The Many Faces of You

Today, let's try something that requires a little more audience partiticipation. It's an exercise designed to illustrate the many roles each individual plays in society. You will need to make sure that each participant has paper and pencil handy. Ask your listeners to put headings above sections of the paper for each group they're in. For instance, over one area  they might write "Family" and over another area "Work." They need to leave enough room to write additional material. After they have listed all their groups, they are to look at one group heading at a time, then list all the titles/roles they hold in that group. For instance, under family I might write: Son, Father, Brother, Husband, etc. Participants can either form small groups to discuss their lists or work together to form a larger list for the whole room.

I'd like to thank Steve Sheridan for the idea that started this exercise.

Remember Your Father

Today we'll branch out a little from speaking to writing. It's likely you'll have to do both at some time in your life, even if you only write an email to request customer service help from a company, or a short letter to accompany your resume. Maybe you're one of the people who consider themselves skilled with words. Maybe you're completely at a loss for a starting place. Whatever your comfort level, the systematic approach is best.

The time-honored formula for successful writing includes planning the piece, getting something written to work with, shaping the writing to your goal, and cleaning up grammar, spelling and punctuation. It is usually advisable to handle these items in this order. The steps are known respectively as Prewriting, Drafting, Revising, and Editing. You can remember this by using a little acronym I chose, PaDRE.

Prewriting involves deciding on the ideas that you want to include in your writing. You may use such tools as mindmapping or brainstorming to decide these items. You may just scratch out a few bullet points on scrap paper, or make a full outline.

Once you know what you want to write about, you begin. Go start to finish, and get something written or typed out, creating your draft. Do not stop to rework sections, or correct your writing at this point.

When the draft is done it will trigger more ideas, and you may see that you want to add, subtract, and move things quite a bit. That's not a sign of deficiency, it is how things get done. You refine your ideas and their expression at this stage, the revision.

If you are certain that you have arranged your writing the way you want it is time to proofread. Check out spelling, grammar, and punctuation. Remember that using a word processing program is no substitute for a thorough understanding of English and a complete check of your work.

You may feel you are good at turning a phrase, or cranking out pages of expressive copy, but this systematic method will give you a much stronger handle on your final output. Try it, you'll even impress yourself!

Streaming Conscience

As you probably know, Netflix has stirred some controversy for itself lately. It began when Netflix announced that it would be dividing its two services, rental DVDs delivered by mail and on-demand video streaming. It also announced significant price hikes. Customers objected to the price hikes but could no longer choose a combined monthly rental-and-streaming plan. For many customers this amounted to doubling their monthly bill.

I usually analyze actions like this in very simple terms. I ask myself, “What do I like?” If I concentrate on simple answers like “cheaper” or “faster” I am usually able to gauge the response of my fellow consumers. In this case I decided that Netflix would have to act soon to stem the flood of criticism and cancelled plans. Well, today they acted. They emailed an explanation. Big deal.

Consumers have seen enough companies go down in flames (Gateway computer, for instance) to know that executive/marketing types don’t always know what they’re doing. If you send a long explanation it means you think things are more complicated than just giving shoppers what they want at a price they’ll pay. They don’t care. That explanation is just to make you feel there’s some reason you can’t do that.

The email gives me the impression that Netflix executives think I would be happy with the rate change if they had just explained it more fully. Nope. That’s how politicians and college freshman dismiss those who don’t agree with them. No student in my Business Communication course could get away with such an ‘apology’ letter.

Netflix' worst mistake was sending an explanation at all. When I read it, I was looking for the “We know you hated this so here’s how we’ll make it up to you” part. There is none. Netflix wants customers to accept their service and rates again without addressing concerns in a tangible way. How about if I started paying Netflix only half what my plan costs, but sent them boring explanation emails? The email raised the expectation that Netflix understood their customers, their reasons for leaving, and the way the company could compensate them in part. The message disappointed that expectation. In fact here’s a direct quote from the email:

For the past five years, my greatest fear at Netflix has been that we wouldn't make the leap from success in DVDs to success in streaming. Most companies that are great at something – like AOL dialup or Borders bookstores – do not become great at new things people want (streaming for us). So we moved quickly into streaming, but I should have personally given you a full explanation of why we are splitting the services and thereby increasing prices. It wouldn’t have changed the price increase, but it would have been the right thing to do.

So, what should that email have said, since Netflix just had to send one? First paragraph: apology for shocking the customers with such drastic changes all at once. Second paragraph: pledge to do what is necessary to keep or win back our business. Third paragraph: announcement of partial rollback of rate structure, or a significant discount code (hint: 10% means nothing). Without this kind of basic business technique Netflix will not reach many consumers. Maybe they're the ones who don't understand.