Business Insight Zone

An open message to all P.R. people:

If you want me to read your press release, please do me the very simple favor of starting it with “Dear Tim . . .”

You could go a step further by indicating some familiarity with this blog, but I won’t put my foot down about that.

I will continue to delete unread any press release blasted out with no personalization at all.

Regards,

Tim

~ ~ ~

Yes, I’m basically asking for a level of personalization that has been possible with mail-merge features since the 1980s — but I can assure you that setting up this one simple hurdle will allow me to continue to trash half of the pitches that hit my inbox.

Yes, I’ll still get lots of irrelevant pitches that have nothing to do with what we discuss here — but I’ve given up hope that the can’t-be-bothered P.R. flack will pay attention to something as strange and provocative as relevance.

And before anybody complains that I paint with too broad a brush: I know many outstanding P.R. people who are a credit to their clients and their industry. It’s just that knowing these people — and counting quite a few of them among my friends — makes the gross failure-to-grasp-the-clue of the bad ones all the more cringe-inducing.

Here endeth the rant.

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Image source.

Twitter seems to be having growing pains again. That’s what I surmise, at least, after the couple of times today I’ve seen this . . .

. . . instead of the screen I wanted.

Here’s the trouble: it’s a lie. The outages are intermittent, and they’re not matched by the usual warning messages on the Twitter homepage to tell users about planned interruptions in service.

Maybe it’s just a goof, and the Twitter folks meant to throw up the familiar “Something Is Technically Wrong” or the famous Failwhale. Maybe they’re embarrassed that they’ve been having too many Failwhale moments lately. Maybe . . . well, I don’t know — what would be a good reason for putting up this message when it’s not true?

Bigger picture (because Twitter itself is trivial, in the grand scheme of business):

What sort of fibs do YOU see around you in the business world?

This post is prompted by a headline that’s innocuous enough in itself:

US new housing figures disappoint

I’ll spare you another rant about how little we should rely on economists’ projections at this point. My point here is to encourage you not to use — and not to feel — words like “disappointed” when you think about the current state of the economy.

I wish the economy were better. I wish more new jobs were being created. I’m just as ready as you are — and as the BBC headline writers are — for the financial picture to get rosier.

Meanwhile, though, I’ve got a job to do. I can do it better if I have an accurate clinical understanding of what’s going on in the economy. Words have meaning, though, and words like “disappoint” don’t help the cause of clinical understanding.

Think of a scientist working in her lab: She WANTS the experiment to work. She would LOVE for the findings to verify her potentially groundbreaking hypothesis. She HOPES for a good outcome.

But then when the results don’t match her expectation, she doesn’t let herself get disappointed — or, at the very least, she doesn’t allow herself to stay disappointed. Because now she’s got work to do to determine what happened, and to figure out what she might try next. She moves forward based on the data, not her feelings.

We’re human. Feelings are an inescapable part of business, and they are often a beneficial part of business. But please, don’t let your feelings about the economy — be they ever so grim — cloud your scientific judgment about what your business needs next.

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Photo by Arwen Abendstern.

Just to tie two concepts together . . .

You’ve heard me rail against dumb questions. (I.e. questions you could and should have easily answered for yourself before you ever asked them.)

You’ve heard me rail against automatic direct messages (DMs) on Twitter. (People use these to spam welcome new followers on Twitter, but they seldom add any value.)

Now let me just make the connection:

• If you ask a dumb question once — hey, who doesn’t?
• If you ask dumb questions over and over, people will come to think that it’s you, and not just your off-the-cuff question, that’s dumb.
• If you want to set up a Twitter auto-DM, you have the (risky) opportunity to make a good first impression over and over on everyone who receives it.
• BUT, if you ask a dumb question via auto-DM, you’re asking the same dumb question over and over of lots of different people. Which, not surprisingly, may cause them to think you’re dumb.

So, don’t do that. Stick with “Hi — thanks for following!” if you’re not sure.

(In case you’re wondering, yes, we’ve been getting a lot of these.)

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Related posts:

• There IS such a thing as a dumb question.
• What Works Better than an Auto-DM.
• What not to say in a Twitter auto-DM.
• The Basic Basics: Don’t do something avoidably stupid.

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Photo by cesar bojorquez.

