Ugh. Sick of the acronyms yet? Only the military could come up with more contrived combinations of letters. And they have: ARGONAUT, or Applied Research reGarding Operationally Novel And Unique Technologies. (And that’s just one example…)

SOPA and PIPA are supposed to protect something of great value to companies and writers, too: intellectual property. These acts would do that by giving the Justice Department new powers to protect your intellectual property, including getting court orders that would bar online advertisers from doing business with websites that trade in illegally obtained copyrighted material, and even putting people in jail for distributing copyrighted material. That means if you write something and copyright it (you don’t even have to file the copyright—just say it’s copyrighted and it is) and post in on your website, and someone steals it and distributes it, the feds could be all over the case. The same goes for a company’s intellectual material.

This has been coming for quite some time, really. Back in the internet’s Wild West phase in the late 1990s, copyrights were largely ignored. Programs like Napster allowed people to share bad copies of songs if they were willing to wait up to an hour for them to download. You see, in those days, nearly everyone was connecting to the internet with a dial-up modem over a phone line. If the government had created an acronym for this technology, it would be SLOW, or TURTLE. Sure, a lot of pirating of copyrighted material took place, and that’s one of the reasons that Napster was shut down. But we hadn’t seen anything yet.

Fast forward to 2012. Broadband internet is everywhere, even in rural China, where US copyright law isn’t in the vocabulary. Thanks to broadband internet, file-sharing programs like BitTorrent, and hundreds of millions of people worldwide who like to share, one can download an entire two-and-a-half-hour movie in HD in literally just a few minutes. Compared to the Clinton era, the sharing of copyrighted material today is like comparing a Ferrari to a Model T Ford.

Critics of the proposed laws say they overreach and give the federal government the power to violate the first amendment and censor the internet. In fact, by the time you read this, WikiPedia and potentially dozens of other sites will have already staged day-long blackouts of their sites in protest.

What does this mean for your business? It means you need to educate yourself and make up your own mind. A good overview can be found on CNET. I won’t tell you how to think or what to decide. But this is big, and you owe it to yourself to learn the facts and then voice your opinion to your Congressmen and Senators.

As soon as the news broke, the analysis began, long before any details were in. What are the long-term impacts on the war on terror? What’s the impact on the Pakistani-US relationship? What will world reaction be?

Within a week, cable channels were running documentaries on the SEAL mission and retrospectives on 9/11 and the life of bin Laden. The same types of stories could be found in news magazines, newspapers and on news websites.

The lesson for businesses is that while stories spread incredibly fast in 2011, people’s desire for analysis has grown even faster. People want to know “How does this impact me? What does this mean for my life?”

To take it a step further, maybe it’s no longer enough to report a fact. Now, it needs to be explained or given context. In a business context, this means it’s not enough to make claims about your product or service. It’s more important than ever to explain why those claims are important, and what impact they have on our audiences, whether they’re B2B customers or consumers.

You manufacture a tougher, cheaper plastic bag—so what? What impact does it have on my bottom line? How will it benefit my customers? How will your more capable, faster software help my company improve its cash flow?

Customers are demanding more and more that we cut to the chase and explain how our products and services get a company from point A to point B. Trade Press Services can help your company craft messages that resonate with your potential clients. Call us at (805) 496-8850 or e-mail gerri@tradepressservices.com.

The writer, seeing French, immediately thought “foreign country,” and decided that perhaps an expensive overseas cell phone call was the not the most-cost effective way to communicate. He suggested to the client that they correspond by e-mail instead, since the client was in a “foreign country.” This was picked up by a contact at the company working with the writer, who took umbrage. Why? This “foreign country” wasn’t France—it was Canada, Quebec to be specific, where most everyone speaks both French and English. The company contact happened to be half Canadian and went to university there. And to top it off, the Canadian client had a toll-free number.

Fortunately, the writer apologized for any offense he had committed and assured all involved that he had the utmost respect for the “foreign” country of Canada. Everyone had a good laugh and the interview was conducted by phone without incident. But this tiny hiccup in the business relationship just goes to show how careful one must be not to be “America-centric” in one’s thinking.

The US economy is truly massive—with a GDP of nearly $15 trillion, it’s the size of the next three largest economies (China, Japan and Germany) combined. The US is also a large, geographically isolated country. Americans too often assume that when they are conducting business, it’s with other Americans is this vast land of ours. However, this isn’t the experience of the world’s other countries. For example, in Europe alone, there are more than four dozen countries or political subdivisions, with multiple currencies and numerous languages and dialects. It’s a similar situation in Asia, where Japan, South Korea, China, the Philippines, Indonesia, Taiwan and southern neighbor Australia trade actively with one another. Not wanting to make an “overseas” phone call to a “foreign country” just wouldn’t fly there.

