5am at Mango Media Caribbean

A little respect please

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 08:05:00 -0400

It's pretty basic.

Clients should put out the Tender Box the date and time they asked for the RFP (Request For Proposal) to be submitted.

It saves the folks in Legal from running around asking, "Do we have a tender due today?" It makes the company look professional.

At the very least, it shows respect for the blood, sweat and tears that agencies put into getting their bids ready.

What if..

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 01:37:00 -0400

Working in accounts payable is pretty easy. You get invoices from faceless companies. You issue company cheques. You sit at your desk and crunch numbers. Company X gets paid on the 17th. and company Y on the 21st.

That’s it. But what if it wasn’t?.

What if you decide that your job in the accounts department tucked behind the stock room on the ground floor is the most important in the company so you decide to get to know the folks to whom you write those cheques. That Company X is really run my Mr Ben, a short, stocky man who has been entrepreneur for ten years and spends a lot of his time working with young people, 15-18 year old drug addicts in a church rehab programme. Most of his own salary goes there.

Will it matter how quickly you issue his cheque? It might. But it will certainly make you aware of the consequences of a late payment. Suddenly the cheque owed to Mr Ben has a story.

And what if you decide that you want to be more efficient in getting Mr Ben his cheques on time so you automate the payment systems. Mr Ben and others now know exactly what time their cheques will get to the bank. No more standing in line. No more delays. No more saying that the cheque is waiting on another signature.

Suddenly you, the accounts payable person operates like a VP/ Accounts, renowned for your efficiency and care. “ How are you Mr Ben and that 15 year-old you’ve been working with, has he stopped using?”

At Christmas parties your CEO’s ears ring if only because so may people have the nicest things to say. You become your company's most important brand ambassador.

Same thing with the person who greets customers at the door, I suppose.

What if you replace the grumpy, unfriendly face with an intelligent, warm one. What if the receptionist has buy-in. What if he/she understands every person who walks through the door has a purpose: to get a job, have a meeting, audit the accounts, that they'’ve come for a reason. What if the receptionist understands that she could change the mindset of the guest.

“ How are you Mr Ben, are you here to see Mr James today? Oh did you know he just got a promotion.”

Mr Ben because of the receptionist’s help is able to have a humane moment in a business context.

Think of the job acceptance rate that will go up if the first impression is a memorable one? Think of the tax auditor might be a little more friendly if her greeting was cheerful? Think of of yourself, of how more pleasant your walk into your building will be.

Now I know what you must saying. That blogger lives in utopia. Nobody loves every aspect of her or his job. And there certainly aren’t any perfect jobs

But in this imperfect world of work I know it is possible to enjoy your job a whole heap, love the people you work with and the clients that you serve, even as you ignore the crap around.

In any case, you just can’t stop me from wondering what if…?

Facebook Places, have checked in yet?

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 09:27:00 -0400

It was great to see the Foursquare representative share the platform with fresh faced Mark Zuckerberg last evening as the CEO of Facebook launched the company’s geo location based tool, Facebook Places.

Frankly I thought that the body language of the Foursquare rep. suggested discomfort or maybe it was displacement, because no matter how he tried to present it, Foursquare was perhaps present at its own funeral last night.

I dabbled with Foursqaure, the location-sharing programme, since its inception but found it a lonesome place. Few of my friends were on it, I took no real joy in being Mayor of a Mango Media Caribbean or Angelos’ ( I figure it’s because I’ve never been much of a gamer). And I missed the interaction that you get form Twitter and Facebook. I noticed that when I share selected Foursquare updates to Facebook, it was then I got responses and a wall conversation ensued. With Foursqaure updates alone it felt I was just sending pings into space.

Facebook Places promises to be different, less of a game and more connection. Facebook says it is adding Places merely to enrich the social experience it already provides. The company says its users already post status messages. Users can tap a new Places icon in the Facebook app on their iPhones and do this more easily, complete with a map. (You initially can check in to Places only if you have Apple’s iPhone, though you can use a site at touch.facebook.com via your browser on other phones and laptops that can track your location and support HTML 5 technology.)

“We’re just building a new way for people to share that information in an engaging way,” says one Facebook official at the launch

So what do you think Facebook Places? One of my Twitter friends lamented during the live launch last evening that he didn’t want Facebook knowing more about him than it did already. It’s one thing to share a thought or a picture on Facebook or Twitter, but telling people where you are physically was tipping the balance for him.

