Archive for category Communication
Changing the conversation, not the channel
Posted by admin in Business, Communication, Improvement on January 4, 2012
In my 10 or so years in marketing and communications the one principle that I have lived by above all is “if you do not like what people are saying, change the conversation”.
Naturally our instinct is to change the channel. We ignore complaints, run from them, or remove the people complaining. It is my natural tendency and I am willing to bet it is yours as well.
Sometimes, in fact I would dare say most of the time, the problem isn’t the channel but the conversation. Sometimes it is an outspoken person who finally says what everyone is thinking, sometimes it is a conversation you keep changing channels on instinctively. Usually however there are nuggets of truth in that conversation that are hard to accept.
Couple of case studies. First, United Airlines. In 2008 a local musician watched baggage handlers throwing his guitar around as they were loading it on the plane. After he recovered his luggage he found his guitar broken. This became the United Breaks Guitars incident. The musician went through the channels alerting employees and eventually corporate. They all ignored him, saying he missed a timeline for reporting or that it was an accident.
The musician, Dave Carroll, then decided to use his musical talents and create a youtube video parodying his guitar breakage. The song became an instant youtube hit. United instead of trying to change the conversation changed the channel. The result cost United roughly $180 million in stock value.
The second case study is not an incident but a long trending organizational problem. Domino’s pizza had a problem, it made a crappy pizza. When you are a pizza company making a bad pizza is probably not good for business. Dominos was ranked so bad that it was tied for last place among popular pizza chains with Chuck E. Cheese.
Domino’s customers complained and they ignored them. Employees complained and they fired them. Most importantly in this is not the number of complaints or firings but how many customers went somewhere else or quality employees quit for another job.
Unlike United, Domino’s after changing the channel for several years decided to change the conversation. New CEO Patrick Doyle decided to hear the conversation and find out why it was being said. He then took that very conversation and used it in their favor, changing products based on what customers complain about. The result is that the conversation changed. Domino’s is no longer known for cardboard crust but for customer service. The result is that in the past 2 years Domino’s has seen its stock grown 230+%.
There are hundreds of other case studies that show both sides of the conversation. Companies, organizations, and governments who have changed the channel and lost in the long run or changed the conversation and experienced gains. There are very few absolutes in marketing and PR, but when faced with a crisis of any sort I’ve yet to see this fail.
Does social media make us more connected?
Posted by admin in Communication, Marketing, Social Media on March 4, 2011
6 degrees of separation theory
If you ever read this blog you know that I am a bit fascinated with a phenomenon known as Dunbar’s number, developed by Robin Dunbar. Again, for about the 20th time here, Dunbar’s number represents the maximum number of personal connections that one single person can hold at any given time, which is 150. That number has been tested over and over again since the 1990s and seems to hold true.
I am in the middle of finishing a graduate degree in communication as you may know. Initially I took on a project studying the use of social media in delivering health messages to Hispanic populations. This project has been continuously delayed and it opened up an opportunity to study other things while waiting on this project. I decided to return my fascination to Dunbar’s number.
My basic hypothesis is that either Dunbar’s number actually increases when all social communication is used together, or more people reach this number easier and have a wider spread that previously.
It should be important to note that Robin Dunbar himself did a studying on the same idea last year. He focused solely on facebook and finds that the 150 number still holds true. Dunbar theorizes that it has more to do with the size of our neocortex (part of your brain that manages thought) than the ability to connect with that many people.
Why does it matter how many connections we can hold? The rate at which a product or idea is adopted by a critical percentage of a population (diffusion) has been increasing steadily alongside technology and mobility. Innovations such as the telephone, radio, television and the computer/internet have caused bumps in the rate of diffusion. However products and ideas have begun diffusing almost instantly over the past couple of years while physical technology has held basically constant. I believe this is a result of increased connection among people through social networking.
As a marketer and communicator this impacts everything. I think this has huge implications on understanding the overall value of social media. I believe it leads to products and ideas diffusing (or failing) more quickly. It causes more rapid response time, revolutionary changes to marketing strategies and an increased demand for exceptional customer service as part of a marketing technique.
