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July 7th, 2012 by James Richter
Canright Guide to Pitchfork 2012 – PDF download
Canright Guide to Pitchfork 2012 – PDF download
We at Canright Communications love discovering new music and sharing it with our friends, family, and business partners. Music can open our minds to unfamiliar emotions, different cultures, and new possibilities. We’re often listening to music while writing and designing new communications solutions for our clients. It can help us get in the zone.
Pitchfork has served as a wellspring of emerging artists for over a decade. Founded and headquartered in Chicago (just like us), the former start-up is now the leading voice in independent music. From their incisive, well-crafted reviews to their newly launched YouTube channel to the upcoming annual music festival July 13-15, Pitchfork is simultaneously criticizing, curating, and collaborating with musicians in a range of genres (and even helping to coin new ones).
While looking at the music schedule of this year’s Pitchfork Music Festival, we couldn’t help but notice that the set times and stages were presented in a format that is less than ideal. It’s easiest to plan out your personal schedule–and improvise while at the fest–if you have the acts lined up side-by-side. Most major fests do this, but Pitchfork does not.
Well, we just couldn’t resist, so we created a very basic schedule that you are free to download, print, mark up, and take with you to this year’s Pitchfork Music Festival. It has times, stages, and even some aftershows clearly laid out to help you make the best of the fest.
If you haven’t gotten a ticket, day passes are still for sale.
Enjoy the music, stay hydrated, and have fun!
Canright Guide to Pitchfork 2012 – PDF download
Tags: 2012, canright, Chicago, communications, Design, download, festival, music, pdf, pitchfork, pitchfork music festival, print out, printable, visual
Posted in Canright Blog, Canright Designers' Blog, Canright Writers' Blog, Inspiration Notebook, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
May 31st, 2012 by James Richter
Sometime early last week, I was walking past the bookshelf in my apartment when I did something unusual: I actually stopped and looked at a few of the titles.
The first book to grab my attention was one called Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking by Andy Sernovitz. I picked it up to scan the contents and intro, but before long I was laying on the couch, in full reading mode. The book kept my attention during my rides to and from work the entire week, and it was still fresh on my mind early Tuesday morning when I was sitting down to get a haircut.
Joe Gambino has been dicing domes from the third floor of the Tribune Tower for over twenty years. He’s got an old-school barber way about him, always asking which way I part my hair and snipping accordingly. There’s a classic masculinity about this shop, too, with no attention paid to wall art or the few random bottles of hair product in the display case, but Playboys are neatly splayed on a table next to where I sometimes sit and wait. At 26, I still can’t bring myself to open one in public, opting instead for a Scientific American.
That morning there was already one other man in the barbershop chatting with Joe when I got there. His presence was fortunate, because it was early, and after Joe and I both shared our Memorial Day weekend activities with each other, I was out of topics of conversation.
The man asked Joe, “Did you hear about the White Sox giving all the police officers free tickets to any game of the season?”
Joe had. I hadn’t.
Boom. Word-of-mouth marketing. Beautiful in its simplicity, no?
Some people might dismiss WOM as an antiquated technique of the pre-Social Era. Indeed, Word of Mouth Marketing was published in 2006. In his book, Sernovitz places particular emphasis on blogs, because that was before the platform exploded into so many mutations that continue to proliferate at warp speed. These new social media amplify strong WOM campaigns, rendering the fundamental WOM strategy all the more important.
WOM still begins with a great idea that will get people talking:
“Let’s give tickets to every Chicago police officer to thank them for their service.”
SIDE NOTE: Anyone reading this who keeps up with the turbulent world of Chicago politics might know that the back story behind this idea is a bit more complicated than that, but let’s assume that the idea sprang organically from somewhere within the White Sox organization.