Here’s your new business card:

This was sparked by a Twitter discussion about meaningful and meaningless job titles. (”Consultant” and “community manager” were two that came up.) And you’ll know better than I do what the real and bogus titles are in your own field.

But keep this firmly in mind: Nobody ever bought anything if they didn’t think it would suit some need for them. That need might be the meaning of life, or it might be “Pacify my kids while we stand in line at the grocery store.”

The first three of these cards go to my friends Amber Naslund, Meg Fowler, and Tracy Lee Carroll.

Are you showing your customers and prospects how you make their problems go away?

You’re given 45 minutes to present — say, to speak at a lunch meeting. Take no more than 20. (You’ll probably expand to 25 anyway, if you’re like most speakers.) Then say

“Now, where have I gone astray?”

or

“What do you think?”

or

“There’s more I could say on this, and I’ll be happy to answer questions, but what I really want to know is what’s on your mind.”

(Not “your minds” — it’s not about the group. Say “your mind” with conviction, and any member of the audience will take it personally.)

The world is full of speakers, even funny ones and ones with smart things to say, who end up a presentation with something like, “Well, I wanted to take some questions, but I had so much material that I see we’ve run out of time.” These folks — unless they’re so legendary that the audience would sit there for hours (think Katherine Hepburn, or John Wooden, or the Dalai Lama) — make the mistake that the members of the audience are there for the speaker rather than for themselves.

So cut it in half, and give what’s left to the audience. Give it wholeheartedly.

Note that this isn’t a shortcut when it comes to preparation. You’d better work extra hard to make sure you put an hour’s worth of value into your half-hour of time, and you’d better be ready to talk about whatever comes up during the discussion, even if that means saying, “I don’t know” and then moderating an impromptu roving panel among members of the audience who know more about a given facet of the topic than you do.

Have you ever tried this? Are you willing to?

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Photo by Bruce Tuten.

“. . . So it’s reasonable to think we can grow this line of business 30% — even 40% — by the end of next year.”

Maria looked across the conference table at the speaker, Larry, who was a division manager with a degree from Amos Tuck and an air that asked, with a chuckle that left no room to doubt him, that surely you would not question his command of the numbers? Had Larry looked her way, taken even a moment to study her face, he would have seen the note of genuine concern. Not of doubt about his ability to manage, nor of ridicule at his grandiose dreams of expanding their division, but of genuine concern that he could not see how far afield his delusions had flown. His love affair with the new product line had passed — long ago passed — the point of enthusiasm or of confident projection. It had taken him into a realm where he could no longer see facts, no longer grasp the simple realities faced every day by the sellers and marketers and designers and developers in the division: what they had in the new product line was a respectable evolution from the products that had gone before, one that should please existing customers and attract new ones at rates with which they in the division were familiar. This was not some breakthrough, some zenith of product design, that would win the hearts of millions.

Thinking of all this, and listening to Larry wax eloquent about his brainchildren, Maria shook her head, slightly so as not to cause an argument.

~ ~ ~

The story of Maria, Larry, and the division headed for trouble is fiction, but most people in business have faced something like it in real life. Its roots are complex: if it were as simple as overreaching on the part of a division manager, reality — or a senior executive — would have caught Larry short already. If it could be disproven by incontrovertible numbers in column G of the spreadsheet, Margaret from Finance would have said so. Instead, there’s a compound of strategic misjudgments and tactical mistakes, ones involving lots of people, and next thing you know you have a leader of a business who can’t see that he’s gone astray . . . and a slew of people under him who can’t tell him.

It’s the stuff of good drama, right? Characters with competing motives. Crucial gaps between what is said and what is meant, what is said and what is heard, or what is said and what is real. Setting, tone, conflict — all the things the middle-schooler in my household has begun to study in English class.

Well, here’s an idea for the English majors and lovers of fiction in the business world — one that’s the opposite of the haiku approach I recommended recently: analyze the real-life business challenges around you at length, as you would have broken down a novel in Professor Smith’s sophomore lit class.

