How Communication Skills Power your Performance

OPENforum has a guest blog from Chris Brogan, the social media guru, about simple ways to make your email communications clearer. Read it on the OPENforum website by clicking here, or scroll down.

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Back when I worked for corporations, no matter what my official title was, my role was quite often, “the guy who explains to the senior team what the tech guys mean,” or “the guy who tells the tech guys what the senior team just said.” It went both ways. Over the years, I’ve learned that my communications skills are often the tool that gets the job done. I have a few skills for you to practice.

Bring Conversations to Ground

Something happened when the world discovered email. The twenty-five message thread was invented. Frankly, I’m not a fan. I like messages to go no more than three replies and then consider that communication over. I call this bringing the conversation to ground. Here are some ways to do that.

• Ask brief, definitive questions versus open-ended questions. (bad example: “what do you want to do about lunch?” good example: “I’m thinking either Korean barbeque or sushi for lunch. Do you want to go?”)
• Clarify the other person’s points in your response to their message, and answer each briefly: “You asked whether I would be willing to honor the 200 books for a half/day consultation deal. Absolutely. I just need the sale by Saturday.”
• Use bulleted or numbered lists for the briefest of message threads.

Tell it To Me Like I’m Six Years Old

One of my favorite college professors, Ken Hadge, said that one day in class. “Tell it to me like I’m six years old.” He made that the rule for business transactions, no matter how complex. I’ve made that a hallmark of how I talk about things. One way to do this is to use metaphors instead of jargon. Another is to strive for brief sentences in words with fewer than three syllables on average.

It might seem condescending or counter-intuitive, but business communications are often made more complex for no viable reason. We talk like humans to each other outside of work. Why not attempt to do the same inside?

Subject Lines are Your Friends

Great subject lines clear up email fast. Here’s a sampling of useless subject lines in my inbox right now:

• Businessweek.com (turns out, they want to interview me, but I don’t know this from the subject line.)
• CNN Radio (same as above)
• Re: Follow Up (that’s not doing me any favors)
• Making the transition (from what to what by whom?)

By contrast, here are some subject lines that are effective:

• Our post about Trust Agents (Trust Agents is my new book)
• Details on the bulk book order
• Susan G—- recommended I get in touch with you

When you look at these, it’s obvious what they’re about, why they’re important, and what I’ll do.

Visual Dividers and Headlines

This blog post is easy to read. I chunk it up. I use lists. I can add photos. I can do lots of things to keep your eye happy. Why aren’t you doing that at work? Do your eyes deserve worse treatment at work? Go back and look at a few sent emails in your box. Are there emails that look like you were paid by the word? Are they dense and hard to dig through?

Your defense of “sometimes things take a lot of explaining” isn’t going to fly. If you’re drafting documents, that’s not writing for communications value. That means, you’re delivering information. It’s something different—which is okay, but be clear of your goal. Keep things visually simple, crisp, and broken up.

Does This Help?

One last thing: a call to action is rarely useful at the end of an email. It works fine on a blog, but in an email, make all your “asks” at the top. Making me fish through 779 words to find your request to me is a slog. Start with that at the top even if you have to fill in the story so that I understand what you’re asking of me.

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What do you think? Should email conversations be simplified like this? Would it help? Tell us here!

How to access good market research for free using the web

This article, from Convince and Convert, explains how to use information available on the web to improve the services you offer your customers, while also potentially upping your rankings on search engines.  Read  on!

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Are your customers telling you everything you need to know to improve the bottom line?

Conducting primary market research and audience research, and purchasing secondary studies are fundamental ways communicators inform and align their efforts to produce relevant results. Obvious. While amazingly helpful and unquestionably valuable, beyond simple surveys, the downside is that this type of research is often expensive and time consuming to produce.

In the fast-paced, economically suppressed world we currently live in, it’s not uncommon for organizations to roll the dice and move forward without this knowledge. That’s a mistake, and while everyone knows results are at risk, budgets are budgets.

Wish you could afford to sharpen your communications through customer understanding? And obtain actionable tips quickly on a budget? It’s your lucky day. This post will show you how to learn more about your customers than you do now to improve your communications efforts all by digging into data you already have or have access to.

So What Exactly is This Data I Speak Of?

Just as the internet has changed the way we communicate and interact, the data tracked has presented an opportunity for market research professionals to adjust their methodologies for the better. One of the benefits, and slightly disturbing nuances of the internet, is that all activity is recorded. Search engines, social networking sites, results from your promotions and testing (email activity, customer reaction to banner ads, etc) and analytics from your own website for that matter, hold unbelievable gems of knowledge that you can utilize immediately to improve the relevance of your integrated communications. Bottom line – if you know how to tap into and mine these sources for trends, you can learn a great deal about your target audiences without ever having to bribe a single stranger that might match the profile.

Search Engine Data Analysis: Equivalent – Market Research, Audience Research, Focus Groups and Surveys

My friend Jeff Herzog of iCrossing fame and ZooLoo (what exactly is ZooLoo Jeff anyway?) used to say “search is the world’s largest focus group.” I’m not sure if he authored the phrase, but regardless, I’ll always remember it and give him credit. Why? If you compare the 14.3 billion searches conducted in March 2009 per comScore to the response pool of any survey or focus group, you can quickly understand which set may provide more value. Of course, not everyone is searching for the topic you may be interested in, but it’s extremely likely that more people are searching for your topic of interest versus the number of subjects in your research partner’s database.

So what can you learn from search phrases? Some elbow grease and time with the tools mentioned in a previous post of mine Keyword Research and Keyword Ranking Tools, can net you findings like these:

By categorizing search phrases and ranking groupings by popularity, in this case, it was easy to discover what true product demand looked like online and understand consumer vernacular. The company we performed this particular research for changed website vernacular, navigation, product names and categorization to better align with their consumer’s interests, and the results spoke for themselves. There isn’t an organization in existance that wouldn’t benefit from improved consumer relevance, the real mission of employing research.

Social Listening and Search Behavior Over Time: Equivalent – Market Research, Trending Reports and Surveys

A way to enhance the findings of linguistic studies like the above is to examine search phrase popularity over time. On a high-level, many sites and reporters use this information to report on the latest in pop culture interest. Beyond providing Perez Hilton with the necessary ammunition for his next rant, trending data is extremely useful for gaining a better understanding of seasonality and changes in consumer interest over time. Overlaying the efforts of campaigns, press mentions and the like can also help you understand the effect of your integrated communications efforts. Free tools like Facebook Lexicon offer glimpses at searches on Facebook. TweetVolume allows you to compare searches for various phrases – looks like I have you covered Jeff, Kirstie and John, now look who’s talking!

Google Trends is even more useful for general market research as more people search Google for information than any other site ever.

Example, when looking at the Google Trends report above for Kirstie Alley, yes, we’re really going there, you see a large spike in late 2006. I know you’re thinking that must have been the buzz-worthy release to BluRay date of “Look Who’s Talking Too,” but surprisingly, it’s not, as explained by the backup information on the right of the graph – the Oprah effect, imagine that. These tools are also a PR pros dream, and the findings apply both online and offline as they represent general interest.

Site Analytics: Equivalent – Audience Research, Customer Survey

Maybe the most informative way to listen to your customers is through your own site’s search software. Understanding what terms your visitors are using here can help you identify popular vernacular, the associated quantity can help qualify demand, and this data also is informative when thinking about plussing up the usefulness and usability of your website.

There’s literally thousands of ways to mine consumer data online to inform your integrated communications efforts. What tools do you use? How do they inform your decisions? Are you doing it at all?

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What do you think? Would you go to this sort of effort to improve sales? Tell us here…