I’ve been thinking about communications today. Hey, it’s what I do.
One of the opportunities – or challenges if you prefer – of being in training is the need to remain on the cutting edge. While training has a certain structure, of course, it’s also important that training professionals be the early adopters for technology and the innovative visionaries who harness the energy of the next big thing. We’re not just riding the wave, we’re paddling way out in front of it, and making sure everyone else is ready for the swell.
There are some great advantages to being the guinea pigs for technological change, certainly not the least of which being the importance of developing the next-generation skills that are most in-demand. In many cases, suppliers pave the way for success, by training the trainers in new systems and technologies in the ultimate win-win-win partnership.
But when the advances are more stylistic than technological, sometimes we’re on our own. I’m thinking specifically about re-training a middle-aged brain with brevity as the new watchword. We’re in the age if instant messages, short iPad emails and reducing critical information to 140 well-chosen characters. I haven’t seen a lot of training classes taking up the challenge of capturing the grandeur and glory of The Gettysburg Address in just 140 characters.
I’m personally still struggling a bit with Tweeting, trying to efficiently summarize the nuances of a one-hour webinar into a short message that has to include some version of the word “register.” I can only imagine how much more difficult this gets when a) your training is longer and more complex and b) your boss is wanting faster-than-immediate results. How do you say this in less than 140 characters? “Help!”
Actually, I’m exaggerating … it’s not that hard for even an old dog to learn new tricks. Especially when the trick isn’t that new.
Let me set my career dial back, to a long time ago, in a newsroom far, far away (Anaheim, California, to be exact). You may not know this, but newsrooms are sometimes irreverent places. The combination of stress, deadlines and high emotions often causes a release of nervous tension in weird, weird ways. Remember Don Henley’s song “Dirty Laundry?” It’s a lot like that: “Have they done the operation? Is the head dead yet? You know the boys in the newsroom have a running bet.”
I’m telling you that just to tell you this: Way back in the day, my colleagues and I went through a little haiku phase, trying to encapsulate stories and emotions in three lines of 5-7-5 syllables. (There’s more to haiku that just counting syllables, but let’s leave it there for the purpose of this tale.) With the longest of these bad examples about 75 characters, the 140 characters of Twitter seems nearly magnanimous.
I’d be stretching to call these poetry, but they definitely told a story:
Writing into night.
Tired brains sing out for sleep.
Morning sun shines on.
Editor yelling.
Fire burns as free markets burp.
Glorious Monday.
Computers crash hard.
Long story, lost in ether.
Beer cools searing pain.
So everything old is new again, and Tweets have become my new haiku. Thanks to the advent of Twitter as a communications tool, I’m able again to write in form that comes close to complete sentences.
But the challenge remains. How can you tell a complex story full of nuance and shading, with a brevity that makes Dragnet’s “Just the facts, ma’am” sound like a rambling monologue? For a print-trained journalist used to writing in terms of inches, the millimeter options of Tweeting can be frustrating.
Of course, the answer is to mercilessly cut details, get creative and shorthand, shorthand, shorthand. It’s rough, but doable:
- “Gone with the Wind”: Scarlett loves Ashley, then Rhett. War starts & ends. Time to rebuild Tara. Melanie dies, Ashley cries. Rhett swears at her and leaves.
- “The Godfather”: Michael Corleone comes home. Dead horse, dead cop, dead wife, dead brother, dead Vito. Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes. Michael gets even.
- “Titanic”: Class struggle on boat. Poor boy, rich girl. But I love him. Look! An iceberg. That water looks cold. Jack sinks. Rose’s heart will go on.
Maybe those capsules lack scope and sweep, but they’re functional. Remember the point of your tweets is twofold: To get the message out, and to harvest the desired reward (read, register, share, buy, whatever). Maybe now the time is right for someone to develop tweet training. The haiku is still with us, and there’s no reason to believe tweeting is going out of style anytime soon either.
That’s about it, but to be sure I don’t look like a total Luddite, I’m taking my own challenge seriously. Here are 140 characters, reporting on the world’s most-famous speech:
- A Lincoln in PA: 87 yrs ago new nation founded. Now Great Civil War. Last full measure of devotion. Gov’t of, by, for people won’t perish.
What do you think? Are you at all challenged by the new communication styles available? Leave a comment, send me a tweet, shoot me a haiku or just write an “old-fashioned” e-mail.
