The Lone Communicator

The Wired article about Google’s new Web browser, Chrome, talks about how the software engineers essentially threw every preconceived idea about the Web browser toolbar out the window, and started from scratch. Tools such as the back button made the cut to be included in the toolbar; something like the bookmark bar is optional only if users depend on it, since Chrome is introducing several new navigation methods that user testing shows are more effective than bookmarks.

There’s something really wonderful about throwing out all assumptions and starting over, instead of just repeating the same standard nav tools that were built into browsers 13 years ago. Yet Google remained sensitive to the familiarity quotient, knowing they’d have the best success if they didn’t completely move users’ cheese.

And from a communications point of view: how smart is it turn a technical explanation of Chrome into a comic book, with Google software engineers as the characters? Talk about knowing your audience …

I almost hate to write this post. I almost hate to admit that my gut instinct was right on the whole time.

A few months ago, I got a call from someone who found me through a Google search. My keywords were working! I was excited, but skeptical. My experience has been that people who find my Web site through blind search engine searches tend to have high expectations, low budgets, and a sketchy idea of what they really want. That’s not always the case of course. But it tends to be reality.

This prospective client was a startup. She talked tough, but the more I heard about the story behind her business, the more excited I became. She knew very little about marketing, but she had a fantastic story to tell. It was also a chance for me to get some design and writing work under my belt.

I was very surprised that the project moved to the contract stage. Then we did the work. Lots of work. I didn’t bill her upfront for half of the project, like I usually (and should always) do. I was excited. I was in love with the work that came out of it.

Yet all along, I had this little gut thing going on. This itsy bitsy little demon in my stomach, squeaking up to me: “This isn’t going to end well.”

I don’t know why I thought that. But I just had a hunch. We kept going. We tweaked and tweaked. I researched printing prices. We tweaked some more. She was leaving me voice mails insisting that we wrap up the project because she was ready to go! She had business to do! She couldn’t wait to roll out her marketing kit.

Then.

She stopped calling. Stopped emailing. Emails went unanswered, voice mails went unreturned. It was unlike her. I sent her an invoice for the contracted amount. She never logged in to look at it. Today I finally called the main number at her business and got a curt, evasive answer from her coworker about how my contact will probably “not be in for awhile.” I asked if I should call her cell phone, and her coworker answered abruptly, “No!”

I guess I would be more upset about it if I hadn’t known all along that it was going to turn out like this. Yet, my gut instinct was so irrational. I had no earthly reason to stop work on this project. No red flags, at least not traditional red flags, popped up along the way. So what was it that nagged at me? Is there something I should learn from this?

Malcolm Gladwell would say my Second Mind was talking to me. That I have enough experience to instinctively know when something’s fishy. Was it her small-town vibe? Her rogue past (mentions in passing of behavior, and consequences, that were presented as noble and brave but also could have been construed as ornery, or worse, destructive)? Her big ideas (which, I’ve learned, don’t always translate into big reality)? She seemed nice enough, a good, solid businessperson. But there must have been enough little, intangible signs to make me vaguely uneasy along the way.

Anyway. I don’t know if I’ll get paid or not. It wasn’t that expensive a project. I guess I just want to learn from this. Does it mean I don’t take on small business owners as clients anymore? Or more that I just need to do a little gut searching before proceeding?

I recently returned from a three-day trip to Chicago to attend the inaugural Creative Freelancer Conference, an event put on by HOW magazine (for which I have been a long-time contributor, and to which I fully attribute my one-thing-leads-to-another brand of career success) and Marketing Mentor. HOW is renowned for its excellent HOW Design Conference, with great content and big-name speakers in the design world every year. I was excited about being part of getting the CFC off the ground.

