Tell Me About Yourself

This Life - Lion O'Brien (mp3)
Names in the Sand - Boh Runga (mp3)  [Link removed because the promotional company sent us Boh's album and asked us to link a song, and then the record company reported us for DRSM violation. Yeah, it's a wonderful world.]

"Well I hope they get my name right." -- Deathstalker, from the Oscar-winning film Deathstalker II

Nothing gets our attention and keeps it quite as well as the chance to talk about ourselves.

As someone who works in marketing and communications, it's my job to try and understand what people ignore. And people ignore a lot of shit. For every smidgen of information our brain actively processes, it flushes tons of other information down the mental crapper. If our brains were a Charlie Brown cartoon, 90% of the cartoon would be the adults talking in that waah waahhhh wahhhh muffled trumpet-speak, and maybe 10% is Lucy or Linus or Peppermint Patty saying something you comprehensible. If you're lucky.

When people attempt to communicate to a large group with a single message, we often wrongly assume just how few people give enough of a shit to pay it any heed. We don't look at most of the billboards we drive past, but when we make the billboard, or when we pay to have it placed in a certain spot, we just want to magically believe everyone's gonna look at ours because, well, it's OURS, dammit. It's a unique snowflake in a way the others are not.

When we stand up at a meeting or in a crowd, and we speak our minds and our hearts, we want to believe people will stop their snide and snarky under-the-breath commentary to listen to us, because we're not just hot airbags talking to hear ourselves talk. We're different than that. Our words should carry more weight.

And when we send an email out to a large group, we expect the large group to read it. Our email is special. It's not like those boring ol' emails we get from the technology office or that quack secretary everyone makes fun of. We don't send this shit all the time, so when we do, we've earned the right to be heeded!

Except that's not how it works. At all.

For example, our school communicates with parents almost exclusively through email and our web site. When we send out an important -- sometimes essential -- message to our entire parent community, we want to believe they all read it and heed it. Compared to other schools, we are very careful and mindful not to overload parents with so many emails that they're numbed or annoyed to our communications. Unfortunately, thanks to statistics and the tracking capability of push pages, I know for certain that this mindfulness is only marginally rewarding. Our best messages will reach and be read by under half of their intended audience within 24 hours. The average for our school is about 33 percent. The worst ones hover at 20-25 percent, or even a little lower.

With teachers, the percentages are worse than parents. Collective communications to our school employee list are deleted, misinterpreted, or mocked  by at least 60-70% of teachers and staff at a school.* The only emails they tend to read involve their paychecks or their vacation times. Anything else is completely unreliable.

Last Monday, I sent an email to my 170 or so coworkers asking them to review and update the brief autobiographies we publish on our school web site. Honestly, I would have been pleased as punch to get 50 responses within the week, so I practically shit a statue when I had received 90 responses by Wednesday afternoon. By the end of the week it had crept over 100.

This kind of response is truly without comparison in my area of work, which forces the question of WHY?

First, it doesn't hurt that I had to go through the work of sending each and every member of our workforce a separate, person-specific email with their own "old" write-up. Personal emails get a better response.

But the bigger factor, I'm convinced, is how much most of us cherish the opportunity to talk/write about ourselves.** We love reading our own biographies. We love making changes to our own stories, updating them, adding something new, tweaking our lives as only we can do.

Maybe writing those 10-20 sentence autobiographies are some kind of beautiful oasis, this rarefied and brief chance to control and create our histories as we see them, as we enjoy them, as we wish them. Maybe we all deserve moments such as these.

* -- Lest you think I'm putting myself above this, I'm very much an active part of two separate email lists whose sole purpose, it seems, is to seek out and mock the inevitable absurdity or moronitude that sprouts up in emails sent to the collective.

** -- Please understand, I'm not throwing stones here. Hell, with Bob's help, I've got an entire blog dedicated to my own unhealthy degree of self-obsession.

Boh Runga and Lion O' Brien are both here thanks to promotional folks recommending the music to us. Having heard Ms. Runga's album Right Here and Lion O'Brien's EP Raincloud vs. Sunshine, I can confidently say if you like these songs, you'll like their albums. Artists are starving these days. Consider taking a few of your hard-earned dollars and feeding these artists.