Social Media and Communication, Part 2: Establishing the Aim

The first order of business in social networking is establishing an aim. This means clearly answering a series of questions:

• Will the platform be for employees only? For select clients? For the world?
• Is your aim to deliver valuable industry-specific information to readers?
• How relevant should the information be to the products and services you deliver? 
• Will you use the platform to announce new products or services? 
• Is the idea to get your staff more involved in pushing the organization's message? 
• Are you using the platform trying to increase your organization's visibility? 
• Will you use it to bring people to your sales center website?
• Will it use advertisements as a source of generating income?
• What should the platform look like?
• Do you want it to maintain an image that matches the formality level of your organizational brand, or do you want it to be less formal?
• Should you maintain only one platform, or have one platform for each service or group of services?
• Do you have the necessary staff to keep the platform fresh and dynamic?

You'll have a lot of questions to answer before going live, but you should weigh each of them carefully and articulate your answers unequivocally.

Social Media and Communication, Part 1: Creating a Policy

When something new happens to you two times in the same week, you take notice; when it happens three times, as it had to me last week, you think you're experiencing a trend. Within days of each other, three of my clients talked to me about their new social media policy to regulate staff usage of social media platforms not only at work but after hours as well if staff choose to identify themselves as employees of the company. 


Two points make this phenomenon important:

• The three clients are in entirely different industries (education, investment banking, and transportation). Anecdotal as this data may seem, I take it to mean that the concern is pervasive.
• All three have an email policy, as do most organizations, but felt compelled to create a social media policy because message boards, blogs, and other community e-communication tools such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter are far different from email.

Companies will have a hard time completely forbidding the use social media because they themselves are deeply invested in a social media presence of their own, and they will likely encourage their staff to contribute to these platforms. 


Over the next three posts of Words on the Line, I will share best practices for those who are creating a social media policy of their own or modifying the one they already have.

My Top 100 Movies

I noticed that two of the top ten films on the American Film Institute's Top 100 Movies List would not make my own top 100. I also find myself recommending movies to others during informal conversations about sources of entertainment. So I decided to list my own top 100 movies in chronological, not preferential, order. I probably left out some great pics, which would push out some of the films listed, but here's a first draft.

You may be thinking, "What does this list have to do with my writing?" Here are two strong reasons.First, as storytellers, proposal writers, poets, or technical communicators, we often allude to movies to crystallize our points. In fact, I notice that my own teaching points are often best understood by learners when I refer to popular culture. With the exception of music, movies are an abundant resource for cultural references. The movies that made this list are rich in metaphors. Second, the movies listed here share a common bond: outstanding writing. They exude imaginative narratives. Just listening to these films offers deep insights into quality writing. 

See these movies, or see them again, with these thoughts in mind.

MY TOP 100 MOVIES (in chronological order)

    1. The Grapes of Wrath (American, 1940)

    2. Casablanca (American, 1942)

    3. The Ox-Bow Incident (American, 1943)

    4. All About Eve (American, 1950)

    5. An American in Paris (American, 1951)
    6. A Streetcar Named Desire (American, 1951)
    7. High Noon (American, 1952)
    8. Ikiru (Japanese, 1952)
    9. On the Waterfront (American, 1954)
  10. A Star is Born (American,1954)
  11. Twelve Angry Men (American, 1957)
  12. Inherit the Wind (American, 1960)
  13. Judgment at Nuremberg (American, 1961)
  14. A Raisin in the Sun (American, 1961)
  15. Requiem for a Heavyweight (American, 1962)
  16. The Miracle Worker (American, 1962)
  17. Lawrence of Arabia (British, 1962)
  18. Long Day's Journey into Night (American, 1962)
  19. America, America (American, 1963)
  20. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (American, 1966)
  21. Persona (Swedish, 1966)
  22. The Graduate (American, 1967)
  23. Shame (Swedish, 1968)
  24. Midnight Cowboy (American, 1969)
  25. Husbands (American, 1970)
  26. Patton (American, 1970)
  27. Death in Venice (British, 1971)
  28. A Clockwork Orange (British, 1971)
  29. Cries and Whispers (Swedish, 1972)
  30. The Godfather (American, 1972)
  31. Last Tango in Paris (Italian, 1972)
  32. Scenes from a Marriage (Swedish, 1973)
  33. Love and Anarchy (Italian, 1973)
  34. The Conversation (American, 1974)
  35. Lacombe, Lucien (French, 1974)
  36. The Godfather, Part II (American, 1974)
  37. Chinatown (American, 1974)
  38. Seven Beauties (Italian, 1975)
  39. One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (American, 1975)
  40. Taxi Driver (American, 1976)
  41. Providence (French, 1977)
  42. A Special Day (Italian, 1977)
  43. The Deer Hunter (American, 1978)
  44. Apocalypse Now (American, 1979)
  45. Being There (American, 1979)
  46. Raging Bull (American, 1980)
  47. Breaker Morant (Australian, 1980)
  48. The Elephant Man (British, 1980)
  49. Pixote (Brazilian, 1981)
  50. Gallipoli (Australian, 1981)
  51. Sophie's Choice (American, 1982)
  52. Gandhi (British, 1982)
  53. Tender Mercies (American, 1983)
  54. El Norte (British, 1983)
  55. Paris, Texas (German, 1984)
  56. Amadeus (American, 1984)
  57. The Trip to Bountiful (American, 1985)
  58. Shoah (French, 1985)
  59. Cinema Paradiso (Italian, 1988)
  60. The Civil War (American, 1990)
  61. Barton Fink (American, 1991)
  62. 32 Short Films about Glenn Gould (French, 1993)
  63. Schindler’s List (American, 1993)
  64. Household Saints (American, 1993)
  65. The Shawshank Redemption (American, 1994)