Way back in the day—I’m talking two thousand eight—this news would have most likely been disseminated via a barbershop-type scenario or a news story that you just happened to stumble across. But this is 2012, a time when complete strangers share opinions, news, recommendations, and more with one another through a constellation of media. Here’s a small sample of tweets referencing the aforementioned story, which was generated after a quick search of “white sox cops”:
These people and many more all liked the story for one reason or another, so they tweeted it. With a story like this, people might tell a few friends, maybe a coworker or two. But they will absolutely tweet it. Or pin it. Or post it to Facebook or Tumblr or maybe even the blog they’ve been updating since 2006. Some people will post it to all of their accounts with just one click.
No, they don’t have to actually use their mouths for it to count as word-of-mouth marketing.
Sernovitz writes, “You need to do two things: Find a super-simple message and help people share it.” He also makes this observation: “People share surprisingly simple and stupid things.”
Anyone who has ever seen a guy go gaga over a double rainbow would agree with that.
-JR
Tags: Andy Sernovitz, Chicago, cops, free tickets, marketing, police, Social Media, Twitter, white sox, word of mouth
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December 7th, 2011 by James Richter
There is such a thing as too much Twitter.
The University of Chicago and Chicago’s public radio station WBEZ recently hosted a talk called “More than a Century of Style” in honor of the Chicago Manual of Style’s historic influence on the written word. A detailed description of the event and its panelists can be found here.
I was interested in the talk, but I didn’t feel like actually going to the U of C campus. Lucky for me, that didn’t matter. I watched and listened to the live stream of the talk on the U of C Facebook page, and I used Twitter to type my comments and questions in real time to @chicagomanual.
After my first question failed to yield acknowledgment from the moderator on my computer screen, I decided to dig deep for the best question I could think of. Recalling an essay titled “Authority and American Usage” that I read in David Foster Wallace’s Consider the Lobster, I tweeted:
To my surprise, it didn’t take long before I heard my Twitter handle and tweet read aloud. I felt my heart quicken and blood rush to my face.
Several questions popped into my head: Why am I participating more in this discussion than the folks who actually made the cold trip to the university? How did technology just prompt several biological responses? Am I going to get more Twitter followers?
As I lay on my couch in my sweatpants, I listened to Anita Samen, managing editor of the University of Chicago Press Books Division, thoughtfully answer my question. The advantages of using social media for events like these were clear: access and participation.
However, the talk also demonstrated how social media can be burdensome when misused. In this case, it suffered from too much Twitter.
First of all, why would a discussion completely bar those in attendance from asking questions? I think a mixture of live and digital questions would have been more rewarding for the physically present audience. Organizers should think of these live panel discussions as an entree with several complementing dishes. Twitter and Facebook should be the salt and pepper.
The non-stop Twitter feed chopped up the discussion among the featured panelists and even distracted panelist Jason Riggle enough that he lost track of what they were talking about. Events like this should be a flowing conversation and even at times an informal debate. Constant twitteruptions are momentum killers.
It also gives voice to people who don’t always deserve one. Here we had some of the foremost experts and authorities in grammar, style, and linguistics, and they were consistently being interrupted by tweets from the peanut gallery. The questions were at times trivial (numerous questions about the Oxford comma), ridiculous (Would you make Dave Eggers conform to Chicago Style?), and outside the discussion’s scope (What about email?).
As one of the lazy armchair grammarians who stayed in to stream the talk and live-tweet questions, I thoroughly enjoyed it, and I appreciate the University of Chicago for consistently sponsoring events like these. The university’s commitment to not only engaging everyone it possibly can, but also directly involving them is admirable. I look forward to more streaming and tweeting in the future, but I hope that the tweets only help tease out the discussion, rather than dominate it.
You can watch the full event here.
You can read David Foster Wallace’s essay as it was published in Harper’s here.