Dunbar’s follow up study focused just on Facebook, which is much more of a passive networking tool due to the way timelines are managed. This I believe is the reason Dunbar was not able to see any changes. If however there truly are no changes I believe people reach the 150 number more easily. This is important because it expands the overall total reach of a community or population group. This allows ideas to spread more rapidly because more people are highly connected.
I will continue to share my research as it progresses on this topic. I plan on reaching out to Dr. Dunbar at some point along the way to try for some collaborative research. Please let me know if you have any specifics or ideas that you would like to see incorporated.
The local paper problem
Posted by admin in Communication, Improvement on January 25, 2011
Someone told me once that it might be a bad idea as a communications professional to talk bad about the primary newspaper in the state. I apparently didn’t listen. It is not fair of me however to put them down constantly without a full explanation of why.
This has nothing to do with pay walls online as a lot of people want to highlight. It is all about the content, which in case you have not read a paper in a while, makes up about 90% of what is in a paper. I will explain why this is the problem, but first, a history lesson.
See not too long ago newspapers were the primary way we received information about both local issues and national. Papers would take all the information from the previous day, mostly in the form of newswires like the Associated Press, mix in a few local stories and send it to you. That worked great.
This model began to get a little shaky in the 90’s with the rise and adoption of 24 hour news stations on television. The primary problem with tv news however was that while great for breaking news, you had to wait to hear about topical news that interest you. Papers survived on allowing you to directly get the information you want. Once a day at least.
Internet presented the next big hit to newspapers. This transition was slow at first. The combination of slow support from the news media and limited adoption of broadband internet gave newspapers some time to adjust and get in front of the curve. Most big papers with a little extra resource did. They began leading the way in pushing out news. As broadband adoption rose in the late 2000’s so did the consumption of news online. It became easier to go online and have instant access to what is happening around the world. This was the pull phase, readers went and pulled information from the sources.
Then the 800 lbs. gorilla walked into the room. News sources started pushing information both actively and passively. I get breaking news on email, my phone and socially. Even more critical is that news sources have made it simple to share stories so now I am 75% more likely to read a story that a friend shares.
I said this was not about pay walls, and it is not. These news sources however are freely available and easily accessed. Most of the national news feeds can be found in some form or another online, which brings me back to content. Some local papers panicked when online adoption started to rise. They made a critical business decision to save resources by tapping into more feed stories and hiring fewer reporters for original content. The problem with local papers is not the reporters. I know plenty; most of them are overworked and are given less and less space to show their quality talent.
As local papers began to push out more articles from feeds they began to dig their own grave. I as a consumer am already receiving my national news both by push and pull methods. Most Americans are in the same boat. I start finding less and less information that I want to read in a news paper because it is a feed dump from the day before, most of which I have already read. The stories I care most about, which are the local ones I do not receive from my national news, have be shrunk into paragraphs or ran once a week because of fewer reporters.
See, local newspapers cannot compete with regurgitation of national news. They must look at focusing on local stories and impacts. The day of a catch all local paper is dead and the start of specialization has begun. Papers can no longer focus a once a daily or weekly paper on news items, rather they must move more toward editorials and impact stories.
A clear example of how this works is Arkansas Business. Full disclosure: I have a lot of respect for them; many of their employees have become friends. I advertise and pitch them stories because they do it right. They save (for the most part) breaking news updates for the web. Even then they try to add commentary about how it impacts us locally. They focus the print edition on telling stories about businesses locally and the impacts they are making in the community. This move to a story telling approach is what made them successful in a changing news climate.
Local/state papers in order to survive must shift to this story telling approach. Yes ADG has publications that do this like Sync, but they fail to embrace the concept with their core (and rapidly dwindling) audience. Give people stories they care about and they will start to care about you again. That is how to fix the local paper and people will even pay for it.
As always everything I say is up for debate. I appreciate feedback, just be willing to defend it.
Co-creating business
Posted by admin in Business, Communication, Vision on November 23, 2010
I am currently working on a larger paper trying to bridge the gap between interpersonal communications and business communications. My main stance is that if businesses treat all communication like interpersonal communication we can build better and more positive relationships. I am still working through the research but I wanted to share a bit with you as I am working on it. I will try to release the full paper when finished. This particular section is focusing on our relationships with our customers and clients and has been edited to speak to the blog audience.
