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Signal, Noise, and Bandwidth June 10, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Technology.
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2 comments

In case anyone hasn’t noticed, it seems that everyone has to deal with a lot more information these days.  This whole internet idea, if it takes off, could really make it difficult to stay on top of things.  Why, then, are people shifting to technologies that make it harder to keep up?

I recently received an email from a major corporation.  In the email was a link to a video, which contained An Important Message For Our Customers.  Since I like this company, I decided to watch.  The video was a four minute clip of the company president making a speech.  It took four minutes to watch a man read a message to me that I could have skimmed in fifteen seconds.  What was the point of the stretching the content to be sixteen times longer?

I can see the marketing meeting: “Let’s just email this out over his signature.”  “That’s too impersonal; we want to engage our customers.” “We could dress it up with HTML and make the email look really sharp.” “Still not good enough.” “Maybe a podcast?” “I don’t know… how about a video?” “Great!  That will really connect with people!”

I appreciate this.  Really. But I don’t have time to watch it all.  Imagine if every email you received were converted to a video clip of someone reading the message to you.  You’d never get anything done!  Imagine the cacophony in the cube farms!

I see blogs going the same way.  People who used to write a blog are now reading the blog and sending it out as a podcast.  Some people are going the next step and converting it to a video.  This may be cool, but it makes it harder for people to absorb the information.  The content is the same, but the wrapper is much, much bigger.  In the parlance of information theory, the signal stays the same, but the noise has gone way up, and you’re burning a lot more bandwidth to send the same message.

There is a delightful minimalism to Twitter.  You can skim hundreds of tweets in just a minute or two, stopping to absorb ones that catch your interest.  If you had your tweets read to you, you’d never get through a fraction of them.

If you are trying to convey an idea to someone, you must do it in a way that makes it easy as possible for that person to absorb the idea.  There is a place for audio and video.  If you are conveying instructions, a video may be the perfect vehicle, far more efficient that trying to explain the same idea in prose.  If your message involves sounds, audio is the way to go.  But the vast, vast amount of what we send back and forth is perfectly captured as text. Wonderful, simple, written words, perfected several thousand years ago.  Our brains absorb written words at an amazing rate, far faster than if we were listening to them or watching someone recite them.

As in all things, respect your audience.  Send them information in the form that works best for them.  Use audio and video where it truly adds value, and rely on the written word for everything else.  Your audience will thank you, hopefully in writing.

The Original Social Media Guru June 8, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Book Reviews, Networking.
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7 comments

If you spend any time doing anything on the internet, you will soon stumble across a special kind of expert who is just dying to help you improve your virtual social life.  These self-professed Social Media Gurus promise to reveal deep secrets about Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, all designed to garner you more followers, more attention, and more interest on the internet.

Let’s face it: the vast, vast majority of Social Media Gurus know just a teeny bit more than you do about all this stuff.  If you really wanted to learn their secrets, ten minutes with Google (or Bing, which is growing on me) will make you a Social Media Guru, too.  And if you really want 100,000 followers, or friends, or connections, one mortifying YouTube video should do the trick.

All these social networking tools are just communication tools: conduits for information. You can learn the mechanics of any of them in a day, and absorb most of the culture in a week.  But that doesn’t make you any more social, although you may have made a good start at a network.

What matters is what you send over those conduits.  The information you share and how you respond to others is what’s important. It’s the content that counts, not the mechanics of the tool.

Most modern Social Media Gurus want to teach you the mechanics.  This is not social networking, just like understanding the mechanics of a piano is not going to make you a piano player.  Very few Social Media Gurus can teach you what to send using these systems, once you have mastered the mechanics.

Sadly, the very best Social Media Guru died in 1955, before any of these things were invented. Fortunately for us, he wrote down all his secrets well before he passed away.  That Guru was Dale Carnegie, and his secrets are revealed in his book, How To Win Friends & Influence People.

If you have never read this book, do yourself a great favor and pick up a copy.  For Amazon’s bargain price of $8.70 ($0.96 on your Kindle) you can learn the secrets of the greatest Social Media Guru in history.  Carnegie’s book is easy to read, with each concept presented in a short chapter with supporting anecdotes.  If even that’s too much for you, he summarizes each chapter with a one-line moral at the end.  The anecdotes are delightful, recalling social situations from the 1920’s and 1930’s that are still relevant today.

If you have read this book before, read it again.  You will have the same revelations all over again, and be even more committed to changing the way you communicate with people. Carnegie was among the first, and is still the best, Social Media Guru.

I won’t even try to summarize Carnegie’s advice here.  Click the link above, buy the book, and start your summer reading with the one book that could truly improve every relationship you have.

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Spelling Bee! June 1, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Random Musings.
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5 comments

By chance, I stumbled upon the finals of the National Spelling Bee last week.  I watched a bit for fun, but was soon completely captivated.  I wound up watching all ten rounds to see who would win.

I am a stickler for correct spelling.  Spelling, like math, is either right or wrong. There is no “close enough” in spelling, even if the reader can figure out what you were trying to say.  Poor spelling says, in effect, “I can’t figure this out; you do it.”

It was fascinating to see the competitors work through the Bee.  For each word, they were able to ask questions about origin and meaning, as well as alternate pronunciations and appropriate usage.  The color commentator was great, explaining how these clues helped.  Word origin is especially helpful since various root and suffix patterns differ between Latin, Greek, and Germanic origins.  Sure enough, one kid used the Greek origin of a word to pick out the correct “rrh” pattern in the middle of a medical term.

