September 29, 2008

For WaMu, the right words were not enough

As communicators, we spend a lot of time and energy searching for just the right words—the words that will get people’s attention and encourage them to take action.

But, as Seattle Post-Intelligencer columnist Bill Virgin points out, sometimes words are not enough. In a poignant piece on the downfall of Washington Mutual, Mr. Virgin writes that although words helped the bank during its growth, words failed the company at the end.

“So much of Washington Mutual's legacy in recent memory was tied to its message,” Mr. Virgin writes. “Longtime Seattleites can remember the ‘friend of the family’ image as a hometown, homespun institution, backed with such signatures as its school savings plan.

“More recently, as WaMu under Killinger pursued dreams of being a coast-to-coast consumer financial-services giant (one of the very few in the country), the company's message took on a tone of irreverence, of being unbankerly.”

But, when things went awry, even the best words didn’t work. “In the end, a company that had traveled so far and so long on the words it used to tell customers and investors who and what it was, ran out of the right words to convince regulators it should be given enough time to prove it could back up its story.”

Sad, isn’t it?

Posted by Alison Davis at 11:34 AM | Comments (0)

September 25, 2008

Hey, Mr. Paulson! What does this mean to me?

Poor Henry Paulson. Our Treasury Secretary is trying to bail out the banks and save the economy with a $700 billion package, and members of Congress keep asking him pesky questions.

Like: “How will this work?” And: “What will it really cost?” And, perhaps most annoying of all: “What does this mean to me (or, more specifically, my constituents)?”

As a former CEO (ironically enough, of Goldman Sachs) Mr. Paulson is used to being the smartest guy in the room. And he’s also accustomed to setting the agenda, laying out the plan, calling the shots.

So it’s no wonder that he seems downright annoyed that he has to deal with senators and members of Congress who are not focused on the big picture, but are taking the hometown view. Fueled by thousands of messages from constituents (Senator Barbara Boxer of California alone has received nearly 17,000 e-mail messages), elected representatives are persistently asking what the proposed bailout means to their districts, and to the people in them.

In response, Mr. Paulson has finally started focusing on average Americans. On Tuesday, he told a Senate banking committee that if the plan isn’t passed, “people aren’t going to get the loans they need, small businesses aren’t going to get the capital they need, farmers aren’t going to get the loans they need.”

Still, one gets the feeling that, like many well-paid and cosseted CEOs (although he’s a public servant now, his net worth has been estimated at $700 million), Mr. Paulson doesn’t quite relate to the average American. He certainly doesn’t communicate like a guy has spent a lot of time on Main Street, driving a Chevy, eating at Applebee’s.

According to a Wall Street Journal article, Mr. Paulson is “angry at having to make the sale” to a reluctant Congress. But once he gets past his anger, maybe he’ll realize that the most important question to answer when communicating change is: “What does this mean to me?”

Posted by Alison Davis at 12:32 PM | Comments (0)

September 17, 2008

Survey fatigue

Let’s start with the good news: The International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) is conducting a member survey about the organization’s print publication, Communication World, and its electronic newsletter, CW Bulletin.

Feedback is a good thing.

Here’s the bad news: The survey is so long, so extensive, so open-ended, that it’s exhausting to complete.

It contains 29 questions, a lot for an online survey. Even worse, 16 of those questions are open-ended (also known as write-in) questions. And they’re not the usual run-of-the-mill “do-you-have-any-suggestions?” questions; these require deep thought. Here are just a few examples:

“Please list up to five issues or trends in branding and marketing that you would like us to address in CW.” (There are actually six questions just like this, asking for topic ideas in employee communication, PR, measurement, change communication and skills development.)

“What do you like best about CW?”

“What other industry-related e-newsletters do you subscribe to?

“What kinds of products or services would you like to see advertised in CW or CW Bulletin?”

Whew! Only the most dedicated reader (or member) would take the time to answer every question. Most people would either do what I did—answered just a few questions and skipped the others—or get to a certain point and jump ship. In research parlance, that’s called “noncompletion.”

What’s the root cause of this problem? There are at least two: First, what the survey creators wanted to do was explore issues in an open-ended ways. But the wrong tool for this job is a survey, which is a quantitative, closed-ended, data-producing instrument. The right method is qualitative, either focus groups or interviews.

Second, the creators didn’t consider the experience of survey respondents. If the creators had tested the survey, they would have realized that completing it would take at least 15 and probably up to 30 minutes—waaaayyy too long for an online survey.

Before you are tempted to include open-ended questions in your next survey, consider the fatigue factor.

Posted by Alison Davis at 11:48 AM | Comments (1)

September 10, 2008

The woman in red says: Break the rules

Do you use posters in your communication efforts? Then you might be familiar with these tried-and-true rules:

• Always use a strong visual
• Severely limit the number of words (headlines should be fewer than 7 words)
• Hang posters in a variety of high-traffic areas
• Keep posters up long enough to register, but not so long that they become wallpaper

But you know that thing about rules: Sometimes it’s more effective to break them. That’s why I found this blog from marketing guru Drew McLellan so inspiring. Mr. McLellan’s post is about outdoor advertising—but many of the same principles apply to using communication (like posters and bulletin boards) in the work environment.

In any case, Mr. McLellan maintains that “the most brilliant outdoor campaign ever” (created in 1989 for a pub in Buffalo, N.Y.) broke all the rules. And yet it was memorable and effective.

The (fictional) premise? A guy named William rents a billboard to send a note to a mysterious woman he saw in a bar: “Angel in Red: Saw you at Garcia’s Irish Pub. Love to meet you. - William”

The story continues for nine weeks, with nine different billboards, in which we see “notes” from an increasingly desperate William, another woman interested in William, and even the woman in red’s jealous boyfriend. The continuing element is, of course, Garcia’s Irish Pub. And the billboards make you want to go to see what all the fuss is about. (See the photos on Mr. McLellan's blog.)

Can you break some rules to make yourposters more compelling?

Posted by Alison Davis at 11:16 AM | Comments (0)