Most often we think of interpersonal relationships as existing between two individuals. Most businesses however interact with their customers every single day. These interpersonal relationships can exist between businesses (or those representing it) and their customers. I believe that for small businesses to communicate excellently they create a social world with their customers.
Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM), which I have introduced here before, claims that our social worlds are co-created through communication with one another (Pearce & Pearce, 2000). CMM is considered a macro theory, looking interpersonal communication as a whole rather than specific communication instances.
CMM is traditionally applied to person to person interpersonal communication. In 1996 however a group known as the Public Dialogue Consortium (PDC) approached the city of Cupertino, CA to incorporate a more productive form of communication. Their goal was to apply this to the most important community issue, which was identified as the city’s rapid change in ethnic composition (Pearce & Pearce, 2000). I believe this case study is a clear example of how CMM can function between an organization and its customers.
To understand how CMM can be applied to small businesses and organizations I want to look at two main findings of the Cupertino project with interactions between my own business and its customers.
Communicate
First, the primary goal of the Cupertino project was a focus on creating conversations. To do this they took a communication perspective which consist of “viewing the events and objects of the social world as made.” (Pearce & Pearce, 2000, pg 408). This focus on creating conversations allowed them to later move the people to action.
In my current business we do training events and consulting projects for medium to large companies in the state. We do regular marketing activities such as email marketing and direct mail. The vast majority of people who respond to our marketing campaigns are companies that we have engaged in personal conversations with during the past year. As a result we have shifted the marketing approach to establish personal communication first and then follow with traditional marketing.
Engage
Secondly they created the means for relationships to form. PDC encouraged the city to create a new communication architecture. The city government began to participate “in conversations about residents’ concerns, their visions for the future, and the actions (to bring) desired futures” (Pearce & Pearce, 2000, pg 409). This allowed the city government to create a positive social world which both groups co-created.
Recently our organization introduced a new training service to our clients. We waited until we launched the service to tell clients about it. We held the first training event for it in November 2010 and we experienced a record low turnout for a new service. When promoting the event I informally questioned a few clients about why they were not interested. The two main responses I got were “it doesn’t match our company’s direction” and “it does not address our current business problems”.
What does this mean to business?
In the case example I showed some of the results of the Cupertino project and compared that with recent activities that I have experienced in my own business. I feel that the Cupertino project provides a bridge between understanding CMM as person to person and business to person. From studying this case I have developed two main findings.
First, by focusing on creating conversations and relationships with customers they are more likely to be compelled to action. With the Cupertino project engaging the citizens in conversation early the residents “saw a model for and experienced talking productively with members of other ethnic groups” (Pearce & Pearce, 2000, pg 409). In my own organization having conversations first with customers allows a discussion about how our services fit into their business model. This is not achieved well by mass marketing because it is not individualized to each company the way a conversation can be.
Second co-creating the conversation allows for the best possible product. In the Cupertino project they were able to listen to the citizens and hear their concerns and visions for the future. This in turn lead to the city leaders identifying various political processes that “were insufficient for most vexing issues” (Pearce & Pearce, 2000, pg 409). In the example of my business we rolled out a product without first having conversations with our customers to see if the new product was useful to them. As a result we wasted time and money on solely creating a product that our customers did not need.
For small businesses to engage in excellent communication with their customers they must co-create a social reality with them. Organizations that co-create their relationship with their customers in turn create the best outcome for both the business and the customer.
Practicing Better Communication
Posted by admin in Communication on October 28, 2010
This is the 3rd post in the communicating better series, and we are getting close to the end. I’ll wrap this series up next week so if you have any suggestions please let me know.
So here is something you probably didn’t expect. In middle school and Jr. High I played basketball. Amazing I know. I started off initially as a point guard because I couldn’t shoot to save my life but I was excellent at dribbling and passing. I hit a growth spurt before anyone else and for 1 year played as power forward before being demoted back to point guard and never grew another inch. By the time I broke an ankle that put an end to basketball for good I had actually become fairly good. The secret was that I practiced and played every single day.