So do you feel the same, would you want people to know where you are 24 hours a day? Do you have any privacy concerns?

Relationship issues at work? Maybe it's time you figured out each others communication style

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 09:21:00 -0400

A close friend asked me to give her teenaged daughter a summer job. Jenny is quite shy and doesn’t say much.

“How was your weekend?” I asked when she walked into the door this morning.

“ It was good,” she answered abruptly, struggling with her bag so she could seem busy.

“No Jenny,” I said, “I really want to know, how was your weekend?”

Her eyes lit up. She was remembering a conversation I had with her the previous week where I said that there was no need to fear communicating and though we were of different age groups and had vastly different communication styles she could still open herself up to another way of interacting. Soon, we were having a discussion about Nick and Nora, a movie she had seen over the weekend.

In those precious moments Jenny and I were bridging gaps that few people (co workers, husbands and wives, sisters, mothers and daughters) even know exist much less understand how to close them. The truth is the key to any successful relationship is to understand your communication style, note how different it is from the person with whom you’re interacting and figure out how to adapt your style in order to be heard.

The talkers out there know exactly what I mean. If you’re one, and the person in the cubicle next to you isn’t, the quickest thing is to tag him/her as aloof or arrogant. The reality may be quite the opposite. Yet no one ever considers that the co-worker maybe just plain shy. Talkers like other talkers. And the quiet-types? They need mental and physical space to think. Any good book on human communication will tell you that while we all have smidgens of both tendencies in our personalities in stressful situations, a talker wants a back and forth and a quiet-type needs some space.

In my own relationship, my husband and I can’t ever discuss politics; he considers my cool analysis as disinterest, I consider his passionate outbursts as illogical. He is neither illogical nor am I disinterested but cultural differences have made us incompatible in this area. After several heated discussions we now just avoid the topic altogether and I have learned how to remain silent when some innocuous politician with an even more innocuous policy gets him going.

Silence though does not always work.

In the office, I’m the deductive type and on Monday morning an assistant would come in and want to spend 20 minutes talking about her weekend. One day after her recap went on one second longer than necessary I was forced to say” “Let’s talk strategy first, then we can catch up on our weekends?” She clued in then and we have had a much better relationship since.

Different communications style can lead to all sort of conflicts the trick is (and this is what I am teaching teenaged Jenny) to learn how to switch your communication tendencies to match the person with whom you’re trying to persuade, discuss and/or interact. You can do this in a couple of ways 1) You can read your listener i.e look for glazed over over eyes, a sudden attempt at busyness, fidgeting etc. 2) You you can simply ask the person how he/she wants you to communicate: more talk or less, emotional or logical, inductive or deductive. Believe me figuring how to bridge your communication differences is a key solution in most relationship problems.

Ideas are Cheap and Plentiful

Wed, 11 Aug 2010 08:40:00 -0400

We all have that one friend in our life who is a dreamer. In my case it’s June, I call her my ‘if only’ friend.

“If only, I had opened that vegetarian restaurant like I thought of years ago, I’d be making tons of money right now,” she said one year ago.

And later on.

“If only I’d listen to my instinct I would have started an art shop, see how well Tish is doing?” She is referring to another friend who though not as creative as June recently secured a loan to open a small gallery.

My friend June is a real ideas type but her thinking is illogical. As I keep telling her (but lately have learned to shut up), Having an idea of a restaurant has nothing to do with actually opening one. What you do is what matters, not what you think or say or dream of.

Doubt me?

Try peddling your ideas on the street, how much do you think they’ll fetch? See what I mean? June’s idea of the veggie restaurant won’t go for much nor will the art shop, not at least until she actually starts working a plan. Of course the constraints can be humongous but it can make you work harder, make you see how far you can get with what you have.

My dad, who was a journalist, used to often tell me: “Go write!" I was only 12-13 at the time and despites my groans and protests I would come back to him with reams of paper about silly things like how I spent my day or notes about how much I loved my grandmother.

I think in his directive he was really telling me that the most important thing in execution was the beginning, getting started. The second idea was committing to the task and making mistakes (which he would correct) and getting better at things. So if I got pad, pencil and started writing on just about I would develop a skill that I could later put to use.

Ideas are cheap and plentiful. The real deal is to begin to execute.

Why is PR writing so atrocious..

