Last weekend, I was riding with my husband and daughter on a busy four-lane commercial street on a Sunday afternoon, on our way back from shopping for a toddler bed at IKEA. Typically while I’m riding as a passenger, I space out and stare out the window and neglect to pay attention to the negotiations and politics of the traffic. But I always do notice when my husband, a fast, impatient and often-annoyed driver, starts to twitch and weave because of the slow idiots in front of him.

In this case, he swerved into the left lane to pass a tiny electric car, behind which a line of cars had formed. “THAT’s the car holding up the traffic,” he growled.

As we passed, we both snorted a little as we read the large sign posted on the back of the little Smart Car: “25 mph is the maximum speed of this vehicle.”

“Gre-e-e-a-t,” my husband groaned, anguished to learn that someone on the road could be that intentionally disruptive to his desire to get everywhere as fast as possible.

I glanced over to the car to see who was driving. The first thing I noticed was an 8.5×11 sheet of paper pasted in the back driver-side window. The headline of the page said: “You don’t know how much you need to slow down. I want to help you.” The rest of the page was made up of copy too small to read from a distance.

The next thing I noticed was the woman driving: not a hippie with tangled hair, but a serene-looking, pleasantly smiling, middle-aged Asian woman, with a friend in her passenger seat — unflustered, unconcerned, proud of her decision to hold up the tailgating Californian consumers tapping their steering wheels irately behind her.

I thought about this woman several times after that, but especially as I was reading John Freeman’s essay, an excerpt from his book The Tyranny of E-Mail, in The Wall Street Journal last week. Freeman’s observation is that we’re all moving, reading, communicating faster and faster as we have the technology to support increased speed — that we place great emphasis and importance on the ability to do things fast, trying with all our might to become automatrons. But we’re not automatrons, after all; we’re human. And here is what is happening, according to Freeman:

In the past two decades, we have witnessed one of the greatest breakdowns of the barrier between our work and per­sonal lives since the notion of leisure time emerged in Victorian Britain as a result of the Industrial Age. It has put us under great physical and mental strain, altering our brain chemistry and daily needs. It has isolated us from the people with whom we live, siphoning us away from real-world places where we gather. It has encouraged flotillas of unnecessary jabbering, making it difficult to tell signal from noise. It has made it more difficult to read slowly and enjoy it, hastening the already declining rates of literacy. It has made it harder to listen and mean it, to be idle and not fidget.

His argument is that, while the tools we use today to communicate more effectively are revolutionary and have changed the way we do business forever, the way we have reacted to them is seriously flawed. We are all scrambling to keep up with the larger quantities and breakneck speed of information by moving faster ourselves, working more, multitasking like crazy, forgetting to step away from the screen and foster real relationships — which, by the way, develop slowly, incrementally, over time. With all the recent frightening studies about the effects of multitasking, and how many different directions younger people are pulled in with all their technological devices, we know that this is only going to get worse before it gets better.

Slow down: you move too fast
Freeman calls for a return to slow communication. As communicators, we have a hand in this. Despite the pressures to go, go, faster pussycat! … we need to help pave the way for this. Why? Because contributing to it (as we are wont to do) will ultimately work against us, not only in our own personal and professional lives, but in the relationships we are able to form with our customers. Slow, thoughtful communications will help you stand out in a world of fragmented, hastily conceived ones.

We can make a difference by:

• Taking the time to say what we mean. Cut through the clutter. Stop jargoning everything up. Just say it, clearly, using real language and real words. Stop and think carefully about what you’re trying to say, and why you’re saying it. You’ll eliminate a lot of extraneous, half-developed jumble from the airwaves.
• Being more deliberate in how we communicate. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. If you’re constantly scrambling to be out there in every channel and format just because it is available to you, you’re probably not stopping to think about your overall content strategy — or how your fast, here-I-am-look-at-me approach is helping you gain ground rather than overwhelm and alienate your audience. Think about what you want to say first, then choose the appropriate tool to help you say it — not the other way around.
• Being proud pioneers. My husband would roll his eyes at this, but I keep thinking about that slow driver’s proud and resolute expression as she drove her steady 25 mph that day. In our own car, things were a little more stressful — we’d been doing too many things that day in crowded spaces, we had too many other things on our to-do list, my daughter was whining, my husband was grumpy, we were all hungry and irritated. You have to admit the driver lady has a point: we don’t know how much we need to slow down.

