Ever had one of those days in which all conversations seem to lead to the same place? I've been having one of those months. Lately it seems that more and more organizations forget what they've learned in the past and proceed to start over every day -- despite all the evidence that learning and evolving might be good for business. A kind of permanent Ground Hog Day reel.
Guy Kawasaki reminded me of some of those discussions today in his post Top Ten Stupid Ways to Hinder Market Adoption and Seth Godin gave us yet another refresher on Really Bad PowerPoint.
They essentially talk about the same thing: for some reason, people decide that they want to make it hardest for others to have a good -- heavens even remarkable -- experience of them, their company, brand, product, and service. Working very diligently to make things difficult to learn, obscure to figure out, time-consuming, unpleasant, and, worst sin of all, boring.
Why? Could it be because when thinking of others in the context of a service, product, or exchange of information we use terms like users, adopters, audience, employees, subordinates instead of people or customers? Are we addressing others as entities, "it", if you will, instead of "you"? At least tell me you're thinking of others.
I'm re-reading Permission Marketing -- it's obvious that it hasn't been done; yet we should all be familiar with the concept. In fact, I bet you that if you asked any person how they would like their marketing and advertising, they would tell you straight off that they wouldn't at all. What we would like more of is conversation, less being talked at.
Take a look at some of the obstacles and hurdles companies scatter your way from Guy's list:
- Enforce immediate registration -- it's like you meet someone and *have to* give them your phone number and business card before you even decide you have any interest whatsoever in them. I've been at numerous "networking" events where I brought no business cards at all for this very same reason. I will hand out my corporate business card when pressed. If I handed that to you, it means my interest level is pretty low. I have a friend who has a card with just a name imprinted -- he decides what and if to share any contact details.
- Limiting contact to email -- how about having no contact at all on your Web site but a form? Once I worked on a project where I wanted to partner with a company and could find no address or contact information on their site at all. Why bother with having a site in the first place?
- Unreadable confirmation codes -- this strikes a chord for me. I have a Yahoo! email account, which I've been using to moderate an online listserv to a professional network for almost 7 years. Now whenever *I* send an email out, I need to comply with that unbelievably hard to read string of characters to send. Very often I type it wrong, get an error code and my message is dumped unsaved. I wrote to Yahoo! Customer Service articulating my problem. The answer? This feature is protecting *you* from spam. I might be a dinosaur on technology, but how does it protect the sender? Wouldn't I know it's not spam? Don't you trust me? Or maybe you think I opened this account to spam others... wouldn't you have all my traffic reports from the past several years? Surely there are ways to make it easier. I just switched to gmail.
And the list goes on beyond the scope of this post. Which is the reason I ask: why wouldn't we consider putting conversation at work in these instances? All this smart and sophisticated technology can gather feedback on what people and customers want and like, can't it?
Which brings me to Seth's "communication is the transfer of emotion"; emotion leads to action. I admit it; the pressure is really on to under perform on the PowerPoint side. Especially if you work in a scientific, engineering or financial environment your slides -- you understand that nobody can possibly present without them, do you? -- *must* contain loads of data, and further proof and then more of the same possibly in 10-point type so at least the first four paragraphs of your content can fit onto each slide.
Have we really stopped having conversations at work?
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