Interested in having your company dive deeper into social networking and blogging?
Scared to death of what all your employees may blog about?
Here’s a short First Person from ragan.com on how IBM addressed the situation:
Math. Cool, right?
It’s up there with Firefighter, Quarterback and Veterinarian as your kids’ dream jobs. (this is what’s referred to as sarcasm).
Remember when your teacher demanded you “show the math” when solving all those complexes of letters, numbers and symbols? Lots of fun.
Reality: Business and Industry are currently facing Peak Engineering. We need more scientists and engineers because American kids aren’t walking the Einstein career path.
Professionally, my colleagues and I are constantly challenged by various Engineering and Science associations to create materials – mostly video – to make math more attractive to middle and high school students.
We try to cram in all the various career options, how everything from fashion to NASCAR needs math and science to exist. “Yes, you too can work on the next sports car…thanks to math!”
Interviews of young, hip scientists, flashy video treatments – we add it all.
But we always seem to add too much, cluttering the message.
Here comes IBM. Here comes simplicity. Here comes the Smarter Math Ad.
The theme: Using math, IBM can solve problems.
And the ad stops there. No attempt to add any details; the problems can be solved. Big Blue is smart enough not to show the math.
After 30 seconds, there’s a simple message.
(paraphrasing/interpreting) We’re (IBM) going to do some pretty remarkable things…with math.
Appealing? Yes. Clear messaging? Yes. A well-positioned client? Yes. (no sarcasm)
Side Note: The editing and music fall within the IBMAdvertising style, mimicking the company’s current campaign and establishing Big Blue (a successful campaign; you know it’s an IBM ad despite the lone mention of the company comes within the ad’s final 5 seconds).
So the solution to the problem (“How to make math appealing?”) is to get straight to the answer.
It would be nice if we made all our communications as clear as 1 plus 1.
