We don’t give much credence to what we’re being told unless it lines up with what we see in action.
The hotel guest information book tells me you want me to enjoy my stay, but if I have to walk outside the hotel and find the bell boy myself so I can get my luggage, I don’t believe you want me to enjoy my stay.
The signs all over the airport tell me you take my safety seriously but if I see your male employees snickering when your female employee pats me down for a body search, I don’t believe you take my safety seriously.
The in-flight video (from the CEO himself, no less) tells me you care about my customer experience, but if I’m standing at the back of the plane and I hear your employees complaining about their customers, I don’t believe you care about my customer experience.
Next time you think no-one is watching, or think no-one will notice or care, think again.
Natalie Zensius is a marketing communications strategist with experience in both the for-profit and non-profit sectors. Learn more about Natalie at http:www.linkedin.com/in/nzensius.
Social Media and Politics
Image: Mashable
When I was a kid, it was practically impossible to get away with being naughty and even harder to lie my way out of it when I'd done something wrong. My grandmother, who babysat me after school while my mom was at work, would knowingly say, "the truth always finds it's way out", and my mother, ever her daughter, would build on that with, "tell the truth, because you’ll be found out eventually." My husband’s mother always told him growing up, “don’t do anything that you wouldn’t mind being splashed on the front page of your local newspaper.” Wise women–all of them. And now, more than ever, aphorisms to live by.
Social Media makes it hard to get away with anything. It's in our nature to want to exaggerate or pretend to be something we aren't to advance an agenda, but today’s world is a tricky place to do that. Both individuals and organizations need to be careful what they disseminate on websites and other outposts because people are paying attention, and, let's face it, most of us dislike being lied to. It's human nature to want to call out falsehoods when we see them and social media gives us the perfect outlet to do that. I think we feel just as strongly, if not more, about hypocrisy, lying's ugly sibling. So why then, aren’t people more careful about what they do behind closed doors or about representing themselves to be something they aren’t?
I am convinced that most people–regardless of their age–haven’t fully grappled with the reach of the Internet yet. Social media is still fairly new and technology in general is moving faster and changing our lives in more ways than we can wrap our heads around. (It might even outpace us soon; Kevin Kelly's latest book What Technology Wants has great insight into this.) Attitudes, while slowly changing in regards to what’s acceptable to publicize and what isn’t (and what it all means about a person’s character), still haven't adjusted to the reality of the information age in which every detail of our lives is suddenly fair game.
A large part of the job in communications used to entail controlling the message and the public personae of the leaders that we represented. Thanks to the explosion of social media, reputation management has become somewhat more challenging. We are all now public figures–the CEOs of our own lives and reputations–even when we're not officially working, and it can be difficult to keep things off the record. Anything we say or do in private can easily be used to besmirch us.
The people who are struggling the most with this are the boomer and x generations. Millenials, on the other hand–who aren’t running the world yet, but soon will be–have grown up with technology and have much different attitudes vis a vis their privacy and what is acceptable to be made public. They may face judgment from hiring managers as they navigate the shoals of today’s workplace but that will most certainly change over time as they and their peers move into management positions. All in all, it's not really an issue for them. They just don’t criticize others’ “off the clock” behavior as harshly as previous generations. Consider for a moment that Bill Clinton had to deny inhaling, yet it’s common knowledge that Barack Obama, who enjoyed large amounts of support in the last general election from young voters, not only smoked-but publicly enjoyed-marijuana and cocaine.
Speaking of politicians, it's only a matter of time once someone announces their intention to run for public office before something gets surfaced from their past and splashed all over the Internet; social media is amplifying the reach and impact of our desire to throw stones at people who live in glass houses.
Christine O'Donnell seems to be this election cycle's poster child for negative press. Why? Ms. O’Donnell has been very public with her views in the past and there's lots of fodder available to lampoon her with when human nature rears it's ugly head. Consider the most recent story that Gawker published about Ms. O’Donnell’s antics at a Halloween party a few years back. Whether or not you agree with their approach, it's clear what Gawker's intent was behind publishing it: they saw it as an opportunity to call out hypocritical behavior. (Plus, Gawker was very upfront about their profit motives–no hypocrisy there.)
I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall for the media strategy session regarding this incident, especially since Ms. O'Donnell's communications team should have known that there is footage of her (courtesy of Bill Maher) saying explicitly that she doesn’t celebrate Halloween because it’s a paganistic and satanic holiday. Team O’Donnell’s response–that Gawker was being sexist–was a red herring that just added lies to the hypocrisy (Gawker has lambasted many male public figures for their regressions too and can hardly be called sexist).
