Since I’ve spent more than my fare share of time thinking about Shakespeare’s plays I clicked and was taken to one of the dullest, schmaltziest articles I’ve read recently (and that’s saying something).

The anonymous author culls five lines from Polonius’ advice to his son Laertes as the latter is returning to college in Paris after the funeral of the Danish king (in act one, scene three).  Here’s a sample. Read it slowly.

“Give thy thoughts no tongue”

Basic as it may be as far as business lessons go, keep in mind the idea of thinking before you speak; it looms large when you are just starting to feel your way through your career. You must pick your battles wisely and with caution.

Kinda clichéd– both the line from Shakespeare and the lesson the author, right?

There’s a reason: Polonius’ advice to Laertes was already clichéd in 1603 when the first edition of Hamlet hit the printing press. In fact, back when I was teaching Shakespeare at U.C. Berkeley one of my students, upon reading this passage, said to me, “Mr. Berens, I don’t see what’s so great about this play: it’s really just a patchwork of old sayings”—not realizing that Shakespeare is where such saying come from.

Anybody who has had even a half-conscious 11^th grade English teacher (or seen it onstage, or one of the many movies) will instantly see that trotting out Polonius as a business councilor is like getting personal decorum tips from Lindsay Lohan or nuance advice from Carrot Top. He is a foolish character who gives idiotically superficial, greeting card advice that the play’s original audience would have found laughable.

The author of this article was probably under deadline, came up with something in a hurry and pitched it to an editor who needed to fill some space. More importantly, this sort of deployment of Shakespeare as a cultural shield behind which lack-of-thought can hide is exactly why most people find the plays boring beyond all comprehension, and that is sad.

However, my point in this post is not to say, “Shakespeare is for trained professionals: kids, don’t try this at home.”

Quite to the contrary, if you want good business advice you should look carefully at William Shakespeare’s career. Yes, read the plays, but don’t just take greeting-card snippets from famous passages. Instead, look at their deep structure and how they’re embedded in the early modern London economy.

Shakespeare was the greatest playwright in the history of the language, but he was also an innovative businessman who vertically integrated the production of his product centuries before “vertical integration” even became a term: he was part owner of the playing company, part owner of the buildings in which the actors performed, the chief dramatist and one of the players.

More on this soon—let me know in comments if you want it sooner.

And here’s the full passage in question—a beautiful patchwork of entry level HR handbook precepts that just happens to be written by the best copywriter ever:

POLONIUS

Yet here, Laertes? Aboard, aboard, for shame!

The wind sits in the shoulder of your sail,

And you are stayed for. There, my blessing with thee,

And these few precepts in thy memory

Look thou character. Give thy thoughts no tongue,

Nor any unproportioned thought his act.

Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.

Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,

Grapple them unto thy soul with hoops of steel,

But do not dull thy palm with entertainment

Of each new-hatched, unfledged courage. Beware

Of entrance to a quarrel, but, being in,

Bear’t that th’opposèd may beware of thee.

Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice.

Take each man’s censure, but reserve thy judgment.

Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,

But not expressed in fancy–rich, not gaudy,

For the apparel oft proclaims the man,

And they in France of the best rank and station

Are of a most select and generous, chief in that.

Neither a borrower nor a lender, boy,

For love oft loses both itself and friend,

And borrowing dulleth edge of husbandry.

This above all: to thine own self be true,

And it must follow as the night the day

Thou canst not then be false to any man.

Farewell. My blessing season this in thee!

My eyebrows lifted at this, as to me re-reading is a special pleasure and it had never occured to me that this was unusual or a family trait– H is also a big re-reader, as is Kathi, my wife).

I read a LOT and I re-read a lot: when I travel on busienss I often find myself visiting with old textual friends (“It’s homey,” as H says) like Austen’s “Pride & Prejudice,” the Vorkosigan adventures by Lois McMaster Bujold or — and this one I finished for perhaps the 40th time over my morning cup of coffee a few minutes ago — Heinlein’s majestic “Time Enough For Love.” Last week, I downloaded “Huckleberry Finn” onto the new Kindle Dx (a seven-league-boots leap forward for Amazon, by the way) for my next trip.

