Four quick tips to strengthen your writing.

February 5, 2015

Filed under: Writing Tips, Effective Communication — @ 10:11 am

Tagged: effective communication, grammar, writing

Writing is a skill that needs practice, just like your golf swing or your skiing technique. However, unlike golf or skiing, very few people devote their Saturdays to grammar and phraseology.

Here’s the equivalent of installing a putting green in your office. Work these four tips into your everyday writing, and give those stagnant brain muscles a workout.

Stop beginning your sentences with “I” or “We.” You’ll be surprised how often you do it, and making this one tiny change will enhance the power of your message. Here’s why and how.

Choose descriptive words that pack a stand-alone punch. There are – give or take – a million words in the English language. It’s a safe bet that “great” can always be replaced with a more meaningful word (get some help on that here) and the words “very,” “really,” and “extremely” are unnecessary; very happy = ecstatic, pleased, delighted, and so on…extremely upset = livid, furious, incensed, and so on.

Condense wordy phrases into compact ones…or better yet, into a single word. This reduces the burden on your reader’s attention span and illustrates your point with instant clarity. For example:

Coming at the wrong time = ill-timed

Covered with decorative elements = ornate

Make this process smoother = streamline

Almost ready to put the finishing touches on = poised to complete

Hard to find = elusive

Aspire to cut your document length by a third. This measuring stick will serve you well: in any first draft, at least a third of the words are poorly chosen. That’s because it’s really hard arduous to write and edit at the same time simultaneously. Keep your thought process intact while the words flow, and then attack your phrases with a critical eye afterward.

~~I hope you find these tips useful.~~

Reprogramming your writing style using these four tips will take awareness, patience, and a thesaurus. Keep practicing, buy a red pen, and eventually new habits will form.

Eat more lamb, Larry Bird.

January 12, 2015

Filed under: Observations From the Field, This is Cool, Branding Strategies, Effective Communication, Uncategorized — @ 1:52 pm

We humans are an unruly lot…we are busy and distracted, and frankly, we just don’t like being told what to do. This means that informative and useful signage is often overlooked as white noise competing for our attention amidst a barrage of sensory input.

Savvy businesses know a fool-proof cure for this: unexpected humor that seduces people into reading the otherwise-boring sign. It’s a brilliant strategy. Not only do people read it…they get the message AND they are left with an impression of a business, company, or brand with a groovy personality. Behold:

Bennett’s Store in coastal Maine could say “No Parking” or it could say…

Wood ‘n Hart Farm at the Halifax Seaport Farmer’s Market in Nova Scotia could say “Lamb for Sale” or it could say…

The Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority in NYC could say “Don’t Drink and Drive” or it could say…

An airport in Fort Lauderdale could say “Pardon Our Construction” or it could say…

The Weylin B. Seymour’s glamorous event space in Brooklyn could say “Wheelchair Accessible Bathroom” or it could say…

These signs have stopped countless people in their tracks…and quite possibly prompted them to snap a picture just like I did. Mission accomplished.

So, the next time you have something important – but boring – to communicate, take a few minutes to answer the question: how can I make this message interesting?

Need more inspiration? See what the Inn at Manchester did with their housekeeping tip envelope. Seriously…if they can make THAT fun, anything’s possible.

Tips for saying “thank you” like you mean it.

March 21, 2013

Filed under: Effective Communication — @ 9:50 am

It is often said that PR is a thankless job. But yesterday while at work, I kept a running count of the number of times I was thanked for things throughout the day – in writing, by phone, and in person. The total? A whopping 93 times… in a single work day, while just sitting at my desk. That’s 10.33 times every hour – which means that basically, once every six minutes, I am being thanked for something.

Now…I am just NOT that awesome. Moreover, I have no business interaction with the general public, there were only nine people in the Redpoint office yesterday, and I spent most of the day quietly alone, writing at my computer. So why the outpouring of gratitude?

Because most of the thanks I received were completely inappropriate for the situation. For example:

A letter from American Express thanked me as part of a notification that my account may have been the victim of fraud.
An email from someone shared the unwelcome news that, “Sorry, but we’re not sending you a check this week as we promised,” and was closed with a simple “Thanks,” at the end.
A woman who cut in front of me in a ladies room to use the hand dryer before I got to it looked at me and sheepishly said “thanks”…as if that somehow excused her behavior.