  I find that I tend to absorb the cultures of my clients’ companies — to respond immediately because they’re always on Blackberry, to work late into the night because the rest of them do, to overcommunicate and overthink and waste a lot of time scrambling down the wrong path rather than insisting on thinking through the right path at the beginning. But I’m learning, and my advice is: refuse to be that person. Chart a new path. Be calm, be strategic, be deliberate, be thoughtful. Be slow. Don’t succumb to peer pressure. I’ve found that people respect the slowness, once they get over the initial shock of it (and maybe irritation at it), especially when they see that slow gets better results every time.

The past several days I’ve seen a few interesting developments and discussions on the potential of social media for a more enlightened, and even productive, healthcare provider community.

One is The Bedside Trust, a sort of thinktank of healthcare executives and providers that has set up shop as a social network on the SocialCast platform. The idea behind it is to build a community of healthcare leaders who can work together collaboratively to create change in healthcare, participating in discussions and sharing ideas to “solve the healthcare crisis” as colleagues. The site is brand new and so far pretty sparsely populated — it’s also unrestricted and free for anyone to join, and it will be curious to see if that continues to be true — but so far the topics being floated by community members range from how healthcare organizations can better engage their physicians to how physicians and nurses can overcome historical tensions and work together more collaboratively.

While the idea of online communities for clinical leaders and healthcare executives is certainly not new, this seems to be a different approach: a true social networking platform where members establish profiles (rather than posting anonymously or hidden behind a handle), connect with others in the same geographic region or with the same professional title, and begin conversations within their established networks. It’s going to be interesting to watch how this community grows, and what kinds of offlines implications and influence it will start to have as it does.

In the meantime, Phil Bauman, an RN and author of a blog about “health 2.0,” writes about the 140 Health Care Uses for Twitter. His premise is that “micro-sharing” is the ideal platform for healthcare — presumably because it’s a brief, fast, easy-to-use way to communicate directly to a targeted group of people when moments count. His list of potential uses includes everything from emergency response team management and tissue donation recruitment to glucose tracking for diabetes patients and live-tweeting surgeries for educational purposes (something that’s already being done today).

Bauman raises the natural objections and obstacles to social media as a platform for the medical world: namely, the concerns about privacy and HIPAA compliance, violations of professional oaths and possible litigation. For these very reasons, the “letting it all hang out” nature of social media will cause the industry to move with extreme caution before adopting such channels as a standard way to communicate. Bauman acknowledges that while the concerns are very real, solving healthcare’s overwhelming problems may involve thinking creatively, and finding a way to steer around the roadblocks:

I want to focus on the possibilities because once we see the potential, we may have stonger motivations to deal intelligently with the constraints. So when reading this list, don’t get hung up on the details, the fears, the anxieties that may be provoked by the realities of health care as it is practiced today. It’s the 21st Century: let’s be imaginative, determined and innovative. Let’s be remarkable.

Every marketing expert with a blog and a pulse has already released a “predictions” list for 2009 — they’ve become as ubiquitous as the end-of-year best-of albums and Oscar favorites. Neither a soothsayer nor a guru, I won’t endeavor to predict the future. But I can make some educated guesses, based on a lot of reading, trendwatching, and some old-fashioned history-repeats-itself wisdom. Here is my contribution to the blogosphere’s 2009 list-fest: nine hunches about where brand communications are heading in the next 12 months.

1.  Brands will go back to basics.
In these tenuous times, we’ll see brands seeking solace in the stuff that has always worked for them. They’ll put more emphasis on their cornerstone products and simplify their messaging to promote the core values that made them successful in the first place. An Interbrand study published during the last economic downturn in 2001 promoted companies’ need to separate the wheat from the chaff: carefully evaluating and eliminating all unnecessary product brands, subbrands or program brands, so companies can instead focus money and energy on building out the brands with the strongest customer loyalty and capitalizing on their potential.

2.  Communicators will seek non-traditional channels that work harder for them.
With business on the edge of its seat wondering when the next economic hit is going to come, marketers are quickly finding themselves with more constrained budgets. Print advertising is out; for some companies, print anything is out for the time being. Discovering marketing and communications efforts that work harder and go farther for less money is key. One example is the diamond company Hearts on Fire, which launched a viral Internet campaign à la last season’s dancing elves, distancing itself from the conservative advertising and promotional campaigns traditionally favored by the jewelry industry.

3. Hope will prevail.
Americans responded overwhelmingly to a strong, clear message of hope, change and unity in the November presidential election, and I can’t remember the last time spirits were so high after that message – and its evangelist, Barack Obama – won out over negativity and complacency. The collective mood quickly plummeted in the following weeks with all the disheartening news about unemployment, dismal retail sales, and war in the Middle East. But I suspect that as the Obama administration takes office and change starts becoming a reality, communicators will piggyback on that mood and message of optimism and hope. Pepsi, for one, is counting on it in its 2009 “Optimism Project.”