Andre Agassi talks about in his book Open how he would hit 2,500 balls a day, every single day. Agassi is famously quoted as saying “If you don’t practice you don’t deserve to win.” Is it any wonder why the most successful athletes like Agassi, Tiger Woods, and Michael Jordan are known for their amazing amount of practice time?
As I’ve said before in this series, communication is one of the most important things we do. Doing it well is absolutely vital to our overall success. Just like hitting a fade away 3 pointers was vital to Jordan’s overall success. If this is so important shouldn’t we spend a large amount of time practicing it?
Instead what we do is we blindly throw up free throws and hope they go in. We shoot off a response on twitter without thinking. We throw up a blog post in the heat of the moment as soon as someone pisses us off. We write out a quick speech out line and get up and deliver it. Then we wonder why we suck.
If we took the time to think about the things we are communicating every time we sent a tweet how much better would our interpersonal skills become? If we wrote something every day how much better would our blog post be? If we spent time working on our speaking ability in our daily meetings how much better would we be when we spoke at a big conference?
Just remember though, practice doesn’t make perfect. Practice makes better. If you don’t think you could not be a little bit better then perhaps you should practice your humility a bit, because we can always become better. Then maybe if we all got a little bit better at communicating we would find that others are a little bit better at communicating with us. Then maybe we can find that better communication brings better relationships, and that is a very good thing.
What we create when we communicate
Posted by admin in Communication, Improvement, Marketing on October 26, 2010
Sorry for the long delay. This is the second in the communicating better series. Last time I looked at ethics in communications. As always feel free to drop comments here, on twitter or verbally and I can assure you it will impact future discussions.
The old days
Remember walkie-talkies? We thought they were the coolest thing as kids. This was before cell phones hit critical mass and every kid older than 7 had one. Later in life as a camp counselor (poor kids) we used them to communicate around the camp. With walkie-talkies you pressed the button, said what you had to say and waited for a response. This was a transition based communication.
This is how we use to view communication. I sent a message, you received it and then you sent back your response. The focus in this model quickly becomes on how I craft the message I push out. My hope was that you would interpret the message with the same meaning that I intended and vice versa. Sadly this is how most of us still function with our business messages. We send a press release, ad, put up a website or say something on social media, and then we sit back and hope it is interpreted the way we intended. Ineffective, hopeless
Tag, you are It
The major problem with this type of communication is that we start viewing customers as “It”. We push out an email campaign and monitor the open and click through rates and use that as a measure of success. We monitor ad impression rates and try to find correlation between impression and sales. We count our twitter followers, our newsletter subscribers and the circulation numbers on our press releases.
Repeat after me: Customers are not a metric
We have to move beyond viewing customers as it. @Bryanjones wrote a great post looking at social engagement in which he references Martin Buber (who I am a fan of). Buber talks about the need to move from an I-it relationship to an I-thou. Essentially by doing this you are viewing people not as metrics, but as people. Isn’t that what they should always have been?
We create something
Allow me to introduce you to another great person, his name is Barnett Pearce (read his blog sometime, great wisdom). Pearce along with pal Vernon Cronen developed a concept known as Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM). CMM says that when we communicate we create something. Instead of me sending you a message and you sending me one back we exchange messages together. From those messages we develop a shared meaning based on our unique relationship. This relationship is different from any other that I have, and through understanding what we have created I am able to communicate with you to the absolute best of my ability.
This moves beyond the walkie-talkie communication model and we try to interact with our customers and build relationships. I’ve said for years this is the real interactive marketing, not building a web page or advertising online. Is it really that hard to form a relationship with each of your customers? Unless you are Wal-mart or some large retailer I would think not.
So maybe communicating better is becoming more aware of the people we communicate with. We become aware of what we are creating with them. We become aware of what they need. Ultimately they might just become aware of us. And that is a good thing
Communicating Ethically
Posted by admin in Communication on October 21, 2010
This is the first of my communicating better series. As always if there is anything you would like to add, hear me talk about or disagree with feel free to add it to the comments.
