Working Alone?

"It is far better to be alone than to be in bad company."
 George Washington

"Solitude is certainly a fine thing; but there is pleasure in having someone who can answer, from time to time, that it is a fine thing."                                                     Balzac

Whether because of personal preference, economics or other circumstances, more and more of us find ourselves working in one-person marketing and PR offices.  While there are aspects of this that are positive (no one messes with the messes on your desk, you don't have to play departmental politics and you know EVERYTHING that's going on in the department...becasue you ARE the department) there is one decided disadvantage.  You have to do all the work.

There are many keys to surviving work in a one person marketing office.  These include

• Setting and sticking with goals and plans
• Learn to say "no" to additional work
• Take care of your physical work space and the physical YOU
• Give yourself breaks, especially from anything with a screen!
• If you are working from home, establish an "office" space and "office" hours

The most import tip for surviving working alone is to not do it.  Most of the successful people I know in one person marketing/PR offices are really one person in name only.  These people successfully co-opt others into their marketing/communications/PR world.  They recruit interns, find and nurture quality vendor relationships, and involve others in the organization in communications and public relations and outreach.

By making public relations and communications an organization-wide priority, a saavy marketer in a one person office can essentially have the entire organization working for him.  By making sure that marketing and communications principals and values are part of the management principals and values, an on-her-toes communicator can involve the entire management team with her "to do" list.

Ultimately, since marketing and public relations involve communicating with others, you need to involve others.  Done well, the communciations is a conversation, one in which the marketer from the one-person office doesn't have to do all the talking!  

Face to face

We have a plethora of ways to communicate with each other in this wired and digital age.  We can connect instantly and just about anywhere.  We can send innumerable words, voice and images, often for free.

There are ways to reconnect with high school classmates or finally connect with your soul mate.  We can easily and cheaply reach out to thousands of people, prospective customers or the three couples you are inviting over for Saturday's cookout.  We have huge communications technology advantages over communicators of just a few years ago.

Nevertheless, sometimes an email or a text leaves a lot to be desired.  Or a lot to be interpreted...or misinterpreted.

I was reminded of this over the last couple of weeks as I started a string of email conversations with a friend.  She had written a comment on one of my blog entries that I wanted to use in a subsequent blog.  As a courtesy, I shared my first draft of the blog post to let her know I was going to use her comment.

It seems I had significantly misread the intent of her comment.

No problem.  That was why I had sent her a draft.  I scrapped that post and rewrote it taking a somewhat different direction with it.  Again the draft was sent.  Again comments returned.  Again I missed the intent.  Worse than before.

If, instead of trading emails, we had discussed this face-to-face, I am confident I would have better judged her intent.  If we had talked face-to-face, I am sure that the back and forth exchange would have resulted not only in a better understanding but a more creative and entertaining blog topic.  Instead, you just get this.

Nothing replaces the amount of communication that happens when you are with someone and talking.  You share the words you say, but also the delivery of those words.  As poets are fond of saying, there is quite a lot that can be said in the spaces between the words.  The speaker's intonation, facial expressions, body language and  volume send messages, often clearer and more truthfully than the words chosen.

There is also no such thing as one-way communications when you are talking with someone in person.  The listener often communicates just as much as the speaker.  Her body language, level of attention, reactions and responses often let the speaker know whether the message is being received or whether there is miscommunication or confusion.

Also, the role of speaker and listener is not so clearly delineated in face-to-face conversation as it is in email.  In a healthy conversation, the roles of speaker and listener shift rapidly.  Often, especially when the parties are truly engaged in the conversation, it would be impossible to label either person as the speaker or the listener.  In fact, one of the challenges of effective face-to-face communications is to allow the other person the space to respond and discuss with you.

There are many instances when emailing or texting is the best way to reach someone, the best was to address and resolve an issue and the best way to chat with someone.  But many times, nothing beats some java (the brewed kind) and the other person sitting across the table from you!

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Talking together

Lately, we seem more concerned with having our devices talk to each other than we do with having our colleagues talk to each other.  With the explosion of wireless computing and the Swiss army knife of the 21st century, the smart phone, featuring more and more capabilities and tools, we have more and more ways to connect with colleagues and customers and fewer and fewer reasons to talk to people.

While I believe in the efficiency of webinars, conferences and conference calls, I also have multi-tasked my way through all of them enough times to know that they are not usually the best way to have an engaged conversation.  As with so many things related to communications, the closer you can get to face-to-face, one-on-one conversation, the more impact and persuasion you can have.  The closer we can get to one-on-one conversation the more likely we are to make a connection with the other party in the conversation.  

A friend of mine sends out emails about her business on a pretty regular basis.  She was telling me that she had recently started personalizing some of the emails to key customers.  The response from those customers was remarkable, she told me with a bit of amazement.  While not everyone made a purchase, many people felt the need to respond to her; to reconnect with her.  They saw these emails not as advertisements, which they essentially were, but as one-on-one communications.  As a personal message.  They felt compelled to respond.  They felt compelled to strengthen the relationship.

There are ways that technology can help us approximate the one-on-one conversation.  For a while, one of the biggest concepts in marketing was the idea of mass customization.  The theory was that technology would allow us to use the convenience of mass marketing but with the impact of a personalized, customized message.  While I suspect there aren't many people anymore who feel that a mail merged letter is the same as a hand-written note, it does make a letter seem a bit less like a form letter and a bit more like the sender wants to really communicate.  Technology allows us to customize what information a customer or prospect receives, essentially allowing us to customize our interaction on a one-on-one level.

We need to be mindful of what we are doing and not let the technology seduce us too much.  For example, think about how too many people use what is now a pretty dusty technology, PowerPoint.  Too many speakers continue to pour all of their energy into creating detailed, bullet-riddled PowerPoint presentations.  They end up giving their speech facing the slides because they don't want to miss any of the precious facts they have loaded onto each slide.  As Seth Godin says in his blog post titled "Really Bad PowerPoint," "countless innovations fail because their champions use PowerPoint the way Microsoft wants them to, instead of the right way."  Wordy, bullet-laden presentations rarely communicate as much as the creator hopes they will.  When a speaker is speaking to the screen, he cannot be talking with the audience.  Also, people can't see all the brilliance on the slide if their eyes are closed.

Similarly, some organizations confuse the use of social media as a strategy as opposed to a media option.  This results in companies focusing unwarranted attention on generating likes, or followers, or repins instead of focusing on the true mission of the organization or the brand, generating sales.  Getting someone to push a "Like" button is not a conversation or a connection.  It may be an invitation to start a conversation, depending what scheme you used to get that person to push that "Like" button.  We really need to be focusing on connections, real connections, with customers and prospects and other key audiences.  We need to be finding ways to talk together.

A colleague of mine told me recently that if an email exchange goes past three emails without the issue getting resolved, she picks up the phone and calls the person.  The issue rarely goes past one phone call.  There is nothing more powerful than talking directly with a person.

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