Communications — 10 comments
18
Oct 09

Is There Still Room For Corporate Communications?

I got commented not to long ago that my writing was to Business style/Corporate  and that kind of stuck with me for a bit. Having recently graduated with a business degree and having been rewarded for it for so long I thought of it as a stronger way of writing and a better way to get my point across. But then social media comes along and the trend of being much more informal and completely  the opposite of  this style begins to start. With this I’ve seen  some criticism of corporate writing  being seen as  the old or caveman  way of doing things and  it not having any practical use.  So my question is, is there still room for corporate writing or do I need to unlearn about 4 years of my educational experience?

Conversational or the ‘new’ way of writing?

So the biggest argument for moving away from the traditional style of writing is that its very cold and unemotional and that its better to write like you’re writing to a friend or like you’re talking to the person beside you. A lot of the time I’ve seen it to be very upbeat and full of personality.

C/ O Alex Barth

Photo from Alex Barth

Some Criticisms I have: I can see it very easily causing miscommunication especially as companies are trying to reach a larger more international audience. Writing isn’t the same as face to face communications you can’t completely express tone and emotion and everyone can have their own interpretation of things.  You can  also easily go overboard as well with  poor language, use of slang  and the appropriateness of subject matter ( ex: will someone be offended by a joke). My personal criticism of moving away from the business style of writing is that it can get too cutesy/expressive and not quickly get down to content .

Corporate or the ‘old’ way of writing:

In my opinion there was a reason that corporate writing became the norm. It standardized things and got right down to the point. When done right there is little ambiguity and the reader can quickly grab the information they need. It also made sure that nothing that was said would improperly anger anyone or put businesses in legal situations which could cost a company a lot of money in the courts.

Photo by PinkMoose

Photo by PinkMoose

When it can be used poorly: This style of writing has also been known as being cold and very political. When there is pain being felt such as during a crisis event a corporate style press release or letter does not show much sympathy. On the other side of things it can improperly  show a company’s excitement for a new initiative or company win.

So here’s my look at both types of communications  and the benifits/drawbacks of both. I’d like to suggest a hybrid of both styles as they each communicate well in a specific way.  What are your thoughts? Is informal writing in  or is  business communications not going away?

Personal Thoughts — 2 comments
13
Oct 09

But I Just Want to Be Touched!

A major trend I’m currently seeing in consumer electronics is that we are becoming  much more involved with our electronics. We’re touching more, we’re feeling more and we’re also bringing more technology around with us as ‘life tools’ rather than leaving it at home. Here are some examples to show you what I mean:

Mobile Devices: Iphone, Blackberry Storm, Palm Pre ( and many others)

Computers: HP TouchSmart PC, Microsoft Surface,  and coming up the Crunch Pad, ‘Rumored’ Applie itablet, and Microsoft Courier. Laptops have gotten a lot smaller, much more tactile and are getting additional screens for added use.

Interactive Gaming: the hold in your hand Nintendo DS, Sony PSP, and the Wii. Upcoming Xbox Natal and PS3’s new motion remote.

Other Products: touch screen GPS  and car displays, interactive footwear, Mp3 players with touch screens/internet/ video camera ….(truthfully I have a blank but the list definitely goes on!)

Erin McNaught Launches GPS System

Even more recently I was interested to hear about how some television manufacturers were beginning to make 3d televisions , this is a drastic shift! Television has often been an inactive activity and now you’re getting placed into your shows!  Electronics becoming more tactile and interactive is an interesting shift. Perhaps over the years people have felt a lot more passive and immobile with the use of PC’s and low touch devices.

With the improvement of wireless technology’s, smaller devices  and a more social internet maybe what we are seeing now are people in general wanting technologies that offer them an  experience and further feelings of freedom and attachment. For me thats an important shift to take into account and is something that can be used in terms of business and marketing.  Looking at customer experiences ( whether its interactive or passive ) how products are used ( are there ways to let a person know if they are doing this right? How can this product improve their life experience?)  and what  materials go into these products ( will material X feel better than material Y).

