This is a tale of two Malcolms, with something else in the middle.
Back in 1998, when most of the world had not yet heard the name Malcolm Gladwell -- or blogging, or Google -- the highly accomplished social-science reporter published a piece about the public relations profession entitled,"The Spin Myth." In this much-overlooked article, Gladwell (that's him, above, in a photo from the old days), among other things, asks whether the art of spinning is still effective. It might have been effective years ago, when Edward Bernays -- the so-called father of public relations -- first practiced his black magic. Like persuading Americans that "beer is the beverage of moderation." Like convincing the public that bacon was an essential part of a "hearty" breakfast (and minting the phrase "hearty breakfast" in the process). Like seducing publishers into believing they could sell more books by getting home architects to build more book shelves. But if you look at the marketing that has been most effective in recent history, it is not spin -- which Gladwell nicely defines as the art of "telling stories even when there is no story to tell" -- but plain talk. The father of this style of marketing, says Gladwell, is not Bernays, but Lester Wunderman, a direct-marketing wiz whose career high was the Columbia Record Club, a finely-tuned mail-order campaign that achieved modest fame in the 1960s. Wunderman's success was based on a very bloggy but pre-blog concept: listening to the customer. It was also based on a very googly but pre-Google concept: carefully measuring and calibrating marketing according to what the customer tells you.
Much of the apparatus of modern-day marketing--the computer databases, the psychographic profiles, the mailing lists, the market differentiations, the focus groups--can be seen, in some sense, as an attempt to replicate the elegance and transparency of this model. Marketers don't want to spin us. They want to hold us perfectly still, so they can figure out who we are, what we want, and how to reach us.
Gladwell concludes his article with the punchline, "we are all Wundermanians now." Many people may have doubted that in 1997 (after all, Gladwell's stock in trade is the counterintuitive). But few today would dispute it. But was Gladwell going too far in his pronouncement that spin is dead? For Gladwell, spin is/was something that PR people and reporters -- the only people who need to tell a "story when there is no story to tell" -- care about. The result is that spin gets trapped in an echo chamber. Customers just want facts, and details about the product, thank you, which is probably why so many PR agencies today find themselves competing for the same budget that goes to Google ads.
Which brings me to this week's topic for "Office Talk": a word that has been subjected to a lot of Big Spin -- "transparency." You've encountered the word, I am sure. In the general world of business, it refers to the practice of disclosing your financial interests. In the world of blogging, where many conversations about PR are happening today, it refers to a specific kind of financial interest -- that is, the company who is paying the bill for the blogger and the blogging. Transparency, the word, was meant to stand for common-sense ethics. But like all fancy words, transparency is open to manipulation. Which appears to be what was bothering PR blogger Mike Manuel when he wrote a post was entitled, "A Failure to Be Honest."
"Okay, it's official, transparency is now the universal PR euphemism for honesty," wrote Mike, linking to Richard Edelman's apology for the 2006 Wal-Mart blogging scandal (you can read about that episode here). Richard had apologized for agency's "failing to be transparent." Not quite the apology that Mike was looking for, or expecting.
This small scuffle between Mike and Richard -- if you want real drama, read B.L. Ochman's commentary -- is instructive in at least two ways. First, there's the irony of using the word transparency in a non-transparent way, i.e., to gloss over the transgression with a word that evokes more of a business standard rather than an ethical rule. Fair or not (I believe Richard was sincere in his apology), it feels like the same kind of verbal sleight-of-hand crooked politicians practice when they apologize for a "lapse of judgment." And in a world where being open and direct is the number-one rule, the use of a euphemism for dishonesty is hard to forgive. Which is one reason why bloggers like Mike Manuel, B.L. Ochman and many others reacted so harshly. Edelman appeared to be spinning the spinners in a no-spin zone.
But there's something else. In the "Spin Myth," Gladwell poked fun at media critic Howard Kurtz for castigating PR people who are so adept in the art of persuasion that they can spin candor as a weapon. Kurt offers the example of a moment during the Clinton administration when the White House won points for turning over mountains of evidence in the Whitewater scandal in an effort Kurtz called "Operation Candor." Gladwell dissects this episode and concludes that the only people being spun were the media, not the public, so no harm done.
But I believe that Gladwell missed the point on this one. In today's world, it is not easy to separate the media from the people, and when the spinners spin, they accidentally might be spinning not just CBS, but you and me as well. The euphemistic use of words like transparency is an affront not just to the Media-Spindustrial complex (Randall Rothenberg's term), but to the literate world at large. It's a perspective that even Gladwell might agree with today (that's him, below, in a more recent photo). In his most recent article for The New Yorker, he lays blame for the Enron debacle not only with Enron managers, but with the public for failing to understand the information that Enron openly disclosed. The new information age requires we all get smarter.
Gladwell may have been right about us in 1998; perhaps we were all Wundermanians. But a lot has happened in the last ten years -- Google, blogging, and the so called "you" economy. Today, ideally, we are all Manuellians -- people who are not just listening, but capable of coming right back at you. Careful who you spin.
NEXT WEEK ON OFFICE TALK: "THE MEMING OF LIFE"
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