The Coronation of Content

"They" say that now, in the brave new world of social media, content is king queen royalty all that matters.

My initial response to that saying is when hasn't content been all that matters?

If content is now everything, that must mean there was a time when content meant less...when what was in your messages wasn't as important as it is now.

With some notable exceptions, I must have missed the Vapid Age of Communications.
  

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Or else

I had a boss once who would ask "Is this the best you can do?" whenever you handed him some work.  If you answered no, he handed the work back without waiting for excuses.  If you answered yes, you knew that it had better be your best work.  The "or else" was never spoken of, articulated or, honestly, thought a lot about.  He was just the type of guy that you knew there would be an "or else" that you wouldn't like.

Sometimes, when I am experiencing exceptionally bad customer service, I think that the person delivering that service must not be thinking about the "or else."

The "or else's" for bad customer service are many:

• the sale could be lost
• the customer could never come back
• the former customer could tell others about the bad service she got and convince others not to come back
• other employees could see that bad service is tolerated and some of them may start taking the easy way out (good customer service usually takes a little effort and initiative)
• The customers of those employees could stop coming back and stop making purchases
• The business, facing declining sales and lowering public perception, could be forced to cut expenses
• The sales person who started this all could lose their job.
• The company is forced to close because the smaller sales force makes it impossible to be responsive to customer needs
• The industry is struck with rumors of decline, sending stock prices plummeting and closing more businesses
• The economy, facing a sudden and unpredicted business sector collapse goes into a tailspin, and then..
• Well...you get the idea.

I am not seriously suggesting some sort of customer service butterfly effect (where a butterfly flaps its wings in one part of the world and creates a hurricane elsewhere in the world).  I am proposing that customer service, good and bad, DOES have ripple effects that are difficult to predict.  I am saying that the small gestures, like a smile or a courtesy to a customer, CAN come back to you multiplied many times over.  I am suggesting that we would be a lot better off if we each asked ourselves if this was the best we could do.  

I am also recommending that we consider the "or else."

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PowerPointless

Sooner or later you will be asked to make a presentation.

After you get past the night sweats and churning stomach, most likely your next step will be to turn to PowerPoint.

You will use PowerPoint to create an outline of your presentation.  Like most people, you might add some pictures, maybe a sound effect or clever animation, and consider yourself done.  You really haven't begun.

I believe that many would be wonderful presentations are ruined by over-reliance on the PowerPoint crutch. All the thought and care and creativity that should go into the words that the speaker says instead goes into the slides he is putting up on the giant screen.  Then, because the slides are so brilliant, the speaker turns to enjoy them along with the audience.

Speakers would be well served if they thought of PowerPoint as a highlighter rather than a pen.  The slides flashing up on that giant screen should have images and words that emphasize or focus attention on key ideas and themes.  There is no need for them to contain the speakers entire outline.

Of course PowerPoint isn't the only culprit.  There are also a growing number of speakers who have turned to other presentation options.  While these might add some different features, I have not heard of any that help you make your presentation more audience focused.  Presentation software is designed to make things easier for the speaker...not the audience.  The presentation companies are in business to get you to upgrade from the free version to the pro version.  The last thing they want you to do is turn your back on the slides and focus on the audience!

I am intrigued by the PechaKucha formatof presentations.  In this format, which started in Japan, speakers get 20 slides which are shown for 20 seconds each.  Speakers do not have control over when slides change.  Speakers who are successful in PechaKucha let go of trying to time their comments to slides.  They have 6 minutes and 40 seconds to tell their story.  Obviously, this is not a format that works for every presentation, but it seems to me the slides have the proper prominence compared to the words spoken.

When I have a presentation to make, I still turn to PowerPoint to help me rough out an outline for the presentation.  I find that the format allows me to easily summarize my main points and then organize them in a coherent order (or at least that is the goal!) Once I have the outline done, though, I scrap that PowerPoint and start a new one.  No more than one image, word or phrase per slide.  Occasionally, I will allow myself to add a quote.  But I do not read the quote or make mention of the images on the slides.  I treat them almost like footnotes...additional information that adds to my comments but hopefully doesn't distract.  I am trying to get brave enough to do a PowerPointless presentation.

