Should a Speaker Ever Break the Fourth Wall?

Aristotle advised every speaker to use pathos (feeling) to cater to listeners' "sense of identity, their self-interest, and their emotions."

But it's not enough to open with "My fellow Americans," as politicians do.

Sometimes it's smart for a speaker to break the "fourth wall" by letting listeners in on the secret that he or she isn't 100% "on the podium."

Twenty-five years ago, two media studies researchers discovered audience participation—a key index of audience interest—increases when a TV show character breaks the fourth wall, acknowledging he's fictional by suddenly interacting with the audience.

"That interactive relationship redefines the normally passive relationship with a given show and makes the viewers a part of the action," the researchers said.

The research proved TV shows that broke the fourth wall not only gripped audiences, but shot up viewers' charts for their "entertainment value" and "content sophistication."

Analogously, speakers who self-efface are much more popular than those who don't, says Chris Anderson, curator of TED.

“Some people come on full of ego and want to boast about their accomplishments or they tell a story that’s just designed to show off,” Anderson says. "That doesn’t work, and audiences push back on that. 

"What works is people who really have something important to say, and that they’ve done the work. They’ve earned the right to say something that matters, and they’ve found a way of saying it authentically and humbly.”

Marketing Myopia 2016

Our “measure everything” age has engendered a new form of marketing myopia, says Todd Ebert in Convince & Convert.

"While marketers once accepted as fact that they didn’t know which half of their ad budget was wasted, today they’ve done a 180 and believe that if it can’t be measured, it’s not worth doing," Ebert says.

Marketers' new myopia causes them to put all their money on one number, whether that's SEO, podcasts or white papers, and to walk away from proven, but less measurable, tactics like advertising, PR and exhibiting at trade shows.

A riskier bet you couldn't imagine.

Betting only on search, for example, ignores every buyer who hasn't started her product research; while betting only on podcasts or white papers ignores every buyer who thinks she's finished it.

In fact, betting it all on one number—no matter how measurable—undermines the marketer's tactic of choice, Ebert says.

"If you don’t do anything to drive brand familiarity and interest at the beginning of the journey, then it won’t matter how well you optimize at the end because you won’t be invited into the buyer’s consideration set."

How to Conquer the Robowriters

By 2020, 75% of news coverage will be written by bots, says content marketing guru Mark Schaefer.

"When it gets to the point that a computer can consistently generate content at a level that passes the Turing Test, the economics of content in every form will change forever," Schaefer says. "The freelance writer will become an endangered species."

Schaefer offers freelancers four strategies to beat the bots:

Emote. Good writers transcend their content by connecting emotionally with readers. It hardly matters what they write about; we still want to read it.

Dive. Position yourself as an expert and a "trusted voice of experience," because no bot can "corner the market on true insight."

Engage. Express some original thoughts, or at least express others' thoughts originally. If you only offer commodity content, "it’s going to be game over." Cede content like "10 Twitter Tips" to the bots.

Rebel. Be a part of readers' "bot-free zones." Just as consumers pay a premium for organic, local and artisanal, readers will prefer writers who shun "bot-speak." Keep your content human.

My view is that skilled freelancers needn't fret:

• Mathematician Émile Borel said a century ago, if you provided an infinite number of monkeys typewriters, eventually they'd produce Hamlet. Bots may not represent an infinite troop, but they're 'still a boatload of monkeys. As Uber will do to taxi drivers, bots will soon disintermediate low-skilled writers (it's funny that both are called "hacks"). The great social sewer will awash in robowriting—a genuine improvement.

• But while bots can produce passable news stories, it's hard to imagine them attracting followers. The reason is simple. As great writing teachers (Donald Hall, for example) have always told students to rewrite, rewrite, rewrite, rewrite, because the good writer is full of doubt; she knows her prose isn't inviolable and that the good stuff only emerges from the fifth or sixth or seventh draft. But computers aren't writers; they're robots. They'll never rewrite their stuff, because they lack self-doubt. Have you ever met a computer that doubted its own solution to a problem?

Content Marketer: Why Punish Yourself?

Unless you crave brawn more than bliss, you'd never do 100 extra pushups. 

It'd be masochistic.

So why, when writing's such hard work, write more than readers read?

Brevity should be the rule, not the exception, if you want your content to catch and keep readers' attention.

In The Dyer's Hand, W. H. Auden urged brevity on memoirists with one simple command:

"Be brief, be blunt, be gone.”

Nuff said.

Google Outs a Family Secret

Victorian doctors prescribed morphine like today's doctors do hydrocodone, especially to young middle- and upper-class women. As a result, thousands were committed to "the shadows of addiction."

George Sand, Louisa May Alcott and Mary Todd Lincoln were all morphine addicts. So was playwright Eugene O'Neill's mother, as depicted in Long Day's Journey Into Night. My own maternal grandmother was one.

Family secrets have always been hard to keep, but Google's made them harder.

Researchers at Rutgers University used Google to unearth the long-buried fact that Thomas Edison's first wife died in 1884 of a morphine overdose, even though "congestion of the brain" was recorded as the official cause of death.

Here's how:

• Using Google, they first found an article in an unidentified newspaper that said Edison had tried to revive his comatose wife with electric shocks. Edison was an expert in electricity.

• Using NewspaperArchive.com, the researchers next found another (unsigned) article alleging Mary Edison was a morphine addict who died of an overdose. They also found an interview Mary had given the same paper, and concluded the same reporter who conducted the interview wrote the story about her death.

• Using Google Books, the researchers then discovered “congestion of the brain” was a Victorian euphemism for "overdose." They also discovered electric shock—Edison's expertise—was prescribed in medical books as a way to revive victims, and concluded Mary indeed OD'd.