4. Audiences will start to tune out.
We have reached a fever pitch in the amount of information and stimuli any one individual can process in a given moment. Especially given that so much of the content coming our way right now leans toward the negative and unproductive, I believe people will begin to be more selective in the amount of information they choose to encounter and engage with. More productivity and business thought leaders – including the king of simplicity, Jakob Nielsen – are advocating the shunning of habitual email, IM, RSS readers, Twitter and other compulsions that fragment attention and interrupt our flow. If the backlash happens, communicators will be under more pressure to truly break through the clutter by providing information that customers consider vital to their business success (in the case of B2B) or lives (B2C).

5. The social media shakeout will begin.
In the mid to late 1990s, everybody talked about how Web sites, to be relevant, had to have a online community – which at the time meant a bulletin board and a chatroom with hosted live chats. Yet few companies could actually figure out how to build an online community where people would actually congregate. It was the “If you build it will they come?” question. Over the years those tools have naturally found their niches – for example, bulletin boards are perfect tools for software companies whose community of users can provide free tech support to one another, or provide organic feedback that helps the company evolve the product.

Now, everybody says we all need to be on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc. Yesterday, I attend a lunch meeting of the Independent Communicators Roundtable, a group of highly accomplished, educated and creative writers, brand and PR consultants and other entrepreneurs. Everybody at the table of about 12 people shared the same frustration: we’re not quite sure what to do with Twitter. We know we’re supposed to be “joining the conversation,” but what exactly does that mean? I personally have followed countless writers, communicators, business consultants and big thinkers, and mostly I have been bombarded by Tweets about bad colds and snowstorms. Rarely do I see a Tweet from a stranger that makes me want to jump in and start talking.

Point being: much of this social media hype is putting the solution before the problem, or the platform before the business need. If a company still doesn’t know whether it should be blogging after several years of talking about it, the answer is probably “no.” We will begin to watch social media tools shake out and serve legitimate business purposes to support true brand communications objectives. But I suspect we’ll see a lot less advice about how your company simply must join the fray.

6. On the other hand … social media will continue to influence brands.
And now I am going to contradict everything I just said in #5 – sort of – with the assertion that “the conversation” taking place on social media platforms will begin to have more influence on companies and their brands in 2009. The Motrin vs. Twitter Moms debacle in November was one of the first examples of how a powerful community of consumers using Twitter could blacken the eye of a stalwart brand in a matter of hours. Motrin manufacturer McNeil Consumer Healthcare recovered impressively, picking up on the wildfire quickly and falling over itself to claim mea culpa and make up for its mistakes.

My first question after it all happened: will this make McNeil, and other corporations, more aware of the need to build a real relationship with their consumers, rather than assuming they know who their customers are and what they need? When companies discover that they indeed need a little bonding time with their consumers, using social media to grow that relationship organically (instead of forcing it through false camaraderie) is indeed the legitimate business need that I talk about in the previous point.

7. Customers will begin to drive the message.
In the healthcare space where I do a lot of my work, we talk a lot about the emergence of consumer-directed healthcare. So much information (much of it credible) is now immediately available and so many communities of people are able to share experiences and recommendations that the patient is – possibly for the first time ever – in control. And that is becoming true for all industries and groups of customers. The means are in place for customers to ask directly for what they want from a company and a product. If the company doesn’t, or can’t, comply, customers can and will go elsewhere. Finding a way to “hear” customers and being agile enough to respond to what they’re saying is going to become an essential part of doing business.

8. Companies will continue to talk more narrowly to target audiences.
From a business perspective, being everything to everybody can be (depending on your business) a good position. From a brand perspective, it doesn’t really work. Audiences have a hard time taking a sweeping message about comprehensiveness and boiling it down to answer the biggest pressing question they have: “What can this company do for me and me alone?” More companies are beginning to target their brand positioning to more narrowly defined groups of customers. Read this case study about SeaPak, a frozen shrimp company that identified two very different consumer profiles – the “live-to-cook” shoppers and the “cook-to-live” shoppers – and positioned its brand differently for each group.

9. Language will continue to disintegrate in the name of pop culture.

The image speaks for itself. (Thanks to Melissa Klug for the secret shopper photo!) Whether the infiltration of SMS abbreviations and colloquialisms in our written language is a good thing or a bad thing I leave up for debate – but let’s just say I bet a certain journalism school professor of mine is feeling pretty crabby about this continuing trend.