Keep Your Stationery Stationary

October 3, 2016 //
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I often see the words stationery and stationary mixed up. It’s an easy mistake to make, and is only an issue in the written word, since both words are pronounced identically and the context is usually clear.

Stationery is a noun, meaning office and desk-type stuff. Think millinery, machinery, that kind of thing.

Stationary is an adjective, meaning motionless. Think customary, arbitrary, and so on.

And of course, because this is English, you get nouns like anniversary and adjectives like blustery :-).

So, remember to keep your stationery stationary and you’ll be fine. Good luck!

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Categories Language

I Died

September 30, 2016 //
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These days, you hear kids say ‘I died’ all the time. Not as in ‘I died laughing,’ like my generation would have said, but as in ‘oops, I died,’ from losing their virtual life in a video game or anything that simulates real life.

It got me thinking about how seldom you would have heard kids saying that before video games like Pac Man, Space Invaders and the like. After all, to actually die – well, it’s a pretty horrendous concept for those of us who feel we haven’t accomplished much yet.

What a poor memory I had, and what a classic example of falling into the trap of judging everything from today’s perspective.

Of course, kids have been role-playing and more specifically playing war games since the human race has had toys, and they must have killed other soldiers or been killed themselves on many occasions. It’s all part of growing up.

Maybe it was mostly boys that played war games. I don’t know or remember, but it still sounds odd to me when I hear my daughter say ‘oops, I died.’

I recount this story not for its own intrinsic value but as a reminder to you and me that we often make decisions based on our own current context, when that can be the wrong context. It pays to think out of the box, and in the box of the person we’re trying to influence.

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Categories Customers, Language, Marketing

Dublin Airport

September 28, 2016 //
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I’ve spoken before about how the world’s airports have a lot to learn from Irish airports, in terms of their free wifi, free drinking water and general welcoming ambience.

Well, you can add to that the speed with which they expedite people.

Recently, I landed on an arriving flight at 8:59am. We taxied to the gate, got off and I walked swiftly down the travelators through to passport control. I then went to baggage claim, used the bathroom and picked up my checked-in bag. I walked out of the terminal to the coach to take me home.

Nothing unusual in that. Except that it was 9:17am. 18 minutes had passed from runway to coach. This was during rush hour in the country’s biggest airport. It means that my bags were unloaded and moved from the plane to the baggage conveyor in no more than 10 minutes, probably 7 or 8.

In a world where we often moan about the time it take us to get from outside the terminal to the runway, and vice versa, my 18 minutes stands in stark contrast.

Phenomenal stuff.

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Categories Communication, Marketing

To Do So, Go To

September 26, 2016 //
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I was reading a software manual the other day – I know, very rock and roll – and a sentence began ‘To do so, go to…’. All quite legitimate and grammatical. Also, written by an organisation that doesn’t use English as a first language and whose author was Eastern European, betrayed by a few other incidents of phrasing elsewhere in the document.

It got me thinking about our fabled, ancient, and multi-rooted English language, and how impenetrable it must seem to learners of the language. Not of the spoken language, but of the written language. The dictionary must be constantly at hand.

We don’t even think about it as native speakers, but right there you’ve got five two-letter words, all ending in ‘o’. In order, one’s a infinitive prefix, one’s an infinitive verb, one’s a kind of adverbial thingummybob that can mean a bunch of things depending on where it is in the sentence, the next one’s an imperative verb and the last one’s a preposition. Phew!

Not only that, but two of the words have completely different vowel soundings to the others.

They’re testimony to how the language has evolved over the years.

Congratulations to the writer for getting it right, but, boy, we don’t make it easy. I won’t even get started on two, two, sew and sow…

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Categories Communication, Language

Video Calls

September 23, 2016 //
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I vividly remember the Sam Mendes-directed launch video for the Apple iPhone 4. This was the democratisation of video calls. High quality video calls reducing the geographical distance between people. Kirk to Enterprise had become a reality.

We’d already had Skype video calls for a while of course, between computers. But now it was for mobiles and tablets.

It promised so much, and has probably delivered in places with an abundance of one critical ingredient in the successful video call.

Bandwidth.

I travel quite a bit, and miss my family when I do. Yet, I find the Facetime call is an increasingly frustrating – rather than satisfying – experience. We live in the country, and the broadband is 30MB ‘down’ in theory, but the contention is 1-to-48 so the video element at the family end is jittery, or falls out, or freezes.

This is also a problem in business where company networks have insufficient bandwidth. You don’t need video so much on business calls, but it’s more important to connect visually with people you love, I find.

So, until our contention improves, I’m leaving video calls and going back to audio. The kids are less distracted and you get a better quality of conversation. I’ll simply have to imagine their faces better.

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Categories Communication, Language

Product Descriptions

September 21, 2016 //
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In the world of high tech, the product description is a vital document. It’s the link between inside and out. It connects the worlds of product management and product marketing, like the bridge between the left and right sides of the brain.

The product marketer has the job of enabling the sales force and partners to sell the new product, and customers to buy it, with the right messaging and assets to support the buying process.

To do this well, the product marketer relies on a good product description. A well-written product description is the base document that feeds internal enablement documents, the data sheet, website content and more detailed pieces of collateral.