Over three-ish days (short programs on Wednesday and Friday and a full day on Thursday – no doubt meant to address the internal struggles that all of us freelancers felt with taking three days away from ridiculous piles of work) we addressed the big stuff. This being the first conference, we jumped right in to the stuff that really bothers us. How do we charge? How do we manage our time? How do we make sure we get paid? It shouldn’t have been a surprise to any of us that our fellow creatives struggle with exactly the same things. I’d say 25% to 30% of the people there were copywriters — the rest were designers, natural due to the HOW connection — but whether talking to writers or designers or Web developers or illustrators, I discovered that many of us were there for the same reasons. We all grapple with the insecurities that being isolated can bring; the head-scratcher about how to take the time to market oneself when inundated with client deadlines; the universal battle with learning how to say “No!”.

I took two major things away from the conference. First: I’m not doing so badly after all. I have a contract and a process for doing estimates in place; I’m doing pretty well with client communications; I am slowly but surely learning how to better manage my time so I don’t take on too much work.

But second: I have a lot left to learn. I have major problems with overpromising. I still, in my gut, think like a full-time employee who believes all my clients are looking over my shoulder, expecting me to jump when they call. I feel scared a lot. I worry about the future even when I’m underwater in the present.

But the conference was a great way to get away from all of that for a few days, clear my mind, be around a lot of amazing people with great ideas floating in their heads, and gain some perspective. Here are a few key takeaways that I brought back to my office from the week — and that I’m working on putting into practice as we speak:

• Say “I am,” and then be it: Too often, creatives fall into the trap of not being assertive when it comes to saying what services they provide. They say things like: “I’m just a writer,” or worse, try to be everything to everyone without clearly defining what they do well. Decide what you are, and then say, “I am this.” People will believe you. Do what you need to do to back it up, and be this with all your heart.
• Lions don’t apologize. The lead-in title of this bullet is taken from a line in a fun storybook I read to my daughter — but it’s appropriate. Many times creatives share their costs with clients or prospects and then either apologize for them or immediately retract by offering flexibility in pricing. I am guilty of this, especially with my small business clients who are on budgets. The outcome of course is that we feel resentful or tend to back-burner the project if it’s not paying enough. Be strong upfront. You cost what you cost. I like the analogy that your lawyer or doctor wouldn’t blink when stating the price of a consultation. And would expect the money upfront. Creatives need to do the same thing. Our services are equally valuable.
• Creativity doesn’t happen at your desk. OK, this isn’t always true. But the point is that learning what your sources of inspiration are, and making a date to go and find them, is invaluable with creative freelancing. Suggestions included everything from visiting stationery stores to going to museums and galleries. We don’t have the benefit of a team surrounding us to constantly share things they’ve read, leave articles on our chairs, drop by with gossip and ideas, or bounce things off of when we’re stuck. We need to find these things ourselves. I was living this at the conference. I arrived in Chicago with a half-dozen or so creative blocks. Within two days, I had a new elevator pitch, a new business card design, and a revised design for the home page of my Web site, which I’ve been working on redesigning and have been stuck on for weeks. This was all just from talking to people, trading business cards, seeing samples of what other people were doing, and talking about my business with others. My account got unlocked, if you will. Things started flowing again.
• The best time to market yourself is when you’re already busy. I liked this advice from well-known logo designer Jeff Fisher. His advice is to carve out time for yourself, and make it non-negotiable, even when you’re swamped with deadlines. Because it’s better to take time now than to have three or four really quiet months in the near future. This is the toughest one for me, but I love that I feel like I have permission to do it now. The “reading and blogging” recurring event that appears on my calendar twice a week will from here on in be the real thing, not just another calendar notification to be ignored.
• You’re in control. This is seriously the toughest one to reconcile. I’ve been a full-time employee for nearly 12 years, with internships and plenty of part-time minimum-wage jobs before that. If there’s one thing I’ve gotten from that, it’s the ingrained workers’ guilt — that I’m not working hard enough, not performing well, that I’ll “get in trouble” for taking a lunch break — and that creeps into my daily work now too. If a client calls while I’m at Peets writing, for example, I immediately apologize for the noise and worry that my client will disapprove of the lack of professionalism. The truth is that I’m the “Night Writer” for a reason. I work where and when I can, and sometimes my best work happens on my sofa, or at the wi-fi café at Whole Foods! Jeff Fisher’s advice: “Don’t let clients tell you how to work.”
• Refuel before you’re on E. We didn’t talk about this an awful lot at the conference, but there was an undercurrent of it that I picked up on simply because it’s a major theme for me right now. We all have our limits. We all have our ways of refueling. I have learned that if I wait until I’m running on fumes, I do not perform my best. Clients don’t get my best work out of me. I’m unhappy with the result. I need to find ways to refuel every day. Blogging, reading, playing choo-choo trains with my daughter, snuggling with my dog, doing yoga, going to the gym — they all have to be part of my schedule. They are essential parts of my work. Without them, my work will be nothing.

