SEO, Frisson, and the Craft of Language

The other night I walked down the river path to a gathering of Women in Communications. These ladies know how to reach out in a social setting, and even though I didn’t know a soul when I entered the room, I spent the next couple of hours conversing with informed, involved, and astute practitioners of the craft. This guild includes videographers, mediators, academics, fundraisers, authors, crisis communications specialists, and a host of other specialists. There is opportunity for storytelling in every nook and cranny of human interaction.

These communicators use words as tools, tools that can help you build a case, change a behavior or an attitude, rouse, rile, needle, cajole, inveigle, incense, entice. Words create action and reaction, and right there is where the story happens. It’s in that little sweet spot where you have a chance to make something happen between you and your reader, viewer, whoever is on the other end. Part of your job is to remember that it is one person there, and that person doesn’t consider herself an “audience” or an agglomeration of attributes.

This is where I have a problem with SEO as it is now. Search engine optimization makes the universe of story poorer by shrinking the pool of words that are generated because they don’t rank high in Adwords. For instance, recruiters may use the same ten words to describe similar positions they are filling when in fact, performing that role in Company A may be very different from the expectations in Company B. Applicants then put the same ten words in their profiles and CVs, hoping to land those jobs. You know they are not all the same. It’s getting stuffy in here.

While the Web has made access to information infinite, it can also standardize relationships, limit vocabulary, and constrain experience within the tolerable echo chamber shared by one’s social media peers.

As I walked home from the meeting with these wordsmiths (27,100 people per month search for wordsmiths according to Google), storytellers (22,200), poets (49,500) and writers (74,000), I wondered if the pressure to increase page views will lead to loss of language and the trifling nuances that make the difference between whether I fall in love with you, or walk away.

My hope is that the people who measure these things will themselves develop more subtle ways to calibrate frisson, because it is more interesting to me to tantalize you specifically than simply engage an audience. Which would you rather be, a tantalizee or an audience? I’d like these algorithm wizards to help me do my job, which is to spark a charge in that teensy synapse when our orbits glance off each other out here in the internet.