Getting social means communicating…all ways

Communicating... an old art

As the ever rising number of companies ramp up their efforts in the digital media space (aka digital marketing), there are, in my opinion, three very important parts of the social “program” that need to be checked before embarking:

(1) to what extent do members of head office meet and discuss with clients in the field?
(2) what is the experience when calling the company on the telephone?
(3) what is the experience when sending an email to a company representative?

On the first point, the further question is to what extent management is engaging in real dialogue with its customers and stakeholders. Does management have a true intent to listen — exhibiting such soft skills as empathy, humility and openness?  The answer to this question will give a good insight into the company’s culture and its orientation toward the customer.  Being client centric is not something to which one can just pay lip service.  It needs to be lived and breathed from top to bottom.

Social: Dial(-ogue) Those Numbers

What is the experience?

The two following questions — about the telephone service and email experience — are extremely relevant as companies explore the social media question.  In its core, social media is about communication.  A company’s disposition to engage and communicate with its stakeholders can be read through the prism of the current telephone and email interaction.  If companies have not created a culture of fluid communication via the old and standard means, I would be pessimistic about their ability to adapt to the new environment, where messages are being sprayed out in forums, social networks, instant messages, VOIP and more.  As Bill Gates forecasted, “[s]ocial networking-type applications will become as ubiquitous in the workplace as Microsoft Office tools and will likely replace e-mail as the dominant form of corporate communications.”  If you think you are overwhelmed with emails, wait until Bill Gates’ vision becomes reality. The email will likely not disappear overnight, that said.  Nonetheless, the way a company has come to (mis-)manage emails will likely show up again in the social media space.

Email - Nominative & Personal

To this end, a company would do well to revisit its ability to answer the phone swiftly, capture and pass along messages to the correctly identified individuals, reply promptly and personally to emails, etc.  Otherwise, you can do as someone like Robert Scoble does : openly admit that you can’t reply to all the messages.  I would much rather that someone acknowledge that they cannot get back to everyone rather than (a) pretend they care or (b) just get lost in a black hole or be considered as junk mail, or both.  The idea of emails (that are not spam) and most phone messages, it should be underlined, is that they are personal and, very often, nominative… Therefore, when someone does not reply to a personal message (i.e. the message disappears into a black hole), it certainly augurs poorly for corresponding and interacting in the multi-forum, multi-format & ubiquitous internet message systems. Personally, I have seen many companies whose email habits and phone systems leave something to be desired.  If, as I am beginning to believe, customer service is the new marketing engine, are these same companies going to be able to switch gears in the digital space?

What do you think? Is there a relationship?  How can an organization mobilize itself constructively to listen and answer to the dissipated (and disorganized) world of messaging when they don’t manage the more or less linear world of faxes, phones and emails?  Will the new Facebook Messages system help or accentuate a poor communication culture?

Words are in...

Wordsmithing remains a critical talent.   Whether it is crafting the right slogan, snaring a killer title for your email campaign or cutting down to 140 characters the sweetest tweet, the word is [still] in.  If images and videos generally gain more traction on the ‘net, the filter through which you have to go to get to them remains, by and large, the written word.

EMOTIONAL TITLES

In terms of creating powerful titles that are capable of punching through the noise, emotionally charged titles will typically win out.  Thanks to a tip from the ebullient Larry Beacham, I got turned on to this Advanced Marketing Institute free service (limited to 20 words though) which algorithmically determines the emotional impact of your title.  The site calculates an Emotional Marketing Value rating.  The algorhythm takes into account intellectual, empathetic and spiritual factors.  According to their verbiage:

Intellectual words are especially effective when offering products and services that require reasoning or careful evaluation.

Empathetic words often bring out profound and strong positive emotional reactions in people.

Spiritual words have the strongest potential for influence and often appeal to people at a very deep emotional level.

Getting a title right also depends on your intended audience, the context in which it appears as well as capturing the nature of the article that follows (i.e on message).

GET YOUR SPELING RIGHT TO?

Grafitti Should be Graffiti

English is a global language with various official forms (notably — but not limited to — British & American) and, considering its reach, the number of different accents, spellings and interpretations of English could make for endless humo[u]r.  English is (at least for now) also the dominant language of the Internet.  I would argue that, in this context, to the extent the Internet has an ever-extending long tail, getting spelling right is absolutely vital.

