WHAT HARVARD LEARNED FROM US

As communicators, we feel vindicated.  Big time.

In a summer 2014 issue of Fast Company, no less an intellectual celebrity than the current president of Harvard, historian Drew Gilpin Faust, admitted she was bewildered and challenged by communicating messages in a large organization.  Her solution?  Say them again and again and again.

We wonder, though, if the good Doctor truly embraced the concept of different repetitions.  Training gurus will tell you to communicate the same thing six different ways – through pictures, spoken and written word, demonstrations, teaching, and activities, for example – for stickiness.  Plus they’ll also point out the difference between learning and mastering repetition.  Think of a nascent marathoner who’s figuring out, with help, the right ways to run.  That’s the learning part of the equation.  Then contrast that with a seasoned miler who’s perfecting his/her technique to win that race.  Voila:  Mastery!

With us, though, the issue with repetition is boredom.  It’s an imperative of our and any business that, with new information, strategies, benefits, changes, we better understand it in order to spread the messages.  Invariably, though, we get fatigued, tired of the same-old, same-old and yearn for the novel.  So we quit, perhaps earlier than the sixth iteration.

The same thing sometimes occurs with our advertising brethren.  The client or the agency or whomever decides that ‘enough is enough’ and shifts the campaign, even though it might just have started to work.  Even though not enough eyes and ears have been exposed.  And so on+.

Guess we’re becoming Walt Whitman:  “Do I repeat myself?  Very well then, I repeat myself.”

THE PARTY LINE

Conference calls get our goats.

First, the dogs barking.  Vacuuming in the next room.  Or other distractables, like e-appliances, overloud conversations, random paper shuffling, texting.

Second come the introductions.  But only once.  [It’s hard to voice-ID during a business conversation if you’ve heard the name and the voice just one time.]

Third:  The sidebars, the jokes (when you’re not there), the awkward gaps.

Got the [silent] picture?  There seems to be a real need for a uniform manifesto for conference calls, with everyone agreeing and signing up, and with rules posted online and in our faces.

Sure, we’ve all been guilty, at one time or another, of multitasking, checking emails or smartphones when we think no one’s watching.  Still, since a meeting is a meeting is a meeting, we need to get things done.

Here are our demands:

• Appoint a moderator who’s sensitive enough to tease people out of their shells and strong enough to just say no to monopolizers.
• Stick to the topic – and to the time.  We all have other things to do.
• Start right away.  And that doesn’t mean 11 on the dot; it means 10:57 am.
• Pay attention.  Though email use can’t be monitored, it’s not hard to tell when folks are following the agenda.  Or not.
• Test the technology … ahead of time.  Not on our watches.

Researchers state that business’ spend on conference calls will grow 9.6 percent yearly through 2017, with 65 percent of those being audio.  Being active and good listeners (and participants) simply equates to good corporate ­citizenship … and good communications.

R.I.P.?

Last week, we lunched with a rather senior colleague who’s on job search.

“I need a business card,” s/he explained.  And went on to talk about its qualities, like design-worthiness  and purpose and so on.

Which (natch) got us to thinking.   Is our biz card defunct, out of date, even lame as the digital geeks assert?

Truth:  We’ve got issues with bumping smartphones to exchange contact information, not just because technological compatibility ain’t there yet.  But also because there’s something about a heavy-duty stock, a great brand look and feel, colorfulness, and a permanence that seduces us. 

Sure, we’d be lost without our portable e-database, housed oh-so-conveniently in our phones.  It’s handy during a conversation, or meeting, when we absolutely positively need immediate access.  On the other hand, we (like the few thousand International Business Card Collectors – and yes, there is such a group) tend to hang on to the best specimens, those that are memorable for whatever reason.

Best also implies yet another quality:  Innovation.  We’ve seen and heard of USBs attached to a card, one composed from an iPhone screen, yet another functioning as a keyboard.  The marketing ideas for our commonplace rectangle are almost endless.

There’s yet another reason for not burying the business card:  The networking possibilities.  Japan has us cornered on the romance of the meishi (occasionally carrying its own QR code), having created a rather personal ritual around the hand-off of cards.  In fact, relationships a few hundred years ago flourished, thanks, simply, to the use of calling or visiting cards.

You, dear reader, know the business case for business cards – from exchange obligations (“Hey, I handed you one – I need one in return”) and etiquette to quick responses and quality messaging.  Would you ever give them up?  RSVP about the business card’s potential R.I.P. to cbyd.co.

SAD AND GLAD ... AND EVERYTHING IN BETWEEN

With Valentine’s Day in the recent past, we were musing about expressions of like and love in these e-days.  If not before.

Few realize that, even before Internet pioneer Tim Berners-Lee was born, Morse Code and Puck magazine and satirist Ambrose Bierce all talked about love and kisses and vertical emoticons and snigger points.  Though a Carnegie Mellon University student might have proposed the idea in the 1980s, today, emoticons – and their Japanese smartphone cousins, emoji – have become world-wide substitutes for saying how we feel, digitally.   Teens we know use these pictographs extensively in texts (in fact, often without words).  And yes, we’ll admit a guilty pleasure in occasionally using a smiley or frowny or LOL symbol when we’re e-talking with good friends and colleagues.

Think with us, though.  How frequently do these symbols truly portray what we’re up to emotionally, in the moment?  Is it easy to show our concerns or fears within our smartphones or Outlook or Lotus Notes?  Have your colleagues misunderstood your intent within the message’s content?  And if so, how long did it take you to explain what you meant?

That’s been the task lately of USC’s Annenberg Innovation Lab, charged with interpreting political sentiments of Twitter feeds.  The most difficult analysis, says a spokesperson, is determining sarcasm.  The computer does so in a unique combination featuring human and data-mining services, but not always successfully.

Remedies run from adopting new pictographs (yet another visual to remember!) to avoiding the sentiment altogether.  One reason to discontinue these pictures:  Researchers have discovered that millennials and younger tweeters use emoticons sarcastically as well as to show a lack of feeling altogether.

No surprise:  But why don’t we, as the ultimate communication and marketing professionals, set the new standard?  Like picking up the phone.  And meeting face to face.