Regardless of the strategy you use, it is important to remember that the best presentations should be conversations with the audience.  Make sure you are speaking with your audience, not your slides.  Make sure you are using the audience as the guiding force of what you say and how you deliver it, not PowerPoint.  PowerPoint or any of the countless presentations support options are wonderful tools that can enhance and add some visuals to your presentation.  Just make sure your slides don't take over everyone's attention, including yours!

The strongest personality in your presentation should be YOU, not your slides!

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Earth Day

Today is Earth Day.  Happy Earth Day!

When you talk about Earth Day to a variety of people, it seems it is somewhere between one of those crazy commemorative days that you read about in the newspaper (April 22 is also National Jelly Bean Day) and a national holiday.

Like a nominal commemorative day, no one has the day off of work or school.  Some people scoff at it or ignore it.  Like a national holiday, preachers and teachers talk about it.  People generally know about it and pay attention to it.  Magazines, newspapers and television stations all feel the need to buff up their green credentials and present articles and programs that talk about the Earth, pollution, nature and climate change.  Some have called it the largest secular holiday in the world, celebrated by half of a billion people worldwide.

While it is always good to pay attention to them, Earth Day isn't really about big environmental issues or the celebration of the masses.  Earth Day is about the difference an individual can make.  Earth Day is about promoting environmentalism on the personal level; increasing your awareness of environmental issues, and understanding the impact of your actions.  Earth Day is about learning about the things you can do that can make a difference the other 364 days of the year.  Earth Day is a day of  community celebration and individual education.  

I saw a cartoon in the blog I posted a link to below, in which the planet Earth is looking for a diagnosis from a doctor.  "I am afraid." says the doctor, "you've got humans."  Earth Day is about making that cartoon a little less true.

Happy Earth Day!  I would have gotten you a card, but I was afraid it would just end up in the landfill.

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Reading: Your Future

"The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read." Mark Twain  

"Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read." Groucho Marx

I have never met a good writer who isn't a voracious reader.
I have never known of a great leader who wasn't a student of other great leaders.
I have never heard of a great thinker who wasn't an even better listener.

It is my opinion that writers, leaders and thinkers are made.  They are self-made.

Writers, leaders and thinkers all share a curiosity about the world around them and an insatiable thirst for knowledge.  They read in search of answers, often without knowing the questions.

They also read literature.  A great mind is not developed solely by reading self-help books.  A great mind is developed by exposure to great thoughts, most often found in great literature of all sorts.  Fiction, and poetry can teach us about the human condition.  Philosophy and science can teach us how to think.  History and biography can teach us about leadership and failure.

Often times a writer or a leader will find success while not having been previously in the public eye.  She was an overnight success, the pundits say.  In fact that couldn't be farther from the truth.  She grew page by page.  In the library.  Between the covers of a great book!

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Leadership Lost

"Being a leader is like being a lady.  If you have to go around telling people you are one, you aren't."
-  Margaret Thatcher, 1925-2013

 "I begin to feel like most Americans don't understand the First Amendment, don't understand the idea of freedom of speech, and don't understand that it's the responsibility of the citizen to speak out."           - Roger Ebert, 1942-2013

In the last two week we lost two groundbreaking leaders.  Both of them cleared new territory for those who came after them.  Both of them paid little heed to what had been done before but rather looked forward and acted on the possibilities of what could be.  I am talking about Margaret Thatcher, the former Prime Minister of Great Britain, and Roger Ebert, the film critic for the Chicago Sun Times.

I am pretty sure that there won't be too many articles or blogs that will discuss the passing of both of these two rather unique individuals.  However, to my mind, they had much in common.  Both Thatcher and Ebert broke new ground in their respective fields.  Both were divisive leaders, loved by some, despised by others.

Whatever you thought of her politics, it is hard to deny that Margaret Thatcher was a leader.  The first and only woman to serve as Prime Minister in the United Kingdom, I also believe that she had one of the longest tenures in recent history.  She was a towering figure in history and an impressive leader.

Articles and books have been and will continue to be written about Margaret Thatcher and her leadership style.  Margaret Thatcher, if only because of the historic nature and length of her tenure as Prime Minister and her very visible style of decisive leadership will be a subject of study for some time.