Despite this, it’s sometimes hard to get a good product description. Perhaps this is because the product management function is more internal and technical, and being able to translate this into something that resonates with the customer is more external and business-oriented. When you don’t get a product description, it tends to make your job as a a product marketer very difficult, and it tends to compress the timeframe for generating the content.

The product description needn’t be a huge document; in fact, the simpler the better in my opinion. Here’s my suggested outline of what a good product description should cover:

  • What the product or product enhancement is
  • What it does (feature/function)
  • Which customer and prospect audiences it’s for
  • What it can and can’t do
  • How we should message it 
  • How we will sell it (including customer fit and pricing if relevant)
  • How it stacks up against the competition
  • How it will be implemented and supported
  • What success looks like for the product

Not too difficult, and key to success.

Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales

Single Point of Signal Failure

September 19, 2016 //
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As I’m sure you’re aware, a single point of failure is a bad thing. If the single point fails, the whole system fails. That’s why we try to build in contingencies.

I was reminded of this – and if you’re a regular reader of this blog you’ll know that transportation and travel are recurrent themes – on a recent train journey into England’s capital. I was joining the train at Didcot, a 45-minute run into London and favoured as a daily commute by thousands of residents in the Didcot area.

The trains to London run every 15 minutes, and so they need to, to get the volume of people to London for work. A signal failure in the west of country cancelled one of these services and delayed another. This led to passengers being 5- and 6-deep on the platform edge. Because of the delay the train then had to drop anchor at another platform, which necessitated about a thousand people having to change platform.

Not for me. I stayed where I was, took a later train and was able to sit down and get some work done.

It seems amazing, though, that in 2016 a network and thousands of passengers can be compromised by a single point of failure, on this occasion a single point of signal failure.

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Categories Communication, Customers

UK M6

September 16, 2016 //
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Whenever I come back to the UK from Ireland for work I suffer a mild form of culture shock. Perhaps cultural adjustment is a more appropriate term.

I know you’ve read it before on this blog. The sheer volume of traffic is a problem.

This time I found myself on the M6. Not the Irish M6, that glorious, blissful, never-packed stretch of motorway that speeds folk between the midlands and Galway. No, the UK M6, the 50-year-old main artery from the middle organs to the upper left ventricle in England’s complex circulation system.

How do the Brits get anything done? The traffic was nose to tail, with warnings of 45 minute delays further up the track. I took a diversion, got back on the motorway and discovered the ball of congestion had simply moved further up the road, to where I was heading.

Add to that is the fact that you are in roadworks situations and lane closures for mile upon mile, and even after you turn off and thread your way into Manchester, jewel of the North, the roadworks keep coming.

Of course, the signs had not caught up to the fact that there was a broken down coach in one of the available lanes, which we spent time crawling past.

There are people that spend every day in this. What happens to the national productivity as a result of the cumulative loss of productivity of thousands of individuals? Nothing happens, because the rich and powerful have people come to them or they’re working from a yacht with an impossibly gorgeous view, or else, like the heads of government, they’re being driven around the place so they can get stuff done as they go.

The person that suffers is the rank and file, the regular Joe and Jo who form the labour backbone and who have their commute times lengthened and their free time with their families compressed, all in the name of progress.

Sometimes, I’m glad I can do some of my work at home and on the phone. It keeps the wheels of productivity greased, in case of the occasional roadblock.

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Categories Customers, General, Marketing

Start-up, Upstart

September 14, 2016 //
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I was walking past a sign the other day. It said ‘Stressed is desserts backwards.’

Have there ever been truer words, in more than one sense?

It got me thinking about other types of palindrome-type anagrams. A start-up is the reverse of upstart, if you’ll allow me the license of a rogue hyphen. Yet, strangely enough, this is exactly what a start-up needs to be in order to taste lasting success.

A start-up has to do things differently, approach the market in a different way, and offer a new way of doing things. It has to disrupt the status quo, the accepted, established way of doing things, and become the new accepted, established way of doing things. it’s the new kid on the block. In short, it has to be the upstart.

I guess this is why you sometimes hear start-ups referred to as upstarts.

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Categories Customers, General, Marketing, Planning, Technology

Internal Naming

September 12, 2016 //
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It never ceases to amaze me how much confusion there is, and much talking across purposes, when we haven’t agreed the basics in a project.

Especially an internal project. When it’s an internal project, we’re all taking with people inside the business so a level of understanding is assumed. All the more reason to make sure we define what we’re doing and the parts of what we’re doing, to avoid confusion, miscommunication, missed deadlines and frustration.

It’s the best way to avoid this kind of conversation:

“Where’s the rest of it?”

“What do you mean, the rest of it?”

“Well, I kinda assumed you were going to do this, this and this…”

“No, I think this and this was supposed to be all we were doing for today.”

“OK, I need to do a reset with the Chieftain, then. I don’t think we have everything s/he’s looking for.”

Sometimes it’s only when you get into the detail of a project that you uncover the misunderstanding. All the more reason to get your internal naming of parts of a project right, and define what’s involved. Otherwise you end up over-promising and under-delivering. Not good, especially when it’s an internal project.

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Categories Communication, Marketing
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