now a problem that had been resolved was suddenly UN-resolved in the minds of many.
As a company, we did what we were supposed to. We talked with the man, in person, and did so as part of our ordinary protocols. So why did things get worse? [Read more...]
I had a lovely vacation, and returned with a couple of lovely thoughts about communicating from solid ground.
You know, the wise man built his house on the rock, the foolish man built his on sand (or wrote in the sky.)
While there are many facets and layers to this, they all boil down to one thing: do you own it?
Those of you on wordpress.com or blogspot.com domains, are building on someone else’s sand.
Those of you on Twitter and Facebook are building your reputation on someone elses’s sand.
And sand shifts.
Image by pedrosz on Flickr
When the dunes move, they can tear down things you’ve built.
I made a decision a few months ago to build my own link shortener, using an open-source script that I housed on my own server space. (It’s not my physical server box in my house, but if I rent it and own the data, then I can export it. Not quite sand…)
At the time, there was much discussion about how link shorteners can be used to hide malware, and the issue of trust remains a big one with me. If you ever see an http://ike4.me link out in the wild, you can rest assured that only two people might have created it. It was either me, or my friend Adam Daniel Mezei. You don’t have to worry about whether it was a malware link that someone foisted on me, that is automatically coming to infect you.
There is a larger trust factor involved too. I hesitated writing about this, but I had been consulting with my friends at the American Red Cross and the Centers for Disease Control for a while, discussing the benefits of having custom URL shorteners. In a major disaster or pandemic, there is a great benefit in knowing that the public health advice being offered is truly from a trusted source. (I didn’t write about this in the open, for fear that idiot speculators would jump out and grab all of the good obvious short URLs and hold the organizations hostage for a sale.) But seeing a shortened link with rc4.us (or some variation) would carry a lot more merit, and people would be more inclined to act on it and share it.
Before you dismiss this, you need to understand how crucial the elements of trust and consistency are in a time of public confusion. When you see conflicting statements from organizations, it rapidly promotes inaction for the very people you are trying to help.
After a while, it is too confusing to sort out, and paralysis ensues.
Imagine what the next big public health issue will look like. The Red Cross and the CDC — who have been very diligent about making their messages uniform. During disasters, the Red Cross works with FEMA for the same reasons.
But you know as well as I do that those messages will get drowned out by all of the well-meaning bloggers and contributors who dig up their old versions of documents, some of which were never right to begin with, and sharing them across the internet. In a major disaster, a large segment of the population will turn to Huffington Post and other high-traffic sites, and consider what they see there.
Which is why the branded link shortener can be so very important.
Yesterday, Twitter unveiled an upcoming feature, whereby all links in Tweets will be “wrapped” by a link with the t.co domain.
When Twitter began, the default shortener was (the now gargantuan) tinyurl.com, then it switched to bit.ly. The difference now is that every link will apparently be washed through Twitter’s shortener service, and will appear as a t.co.
Twitter is offering a benefit, namely it will screen out the malware links which made trust an issue in the beginning. But I submit that it doesn’t solve the other trust issues remaining, and it leaves Twitter vulnerable. Now if a piece of malware does squeeze through, Twitter is indeed culpable because it has made the pledge to stop that. Also, there will be issues with false positives, and the possibility that really scummy Black Hat SEO types will figure out how to temporarily get their competitors on the Twitter black-list.
http://ike4.me will still work for me, but it now gives me no real advantage. And I would have to think that the bit.ly and awe.sm services that have been offering premium-level service to nyti.ms and huff.to and others will feel the pain. After all, why should the New York Times bother promoting a service that brands its links, if no one sees the branding.
Yes, it’s only Twitter for now. But consider:
That’s what you get when you build on sand. And that’s why I want to own as much of my data as I can, and you ought to as well.
Thanks to the internet, any crank with access can write something that spreads. If you’re managing the reputation of a brand, the factor working in your favor is there is so much material being published that it is the rare message that cuts through the clutter.
But how do you recognize it before it starts doing its damage?
The following is a piece I wrote for the Now Is Gone blog, but now there is some added backstory. (Most of what I write has a backstory. It makes it easier to draw distinct conclusions; the trick is in generalizing them enough that you can communicate it without tipping the backstory.) [Read more...]
