A Good Read?

Posted on February 13, 2012 by Peter Buechler

Customers don’t usually curl up by the fireside and devour your collateral. If they look at it at all, they browse it – often while doing other things.

No matter how profound your insights, it makes sense to follow the KISS principal – as in Keep It Simple Stupid. If you’re writing a graduate school thesis, don’t expect anyone but your committee to read it. I’m not recommending that you dumb down your prose. Say what you need to say, but clearly and briefly.

To help make it easier for your potential customers, consider using a measure of readability. Educator Rudolph Flesch, author of Why Johnny Can’t Read and early advocate of phonics, proposed a readability index*. You can get Flesch’s Reading Ease score automatically – it’s built into the spell checker of Microsoft Word. (You may have to turn this feature on, before using it for the first time.) If you don’t use Word, you can use free online sites such as Edit Central.

More readable text has a higher index. Consider an example from an Iowa public health program:

Reading Ease of 48.0:

Babies born to women who are covered by one of Iowa’s health care programs are covered through the month of their first birthday, provided the baby continues to live with the mother and reside in the state of Iowa.

Reading Ease of 80.1:

Are you pregnant? Do you get health coverage from an Iowa program? If you do, your baby will also be covered. Coverage will last until the end of the month of your baby’s first birthday. The baby must live with you in Iowa.

If you were marketing the program, which copy would you use?

As a simple test, I grabbed some copy from websites of major brands. The easiest to read was from Sony Playstation; the most difficult from a consumer publication of the Federal Reserve. In this sample, the firms offering easier reading also tend to be more successful.

 

Ease of reading is, of course, only one ingredient of good copy. Since it’s so easy to test, why not grade your latest masterpiece before pushing the publish button?

* Reading Ease score = 206.835 − (1.015 × ASL) − (84.6 × ASW)

Where: ASL = average sentence length (number of words divided by number of sentences)
ASW = average word length in syllables (number of syllables divided by number of words)

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Out Of Box Experience

Posted on February 6, 2012 by Peter Buechler

cardboard shipping box Apple recently announced another blowout quarter, where sales ($46.3 billion) and profits yet again exceeded analyst’s expectations (how boring). It sells as many iPhones and iPads as it can make and its Mac computers are gaining share with both consumers and businesses.

Apple has become a premium brand – one which avoids the commodity trap and can charge higher prices than competitors such as HP, Samsung, Amazon, Sony, and Nokia. In an era of commoditized technology, how can it continue to do this? More importantly, how can you?

We needed another computer at the office anyway, so we thought we’d see how Apple seemingly defies gravity and what they do that you can too.

Let’s say you just picked up a new product – in our case an iMac. You could struggle with it in any number of ways.The box might be tough to open (clam shell cases), the instructions confusing, the package incomplete (you need special tools or supplies), the website fraught with unnecessary steps, the product too difficult or confusing for a typical customer… The list goes on and on.

If the experience were bad enough, you might return it. If it’s not that bad, you might keep it, but not get another of the same brand. Nor would you recommend it, and you might even pan it. First impressions count, so they should not be left to chance.

Apple has clearly thought long and hard about making a good first impression. Here’s what they do:

Out Of Box Experience

 

You may not be a firm on the scale of  Apple, but at least some of your competition is probably as ham-handed and flat-footed as major manufactures, retailers, and service providers. They find it easier not to bother with the rough edges of being their customers. You don’t have to. What are you going to do to make your out-of-box experience delightful?

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How to Get Less Email in 2012

Posted on January 8, 2012 by Peter Buechler

Unless your New Year’s resolution included getting more email in 2012, especially the kind with large documents attached, you may like file collaboration systems. One that we’ve been using with some success is Box. It works with Macs, PCs, tablets and phones.

Though Box not hard to use, “easy to use” is perhaps too easy to say. Here’s a brief tutorial.

Collaborate with Box

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Your Company University

Posted on December 20, 2011 by Peter Buechler

The success of a complex product depends on customers knowing how to use it well enough to succeed. Whether you’re selling devices, technology, or services, a knowledgeable user is a better prospect. Sometimes selling is teaching.

Manuals, white papers, and other content may help, but they seldom get the naïve customer from zero to sixty. Workshops or classroom teaching are expensive, inefficient, and inconvenient.

There is another way. Recent progress in on-demand training (ODT) is a promising way to get your team, your customers and yourself up to speed on a wide range of topics. ODT is typically a step or more up from the simple How-To demos common on YouTube.

Unlike a traditional classroom, ODT leaves you in control. Learn at your own pace and schedule. If you didn’t understand all of a particular lesson, you can pause and repeat it. If you have a question, you may be able to post it to a forum, email it, or use online chat. Like conventional courses, graded assignments are often included.

