'TIS THE SEASON

Along with holiday jingles and tra-la-las, expect the frequency of online surveys this November/December – and beyond – to escalate.

After all, the 2016 POTUS election is less than 12 months away. 

Today, prognosticators say there will be increased emphasis on gathering online and mobile data, adding to the already $10 billion marketplace (more than telephone and face-to-face opinion-izing combined).  SurveyMonkey and peers have done a great job in selling services to professionals like lawyers who now use this kind of polling for all sorts of matters, from assessing racism in potential jurors to backgrounding those up for judicial appointments. 

As well as to communicators and brand gurus.  At the same time, many of us fail to use these tools wisely – and/or follow the pollsters’ leads.  With a tip of the hat to Advertising Age, here are three rules that might make our employers’ bottom lines ring – and our employees’ experience, a bit more compelling:

• Remember the two Cs – continuity and consistency.  Judging new directions on the results of one or two polls isn’t advisable; asking regularly is.
• Truth rules.  Yeah, it might not be popular – but if what you’re hearing can be readily validated, leaders need to be told and your efforts, guided.
• The wider, the better.  Especially inside business, it can be tough to grab employee attention.  And therefore, very tempting to go to the same-old, same-old for questions.  Expand your horizons – and offer incentives for responses.

What’s real is the data we’re seeking.  Make sure you get the right kind of information to guide decision-making, inside and out.

A NEW-FASHIONED CANDY STORE

Announcements of new mobile and Web-like tools come almost daily, it seems. 

Sometimes, it’s old stuff in tech format, like our childhood’s Viewmaster® collection of reels and hand-held viewer.  [Thank you, Mattel.]

Other times, it’s a brand-new spin for ageless concepts, such as flash cards made digital.

No matter what, though, we get jazzed about the novelty – and pondering ways that we might use this software to great impact.

Take flash cards, for instance.  They were pre-school mainstays, helping us learn our ABCs and numbers and names of items.  Today, programs like Anki, Cerego, and Memrise not only jolt our memories, but also make our knowledge much longer lasting.  [Confession:  Which is how we got through college chem courses …] 

What’s more, researchers have proven that there’s something to these spaced-repetition tactics – i.e., fixing information in our brains through repeated exposure at planned intervals.  Students get better grades.  Memorizing is less onerous.  Even exposures to difficult foreign languages like Mandarin stick … somewhat better.

Imagine, for instance, salespeople drilled on products and pricing and spiffs.  Or the smartphones of new hires embedded with this software and info on the company, its strategy, history, vision and mission.  And the litany of human resources programs instantly recalled via visual images and quick blurbs.

Hmmm:  Candy retailers are so non-PC.  Shall we call it, ‘acting like kids in the Apple store’?

INFO-WHAT?

Software that turns data into charts and graphs is, similarly, transforming the art of presentation, exponentially, day after day.

Classified as business analytics, these tools are now produced by every major and minor e-player, from Microsoft and SAP to Tableau and Tibco, in a market that’s growing faster than the business of design experts.

Which is the issue, as we see it. 

Sure, we have zip argument with the need to pump up nonverbal communication.  After all, stats alone bear out the way we process data:  50 percent of the brain’s real estate either directly or indirectly touches vision.  Eighty percent of us remember what we see and do, versus 10 percent, what we hear, and 20 percent, what we read.

And we’ve been preceded by some pretty smart vis-info practitioners.  USA Today popularized information visuals in its front-page snapshots.  So did modern map-makers.  Edward Tufte, called the daVinci of data by The New York Times, gave us a series of tomes that define exactly how we should use design to communicate information.

We don’t do that. 

Instead, every possible number or word, when grouped, is subject to picture-ification.  Not much time is spent on considering content, comprehension, and communication, in our minds the three critical Cs of what we do.  [Not to mention the changing of behaviors!]

Florence Nightingale, more than a century and a half ago, persuaded Queen Victoria to improve the conditions of military hospitals through a graphic.  What would we say and do today?