Bloghound

There’s one big thing holding companies back from innovation, growth, attracting and keeping amazing talent, realizing the possibilities of emerging trends like social media: obstacles. (aka fears)

Reflecting on some recent experiences I see it everywhere.

• I spoke with a small group of Fortune 500 executives about social media and they zeroed in on what don’t like about social media: losing control.
• A group of brilliant IP attorneys got really involved in a session about conversational marketing, but suggested I spend much more time on one particular slide: overcoming obstacles.
• A workshop for a Fortune 50 company resulted in a powerful point of view that management, sales and marketing collaboratively created –and loved– but a then decided to stay with a safe, bland message platform. Why? The official reason was “internal politics;” the real reason was fear to have a point of view so different and evocative from the industry norms.
• A pharmaceutical company hired actors to pose as customers because they feared what real customers might say to their employees.

Going to fear school

Every year I do one big thing for my own professional development. There’s only one criteria: it needs to scare me, shake me out of my comfort zone so I really learn something.

This week I’m taking a workshop on how to design and develop transformational workshops at Kripalu. I’m the only business person among medical professors and educational activists, healers and shamans, ministers and coaches. Dropping into this touchy-feely environment where people chant in the morning instead of firing up PowerPoint made me feel very, very uncomfortable — so much so initially that I wondered whether I could learn anything at all. My own obstacles and judgments kept whispering in my ear, “Get in the car and get out of Yogi Dodge.”

Then in a session called “Going Beyond What Usually Stops Us,” David Silberkleit led us through an exercise where we had to articulate those obstacles (and the fears lurking behind them) that stop us from pushing forward to accomplish more, reach higher, take risks. Unarticulated fears/obstacles are what usually stops people. Acknowledge the obstacles, then you can go forward faster. (And David should know; he acknowledged his professional obstacles and walked away a sizable family business and inheritance — Archie Comics.)

During the program I thought about how thrilling social media is, opening up new business models, changing product development, innovation, customers service, CRM, marketing, public relations and leadership communications. Yet for so many companies and people the first step in realizing the possibilities will be acknowledging the very real obstacles of social media: eliminating job types and functions, reallocating budgets, losing control, lacking new skills, feeling irrelevant. I’m sure you can add more as there are many.

Mindset vs. toolset, human change vs. program change

Just as social media is a mind set as much as a tool set, success will require human change as much as functional and program change.

Just as we marketers know strategy and creativity, so we will need to learn how to guide our organizations through tremendous behavioral change.

So for my final project tomorrow morning I’m trying out a new workshop: “Burn Down the Obstacles.”

Oh yeah.

PS — warmest thanks to teachers Ken Nelson and Lesli Lang and my brilliant fellow workshop participants for teaching more in a week than I’d learn in a year of business conferences.

Here’s an example of highly persuasive writing and a piece that can light up the word of mouth networks:? “Goodbye To All That (#2)”, from Robin Morgan, author and co-founder of the Women’s Media Center. Her first “Goodbye To All That” was published in 1970, and became a famous essay about women breaking free from politics of accommodation.

This essay is an example of highly-effective persuasive communications — it has a distinctive point of view, backs up those points with facts and examples, and is infused with passion and emotion.

Several people have told me they were leaning towards voting for Obama until friends emailed them this article. Now they are? rethinking Hillary.

The people at Bose must know that people trust other people far more than a manufacturer.? So in its ads for its new Bose Computer MusicMonitor Bose does something very clever that disarms and earns credibility.? Before listing the product benefits the ad uses a “warning.”

BEWARE THIS IS THE MANUFACTURER TALKING!

Then, rather than the usual “benefit” copy, the ad lists four things that Bose believes, e.g. “We believe that the Computer MusicMonitor also comes the closest to our goal that sound is meant to be heard and not seen.”? Another clever tactic as people gravitate to beliefs and points of view.

Watching Steve Jobs present is watching a master. What makes him so effective? Carmine Callo, author of Fire Them Up!, offers this 10 tips in an article over at BusinessWeek.com

1. Set a theme. And then deliver it several times throughout the presentation.

2. Demonstrate enthusiasm. Don’t be afraid about injecting some passion and personality.

3. Provide an outline. Start by saying there are four thins I want to talk about today.

4. Make numbers meaningful. Frame numbers within a context.

5. Try for an unforgettable moment. Have one scene that people will remember and talk about.

6. Create visual slides. Go big on graphics and short on bullet points.

7. Give ‘em a show. Think entertainment not lecture.

8. Don’t sweat the small stuff. Glitches happen. Don’t fret, move on.

9. Sell the benefit. Answer the question in the listeners’ minds, “What’s in this for me?”

10. Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse.

Chrysler CEO Bob Nardelli ’s poor communications judgment and skills hurt Home Depot’s reputation. But communications still doesn’t seem to be a priority for him. Rather than having corporate communications report to him, last month he put the organization under the human resources department, and the VP of communications resigned. ( I don’t blame him.)

This move signals that Nardelli doesn’t value communications — or thinks that he knows enough not to need a direct report in that function. Leadership is communications. Inspiring employees to act on ideas. Instilling confidence in partners. Building trust with the media and customers. Listening to disgruntled employees dealers and customers to get to root causes.