Compensating for the misspellings, Google and Yahoo (to cite the majors) have a nice habit of catching (what might be generously called) inadvertent typos and proposing searches for the correct spelling.  All the same, brands must remember (in part also as a protection against crafty URL fishers) to reserve URLs of all spellings around their official brand name in order to accommodate a less-literate fan base.  After coming across the story of the valiant Tipp-Ex kids, Jeff Deck and Ben Henson (who went around America to search & correct typos) and thinking about the reliance on word search in Google, it is probably more important to have proper spelling than proper grammar (although I would prefer more of both).  I enjoyed this interview, in Salon, of Jeff Deck and how he refers to the two ‘schools’ with regard to spelling and grammar principles: the Hawks and Hippies.  Hawks are intransigent on the need for ONE standard system of English.  Hippies are ‘descriptivists‘ who support the evolutionary nature of the language, which has participated in making English such an enduring force.  And, in the realm of keeping up with the Jones’, Peter Roy Clark, a senior scholar at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida, has just come out with an updated review of contemporary grammar in “The Glamour of Grammar.”  (See here for the New York Times book review)

I would argue that good writers / copywriters are going to remain very important as part of a communication plan and, in English at any rate, the power of a good copywriter will be knowing how to evolve with the times to find the right emotional touch, all the while being accurate.  In all likelihood, English with its 500,000 words must remain an organic, fluid language; but we should not back down from the discipline of proper spelling and good grammar.  It is a fine balance.  When refering to the pillar Académie Française — whose role is to uphold the French language — Deck says, “I think it is possible to get a little too academic about standards.”  Yes, well put.

I write this post to alert you all to a new form of scandalous cyber scam.  Last night, at 7:30pm, I received this email below directly from the address of a good old friend, Elisabeth, from the United States.  It was a bulk mail as my email address was not visible.  Nor was the message personalised to me.

“Hello,

I’m writing this with tears in my eyes,I came down here to London,England with my family for a short vacation and i was mugged at Knife point last night at the park of the hotel where i lodged all cash,credit cards and cell were stolen off me.

I am even owing the hotel here,the hotel manager won’t let me leave until i settle the hotel bills now am freaked out.So i have limited access to emails for now, please i need you to lend some money so i can make arrangements and return back I am full of panic now,the police only asked me to write a statement about the incident and directed me to the embassy,i have spoken to the embassy here but they are not responding to the matter effectively, I will refund the money back to you as soon as i get home, I am so confused right now and thank God i wasn’t injured because I complied immediately.

I await your respond

Regards Elisabeth”

I was clearly surprised by the way the note was written with its poor typing as I know Elisabeth to have impeccable English and great typing skills.  But, putting it down to the stress of the incident, I was prepared to overlook the English and believe the story — the fact that I am based in Paris made it reasonable to have sent me the mail, I thought.  I was on my iPhone in a conference and so I blithely replied wondering how we were supposed to connect.  The so-called Elisabeth then replied with a second mail:

“the muggers took my phone as well and i wish i could call you but i can’t because i didn’t have access to phone at the moment,I have nothing left on me and i’m grateful to God that i still have my life and my passport cos it would have been worst if they made away with my passport.

I am full of panic now and i will be glad if you can help me out

Elisabeth”

This second mail was too much and as I prepared to ask the person to prove that she was indeed my friend Elisabeth, I received a third mail:

“all i need now is money…760pounds,let me know if you can lend me the money and i will instruct on how to get it to me

Elisabeth”

Once I had connected with Elisabeth to discuss the scam, I discovered that the person had taken over her email entirely and had also managed to divert Elisabeth’s mobile telephone number (it was reconfigured by this perpetrator not to accept incoming calls!).

