Canright Communications

Jobless: Links on the Language of Employment Statistics

February 5th, 2010 by Collin Canright

Although I didn’t realize it at the time I wrote it, my take on today’s employment reports, which showed both a decrease in the unemployment rate and a loss of jobs, may be among the most pessimistic. When our Canright Calendar email comes out on Monday, today’s report will be referred to as a “job-loss report,” in contrast to most-often used tag of “jobless report.”

But then the figures have shown losses for so long, it appears that my brain sees it as a report of losses and not of data. A review of today’s headlines shows that I’m not the only one. In a search for meaning in the data, major media reported today’s seemingly contradictory figures mostly as a mixture of optimism tempered with the frustration of this recession’s long-declining employment data.

My tag may simply have been influenced by the first report I saw, CNNMoney.com’s article “The big jobs hole.”

MSNBC put a little more positive spin on the figures in “A ray of hope clouded by 8.4 million jobless: Mixed January employment data show how far the jobs market needs to go.”

The business media put the most positive spin on the news. “US jobless rate lowest for five months,” reported the Financial Times. “The US unemployment rate fell to a five-month low of 9.7 per cent in January, even as the economy shed 20,000 jobs. . .

The Wall Street Journal followed suit in “Signs of Hope as Jobless Rate Dips.” The report, however, noted the “employers continued cutting jobs in January as businesses remained insecure about the economic outlook.” Indeed, though we hope to add to our staff soon.

President Obama tempered his optimism, according to the Journal, by saying that the report is “encouraging” and a “cause for hope but not celebration.”

Taking the just-the-numbers approach was National Public Radio and the Chicago Tribune; both reported “Jobless Rate Drops To 9.7 Percent,” though NPR inserted the word “unexpectedly” in its headline while the Tribune left that information for its article’s lead. The New York Times led in the same way but with the sunny headline “Labor Market Shows Signs of Rebirth in New Data.”

As usual, NPR’s excellent Planet Money team made the most of the situation to explain how reports can show a fall in the unemployment rate with a loss of 20,000 jobs in “Yay!(?) Jobless Rate Under 10 Percent.” The ever skeptical Agora Financial’s 5 Min. Forecast simply tagged it all “Jobs Insanity.”

Finally, my favorite, The Economist, which always seems to provide so much interpretation in its headline decks of so few words:

American jobs figures
Falling flat
More evidence that America is experiencing a jobless recovery

The lead paragraph rounds out the situation with economic context:

A WEEK ago, Americans were told that their economy had expanded for a second consecutive quarter, and rapidly at that: output grew at an annual rate of 5.7%. This week, they are reminded that a return to growth has yet to benefit the jobless. The economy lost 20,000 jobs in January, a decline driven by the loss of 75,000 jobs in the construction sector. Economists had forecast an increase in employment of around 15,000. The unemployment rate, based on household rather than establishment data, showed a slight improvement, dropping from 10% to 9.7%, but nearly 15m Americans remain unemployed. As Larry Summers put it in Davos last week, the American economy is experiencing “a statistical recovery and a human recession”.

For his nice turn of phase, which gives the most accurate and concise summation of the jobs report and economic situation, my business language prize goes to Larry Summers, director of the National Economic Council.

- Collin

Tags: business writing, journalism, language, media, public relations
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The Three Phases of Online Marketing

February 4th, 2010 by Collin Canright

Acquire, convert, retain. All of the activities of online marketing take place within these three basic phases, as Tim Ash explains in his book Landing Page Optimization: The Definitive Guide to Testing and Tuning for Conversions.

1. Acquisition. Getting people to your website or landing page. This is also called traffic generation, and from a content marketing perspective, it involves publishing ebooks or white papers.

2. Conversion. Persuading visitors to take the desired action, such as making a purchase, downloading an ebook, or registering for a webinar or white paper. The conversion process generally takes place on a landing page, the subject of Ash’s fine book.

3. Retention. Deepening the relationship with prospective customers who, for instance, have given you permission to send them your email offers or enewsletter content.

Each phase feeds into the next. At Canright Communications, we tend to use social media in the acquisition process, either as a means of sparking a conversation online that we can take offline or as a way of distributing content we write in our blog posts, enewsletter, or ebooks and report.

Conversion takes place on landing pages, which vary depending on the content we publish. We have specialized landing pages for white-paper registration, and we have sign-up boxes on our home page and blog pages.

