OMG! I Didn’t Sign on for This!

Many decades ago, when I was as younger, but not shorter, I was executive editor for a newly appointed Vice President of Product Development in a publishing company. Shortly before the yearly sales conference, she called me into her office to ask my advice about our editorial team.

“This is the first time we’re taking the entire editorial department to sales conference. I have certain expectations of what I think they should be doing there. Do you think I should tell them what my expectations are?”

What?

I felt transported back to conversation of the kind that my younger older brother used to use to tease me as a kid and I was so tempted to say what he used to say to me.

“I can’t tell you because then you’ll know.”

Instead I answered with an emphatic YES! and I followed it with a few words on how much easier it is to get the behavior we expect if we simply explain what it is and why we value it.

Sounds like a crazy conversation – eh? But it really happened.

Expectations and Drama

Think about the last “high drama” business situation you observed or were pulled into. Someone was seriously complaining about something that didn’t go the way he or she thought it should.

What he or she expected out of the situation is not what actually happened.

Consider this scenario …

You and I are asked to move a cart of apples down a dirt road to neighboring farm in a limited amount of time.

We expect our apple carts to go down the road smoothly to our destination and suddenly one tips over. Apples everywhere. It’s a bad surprise, extra work, and unplanned stress. It’s almost a crisis.

Now suppose that someone said before you started that about halfway through the assigned apple cart trip, you’ll hit a rut, tip the cart, and have to collect the apples again right the cart to continue. It happens to everyone. Now there’s no surprise, no extra work, and the stress is planned. It’s not a crisis. It’s part of the quest.

Knowing what’s going on makes a difference, doesn’t it?

Herein lies the moral of the story. Plan the work and share the plan. Let everyone know what to expect and the drama in your event, project or business will be a whole lot less.

Have you seen any situations lately where lack of planning or communication turned into drama instead of great business?

PS If you want less drama in your business, stop being dramatic yourself.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Data is Interesting. People Are Irresistible

One evening at dinner, Rick Murray offered the most interesting insight into the state of marketing. He pointed to the moment that marketers started measuring everything as the moment when we lost the “art of marketing,” turning it into a science. It’s been a thought I’ve been thinking on for almost a year. To me, it seems a lot has been lost.

The numbers and data that we collect, plot, and analyze flatten out the people they represent. The time that it takes to build the surveys, administer and interpret them, and then discuss their various possible implications have taken away time once spent in more organic and natural conversation with people who help our businesses thrive.

Though those conversations are harder to quantify, they add to the intuitive detail that fills out the “personality” of our customers, the nuance of their motivations and intention, their yearnings and wants. Those numbers, charts, and graphs flatten the people we might be thinking about. That’s how we came to talk about living breathing human beings as users, eyeballs, consumers, anything but the people they are.

It’s important to sit silent sometimes with our thoughts about the people we serve. Who are the people who help our businesses thrive and what brings them to love what we do?

Numbers can’t explain your smile when you felt you were heard.

A check box doesn’t fully express the deliciousness of discovering a product feature that seems put there just for you.

A line graph doesn’t make my delighted response to a fabulous experience the same as yours.

Understanding the nuance of my loyalty and yours are what gets us each to find that company irresistible.

That only happens when the company has a mindset that were individual people, not numbers on a survey.

People go flat in a data stream and when we feel flat it’s hard to invest energy.

Every time you see data, get to the heart of it. Stop to think about the people it represents.

Be irresistible.
Liz Strauss
How can I help you be irresistible?

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Pairing Sentences

When we learn to speak, it starts by listening. Google has started a global listening machine.

Google has announced it’s building a Translation Center to connect people who need text and documents translated with people who can do that. Such a central location for language conversation has fabulous implications for the Internet and the translation industry.

Amir Helzer, of I Can Localize a translation service that combines human and technological solutions, and I spoke about the Google Translation Center on Friday. Amir suggested that, looking at Google’s core business, it’s likely that this new center will function similar to Google AdWords — connecting buyers to seller without intervention. He and I discussed the nuances of accurate cultural translations. Amir pointed out that, “Now that Google has made this move, people are talking about the translation industry. It opens the door to a discussion of quality and standards and the value of providing a local feel to a global web business.”

Google will be collecting words in context to build what Brian McConnell has called a free global translation memory.

Google has been investing significant resources in a multi-year effort to develop its statistical machine translation technology. Statistical MT works by comparing large numbers of parallel texts that have been translated between languages and from these learns which words and phrases usually map to others — similar to the way humans acquire language. The problem with statistical MT is that it requires a large number of directly translated sentences.

Before we speak, we listen. Are you ready to start speaking and listening?

Global is the new local. Communication is relationship.

Liz Strauss
Find out about working with Liz.

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