My hosting service obliterated the mySQL database on which my old blog was sitting … so please bear with me while I restore everything.

The lead story in The New York Times’ business section today featured James Farley, Ford’s CMO (and chief “believer”) who left a cushy position at Toyota to turn around sales for the Detroit automaker. A former Ford owner myself, I count myself among one of the people Farley is trying to convert. I am a nonbeliever in the brand, based on the number of times I got stuck on the side of the interstate waiting on AAA with my Ford. (Easily four or five. Compare that to the big fat zero times my previously owned Corolla has broken down in the 10 years I’ve owned it, and you can see where my brand loyalty lies.)

I’m fascinated by this article, because Farley has a really interesting story to tell — the renewed commitments to innovation and quality at Ford in recent years — and a seemingly insurmountable obstacle in telling it: public perception that the company’s product is crap. The outcome of this story remains to be seen, but I’m interested in the elements of his strategy:

• He seeks the truth. Farley talks about how, when he first worked for Toyota in Europe, he used to walk around parking lots for hours looking at what kinds of cars people were driving, and then he started exploring why. “When I’m in a new situation, my formula is to really find the truth in things, to observe and get close to the truth.”A couple of my clients told me recently that their organizations “don’t believe in testing,” making me realize how rare it is for companies to want to spend the time getting to the true heart of the matter, especially if it makes things much messier. Farley’s approach takes longer and isn’t convenient, but when he’s a position of turning things on their ear, it’s what’s necessary to find the right direction.
• He engages his sales channel in a unique way. Through the years of Ford’s lame advertising campaigns and watered-down messaging, the real victims have been the dealers, who don’t know how to talk about the product at the point of sale. The Times article talks about how Farley has brought together small gatherings of dealers and paired them up with Ford engineers, so the true experts can bring valuable information about what the company’s doing to improve its cars to the salespeople, who can in turn use real-life examples and anecdotes to educate and impress customers. The article shared how in one case, a Ford chemical engineer was talking in great detail to dealers from agricultural communities about the soybean foam used inside Ford seats. “‘Do you know how happy it makes me to see a Ford engineer talking to Ford dealers about soybean foam so they can tell their customers who are farmers?’ Mr. Farley said. ‘I mean, how freaking cool is that?’”
• He’s building a brand on real emotion and tangible facts. Rather than rolling out yet another series of copycat TV ads with pop songs and Gen Y actors, Ford is figuring out a way to talk about its brand with actual examples of technical innovations and improvements, while trying to express real heart in the importance of Ford as part of America’s heritage and its survival in the future. The article said Farley recently told a crowd of Ford dealers: “‘I believe, in many ways, the future of Ford is the future of our country … The work here is simply more important than the work I was doing at Toyota.’”