Roger Ebert was a leader of a different ilk.  An early adopter of new media, Roger expanded the perception of what a journalist is or could be.  He took one of the more mundane parts of the newspaper, movie reviews, and created an empire.  He teamed up with Gene Siskel to talk about the big screen on the little screen.  He was an early and voracious blogger.  When he lost his jaw to cancer and could no longer speak normally, he found numerous other ways to make sure his voice was heard.

Like Thatcher, there were many who despised Ebert for his showmanship, for his insistence on writing his own rules.  Like Ebert, Thatcher paid less attention to critics than to the voice driving her to break new ground and achieve great things.

Leaders begets other leaders.  Martin Luther King wouldn't have had the success or visibility he had without Rosa Parks and Malcolm X.  Mark Zuckerberg might have been just another Harvard dropout without Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.  Some have postulated that without the walls (and ceilings) that Margaret Thatcher knocked down, we wouldn't have had Angela Merckel in Germany or Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama in the US.  Without Roger Ebert, would we have had the early adoption of the internet by critics?  Would we have cared whether or not movie reviews were on the internet?  Would we have understood the Facebook thumbs up symbol?

The point is that tomorrow's leaders are in the wings, watching what today's leaders are doing and learning from their triumphs and their failures.  As each new generation of leader breaks new ground in style or inclusiveness or social consciousness, the leaders who follow find it easier to do so.  They can do this because they are standing on the shoulders of the generation that went before.  And hanging onto the shoulders of the other leaders of their generation.

As Margaret Thatcher indicates in her quote at the start of this blog, most lessons in leadership are better shown than talked about.  The world has been shown a lot by the two leaders we lost this month.

********************************

The recent tragic events at the Boston Marathon leave me in a quandry as to how to respond or whether I should respond.  I will simply say to the people that were there and to those who were impacted by what happened there, the thoughts and prayers of a nation are with you.  I would also make a plea that as a society we work harder to find less violent ways to express ourselves.  Thank you.

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Tax PR

Taxes have lousy public relations.

As taxpayers, the our most intimate experience we have is with the painful side of taxes, paying them.  With every pay day we get a reminder of how much we AREN'T getting in our checks because of taxes.  We have a very clear idea of what we think of taxes every year when we file our taxes or our extensions.

Tax Day (Photo credit: ChuckHolton)

The only time most people like reading or hearing the word tax is when it has the word free after it.

So this got me to thinking.  As a public relations and communications professional, I am often asked to shine a positive light on something that has a less than positive reputation with the public.  What would be the public relations steps for making taxes more acceptable to the general public?  This seemed like a worthy exercise.

My first thought is a standard of marketing: don't focus on the price, focus on the value.  What if with our tax bill we got an accounting of what our specific taxes went to purchase. I don't mean some meaningless pie chart that says that 12% of revenues were spent on boondoggles and whatnot.  I mean a very specific accounting of the things that my specific taxes likely paid for.  For instance, I imagine the tax bill would sting a bit less if I got a notice that told me that with my taxes, I paid for:

• a semester of hot lunches for a Kindergarten student in Kalamazoo, 
• paved 1/3 mile of the local highway outside of Kankakee, 
• provided medical care for 9 months to a senior citizen in Kansas City, 
• helped develop and support small businesses in Keelersville, 
• bought the fuel for two days of an Air Force jet stationed near Kannapolis and 
• helped to provide subsidies to a family vegetable farmer in Klamouth Falls. 

Of course, there is always the possibility that all of my taxes went toward a toilet seat for the Pentagon.  That would probably make me feel worse about my taxes.  

So then I started thinking about changing the language around taxation.  Like so many things that are viewed negatively by society, taxes have a vocabulary problem.  Rarely do we hear the word tax used in a positive light.  This is partially due to politics, but it is also because no one really LIKES paying taxes.  From Robin Hood to the Tea Party (1700's version or current version), taxes have been associated with the evil or despotic side of government.

What if the the IRS was responsible for collecting user fees and citizenship dues instead of taxes?  What if instead of taxes being withheld from our paycheck it was our monthly membership, like the health club?  I think that would only help if the fees and memberships were voluntary and we could discontinue them, like I hear some people do with health club memberships.

