Hall of Fame: Consultant-Speaker Gregg Fraley Builds Credibility Online (with PowerPoint Slide for Classroom Use) |
March 7, 2013 |
Gregg Fraley is a highly regarded expert in the field of creativity and business innovation, but because his services are intangible, potential clients can’t “test drive” those services before making a purchase decision. His website shows the care he takes to build credibility as part of his communication efforts.
Bovee and Thill blog – Hall of Fame – Gregg Fraley
Hall of Fame: Creative Commons’s Effective Use of Plain Language (with PowerPoint Slide for Classroom Use) |
January 24, 2013 |
The ability to explain complex topics in clear terms is one of the most important skills a business communicator can have. This example from the Creative Commons website, explaining three levels of content licensing, demonstrates the power of plain language.
Bovee and Thill blog – Hall of Fame – Creative Commons website
Hall of Shame and Fame: Apple Statements Regarding Apple Maps (with PowerPoint Slide for Classroom Use) |
October 3, 2012 |
Within minutes of its release as part of an operating system upgrade on Apple mobile devices, the Apple Maps feature began to generate howls of protest. Compared to the Google mapping feature it replaced, Apple Maps had numerous problems, from egregious errors to missing functionality.
Users accustomed to finding just about anything through the Google app flooded the Internet with examples of mapping blunders. A railway station in Helsinki showed up as a park in Apple Maps. A farm in Ireland appeared as an airport. The Washington Monument was misplaced by several hundred yards. Driving directions steered one user down a railroad track. A search for the huge John Lewis department store in central London yielded nothing, even when the user was standing on the sidewalk outside the store. (This Tumblr blog offers dozens of examples—some amusing, some frightening.)
Beyond the errors and omissions, the removal of real-time mass transit schedules upset people who had been relying on this feature to plan journeys.
Two responses from Apple caught our eye during the aftermath. The first merits our Hall of Shame award, but the second gets into the Hall of Fame.
The Hall of Shame Example
An article on CNN.com highlighted the many problems Apple Maps was displaying soon after launch and quoted this response from Apple’s Trudy Muller:
Customers around the world are upgrading to iOS 6 with over 200 new features including Apple Maps, our first map service. We are excited to offer this service with innovative new features like Flyover and Siri integration, and free turn by turn navigation. We launched this new map service knowing that it is a major initiative and we are just getting started with it. We are continuously improving it, and as Maps is a cloud-based solution, the more people use it, the better it will get. We’re also working with developers to integrate some of the amazing transit apps in the App Store into iOS Maps. We appreciate all of the customer feedback and are working hard to make the customer experience even better.
There are five major problems with this response:
First, there is no acknowledgment of any problems, even though people all over the world were having problems and sharing them all over the Internet.
Second, there is no element of apology. Many users were furious, particularly given that they had no choice in the switch from Google to Apple Maps. (Of course, you can’t apologize if you don’t admit you even have a problem.)
Third, the upbeat tone adds insult to injury. Yes, companies need to put a positive spin on things whenever they can, but when customers are angry, they really don’t want to hear that you’re “excited to offer” the very service that is driving them nuts. Yes, Flyover and Siri are cool features to add to mapping, but if the map sends you astray, they aren’t all that helpful. And promising to make customer experience “even better” is tone deaf in this context. Something has to be perceived as “good” before it can get “better.”
Fourth, angry customers also don’t care that it’s a “major initiative” or that you’re “just getting started with it.” They care that a major feature on their expensive phones was suddenly replaced with one that was unreliable and in many instances simply unusable. Plus, this aspect of the message risks coming across as “give us a break; this is really hard and we aren’t finished yet.”
Fifth, with “the more people use it, the better it will get,” the message comes close to blaming users, or at least suggesting that they share the responsibility for fixing the problems. And what are people supposed to do the meantime, keep driving down railroad tracks or walking across lakes?
All in all, it’s a classic. But not the kind of classic any company wants to be known for.
The Hall of Fame Example
About a week later, Apple CEO Tim Cook responded with an open letter to Apple customers that acknowledged the extent of the problem, apologized for the frustration Apple created, and, most impressively, explained how to put alternative mapping capabilities—including Google—on affected Apple products. (Click here for an annotated slide.)
Cook’s letter does repeat the “the more people use it, the better it will get,” which we believe is an ill-advised message point. Mapping is an important feature on an expensive product, and it is Apple’s responsibility to fix the problem, not customers’, even if customer input can help. However, the letter has enough other helpful information conveyed in a respectful way that we still think it offers a worthy example.
From Lighthearted to Laugh-Out-Loud: Are Social Media Changing the Tone of Business Writing? |
June 16, 2011 |
Have you noticed more companies lowering their guard when it comes to communicating in a lighthearted style?
We have only anecdotal observations on this, but as social media change the nature of the relationships between companies and their stakeholders, we’ve noticed an uptick in the number of companies working humor into their routine communication efforts.
At the subtle end of the humor spectrum, for example, the software company Techsmith includes the following privacy statement at the end of its email newsletters:
We’re happy to have you on our list, and since we want to keep you all to ourselves, we never share your email address with anyone.
“We want to keep you all to ourselves” is a pleasant and slightly offbeat way to convey both the privacy assurance and the idea that Techsmith values its customers.