This may all seem very rambly…. or it may put things in perfect sense. I don’t know. Its just been something thats been on my mind for while, driving ideas and thoughts. Am I headed in the wrong direction with this or do I have a sense of sanity in these thoughts ? Let me know what you think.

Uncategorized — 1 comment
10
Oct 09

First!

So umm, first post on this new blog . Out of finally bending to the pressure of guys like Malcolm Bastien and Dan Hocking I’ve started up this blog. I’m going to be looking to bring everything from my old blog onto this site ( just for continuity) and then deliver some great and probably better content. Things are going to be gradually changing with this blog so don’t expect anything to stay exactly the same. I’m probably going to make a more definite choice on the theme and grab a few widgets to make things even better.

Overall stay tuned! This blog has a lot of life ahead of it!

-Kevin

@kevrichard

Branding / Communications / Community — No comments
08
Sep 09

Lessons from Peter Molyneux on Customer Engagement

This is a bit of an old experience of mine but  I was inspired by Brian Alkerton with his disccussion of cheezy gaming advertising . Someone I’ve really admired in the electronic gaming industry is Peter Molyneux current creative director at  Microsoft Game Studios Europe.  A saying  from him that really has stuck around with me was’ Reach for the stars and come out with something special’ ( can’t find the exact wording….). But what was really important  and that had a lot of impact for me was a game he developed a while ago ( 2000-2004) . Despite going through a name change ( Project Ego to Fable)  and  taking close to 4 years to make  its been hard to find a product that ever made me so excited. He made an experience around this product’s development that was memorable and stuck with me.

So what did he do to make this product launch truly special:

Shared His Excitement About the Product: While he received some criticism for his openness with game journalists he spoke with great  excitement about the game. He fully stood behind his product and weaved a strong story around it. Screen shots and game information were shared throughout the development process. Peter and his development firm weren’t afraid about sharing details  even those that weren’t completely solidified.  This excitement was contagious and kept fans wanting more.

Community engagement: During development and even after the game launched Lionhead Studios interacted with its  community. Through a central forum they released trailers and other product teasers and discussed the process of the game.  As a fan you really felt like part of the process. They weren’t afraid about being perceived as un-professional or whether they were going against industry norms they were more concerned about sharing with the community that came together around the game.

Fable Goes Gold!!

Fable Goes Gold!!

The above image  to the uninformed person just looks like a regular DVD. But this was the final tested version of the game, the final files before its sent to production. Most gaming studios never shared such a moment, but considering the development time of the game Lionhead felt it was important to share such an milestone.The long wait was almost done!

So what can be learned from this other than I’m a giant geek…. well to me it shows the importance of sharing with your companies fans and that product development and even day to day operations can weave stories and create relationships with your customers. By just releasing a product or just providing a service with nothing else  your company is forgettable and is  just like every other but by becoming more open and creating an experience you can turn your service or product into something much more memorable.

Communications / Social Media — No comments
03
Sep 09

Corporate Twitter Accounts: Balancing Conversation and Frequency

So this is a bit of a long time coming but part 2 of my twitter ‘experiments’ can be found below:

Experiment 2:

My second experiment involved messaging and how much interaction cans a personality or twitter brand can have with its followers. Yet again I decided to take a twitter alias(@socialmediabot2)  as I’m far from the average twitter user. Going to wefollow I decided to follow 50 people (close to the average of 69 )  and posted intermittently hoping perhaps for some interaction with who I’m following … a bit of a downfall of this experiment lack of true connection with people.

Afterwards, starting on the Monday morning I started posting messages from another account. 1 for every half hour for 7.5 hours for a total of 14 with the messages ( TEST #_ )  to see how this would be viewed on my feed. I wanted to see how the everyday  messaging from the people I followed would fit with the planned ‘corporate’ messaging and whether it would overload my feed and possibly cause me to want to unfollow the account

The Result:

Twitter Overload

Twitter Overload

As you can see there are portions of my feed where the messaging overlapped, for a casual user of twitter this may just be too much!  Especially for accounts with little customer interaction (  just sharing links, company news etc) a strong consideration will have to be  made regarding how many times to post daily will work to allow you to build and retain your audience.

