Tag: communications

10 Obvious Tips for Email (that most people don’t follow)

~ Sasha ~ 5 Comments

Like it or not, most professional communications nowadays is on email.  And if communications are about building personal connections and trust (which they are), then getting email right is important.  It’s a way to differentiate yourself in a crowded, noisy world.

So here are 10 tips for good emailing, especially if you’re in the relationship business (which you are):

  1. Never email someone who isn’t expecting to hear from you.  Or if you do, you’d better have a heck of a way to introduce yourself.  If they don’t know you or why you’re contacting them, you’re sending spam.
  2. Overwhelm people with your responsiveness.  This matters more than you think.  Get back to them quickly.  If it’s going to take you more than a day to respond, let them know.
  3. Be personal.  Have your personality come through. Really. Give them a glimpse of where you are, of what’s going in the world or in your world – something that places your email in a place and in time and shares a little bit about where your head is when writing the note.
  4. Use different tones of voice for different people.  Formal or informal can work for email, it just depends who you’re writing (but informal still means full sentences).  Just don’t be generic.  Ever.
  5. Be concise.
  6. Be specific.  Tell someone why you’re writing them.  If you’re asking them for something, ask.  Be clear, direct, and polite.
  7. Assume people are reading on a handheld device – even if they’re not, that will keep you short and to the point, and you’ll avoid graphics and tables and fancy stuff.
  8. EVERY email you write needs to strengthen and reinforce the relationship you have with someone.  Every one.  No exceptions.
  9. Think twice before you reply all.  Then think a third time.  And never, ever, reply all to say “Thanks” or “OK.”
  10. If you’re hesitating about sending an email, pick up the phone.  Don’t hide behind an impersonal medium, especially for tough conversations.

(Oh, and one more thing that most people will ignore: filing email in folders is for the birds.  It takes way too much time, and your email Inbox is not a to do list.  Use search instead.  MSN or Google Desktop really work, or if you’re lucky enough to have a Mac, use the built-in search feature.)

The Body Shop: when stories fall short

~ Sasha ~ 6 Comments

[EDITOR’S NOTE: I’ve been given a serious factual correction by Michael, the Brazilian fixer who worked for the photgrapher on this shoot.  Please see his comment below.  Bottom line is he’s right and I was wrong in jumping to conclusions.

It turns out this girl is not a model, she is a person who works on picking nuts that supply the Body Shop in Maranhão, Brazil.  So I was wrong here – I figured she was a model and wove a whole story around that.

Personally, I still have some questions about this choice of image and the decisions around this campaign, but that doesn’t make up for the fact that I missed the mark on this one.  Thanks to Michale for the correction, and lesson learned for me that there tearing others down is not the right way to make a point.

I’ve edited my post somewhat.  I still stand behind some of the points, but more importantly I think it’s only fair to leave up what I originally said — lesson learned on this one, though.]

I’m beginning to think that outdoor advertising is the lowest rung on the external communications ladder.

Yesterday I came across this terrible ad.  Here’s a storytelling 101 suggestion: when you think your story is done, step back, look at it, and repeat it in 10 words or less to someone who’s never heard it before and who represents the people you are trying to reach.  See what they say; ask them if the story makes sense to them.

So what is the (very low quality…sorry) “hand selected naturally!” image trying to say?  Presumably that this woman had something to do with the hand selecting of the natural ingredients to your Body Shop products, and that this makes them more real, natural and authentic. [In fact she did, according to Michael’s comment, below.] Problem is, look at the woman — down to her designer short jean shorts and her $75 woven basket.

The image is so far off that it is borderline offensive.  There are hundreds of millions of people out there who make their livelihoods in agriculture, and I’m sure many of them sell to the Body Shop.  But somehow the Body Shop was unwilling to go all the way to authenticity in this campaign and with this image — finding actual Body Shop producers and telling their stories — and the whole house of cards comes crashing down.

The irony here is that people who buy at the Body Shop and who are passionate about the Body Shop  are going to notice exactly this kind of thing.  The brand was once about authenticity, natural ingredients, and our interconnected world, and it attracted educated consumers who likely care about things like the environment, the well-being of producers, and poverty in the developing world.

I guess it’s not surprising that this once-authentic brand has gotten so watered-down within L’Oreal that it’s lost all of its distinguishing charateristics — and the passionate followers who once made this brand great are gone as well.

“Presentations” are Stories Too

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

A lot of people have trouble with PowerPoint presentations.

The first problem isn’t with the slides.  The first problem is that people think that “making a presentation” is something other than storytelling, and that their goal is something other than connecting with the audience.  Do yourself a favor: the next time you have to “present” something, DON’T start with a blank page in PowerPoint.  And don’t start with a few slides that you have pulled together for some other purpose.

Instead, take out a sheet of paper (or open a Word document), figure out what you want to say, and write it down.  Keep it simple and stick to the main points.  Make sure someone who hasn’t been elbow deep your work would understand and care about what you’re saying. Avoid acronyms and abbreviations.  Give specific examples.  Use anecdotes.  Tell stories.  Share of yourself.

Once you’ve figured out what you want to say, start writing slides.  Use pictures.  Don’t write out full sentences.  Take most of what you want to say and put it in the notes section as a script.  Then learn the script.

If your slides would make sense without you presenting them, then they’re not slides, they are handouts.  These are two very different things.

If the presentation matters, practice giving it a few times before the big day.  The point is for people to listen to you.  The slides are supporting you and the story, they are not the main attraction.