For me, one of the worst things about taxes is actually preparing them.  The US tax laws are a Gideon's knot of special rules, worksheets, penalties and deductions.  I speculated that if this were simplified it might make people feel more positive about taxes.  Then I read that 58% of taxpayers have their taxes prepared for them by someone else.  I suspect those people don't care how complicated the tax code is as long as their tax preparer is able to make things as painless as possible.

I was about to throw in the towel on this tax PR challenge when I hit on an idea.  A rather brilliant idea.  There is one aspect of taxes that is almost always viewed as positive.  There is one element in the collective taxing experience that people hope for and look forward to experiencing.  I am talking, of course, about tax refunds.

So, in my professional public relations opinion, if the IRS wants everyone to look more positively toward taxes, they should just collect 100% of our salaries as we earn them and every couple of weeks issue us a tax refund!

If you have some other public relations ideas on how to make taxes popular, please share them in the comment section below.

The views expressed above are not those of Blogger, Google, the Internal Revenue Service, 
the management and staff of Everything is Marketing, reasonable public relations practitioners 
or the author.  

The Meaning of Life...

There is nothing more to say.

Have a great weekend!

Wounds

Skinned knees heal.  Broken arms mend.  Wounded feelings and damaged trust don't often repair themselves as easily or reliably.

In business, as in  relationships, you cannot count on nature or time to heal wounds.  Despite the saying that time heals all wounds, smart  businesses seek out customers (or former customers) who are feeling wounded.  They seek them out and talk to them.

Talking to disappointed customers has many benefits:

• You have an opportunity to right the wrong.  This can often turn a bad experience into a good one for the customer.
• You learn quickly what isn't going right so you can address the problem before it disappoints more customers.
•  By reaching out to customers, and making this a routine practice, you help to evolve your culture into one that is more caring and customer-focused.
• After you have shown a customer that you care enough to learn about their problems and concerns and take steps to address them, you are likely to increase the loyalty of that customer.
• You are also likely to turn negative word-of-mouth into positive testimonial.  This is powerful in two ways.  First you get someone talking positively about you and your brand.  Second, because negative word-of-mouth spreads many times faster than positive word-of-mouth, you stem a tide of mind-changing bad publicity.

Often times, when you take time to listen to customers' concerns, you will find that the problems are not ones that you were aware of before you listened.  And sometimes they aren't hard to fix.  Furthermore, you will find that most customers understand that you cannot change everything.  They will understand that even when you can change something, you might not be able to make the change in time to impact their personal experience.  They also understand that because you took the time to listen to them, that they are important to you.

I had a boss and mentor once who said that the customers who complained were our greatest friends.  "They are taking their time to tell us where we made a mistake and how we can get better.  We pay consultants lots of money for the same advice!"

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The cost of a smile

It costs nothing to smile at a customer, yet the price for not smiling can be immense.

It costs nothing to listen to a suggestion or a complaint of an employee, yet the cost of not listening can be that smile for a customer.

Excellent customer service often starts in the break rooms and meeting rooms of an organization.  Someone who feels respected and valued in their employment is much more likely to treat customers the same way.

So in reality, the cost of a smile is the time and effort it takes to treat employees respectfully and professionally.  

Seems like a small price to pay.

adrift...

Photo of the Carnival Triumph at Half Moon Cay
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

"The same Carnival cruise ship that had been disabled for days in the Gulf of Mexico, stranding hundreds of passengers without electricity or plumbing for days (it has been not so affectionately dubbed the “poop cruise”), broke away from the dock where it was being repaired and crunched into a cargo ship. Four tugboats went after the wayward ship and eventually re-secured the Triumph to the cruise terminal later Wednesday."   

                                                        Source:  news.msn.com

I find myself wondering what things are like in the Carnival Cruise Line's marketing department these days.  First they had a highly publicized, very embarrassing, overly graphic story of a cruise ship that was stranded at sea for several days without power and working toilets.  Just as I suspect they were putting public relations and messaging strategies into place, the cruise line suffered from two more ships that become stranded, these times, thankfully in port.  And now their ships are running away on their own.

