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August 23, 2010
E-mail is too slow, says the class of 2014
This week college freshmen start to arrive on campuses, ready to experience orientation, new romance, what happens when you drink too much cheap beer and . . . oh, yes, occasionally going to class.
What are these new students like? To find out, it’s time to check out the Beloit College “Mindset” list , the annual collection of facts about the incoming class that gives us insight into what 18-year-olds are thinking (and makes the rest of us feel old).
No surprise that my focus is on how freshmen experience communication. Why should you care? Because it’s valuable to step outside your own perspective and take a look how people in a different demographic see the world. Only then can you design communication that meets your audience’s needs.
Here are Beloit’s big communication insights:
- Incoming college freshmen will be using their smart phones for absolutely everything, and think that e-mail is way too slow.
- Few in the class know how to write in cursive.
- Unless they found one in their grandparents’ closet, they have never seen a carousel of Kodachrome slides.
- Computers have never lacked a CD-ROM disk drive.
- College freshmen never recognized that pointing to their wrists was a request for the time of day.
- The first home computer they probably touched was an Apple II or Mac II; they are now in a museum.
- Nirvana is on the classic oldies station.
- Having hundreds of cable channels but nothing to watch has always been routine.
Got any others? Feel free to share.
Posted by Alison Davis at 01:08 PM | Comments (0)
August 08, 2010
Great questions about email
(Sorry that I’ve been a little inconsistent with my blog posts lately; I’ve been busy working on my new HR communication book with my colleague Jane Shannon. The good news is we just sent the completed manuscript to the publisher. Whew!)
As you may know, I invest a lot of time learning about marketing, because I find that marketers spend their time trying to attract customers’ attention—so there is a lot we internal communicators can leverage from marketers.
I just read this fabulous Email Insider blog by Loren McDonald, which asks the great question, “Your Email Program: Time for a Tune-Up—Or a Blow-Up?” The idea is this: If you had to start your email program from scratch, would you run it the way you do today? (Another way to ask the question: Are you so focused on small improvements that you’re failing to step back and look at the entire program?)
The blog is aimed at marketers, of course, but many of the questions apply to using email to communicate to employees. Here are some to consider (which I’ve altered somewhat to make them more applicable to employee communication):
- What is the role of email in our company?
- Does the return we get on our regular broadcast emails justify the time and money we spend on them?
- Do we integrate email with other initiatives, including social, mobile, print, or broadcast?
- What are our company's business goals, and what role does email marketing play in achieving them?
- How do we best reach and engage our employee segments? What are their pain points, and does our email program address them?
- Is our program's frequency and cadence logical to employees, or do we need to move to a more customer-centric approach?
- Are we using the right metrics to measure and communicate email's ROI and value?
Consider these questions when thinking about how well your email program is working.
Posted by Alison Davis at 04:42 AM | Comments (0)