  66. Shine (Australian, 1996)

  67. Ponette (French, 1996)
  68. Affliction (American, 1997)
  69. Shakespeare in Love (British, 1998)
  70. Central Station (Brazilian, 1998)
  71. Run Lola Run (German, 1998)
  72. Saving Private Ryan (American, 1998)
  73. Being John Malkovich (American, 1999)
  74. Hurlyburly (American, 1998)
  75. Calle 54 (Spanish, 2000)
  76. Pollock (American, 2000)

  77. The Hours (British, 2002)

  76. City of God (Brazilian, 2002)
  77. Omagh (Irish, 2004)
  78. The Motorcycle Diaries (Argentinean, 2004)
  79. Tsotsi (South African, 2005)
  80. Paradise Now (Palestinian, 2005)
  81. The Lives of Others (German, 2006)
  82. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (French, 2007)
  83. Lust, Caution (American, Chinese, 2007)
  84. Hunger (British and Irish, 2008)
  85. Synecdoche, New York (American, 2008)
  86. The Hurt Locker (American, 2008)
  87. Doubt (American, 2008)
  88. Poetry (South Korea, 2010)
  89. Midnight in Paris (American, 2011)

  90. Margaret American, 2011)

  91. Carnage (French, 2011)

  92. Margin Call (American, 2011)
  93. Amour (French, 2012)
  94. 12 Years a Slave (British, American, 2013)
  95 Ida (Polish, 2014),
  96. Son of Saul (Hungarian, 2015)
  97. Fences (American, 2016)

  98. The Father (French, British, 2020)

  99. The Brutalist (American, Hungarian,2024)

100. Sentimental Value (Norwegian, 2025)

Industrial Revolution = Writing Revolution

3D Printer

The machine in the picture does not look like much, but it will transform our lives. It is a 3D printer, which can manufacture three-dimensional objects based on specifications a designer provides by a digital file. On the agenda for production are clothing, furniture, cars, and even planes. The advent of 3D printing has led us to "The Third Industrial Revolution," a time when we will have greater access to the manufacturing process, bypassing costly tooling charges and long waits for products. As a result, we will reap the benefits of greater choice and become manufacturers ourselves, just like we have become high-quality personal print shops. 


This revolution will affect writing as profoundly as the smartphone. We will learn more digital code to communicate in formulas that will process what we want; in short, more than ever we will think like the machine. What we now consider to be cryptic, acronym-laden style will become the parlance of every industry. How much writing will change nobody can predict. But it's coming. Skeptics can review standard documents from the business world a quarter-century ago, around the time most of us started emailing,  to how it has evolved today. Yes, the third industrial revolution means the writing revolution.

That's a Human with an Issue on the Other End

In one of my recent writing classes, by a nine to one margin—a landslide in any election—participants  agreed that the e-world has made communication more challenging than ever. The majority cited these reasons for their beliefs:

• They are deluged by more than a hundred emails a day with hardly the time to respond to them properly.
• They are required to be available 24/7 to clients and managers through their smartphones.
• They now struggle over the best means of communication to reach their reader.
• They become less rigorous in assessing the validity and reliability of information they instantaneously access online.

To deepen the problem, representing the 10 percent of dissenters, a young financial analyst in the class said, "Are you all kidding? Communication is easier than ever! I would never read a newspaper or magazine if it weren't for the Internet, and I could instant message my boss or my wife in New York from forty thousand feet over Beijing."


