I recently finished the new book Digital Strategies for Powerful Corporate Communications, by Paul Argenti and Courtney Barnes. I must admit, I’m allergic to many Web 2.0 books. This book does have some of that social media handbook feel, but I was excited about it because co-author Paul Argenti, a professor of communications at Dartmouth, is someone whose ideas about communications have really influenced my thinking over the past few years.

Paul was one of the masterminds behind The Authentic Enterprise, a whitepaper that may be one of the most compelling looks into the future of the communications field I have ever seen. I’ve written about it previously here, here, and here.

The following paragraph highlights the point of view from which this book approaches digital communications strategy:

“The business of managing relationships– and therefore, business itself– has changed dramatically in the last decade. Stakeholder empowerment, as it’s come to be known, has shifted the corporate hierarchy of influence from the hands of elite business executives to those of their once-passive audiences, including employees, consumers, media, and investors.”

This paragraph does a nice job illustrating what we might define as the democratization of corporate communications.

—–
Democratization of Corporate Communications:
Any person communicating about any company at any time.
—–

A company’s own communications professionals can no longer expect to be the only communicators of the brand message. Employees are communicators. Customers are communicators. Even former employees and former customers can now communicate on behalf of brands. Scary stuff or exciting stuff, depending on who you are.

One of the things I really liked about this book is that it has an entire chapter highlighting a favorite subject of mine: the need for closer ties between the human resources and communications function. Why? Simple:

In a world where everyone is a communications person, everyone needs to be on brand.

[Read the rest of this post on Dark Matter Matters]

A few years ago while returning home from a trip to San Francisco I had a short lay over in the Salt Lake City airport. I browsed through the airport book store and picked up a copy of “Made To Stick.” I had read some very positive reviews and I loved the design of the cover. Glancing over a few pages, I  found the writing simple and strong. I bought a copy and finished it on the flight. When I landed I purchased copies for everyone in my office; all storytellers can benefit from the Heath brothers explanations of what we do.

At the time, my team at Red Hat has just finished the first of many short animations we created in-house that we titled “Real Technology Lessons.” As part of our Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 launch, we wanted to show that Red Hat understood the most basic problems our customers faced every day. Red Hat was the leading Linux provider in the world. Which meant we worked closely with the open source community to develop software for the Linux operating system. We delivered enterprise-ready, open source solutions. We supported and serviced these solutions using a subscription model. Very abstract and unfamiliar ideas for most IT purchasers.

We began by locking in a room one our brightest technical marketing guys— Joel Berman— with Jonathan Opp, a wonderful writer who I have longed referred to as Red Hat’s poet laureate. Together, they began to create the basic idea of a series of very simple stories. The team quickly grew as additional writers, designers and animators (Tim Kiernan, Rebecca Fernandez, Bascha Harris, Josh Gajownik, Adrienne Yancey, Chris Grams, Greg deKoenigsburg) joined in the open collaborative process. Soon ’servers’ became characters with personalities. Everything— the design, animations, voice overs, soundtrack— created internally. We kept it simple, true to the KISS principle.

One of the earliest lesson I learned in design school (thank you again, Michael Pause) was the KISS principle— Keep It Simple, Stupid. It works, of course. Made to Stick does a wonderful job explaining why. In their terms, we at Red Hat turned our large, complex, abstract stories into parables— simple, accessible and memorable stories easy for others to repeat. That’s how an idea passes from one person to another. In this case, we made our videos ’sticky’ so people would want to watch it. And share it.

That’s the simplest storytelling— and branding— there is…

I continue to recommend Made to Stick— one of the best books I’ve ever read on the power and practice of storytelling. If you want to see great examples of great storytelling, take a look at Real Technology Lessons. I’m still proud of this work.