- James
I was interested in the talk, but I didn’t feel like actually going to the U of C campus. Lucky for me, that didn’t matter. I watched and listened to the live stream of the talk on the U of C Facebook page, and I used Twitter to type my comments and questions in real time to @chicagomanual.After my first question failed to yield acknowledgment from the moderator on my computer screen, I decided to dig deep for the best question I could think of. Recalling an essay titled “Authority and American Usage” that I read in David Foster Wallace’s Consider the Lobster, I tweeted:
Tags: a century of style, alison cuddy, anita samen, armchair grammarian, ben zimmer, carol fisher saller, chicago manual of style, chicago style, eight forty-eight, Event, Facebook, grammar, jason riggle, on language, panel discussion, Social Media, stream, style, talk, the subversive copy editor, Twitter, university of chicago, wbez
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May 25th, 2011 by Collin Canright
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Retailers, Regulators, Bankers, and Consumers
Navigate New Retail Payments Realities
Think about how many times you have heard about the demise of cash or checks over the years, and you have a good idea of the pace of change in the payments business.
The way people pay has a multitude of new realities today, especially in retail, as attendees learned at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago’s 11th Annual Payments Conference, held May 19-20. One speaker and long-time attendee, Tim Willi, managing director and senior analyst at Wells Fargo, put it like this: “I’ve never been more confused by the payments landscape. It’s insanely dynamic.”
Indeed, there are payments product announcements daily, many concerning mobile payments. Here’s one coming over my Facebook page from TechCruch as I write: “Square’s Disruptive New iPad Payments Service Will Replace Cash Registers.”
Square, as it happens, provided an example of the fast pace of change in the retail payments market. Last year, mainstream payments players criticized Square CEO Jack Dorsey for the company’s approach to allowing consumers to swipe credit cards on their smart phones. “Today his biggest problem is shipping enough product,” noted Richard Oliver, executive vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.
In his May 19 keynote address, “Paradigms Lost,” Oliver likened the industry today to Milton’s classic, Paradise Lost (with apologies). “There are many candidates for Satan,” he observed. “It depends on where you sit and who you are.” For details, see Oliver’s comparison of yesterday’s payments paradise with today’s payments paradise lost.
The End of ‘Everything Is Free’
Merchants want lower fees. Banks want to make a profit for shareholders. Consumers want to make payments quickly, easily, and securely easily on their mobile devices. Consumer advocates want to make sure that the emerging technology does not leave behind the working poor who don’t have bank accounts or older people who prefer traditional methods for making payments (the unbanked and underbanked).
Everyone wants coordination and cooperation on mobile banking schemes. Nobody wants regulation to stifle innovation.
Consumer payment preferences are shifting from checks and cash to PIN debit card payments, reported merchants and Federal Reserve researchers. “The debit card and the prepaid card are the only things growing explosively,” Oliver noted.
At the same time, most speakers agreed that consumers are likely to pay more for both banking and payment services. When the Senate issues final rules to govern the Durbin Amendment, bank fees for consumers will go up. But consumers may see those fees offset elsewhere. The Durban amendment will save merchants money, and they may pass those savings on to their customers, which should slow the rate of consumer cost increases for products and services.
The reform could end up costing consumers less in the long run, and it will probably be fairly easy for savvy consumers to avoid paying bank fees. Competition among banks will help. Which bank, after all, wants to be the first on the neighborhood to announce to its customers that they are now going to start paying more for writing checks and using their ATM machines?
“We are guilty because we established an everything-is-free model , with revenue based on penalties,” said Bank of America global card executive Andy Rowe. “Now that penalties going away, we have to say to our customers, ‘Well there is value, and you have to pay.’”
In a bid to avoid losing customers and to leave behind the standard practice of supporting services based on late and overdraft fees, Bank of America is piloting a tiered service and pricing scheme. “All customers must pay a fair price for value, and the cost structure and revenue matches customer preferences.”
Just to show how history loops, this consumer development is similar to corporate treasury management in the mid 1980s. At the time, banks gave away cash and treasury management services in exchange for the interest they earned on account balances. Interest rates fell. Companies borrowed from one another in the commercial paper markets, further limiting interest-based income, and banks started charging fees for all the once-free corporate services.
