A while back I had a debate with a chef, someone who believed in the purity of traditional methods versus modern tools. This was the period when I had decided to take up pizza-making and was getting ready to invest in an electric mixer versus pounding dough by hand, which I detested. We were arguing the efficiency of dough hooks versus human hands, then the discussion moved on to the overall productivity in modern kitchens versus a hundred years ago. I eventually lost that argument because:
- Modern kitchens, with their hundreds of little gadgets and big machines like mixers and liquidizers, have a higher TCO (Total Cost of Ownership). Think of the money spent on acquisition and maintenance, plus the extra man hours cleaning and storing all that equipment.
- Cooking experts commonly agree that traditional manual methods, from making mayonnaise to kneading dough, outperform mechanical means in quality. There may be a few exceptions, but overwhelmingly the manual methods generate better results.
Contrast this with today’s prevalent opinion that while technology has generally increased efficiency and increased productivity by orders of magnitude, modern workers are paradoxically working longer and longer hours, and suffering from a lopsided work/life balance.
This applies to the social media lifestyle too. I started counting how many social media channels I have, and surprised even myself:
- Company-sanctioned business blog, Conversationage
- Semi-public Posterous blog
- Company-sanctioned Twitter account
- Private, anonymous Twitter account that only my friends can see
- Private, anonymous blog that only close friends can see
- Daily personal photo blog on Tumblr
- Facebook account
- Foursquare account that I still update religiously
- Kaixin account (dormant)
- Flickr
- Picasa web albums
- Youtube (which I upload videos to only rarely)
Apart from Kaixin, Flickr and Youtube which I update rarely, the rest I update fairly regularly, and in the case of Foursquare, sometimes hourly. Truth is, I don’t need all these outlets. I’m not that interesting, I don’t really have that much to say, and I don’t have that much time, considering I also have a day job that involves an insane amount of travel, and a personal life that involves a fitness regime I’m trying to stick to. True, living in an industry increasingly dominated by digital influences, participating in all of this is part of my job. And I believe that in order to really deliver quality counsel to clients, we need to live and breathe social media, not just engage at an intellectual level.
Yet I can’t help but wonder, are we painting ourselves into a corner by constantly trying to catch up? Are we spreading ourselves, and our time, too thin? Where do we draw the line?
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Our daily lives are consumed with content in the digital realm — news, tweets, blogs and e-mails that we are continuously drowning within in a mere attempt to keep up to speed in the world. We are all guilty of reading the first few lines of any piece of content to grasp the basic concept being conveyed and then moving on to the next.
An effective writing technique that I find valuable is to “trim the fat.” Working in the communications industry, it’s a skill that I am actively working on to ensure my readers are grasping my main point without having to skim for it. Remove the wasted words loitering in your writing, and you can soon become your own editor. With any skill, it takes time to adjust your practices, but eliminating the unimportant will allow your readers to recognize the significance of your message more clearly.
Below are some words and phrases that frequent our writing but, needless to say, (perfect example in its own) can be removed from our everyday use. More guidelines specific to trimming the fat are available for business writing and for freelance writing.
Common Unnecessary Words and Phrases:
- Very
- Just
- In addition to
- The fact that
- Until such time as
- At the present time
- In the past
- By means of
- For the purpose of
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Guest post by: Sarah Hahn, Account Executive, WE Social Innovation
When I started graduate school in the fall of 2008 at The Fletcher School at Tufts University, I knew I wanted to be doing something completely different with my professional life. I was what the admissions office affectionately calls a “career changer.” I had worked exclusively in the nonprofit sector for several years and needed to shift gears.
It was with that attitude in mind that I interviewed for and ultimately accepted a summer internship position with the Issues Group in Public Affairs at ExxonMobil, which couldn’t have been further from my previous experiences in grantmaking and international development. I was working with engineers and geoscientists on issues ranging from carbon sequestration to the effects of seismic surveying on marine mammals.
The job was really interesting and exactly the change I had been craving. However, when that didn’t turn into a post-graduation job offer, I started to get a little nervous. Public Affairs at Exxon is a unique office, and I wasn’t sure how I could duplicate the experience elsewhere.
About that time, I made plans to travel to Washington, DC, for the annual Fletcher-sponsored career trip. DC is home to an overwhelming number of Fletcher alumni, almost all employed in government, international organizations or nonprofits. The career trip agenda reflected this, so I, being interested in the private sector, was challenged to find meetings and site visits that would be worth my time.
About a week before the trip, a classmate suggested that I sign up for the session at Waggener Edstrom, thinking I might be interested in the Public Affairs practice. I hadn’t really thought about public relations as a career focus, and had definitely never heard of Waggener Edstrom, but I realized it was probably a more productive use of my time than coffee at the World Bank. Well past the deadline for changing my schedule, I wrangled my way into the meeting and passed along my resume just in the nick of time.
At the Waggener Edstrom site visit, I had the pleasure of meeting Jean-Louis Robadey. A fellow Fletcher alum, he spoke to our group about this relatively new practice area called Social Innovation. My interest was piqued because he was talking about the very topics I was writing my thesis on – corporate social responsibility and environmental sustainability. I also appreciated that he remembered I had listed “Catalan” as one of my languages on my resume.
When I followed up with Jean-Louis later to ask some questions related to my thesis, I can’t say I was ever really thinking that this connection could turn into a job opportunity. But I can’t say I was surprised, either, when he eventually asked if I would consider applying for a summer internship. Still, I wasn’t too sure. I mean, I was graduating from a master’s program – internships are for while you’re still at school, right?