Both sides have great points. Some of the people in that class were not even born in the interoffice envelope days, when a writer had to photocopy, fold, and stuff a copy of a memo for each person on the distribution list. In those days, I sometimes had to perform this tedious task for up to a hundred staff. Writing would take 10 minutes and distribution would take 60 minutes. I'm also reminded of a young person who recently asked me, "What's carbon paper?" For sure, the minority has a good argument about the convenience of instant and paperless communication. No doubt, we will not be giving up our handheld devices anytime soon.


But what about our humanity? Have we sacrificed our own social needs and our empathy for others as we text, chat, and flame away? And what of our ability to focus on the task at hand? Does the endless tide of messages flooding our many inboxes diminish our capacity to understand the impact of a given problem, its underlying causes, and the options for remedying it?


Two articles in The Atlantic have clear opinions about these issues. In "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" (July/August 2008), Nicholas G. Carr argues that indeed our amazing online searching capabilities has eroded our attention span. In an interesting sequel to that article, "Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?" (May 2012), Stephen Marche writes that social networking is far from social and, in fact, a contributor to our isolation unto illness— and death. Judge for yourself. Both articles are reading for our communication times.

Those Darn Articles, Part 3: It Depends

Carefully read this dialogue for the uses of the definite article (the) and indefinite article (a, an). All uses are correct.


(MOE and ZOE are customers sitting in a diner. JOE, the waiter, stands beside them.)
JOE: Would you like coffee?
MOE: Is the coffee here good?
ZOE: It's great. I'll have coffee.
MOE: I'll have a coffee too. I haven't had coffee in a while.
ZOE: Come to think of it, the last time I had a coffee was right here.  
JOE: Two coffees. Great.


Moe's question with the coffee is easy enough to understand, because he is talking about the specific coffee of the restaurant. But notice how Zoe later says, "I'll have coffee," and Moe says, "I'll have a coffee." Then Moe says, "I haven't had coffee" and Zoe says, "the last time I had a coffee." Downright confusing, eh? 


In their last lines, Zoe and Moe could have added a where they deleted it and deleted a where they said it. This is where the parlance of English comes into play. You have to have a feel for the language.

Finding Inspiration, Part 4: The Show

We capped the magical evening of March 22 with a Broadway show, Porgy and Bess, perhaps my best theatrical experience ever but definitely the most surprising. The show was receiving negative publicity because the 1935 Gershwin-Heyward opera was cut by roughly an hour. Purists disapproved of any tinkering with America's best known opera, and as a lover of the music from Porgy and Bess, I had my own reservations about seeing a show that would cut any music from the original.

Audra McDonald, Bess in Porgy and Bess,
after her performance on March 22

Norm Lewis, Porgy in Porgy and Bess, at the Richard Rodgers Theater 

What I saw that night at the Richard Rodgers Theater was awe-inspiring. The acting and singing talent was incredible. After seeing the performance, we stayed to congratulate the performers, who were to the last one gracious, humble, and good-humored. The photos above show my wife with the amazing Audra McDonald (Bess) and Norm Lewis (Porgy). 

There's nothing like a great dramatic experience to inspire writing. When I got home, I visited the play's official website to learn more about the history of show and Catfish Row, South Carolina, where the musical takes place. There I found a place to write my own review of the show, which appears below:

America's opera has become America's musical. From the first note to the last, from the supporting cast to the leads, this show dazzles with an emotional intensity that I have not found in a half-century of going to the theater.

I want to mention all the performers' names, not only for their transcendent voices but for their electrifying dancing and magnetic acting as well.

Early in the two-and-a-half hour play, Nikki Renee Daniels as Clara sings "Summertime" and is joined by Joshua Henry as Jake. At that moment, I thought can this show get any more magical? But when Bryonha Marie Parham as Serena breaks my heart singing "My Man's Gone Now," I felt that if I had walked out then I would have gotten enough for the price of admission. But things were just warming up. Audra McDonald as Bess and Norm Lewis as Porgy are great together and on their own, Ms. McDonald creates magic in "I Wants You Porgy," seizing the raw essence of her character in her closing stanza like no other performance I've seen on stage. Mr. Lewis shines in "I Got Plenty of Nothing." David Alan Grier devilishly reinvents Sportin' Life, hitting the high notes--both literally and figuratively--in "It Ain't Necessarily So" and "There's a Boat Leaving Soon for New York." Philip Boykin commands the stage as Crown, overwhelming everyone around him, making his power over Bess apparent from the start, climaxing in his reappearance on stage in Act Two. I left this play emotionally drained but feeling better for it.

Without question, for its drama, singing, and orchestration, Porgy and Bess is the work of this century, and a stunning acknowledgment of the Porgy and Bess of the last century. Great work, director Diane Paulus, book adapter Suzan-Lori Parks, and music adapter Diedre Murray. May both works live harmoniously to the next century.