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December 30, 2008

Long photo, Joe-the-, tweet-up, crawl, flipper

What’s the word? According to a New York Times article , 2008 brought lots of new words, from politics, technology, and daily life.

For example, here are a few that relate to communication:

Did you know that a long photo is actually a video which lasts 90 seconds or less? The term was coined by the web site Flickr, which for the first time this year allowed people to post videos as well as photos.

And I’m sure you’re familiar with that symbol of an ordinary man, Joe the Plumber. In his spare time, he’s known as Joe Six-Pack, but in any case, “Joe” represents the everyman, not sophisticated, outside the boundaries of New York, Washington or LA—the real American.

Want to get together for a Tweet-Up? The term describes a meeting arranged through Twitter, the free nano-blogging service which helps small groups share what they’re thinking in a 140-character message called a Tweet.

The Times article offers lots of other interesting terms: nuke the fridge, naked short selling, pregorexia and skadoosh, but you can explore those for yourself.

Meanwhile, also according to the Times, there are more words in action at CNN, which invented the crawl, that annoying stream of news briefs that run along the bottom of cable news programs.

CNN has finally come to its senses and realized that the crawl is merely distracting, not illuminating. So it’s killed the crawl in favor of a new device called the flipper, a static line of text at the bottom of the screen that is tied to the story on air. (Sometimes the flipper shows headlines from other stories, but it doesn’t constantly move.)

Other cable news shows continue to use the crawl, but it’s not an effective device, according to Earl K. Miller, a professor of neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “A lot of times, when you think you’re multi=tasking, you’re just switching your attention between one or two or three things.”

Hope I helped you increase your word power.

Posted by Alison Davis at 08:47 AM | Comments (0)

December 23, 2008

Sorry, I didn’t see your e-mail. Was it important?

The other day, my younger son misplaced his wallet. He thought it was in the car—the Nissan Versa that he and his brother drive—but he kept going out to the car, looking around, then coming back into the house.

“Are you sure it’s in the car?” I asked. I knew I should go out to help him look, but it was really cold outside, and the car scared me: It was filled with half-finished snacks, fast food bags, dirty clothes, and assorted other detritus from misspent and messy college life.

I suggested that Younger Son take the flashlight to shed some light on the problem. When that didn’t work, I sent his older brother out to help him—the same young man who had driven the car all semester and had been responsible for creating most of the chaos. (My theory was that since the mess was Older Brother’s natural habitat, he could navigate it easily.)

Thirty seconds later, the wallet was found. “It was right there in the middle of the floor,” Older Brother said triumphantly. “Easy!”

I simply had to see for myself. I ran out to the driveway and looked in the passenger window at the floor. The wallet was, indeed, right there, but it was surrounded by and partly covered by the following: Four water bottles. Three Fruit-by-the-Foot wrappers. Two winter gloves. (And a partridge and a pear tree? No, but there was a box of candy canes.)

Why do I share this little tale of domestic life? Because my sons’ car is a great metaphor for e-mail, especially the way it’s experienced in organizations.

Most of the e-mail employees receive seems to them like fast food wrappers and water bottles; in other words, like junk. And their inboxes get so messy as a result that even important e-mails can get lost in the clutter.

For instance, a couple of years ago, a major company needed to tell managers about an important change to their incentive (stock-based) pay—a change that was actually good news. So the head of HR sent an e-mail to affected managers. Imagine HR’s surprise when, a week or so later, the results came back: 20% of managers deleted the e-mail without reading it. Another one-third did not recall hearing about the compensation change.

What was the problem? According to managers we spoke to, there were two factors at work: The first was that managers didn’t recognize the HR head’s name in the “from” line, so they ignored or deleted the e-mail. The second was that managers had simply too many messages to pay attention to one that didn’t seem urgent.

My sons solved the car clutter problem by filling up a trash bag with junk. What can do you do to reduce the amount of e-mail so that employees don’t miss important messages?

