I recently attended a panel discussion where the five speakers on the panel were going to share their insights about industry trends. The first speaker got up (literally, up out of his seat) and started providing stats and information about his business, and then proceeded to ask the audience for questions. The moderator had to jump in to remind him that questions would be taken after all the speakers had their say.

This speaker didn’t seem to know what the panel’s topic was (trends) and he was completely focused on sharing what his business does, even though the audience wasn’t there to hear that. Worse, he acted as if he was the only one presenting by pacing in front of the other panelists.

The speaker was talking at the audience. He was giving a speech that was all about him and did not respond to what the audience wanted or needed.

Does the expression “given a talking to” convey positive feelings for you? I bet it doesn’t. Nobody likes to be talked to and being talked at is almost as bad. Both imply that the speaker has power over the audience or that the speaker is superior in some way.

On the other hand, if someone is talking with you, there’s a conversation going on. There’s some give and take, even if it’s not verbal. Speakers who are talking with an audience are paying attention to what the audience needs, they are responding to cues and they are engaging the audience’s attention.

You want to be talking with your audience. You want to be responsive to their needs.

There are three basic steps to make sure you are talking with your audience:

1. Understand who your audience is
2. Understand why the audience is there
3. Understand what the audience needs from you

You get bonus points for adjusting your speech depending on where you are and when you are giving it.

Have you sat through a speech that was all about the speaker? Did you feel talked at? Did it bother you? Please share your stories in the comments.

“What you meant to say” is a new feature here on the Caffeinated blog. It’s meant to be a compilation of the (many) grammatical/spelling/word choice mistakes we see all around us, all the time.  It occurred to me that I should start keeping a running list for fun, and then of course, I thought it would make a fun blog post. These are all real examples. Readers are welcomed to add their findings.

For the week ending July 10 (questionable word/usage is bolded):

Subject line on a spam email: This Video Is A Must Watch. [Effects Us All}

What you meant to say: Affects

***

Tweet: Come check out our conference room and setup a tour!

What you meant to say:  Set up.  As two words,  set up is a verb,  whereas setup is a noun.

***

Tweet: CAE stands for Certified Association Executive. They’re the hallmark of a committed assoc. professional.

What you meant to say: It’s

***

Tweet to a car rental company: Great service. Great cars. Will defiantly pick [name] again for my next trip

What you meant to say: Definitely, showing how you can’t ever rely on autocorrect or spell check.

Have you checked your analytics lately? What’s your bounce rate? If it is high, it means that people arrive at your website only to “bounce off” a few seconds later. This means they are not reading your content. This means they are not clicking through to other pages.  And of course, this means they are not buying your product, supporting your cause or contacting you to learn more about your services.

Here are three website blunders that could be costing you readers (and support):

1. Audio/video autoplay: Nothing, and I mean nothing, makes me close a website faster than auto sound/video. It always startles me and then it irritates. Do not, under any circumstances, enable autoplay on your website. Not many people want noise (talk/music that is unwanted is noise) suddenly blasting out of their device.

2. Links to abandoned social media feeds:  Sending folks to a Twitter account that hasn’t been updated in months (or worse, years) is a recipe for failure. If you can’t keep up with a particular social media account, do not link to it. People do check social media accounts because they want to see what you’ve been up to. If there’s nothing there, they assume you are not active, not just on social media, but in general.

P.S. Plus, it’s essential that your social media descriptions be up to date, and relevant.

3. Your way or the highway: Are you enabling pop-ups to force people to sign-up for a newsletter before being able to access your site? Are you asking people to subscribe to email in order to get updates instead of allowing RSS subscriptions? Telling people to go to Facebook to read the latest news?  If you are imposing your favorite tactic, you are effectively telling people that it’s your way or not at all. People appreciate choice. And different people like different things, so offering options is always good (not too many options mind you).

Are you committing any of the above three blunders? If not, there are several other issues that may be turning off readers, including:

• Making your content hard to read (font/type that is too small or white type on black background)
• Website it too busy (too much going on, distracting)
• Typos and/or spelling/grammatical mistakes
• Outdated information
• Not enough information

What sends you off a website? Please share your website peeves with me in the comments.

“What do I need to know about this?”

Here’s the thing–you don’t know what you don’t know. And if you don’t know, you can’t ask the right questions in order to get the answers you need.  So you have to start from zero, and ask “what do I need to know about this.” You’ll want to ask someone who has more knowledge or experience than you.

What does a new home buyer need to know?