Most of our online marketing effort goes into retention. Email marketing is our primary means of retention communication, and we believe that’s the best use for email in content marketing.

As Scott Stephen, now head of digital at Playboy, put it during a panel discussion we sponsored: “My goal in an email is simply to start a relationship and to get their permission to speak with them over time through email or other means. You don’t go on your first date and ask someone to marry you.”

Tim Ash extended that thought in his book: “Retention programs should seek to build on the initial permission with anticipated, personal, and relevant ongoing communications. Over time, as you earn the consumer’s trust and continue to provide value, you are granted higher levels of intimacy and permission in return.”

The company or individual with a changing menu of compelling content earns – truly earns – a valuable return in the form of a community of people who are highly attracted to learn more about the company’s subject and, in turn, market offerings. This invariably leads to customers.

What kind of content do you feel extends your engagement with a company? How do you manage acquisition, conversion, and retention?

Tags: content marketing, online marketing
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5 Ways to Connect with Content

February 2nd, 2010 by Collin Canright

The most critical element of maintaining contact and building relationships with a network is to touch people as many time as practical using as many ways as possible—from emails to blogs to newsletters to social media to phone calls to face-to-face meetings. Here are some ways to maintain contact with a network that we know, from our own experience, work:

1. Publish a networking calendar.

We’ve created the Canright Calender, a list of networking events in Chicago for executives, marketers, entrepreneurs, and innovators that we consider attending, and send it by email each week. It’s become the thing we do that people comment on and appreciate the most, building goodwill for our firm. We also run into people we know at events we would not have known they would be interested in, but they read about the event in our networking email and come. Several other people do the same thing, and we list their calendars at the bottom of our weekly Canright Featured Event emails and posts.

2. Send a regular enewsletter.

The key word is “regular,” which is a synonym for “consistent.” The content is, of course, the news business thrived for years on familiarity and punctuality, and those qualities are still required to make an impression. We seek to make our enewsletter personal through our staff media recommendations–they’re the more commented on and read portions of every issue of Canright Communicates.

3. Solicit comments for your blog.

In writing our White Paper Basics report, we posted a link with a request for comments on the topic on LinkedIn and sent a request for comments in emails both to people we knew well and people we hardly knew at all, as a way of “crowdsourcing” information. We posted the feedback on our blog and incorporated it into our report.

4. Distribute articles through social networks and media.

We wrote a summary of recent research in the payments market as part of a promotion surrounding the SIBOS 2009 Conference. We emailed the article to contacts we thought might be interested, posted the article on LinkedIn groups and the SWIFT payments community, and even wrote an article about the article in ourAugust 2009 newsletter. LinkedIn became the top referral source to our blog.

5. Continue the “old-fashioned” ways.

The telephone still works as well as it did when the Bell System advertised in LIFE magazine “You could never without a telephone” in 1953, though most people believe that email gets more response. I regularly call frequent readers of our enewsletters and people who register for our white paper report to see what their interests are and whether we can help with their marketing.

I aim to meet with people in person. Indeed, in-person meetings—off-line connections, if you will—remain the goal of most network contacts. Perhaps it’s a predictable backlash to connecting online or to continuing travel restrictions, but Hyatt Hotels is using the slogan, “Great Happens When People Get Together” for its current meetings and events promotion.

Tags: email marketing, networking Chicago, Social Media
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Extending Blog Posts with Zemanta

January 30th, 2010 by Collin Canright

Last week I downloaded the Zemanta plug-in for Google Chrome and have been using it when writing posts through my two WordPress blogs.

Zemanta uses the slogan “Blog Smarter” in its title bar and the line “Write your post . . . Enrich with Zemanta. . . Get more traffic.” I can’t say anything about the claim “get more traffic,” but I have found that the tool both makes blogging easier (I’ll use that for smarter) and enriches posts.

For instance, I wrote a post on Paul Volcker last Sunday in my personal blog as a way to comment on three articles I had read on the President’s economic advisor and former Federal Reserve chairman. I took a look at the Related Articles section of Zemanta’s Content Recommendations sidebar that shows in my WordPress dashboard, and found another excellent article to round out my post with some details on a news conference in which Volcker participated.