Overall Takeaways:

Twitter is still a difficult area to get solid data from and you can’t just jump on twitter hoping for success in your campaigns or awareness.It takes planning and organization but even then trial and error is needed. I think something that is often missed with twitter  for heavy users like myself  is we forget that the vast majority of people don’t follow hundreds of people or have the equivalent # of followers .

They follow friends and organizations that they are close to and that needs to be considered when planning out a campaign. While heavy twitter users may be able to withstand messaging it probably would be seen as spam to these casual users. I think an excellent example of how to avoid this sort of twitter spam is from Best buy and their Twelpforce where they have once central account but many separate support accounts.

Have any questions/comments ? Contact me at kevin@kevrichard.com or send me a twitter message .

Communications / Marketing / Social Media — 2 comments
19
Aug 09

How I didn't get 100's of twitter followers!

Having a  traditional marketing background,  for promotional actions I always consider the end result or goal. In terms of twitter and social media  though there are a lot of unknowns and what ifs . Overall its untested territory for most people. Steming from a conversation I had recently I decided to do a bit of testing of the twitter platform and see if I can build a bit of test case.  This is part 1 of 2 twitter experiments I completed, stay tuned for the second one to come soon! * Note these  experiments are definitely not experimental and would probably not be replicated if redone, take my conclusions with your own judgement.

Experiment #1:

I think a lot of twitter users have come across the messages “Get more followers now” or ” Get X amount of followers today” and despite the general sentiment of  quality of followers over quantity I’m sure everyone even for a moment  where slightly tempted by this thinking that that more followers equals more people to get their messaging out to.  This is especially relevant  to  traditional marketing mediums as  more eyes =more marketing awareness= more customer action = money!  So I decided to put this to the test, can someone get tons of followers overnight using these follower programs.

The Scenario:

Starting off with an empty account ( @socialmediabot1) I joined the following  social media following programs:

Initially I started following 19 people and I noticed with all 3 of these programs that there were paid for premium options ( so basically paying for followers)  I also noticed that I almost immediately started sending out auto posts from these programs.  From there I left the account completely alone to let the followers come in, opting not to send out anything to not influence the result based on my content.

Result:

#FAIL

#FAIL

I started @socialmediabot1 on a Friday night, deciding to leave it  over the weekend. Checking it once I noticed that I was following over 100 people and had just 19 followers, no where close to the promised massive amounts of followers.  At the end of this experiment I come to above picture, no followers and 12 auto tweets and a suspended account.  I wasn’t completely surprised.

Conclusion:

I am by no means a great twitter user but my account certainly didn’t popup over night and I certainly didn’t expect this one to. A major marketing/branding implication of this is communities need to be built and  its not a matter of massively following people or hoping that  people  run to your brand. Relationships need to be formed  and this takes a lot of time and effort.

Often times I feel that platforms like twitter are advertised as a panacea for marketing and that suddenly you’ll see huge results. FALSE! Like all marketing efforts hard work needs to be invested and careful planning and organizing should be done.  Social Media is just another touch point to your customers, the only ‘magic’ there is the opportunity to have further communications with customers and the general public.


I’d like to hear  what you  think about twitter and  any of your thoughts on  best cases or usage scenarios for companies and organizations so please feel free to leave a comment, send me a twitter message or email me at kevin@kevrichard.com .

Community / Marketing / Social Media — 13 comments
17
Aug 09

Toronto takes SXSW!

With such a large tech community in Toronto there has been a  lot of growth this year in Toronto applicants to the  2010 SXSW convention ( held in Austin Texas, more info can be found here) as so many have now made it to the voting stages I thought it would make things a lot easier to have all the sessions in one place for everyone to vote and show your support .  I hope to see everyone there!