A couple of weeks ago, I was talking to an acquaintance of mine, who happens to be a top-selling real estate agent (she’s sold something like $25 million in property).  I was telling her about my first few months as a homeowner, when I had to have a bunch of things fixed. The real estate agent asked me if had gotten a home appliance policy. I told her that I hadn’t and that I didn’t even know about it.  She went on to tell me she negotiates that for every single one of her new home buyers. She told me my real estate agent should’ve told me about it.

What do you look for in a real estate agent?

This question of course lead to a discussion about my real estate agent,  whom at first I really liked, but, after being in my house for a few months and dealing with a bunch of issues,  I came realize didn’t really do her job well. She didn’t point out what I needed to know as a new home buyer. And I didn’t know the questions to ask her, since I said before, you don’t know what you don’t know.

The more I learn about real estate and home ownership, the more I realize that my real estate agent (unlike my new acquaintance), was just not very good. She was mediocre but the fact is, it was my own fault for choosing to work with her without having educated myself more about what to look for in a real estate agent.

You need to acknowledge that you don’t know

I should’ve started by asking myself: “what do I need to know before buying a house?” I could’ve asked friends, I could’ve read books, I could’ve done more research online. I didn’t.

I did watch a lot of HGTV (don’t laugh, it was very helpful), especially House Hunters and Property Virgins. I watched enough HGTV to know that you have to look at the bones of the house, not the current esthetics and also to know what your priorities are. But those shows don’t talk about issues such as heat pumps versus furnaces, or what costs you should plan for in your first year, and so forth.

But this blog is not about real estate, it’s about communications

Not knowing what questions to ask is what gets so many projects off track.  Say you are launching a blog, and you don’t know to ask what you need in a web host, you may end up with a blog that doesn’t work.

So before you start any communications project–whether it be launching a website or putting together a social media campaign–ask someone who’s been there before: “what do I need to know?”

How do you know what questions to ask? Have you ever been in a situation where not asking the right questions made a project or situation go wrong?

Bobby Jindal just announced (via Facebook) today that he is adding himself to the slew of GOP 2016 presidential hopefuls.

There are lots of reasons why Jindal does not have even a small chance of winning the nomination: Louisiana (the state where he is currently governor) is doing badly, he lacks charisma, and he has made a series of questionable/false/stupid comments recently (Muslim no-go zones, for example).

Currently polling at about one percent, Jindal faces tremendous challenges even getting in to the Fox News GOP candidates debate that will only allow the top ten contenders on stage. It’s pretty clear that Jindal is jockeying for a vice presidential nod, but even that is out of reach for him. Why? He has a huge authenticity problem.

Jindal, who was named Piyush by his Indian parents, seems to have rejected his background. He converted to Catholicism and changed his name to Bobby. He has even said he doesn’t consider himself Indian-American, but just American. The Washington Post explores the question about how Jindal views his past in this article published yesterday: From Piyush to Bobby: How Does Jindal Feel About his Family’s Past.

This passage from the article (the bolding is mine) is very telling:

Suresh C. Gupta, a Potomac, Md., doctor, gave a fundraiser for Jindal’s first gubernatorial bid. But he said Jindal has actively tried to disassociate himself from the Indian American community in recent years.

“So what if he’s Republican? So what if he’s Christian? I don’t care about those things,” said Gupta, who is a Democrat. “But you can’t forget about your heritage. You can’t forget about your roots.”

When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to the United States last September, a host of politicians attended his rally at Madison Square Garden. Jindal did not. When Jindal’s name was mentioned, he was booed by the crowd.

It’s impossible to say what motivated Jindal to embrace being “American” while at the same time downplaying his roots. Perhaps he is embarrassed by his background or perhaps he thinks people can’t relate to an Indian-American. Whatever the reason, it’s clear that potential supporters are turned off by his disassociation with his background.

Although the United States is a melting pot, and most immigrants try to assimilate, many still have pride in their heritage. And there are many politicians who embrace hyphenation, from the first Italian-American mayor of New York City Fiorello LaGuardia to former Congressman David Wu (D-OR), the only Chinese-American serving in the House of Representatives from 1999 to 2011.

An even more negative view of Jindal is given in the Politico Magazine article by Alan Greenblatt: “The Stupid Party’s Candidate:Running to the Right is not Working for Bobby Jindal.”