People make choices that others question, or that they regret, or they change their positions over time. I’m not saying that they shouldn't run for elected positions because these facts may come to light through social media; we'd be hard put to find applicants for the job if that were the case. I’m merely pointing out that it’s more important then ever to be honest about who you are, and what you've done, as the truth will eventually find its way out. At the very least, you should fess up when it does and not try to detract from what’s really going on. Social media shines a light on authenticity, or lack thereof.
Which brings me to my final thought. I wonder how my colleagues in PR deal with the challenge of managing the reputations of politicians who run on public platforms that are disconnected from their private actions and behavior. There seems to be lots of them on both sides of the aisle. If I were Ms. O'Donnell's Communications Director, I'd have wanted to know the truth ahead of time so I could figure out how to spin it in a way that didn't make her look even less credible.
But then, I'm not Ms. O'Donnell's Communications Director.
UPDATE: Wisconsin voters are sending 39 year old Sean Duffy, a contestant on the sixth season of The Real World, to congress. NY Mag wryly points out:
Kids, take this as the inspiring lesson it should be: Don’t let anyone scare you into thinking there are embarrassing things you can do on television that, given the right amount of time and effort, you can not live down.
Natalie Zensius is a marketing communications strategist with experience in both the for-profit and non-profit sectors. Learn more about Natalie at http:www.linkedin.com/in/nzensius.
How Sport Is An Important Part Of Business
Image: Randy Chiu
What do baseball and football (or any other sport for that matter) have in common with business? They're fail-safe things you can talk to your colleagues and customers about.
Your work most likely takes you around this great country to various organizations where you no doubt meet and interact with people of all stripes. When you sit down with your clients or vendor partners for a meeting, in the first few minutes there will invariably be two types of people in the room: the ones who are talking and the ones who have nothing to say. Why? Because before you get down to the brass-tacks of business (and while you're waiting for stragglers to arrive) the ice-breaker is more often than not, sports. Some people feel that sports is beneath them and so don't deign to follow which means they can't participate in this important part of the business ritual.
According to this study, college educated women enjoy sports as much as their male counterparts but men watch more sports than women and have a greater grasp of sports trivia. Sadly, there are still more men than women in leadership positions in the U.S. (source: Catalyst research) but the chances are, for your client or colleague of either gender, sports is a great water-cooler topic to chat about. The same holds true for vendors, regardless of whether they have a college education or not. Plus, it's much safer ground than politics, or religion, or what kind of car you drive.
I'm not just talking about sports, really. Think communication, connection and preparation; all things you need to be good at to make it in business. If you really care about your various stakeholders and you want to forge a strong bond with them, or strengthen an existing relationship, demonstrate that you care what they care about, be prepared and spend some time reading up on their sports teams.
Go Giants!
Natalie Zensius is a marketing communications strategist with experience in both the for-profit and non-profit sectors. Learn more about Natalie at http:www.linkedin.com/in/nzensius.
Management Lessons From Healthcare
Image: Ezra Klein
I just finished reading Letting Go, the latest treatise by surgeon-cum-writer Atul Gawande, which explores the ambiguities of end-of-life care. There is a lot to be learned from the study of healthcare. It helps us gain “insider” information that can not only empower us as healthcare consumers, it can also be instructive as we think about our own work.
As Drs. Leonard Berry and Kent Seltman point out in their book, healthcare customers are unique in that they are usually sick or injured and under considerable stress; medicine requires them to bare themselves–emotionally and physically–to doctors and caregivers to a far greater degree than any other industry. Healthcare providers must continually perform well together in the face of vulnerable customers, known human error, system failure and vast amounts of technology to provide the intangible service called health and well-being. It goes without saying then, that there's much to be gleaned from the individuals that serve us in this unique–and often life altering–way.
More than 70% of Americans now earn a living in the service sector, which encompasses everything from health, law, telecommunications and entertainment to retail, finance and beyond. The chances are high that we will all work in a service job at some point in our career. And the notion of service has applications for all industries. Management guru Tom Peters believes the concept of "servant-leadership" is critical for success no matter what business you're in. At its core, service is inherently about performance so medicine is a great place for management to look for insight about how to improve service for both their internal and external customers.
