8 Digital Media Rules As Told By Children's Fables

Social media - is it a truly revolutionary development that is reshaping our world in a radically new fashion, or is it simply a digital recasting of ancient social patterns?

Digital media scholar and consultant Jonathan Salem Baskin maintains that there's more truth in the latter than the former. In his recent book Histories of Social Media: 2,000 Years of Do's and Don'ts, Baskin contends that while the technologies used in social media are new, the types of connections that it facilitates can be traced back many centuries, and in many ways bears a closer resemblance to medieval villages than our modern day social groupings.

The book analyzes the forms and functions of social media one by one and in all cases finds historical antecedents. Crowdsourcing? The author alleges that villagers in medieval Europe used it to learn about treatments for the Black Plague. Engagement? 19th century industrial unions planned activism in ways that make 'friending' a product or service little more than a joke. Conversation? The Roman Senate used it to run an empire while the perpetrators of the French Terror used it to commit mass murder. Debate? People have jousted and dueled for centuries. Wikis? Oral narratives were the product of waves of user contributions, as was, for that matter, the Old Testament.

In today's world, many parents and teachers worry about letting their children loose in the dangerous digital jungle of the information age, with all of its many monsters and menaces. How did their counterparts in the ancient and medieval world safeguard their kids? Thanks to Aesop, the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen and other social media educators of yesteryear, there has long existed an enormous body of cautionary tales about how to navigate this often dangerous terrain. And as it turns out, many of these fables apply just as well to today's social media as they did to the social and cultural landscapes that gave birth to them.

1. The Town Musicians of Bremen

Lesson: State your mission and objectives clearly when launching an online campaign.

The Brothers Grimm's famous folktale about four disgruntled barnyard animals who abandon their abusive keepers and set off for the town of Bremen to become town musicians is a powerful tale of emancipation from mistreatment as well as a polemic against ageism (all four are 'past their prime' in terms of their usefulness). But it's also a lesson in the power of a clearly stated goal and purpose. Had the donkey simply said, "Hey guys, we're gonna hang out, maybe play some tunes and stuff..." it's unlikely that the four beasties would have banded together so closely. As it happened, they never ended up going to Bremen but the power of their strategic plan was enough to see them through every obstacle in their path.

2. The Ugly Duckling

Lesson: Don't stick with an online tool that doesn't fit your organization.

Most if not all digital media afficionados can relate to Hans Christian Andersen's melancholy cygnet who is ostracized by his adopted duck siblings before eventually finding a welcoming community of fellow swans. Most of us were nerds and misfits of one sort or another. But the tale of the Ugly Duckling is also a lesson in compatibility and the futility of sticking with tools that don't work. Just because people or organizations closely associated with you are using a certain type of digital tool doesn't mean it will necessarily work for you. Analyze your communications needs, scout out all the available tools and choose the best match.

3. The Boy Who Cried Wolf

Lesson: Transmitting excessive irrelevant information undermines your status as a credible source.

Regrettably, social media networks are full of people who behave like the irresponsible shepherd boy in Aesop's famous tale about the perils of dishonesty. However, one doesn't even mean to be flat-out mendacious in order to suffer the same fate as the shepherd boy in today's social media world. The Boy Who Cried Wolf serves as an allegory for online reputation management, in which steady bombardment of useless information transmitted for its own sake means that genuine calls to action go unheeded. Decide what is - and isn't - worth communicating based on whether or not it meshes with your mission and stick with it.

4. The Tortoise and the Hare

Lesson: Slow and steady communication trumps sudden bursts of activity.

The story of the greatest athletic upset in all of fiction serves as a powerful allegory for social media - and for Twitter in particular. In the Twittersphere, the only way to establish yourself as an influencer is through slow and steady daily output. Short, fleeting bursts of output followed by lengthy absences will completely undermine your effectiveness. The same also applies to blogging, where short but regular posts will galvanize your status while impressive flurries of activity followed by silence will get you nowhere in the blogosphere



5. Little Red Riding Hood

Lesson: Take every measure to protect your online privacy.

This one is really a no-brainer. The character of the wolf in Charles Perrault's iconic fairy tale can be used to represent any number of online villains: hackers, identity thieves, Trojans, online predators....you name it. Having successfully gained access to Grandma's IP address, password information and various other choice bits of information, the wolf successfully commandeers her entire system and had it not been for the Deus ex machina intervention of the woodcutter-cum-IT troubleshooter, all would have been lost. At least Grandma thought to back up her system.


6. The Three Little Pigs

Lesson: Spend the money and build it properly from the beginning.