Tue, 10 Aug 2010 08:43:00 -0400

... Because they are filled with buzz words written by agency folks who do not have the slightest idea what they're writing about. They don't understand the product or the client. They have no background in the industry.

We didn’t write that. PR blogger Mark Ragan did, here’s his take on why so many releases get thrown into the garbage by irritated journalists.

When you’re finished reading the post maybe you can add some buzz words and industry jargon that you see everyday that ‘totally’ kills the stuff coming out from agencies and heck, even corporate communication departments for that matter.

Just suppose...

Thu, 05 Aug 2010 07:58:00 -0400

... That you removed the table from your conference room and replaced the seats with armchairs. Suppose you turned it into a living room. How much would that affect your meetings?

Hmmmm.

That's how much your meetings are about power, not communication.

"From the cluetrain manifesto."

Are the prices you charge winning or losing you business?

Wed, 04 Aug 2010 10:32:00 -0400

A strange and surprsing thing happened to our firm earlier this year, we started losing every bid for which we tossed our hat into the ring.

First it was a year long public relations project from the European Commission (we were in the final 2) . Then it was the bid for the PR campaign of a public utility, and later, a one month intensive media training session for a team of crisis communicators. There it was, three out of three, all back-to-back, all major losses.

There were a few possibilities pointing their scrooge like fingers as to the reasons why? Had our competitors gotten better? Were our RFPs missing the target? Had we grown complacent?

I never for a moment thought about price until a prospective client called us after our presentation to say we had the most incisive of all the proposals his executives had seen, he then asked me to lower our price points to match what our closest competitor had put on the table.

This was the eye opener.

The realities of a new global economy meant a few adjustments in price, the question was how to go about doing it. Naturally my first instinct was to lower prices just to be able to compete but since I have never devised my firm’s pricing as a ‘fly by the seat of my pants’ activity, I decided to give some real thought to the issue.

Like other committed small businesses, my team works long and hard at bringing our sleuth of services to market and pricing is based on the often dedicated and invisible work needed to execute a project, our expertise, the service agenda, the opportunity cost and yes even the financial risk. When we look at pricing just as a mix of marking -up costs, maintaining margins, matching competitors, or doing things the way they’ve always been done, then we miss the point that pricing is really a strategy: one of survival and growth, yes even in the toughest of business climates.

So to the solutions for the tough times for small businesses, I came up with new ground rules:

Know your value and what you can offer; set value based prices
Acknowledge that each client is different with divergent needs and a one size pricing is not the best strategy
Offer targeted service versions to meet specific customer needs, I call it a Bronze, Silver and Gold package. A good, better, and best version that is designed to capture different customer valuations. In the end the customer decides
Over deliver; this never hurts and ensures you’re the top of mind choice for your client

Focusing on better pricing (not necessarily lower draconian cuts) is not easy. It requires confidence, an enormous amount of follow through on your service promise and the requisite expertise, you’ve got to be better than your nearest rival; you must be super service oriented.

Each day I say a thank prayer to that prospect (now client) who gave me that wake up call. Since then, we’ve won 5 out of 7 bids, seems like we’re back on track.

The greatest obstacle to your creativity might just be (gulp) you.!

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 12:10:00 -0400

" Although we, as creative minds, would rather not think about it, the sad truth is that most of our ideas will never see the light of day. Indeed, brilliant breakthroughs are conceived and plundered in the hands of creative geniuses all the time. But why?

Creativity, it seems, is not only the catalyst for new ideas. Creativity is also the greatest obstacle to seeing our ideas through to the finish.

So, what is this darker side of creativity that obstructs progress?

It is the series of negative tendencies and challenges that accompany the creative psyche: The self-doubts; The distaste for negative feedback; The tendency to use idea-generation as a way to escape the pain of self-discipline and execution; The rampant disorganization that (supposedly) fosters creative thinking.

It turns out that ideas don’t happen because they’re great—or by accident. Ideas are made to happen through a series of other forces. And And the most neglected among them is organization. Great execution starts with supreme organization.

Ultimately, organization comes down to howyou manage your energy. Contrary to popular belief, organization is not about “neatness,” it is about efficiency and allowing yourself to take action as swiftly as possible."

Thank you Scott Belsky for writing this.

When journalists get it wrong...

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 10:03:00 -0400

2 years ago my assistant, La Toya, sent a press release to a young reporter at one of the daily newspapers.