Could it be that the more things change the more they stay the same? “I don’t see in our immediate future any massive change coming about,” Oliver said. “No payments technology in this country has ever been taken away.”
The ‘Wild Lunatic Fringe’
Yet these turns of events are not the banking and consumer nightmares they may seem, just as they weren’t in the late 80s and 90s. In a validation of my previous article on The Durbin Amendment, John Drechny, senior director of payments at WalMart Stores said, “You say Durbin is not going to create innovation. I hate to tell you, but it already has.”
As with any new service, especially those deriving from internet and mobile devices, consumer choice and convenience will rule, noted Tim Murphy, chief product officer at MasterCard Worldwide. MasterCard is working to integrate payments with internet search and social networks, asking the question, “How do you get the payments more integrated with consumer research preferences?”
Erin McCune, presenting the “wild lunatic fringe of payments,” showed some of the seemingly unlikely possibilities of innovation: addictive Facebook games like FarmVille and CityVille, with their virtual currencies purchased using very real credit cards. “If grandma is already on Facebook to look at her grandkids’ photos, why not let her send the $100 for the gift and not just the digital cake?” asked McCune, a partner at the payments consultancy Glenbrook Partners, San Francisco. You never know the sources of innovation. “Look at PayPal 10 years ago,” she said.
Look at PayPal, indeed, for strange turns in the payments marketplace. PayPal’s Laura Chambers reminded the audience that the company started as a way to beam payments between two Palm Pilots (See “PayPal Puts Dough in Your Palm,” Wired, July 27, 1999.)
The company, with its reputation for telling consumers and businesses how payments work, gained more than virtual points from me for the consumer-oriented approach to mobile payments presented by Chambers, senior director of PayPal Mobile. “People have incredible systems in ordering their funding sources and in how they order their wallets,” she said. “Payment is very personal to people.”
Not Comfortable but Very Resourceful
Consumers are not comfortable yet with mobile payments made through apps, just as they weren’t initially comfortable with payments made over the internet through web browsers. For a discussion of the current mobile payments ecosystem in the U.S., see “Mobile Payments in the United States: Mapping Out the Road Ahead,” a recent report provided by the Atlanta and Boston Federal Reserve Banks.
“Consumers are more resourceful on how to pay,” says MasterCard’s Murphy. With the growth of Groupon, couponing and local offers are more prevalent and ripe for integrating with mobile devices. “Driven by a deep perspective from consumers that they will spend but have to get a deal,” Murphy said.
Regulators are concerned. Prepaid cards make them nervous because nonbank providers issuing cards could, in effect, be seen as taking deposits. That didn’t stop the U.S. Department of the Treasury in introducing its Direct Express card for delivering benefits to unbanked individuals, nor WalMart as a way of providing payroll to its employees.
In assessing a paper he co-authored 10 years ago, Emery Kobor,a strategic policy director at the U.S. Department of the Treasury, noted, “We didn’t anticipate potential for nonbanks to have a customer-facing relationship and be more than a service provider for the bank. Today that model is being flipped around.”
“There is certainly as much potential for a nonbank to maintain a customer relationship and a transaction account for a customer as there is for a bank,” Kobor continued. “The bank may not appear at all except as a back-end service provider for settlement, and the customer may not know at all.”
To see how innovation in payments has evolved, read “Why Invest in Payment Innovations?” by Sujit Chakravorti (now Chief Economist at The Clearing House) and Emery Kobor (now assistant director for strategic policy in the Office of Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes at the U.S. Department of the Treasury), published in 2003 when both authors worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.
–Collin Canright
payments.canrightcommunications.com
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March 17th, 2010 by Collin Canright
Technical writing can sell products and improve a company’s image with customers. Nothing is more annoying to a customer—and few things are complained about more—than manuals and instructions that are hard to follow and generate more questions than answers.