Three little companies set out on their own to build their own websites and establish solid online presences. In this case, the 'wolf' isn't a single identifiable menace but rather the cumulative effect of social and economic shifts, changing demands, the forces of competition and adversity as a whole. The third little pig invested in a first-rate website with a flexible content management system, a stable and user-friendly CRM and an intranet so as to facilitate good internal communication. The other two companies threw together something cheaper and faster - and suffered the huffing and puffing of a volatile marketplace and changing demands.

7. The Emperor's New Clothes

Lesson: Make sure you consult internally before embarking on a new tech development.

Here's a fable we've all heard before. A CEO decides it's high time to embark on a stunning new digital media campaign. He hires a team of slick IT consultants who entrance him with various exotic-sounding tools, and poof - he's sold. Unfortunately, he fails to consult with his staff, his business partners and other stakeholders and winds up with a website or array of digital tools that end up being completely ill-suited for the company's activities, while the consultants walk away with a fat cheque. In the end it's a bratty intern who opines that the new system frankly sucks ass. Moral? Get a second, third, fourth opinion before you drink the Kool Aid.

8. The Shoemaker and the Elves

Lesson: Take advantage of your people and let your online community do the work.

There's something very refreshing about the Brothers Grimm's tale of the destitute shoemaker whose fortunes are dramatically reversed thanks to an enterprising team of diminutive cobblers. While a great many children's fables champion grunt work and thankless industriousness, the tale of the shoemaker and the elves tells a very different lesson - take full advantage of the help that's offered, whatever shape it may take. And nowhere is this lesson more applicable than in today's social media, where the only route to success is creating conditions where your stakeholders take over the means of communication and communicate your messages for you. Give your people the materials (information and key messages) and let them do their thing while you monitor it. And you will reap the rewards.

Got any other examples of children's fables that are allegorical to today's social media? I'd love to hear them.

PR History - The Elevator Pitch That Made Modern Japan

Every PR professional with any experience is familiar with the idea of the elevator pitch. Alternately known as the 'elevator speech' or 'elevator statement', it's a short summation used to get a point across as quickly and coherently as possible - hypothetically within the time typically spent on an elevator. It's the sort of thing PR people the world over are enlisted to help business executives, politicians and other public figures develop and deliver. It's also the sort of thing that comes in handy to PR folk themselves, either when trying to transmit key messages over the phone (or, potentially, on an actual elevator) or even trying to convince somebody that our services are absolutely invaluable.

There are plenty of online resources dedicated to crafting and delivering the perfect elevator pitch, as well as a glut of blog posts purporting to tell you the top five or top ten or top two secrets to the perfect elevator pitch. This is not one of those posts. For one thing, so many of these posts state what to my mind is plainly obvious, namely that you need to keep it short and concise and refine your key messages. The one point I would add to the predictable adages would be to practice your pitch on your dog - or if you don't have one, somebody else's dog. If you can get your message across within the length of time the average dog can sit still and pay attention, you're good to go.

Do elevator pitches work? Absolutely. And sometimes they change the course of history. And in certain cases, they have actually taken place in elevators. The story of a young lad named Kakuei Tanaka and his chance meeting with one of Japan's most influential prewar industrialists on an elevator in Tokyo shows just how valuable having that 60-minute self-promotional sales pitch at the ready can be

Former Japanese prime minister Kakuei Tanaka is without doubt Japan's most memorable postwar political figure. While perhaps not the greatest prime minister in Japanese history, he was most definitely the most fascinating - and arguably the most influential. He was gregarious, megalomaniacal and possessed with an almost fanatical devotion to his constituents and allies. Tanaka was, in Canadian terms, a sort of amalgam of Chrétien's down-home charm, Trudeau's arrogance and Mulroney's ethical pliancy - with more than a little bit of Berlusconi thrown in for good measure.

Born into a destitute farming family in rural Niigata Prefecture in 1918 and arriving in Tokyo as a teenager with a eighth grade education and an thick Niigata accent, his rise to power was totally improbable. While his tenure as PM lasted only two years (though long compared to the parade of lemmings that have occupied the office in recent years), the man thoroughly defined Japanese politics for well over a decade and his ghost still haunts the halls of Nagatacho 20 years after his death. Twice jailed for accepting bribes from industrial stakeholders and dogged by scandal his entire career (most notably by the notorious ANA-Lockheed Scandal in the 1970s), his Robin Hood/Mafioso persona continues to fascinate and polarize.

Watergate, shmatergate! 12 bribery scandals and I'm still king of the world!

In a sort of flawed Horatio Alger story, Kaku-san (as his supporters called him) went to the big city with a mission: to bring hinterlands like his own into modern Japan through mass infrastructure development. His system, known in Japan as the 'construction state' (土建国家, Doken Kokka), has been lauded for making Japan a world leader in infrastructure and helping spread the country's postwar prosperity to its farthest flung corners and derided for fostering corruption, littering the countryside with ugly (and often unnecessary) public works  and ratcheting up the country's national debt. Love him or hate him, he remade his country.