Notwithstanding my “give me proof” mail, I sent a final message asking for details to wire money…  And, after midnight last night, this was the mail I received:

“You can wire it to my name via Western union so that i can use my passport for verification here western union outlet here in London

This is the details you need at western union location below -

Name – Elisabeth & FULL LAST NAME

Location – 30 Leicester Square London United Kingdom WC2H 7LA

Kindly visit www.westernunion.com/locator to search for an agent location near you.I shall have your money reimbursed immediately on my return.Thank you so much,Please once you are done sending me the Money please help me scan a copy of the Western union receipt or help me write out the Money transfer control number (MTCN).

Thanks……..

Elisabeth”

Different from the Nigerian “I’ve got money to give away” scam sent from some more or less creative email address, the ugly and scary components of this scam approach are the real email address, the nature of the supposed ordeal as well as the REAL TIME element.

My first reaction on getting home was to change my passwords.  I suggest that we all do the same.  Cyber theft is a very real threat and a super hassle to undo. Please do pass this message along among your friends to make them aware.  If I get any further updates from Elisabeth, I will be sure to post.

Add-on (noon on 14 Jan 2010): I googled this nasty email and have found, as you can imagine, others posting on this same scam already.  Evidently, this scammer has been working this since late last year (early November)… Here is just one reference: La Shawn Barber’s Corner;

The bigger question is what to do if this happens to you and how to avoid your account getting kidnapped?  I read in one forum for a compromised gmail address about  filling out the accont recovery form… which apparently takes multiple tries before succeeding.  I quote from the above-mentioned forum:

“Keep trying the account recovery form.  People have reported success after multiple tries.  And just-in-case…  This page will help you through the account recovery process:  http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=46346

For information about account recovery (includes a link to the Account Recovery Form) see: http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=117219.”

And, further advice from 9News.Com on how to avoid having your account compromised:

“To avoid being a victim to this type of crime, Cyopis recommends:
- Don’t use the same password for multiple accounts and change the passwords regularly.
- Use longer passwords. Shorter passwords are more easily compromised.
- Monitor your financial and personal data regularly.
- Make certain your computer has a good firewall and security program.
- Limit your personal information on social Web sites.
- If you get an e-mail that doesn’t look right, ask more questions and believe less.”

6TUWXFXHEFY2

I was not able to find a ‘best practices’ site or space on the ‘net listing the best “personalised” automatic signatures (which one can add on to the end of emails). Recently, I have noticed a couple of novel signatures tacked on to messages sent from smart phones — if not smart friends! I thought I would share them with you, as well as suggest a few others to start a possible best practices meme on the topic of automatic signatures… (if only Facebook would allow the same, don’t you think?)

1/ “Sent from small keyboard – pls excuse the brevity” (from Brad C)
2/ “Sent via Blackberry Handheld – Please excuse typos” (from Charlie H)

My own suggestions, trying to look at a more positive spin:

3/ “Think before you print (even if it’s a stretch to think to print from your iPhone”
4/ “Sent from my iPhone. In virtual heaven.”
5/ “Sent from my blackberry, while in a boring meeting.”
6/ “Typed in the toilet.”

Lastly, in total disclosure, here is the one I am currently using on my iPhone:

7/ “Sent from my iPhone… so, please excuse the virtual typos, merely a figment of the imagination.”

Would be very glad to hear of other suggestions out there!

Ever had nerves as your mouse’s arrow hovers over the “send” button for an email you have written? Whether it was an important message or to an important person or both, you inevitably toiled over each word. Then, rather than act on impulse, you slept on it. The following morning you read it over again and congratulated yourself on having been prudent as you pick up an error or just a typo. Then you fix it and, finally, take a deep breath as your index finger presses the left button on the mouse. It is gone. Same deal for sms messages too, although the content is usually quite more mundane.

I observe that the notion of blogging, whether composing or commenting, can involve the same emotional touchpoints. When you click the “publish” button, there is (at least theoretically) no turning back. And, just as you gain experience in writing sensitive emails and coming to terms with the finity of a (one-way) communication, you become accustomed to the process. Ever better, you work to understand how the missive will be received. What will the reader retain? What will be the response?

In the old days, that “click and it’s gone” feeling was experienced when you relinquished the envelope and let it drop into the unopenable mailbox. Seems like, via the democratization of communications, the liberty to “click” is evermore present.

I can imagine new courses on managing the stress of sending messages or publishing on line, much more than the receiving and treating of the daily deluge of emails.