Apple, the exalted computer brand, faced off recently against an equally beloved, well-known, and arguably Bigger Apple: New York City. When New York filed a trademark application to protect a new logo mark for its sustainability initiative, GreeNYC, last year, Apple swooped in to file a formal opposition to the trademark. The company based its challenge on the premise that:

Since at least as early as 1977, Opposer has extensively promoted, marketed, advertised, distributed and sold goods and services in connection with a family of trademarks consisting, in whole or in part, of the word APPLE and a visual equivalent of the word, to wit a logo depicting a stylized apple …

Here’s the world-famous Apple logo, next to New York City’s new “green” Big Apple logo:

News outlets and bloggers everywhere were scandalized that Apple was throwing its weight around in a case where the two logos were so clearly different from one another, and where New York so clearly had not only historical precedence (with its unofficial nickname as well as its use of the apple symbol in tourism since the 1970s) but also with better intentions (GreeNYC is an earth-friendly not-for-profit initiative, Apple a greedy corporate profiteer known for being bratty about its intellectual property). Tech reporters and bloggers, usually enamored with Apple’s spectacular design and spotless brand, took pleasure in an “Apple sucks” lynching.

It was one of those moments when consumers, who think of their beloved brands as good, trustworthy friends, feel betrayed; that they couldn’t imagine their ultra-cool friend could become a bully and pick on the underdog. Having built a brand based on friendly, intuitive, simple, attractive design (not to mention catchy music, funny commercials and an approach to technology that’s the antithesis of its arch-rival), Apple shocks and disappoints when it does exactly what any corporation in its shoes would do: defend its trademark.

After several days of misleading reports, several blogs, many of them written by lawyers, stepped in to point out that Apple was not in fact suing New York City, as was initially reported by major news outlets, but had done something very basic for a corporation invested in monitoring and defending its IP: it formally opposed the issuing of a trademark for another apple-based logo, as part of standard procedure that is part of the very public trademark review and decision process at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Keeping tabs on similar logomarks and taking measures to protect its own trademark is by nature part of Apple’s responsibility as a trademark holder — filing these oppositions helps solidify their own trademark ownership, so that if necessary they can later prove usage in a court of law.

This is one of those cases, then, where Apple’s status as a major corporation — with its own heavily staffed corporate legal department — comes into direct conflict with Apple’s status as a major brand. The company was acting in its best interest as a matter of course. It’s very likely that the opposition (which isn’t published by the USPTO, and was only made public when Wired.com got its hands on it) never even came to the attention of the brand or corporate communications teams at Apple, but was simply filed as a routine measure. Only when it leaked and got picked up by the blogosphere did it become not only a PR nightmare but a brand crisis for the company: yet another example that our beloved Apple isn’t as benevolent as we all believed.

I just got back from NYC myself and spent my time there feeling miffed that Apple Inc. was picking on poor beleaguered New York, feeling the dispute was ridiculous. In the fight between the two, as faithful as I am to Apple the brand, I was ready to take NYC’s side. But when I started doing research, I actually discovered that, though the nickname “the Big Apple” is known worldwide, there is actually no recognized apple logo for the city. I thought there was, but it was the “I [Heart] New York” logo I remembered instead. New York used apple imagery in tourism campaigns in the 1970s, but in terms of a visual brand there isn’t anything that’s been used universally. In fact, in his history of the use of the phrase “the Big Apple,” Barry Popik uses newspaper columns and building signs from the early 20th century as the only imagery of the famous nickname:

So really Apple Inc. has a case: they’re not disputing New York’s use of the “apple” name but the use of an apple logo, which the company claims is causing confusion in consumers’ minds. If NYC hasn’t laid claim to a visual “Big Apple” brand in any consistent way for 80-odd years, it’s not completely unreasonable for Apple to challenge NYC’s trademark application. But by doing so it unwittingly wanders into “evil empire” territory, and if there’s one thing consumers hate, it’s territorial corporate grinches.

I was sitting in traffic coming off the Bay Bridge onto 80/101 in downtown San Francisco the other night around dinnertime, heading to my book group meeting at the worst possible time of day to be commuting from one side of the Bay to the other. As I idled, I started to read billboards. That stretch of highway in downtown S.F. has some of the best billboards, but I rarely get to see them anymore because when I go into San Francisco at all it’s usually under the city on BART.