Greenblatt argues that Jindal is pandering to the more conservative base of the Republican Party. He writes:

A governor who reshaped his state by overhauling the education and Medicaid systems now hardly talks substance at all. In fairness, he has released detailed plans on taxes and education, but he routinely spends his time on the stump throwing red meat to the most conservative parts of his party.

He adds:

His pander approach hasn’t worked for him. “He is smart, he is policy knowledgeable,” says Henry Olsen, a conservative analyst at the Ethics & Public Policy Center, “but rather than build a public persona around his strengths, he has crafted a public persona around other people’s strengths.”

This adds up to an authenticity problem. Who is Bobby Jindal and why does he keep changing his stripes? People respond best to what is authentic and can generally spot a fake. Jindal seems to be working hard to be something he can never be. As long as he’s trying to be something he isn’t, he will continue to lag behind in the polls.

Authenticity matters, especially when you are trying to persuade.

What do you think? If you were Jindal’s communications person, what would you advise?

Every Monday, I get a enewsletter that compiles events. Yesterday, it listed an event that sounded interesting and when I clicked on the link to learn more, it took me to a 404-error page not found.

Broken links or missing pages are a hassle for your readers.  And not only that, search engines punish you for them (by affecting your SEO).

If you are planning an email/enewsletter/Tweet/Facebook post/etc.: Check your links before sending or posting. It’s that simple. Just click on them and make sure they are taking you to the right place. It may be an extra few minutes of your time, but it will make your readers happy and make you look competent.

If you want to make sure there are no broken links on your website, there are many tools that can help you (search for broken link checker). Here’s a compilation, specific for WordPress sites:

5 Tools to Check for Broken Links

Once you’ve found broken links on your website, you will want to fix them.

Web Marketing: How to Deal with Broken Links

Make sure to put some time and effort into avoiding sending people to non-existent website pages. It will help maintain your readers’  trust and your standing with the search engines.

If you come across a broken link, what do you do?

Here’s the story:

Yesterday, Grammarly (a site that promises to be your best grammar check resource), posted an article titled “5 authors who died old maids” to Facebook (unfortunately, I was not quick-thinking enough to take a screen shot). The post was about great female writers such as Emily Bronte and Emily Dickinson.

I did a double take when I saw that on my timeline. Old maids? What year is this? Who calls unmarried women “old maids?” I commented on the Facebook post that it was sexist and ageist to use the term, and that Grammarly should rename the post. Many others had similar comments and sentiments.  Some ( minority) thought using the term was perfectly OK and that the rest of use were too easily offended.

Then, I went to Twitter where I posted this:

I remind you that Grammarly is a site that claims it offers a “better way to write.”

No response from Grammarly on Twitter or on Facebook. No comment whatsoever. But this morning, the post is gone from Facebook and from the Grammarly blog without any type of acknowledgement.

It seems that Grammarly understood that using the term was offensive enough to some, or at least, controversial enough, to remove the post. They have erased it from Grammarly post history. But Grammarly has not admitted anything explicitly.  It ignored tweets and Facebook comments.

Is ignoring comments a wise move?

And just this past weekend, in the Washington Post Magazine, humor columnist Gene Weingarten had this to say about Grammarly:

In short, as a sleuth, Grammarly is top-notch. As an editor, however, it is of the prissy, arbitrary, rule-besotted sort whom good writers want to kill. Under the circumstances, I would do it slow and ugly, like what Dave the astronaut did to HAL.

Perhaps not super humorous, but definitely worth it to read the whole piece.

Grammarly can’t erase Weingarten’s piece as easily as it can erase it’s own mistakes.

Now, is Grammarly in crisis, even of the fleeting social media kind? No, of course not. But in my book at least, it has a damaged image. Between Weingarten’s criticism and Grammarly’s uncaring attitude, not to mention the fact that a sexist term got through the supposed strict usage checker folks, I am not keen to promote or use the service. And no amount of erasing posts (would this also be called white-washing? I am not sure) and ignoring comments is going to fix that.

What would you recommend that Grammarly do, if anything? Oh, and had you even heard of Grammarly before or am I doing it a public relations favor by mentioning it?

You’re invited

That was the subject line for an email I got recently from Boston University. Naturally, I assumed that I was been invited to attend an event. But no, I was being invited to donate money to the annual pledge drive.

This was a classic bait-and-switch. 

The following week I got an email from BU that said something about women (fewer/more women getting degrees, I can’t recall). Again, I opened it since I thought it would be an article about gender disparity. It wasn’t. It was another bait-and-switch. Again, BU wanted me to be among the women who donate to the university.