Speaking of Mark Twain, one of the best passages on re-reading I’ve encountered comes from the first chapter of Annie Dillard’s autobiography, “An American Childhood” where she talks about her father’s disasterous boating trip down the Mississippi River and what provoked it:

In 1955, when I was ten, my father’s reading went to his head.
My father’s reading during that time, and for many years before and after, consisted for the most part of Life on the Mississippi. He was a young executive in the old family firm, American Standard; sometimes he traveled alone on business. Traveling, he checked into a hotel, found a bookstore, and chose for the night’s reading, after what I fancy to have been long deliberation, yet another copy of Life on the Mississippe. He brought all these books home. There were dozens of copies of Life on the Mississippi on the living-room shelves. From time to time, I read one.

Re-reading lets me focus on the HOW of a piece of writing, not just the WHAT of its sense. If I’m just reading for plot (like, say, the J. D. Robb “In Death” mysteries that are a guilty pleasure like a pint container of Chunky Monkey in my lap while I sit on the couch watching The Mentalist) then there’s not a lot of point to re-reading, but the best books, even the best mysteries (Ellis Peters’ Cadfael books, for example) exceed the pleasures of plot and merit thinking about the how.  This is true of novels, essays, and particularly denser language like verse. The Russian Formalist critic Yuri Lotman famously once said that we don’t read poetry, we only re-read poetry.

There’s also a kinaesthetic old-jeans comfort about the physicality of a favorite book: my fingers know just where to hold the pages and the measuring pressure between the ball of my right thumb and the side of my right index finger hints at how far I’ve come in a reading session and how far I have to go.  The progress bar on the Kindle Dx doesn’t compare.

That cozy knowledge can also inhibit critical awareness, so it’s sometimes handy to read a new edition of an old friend — I did this regularly when I was a Shakespearean, flipping from edition to edition — or mildly tragic when a beloved copy of a book gets lost and the replacement just isn’t the same. I’m curious how reading Huck Finn on the Kindle will be different than reading the ancient, friendly, black-covered hardback edition I found in my grandmother’s front-hall cupboard when I was nine, or the green scholarly edition I read in grad school.

Which brings me to blogging and reading blogs.

The physical properties of books helps great writing stake out space in my head that vaguely corresponds to the space on my book shelves.  I can stumble across a book while looking for something else, pick it up, and in moments step into another place.  It’s particularly true of fiction but also works with the best nonfiction.

With digital media — whether a PDF or on a website or on the Kindle — the kinaesthetics drop out.  I rarely go back to re-read a great blog post because they’re hard to find without SEARCHING for them, and searching is different than stumbling.  And for all its merits the Kindle doesn’t let me organize my many digital books in any personalized way– just by author, title or date acquired.

To be fair, there’s not a lot of re-writing in blogs; by design blogs are the unedited firstlings of the writer’s heart (to paraphrase Macbeth), and for an information-acquisition mode nothing beats them.

But its hard to SAVOR a post, and this is why no matter how much I love the Kindle and digital media in general, I don’t think that books, physical books, will vanish any time soon.  We need at least some of our things to exceed the spatial constraints of a screen.

When I worked at EarthLink, for example, the explicit purpose of our magazine bLink was so that our customers’ experience of the company would extend beyond the PC and beyond sitting at the kitchen table with a checkbook once a month paying the bill.  In other words, we wanted our customers to think about EarthLink while sitting on the toilet because we thought that extra-computer engagement would bind them more closely to the brand.

These days, I travel with the Kindle, a magazine or two (for takeoff and landing) and at least one non-digital book.  Not everything can be constrained by a screen.

For the inveterate readers out there, the gauntlet has been thrown down! John Durham, Don E. Schultz, Sean Cheyney, Doug Weaver, Jim Meskauskas: I’m talking to YOU… and to anybody else hearing this. What explicit business strategy books have you read lately (or ever) that were worthwhile and why were they worthwhile?

Thinking over my own reading, the books that most influence me tend to not to be strategy books either. When I used to teach writing at U.C. Berkeley, for example, I never found that books about writing were useful to my students or to me as a teacher. Instead, I preferred to use things like Sun Tzu’s Art of War or Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics as writing manuals.

There’s a reason for this: off-topic books (Tzu, McCloud) open the mind to think creatively about how to apply the lessons of one subject to a related but different topic. This is also how metaphors work: if you say “my love is a red rose” that statement doesn’t contain or transmit meaning: instead, it provokes your mind to think creatively about how your love and red foliage are similar (the philosopher Donald Davidson explained this usefully in his terrific essay, “What Metaphors Mean”).