Gawande has found a theme in trying to understand human failure and imperfection and studying how individuals, teamwork and process can be improved against a backdrop of dizzying technology and massive amounts of information. What he also shows us along the way is that excellence isn’t innate; it is an ingrained practice borne out of learning from mistakes.
In his first book, Complications, Gawande recognizes that medicine, even with all of the latest technology, is imperfect and asks how we become even remotely competent at something that’s inherently flawed. What he discovers time and time again, is a powerful truth applicable to all of our jobs: excellence in anything is never just about the science; and even with “perfect” science, or well-established process, or advanced levels of education and experience, fallibility is a constant. Excellence in service, whether it's for our customers, colleagues or business partners is about accepting failure when it happens and moving on from it quickly to improve. In Letting Go he teaches us that it’s also about artistry–the human touch, collaboration, generous acts, personal courage and core values that guide decision-making and inspire extra effort.
He is arguably one of the best healthcare essayists for the medical layperson to read.
Natalie Zensius is a marketing communications strategist with experience in both the for-profit and non-profit sectors. Learn more about Natalie at http:www.linkedin.com/in/nzensius.
The Importance of Research and Good Infographics
Image: Neeta Lind
I had some routine blood work done yesterday to test, amongst other things, my cholesterol levels and whether or not I had diabetes. My results pleased me as much as if I had scored perfectly on the SATs (which, physiologically speaking, I had.) It took me a while to figure out that I was as healthy as can be though, because the numbers didn't mean anything and the information my healthcare provider had on their website explaining what the tests were looking for was confusing and sparse. I ended up having to do some searching around on the web to decode it.
Literacy levels in this country are going down and they are inextricably tied to two key demographics: the health and wealth of our population. The 2003 National Adult Literacy Survey found that adults with the lowest literacy levels (a number that has increased since the last time the survey was conducted in 1992) are more likely than those at the higher levels to be poor and to have a physical, mental, or other health condition. Older adults (who typically have more health concerns–such as diabetes and high cholesterol–to deal with) are more likely than middle-aged or younger adults to demonstrate limited literacy skills: 40% of seniors aged 65 or older read at or below the 5th grade level. Yet most health-related materials are written at the 10th grade level.
If I, as a college educated and web savvy individual, have a hard time understanding what my test results mean, I worry about what some people with less education must make of theirs.
I give major points to my healthcare provider (Kaiser Permanente) for the speed in which I received my results and how easy it was to access them. I had blood drawn at 10:30am and by 3:35pm I'd received email notification that the results were available on my password-protected user page. Within 24 hours I also got an email from my doctor telling me how great the results were, asking me if I had any questions, and to keep up the good work. Talk about fantastic customer service. But what about the people who can't get theirs if they can't read, don't have a computer or are not technologically comfortable?
In addition to being aware of the literacy constraints that many people face it’s important for healthcare communicators to understand other aspects of their audience demographic. How do healthcare providers give out test results for folks in poor rural areas, for example?
Whether the delivery mechanism is in person, an online message, or a printout received by mail, it's commonly accepted that more than 60 percent of individuals are visual learners yet my test results were all text and numbers. Couple a lack of graphic design with words that are hard to understand for most people and it's no wonder some healthcare communications (in this case test results) don't make sense. A 2000 Harvard literature review of medical and public health research addressing literacy issues offers little in the way of recommendations to improve communications beyond the written word, yet these communications are often critical to helping patients understand and manage their ongoing health. Good visual cues and clever use of iconography can help all healthcare customers, regardless of their reading level.
In my test results I would have liked to see symbols that represent what each test is for and some sort of chart that shows the scores on it. People are by nature, typically competitive, even with themselves, and this would be a great way to show a person visually how they rank, normatively. Since these tests are done regularly, it could also be customized to track a person’s improvement (or not) over time, which could be a useful teaching tool for docs to use, regardless of how they communicate it.
It's great that I got an email from my doc, with an open invitation to ask questions. It turns out that I was able to find what I needed and didn't need help, but here's yet another instance where doing the research to understand your audience is important. A lot of people who have problems with literacy hide this fact from family members, co-workers and, most likely, their doctors. Plus, people can be busy or lazy, or both. How many people are going to take the time to follow up on these test scores to make sure they really understand them, and wouldn't it be more efficient for everyone if that information could be gotten easily from the initial communication?
Natalie Zensius is a marketing communications strategist with experience in both the for-profit and non-profit sectors. Learn more about Natalie at http:www.linkedin.com/in/nzensius.
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