Re-Thinking B2B Engagement Strategies in the tl;dr Era
Familiar with the phrase tl;dr? It’s digital shorthand for “too long; didn’t read”. You occasionally see it at either the beginning or end of a longer article giving a short synopsis.
tl;dr symbolises the broadly perceived need to make written communications short and snappy in a time-poor era. tl;dr is also the main theme of the 2019 re:publica 2019 digital communications conference, held annually in Berlin. In Market Research tl;dr could easily stand for “top-line; didn’t read” 😉 We all know the challenge.
Crisis time for MR activators and B2B “communicators”?
Is the tl;dr slang a nudge that we must start thinking about ditching words and become visual storytellers, learning from Instagram et al.? Maybe. I’ve blogged for 9 years now on MR issues. There’s certainly moments where I’ve wondered if it’s worth the effort. Social status: nerd. Audience engagement: low. Other metrics – off the cliff. Hmm.
The environment for writers, communicators and insight-activators is certainly changing fast, even in the comparatively slow-moving environment of B2B and MR.
Here’s my reading of this situation, with 2 main hypotheses:
1. Information competition is the real issue, not dwindling attention spans or the inability to cope with information overload
Yes, there’s too much content around – email newsletters, webinars, LinkedIn updates etc. However, we’re getting better at handling huge information streams.
- A study of over 2000 business people in the USA by Prezi found that 60% of business professionals claim that their own ability to give a piece of content their undivided attention over the previous 12 months has improved
- 95% of those surveyed stated they multi-tasked during meetings. Relatively few (20%) confessed that a business error derived from this
- In 2016 Pew Research suggested that issues with information overload are actually decreasing for many US citizens
- Software providers are helping with cognitive ease. Gmail’s categorization of emails into “primary/ social/promotions” for example
Based on the above, it seems the phrase “information overload” isn’t accurate anymore. Furthermore, there’s little evidence I’m aware of that human attention spans are getting shorter. The claim from a 2015 Microsoft Canada study that our average attention span is 8 seconds, comparing poorly to a goldfish, is supported by little or no evidence.
In fact, the whole measurement framework of “humans have an attention span of x number of seconds” seems ungrounded. Scientists from Princeton Neuroscience Institute suggest that our attention floats in and out around 4 times per second. This allows our brains to switch from what the researchers call “maximum focus or a broader situational awareness”. The challenge is to hold people’s attention and stop them from phasing out.
2. As the quantity of digital communication increases and social media monetization takes center stage, quality (originality, well-argued, unbiased pieces) can suffer
We are inundated with all manner of messaging. Our smartphones are a constant presence and reminder. The following is also worth highlighting:
Sales pushes are increasingly muddying the waters of content marketing. Talks on how to solve problem xyz – are given by… solution providers of said company. Yawn
Social media channels are shifting to monetization. This is interrupting natural content feeds with sponsored ads and irrelevant content
Unsolicited emails are increasing (in my experience). GDPR has done a great job in making some companies careful about data protection in Europe. Others, especially those outside the EU have not been impacted at all
Much B2B communication is cheesy, shallow, jargon-ridden. Anyone can create a PPT deck, a corporate blog or an email campaign – it costs little or nothing. Small problem: whilst not everybody’s good at it, most of us are poor witnesses of our own behavior, and that includes writing and creative skills
In other words – on the push side, there’s a lot of sub-prime stuff out there.
So what conclusions are there on the need for brevity suggested by tl;dr?
1.The tl;dr meme is somewhat misleading. Keeping it short is probably a good general tip. However, it’s not mandatory. Short can be shallow, and in fact lead to a thirst for more information. Audiences are adept at both filtering and multi-tasking – tl;dr to me means getting to the point quickly, being concise, non-repetitive and engaging
2. ‘’Long copy” (or other formats) can work well. However, audiences must be provided with substance, new knowledge, and reasons to stay hooked. Contemporary novelists Elena Ferrante and Karl Ove Knausgaard write and sell novels of many hundreds of pages successfully. “Long copy” has an obvious challenge: story-telling. To continually pull the audience in and keep them engaged. For MR that means getting to the point fast, ensuring substance is digestible and using story-telling techniques.
Foot notes don’t, however, have to be a thing of the past 😉
3. Writing skills are undervalued. They’re possibly even becoming a shortage commodity. Language can be extremely engaging in evoking pictures, emotions, moods – in the hands of the right people. Motto here: if you don’t know how, fess up and hire a professional writer. DIY writing can easily go wrong. And when it does, it makes a poor impression
As I mentioned previously, a lot of sub-prime content exists. However, there are some good examples of effective B2B communication:
- Seth Godin’s marketing blog posts (Seth Godin blog) are invariably only a few paragraphs long and make a single point clearly
- Siamack Salari’s LinkedIn posts are full of valuable tips on best practice in ethnography, citing examples from his work in the form of short stories. Entertaining and informative stuff
To wrap up, and without going into too much detail:
- tl;dr should remind communicators that audiences are demanding, likely impatient. That doesn’t mean everything must be only a few sentences or seconds long though
- Digital is different. It’s about getting to the point faster – assume your audience is intelligent and impatient, not in a hurry
- Structuring clearly helps. Make it easy for your readers to understand your purpose and key messages quickly, and allow them to dive deeper if they wish
- Understand the value of a headline – beware of click bait stuff!
- Add to a body of knowledge, keep opinion pieces balanced or strongly polemical. If in doubt, refer to others who know more
- Be topical – talk to the conversational headlines
- Imitate craftsmanship principles, pare back your prose relentlessly, be mindful of elegance and rhythm. Avoid repetition, make outputs sumptuous, tactile and carefully thought-out – tell a good short story
In-bound marketing works – push stuff doesn’t. People will come to you, you don’t need to overegg it or treat communications like a sales funnel – tell, don’t sell 😉
Engaging and effective B2B communication must be focused, probably short, possibly chunked, and for MR audiences ideally supported with evidence referenced in hyperlinks or footnotes. The competition for attention is increasing – making effective B2B communication even harder. Tl;dr
2 comments
Hi Lucy – thanks for chipping in and sharing some insights from your research. I didn’t borrow the tl;dr title from one of your presentations, btw – it was from the re:publicca event amongst other sources. Agree with much of what you say, except your praise of clickbait – that’s a dangerous path, as over time it muddies the water for everybody. Clickbait to me is about teasing….without necessarily delivering, and is part of the short-of-breath culture that can easily become exhaustion. Not sure short is good per se in market research, whilst of course we need to be able to be both concise – it leads easily to a black and white POV; “do this, don’t do that” sort of approach – caveats and grey zones are easily forgotten, assumptions left out. We are researchers, ultimately – not advertising salesfolk.
Great piece thank you Edward – in particular for picking my favourite topic and for using the tl;dr title from one of my recent presentations! I just wanted to add that our research shows people think they get more emails and are more inundated than they are; that audiences are not only impatient, they actively don’t care and really zone out when presented with PPT attachments on email. I agree long-form copy is making a comeback, but in a research context short is good – the skills needed to draft good long form are very elusive. Click bait is good! In that researchers can learn from it and use those techniques in headlines and subject lines to get attention. Again our research has revealed the 5 best ways to write attention-grabbing headlines and which work best in MRX. Finally, I totally agree that writing skills are undervalued in MR, as are design skills; researchers should be more open to using professionals to put some magic into their communications rather than ploughing on doggedly. Ultimately, I always say you should treat the communication of your project like a campaign, define the audience, what action you want them to take and what is your key overriding message before you start.