So, the books that have most influenced how I think about the interactive media business over the last three years have been books like:

• Barry Schwartz’s Paradox of Choice, which explains how and why less can be more

• Daniel Goleman’s Social Intelligence, which explains how the real metric for engagement requires people rather than server logs

• Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody, which explains the forces behind things like Wikipedia

In all three cases, the books have stimulated new thought, whereas when I tried to use David Allen’s Getting Things Done it felt like a set of prescriptions that hobbled my thinking rather than expand it.

So, here’s my question: what do you think?

I’ve created this Twitter hashtag to help us all track the conversation, if it happens: #bizstratbooks

If you can master the haiku-like compression of Twitter’s 140 character limit (I’m followable at http://www.twitter.com/bradberens), and if you can then carry that powerful, high-information density compression forward into the rest of your online writing, then you’re almost halfway to mastering the most important genre of online writing: the subject line in an email. (See bottom of this post for more on email.)

Twitter helps my writing. The tool in this case is the counter that shows you how many characters you have left in an individual tweet.

Let me show you how one tweet came to be over the course of a few seconds worth of self-editing. The background is that I’ve noticed that comment spam on www.mediavorous.com has been spiking up, and wanted to mention that via Twitter.

First pass:

“Comment spam on www.mediavorous.com still seems to be on a dizzying rise up.  This is just as bad a virus as anything that crashes a computer.”

Not bad, but it’s 2 characters over. “Seems to be” is wishy washy, so out it goes.

Second pass:

“Comment spam on  www.mediavorous.com still  on a dizzying rise up.  This is just as bad a virus as anything that crashes a computer.”

Now I have 8 characters left, but I see an opportunity for increased clarity. I don’t need to advertise the name of my blog on Twitter, as those who are interested can click or find me easily — and if I just have the URL then I think people are more likely to empathize with my plight, so…

Third pass:

“Comment spam on  http://bit.ly/S5xli still on a dizzying rise up–   a virus as bad as anything that crashes a computer.  Is it just my blog?”

But this pass is two characters over again. Looking, looking, I now see a problem with “on a dizzying rise up.” Why do I need the word “up”? Where else would something rise?

Fourth pass:

“Comment spam on  http://bit.ly/S5xli still on a dizzying rise–   a virus as bad as anything that crashes a computer.  Is it just my blog?”

Made it with one character to spare. This is good and I almost click, but then I realize that I’ve double spaced after punctuation and have an extra space before the second use of “on,” so if I single space I get two characters back and can change “it” in the final sentence to “this,” which has more force as “this” points in a rhetorical direction while “it” just lies around–

Fifth pass:

“Comment spam on  http://bit.ly/S5xli still on a dizzying rise– a virus as bad as anything that crashes a computer. Is this just my blog?”

I want to add a certain emphasis, so I put MY in ALL CAPS and get the following 138 characters:

Final:

“Comment spam on  http://bit.ly/S5xli still on a dizzying rise– a virus as bad as anything that crashes a computer. Is this just MY blog?”

I hit the post button and only THEN realize that I still have an extra space after the first “on,” but it’s too late now.

Good online writing understands that readers are in a hurry, skimming fast and always looking for a better deal from another shiny object blinking at them from elsewhere on the website or inbox. Used properly, Twitter helps writers get to the good part fast.

Sidebar on email: A report out from Nielsen this week suggests that social networks now trump email as the most popular online activity, which I think is outright silly and when I saw the report I had the following dialogue with myself:

“Social networking more popular than email? Oh really. What about email within networks? Do users make much of  a distinction between in-network email and regular email? What about the fact that Facebook, for example, emails members with updates? How closely is the Nielsen panel-technology monitoring Outlook versus browsers? Or is this just about growth? If so, then OF COURSE social networks are growing more than email– email has a head start!”

Watch for a post about this from Katharine Panessidi later today.

Final word: a business person or just a person who can write effective subject email subject lines is on the road to success.