There’s a lot out there about making good PowerPoint slides, and a lot of it is instructive.  But no amount of slide-making wizardry will help you if you don’t know what point you’re trying to get across, what story you’re hoping to tell.

What have you noticed lately?

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

A friend just shared this fascinating conversation on the AIGA website about noticing.  It touches on a few interrelated themes, but starts with the basic premise that it is important to be an “active noticer” (my made-up term) in the world if you’re going to be an effective designer (and, I would argue, communicator and storyteller).

I’m seeing the importance of noticing coming up more and more.  You need to be an active listener if you’re going to be successful at connecting with people.  You need to pick up on peoples’ cues, the flow of their conversation, even their language (I’ve noticed this last point especially when speaking in a foreign language, and how one’s accent naturally adjusts depending on the person with whom you’re talking.  I’m pretty sure it happens in English all the time as well, it’s just harder to notice).  But more broadly, the more you notice in the world, the more informed, connected, and aware you are of your surroundings, both local and global.

Noticing is also at the core of the design thinking mentality of great design firms, and IDEO has worked closely with Acumen Fund (where I work) to help us think about and incorporate user-centered design in creating products and services for the poor.

What a radical notion: start with poor people, their habits and their preference, when figuring out how to design a product.  Take their opinions seriously.  It’s about listening and valuing what you’re hearing and seeing, and knowing that you as an outsider don’t have all the answers.  It’s also the opposite of how lots of poverty alleviation has been practiced by international organizations, like the World Bank (“Bring in the experts!”), for decades.

From the conversation at AIGA, Dan Soltzberg comments:

It reminds me a lot of the approach we take to being with people when we do fieldwork. In the field, you have to simultaneously drink all kinds of information in, and at the same time be active in guiding the interaction. There’s this tightrope walk between action and non-action, ego and non-ego. To move back and forth gracefully between these different ways of being requires noticing not just what’s going on around you but what’s going on inside you as well. It’s one of these things that sounds so simple, but really takes practice to be good at.

If you’re going to be an effective communicator and storyteller, you have to be good at noticing – it’s the source of your raw material and the fabric of your conversations.

I’m discovering that it’s also part of the value of blogging: it forces you to notice and really pay attention to the world around you.

What have you noticed lately?

4 in the morning

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

My summer cold, which I was sure would pass in 24 hours, is entering its second week. So, Nyquil notwithstanding, most mornings this week I’ve been awake at 4 in the morning. This feels like the worst of all times of day to be awake, doesn’t it?

Why is that? Where did I even get this idea about 4 in the morning? How did 4 in the morning get such a bad rap?

The slam poet Rives might have the answer. Check out his “4 in the morning” lyrical origami at the 2007 TED Conference. I don’t want to summarize any of it, for fear of ruining the effect. See it for yourself and you’ll see how Rives has the uncanny ability to take any topic and make it captivating, humerous and profound. His “mockingbirds” riff still gives me the chills. (check it out; it’s 4 minutes long)

Rives is just one of the speakers at the TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) Conference who defies easy classification. TED is a conference about the spread of ideas. It brings together some of the smartest people on the planet, and asks them to give 18 minute TED talks on their area of expertise. So the next time you’re thinking about watching a Seinfeld rerun on your DVR (“it’s just 22 minutes long,” you think), check out a TED talk instead.

I’m continually amazed by how transcendent the speakers are. Who could imagine being captivated by a biologist talking about the fastest movement in the animal world; a doctor and researcher explaining graphically why some countries are rich and others are poor; a brain scientist talking about her personal experience having a stroke; or computer scientist who modified a Wii remote control to make a $50 whiteboard (the market price is $2,500).

To me, TED is about the raw power of ideas, and of community, to change the world. It is also about how influence comes from the ability to communicate with people outside your field of expertise (see: the Obama campaign).

And listening to these speakers, one cannot help but think, “Wow, maybe I can do something totally fabulous that makes the world a different and better place.”

Slydial: Please leave a message after the beep

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

A new service has been launched called Slydial, which lets you place a phone call that goes directly to a persons’ voicemail, without the phone ever ringing. The service addresses the silent wish of every teenager who, for the past three decades, has whispered to herself, “I hope no one is there and I can just leave a message.”

The Slydial website describes when you might use their service:

Create the illusion of communication
You maxed out your emergency credit card the first week of school. Your parents are looking for some answers. A text message isn’t going to cut it but a voicemail would mean that you tried calling them.

Wow. Pretty bold to come out and state that your value proposition is to create the illusion of communication.

The number of tools we have to communicate is multiplying. If I want to let someone know what’s on my mind, I now have to decide between a phone call, an email, an SMS message, posting on my blog, updating my Facebook or MySpace or LinkedIn or Plaxo Pulse profile. And if I were 20 years younger I could add to that list things like Twitter, video messages, vMix, Bebo, and of course Slydial.

All of this is very exciting, but it also requires a new kind of filtering and understanding of which messages are appropriate for which media. There is also the risk that, as the media multiply, less time and effort goes into composing messages that create a real connection and understanding between people. We end up with lots more information, but a lot less meaning, and we lower the bar on what’s good enough in communications with the excuse that email (or SMS or whatever else) is supposed to be sanitized and devoid of emotion and real connection.

The medium is not itself the problem. But when I find myself emailing someone who sits 6 feet away from me in the office to ask a question, I do wonder if things have gone too far. At least I’m not Slydialing them…yet.