In fact, the number of times I was legitimately thanked for something yesterday was only 37. All the others were just automatic thanks given without deliberate thought…and therefore, sounded insincere.

The upshot of all this meaningless thanking is that the word “thanks” has lost its punch. So when you REALLY want to express gratitude for something, “thank you” often doesn’t cut it.

There are ways to be polite and gracious without erroneously using the actual phrase “thanks.” Here are a few simple tips:

If you have “Thanks” as part of your automatic email signature…take it out because it might not fit every message you send. Adapt your closing to suit the message, be it “Cheers,” or “Best,” or “Kind Regards,” or “My Best,” or even “Enjoy your day,”…or whatever takes your fancy.
Embrace the difference between expressing thanks and expressing appreciation. The person mentioned above who delivered that unwelcome message about the check could have said “Your patience is much appreciated.” While it’s not a hard and fast rule, “thanking” someone is usually an appropriate response to something they’ve done or said (or not done or said) but essentially, it’s tied to THEM and their actions. Appreciation is tied to YOU, and how you feel. You can appreciate someone’s kindness in the same way you can appreciate the beauty of the sunset…but you’d never “thank” the sun for setting.
Change up your wording. When you say “thanks” dozens of times each day, it even becomes white noise to YOU. Try different phrasing: I can’t thank you enough… thank you doesn’t do it justice… I am so grateful for… your kindness meant the world to me… I’m so appreciative that… and so on.

And here’s a final tip. It’s not always what you say to express thanks, but how you deliver the message. I recently ordered flowers from two different florists in the same week. One thanked me in the automated email confirmation and payment receipt. And the other sent this to my house:

Way to go Mischler’s of Buffalo. You’ve given me a new communication puzzle: what’s the appropriate way to thank someone for sending an awesome thank you note?

See also the related post: Write better copy using patience and a thesaurus.

Five tips to deliver bad news gracefully.

August 29, 2012

Filed under: Crisis Communications, Effective Communication — @ 9:39 am

Raising your prices? Cutting services? Not giving out staff bonuses this year? Putting an employee on probation?

No one wants to deliver this kind of unwelcome news. Quite frankly…it sucks, for both the recipient AND the messenger. But sometimes it’s a necessary evil of doing business, and you’re the unfortunate soul who has to bear the burden. Here are five tips to mitigate the drama:

1 – Let your own emotions run their course before you have to share the news with others. You may not like or agree with the news you must deliver, but there is a reason why it must be done. Find a way to come to terms with it in your own mind so you don’t bring your own negative emotional energy to the communication. Your audience will take its cue from your approach, and if you’re defensive, nervous, weepy, or angry…it will only fuel their own negative response.

2 – Restrict your build-up and get to the point. By the time people get through six long paragraphs of posturing and pussyfooting, their BS-radar is on high alert and involuntary butterflies in their stomach are flooding their brain with negative emotion. So, when you finally hit them with the unpleasant punchline in that last paragraph, their adverse reaction is intensified by the emotions you yourself have nurtured in them. The same thing holds true for verbal delivery. Often times, the anticipation is worse than the actual news.

3 – Consider the timing carefully. Procrastinating often makes it worse (especially if there is a rumor mill in the mix), but rushing to break the news just because YOU want to put it behind you comes with great risk. A knee-jerk communication is usually delivered with clouded judgment, high emotion, and a lack of due diligence. Most importantly, think about when this news will best be received. Bad news is never welcome, but you should consider factors like time of day, day of week, and your audience’s state of mind before you decide on the ideal timing.

4 – Avoid misdirection and trickery. It’s tempting to load up bad news communication with a bunch of good news in the hopes of distracting your audience. However, it will only damage their trust in you. You may choose this path because it makes YOU feel better (“Look, see? I’m not that bad…look at all the good things I’m still sharing!”) but to the news recipient, it just looks wishy-washy and weak. And, in many cases, it can give the appearance of trivializing very serious news and not treating it with the respect it deserves.

5 – Remember that nothing is confidential. Emails can be forwarded, and social media is designed to be the world’s fastest grapevine. Whatever you do…whatever you say…before you “go there,” answer this question: how would I feel if 50 million people knew about this tomorrow? Nothing tames you into acting gracefully like the thought of being vilified by an outraged public. United Airlines learned this lesson the hard way. Watch video.