• http://scatter.wordpress.com/2008/12/03/infinity-not-quite-as-big-as-it-used-to-be/
• http://www.oopstime.com/news/health/22008/yes-i-am-afflicted-with-tivo-guilt.html
• http://dailydish.honadvblogs.com/2008/12/03/got-tivo-guilt/
• http://www.fresnobeehive.com/archives/2008/12/what_tv_shows_g.html
• http://www.gizmolovers.com/2008/12/03/tivo-guilt-dont-they-have-a-pill-for-that/
• http://blogs.mysanantonio.com/weblogs/atlarge/2008/12/new_i_refuse_to_believe_1.html
• http://www.tvsquad.com/2008/12/02/yes-i-am-afflicted-with-tivo-guilt/
• http://media.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NDU3MjBiMDNkNjM2N2FmM2RiMThiMGRlNDBmNGIzN2I=
• http://blogs.kxly.com/blog/2008/12/02/tivo-guilt/
• http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1266561/tivo_guilt_too_much_of_a_good_tivo.html?cat=15
• http://truemors.nowpublic.com/?p=34622
• http://economics.com.au/?p=1897
• http://www.tcpalm.com/blogs/thewatercooler/2008/dec/03/tivo_guilt/
• http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2008/12/question_of_the_day_how_far_back_do_your_tivo_shows_go-2.html

Some are taking it seriously and some are making fun, but golly that’s a lot of people!

The sentence most often quoted is my comparison of the moment when you fire up your TiVo to a home work assignment. You can see the original here:

And you can read David Daniel’s article version here.

I’m having great fun with this!

Today’s iMedia Connection cover story is an interview that I conducted with Sean Finnegan, newly-minted CEO of OmniCom’s OMG worldwide digital unit and a brilliant guy.

During that conversation, Sean said this:

The art of a brand relationship is much like the one you and I could have as friends: it is the same dynamic that should be translated by brands. And, right now it has to be. You, as a brand, cannot get away with a one-way dialogue.

Not only that, but when you do engage with someone, you cannot continue to speak to them in a manner that says the same thing at an eight times rate.

As technology allows us to get down to the household level and creatively and dynamically deliver ad assets based on the behaviors exhibited by different people within a household, marketers must possess the assets to have that conversation. Logistically and structurally, with an agency’s help, they must be able to deliver on the content.

Something in what he said sparked my imagination, and so I replied in this way:

There is a term for somebody who every time they see you says exactly the same thing to you that they said the first time. And, the term is autism. This is what you were just describing: the banner ad, or the email that says the same thing each time is like autism.

If you, like me, have had experience working with people who suffer from autism spectrum disorder, one key element is an inability to change the message based on nuance, based on the situation, based on context. And so, what you are describing as the thing that you are working to conquer we might call “brand autism.”

This morning, an iMedia reader wrote to me to convey her disappointment with the analogy. She is a mom, an internet marketing professional and has a child with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Now, I’ve been involved with the kids-with-special-needs, autism spectrum disorder community for more than 30 years.  I’ve spent time with families facing the challenges of autism and with autistic sufferers themselves, and I don’t simply mean the occasional drive by meeting.  I’ve dealt with trying to stop self-stimulation in youngsters, wiping a struggling tushy after an in-school accident, et cetera. And I know the difference between Asperger’s, full-blown autism.  More recently, I’ve been advising an author of a forthcoming book about families struggling with autism on how to use the internet to spread the word about her book.

All of this is why I was very careful in my statement to talk about the spectrum and about one element within that spectrum.

I was, in that moment, working both to be accurate and to make a metaphorical point about marketing departments.  At first, I was surprised to see the email because I thought that I’d done a good job of being careful and not offensive.  Clearly, though, I was wrong.

I suspect that there is no metaphorical use of ASD that would ever pass muster with the parent of a child struggling with that challenge.

Years ago, Michael Andre Bernstein, a professor in my old department at Berkeley, wrote a brilliant book called “Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History” in which he argued that it was wrong to have any narratives about the Shoah (a.k.a. the Holocaust) because to do so was to render it entertainment. This is a gross oversimplificaiton, but in essence it’s the same point that the iMedia reader made to me this morning. Who am I to use her pain, her child’s challenges, as a metaphor for something happening in marketing?

If I’d been thinking with my father hat on rather than my editor hat, I might not have made the comparison.

On the other hand, it was both an accurate and powerful analogy.  The way that many marketing departments talk without listening, say the same thing over and over and over and over… well, if you’ve ever hung out with somebody who has Asperger’s then it’s very familiar behavior.  Marketers SHOULD beware of their tendency to talk without listening… and if the analogy helps them to do that, then it’s a good thing.

So, I’m on the fence with this.

What do YOU think?

The panelists had a series of interesting and useful answers, but one sub-event that struck me was that ALL of them quoted the words “pitchforks and torches” while answering. In formulating my question, I had unexpectedly created a mimi-meme that was sticky enough to infect the rest of that conversation.