• Setting. What difference does it make that this story is unfolding where it’s unfolding? How does the setting affect the mood, empower some characters and weaken others, set up expectations (realistic or otherwise) for the protagonists?
• Tone. Many companies get what’s coming to them based on their internal tone and tempo for doing business. The tone within many companies couldn’t accommodate Netflix’s culture guide if it tried. If your working days were captured in a feature film, what would the musical score of the movie be like — brooding, frantic, peaceful?
• Character. My daughter is learning about the difference between round and flat characters, and whether their actions allow us to regard them as static or dynamic. When you look at the other players in your business drama, do you think of them as one-dimensional, or rounded? Are they prone to change, or fixed in a single gear (good or bad)? For extra credit: how would they describe themselves? And how would they describe you?
• Motive. It’s tempting to think that the Ogre of Purchasing or the Hobgoblin of Sales in your company does things out of sheer bloody-mindedness. But it’s not so. Everybody does everything out of some motive. What are the motives you see at work around you?
• Plot. Some of the greatest modern writers dispensed with plot, yet many of the most widely-read novelists have been masters of it. Do you think that the things going on around you in your business hang together coherently? Or are they like an arch-modernist story, eschewing the comfort of a sensible plot? As an experiment, what if you re-plotted the story of your company’s current fiscal year as a Dickens masterpiece? Or a Stephen King horrorshow? Or a John Le Carré spy thriller?

We could go on . . . and in fact I hope you’ll help me do so. In the comments, please tell me how else you might make sense of your work by breaking it down like a critic would a novel? (For bonus points, you can even continue the story of Maria and Larry — is it a farce or a tragedy?)

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Related:

• What’s the haiku version?

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Photo by Doctor Yuri.

I’ll wrap up my Monday by pointing you to a lovely post about the unlovely subject of online gossip. It’s written by my good friend Meg Fowler — who, besides being a doyenne of Twitter, knows a thing or two about the business world.

it’s not about your brand. it’s about you.

. . . It’s a bit of a battle to hold back sometimes, especially when the gossip is especially juicy, or when everyone else is talking about it,  or when someone we know is frustrated… or when we’d like nothing better than to go find a bat and “adjust some worldviews.”

But it is never a bad idea to think before you  speak, and to consider the impact of your words beyond the next ten seconds or minutes or hours or days.

What Meg writes is aimed at individuals, but I can tell you that it all goes double — triple – for businesses that are engaging online.

By no means should businesses take this as an excuse to duck online engagement. If your audiences — customers, rivals, analysts, hangers-on — are out there talking to you, you’ve got to be able to engage them. But you also have to be savvy about how you engage them.

Meg’s post is full of good advice, not because the world is full of malicious gossips, but because the nature of online communications can so easily make an ordinary person sound like a malicious gossip.

Most of the businesspeople I encounter via Twitter, LinkedIn, or blog comment threads are like most of the businesspeople I encounter over the phone or in person: basically decent, somewhat flawed, trying to make a living. But occasionally I have to gape when someone who’s purportedly using the social media for business violates every common-sense standard that Meg lays out in her post.

Give Meg’s post a read. Show it to all of the people in your outfit who talk about business via social media. Remind them that you’re all good people and that you want to come across as good people online.

And the next time you’re about to say something you’ll regret online, refer back to Meg’s good advice.

The way Twitter works, if I cite you in the middle of a tweet, everyone who follows me will see it. So if, for example, I tweet . . .

Hey, I totally got ripped off by @YourNameHere — they stink!

. . . any of the 3,800+ following the @Hoovers account might see that in their stream of tweets.

By contrast, if I put your name at the beginning of a tweet, Twitter reads it as a “reply” from me to you — and shows it only to the folks who follow both you and me. So if you have 200 followers and only 15 of them are among my 3,800 followers, when I tweet . . .

@YourNameHere I was wrong about you — thanks for clearing things up!

. . . only those 15 people might see the tweet in their streams. (By the way, anyone — even a non-Twitter user — could go and look it up, but how likely is that?)

The point of etiquette I’d like to emphasize: If you complain about a person or company on Twitter such that all of your followers might see it, but then the subject of the complaint makes things right, then you should also say “No hard feelings” or “I apologize” or whatever . . . such that all of your followers might see it.

It’s only fair.

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Photo by avlxyz, used under a CC-Share Alike license.

Deep understanding
requires clarity of mind.
Seek great compression.

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Image source.