In defense of Americans, our geographic isolation and homogeneity have allowed most of us to get by without knowing a language other than English, or knowing much about world geography. But that era is coming to an end. The writer in my story learned his lesson—and hopefully, the staff at your company can benefit from his mistake.

However, if not handled with tact, comedy can backfire and ruin an otherwise fine piece of writing. Writer Suzan St. Maur penned an article a few years ago on using humor in business that makes several good points. She writes that it’s easy to get humor wrong, especially when communicating over the Internet, which is often devoid of context. Sometimes, it’s the body language or the inflection that turns a tasteless joke into a tasteful one. When that human element is missing, all bets are off as to how the recipient of the message will take it.

Still, humor can be used successfully if the proper precautions are taken. St. Maur advises writers to use jokes about situations, not people. All of us can relate to certain situations—a plumbing emergency, a toothache or a speeding ticket, for example—but we may take offense at jokes aimed at ethnic groups, minorities or public figures. St. Maur goes on to say that humor is best used like a spicy condiment in business communications: sparingly, and avoided altogether if one doesn’t know the tastes of one’s audience.

There are other ways in addition to those mentioned by St. Maur to inject a little levity into one’s writing. One is to be self-deprecating. While readers may be quick to condemn an author if that author pokes fun at someone else, they may be inclined to laugh along with the author if they’re poking fun at themselves. And the ability to laugh at one’s self and point out one’s own foibles can be viewed as a sign of wisdom, humility, confidence and a certain level of comfort in one’s own skin.

Another way is quote famous and respected humorists, whose work has gained a measure of respect and acceptance in general society. For example, Mark Twain once said, “Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.” A comment like that might offend if an unknown author made it, but coming from Twain, it is likely to make others smile.

Whatever approach an author uses, it’s always best to have respected co-workers (or two or three) review the piece before it goes to print. If it causes raised eyebrows in the office, it’s likely to do a lot more damage with a wider audience. As Shakespeare, himself no stranger to satire and the clever use of humor, wrote in Henry IV, “The better part of valour is discretion.” When in doubt, don’t.

The British Empire

Did you know that English is spoken as an official language in more than 80 countries, territories and dependencies? Moreover, it is spoken unofficially by nearly everyone in at least two others: the United States and Australia? Add in the many countries in which a large portion of the population speaks English, such as France, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands, and the countries in which English is spoken for business or political purposes, such as China and Japan, and you can’t help but realize the breadth and depth of the English language around the globe.

This is nothing new, and it reflects the impact of hundreds of years of British colonialism and the global impact of post-World War II American economics and culture. What is new, however, is the Internet. Suddenly, the nearly one billion speakers of English around the globe have access to each other’s newspapers, magazines, websites, blogs, Facebook pages—in short, they can truly tap into the global consciousness of English speakers.

The impact of spoken English clearly has tremendous impact for written communication as well, especially for companies doing business in emerging economies. The potential for miscommunication and misunderstandings is greater than ever before. Slights and unintended insults that may never have had legs 15 years ago will now likely travel the globe in minutes.

Consider this small example that materialized as a result of an opinion column written by New York Times columnist George Vecsey on allegations of football recruiting violations committed by the University of Tennessee. In the column, Vecsey poked a little fun at southern culture, with lines like “If you’re ever in the neighborhood, y’all come see us, y’heah?”

In the pre-Internet era, this column may have gone largely unnoticed, even though it was in the New York Times. But in 2009, Vecsey’s column created a minor blowup in the blogosphere, generating this response from east Tennessee journalist Ben Garrett and this follow-up from southwest Virginia journalist Dan Smith, among others. Smith, a career newspaperman and member of the Virginia Communications Hall of Fame, whose members include Roger Mudd, Ann Compton, and James J. Kilpatrick, called Vecsey “a Yankee newspaperman too lazy to do his homework and too steeped in redneck, inbred stereotypes” and said that Vecsey’s column was “mostly wrong, mostly bigoted, mostly shows his uninformed a** to the rest of the world.”

Yikes. Especially that “rest of the world” part.

The lesson here is for writers: consider the audience. In our electronic age, audiences may be far wider than the primary readership an author intended. A gaffe poking fun at a foreign culture, committed by a careless company spokesperson, could cost millions in lost sales, have a negative impact in vital emerging markets, cause irreparable damage to the company brand, and even generate international political ramifications. Remember, the written word carries a big stick!

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