I started to come out of my fog and become cognizant of Washington Mutual’s new slogan. In its entirety, it is: “Whoo Hoo!” The two words take up the bank’s whole billboard, a fancy piece of real estate in one of the highest-price outdoor ad spaces in town.

My stream of consciousness response to this ad went something like this:

1. “Wow, I wonder how their ad agency talked a bunch of bank executives into that.”

2. “Actually, it says a lot about the strength of the brand that they’re building. I like it. They’ve turned a bank brand that didn’t formerly really stand out as anything special into a fun personality that people can relate to, and that attempts to make banking fun. I guess the people who bought into this are the same ones who knew nicknaming the bank “WaMu” would contribute to a friendly and accessible brand character.” (OK, so my stream of consciousness doesn’t sound like it’s trying to be Harvard Business Review, but the sentiment of all this was there.)

3. “Wait a minute. That is not seriously a TM mark I see up there, is it?”

Yes, Washington Mutual somehow managed to trademark “Whoo Hoo.” According to news reports, the company was able to score its trademark by insert an extra “h” in “Whoo.” A WaMu spokesperson told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that they added the “h” because they didn’t want to use a term that “somebody else is already using.”

So, by adding the “h,” naturally they were trying to avoid any kind of pop culture reference. Yeah, right. It’s impossible to see “Whoo hoo!” and not snicker on the inside at the Simpsons reference.

Interestingly, though, a search at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office shows that it isn’t Matt Groening and his crew WaMu actually had to worry about from a legal standpoint. The Iowa State Lottery Commission as well as what appears to be some kind of promotions company own trademarks for “woo-hoo” and its derivatives.

The company’s CMO told BrandWeek: “We want to become an iconic brand that people love.” But when it plays in your head, “Whoo hoo!” inevitably takes on the voice and personality of the dopey, though beloved, cartoon character who’s been shouting it moronically for 19 years. The bank might be trying to express the simple joys of no-fee checking, but the phrase comes across as an inside joke. It’s not even a good attempt at being hip, since Simpsons references stopped being hip about 13 years ago. What it might be doing instead is suggesting the profile of the audience it’s trying to relate to — a bunch of dimwitted Homers?

Having said all that, I’ll admit that as a consumer I’ve been taken in by Washington Mutual’s overall consumer-friendly approach, which started with the new design of its branches to eliminate the transactional, teller-window approach. As an 8-year Wells Fargo customer I recently had a bad experience with my bank and immediately thought: I bet Washington Mutual wouldn’t do that to me. I didn’t investigate it further to compare their policies, but it speaks to the success of what they’re doing with their brand.

In a bizarr-o interview (possibly made more so by the fact it was in a German magazine), designer Philippe Starck expressed all the self-disgust and fatalism of a person who needs a career change or a very long vacation. Starck declared that “design is dead,” that nothing he ever did (not even his ridiculous robot juice squeezer, evidently) has ever meant anything and that the design industry is destined to disappear altogether. “In future there will be no more designers. The designers of the future will be the personal coach, the gym trainer, the diet consultant,” he said nonsensically. I’m not exactly sure what this is supposed to mean, but I look forward to watching that trend emerge.

Link courtesy of J.Go.

The lead copy editor at The New York Times, Merill Perlman, explains in a Q&A why the paper abbreviates the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act as Hipaa rather than HIPAA:

“The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage” … calls for any acronym of more than four letters to be rendered with only the first letter capitalized, thus Hipaa. One reason, as you can see, is that an all-capitalized acronym calls attention to itself, possibly distracting a reader.

This is probably also why the AP Stylebook mandates Nasdaq instead of NASDAQ, something I’ve gotten used to over time. Hipaa will always look strange to me though.

I have never really thought about it this way before, but AP and New York Times style manuals focus a lot of energy on making copy as streamlined as possible, so the eye moves smoothly across the page without a lot of undue interruptions. Newspaper editorial style is like the original usability design.