At the other end of the spectrum—far, far at the other end—the online music retailer CD Baby has some fun with its version of letting customers know their orders are on the way:
Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.
A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure it was in the best possible condition before mailing.
Our world-renowned packing specialist lit a local artisan candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.
We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved “Bon Voyage!” to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, May 17, 2011.
We hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. In commemoration, we have placed your picture on our wall as “Customer of the Year.”
Such an over-the-top message wouldn’t work for a bank or a medical products supplier, to be sure. However, the humor probably promotes a closer emotional bond with CD Baby, if only for poking fun at other companies that take themselves a little too seriously.
Have you seen notable examples of “business funny” that suggest a more relaxed approach to business communication (outside of advertising, that is)? Would you consider having your students try a writing exercise in this vein?
By the way, we’re going to take a short break and will begin posting again in mid-August. Have a great summer!
Situations that involve negative news are sometimes opportunities in disguise. After Toyota had issued several vehicle recalls and been subjected to quite a bit of media scrutiny regarding product quality, the company’s chief quality officer took the opportunity to discuss the meaning of a product recall and explain how Toyota was responding to the situation.We've annotated a copy of the news release that you can download from SlideShare or from the link below.
Hall of Fame: TD Ameritrade Aligns Form with Function (with PowerPoint Slides for Classroom Use) |
April 19, 2011 |
One of the most powerful advantages of electronic media is the ability to structure the design and delivery of a message in a way that supports the optimal flow of the various information points within the message—matching form with function, in other words.The brokerage firm TD Ameritrade did this beautifully on a webpage that directs the reader's eye on a clear path through a well-organized message. We've annotated an eight-slide PowerPoint presentation that shows each step in the communication flow. Download from here or from SlideShare.
A few readers have reported difficulties with downloading the classroom slides that accompany some of our blog posts. For your convenience, all the slides are now available on SlideShare at http://www.slideshare.net/Bovee.
Hall of Fame: Fear No Project’s Minimalist Design Keeps Focus on Content (with PowerPoint Slide for Classroom Use) |
March 10, 2011 |
The project management blog Fear No Project provides a good example of how less can be more when a writer wants to keep the focus on textual content. As this annotated PowerPoint slide shows, the design is about as minimal as one can possibly get, but it supports blogger Bruce McGraw's goal of sharing in-depth project management information with his readers.
Hall of Shame–and Fame: Chargify Infuriates Its Customer Base, The Shares the Lessons Learned |
February 21, 2011 |
Want to make an unpleasant situation even worse? Spring the news on people with no warning.
Chargify, which provides securing billing solutions for small to midsized e-commerce companies, charges its clients flat monthly fees based on the number of customers they have. This tiered pricing plan keeps costs low for e-commerce startups that still have few revenue-generating customers.
Until recently, the lowest tier in Chargify’s pricing plan had an extremely attractive price point—it was free. The idea behind the free tier was to attract e-commerce companies still in their startup phase, and as they grew, they would grow into the higher tiers and become paying clients. However, Chargify discovered that many companies in the free tier grew very slowly, if they grew at all, and Chargify wound up supporting a lot of users that weren’t bringing in any revenue.
In order to pull in enough money to deliver the dependable, sustainable services that its clients needed, Chargify realized it needed to raise prices, and that included charging lowest-tier clients for the first time. The company announced its new pricing structure and immediately came under attack from many of its clients—for the price increases themselves, for the lack of any advance notice, and for Chargify’s refusal to “grandfather” existing customers under their original pricing plans. Some called the company “greedy” or “stupid,” and a few went so far as to accuse it of bait-and-switch tactics.
As bloggers and commenters across the Internet piled on, the technology news site TechCrunch summed up with the situation with an article that began, “It’s been a rough day for Chargify . . .” After spending two long days responding to criticisms on Twitter, industry blogs, and other venues, co-founder David Hauser wrote an unusually frank blog post titled “How to Break the Trust of Your Customers in Just One Day: Lessons Learned from a Major Mistake.” He said the company made “a massive mistake” in the way it handled the changes to its pricing model. By failing to alert customers well in advance of the change, he continued, Chargify “broke a trust that we had developed with our customers over a long period of time, and will take much to repair. We should have communicated our need and desire to remove free plans and provided more information about how this would happen, and over a period of time leading up to the change.”
The services Chargify provides take money to deliver, and the price increases were necessary, but everyone involved agrees that the situation was not handled well. Hauser and his team will continue to learn new lessons as they expand Chargify, but you can bet they won’t ever initiate a price increase without giving their customers plenty of warning. (By the way, if you teach Introduction to Business, this story has a number of interesting angles to discuss in class, including the difficulty of validating a business model before it goes live, the financial imperative to jettison unprofitable customers, and the pluses and minuses of the freemium pricing strategy.)
Hall of Fame: Red Bull’s Audience-Centered Approach to Social Media (with PowerPoint Slide for Classroom Use) |
January 20, 2011 |
The energy drink company Red Bull has one of the largest fan bases on Facebook, giving it the opportunity to connect with millions of enthusiastic customers. This annotated PowerPoint slide illustrates the company's audience-centered approach to social media—sharing information and stimulating conversations among fans—rather than the traditional mode of delivering promotional messages to passive receivers.