Business models of on-demand learning vary. Some charge by the course, others charge a fixed fee per month, during which you may take as many courses as you wish. Some include textbooks, and some offer tiered pricing for extra services.

Prices tend to be a small fraction of tuition at colleges. At the ODT sites I visited, they ranged from free to $250. A typical price is about $30. These exclude on-line degree programs, which can be expensive. What you pay for with ODT is knowledge – not credentials. Despite the low prices, many on-demand portals offer money back satisfaction guarantees. How many universities do that?

I’ve been testing a number of ODT providers studying everything from Graphic Design to Online Marketing to Electronics to Database Programming. Here are some favorites:

Khan Academy

This popular site states it has delivered millions of lessons through over a thousand short (generally less than 10 minutes) lectures on math, science, engineering, economics, finance, business, and even on unexpected subjects such as art history. Most sessions are given in clear informal style by founder Salaman Khan, which gives them a consistency of style. All courses are free.

Lynda.Com

Hundreds of courses focused on how to use popular software and programming languages but also on subjects such as photography and design. A typical course is four to eight hours divided into lessons of ten minutes of less. The service costs $25 a month or $37.50 a month with downloadable example files. There are discounts for annual subscriptions. Quality of the instructors ranged from excellent to uninspiring.

Learnable

This library of online books and courses is primarily for web developers and designers. Courses include lectures, downloadable content, and access to a Q&A forum. Far fewer courses than Lynda.com, but only $17/month and includes unlimited access to an online library.

Udemy

As in “You Academy,” has wide indeed eclectic variety of subjects. In addition to instruction in technologies, it offers hundreds of courses on topics ranging from entrepreneurship, marketing, psychology, languages and music. Quite a number of the courses are free including live recordings of university courses.

If none of these servicesdirectors chair offers just what your customers need, consider imitating them by creating your own miniseries. There are a number of free or inexpensive utilities for drawing (MS Paint), narrating slide shows (slideshare.net,) and making web cam videos (jing.)

Get yourself a directors chair and enlighten your customers.

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Six Low Friction Collaboration Tools for Marketers

Posted on December 12, 2011 by Peter Buechler

How do you keep on top of a marketing program as the client and team members each change and refine their contributions? How can you avoid the jumble of disjointed email and out of synch attachments, which convert what should be straightforward project management into an exercise in detective work and archeology?cloud based collaboration

There may not be a magic bullet for this common problem, but here are six free tools which save time, keep focus and often deliver a better result. Many nifty services save time after you’ve invested in learning them. Not so with these. You can get to know any of them in a few minutes.

All these services are cloud based and this enables real-time cooperation. Except for DropBox, there’s no software or app to install. A computer and an up to date browser are all you need.

Tom’s Planner

Elaborate project plan documents may impress clients. They can also take lots of effort better spent on actually doing the project. The old “solution” was to buy copies of Microsoft Project for team members, invest significant time learning how to use it, and then try to coordinate the different versions from each computer.

What you often need is a simpler tool to create Gantt charts and enable team members to update their portions. Enter Tom’s Planner. It hits the sweet spot between intuitive ease of use and enough features. Tom’s is entirely web based and works impressively well on a variety of browsers including on the iPad.

Writeboard

A fruitful exchange often starts at a whiteboard. Suppose you can extend the collaboration to those not in the room at the time, save the conversation and keep it going? Essentially what you get is multi-user chat, which you can store, share, or export to a read only web page. Its easy yet surprisingly useful.

Flockdraw

As useful as it is, Writeboard is text only. Sometimes a “back of the napkin” sketch gets your idea across best. Flockdraw is a very basic tool. No instructions supplied or needed. With it you can draw straight lines or freehand, change the color and thickness of the pen and share the result.

Corkboard

If you like sticky notes, this ultralight website lets you share them with team members on a virtual cork board. If you change, delete or add a new note, all those with whom you share a workspace will see the updates.

Ta-Da List

A project plan is overkill for some things. In this case a task list may be enough. Ta-Da is one list you can’t simply loose or leave at home. Making it sharable and editable online may help get the items done.

DropBox

Your project will likely include more elaborate documents – graphics, layouts, brochures, word processing files, etc. – any of which go through multiple revisions. This nifty file synchronization service allows you to manage document versions and ensure that you and your team members work on the same one.

DropBox requires a free app, which is available for Windows, Mac, Android, iPad, iPhone, and BlackBerry.

I could have mentioned other tools, but all these are fast, functional, and free. You can get to know them all over a lunch hour – which may be better than a free lunch.

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