A meme is an idea that easily translates from one mind to another or many others (see this Wikipedia entry).

But how and why had my casual turn of phrase proved sticky? It’s hardly an original metaphor– in fact, it’s a cliche from any Frankenstein movie.

Puzzling this later, I realized that the power of that turn of phrase lay in what I DIDN’T do… I didn’t close the metaphor for the audience. I didn’t, in other words, say, “… and sometimes they grab their pitchforks and torches and head for the town square to chase the monster to a barn and burn it down.”

Instead, by holding back, by letting everybody in the room MAKE the association with the Frankenstein story rather than merely receive it, I asked their brains to create a meaning, to close the loop, and that proved more powerful rhetorically.

I should hasten to point out that this is not a new insight. The poet Keats argued that this sort of “negative capability” as THE thing that made Shakespeare great. Shakespeare, Keats argued, was “content with half knowledge,” and therefore could easily remain “in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” He didn’t close narratives, metaphors and the like. Instead, he let his audience do it for themselves.

As a writer, editor and speaker I need to keep this in mind: letting the reader MAKE connections rather than receive them is a powerful communications strategy. However, online this is a problem because doing so flies in the face of the commonly understood best online writing practices of laying it all on the table.

I’ll keep noodling this. In the meantime, here’s a good post on closure and hypertexts from Christy Dena.

Beyond fallacious reasoning, this is an dangerous thing to say for several reasons:

1. It mistakes quantity for quality, never a good idea, suggesting that sheer repetitive practice will make you a better writer
2. It doesn’t understand that writers who don’t think about writing lean on cliche
3. It misunderstands user behavior in the face of infinite media

I’ll get to number 3 shortly, but it’s the thing that takes this post (if I’m writing it well) from more editorial fussing about writing to something that might be useful to the vast population of online writers, professional and avocational.

Quantity vs. quality: Any athlete will tell you that if you train a muscle the wrong way the muscle will get stronger but won’t make your game any better. That’s writing, particularly online. If you write a lot but don’t think much about how or what you’re writing, then the cliches will leap to your fingers — bypassing the mind like the untaken road on a roundabout — with greater frequency and you will wind up saying less and less.

Cliches as beachballs: Using a cliche in your writing is like tossing a beachball: it requires no particular skill or coordination either to send or receive, and precision is absent. Beach ball thoughts are big and filled with stale air, and they don’t communicate much. Often, when a colorful metaphor — e.g., “I just threw up a little bit in my mouth” — is first encountered it has an eye-widening newness, but the second time a reader sees it the eyes squint just a little.

Cliches empower automated response, not thought. The French theorist Michel de Certeau talked (I’m paraphrasing here) about how after a while we don’t think of Martin Luther King when we drive down Martin Luther King Blvd. How many of us think about Alexander Hamilton’s strange personal life and career when we trade a ten-spot for a double latte and a muffin at the local coffee shop? Memorial becomes cliche and moves to the back of the mind’s room. Victor Shklovsky, a Russian literary critic, talked about seeing versus recognizing, arguing that art enables us to see things anew that we had become habituated to recognizing. Beach ball thoughts are exercises in recognition.

Good writers throw fastballs.

Great writers throw knives like a blindfolded circus performer.

Media behavior: Somewhere around 2005, and I hope to see updated numbers on this soon, our friends at Nielsen Media Research disclosed that the average American has 96.4 TV channels available but only watches 15.4. Correlate that with the decline in market share of big network TV shows — the #5 show today has lost around five and a half million viewers compared to a decade ago — and it’s clear that people are consolidating and specializing their media choices in the face of overwhelming choice and defining themselves as certain kinds of viewers in a desperate pre-emptive filtering.

The internet with its infinite variety of blogs spikes this behavior pattern up by orders of magnitude.

Breaking through with your message amidst all the chatter chatter is harder than ever, no matter what kind of message you have. Most communicators respond to this by turning up the volume to yell: just think about how aggressive commercials are, or how brain-damaged the general IQ of political rhetoric has become. Online, here be pop-ups, floating creative and ad units that inflate without asking.
In this environment, good writers and speakers will prosper. The power of voice — the ability to communicate your thoughts in clear, precise, muscular prose with an evocative and controlled use of metaphor — does come with practice, but it’s a thoughtful and strategic pratice rather than simple repetition.

One of my favorite quotes about writing comes from Mark Twain: “The difference between the almost right word & the right word is really a large matter– it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”