You Can Still Lie, Even Without Saying A Word

From the Slow Leadership blog ...

Authentic communication, the cornerstone of all trusting relationships, requires far more than speaking the truth.

Amidst all the articles and advice on being authentic, one area that isn’t looked at as often as it should be is how communication that isn’t authentic destroys trust. I don’t just mean lying — deliberately setting out to mislead or twist the facts. Communication can be just as inauthentic when every word and sentence is correct (factually at least), yet the overall impression left with the other person is derived from a false image of who you are, what you believe and where you are coming from.

In the words of the old song: “It’s not what you say, it’s the way that you say it.” The words you use, the tone of voice, the circumstances in which the ‘message’ is passed — even your facial expressions and body language — can all be used to create a false picture in the other person’s mind; one that will give your words a different meaning from their face value. When this happens, your hearers (or readers) are as thoroughly mislead as they would be if every word of what you said or wrote were untrue.

We are surrounded by people who deliberately use words in ways that conceal their true meaning. They add a gloss that changes the message, conceals a hidden agenda, or is designed to evoke specific emotions. All the time, they are calculating what will make what they say convey something other than the plain words express.

Advertisers, copywriters, PR people, spokespeople for special interests, lawyers, politicians: all are adept at using their words to conceal and manipulate. The authenticity of their communication is low because they are striving to create a specific impact, without revealing anything of themselves or what they truly believe. They show little, if any, empathy for those they are dealing with either. They care next to nothing about them, just so long as they react as required and buy, vote or believe in whatever way they are being told to do.

Once people understand what has been going on, they feel cheated and abused — even if the message passed was factually correct. These people — The Manipulators — cannot be trusted because they always have hidden agendas.

Read the rest of the article ....

Interesting sessions on the future of life and the Net

From Jerry Michalski's Sociate blog ... interesting to think about how mass communication is about the approaches we take to it rather than the "segments" of people we are trying to reach.

"I’m at the Stanford Legal Futures Conference, which today adopted a FOO Camp approach that, in truth, isn’t that FOOish. Last night they posted the schedule, which has multiple panels with five or six smart people on each. OK.

But that doesn’t mean the sessions aren’t full of great stuff.

One small snippet: Jay Rosen quoted Raymond Williams saying “There are in fact no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses.” Then he proceeded to draw a distinction between inferring consumer behavior and following people’s actions, where action is what people do when they exercise their freedom.

It’ll take me a while to digest this, but it gives me a useful way to explain a trend I’m seeing, which is the slow death of traditional market segment analysis and the inference of behaviors in order to run marketing campaigns.

What replaces it? Good listening, fast following, smart adaptation. Segments vanish because their assumptions break all the time. Micro-niches emerge as people from different segments act in similar ways. Some grow really large; most stay small."

Mick's response?

Jerry - nice quote from Raymond Williams. In my experience, the “marketer’s trick” is to use the understanding of behaviors to create manageable segements. The aim is to create some form of critical mass of understanding to take action on.

Micro-niches are interesting but not very useful to act upon. Traditional socio-economic segmentations are virtually useless. Actual behaviors (”you are what you buy”) are more useful.