The blue square-arrow icon on the lower right of each recommendation opens the items in another window, making it fast and easy to read and evaluate new sources, as well as suggestions from information sources that I added to my profile. I have also used the Media Gallery section to find illustrations for posts, something that my posts generally lack and a weakness I will use Zemanta to help correct.

The other Zemanta function that I appreciate is the In-Text Links section, which in WordPress appears right below the text editor. As you write, link suggestions appear. Linking is as easy as selecting the text for the link and clicking on the In-Text Links button you want.

I have not figured out how Zemanta selects in-text links or how to get other items in a post to appear. But the auto-link feature as I now understand saves a lot of time.

So all in all, the tool is proving its worth in blogging smarter. Now we’ll see about the additional traffic claim.

-Collin

Tags: Add new tag, blogging, Google Chrome, technical writing, WordPress, Zemanta
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Jason Fried at Tech Meetup Chicago

January 29th, 2010 by Canright Communications

Jason Fried is founder of 37Signals, the company responsible for the acclaimed project management and collaboration application, Basecamp. I had the opportunity to see Jason Fried speak at a Tech Meetup event last week (co-sponsored by Canright Communications), and found myself agreeing with him for the most part, yet occasionally disagreeing. Though his speech was geared towards entrepreneurs and start-ups building web-based applications, many of these ideas can be applied past software development

Let’s start with something I agree with: “It’s unavoidable you’re going to make mistakes; when you do, acknowledge it’s your fault and do so with sincerity.”

I completely agree with Fried’s view here. He compared the apology of someone spilling a cup of coffee on someone to a more formal apology. One that’s full of loop holes: “We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.” Inconvenience? Why not just state what the problem was directly? May have? It did cause a problem; that’s why you’re apologizing, right? It’s important for your customers to know you care.

For Fried, it’s more important to have useful features than innovative ones. Although this idea downplays innovation— something crucial to society and culture—it’s not something I disagree with. I would rather having something work well and do what I need it to than having something that kind of works but is really cool. He states that Post-it notes will still be used in 20 years and then asks, “Will Facebook?”

He used a common bottle of water as an example to support his view on keeping features to a minimum. Everyone in the room could pretty much agree on it being a good design. You can see how much water is in the bottle from afar, it’s light so you can tell if there’s water in it by picking it up, there’s a cap that screws on. If it had been made out of lead, the design would be bad because you couldn’t see how much water was in the bottle from afar and, since lead is heavier than water, you wouldn’t be able to tell how much was in the container just from lifting. It’s important to say no to feature requests. Sure, you could put a spray nozzle on the water bottle, but it doesn’t make sense.

I also agree with Fried when he says you don’t have to fail just because you’re new. Failure is not a rite of passage. He argued that it makes more sense to learn from your success than your failures. Learning from your failures is only going to teach you what not to do. When you realize you have something successful, you should try to figure out how to replicate it.

One of the things I disagreed with was when he said, “I think everyone in school should drop out.” Now, his explanation that you learn more from real-world experience than you do from taking classes isn’t exactly wrong. You probably would learn more about your job by doing it. What I disagree with is how he wrote off education, basically saying it’s not worth your time, ever. My college experience involves not only education, but exploration. It’s a time when I—and I think many others—got to experiment and develop connections, not to mention social skills.

Jason Fried has good ideas, but, as he said, these are ideas that worked for him. You should do what works for you. Try them. If they work, keep at it. If not, move on. For more on Jason Fried, check out the 37signals blog and their book Getting Real.

-Michael

Tags: 37 Signals, Basecamp, Friedisms, Jason Fried, Tech Meetup
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Discovering Your Ideal through the ISAP Method

January 23rd, 2010 by Collin Canright

Canright Communications believes that purpose and vision should drive any sales and marketing plan and project. During the Discover phase of our Canright Project Methodology, we make sure that we understand a company’s purpose, vision, and goals and how a marketing project will support them.

The primary tool at use at this initial state is the Ideal State Action Planning (ISAP) process. The ISAP process gives a concise framework and method to define the ideal and present states of a problem while suggesting pathways to make that ideal state a reality.

The ISAP process is derived from neurolinguistic programming (NLP) and communication modeling techniques pioneered by Richard Bandler and John Grinder. Dr. Robert Wright, CEO of the Wright Leadership Institute, created the ISAP process from ideas in Grinder’s book Precision: A New Approach to Communication. In addition to NLP and communications modeling techniques, Dr. Wright added his own focus on purpose as a way to ensure that an ideal state flowed from a larger mission, as discussed in his book Business with Purpose.