Our client, the Managing Director of a new hotel, said that the reporter had called several times for an interview that they had developed a rapport and she would be the best person to whom we should send the release.

Typically, I would have cautioned against going with anyone new (this particular reporter had just finished her internship with the newspaper) but this was a press release announcement giving facts on the hotel’s progress. There were questions about its late opening and budget overruns.

Should have been simple enough,

Except that on the day we opened the newspaper, the press release became an article with every single quote ascribed to my assistant, La Toya, whose only role was to press the send button with her email signature at the bottom for inquires.

We were mad. The client, well, he was livid.

When we called and asked for ( and yes after 2 days passed, demanded ) a corrected version we were told by an obviously embarrassed reporter that the editor said no. La Toya’s email address was at the bottom of the release, this particular editor assumed (incorrectly) that the quotes had come from her. "Next time don’t do that," we were told.

Everything between the client and my firm went downhill from there. I would go so far to say we lost a valuable contract because an editor refused to admit that she got it wrong.

It’s unfortunate, but I have several stories like that. Stories where reporters and editors neglect correction requests with little consequence. Where the buck stops with one person and you have little or no recourse to appeal.

I know that minor errors in the news are part and parcel of journalism with its rushed deadlines, understaffed newsrooms and sometimes an over zealous need to create a headline with more sizzle then substance. But what happens when what is being reported is so wrong, (and I am not talking about a typo in a name or a puntuation mistake ) and the the “oh oh we blew it” is so serious that the small square retraction box buried under the weather box on Page 3 does not quite seem to suffice.

Scott Maier, associate professor of journalism at the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication writes on the Poynter website" that a better rule of thumb is needed for reporters who get the big picture and the small facts wrong.

Here’s some statistics from Maier’s research on corrections by the media.

“Industry and scholarly research have documented time and time again that errors in the news media are disturbingly common. The largest accuracy audit, a recent study that Philip Meyer and I conducted of 22 newspapers, found an error rate among the highest in seven decades of accuracy research: over 59 percent of local news and feature stories were found by news sources to have at least one error.

"In nearly the same proportion, news sources identified 'subjective errors' -- information considered technically correct but misleading," Maier said.

"But these errors of meaning were what news sources found most egregious -- and measurably damaging to media credibility.”

Of the people Maier surveyed, only one in 10 informed newspapers about errors.

“Many said they thought the inaccuracies were inconsequential. But some wondered why they should bother reporting errors and assumed newspapers wouldn't respond. When asked to review stories for accuracy, news sources found factual errors in about every other news and feature story.”

I am not sure what the answers are: opportunities for the wronged party to give another view of the story, a corrected headline that circumvents the wrong one, deleting an article if published on the web, tying correction rates to performance evaluations of reporters. Or may be it really lies in taking the time to recheck the work sentence by sentence, and thereafter hold reporters and editors accountable for mistakes.

We hold journalists to a higher standard than most other professionals. We are told, and know it is human to err but I think when newsrooms refuse to admit error, when they set themselves up to be the ultimate arbiter of what is right and wrong, true or false, that’s when the very foundation of begins to crumble.

Can virtual gifts help your brand?

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 08:57:00 -0400

When we trained Angostura’s corporate communications team last week on the value and impact of social media to their brand, we mentioned how effective it would be if they developed some of their products into virtual gifts allowing their fans (who in Trinidad and Tobago does not feel proud that Bitters or 1919 was made here; both products also enjoy worldwide recognition) to pass it on as a non physical, albeit important objects in the social world.

Don’t discount the power of virtual gifting for though it may take a while for your executives to stop scratching their heads, virtual gifting has become a powerful measure of word of mouth marketing and an important tool for marketers.

Mc Kinsey, one of the world’s most respected firms to advise on issues of strategy, organization, technology, and operations, reports that these gifts play an important role in facilitating virtual word of mouth.

“While the notion of virtual goods—nonphysical objects used in online communities and games—still puzzles many executives, it’s quite apparent that consumers love them.” People acquire or compete for virtual items obsessively on Foursquare, Zynga, facebook and it is estimated that virtual goods have become a very real $5 billion industry worldwide.

To read more about how brands can unlock the potential of social networks this article is a must read.

A Noodle in a Pasta Bowl..