Above all, you must remember this: no matter how you spin it or when you say it…your audience won’t like it. That’s why it’s called “bad news.” It would be completely irrational for you to tell your customers you’re raising prices and have them respond “Right, then…no worries, we don’t mind.” So, be realistic with yourself. If you expect to deliver bad news and have people walking away happy…this will not work out well for you.

And that brings us to the last point: delivering bad news is not about YOU. The recipient does not want to hear about how you were up all night belly-aching over having this conversation, or that you’re just so upset you can’t eat, or that it gives you no pleasure to do this. Asking for their empathy at a time like this is most likely to result in their wanting to smack you. Let them have their moment of sadness without trying to steal some sympathy for yourself.

A marketing secret: if you can’t beat ’em…play a different game.

March 27, 2012

Filed under: Trade Show Marketing, Marketing Strategies, This is Cool, Effective Communication — @ 8:57 am

Picture this: you’ve spent a fortune on a gorgeous half-the-length-of-a-football-field booth at the largest trade show in your industry. You haven’t exhibited at this show in years, and you want everyone to know you’re back…and cooler than ever.

But the booth to your left has celebrity chef Guy Fieri doing a cooking demonstration and book signing in their booth…and the booth to your right has Cat Cora doing the same in theirs…and two aisles down is a “Cooking Theater” with a veritable who’s who of celebrity chef demos…Curtis Stone, Paula Deen, Duff Goldman, Michael Symon, Ming Tsai, and a host of other star chefs performing all day long. And sadly, you’ve got no celebrity chefs in your marketing arsenal.

How do you battle such overwhelming star power to make your booth stand out from the pack? Simple: do something TOTALLY different.

And when longtime client Robinson Home Products asked us to help them do that at the International Home & Housewares Show in Chicago earlier this month, what’s the first thing we thought of? The Hot Sardines and their tea-kettle-playing-trumpeter (see earlier post).

While everyone else had their just-one-of-the-pack superstar chefs hawking their wares in a traditional and expected way, we had a 7-piece vintage dixieland band drawing crowds to the Robinson booth with hot jazz and gunbucket blues…but with a twist. All of Robinson’s new product introductions were used as musical instruments: graters, cutting boards, tongs, wooden spoons, spatulas, carving boards, cooling racks, pots, pans, mugs, bowls, collapsible funnels, and more. If it had the ability to make a sound…it became a part of the performance.

Never in my life have I seen so many double takes, as passers-by stopped to see where the music was coming from, and then went… “wait…is that guy tap dancing on bamboo cutting boards? And is she playing a cooling rack with a cheese grater?” Watching the realization sink in was fun. Watching all the camera phones, iPhones, and Tweets record it – and share it – was immensely satisfying.

And after three sets of music throughout the day in the booth, and one in the Cooking Theater to help spread the word show-wide, the deal was sealed: Robinson was super-cool and stood WAY out from the crowd. And all of us working the booth at the show finally understood the power of being able to say that coveted line… “Yeah, I’m ‘with’ the band.” Instant coolness.

What’s the lesson here? If you can’t meet your competitors on their turf, and you don’t want to spend the money to one-up them at their own game…don’t play it. Be creative…and redefine the game. Celebrity chefs have been a mainstay of the Housewares Show for more than a decade, but NOBODY expected a band. And that made Robinson unforgettable.

Hats off to The Hot Sardines for embracing this unusual performance request and knocking it out of the park, and you can see them perform seven kitchen-tool-infused songs by clicking here (side note: Some of These Days is my personal fave). The level of product integration they incorporated into their music – without compromising the integrity of their addictive sound – was unreal. They are a group of exceptionally talented musicians and Redpoint feels fortunate to have stumbled upon them at the Lincoln Square Winter’s Eve Festival on the corner of 63rd and Broadway last December.

And…hats off to Robinson as well. Redpoint has brought some quirky ideas to clients before, but not all of them have the guts to take a marketing risk like this. But we’ve been working with them since 2005, and in their words “it’s easy to put trust in Redpoint…you’ve never steered us in a wrong direction.”

Awwww. Warms our little PR hearts, that does.

Bok choy and the whole shabang…three lessons in customer service.

May 23, 2011

Filed under: Customer Service, Observations From the Field, Effective Communication — @ 8:39 am

So…is this “A Lot” of bok choy?