We hear a lot about ethics now a day. It has become a bit of a buzz word honestly. But why do we suck so much at communicating ethically? Consultants want you to think it is some magical formula or a checklist you work through before you open your mouth or write a press release. I think it is a little simpler than that. In fact I like my friend @BryanJones’ approach to ethical communication
Don’t Suck
Communicating ethically is being honest, transparent, and simply being not shady or misleading. That is your magical formula. Sounds easy right? So why do so many companies and individuals struggle with this?
Because it means they would have to work overall harder. Building a relationship on honesty takes a little time and work. If you do it unethical it is easy. It is the difference between going through a drive through and buying a Big Mac or going home and cooking a real meal. The problem is that we want fast and easy. It is easy to build misleading marketing campaigns or sale snake oil. You can sucker anyone into buying once. Many businesses are based on this principle. Be shady, make quick money and then move on. Or take advantage of something, hope you don’t get caught, and deny or run if you do.
This doesn’t work long term though, and now people are getting tired of this. They want an ethical business. That means building a good product or being a good person, then communicating honestly about that. It is hard at first, but once you build a business or a persona on those principles your customers love you.
So here are my steps to communicating ethically
- Be honest, even if it hurts or causes you to lose a customer or friend
- Make a good product – to sell a bad product you have to lie, make a good one to begin with
- Be a good person – don’t mislead people, don’t backstab
- Be transparent – don’t try to hide things just to make your life easier
- Think about it first – another gem from @bryanjones “Just because you can doesn’t mean you should”
Each industry or role has specific ethical concerns. Marketing is a little different from PR, B2B is different from consumer products. But the overarching principles remain. Take the time to find what specific ethical principles apply to you. It might take a little more time up front, but you will not suck in the end.
What happens when we take the time to communicate better?
Posted by admin in Communication, Marketing on October 18, 2010
I’ve been a marketer for about 10 years now. I make it a point to work every day in some way to enhance my marketing skill and knowledge. The fact is that most of us who are successful constantly work on our skills to enhance them and make them better.
But how long have you been communicating with others? For me it is 27 years. Communicating is the one thing I do most frequent. When I market I communicate; when I sale I communicate; when I apply for a job, sit in a meeting, eat dinner with my wife, or have drinks with friends I communicate. It represents 100% of my interactions with others. Even when I am alone by myself I find ways to communicate.
We are more connected than ever before, our communication channels are seemingly endless. Yet how often do we work on our communication skill? If this is something that impacts almost everything we do shouldn’t we spend most of our skill development on communicating better?
If we take the time to communicate better then naturally we can have better relationships with the people around us. Having better relationships means doing everything we do better. Over the next week or at least until I run out of things to write about I want to explore what it means to communicate better. Feel free to let me know if there is something specific you would like me to explore.
Communicating Passion
Posted by admin in Communication on October 13, 2010
I have a good friend who I have been trying to talk into starting a blog for several months now. She has an infectious passion about reviving the culture of downtown. We frequently meet for lunch and have wonderful conversations about what this city could be if we all cared a little more. I think others would love to hear about it as well.
The truth is that most of us have a passion like this. When we share that passion amazing and rich discussions flow when we share it with others. Our very best communication happens when we share ideas we really care about. This passion might be networks, baking cookies, raising a kid, writing, daily life or communicating better (a few of the blogs I keep up with). Mine is trying to build better relationships through marketing, communications and business.
Whatever your passion tell people about it. People write amazing things when they are passionate. When you spread that passion you are able to explore it further than you ever thought possible. Often times you find other people who share your passion and you develop strong friendships as a result.
Some people worry that it takes too much time. You don’t have to write every day. Write every other day, once a week, or once a month if that is all you have. Find what works for you and try it. My guess is once you start sharing your passion you will want to do it more. If not that is ok, no one is going to fault you for having a dormant blog.
My tip for writing about passion though is to do it in the moment. Don’t lose the thought that inspires your passion, capture it and revisit it later. Moments usually do not come in front of a computer. I carry a moleskine with me everywhere and often write thoughts or whole post when they come. Then I will reorganize the thoughts and blog about it when I have time.