As Chrysler tries to make a comeback communication — not advertising — will be crucial. Methinks Nardelli is living in a bubble and when the bubble bursts he will again have egg all over his face.

How do you politely hijack a conversation when the talk starts to get heated and negative? Check out my guest post on the topic over at the IAOC blog, including an example of what happened when Cymfony’s Jim Nail questioned Joseph Jaffe about his widely-publicized conversational marketing study.

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And thanks to Wayne Hurlbut of Blog Business World for his review of Beyond Buzz. I’ll be interviewed by Wayne tonight at 8 EST/5 PST on his Blog Business Success Internet radio show.

The folks over at MIT Media Lab have created some interesting ways to assess whether someone is interested in or even paying attention to a conversation. In fact, using a machine that measures a person’s speaking style (activity, stress, empathy) the MIT researchers can predict the outcomes of a conversation with almost 90 percent accuracy – from just a few minutes of listening.

One tool is the Jerk-O-Meter, which measures how engaged you are with the other person on the phone and sends you messages, from “you’re a smooth talker” to “stop being a jerk” so you can alter your behavior.

Other tests include the The ElevatorRater, a program that analyzes charisma based on a speaker’s delivery, using non-linguistic speech features like pitch, speaking rate, pause durations. Another is the Human Interest Meter, measuring how interested people are in conversations.

I think tools like these hold some potential for communicators, giving us ways to more scientifically help people relax and be more genuine. They can also help us to crack the corporate speak syndrome, showing people just how engaged or unengaged others are when listening in to their podcasts, webinars, and in-person presentations.

One of the MIT researchers has suggested that perhaps people need to become better actors to be engaged in meaningful conversations. I say rubbish to that notion.

If we want genuine interest we need to be genuinely interested in what we’re talking about – and the people with whom we’re talking.

In today’s conversational world, whether online or in-person we have to learn how to find points of view – or help others in our organization find them – that are interesting to others and that we LIKE talking about. Points of view are an “also” to the traditional vision/mission/messaging basics; they’re beliefs, ideas, advice, and perspectives that are fresh, relevant and have a little emotion wrapped around them.

Harder than the usual “messaging” and best practices and feature/benefits? Surely. But if we don’t speak with conviction, research shows that people will tune us out in less than three minutes – despite the words themselves.

How a Point of View Differs

Nothing gets people talking (and thinking) like a contrarian or counterintuitive point of view. A good example can be seen in a post today over at the Running a Hospital blog by Paul Levy, CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. There’s a local hospital in financial trouble that none of the Boston-area hospital groups have the money to acquire and fix. Levy suggests an alternative — that the Service Employees International Union take over the hospital as they have a strong interest in hospital management and lots of cash.

“So why not approach SEIU with a proposal to have the union purchase, own and operate Carney Hospital? Let the union show how it can handle the full panoply of issues of running a hospital and demonstrate how it can profitably operate a neighborhood facility without the kind of state aid that has been pouring into Carney for all these years. Let the union negotiate contracts with the insurance companies, encourage access for low-income patients, maintain high regulatory standards for patient care, and do all the other things required of hospital management, while, of course, providing excellent working conditions for staff members and physicians.”

An innovative idea or a friendly smack at the unions who so often complain about how hospitals are managed? Hard to say, but Paul’s post will certainly be the topic of conversations in the Boston healthcare community this weekend. And there’s nothing healthier for any industry than frank, open conversations about contrarian ideas. That’s where change so often begins.

Thanks to Howard Kain, managing principal of the healthcare group at PNC for turning me on to Running a Hospital, a great example of CEO blogging — and in a highly-regulated, conservative industry like hospital management no less!

Interrupting is a communication felony, says Jerry Seinfeld in an interview with Oprah. “If someone is talking — and I don’t care what they’re saying or how excited you are to say what you have to say — wait until he or she is finished. When you interrupt, you’ve stopped listening. People want to be heard.”

One of the upsides about online conversations is that we listen better because we can’t interrupt. And maybe the reason many people say more online than they would in-person is that they feel that they can have a say. MySpace’s “Never Ending Friending Study,” released this summer, found that 50% of those surveyed said that they are “less awkward when I communicate on this site than in person,” and “the site allows me to more social than I am in person.”

One of the challenges in getting people to believe in a new business concept is having the right words to describe the concept. At the BIF3 Innovation Summit CEOs Robin Chase of GoLoco, Jack Hughes of TopCoder, William Herb of Linear Air, and BIF3 co-host Bill Taylor talked about the importance of messaging to be able to talk about business concepts in ways that resonate –with employees, customers and investors. Without that messaging, it’s difficult to get people to believe in the idea.

How these execs have distilled their concepts to people “get it” quickly:

• GoLoco: personal public transportation system
• Linear Air: car service with wings
• Fast Company magazine: like Harvard Business Review and Rolling Stone combined

All expressed how difficult it is to hone in on those few words that capture the idea. Note how straightforward these concepts are – and how easy it is for other people to use the language.

A few days a go I was talking to a CMO about his company’s new messaging. “We’ve got it done, but I can’t really explain it to you over the phone,” he said. “I need to walk you through the deck.” Sounds like it isn’t done….

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