SXSW

The Sessions:

  1. F#$% Keeping it Simple presented by Dave Coleman, Saul Colt and Jeremy Wright
  2. Community Management : Future Skills You’ll Need to Know presented by Saul Colt
  3. Tweet Your Way to Your Next Job presented by Saul Colt
  4. Putting a Fork in The 30 Second Spot with panelist  Andrew Lane
  5. Life After Wii Fit: Geeks On Fitness presented by Wesley Hodgson
  6. Make Me a Damn Good Manager! presented by Andre Gaulin
  7. Millionaire or Artist? How About Both? with panelist  Amrita Chandra
  8. Distributed Micro-Patronage: The Future of Getting Paid: presented by Josh Newman
  9. Building Blocks of a New Economy For Music: presented by David Dufresne
  10. Colour Trends -Palettes to Pick for 2010 presented by Paige Dzenis
  11. Brilliant Second Acts You Must Steal Tricks From presented by Jaime Woo
  12. How to Recover From  a Brand Collapse panelist  Jeremy Wright
  13. Twitter and Dating in 140 Characters or Less presented by Jeremy Wright and special guest!
  14. Ditch the Old to Build Your Dream Life with panelist Jeremy Wright
  15. Gaming’s Final Frontier- Moving Towards Monetization & Improving Experience presented by Troy Ross
  16. Passionate People: The Key Ingredient to Social Media Success: with panelists  Meghan Warby ,  James Topham and Ryan Taylor
  17. A Different Documentary : Online Story Telling and Social Change presented by Boyd Niel
  18. Documentary Games: Playing with the Truth presented by Tony Walsh
  19. Multi-Platform Storytelling with panelist Andrew Lane
  20. SXSW SARS with panelist Jay Goldman
  21. We are Family: Web Applications Band Together Now! presented by Sunir Shah
  22. How to be  a Customer Support Rockstar presented by Grace Antonio
  23. Experimental Design:Your User Interface is Your Laboratory presented by Mike McDerment
  24. Exploiting Chaos– How to Spark Innovation During Times of Change presented by Jeremy Gutsche
  25. News 2.0 – How Old Media Companies Are Inventing New Models presented by Maggie Fox with panelists Laura Conway, Mathew Ingram,  and Candice Faktor.

Have any questions/comments ? Contact me at kevin@kevrichard.com or send me a twitter message .

Social Media — 5 comments
06
Aug 09

What If Social Media Were Down Permanently ?

Picture from cote

Picture from cote

A friend and fellow marketer Emma Brooks has declared today #InternetFAILday as a result of the multiple failures on social networking and commerce sites. This got me thinking what would happen if companies suddenly lost social media  as a marketing/business tool? Especially now that many customers are accustomed to these practices , how could current social media practices be scaled down into real life settings? Here are a few of my thoughts on this issue:

Customer Service: Many companies are trying to improve their service offering through their online channels having ignored the poor service their customers receive in person. Without this tool sales/service people to be successful would need to be much more autonomous and have the tools they need in front of them instead of outsourced to call centers/outside locations.

This would be a major business shift for most companies. Instead of having a sales orientation in their stores where metrics and the bottom line is the most important part of operations, a customer service orientation would need to be taken where relationships and customer satisfaction would need to be seen as a major driver of sales.

Customer Connection: With the loss of internet tools customers would lose the sense of connection with companies and other customers. They would lose the ability to come together and discuss the direction and changes to the company. Companies would lose a great market research outlet but they also may lose the strong brand evangelists that spread word of mouth for their company as well .

A company I feel that takes this relationship building and does it well on a personal level is Lululemon. By supporting the local yoga communities and offering interaction mechanisms in store (little fun activities and yoga classes) customers feel connected to the company on a deeper level.  Customers don’t think of the company as an organization that just sells them stuff but they also see them as a community hub. Social media places a large focus on grouping customers together and building communities, why can’t stores themselves work on building communities locally?