In practice, an ISAP is a simple process. All of the major stakeholders and members of the Canright team meet to define the vision or ideal state that a project is to achieve. Three flip charts with note takers are set up on the front of the room–one on the left labeled Present, the one in the middle labeled Pathway, and the one on the right labeled Ideal. Sometimes we use a laptop projected on the wall with a Word document divided in three columns.

We ask questions to determine where the organization wants to go as a business and with the project. We also ask questions about where things stand at present. As questions are answered, answers and observations, the note takers write on the appropriate charts.

The conversation progresses, and the present and ideal states become increasingly clear. Pathways tend to emerge, almost as if by magic.

The process takes an hour or two and results in a concrete definitions of the present state, the ideal state, and the pathways required to achieve the ideal state. The information on the flip charts, along with a transcript, serve as the basis for recommendations, proposals, and reports.

Canright conducts kick-off ISAPs for all its major projects and in initial sales meetings as a way to quickly define and determine client needs.

Tags: B2B marketing, Canright Project Methodology, Wright Leadership Institute
Posted in Inspiration Notebook | No Comments »

Anatomy of a Website Redesign

January 22nd, 2010 by Canright Communications

First and foremost, we decided this would be the year that we make our website wonderful. And the benefits have been bigger than we ever anticipated. We refocused who we are, how we want to communicate with our world, and how we want to be seen.

With the goal of a wonderful website that focuses who we are and attracts attention, we looked at which marketing efforts were working best in terms of generating name recognition and sales results. Our monthly email newsletter topped the list. We get lots of comments on our newsletter. In particular, people like our staff recommendations.

The next things we hear about are our Canright Calendar and the Featured Chicago Networking Event of the Week emails. We’ve given both the recommendations and our Featured Event prominent positions on the home page.

From other feedback we’ve received—often unsolicited—people like our articles. We also know that clients turn to us for content. We decided to focus on content and client projects to showcase what we produce. As a communications and marketing firm, we have to be a great example of what we do.

Becoming Our Own Client

But how to get it done? Given that client work would always take priority, we needed to become our own client. We decided to institute the same working process for ourselves as we do for our clients, the Canright Project Methodology.

We had already started the Discover phase of the website design process last spring, when we did an Ideal State Action Plan. Then we came to a screeching halt. We told ourselves it was because we got busy with clients—we all have other jobs besides our website, you know.

So, we planned our formal Develop phase and set a final deadline—go live before Christmas. And we set up a process where we would check in weekly on the progress. We went over what we liked and didn’t like about our previous site, looked at other sites for inspiration, and talked about how we wanted to be perceived. We also made one member of our staff, Aya, the owner of the project—just as we do for our clients.

Shifting Content

We had a lot of content on our old website, and all of it seemed necessary. What to keep and what to let go of?

White space became a point of orientation, to keep a bright, open look no matter what we had on the page. We have more information on our home page now than we did before, but it doesn’t feel that way. We organized it so each section is distinct but all works together. It’s easier to find what you’re looking for.

As we moved into the Deliver phase of our project methodology for coding and content management setup, Michael became the development owner, with both he and Aya consulting with the rest of the Canright team as the actual site took shape with the final content.

The Right Tools

On the technical side, we built the site using the WordPress publishing platform. WordPress has evolved from a blog tool into a content management system for websites and became our preferred site development tool last year. We used it to build our blog and then set up a WordPress installation for the main site. With WordPress, everyone in the office can update pages, not just those who know code.

WordPress made it easier to achieve our goal to have more dynamic content on the site. Our home page pulls the latest RSS feeds, generated by WordPress, to load our most recent blog posts (speaking of blog posts and RSS, see our post on Google’s RSS reader). The platform allows us to categorize the sections of the site and customize how different types of content will load on each page. For instance, our recommendations are set to display randomly on the home page while the Featured Event is always the most recent.

WordPress automatically updates the home page, as well as the rest of the site, when new content is published, so the site always displays something new. We also rely on Feedburner to syndicate our blogs, keep track of subscribers, and offer our readers another way to subscribe (including by email).

