One of my about-to-retire clients, a multinational CIO, was recently regaling me with tales about the days when, as a junior clerk, he used to sent daily reports to far-flung offices via telex. This process took many hours of laborious punch-typing onto a long ribbon of paper tape, then dialling the receiving address and feeding a 100 metre long tape through the machine. He was often at the office into the wee hours ensuring the tape went through without a glitch. Then came the first fax machine in the 80s. “This was a total revolution -  thousands of lines of text could send across the world in less than 20 minutes. We thought life just couldn’t get any better!”

Today gigabytes of text, images, complex documents and video clips can be captured and shared with anyone, anywhere at anytime in virtual realtime.  While this makes it easier to start a revolution,  or to strike up a new relationship with someone on the other side of the planet, what does it acually mean for the business community?

Many companies are excited by the possibilities of new technology, but others are scared rigid.  They are concerned that staff will fritter away the day sharing holiday pics on Facebook, or fear that sensitive corporate data will be let loose  into the ether to undermine their competitive advantage or cause a PR nightmare – or both. While these concerns are valid, the smart folks are harnessing cyberspace to send their message out to a wider audience: busting out of their local geography to stake a claim on the global stage. They are using social networking tools to facilitate a dialogue with their existing and potential customers, and to encourage staff to use Facebook and Twitter for collaborative working.

For those tilted towards the future, the ‘e-world’ is their oyster… and it’s just the beginning!

Elaine Graham

The art of no-name dropping

For our IT clients, the best advertising is a customer endorsement.  Many end-users are happy to be promoted as the early adopters of new technologies since this is generally viewed as a positive thing: it makes them look proactive, professional and at the leading edge of their market sector. It also shows that they are committed to cost efficiences, quality products and best of all, improving customer services.   So what’s not to like, especially since this kind of positive exposure is typically free to the reference customer?

Some industries – like healthcare – have built up around a culture of conservatism, born out of a need to minimise risk and maintain client confidentiality.  Over time this ‘default to discretion’ can lead to a reluctance to divulge anything that may have negative repercussions or expose their IT strategies to competing firms.  To point out that virtually all large financial services use the same industry standard technologies such as SAP, Oracle, middleware solutions, etc., and that most have the same challenges: a need for legacy integration, rationalised enterprise infrastructures, and so on, doesn’t usually sway the argument.

In these cases, when it comes to talking about a client this can be tricky. What’s the answer? The media has become adept at referencing large financial services organisations in generic terms such as: ‘One of the largest retail banks in the UK’, or ‘a leading New York-based asset management firm’.  Case studies are another challenge.  Indeed, if a particular reference is reluctant, the better course of action is to write an industry trend piece whereby the project is discussed as an example of  technology that is being adopted as the solution to a particular issue.

Alas today, few have the time to digest more than a few pithy statements before moving on to the next pressing issue.  The fact is we are bombarded with an ever increasing avalanche of information in every waking moment, brought to us courtesy of 24 hour TV, the Internet, free broadsheets and SMS mobile messages to name but a few of today’s ubiquitous media channels.  Even sound, well-structured and important messages run the risk of ending up as the flotsam and jetsam of this rising tide of data input, swept aside in the next flurry of headlines.   So what does a corporate have to do these days in order to make their message stick, to lodge their brand in the minds of a fickle-through-overload public ?

Well, harnessing social media is one strategy: join the tide and hopefully ride crest of the wave.  But it is not enough.  Facebook, Twitter et al may be the channel of choice, but among the many millions of players jostling for a millisecond of mindshare, how do you stand out? How do you put teeth in your soundbite?

The real question is: what lies at the heart of effective communications?   In Dickens’ day, well-to-do women were plump  the the fashion in literature was volubility (encouraged by pay-per-word).  Today the fashion is ‘less-is-more’ in both cases.  I once received a letter from a friend with a PS: ‘Sorry I couldn’t take the time to make this shorter.’ Well said.  It takes time and talent to find just those few words that ‘say it all’.  But if they are the right words, they will capture the imagination.  And  be remembered.  After all, outside of school poetry recitals, how many words can you readily recall in a phrase?  Three? Four?  Taglines are short for good reason – it’s what people can remember.

KIS is the next vital clue to putting teeth in your taglines.  There is a temptation to try and ‘pack it in’ — shoehorn as many syllables into a sentence as humanly possible. This usually backfires since the brain tires easily trying to unravel the threads.  Words should be like magic crystals:  tiny and compact, when you drop them into water (the mind) they suddenly expand into multi-coloured formations.

But this is just the start….  to be continued.