Bait-and-switch headlines/subject lines are trust-killers.

I understand there’s clutter and that you need to work hard to entice readers. Using a bait-and-switch can guarantee people will open your email or read you article, but at a cost. When you fool people this way (and that is what you are doing),  you ensure they will no longer trust your content.

What’s going to happen when BU really wants to invite me to an event? What type of subject line will they use? I am not going to believe “you’re invited” again.

Writing a subject line/headline is not easy. You want to entice readers to open your email or read your article. You are much better off describing what you are offering inside than using a false premise.

What is your experience with bait-and-switch headlines or subject lines? If you use them, how well do they work for you?

Lately, I have been inundated with customer feedback requests from what seems like every company with which I have even had a glancing blow. And all of these feedback requests have serious flaws.

Self-serving: The airline I flew wanted to know about my recent flight, but not about the other part of the same trip, which included one segment that was delayed five hours.

Bordering on harassment: My gym wants feedback (about what, I don’t know or care) and they have sent me at least five or more requests reminding me they want my feedback. Apparently they don’t take no for an answer.

Not interested in my opinion at all: The conference I attended last week says it wants my opinion, but sent a survey that focused more on my demographic profile than on my opinion.

Asking every possible question on earth: I got a questionnaire that I abandoned when I realized that after five minutes I was only twenty percent done, thanks to the helpful completion meter at the bottom of the survey.

Really, just give us a glowing review: Some companies send you a link to online customer response sites like Yelp, basically asking for you to provide a testimonial, and may even try to promote this action by offering a discount next time you come in.

Customer feedback can be very valuable. If done the right way, feedback requests can tell you what customers/clients/supporters are thinking, and can alert you to any issues. However, there’s a big “if” there, and as evidenced by my own examples above, many organizations are not handling these requests well.

Many times, I have provided specific feedback, only to never hear from the company again or see the problem addressed. I think the problem is that customer feedback requests straddle the line between communications/marketing and operations.

Communicators/marketers see asking for feedback as a way of communicating further with customers. Operations folks see feedback as a potential for improvement (theoretically). But if these two factions are not in consultation, you end up with customer feedback requests that don’t actually address any issues the customer may be having or may even hurt the brand as customers are bothered by repeated requests or intrusive questions.

Before you ask for customer feedback, here are four things to keep in mind.

1. Determine exactly why you want feedback. Are you trying to assess your product/service? Are you trying to pinpoint problem areas? Do you want to get testimonials?
2. Determine what you will do with the feedback. Will you address any issues?
3. Determine the best way to get the feedback. Is it email? Or a phone call?
4. Remember your customers are not obligated to give you feedback. Customers are in fact doing you a favor by providing feedback. Respect their time. Don’t harass them.

How do you handle customer feedback? Do you even ask for it? If you do, how do you go about it? Please let me know.

Your website and your car are more similar than you think. You put in a substantial investment up front when you acquired them, and you need to give them both maintenance if you want to keep them working properly.

Chances are good that if you want to keep your car running, you’ve spent some time and money giving it proper maintenance. But have you given any maintenance to your website since you launched it?

Manufacturers provide guidelines for car owners, making it easy to know when to do what. For example, most car owners are advised to give their vehicles an oil change approximately every 3,000 miles. You are also asked to take your car in for service at certain milestones (50,000 miles, etc.) to check out things like your brakes, hoses, and whatever else.

Depending on who developed your website, you may also have some guidance. However, there are many websites out there that haven’t gotten their figurative oil changes lately. It’s as if the website owners think that just putting up a website and forgetting about it is enough. Unfortunately, if you don’t give your website some maintenance, it will stop working properly for you.

Here are few things to check out on your website:

• Is it mobile-friendly?
• Is the contact information accurate?
• Do you have social media properties? Are they included?
• Are your links up to date?
• Are all your pages rendering properly?
• Is your content updated/accurate?
• What is the copyright information (hint: if it says copyright 2009, you need to update)
• If you list any personnel (staff, leadership, board), is the list complete and up to date?
• If you list services or products, do you still offer all of these?
• If you have pricing, is it accurate?
• Is your website software up to date?
• Is your domain registration in order?

This is not a comprehensive list. But if it’s been a while since you gave your website any thought or attention, you may want to put it on your to-do list. You may even find that maintenance is not enough and that you need a complete overhaul.

It’s no longer enough to just have a website. You must keep it up (or hire someone to do it for you).

What are your thoughts? When was the last time you took a look at your website?