However, I was really impressed with Jean-Louis and the work he described at Waggener Edstrom, so thought it was worth taking a chance. As it turns out, I really enjoy working in communications, and that internship has turned into a full-time job as an Account Executive in the WE's Social Innovation practice. Not only do I get to use my academic background in more ways that I could ever imagine, but I’m part of a practice and an agency that have been nothing but welcoming and encouraging since I walked through the door back in June. And all it took was a little internship.
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After rushing through the lunch hour zoo that is my local Quizno’s, I returned to my desk only to be confronted with a startling lack of carbs: the baked chips AND cookie I ordered had been charged but not included in my takeout bag. I couldn’t resist quickly firing off a tweet expressing my unrequited carb craving, careful to include the @quiznos handle. I felt a little better knowing justice (an offer of a replacement cookie? An apology for my inconvenience?) was surely on the way.
Except, it wasn’t. Even after my truncated meal was long consumed, not a word arrived in my Twitter stream from the corporate handle. In my mind, a small, understandable oversight by a busy employee had now been inflamed into feeling my business was underappreciated twice in one day.
Twitter is widely credited with being the missing link between brands and the consumers who influence them. A sort of long sought holy grail, finally harnessed by companies to keep consumers engaged and happy. Consumers on Twitter are certainly operating under that assumption – who among we Tweeters has never grumbled or raved about our interactions with every day brands at one point or another? We hear it all the time at brand and social media conferences: Your followers expect to be heard, to get results, not at the end of the day but right now. But is anyone at the big brands actually listening (and moreover, reacting) on the other end? Are major brands harnessing the (free) power Twitter provides to build customer engagement and loyalty?
To investigate, I set up a little experiment. For one week, I asked my co-workers to join me in calling out particularly good or bad experiences they had with brands, by sending a Tweet which included the brand’s corporate handle (so it would be guaranteed to appear in the corporate Twitter stream). From at least four of our offices on two continents, my awesome WE colleagues answered the call. Was our test scientific or particularly concerned with methodology? Not exactly. We just wanted a representative, real-life sample of consumers attempting to get the attention of the brands that somehow affected their day to day lives. Surveys are great (like this one recently conducted by King Fish Media, HubSpot, and Junta42 which reported that 72% of US marketers claim to have a social media strategy) but real life examples tend to be more useful in providing a peek into what’s really happening in the world of consumer-brand interaction.
First, the bad news for John Q. Public: When talking to companies and brands, you may be talking into a black hole of the Twitterverse. The bad news for brands? That means you may be upsetting and alienating your customers without even knowing it.
Next week, we'll get to several examples of a number of brands which actually did respond and engage to our Twitter experiment. But let's start this week with a few examples of brands that didn't: Jodi, a WE Sr. Talent Acquisition Partner, tweeted a note of gratitude to LG for fixing her dishwasher and covering the costs, but received no response.
Similarly, Barbara, a WE Account Director, liked the service she got at Round Table Pizza so much, she tweeted : “@roundtablepizza order taker proactively told me about a $3 coupon I could use - didn't even have to ask. Nice surprise!” The company didn’t respond. So did the fact that Round Table didn’t respond to her tweet undo the good vibes she got from saving $3? She admitted, “Pretty much, though I feel lame for admitting it. I find myself a little annoyed, given that I normally wouldn’t call out a company with a compliment like that. You’d think they would want to retweet or respond positively.”
Companies may not have a social media strategy even though they have social media accounts set up. This is what WE like to call Zombie Media Marketing, and we are passionate about helping our clients avoid it. But before we all burn our pizza and dishwasher boxes in effigy, not getting a response to tweets like this could mean a few things. Maybe the social media strategist is out sick for the day, or they didn’t feel certain comments merited an official corporate response. (A third possibility is that companies are so strategic they only spend time responding to their most influential followers—a theory we’ll explore next week.)
Having a strategy is not the same as having an effective strategy or executing that strategy. But in fairness to brands, strategy and engagement has largely been owned by marketing and/or PR departments. Therefore, customer service is not something many companies built into their initial social media strategies, which are usually more concerned with more proactive approaches like telling the company’s story, highlighting news, events and promotions, or initiating a dialogue. But as we’ll discuss next week, it may be time for a change. Stay tuned!
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Mattel’s latest innovation, Puppy Tweets, claims to answer the question: If your dog could tweet, what would he tweet? Unfortunately, it also answers the question: If your dog could tweet, who would care what he tweeted?
The Puppy Tweets device clips to a dog’s collar and purports to use that dog’s motion and sounds to select from 500 pre-loaded tweets and send them out via a wi-fi connection to an active computer.
My dog is tweeting from @MeekusTweets, and he is quite prolific. I can see when he’s supposedly knocked over a trash can, is jumping up on the counter or is peeing on my favorite potted plant. These never fail to make me nervous, but I always come home to find out they were false alarms.
Meekus’s tweets include gems such as:
- Meekus:One man's trash is another dog's treasure.
- Meekus:Having my daily workout. Already did fifteen leg lifts! ; )
- Meekus:Uh oh! It's getting late and I haven't finished scattering my toys all over the room for you to trip over when you get home.
I unfollowed my own dog after two days. He just doesn’t provide the value I expect to come from the people I follow. Twitter users follow others because of the value and perspective they can add to The Conversation. Whether it’s humor, insight, links to good articles or something else completely intangible, there has to be incentive to follow and keep following someone.
I don’t blame Meekus for not bringing anything to the table. The blame lies with Mattel for using Twitter to play on pet owners’ sentimentality to sell them a device that actually adds to the “white noise” on Twitter. Twitter doesn’t need more white noise; Twitter needs more dialog and unique points of view.
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