As all these things do, it came down to a four-time competitor and a newby, battling through the list of “Championship Words.”  The newcomer, seventh-grader Tim Ruiter, missed “maecenas.” This opened the door for Kavya Shivashankar to nail “laodicean” for the win.  Personally, I didn’t think this was fair.  “Maecenas” has that awful blended “ae” and a soft “c,” making it almost impossible to spell if you haven’t seen it before.  “Laodicean,” on the other hand, is spelled exactly as it sounds and is a somewhat more common word.

Although I think a better final round would involve soundproof chambers and everyone spelling the same words at the same time, I can’t complain about the general intent of the Bee: to reward those who care to get it right, who take the time to do the job well.

Would that we would all apply similar discipline and focus to everything we do, spelling or otherwise.  Many people view spelling as a small, inconsequential thing, but it represents a far larger concern.  There is no difference between a writer with poor spelling and a painter who does sloppy trim work, or a carpenter who doesn’t sand everything evenly.  Either you care enough to do a job right, or you don’t.

Spelling matters.  Grammar matters. Punctuation matters.  Neat painting and smooth furniture matter.  As does making that extra call to a customer, taking an extra moment to listen to someone’s concerns, or working a bit harder to understand a problem.  Little things do matter, and all the things that seem big are really just lots of little things strung together.  Get the little things right, and the big things will come much easier.

I Can Help! May 29, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.
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5 comments

My mother tells the story of a friend who was caught in a power outage.  The line for her house was down,keeping her from getting power even as other parts of town were being restored.  Repeated calls to the power company had no effect as they busied themselves with other, more important areas.

Finally, in frustration, she called the power company and asked them to cancel the service call. “Why?” they asked.  She explained that she knew they were very busy, dealing with all those other customers.  Her husband, she said, was very handy, and was headed outside with a ladder to reconnect the drop line himself.  They were aghast.  “Don’t let you husband touch those lines!”  “Oh, no,” she assured them. “It’s OK.  We just want to help out, and this way you can send your people to fix other houses instead.”

A truck roared up in five minutes, and her power was restored.

At some point, every organization is a service organization, focused on internal or external customers.  As we try to provide “fair” service, it can be easy to lose sight of one or two customers who warrant our attention even though they may not be as big or as important as other customers.  What seems fair to us can seem completely unjust to those who are on the wrong side of the decision.  That leads to frustration that forces customers to threaten unusual behavior to get our attention.

As we manage with limited resources, we need to keep in mind that every customer is equally important.  While it may impossible to serve everyone at once, we need to find creative ways to serve everyone a little bit.  The vast majority of customers are fair-minded; when they see that everyone is getting some measure of service, they tend to recognize that we’re doing the best we can in a tough situation.

This goes beyond IT issues like fixing PCs and resolving system errors.  Some of us may be faced with allocating scarce products among competing customers.  Others may have legal work or audits to be done under tight deadlines with limited personnel.  It’s easy to tell everyone to just wait their turn as we honestly work to get to each customer as quickly as we can.  In these days of instant gratification and rapid responses to everything, we need to find ways to provide a little bit of service to everyone, just so they know we understand their needs and are working to meet them.

This kind of incremental service isn’t easy and sometimes requires a complete rethinking of how we tackle problems.  It may not always be necessary; sometimes we’re blessed with enough resources to take care of everyone at once.  But we all need these skills when times get tight.  If not, we’ll have customers reaching for live wires, and that causes problems that are a lot harder to solve.

Solutions Without Technology May 27, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership, Technology.
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1 comment so far

Of the many aphorisms that I enjoy using, one of my favorites is

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

I pull this one out when someone is using some system in an inappropriate way.  People get so comfortable with their favorite tools, they use them for everything even when a better solution is readily available.

This is an easy accusation for an IT person to make.  Most software systems are so complicated that it is easier for a user to twist an existing system into an unusual solution than it is to learn some completely arcane new system.  People just want to solve problems and get on with their jobs and lives.  I know this is hard to believe, but they don’t look forward to exploring and mastering that latest version of some new desktop application.

Those of us in IT would do well to listen to our own advice.

How many times, when asked to help solve some problem, do we immediately reach for a computer?  Typically, the answer is “all of the time.”  We’re in IT; we know how to make computers do interesting things; therefore every problem can be solved with some technology-based solution.

Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Many problems do not exist for want of a technology solution.  In fact, many of the day-to-day business problems we encounter are rooted in process, flow, and data collection.  While you can certainly throw software at all of those areas, you can also fix a lot of issues by talking to people, understanding their real needs, and proposing ways to change things in a non-technical way.

Within IT, we have developed a broad range of skills that are not rooted in technology.  Process analysis, data management, project management, user interface design, audit and compliance, risk management: the list is long.  Why, then, when someone is gracious enough to give us the opportunity to help, do we reach for the hardware?  We perpetuate the perception that we are nothing more than geeks, when if fact we have so much more to offer.

I’ve been on projects where the real solution was to have a user interface designer rework a paper form layout.  I’ve seen errant projects saved by sharing good project management skills.  I’ve seen business processes reworked by applying disaster recovery discipline.  In all of these cases, not a single line of code was written in pursuit of a solution.  Instead, IT people spent time listening, sharing, and collaborating to help users do their jobs more effectively.

People in IT chafe at being known solely for their technical expertise, yet we fall into our old habits when confronted with a problem.  We need to follow our own advice, set down the hammer of technology, and look for effective non-technical solutions to many of the problems we’re asked to solve.  We’ll grow in our ability to be of service, and we’ll begin to build a better reputation with our end users.