What Would Google Do_ - Jeff Jarvis [50]
Though he makes mistakes, Zuckerberg makes them well by listening to customers and responding quickly. After a kerfuffle about a new Facebook advertising feature subsided, blogging venture capitalist Rick Segal begged us all to give Zuckerberg some slack. “He is going to make lots of mistakes, and he will continue to learn and grow…. We need to use care in beating up Zuckerberg and Facebook in general because we want these folks to push the limits of finding new ideas and trying to make sense out of all the data flowing everywhere. Try it and get some reactions, adjust, find the happy center, rinse and repeat…. If they do really bad things, people vote with the mouse clicks.” It’s not the mistake that matters but what you do about it.
Be honest
Fake news anchor Jon Stewart is one of the most trusted newsmen in America because he calls bullshit. Howard Stern is the king of all media in the U.S. because he’s honest. The tagline of Stern’s personal news service on satellite radio: “No more bullshit.” Shouldn’t that be every news organization’s tagline? Every company’s?
I’ve been a fan of Stern’s since I reviewed his show for TV Guide in 1996 and discovered, counterintuitively, that he is best taken not in small doses but in large doses. If all you heard of him were the odd belch, you’d be forgiven for dismissing him. But Stern is greater than the sum of his farts. Listen for a few days and you will hear the rare man—rare especially on broadcast—who is not afraid to say what he thinks and what we think but don’t dare say. In the plasticized, packaged world of roboreporters on TV and shtickmeisters on radio, it’s a relief to hear somebody who’s candid, honest, and blunt. He is open and transparent about his life. He is unafraid to ask the tough question; I only wish that the PR-laden morning shows were as direct as Stern or as skeptical as Stewart.
Stewart, anchor of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, came in fourth among the most admired newsmen in America, tied in that slot with network anchormen Brian Williams, Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, and Anderson Cooper in a 2007 survey conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. Stewart’s spin-off, Stephen Colbert’s Colbert Report, mocks spin, shooting buckshot into the pomposity of news shows, talk shows, pundits, and PR.
Stern, Stewart, Colbert, and bloggers everywhere say what they think. In them, we hear the language of the internet age: honest, direct, blunt, to the point, no bullshit, few apologies. Their tone may shock old, controlled sensibilities. But complaining about it, tsk-tsking it, trying to clean it up, or trying to ignore it won’t work. The post-media generation raised on honesty and directness expects truth and bluntness from others. With Google, it is harder to hide behind spin, to control information, or to hope that people will forget what you said yesterday or the mistakes you make today. The truth is a click away.
Institutions are learning to acknowledge their mistakes and apologize. When he took office following predecessor Eliot Spitzer’s sex scandal, New York Governor David Paterson preemptively admitted having an affair, among other peccadilloes. Apple had a near-disaster in the launch of its Mobile.me service and Steve Jobs admitted it publicly. This is honest talk, which comes in a human voice. Even in the machine age—the Google age—that voice will emerge and succeed over a filtered, packaged, institutional tone. The Cluetrain Manifesto (which you can read for free at Cluetrain.org) teaches this lesson in its 95 theses, which begin:
Markets are conversations.
Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors.
Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.
Whether delivering information, opinions,