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 10:36:00 -0400

...At least that’s what I felt like when the Request for Proposal (RFP) from a fairly large company landed on my desk.

Here was what the letter said.

You are required to write and edit our supplement that will be inserted to the 2 daily newspapers. Mango Media Caribbean is required to raise funding through advertising. Let us know the cost and how you intend to the achieve our objectives. Note that should Mango Media Caribbean not raise enough money from advertising, the firm will not be paid for writing and editing the supplement

Hmmmmm.

Needless to say I asked a few questions, just to be sure I got the RFP right.

“Are you saying that if the company does not raise the required advertising dollars, we will not be paid for the editorial work ?”

It sounded more incredulous once it was in black and white. And wouldn’t you know it I never heard from that company again.

Maybe as service providers we have the word fool (or worse) seared into our heads. I guess some large firms figure that in a tough economy small companies may be hungry and/or desperate for work and willing to accept all kinds of conditions and demands.

For sure, some other consultant took that firm up on their offer. That their strategy was to see if they could throw an outrageous request onto the wall and like pasta see which noodle would stick.

I’m not paranoid.

Over the past last year in particular I’ve come across a number of firms who if you ask them about budget, you’d get no response. Inquire on the timing of a decision after a proposal is written and they don’t know. Ask them about payment and it's a trade secret.

In fact their perfect service provider is small, eager, and not quite aware fact that there still a lot of valuable business to be from respectful clients if only for the patience and the gumption to find them.

Thankfully as tough as the business climate may be, we’re not one of them.

More Space Please

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 11:05:00 -0400

This week my friend Nikola Lashley returns from a sojourn, heart sore yet revived.

Nikola has spent the last 5 weeks traveling through the Caribbean recording the magic, erasing the myths and capturing the mystery of the islands for a series of publications which she is writing.

From her brief teases on facebook, this was not a physical journey as much as it was a spiritual one. And I could tell that in the time away my friend found a space to make decisions long overdue.

We all need that, don’t we?

Room to breathe.

Time away from the clutter and the noise.

A space to stretch something other than our busy fingers across static computer keyboards.

That what I told my colleague, Reinaldo Novoa, a web developer, who is currently working on giving this blog better functionality and along with web designer Ryan Olton, a new look.

“ It’s too cluttered I said, the design needs room to breathe.” What I was really asking for was more space.

I know this is something most of my clients hate seeing. More space represents a waste of money, so logos must be bigger, every nook and cranny of a page filled to the hilt with text and pictures and more text.

But doing so crowds the message. And really that's applicable to everything. Crowded letters, crowded ads, crowded 60-second spots drown out the meaning and you can’t hear anything. Certainly not the meaning or purpose of the communication.

Certainly not the rhythm of life.

I am with Nikola on this journey. With everything, MORE SPACE PLEASE.

When should you not speak to the media?

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 08:34:00 -0400

Someone asked me this yesterday. This wasn't about saying “No Comment” but rather about being quoted on a situation about their industry but not directly related to their organisation.

There maybe lots of good reasons to stay silent, but one simple question to ask is whether anyone will miss you (your organisation’s voice) if you don't provide a comment.

Plenty of reporters will call for comment on issues or events that are tangential to your business. If the story is not about your organisation, stay out of it unless you have a clear message that you know will make it into the story and you are comfortable that the story won't turn into something you don't want to be part of.

Here are some other reasons by Ragan contributor Jim Cameron

1) When you have history with a reporter / publication that misquotes you and always gets the story wrong.

2)When you are asked for confidential, proprietary or personal info not relevant to the topic.

3) When you don't have a message and therefore end up in what feels like a deposition.

Are there any other reasons I have missed?

Five things that will give you more time

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 08:35:00 -0400

1) Get strategic about your time. First, ask yourself what you’d like to be doing during the hours you have each week. What activities could create happy memories for you and your family? How can you spend your hours nurturing your own soul – praying, reading, exercising. When you find the answers, act on them.

2) Log your hours, do this at least for a week. Chances are you’ll find you have more than enough time in a day to take the dance class you’ve been talking about or to meet up with friends.

3) If money is not an issue, then outsource. Yep, that applies to housework too.

4) At the office, don’t ever mistake things that look like work for actual work.

5) If you hate commuting and the traffic, ask your boss for some days where you can telecommute. Make sure you have a plan of accountability before requesting to work some days from home, it will help your case.