Posted by Alison Davis at 11:44 AM | Comments (1)

December 15, 2008

When pigs fly? Maybe social media’s not as tough as you think

Lately I've been listening to clients who have a lot of angst about social media: They'd like to do something, but they just can’t figure out how to overcome the legal, financial and other barriers.

Our advice usually goes like this: Why don’t you try something easy? Maybe start a quick poll. (Yes, that counts.) Allow employees to rate content. Or, since nearly everyone either has a digital camera or a cell phone that takes photographs, ask employees to submit photos.

But the third suggestion is often met with possible obstacles. “What will employees submit photos of?” clients wonder. “How can we ensure that the photos are appropriate?” And: “Won’t the photos be poor quality? After all, we have standards to uphold.”

And this makes me think that these folks aren’t quite getting the social media concept. See, the idea is to encourage participation, and to allow communication to become more informal. The point is to allow different viewpoints and voices to be heard, not just the usual corporate perspective. Along the way, maybe you can even allow fun to enter the equation.

For example, how about asking people photograph themselves wearing pig snouts? Okay, I’m half kidding, but only half.

There’s a candy company called Fat Pig Chocolate that has incorporated a pig snout into its wrapper. The idea is for consumers to “unleash their inner pig” by uploading photos of themselves wearing the snout onto the company’s web site.

Who would do such a thing? According to Paul Parton, the brand-planning partner at The Brooklyn Brothers, a creative collective, a lot of people. “The idea sneaked online before the brand was officially launched, and one digital image on one Web site begat lots of digital images on lots of Web sites,” he writes in Media Post (free registration required).

“Now there are about 2,000 pages of content devoted to Fat Pig Chocolate—simply because it's an engaging idea that invites people to participate,” says Mr. Parton.

Maybe you don’t want to go all the way to people wearing pig snouts. But how asking employees to submit photos of themselves wearing the company logo? Or funny hats? Or holiday apparel?

It could be fun (and even better, it could actually get employees to participate).

Posted by Alison Davis at 10:58 AM

December 11, 2008

Is your corporate blog credible?

If you’ve been slaving over a blog for a CEO or other senior manager, maybe your time would be better spent elsewhere.

According to a study by Forrester Research, only 16% of consumers trust what they read on blogs—a level that is significantly lower than any other information sources, including direct mail.

While this research focused on external blogs, there’s good reason to think that the same mistrust could exist internally as well. According to Forrester analyst Josh Bernoff, corporate blogging is a stale affair.

“Company blogs are in a vicious cycle,” Bernoff says, because most such blogs focus on putting a positive spin on issues, instead of offering the candor and immediacy people have come to expect on the web.

Time to do your blog differently—or to kill it?

Posted by Alison Davis at 09:43 AM

December 02, 2008

How to reach call center employees

A client just e-mailed this question:
“Are you aware of studies that show how call center employees—most of whom are under 30, female, and have only a couple of years’ experience—want to be communicated with?”

Answer:
Most of the employees in this workforce are Millennials—born between 1980 and 2000—but those over age 28 are GenXers (born between 1965 and 1980).

So a good place to start would be to find out more about both those generational cohorts. For example, there was an excellent 60 Minutes segment on Millennials that provides a profile of this demographic group.

Segments and articles like these help you learn overall characteristics of these cohorts. For example, both GenXers and Millennials are more comfortable with technology than Baby Boomers—and, in fact, in many cases they prefer a high-tech solution (especially if it’s fast-acting) to an old-fashioned tactic.

But it’s risky to build your entire communication strategy on demographic information alone. That’s why we always recommend conducting at least a modest amount of internal research to supplement the trend data. For instance, at one company with a call center, we learned that employees almost never use e-mail: Whenever workers are on their computers, they’ve got “selling windows” open.

At another company, we found out that call center employees’ favorite communication channel was old-fashioned bulletin boards. Why? Managers had gotten into the habit of using bulletin boards to post objectives, key strategies and results—and employees had grown to like this simple way of conveying essential information.

I’m giving you the same advice we gave our client: Want to know how to most effectively communicate with call center employees? Ask them—they’ll tell you.

Posted by Alison Davis at 04:38 PM | Comments (2)