Standing on the shoulders of giants: What significant figures can teach us about technical PR and marketing
24 July 2020
In a guest column, exclusive to Connectivity, Richard Stone, Managing Director of Stone Junction – the first ever PR agency for the Fourth Industrial Revolution – explains the relevance of Einstein, Andy Warhol, The Beatles and Fred Astaire to technical PR.
A quick tour of the Stone Junction offices will tell you we love to use historical figures to inspire us. There are quotes on the walls from Maya Angelou, Jeff Bezos, Salvador Dali, Albert Einstein, Mae Carol Jemison, Stephen Hawking, Martin Luther King, Elon Musk and even Winnie the Pooh. It is a fun way to break down complex ideas into simple concepts that we can apply in our work. In fact, I think there are four historical figures who can, between them, teach us everything we need to know about technical PR and marketing.
Be technical, like Einstein
“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough,” said Einstein… never, seemingly. The famous quote is a bastardisation of something that Einstein’s fellow Nobel Laureate in physics Richard Feynman said, when asked to prepare a first-year lecture to explain why particles with half integer spins obey the Fermi-Dirac Statistics.
A couple of days later, Feynman said, "You know, I couldn't do it. I couldn't reduce it to the freshman level. That means we really don't understand it."
Einstein actually told a journalist, who had asked him to explain the photoelectric effect, that, "If I could explain it to the average person, it wouldn't have been worth the Nobel Prize."
I think the balance between these three quotes, including the one that Einstein may have never said, illustrates perfectly how we should write for a technical audience.
The writer must understand the topic well enough to explain it simply. If you are writing for Connectivity for instance, your reader might be a project engineer specialising in robotics, the CEO of an automation company with training in finance or an industrial designer, specialising in 3D visualisation. These people do not necessarily have a great deal of common knowledge.
As a result, your content must be understandable by all of them, despite their different backgrounds. However, don’t break down the content, just its expression; after all, the people you are writing for are all educated professionals working in complex roles. The Wikipedia approach will turn them off if they come across it in a technical publication.
While I hope Einstein was being glib when he made his comment about the photoelectric effect, there was a kernel of truth in what he said. As technical writers, we are normally writing for people with technical backgrounds, so we should not be too simplistic. That said, I think that the misquoted version, or Feynman’s original, summarises my view perfectly; technical writing is about expressing complex information in a readable, entertaining, and simple way. To do that, you have to understand the subject matter.
Be creative like Warhol
When you write something, you should do so with the reader of the content clearly in mind. I find it helps to picture that person; a design engineer working at their station, a production engineer assessing machinery, a CEO, debating the business at the board room table.
But there is also something that links all three of those jobs, and every other job that you might be writing for; they are all human. Much as we like to think that engineers are only influenced by technical arguments, the reality is that all humans are influenced by emotional arguments and we can all be swayed by a creative turn of phrase.
We shouldn’t forget this in our writing. Don’t be shy of a creative hook or idea, it doesn’t have to contradict an authoritative and technical tone of voice.
There is already a lot of dry content out there for technical audiences, which forgets that most engineers are inspired by the magnificent, the epic and the larger than life. People become engineers because of the International Space Station, the Bloodhound land speed record, or the Large Hadron Collider. Not because of their University’s report-writing style guide.
So, no matter what the guides tell you, take some risks with that reader in mind, even if there is a voice at the back of your head, saying the world isn’t ready yet.
Andy Warhol donated a piece to New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1956, only to have it returned with a note saying there was no space for it. Duchamp’s most famous installation, The Fountain, only remained on site in a museum for two days, before being thrown into the trash. The phrase ‘impressionism’ was coined by an art critic that thought Monet’s work was merely an impression of a real painting, less finished than the, ‘preliminary drawings for a wallpaper pattern’.
The lesson here is clear, the world might not always be ready, but you will never know until you try.
Be inspired like The Beatles
To write about a technical subject in a way that is readable, entertaining, and simple you will need to be inspired daily, sometimes several times a day, and often on the same subject. You can see the problem.
You will need to be inspired about something that isn’t all that inspiring on the face of it. Nuts and bolts, thermal gloves, computer memory or storage equipment. The truth is that all of these things are inspiring and essential enough for people to devote their lives to designing, making, selling and refining them, so there should be a kernel of brilliance there somewhere that will pique the interest of you and your reader. It is your job to find it.
If you are interested enough in the subject, you will be interesting when you write about it. But how do you find that precious grain of wonder on such a regular basis?
The answer can be found in the behaviour of artists like Bowie and the Beatles, people who reinvented themselves repeatedly, finding artistic and commercial success nearly every time. These musicians behaved like inventors, they looked constantly outward, searching for the disparate influences that they could bring together in their music to make something new.
That’s exactly how invention normally works; someone who knows a little bit, or a lot, about subject A, becomes exposed to information about subject B – often by experiencing something outside of their normal pattern of behaviour, and the convergence of those two or more subjects inspires a new idea.
Often this happens by accident, but to make it happen regularly, all you have to do is take the coincidence out of the equation. Set out to experience things, instead of simply being present when they happen, and keep a record of them in a way that you can use in your writing.
At Stone Junction we encourage all our writers to keep a ‘hook book’, where they note down the things that pique their interest. That way, when they need motivation, they can look back on a list of things they have been inspired by and see which ones can come together with their subject in a way thar replicates the process of invention.
You don’t have to be experiencing great and majestic moments for this to work; you could be watching Netflix, reading a book or researching nuts and bolts, thermal gloves, computer memory or storage equipment. The Beatles were sleeping in a van, touring Germany for a pittance, when they discovered the visual style that would converge with their musical direction to create something that would shape music for decades.
The key is to understand that inspiration rarely strikes you; to write about a technical subject in a way that is readable, entertaining, and simple, you will have to go out and strike inspiration.
Be objective, like Astaire
There is a lovely anecdote about Fred Astaire watching recordings of himself dancing. The film would be playing, and he would be watching it intently, the greatest dancer in the history of Hollywood, and he would refer to himself in the third person, saying things like, “He’s not doing that right,” and complaining about his own technique.
The dancer had no preciousness about his own work. If it were wrong, or less than perfect, he would correct himself just as he would another dancer on set. As writers, strategists, and people executing marketing activity, we can learn a great deal from this.
Everyone has had the experience of coming up with a brilliant campaign, seeing it fall flat at first and then having to correct it before it works. Sometimes that correction can entail a complete about turn. Similarly, when writing, everyone has started an article, only to have to scrap it and begin again, when the original conceit proves to be a dud.
It is not only OK to do this, it is excellent practice. Ploughing on with a bad idea, which you are emotionally attached to, would be the only wrong thing to do.
You must be willing to kill your favourite ideas if they do not work. This level of objectivity is the essential counterpoint to our creativity and the inspiration that we draw from places outside industry.
The bottom line is that great PR and marketing is brave, technical, simple, creative, eclectic, and ruthless. It is not easy to be all those things, in fact it is not easy to be any of them. When you need a little help, look to history for inspiration, you will soon find you are standing on the shoulders of giants.
Richard Stone is the founder of Stone Junction, a specialist technical PR agency delivering international and digital PR and marketing services for scientific, engineering and technology companies. He loves a bit of Warhol and Duchamp, Beatles and Bowie and even Einstein and Astaire.
His biggest passion in life is pizza is technical PR though, so if you are as passionate about it as him, drop him a line on richards@stonejunction.co.uk. He also loves a chat.
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