Customer Segmentation:  Without social media some things could be much more costly to do. Customer segmentation would be one of them and without social media this would be a be a large strategic challenge for companies. Using the internet and social media , companies have often times tried to attract all groups through customized product offerings and communities. Knowing each individual customer and customizing their experience would be too hard to do in the offline world. It would mean that a company’s customer list would either need to be scaled down so they know each individual customer to  place them  in a specific category or there would be a big brother scenario where every action a customer takes is recorded (not a very friendly situation).

Social media offers information about customers that real world interactions don’t and in this case it would be strategically better to define the customer your company wishes to target instead. By doing this all efforts and resources are focused on  being a strong product/service supplier for a single group building market and mind share among these customers. While the downfall of this would mean that your market is significantly smaller, this also means that your resources are more effectively used saving you money in the long run.

Conclusion:

In closing I think this is a great exercise for companies to be doing. If social media were to just suddenly end today how would their company operate? What changes would need to be made? Looking at how they could improve their operations in real life situations could be an opportunity to further strengthen the company as a whole and create a company much more focused around the customer.

Communications / Community — 3 comments
05
Jul 09

Relaunching an Online Community

Social Networks  are a great way of connecting people who share the same interests and encourage community discussion. Thinking that this may be a great tool to connect its more than 200,000  members across North America the Sigma Chi Fraternity (of which I’m a member of ) decided to create a community for its members where they can interact and connect. Hosted by Affinity Circles its a pretty robust system that allows interaction at many different levels and members are able to form their own groups based on location or interest. Its a great tool and it would be very useful in achieving its purpose… if someone actually used it.

This was the old network ( I personally liked the layout)

This was the old network ( I personally liked the layout)

As a an active member there was no discussion of this site within my chapter or when meeting members from other chapters, I only came across it when searching through  Sigma Chi’s central site. Because no one was active on it and because there was no real life connection or use for it this network was empty and barren. Instead members have reverted to using  larger networks such as Facebook to connect. The downfall with this is that disparate groups are made instead of gathering the organization  together as a whole.


Can this be fixed?

Well the headquarters staff is trying its best to . At a recent Fraternity meeting  this past weekend  they  launched  a new network with toned down features and a simpler interface hoping that it will appeal to both younger and older generations. While this may address some issues in the end I feel  it won’t fix the larger issue of participation.

The new network. Simplified and waiting to be used.

The new network. Simplified and waiting to be used.

So how can this relaunch become successful so it doesn’t become yet another empty community?  While I’m not claiming to be an expert here are some of my ideas in developing interest and use of this website by the general fraternity:

Community leaders: By getting volunteers ( either chapter presidents or designated  geographic community managers) to actively use , connect, and discuss this site  becoming evangelists for this initiative the hope will be to get people talking about it once again and  encourage its use.By building its use in day to day tasks  for active/alumni chapter operations or as a space for organizing events and initiatives among members, users will have a reason to return on a more regular basis and will come to associate the website as the space for Fraternity information/news .

Creating a Hub: Another important piece to this new site is making sure  that it offers something that other social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter don’t . A big part of this in my opinion is having  a central interaction point. While Sigma Chi has a central website, by creating a page where news and events from the fraternity as a whole are posted members will come to this page to keep up to date with whats happening within the fraternity . This can be as simple as a weekly blog posting or advanced as a news feed where members can recieve news and updates from the entire site or just the networks they are involved in.

Connecting Content : Bringing in and organizing the  content  located on other sites will be a good community building tool as well. There are many facebook groups, flickr feeds, Youtube videos and blog entries related to Sigma Chi scattered across the net. Allowing members to either link or post this content up will encourage interaction and discussion. While this may be a bigger undertaking I also feel posting up materials such as  pledge manuals, historic pictures  and other memrobelia on this site will also build  increased value with network users.

These are just a few points that I feel will help to ensure that this new site doesn’t go to waste. There will be a lot of work needed to build interest and to ensure the usability of this network. I’m curious to hear  more about people’s experiences in building community and thoughts of how one can be started/restarted. Feel free to post your thoughts/ideas in the comments section below.

Have any questions/comments ? Contact me at kevin.richard@ryerson.ca or send me a twitter message .

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