In an industry where one of their main selling points is "sit back, relax and let us take care of everything for you," it is important that customers perceive you as knowing what you are doing.  Runaway ships, major mechanical failures and on-board fires, while possibly par for the course,  are not good for maintaining that image.  After the first Carnival Cruise ship got stranded at sea, I talked to a guy who said he was going right out to book a cruise.  Carnival Cruises, he reasoned, would never be cheaper.  Plus the company would do everything in their power to make sure things went well.  I am not sure that is how things actually went.

In the next few weeks, the difficulties compounded.  Then they doubled down. We see this frequently with sports teams where the team gets into a bad stretch and then things seem to continue to spiral downward, making for a miserable season.

But sports teams start afresh each season.  The record gets wiped clean, the team regroups or rebuilds, and they start anew.  It is harder for companies to do that.

While Carnival is not the only cruise line to have problems, they are the current team in that downward spiral.  I don't know if Carnival's headaches are the result of poor management decisions (such as deferred maintenance) or just bad luck.

Carnival's mishaps are not likely to hurt the cruise industry.  This isn't the first time that bad things have happened on cruise lines, and people continue to book them.  The Costa Concordia (which incidentally is owned by Carnival) capsized in an Italian port, killing 32 passengers and is still lying half submerged in the port as a giant reminder.  Yet people still booked cruises.

Nevertheless, Carnival DOES have a PR crisis on their hands.  When mishaps get piled on to each other, an image of incompetence emerges.  That is anathema to the image cruise lines try to portray.

Only time will tell if Carnival can right their corporate ship or if they will continue to be adrift.

Swimming like the sharks

The business world would be much healthier and more profitable if businesses saw innovation like sharks see swimming.

Sharks need to swim to survive.  They don't get to rest once they get their morning workout in or when they become the fastest swimmer in their part of the ocean or when they hit their quarterly earnings goal.  According to Professor James Kitchell, sharks have to swim to stay buoyant, to breath, to survive.  Business should innovate for the same reasons.

The innovation pattern is familiar to everyone except, apparently, companies going through it.  A company or an entrepreneur comes up with an innovation that happens to match the needs of the marketplace.  They start a company or a brand.  Sometimes, if they are lucky, the company or entrepreneur continues to innovate as their company or brand grows.

Eventually, though, success ensues.  Sometimes wild, highly profitable success ensues.  The problem then is that with success usually comes risk aversion.  You see, humans like success and we tend to want to hang onto it.  It is hard to force yourself to act like that hungry entrepreneur and throw caution to the wind to support new innovations.  It is much more comfortable to continue to ride the gravy train that your past innovations have put you on.

The problem with that is that there are always new gunslingers entering Dodge, ready to knock off the top dog.   Entrepreneurs who are still hungry have you in their sights and have nothing to lose by going after you.

A smart, successful company recognizes this and tries to knock itself out of the top spot with a new innovation.  But that is hard to do.  Ask Microsoft.  It wasn't that long ago when there were predictions that Microsoft would rule the world before long.  Then along came Yahoo and all of the sudden Microsoft didn't even rule their product category.  Then Google came into town.  And now Google has countless younger, more nimble companies nipping at its heals, trying to knock it off.  At times, business seems like a giant game of King of the Hill!

Like sharks, excellent companies figure out a way to continue to keep moving.  They innovate like crazy.  They fix things that aren't broken.  They keep swimming.


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"Best Joke of the Day"

In honor of April Fools Day, I want to recall one of my favorite corporate April Fools Day jokes ever.  In 1996, Taco Bell came out with full page ads (seen below) and a press release indicating that they were doing their part for the national debt by purchasing the Liberty Bell, which they claimed would thereafter be called the "Taco Liberty Bell."

Taco Bell did this with a straight face and perfect earnestness until about noon that day, when they sent out a press release revealing the joke, calling it the best joke of the day and announcing a $50,000 donation for the upkeep of the real Liberty Bell. In the meantime, they created a bit of a furor for the National Park Service, who had to field a lot of nervous and some angry calls.




It is always good when a corporation can put a human face on for its customers.  Sometimes that can be done with humor.  Even humor that is a little risky.

I like Taco Bell better because they carried out a great joke.  Then they backed it up with a sizable donation.   I like that they showed a bit of personality in a fun and creative way.

Who can argue with that?