Since founding Canright Communications 20 years ago, I have seen technical writing and documentation as a critical sales and marketing tool. Good manuals reduce customer complaints, returns, and support calls.
At the same time, many companies have products that are difficult to understand. Complex software systems need demos. Complex hardware products often must be seen and used in person. Yet marketing and sales people need to generate appointments from website and print materials. Good technical communications can help here as well.
Two recent Canright Communications projects show how.
Reducing Product Returns
With an international market for its concrete testing devices, James Instruments faces the challenge of conveying product information and instructions to customers around the world, many of whom do not speak much English. The company’s existing manuals were written in English by engineers.
To the person who designs and works with a product, its features are obvious and don’t need to be explained. A case in point is the cord that comes with James Instrument’s Mini R-Meter, one of the company’s most popular products. If you’re on a construction site, and the unit’s AA batteries run down, you can use the cord to plug it into the on-site generator and continue use.
Unfortunately, the cord looks like a cell phone recharging unit. Workers on a job site who didn’t prepare the unit for use would plug in the cord to recharge the batteries. Needless to say, they were unsuccessful and believed the unit was defective. James Instruments started to get returns, which are expensive when they come from overseas customers, as most of them did.
Given our distance from the product, we suggested that James Instruments add a page to the manual that shows clear drawings of each piece of the meter and defines it in simple terms. This included showing the battery opening on the back, so there would be little question to anyone, no matter what language they spoke, that the unit operated on AA batteries:
Improving Product Explanations
We used a similarly visual approach for a new product by our client Assistive Medical Equipment (AME) as a way to explain how the product works. AME created the EZRock™ Patient Transfer System, which allows caregivers to safely transfer their patients from wheelchair to bed and vice versa, with no lifting and back strain.
The product is difficult to explain verbally, and potential customers generally ask how it works. We decided that the website should answer that question—and thereby help AME get in-person demos—by using the step-by-step approach we take to our technical documentation. We used few words and relied on illustrations to show how the product works:
To see all five steps, visit the AME website. To learn how we came up with the solution, read designer Aya O’Connor’s blog post “Serving Your Clients By Predicting Their Needs.”
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February 8th, 2010 by Collin Canright
After decreasing in trust last year more than any other institution, business is gaining trust in the public eye, according to the 10th annual Edelman Trust Barometer report. The 2010 report shows that trust in peers dropped dramatically while trust in business and experts increased.
“Trust data shows that we’re desperately seeking out experts. This is unsurprising given the torrent of information we’re all contending with. We’re self-curating and in the process seeking out higher authorities,” writes Edelman Digital senior vice president Steve Rubel, in his analysis of the report’s implications for PR and social media.
The 2009 survey came amid the worst of the financial crisis. Not surprisingly, all institutions suffered a fall in trust, especially business, whose trust rating fell 23%. This year, business had the biggest year-over-year increase, according to the Advertising Age report on the barometer.
Yet trust remains fragile, the report concludes, and is only as strong and trustworthy as the communications an organization produces. “Transparent and honest practices” topped the list of the factors most important to a corporate reputation.
Read the full 2010 Edelman Trust Barometer and 2009 Edelman Trust Barometer reports on the Edelman Public Relations website.
-Collin
Tags: Edelman Public Relations, PR
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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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November 3rd, 2009 by Canright Communications
Canright helped GTreasury, a leading provider of treasury management software and services, get published in industry websites and newsletters and increase its search presence by writing and distributing two press releases. The release, written in conjunction with the firm’s participation in the Association for Financial Professionals (AFP) 2009 Conference, illuminate recent AFP poll results, the company’s latest treasury workstation product version, and the renewal of a long-term development and support agreement with the General Electric Company (GE). In addition, Canright designed and produced signs for GTreasury’s booth at the AFP conference to highlight the company’s client presentations.
Tags: AFP, AFP conference, Association for Financial Professionals, GTreasury, treasury workstation
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