What few people know about Tanaka is that he would most likely have lived a life of total anonymity were it not for a chance meeting on a Tokyo elevator in 1937 with the Viscount Masatoshi Okochi, a powerful industrialist in prewar Japan. Tanaka was 18 years old at the time and working as an errand boy for a construction company. Tanaka biographer Steven Hunziker tells the story thusly:

Kakuei, a novice at Nakamura, was often sent to the headquarters of Riken for delivery and pickup. One day, while on just such a mission, he rushed through a crowd of waiting employees in the lobby of Riken in an effort to catch a strangely empty elevator. It was empty because the Viscount Okochi was on it. Kakuei's impertinence was indeed embarrassing. A few days later he found himself in an identical situation. However, this time he demonstrated some circumspection and waited outside with the others. The Viscount, remembering the youth, inquired as to why he was being so slow to get on the elevator. Kakuei, always opportunistic, took his cue and joined the Viscount.

From there, he secured a chance for a meeting in the Viscount's office later that day. He quickly related to the Viscount the tale of his pilgrimage to Tokyo. Responsive to Kakuei's ambitious nature, Okochi decided to give the lad a chance to prove himself capable of higher station and promised to grant one wish. Kakuei requested help in establishing his own drafting office. The Viscount complied and thus the Kyoei Architectural Office came into being. The Viscount supplemented the request with a healthy array of introductions to potential business clients.

From this point on, Tanaka wasted no time marrying his way into the upper classes and maneuvering his way into politics. By 1948 at the age of 29 he was appointed Vice Minister of Justice (an astounding achievement in the gerontocratic world of Japanese politics), and he continued to climb the political ladder in a system dominated by blue-blooded hereditary politicians. As PM he was unafraid to antagonize the United States over trade caps while causing some consternation in Nixon's White House by normalizing diplomatic ties with the People's Republic of China ahead of Washington. And while Tanaka and Nixon would both be toppled in 1974 due to scandal, Tanaka only seemed to grow stronger with controversy - and was even managing party affairs from his prison cell.

The moral of this story? Look for an opportunity to accost an influential person on an elevator, barge in, go completely above your station, defy whatever cultural conventions you were born into - and get that elevator pitch across. It also helps to have vast reserves of insouciant self-confidence, something that Tanaka demonstrated at every juncture. It also helps to have a good story, and the story of the Niigata farm boy determined to take on the big boys in the capital not only impressed the Viscount and got Tanaka his first job, but also drove his career and sealed his sordid spot in Japanese history.

Stephen Hunziker's delightful illustrated biography of Kakuei Tanaka is unfortunately out of print. Fortunately, the book is available online in its entirety here.

The Four Animals of Tohoku

A magnificent allegory for recovery in Japan's ravaged northeast

Six months after the most devastating earthquake in Japanese recorded history (and the resulting tsunami) laid siege to Japan's northeastern coastal region, the barely recovered city of Sendai (the Tohoku region's largest city) held a TEDx Conference at Tohoku University, centred around the theme 'Asking the 3.11 Generation'.

Among the speakers at TEDx Tohoku was Paul Bennett, Chief Creative Officer of the global design consultancy IDEO, a company dedicated to designing and bringing to market new products, services, and experiences. He spoke on the concept of ‘human-centered design’ and how it might be applied in post-3.11 Tohoku.

His talk was one of the most captivating TED lectures I've ever heard. He related the story of the resilience and determination of the people of the Tohoku region in the form of a fable starring four animals. Remember the Four Town Musicians of Bremen - the donkey, the dog, the cat and the rooster? Meet the Four Disaster Recovery Critters of Tohoku. They are as follows:

   

• The Canary - The sentinel, the warning bell, the figurative 'canary in the coalmine', representative of the quest for better disaster warning systems;
• The Sea Otter - The keystone species, the harbinger of new life and new ecosystems, representative of the creativity necessary for recovery from total devastation;
• The Wild Goose - The ultimate team players, taking turns leading and following and pushing one another ahead in a spirit of collaboration;
• The Frog - The one none of us want to be, the metaphorical frog in the boiling pot, who we hope will have the wherewithal to learn from the past and jump into action before it's too late.

In one of the most poetic TED talks ever, Bennett applauds the people of Tohoku for their extraordinary show of resolve and resourcefulness in the aftermath of the disaster and shows how Japan should be - and will be - an example to the rest of the world in how to move forward from the worst tragedy imaginable.