Preparing For Launch

Design, content, and coding came together as the deadline neared. We made tweaks and changes to each as we reviewed progress. Talk about excitement. We felt proud, especially as testimonials we had asked for from our clients started pouring in.

To make the site speak to what we do for clients, we went right to the source. We asked our clients to submit testimonials for us and review the case studies we wrote on how we solved their problems (check out this recent blog post to get a better idea of how we approach case studies). Their feedback was gratifying and gave a positive ending to the year for everyone on our team, as we read quotes from emails out loud in our office. It was like getting presents from our clients.

And We’re Live!

The site went live the day before Christmas, and we spent the last week of the year fine tuning. We launched an email announcement, and the response has been great. Now we’re working on additional case studies, ongoing content, and further feedback so we can keep the site dynamic and change it into a means of converting visitors into leads.

Please take a look at the site and feel free to leave a comment below.

Tags: Canright Calendar, Feedburner, website redesign, WordPress
Posted in Onlines | 1 Comment »

Case Study Backgrounder

January 21st, 2010 by Collin Canright

Case studies are influential marketing tools that help a company spotlight and promote its products or services, and can greatly increase credibility with potential customers. A well-written case study illustrates how a specific problem was identified and resolved. The key is to adequately research your case study topic and make sure to ask, and then answer, the right questions.

Here is an outline and a list of questions we use in drafting case studies. Note that it’s comprehensive to handle long detailed articles and elicit interesting responses. We shorten list of questions to fit story requirements.

Case Study Subject Background
- Organization’s name
- Mission of organization
- Products or services offered
- Capsulated history
- How long a client? (if applicable)
- Products and services offered by our client used by the case study company
- Overview of IT environment (for IT case studies)
- Company website (divisional website, if appropriate)
- Grabber: Why would I know this company? (example: “ABC Company launched the initial tool to solve this problem or has dominated its business segment for so many years. “)

Challenges
- What are the case study’s main challenges? Which can be addressed by our client? Which can be influenced indirectly by working with our client?
- What goals did the case study company have regarding resolution of challenges?
- Interviews with client product managers and case study decision makers: why were products or services a good fit?
- Were challenges noticeable to the public or to end-users, or just internally or financially?
- If case study had done nothing, what would have happened?

Solutions
- What did the case study do? How was it implemented?
- What are success stories from implementation?
- What were the problems that client helped the case study overcome?
- What was the process and time to implement solutions and bring online?
- Impact on marketing, sales, operations, finance?
- What was most attractive about the client’s products or services?

Costs
- What was the cost of solutions?
- What people were involved?
- How long did the project take?

Benefits
- What benefits did solutions offer?
- How easy is the operation with the new product or service in place?
- Who can tell the difference?

Results
- Enhancement of market position, customer retention, customer satisfaction, internal attitudes, cost savings, etc.?
- How have the client’s products exceeded expectations?
- What was unexpected surprises? Any “good news” surprises?
- Data on results? (preferably data that can be charted into a visual)
- How has the case study’s perception of the client changed?
- Which of the client’s programs and products did the case study use?
- Learns, such as, “Are online billing customers more profitable?”
- Growth, grounded in data, such as change in number of customers or accounts, revenue, profit, market ranking, changes in product line, customer retention rates, etc.
- Key learns?
- Which of the client’s products or services worked best?
- Has client’s product helped to retain clients? Attract new clients?
- What’s next?

Tags: B2B marketing, copywriting
Posted in Canright Writers' Blog | 1 Comment »

Noteworthy Links for 01-20-10

January 20th, 2010 by Collin Canright

Advice for writing stand-out press releases
A slew of tips and comments on writing effective press releases from Innovative Marketing, PR, Sales, Word-of-Mouth & Buzz Innovators | LinkedIn.

Sarcasm punctuation mark aims to put an end to email confusion
We wish we’d thought of it.

Fleet Management and Fleet Leasing Solutions – Donlen Corporation
Company website showing the beginning of social interaction and mobile tools for fleet communications.

Ipsos Insight
Interesting way of splitting a brand and firm into two distinct organizations or websites. Unclear to me how well this would work. Thoughts?

My REAL Secret to Growing Traffic
Tips and ideas for generating traffic on a blog, of note for the ideas on reader interaction and participation.

Chicago’s tech scene on firmer ground now
The Chicago Sun-TImes’ Brad Spirrison reports on the state of technology firms in Chicago.

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