Recently, when faced with a choice between Chicken with Mixed Vegetables and Chicken with Your Favorite Vegetables on the menu of a Chinese restaurant, my dad planned to go with his Favorite to ensure the presence of “a lot” of bok choy. But just in case the Mixed version was already loaded with bok choy (why pay the extra five bucks unnecessarily?), he asked the waiter what the difference was between the two dishes.

I then spent the next few minutes giggling behind my menu as my dad and the waiter enjoyed a fantastically nonsensical “Who’s on First” dialogue about Mixed vs. Favorite, and just how much bok choy is “a lot.” Apparently, there is NO difference between the dishes, as long as you order the Mixed version and just specify your vegetables. How intriguing. I’ll take the less expensive dish, please.

The very next week, my brother and sister-in-law went to a restaurant called Vero with a group of friends, where they ordered The Whole Shabang. They had told me about this concept earlier, and as a marketer, I thought it was brilliant. The restaurant serves “little plates” of Italian food, and when you order The Whole Shabang, you get one of every single item on the menu – meats, cheeses, olives, bruschette, pasta, fish, chicken…the works. Priced at $500, it’s a neat idea, and a fabulous marketing hook.

They promote it right on the dinner menu in its own special promotional box, so that when you go with just a few people, you see it and think… “Cool! I’m going to come back with a bunch of friends and do this.” …which is exactly what my bro and sis-in-law did.

Imagine my disappointment when I got the post-Shabang recap and it missed the mark. There was resistance to giving the preferred time when making the reservation, not enough servers to accommodate the size of the group (12), drink delivery was exceptionally slow, they missed serving the entire cheese course (what’s this?…The Partial Shabang?), and a host of other small issues. They thought the food itself was delicious, but when you commit to ordering every single item on the menu, you sort of expect to be treated better, not worse, than the “regular” patrons.

These two back-to-back restaurant issues brought three major customer service lessons to light:

1 – Marketing ploys not embraced by the staff cause confusion and disappointment among your guests. Your staff members are the ones delivering on your promises every day on the front lines. If they don’t get it, don’t like it, or don’t want to do it…you could have the coolest-sounding marketing tactic in the world and it won’t work. Training on these points is essential to success.

2 – Anything that is operationally challenging to deliver puts your guest satisfaction at risk. What was intended to inspire positive word of mouth is likely to have exactly the opposite effect. Why take the risk? Either don’t do it, or wait to promote it until you’ve got the kinks worked out.

3 – Consumers are very literal. You write something down in black-and-white, and they expect exactly that. YOU might know what you mean, but if you’re expecting any forgiveness when they discover it’s a loose interpretation…give up that dream. Be very thoughtful in how you position things…on your menus, your websites, your brochures, and more. Over-promising can come back to haunt you.

I’ll let the bok choy incident go…that “Who’s On First” dialogue is actually part of what makes a visit to a Chinese-American restaurant so affectionately memorable. But I’m not willing to throw in the towel yet on The Whole Shabang. Come on – ordering one of every item on the menu? That’s as fun as the Instant Gourmet Kitchen that Redpoint created to market the Masters Collection from the Culinary Institute of America a few years ago (80 items, 5,000 bucks, 3 clicks on the website to purchase).

Stay tuned. I may just visit Vero (with 9 of my closest friends) and test out The Whole Shabang myself, maybe give them a few pointers along the way.

Or, I could just send in My Coffee Guys to host a training session. Lal and Abdul never let me down. Now THAT’S customer service.

Stop using this phrase…ASAP!

February 24, 2011

Filed under: Writing Tips, The Power of Persuasion, Effective Communication — @ 10:01 am

Did you ever ask someone to do something “ASAP” and then not get what you want, when you wanted it? Here’s why that happened:

The phrase ASAP lets people choose their own deadline. It means “as soon as possible,” which – in their world – might be now, tomorrow, next Wednesday, or never. Everyone has their own to-do list and method of prioritization, so the vague direction of ASAP puts the power in the recipient’s hands to judge the level of urgency.

And this is a no-no for getting people to do what we want.

YOU keep the power, or else your own to-do list will always be at the mercy of other people’s timelines. This doesn’t mean you can’t be flexible in your deadline…but if you don’t give one as a starting point, how will the person know where it fits in their to-do list?

There was a time when ASAP implied “immediately,” but those days are over. We’ve abused the phrase too much for it to have any real meaning (see how we’ve also done this with the phrase “thanks”).

So, if you want to greatly increase the chance that your deadline will be met, be clear in your request and state the specific day/time you would like to see results.

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