Perlman also clarifies that HIPAA is a true acronym (because you say the abbreviation as a word), a common mistake that people make:

Let’s not confuse an acronym with an initialism, like F.B.I. Both are formed from the first letter in each word, but in an initialism the letters are pronounced individually.

PowerPoint is under fire again. In an interview on Marketplace yesterday, author Dan Roam talks about how we could all be more creative problem-solvers if we’d put away our PowerPoint decks, with their limited menus of clunky charts that restrict our expression, and start scribbling ideas on paper. He’s written a book called Back of the Napkin about that very thing — how the big ideas come when you’re letting your mind roam free, without fonts and formatting. Here’s what he had to say in the radio interview:

When you take a napkin and you just start drawing on it and start imagining what an idea that’s in your own mind looks like, all of the sudden, you’re opening up all kinds of channels in your own mind that, if you’re just working on a computer screen or just working with the shapes that are available, say, in PowerPoint, do not happen … Seriously, nothing beats just putting a pen on paper.

He’s right of course. It’s why, in the design community, there has been such a backlash against training new designers right out of the gate on design and illustration software — because though they can make perfect concentric circles and right triangles and colorized images, they approach design in a more utilitarian than creative way. Design becomes less about art, about breaking barriers, and more about just getting things done fast.

I’m reminded of the day I got to spend taking a seminar with Edward Tufte last year. Renowned for his loathing of PowerPoint, he growled his way through example after example of the absurdities of trying to present complex data in a PPT-fueled bar chart. As you can see from the cover of an essay/diatribe he published, the man really, really hates PowerPoint:

His message is a little different than Roam’s — he advocates simplicity, clarity and order more than the messiness of creative disorder — but at the end of the day, their goals are the same. They both hope that communicators, and business communicator in particular, will reduce their dependency on bullet-point slides that act as a crutch. They believe that with PowerPoint, businesspeople fail to speak clearly, organize their thoughts logically or illustrate their points effectively. They believe that we would all understand each other a lot better without PowerPoint.All that might be true, but as someone who has managed marketing communications in an extremely sales-focused company, I long ago abandoned my idealism and embraced PowerPoint — kicking, hollering, screaming, but I did it. One thing I’ve discovered with PowerPoint is that it gives non-creative people just enough empowerment to believe they can professionally present big concepts artistically, turning on fancy transitions, layering on clip art and “drawing” to try to show data in an impressive way. One of my favorite examples was a slide that a sales executive created to show how customers were only capturing the “tip of the iceberg” when it came to cost savings. The slide illustrated an iceberg with a tiny sinking ship in the background — an impressive image, but do we really want to compare our customers’ bloated costs to the deadly Titanic?

There is a time and a place for PowerPoint, and I think we can find peace and harmony with it if we use it and don’t abuse it. Here are a few tips for better PowerPoints:

• Create your presentation outside of PowerPoint. Build an outline in a word processing document or sketch out your concepts and notes on paper. In a sentence or two, or in a short bulleted list, write down who your primary audience is, what the audience cares about most, and what your main messages are to that audience. This will help you keep clarity as you build your slides.
• Don’t write in full sentences. There’s nothing more excruciating than listening to a presentation where the speaker is reading word-for-word the sentences bulleted on the screen. The very best slide presentations I’ve seen have used few to no words at all — the slides use funny or captivating images, excerpts of magazine articles or screenshots to arouse the audience’s interest, then the speaker explains the anecdote and data behind the image. Writing out your presentation demonstrates a lack of confidence. At the very least, use one- or two-word recaps and speak to the rest.
• Don’t use clip art. Using professional imagery such as photography or fine illustrations is fine. But clip art (especially the clip art that came with your Microsoft Office software) makes your presentation look amateurish. It does not add anything, and only serves to crowd your page and make your presentation feel unpolished and unprofessional.
• Seek professional help. When building charts and graphs, consider using an in-house or contract designer to help you. Visual designers have a lot of experience in processing complex information and presenting it in a meaningful and impactful way. They can also create visuals in a more professional illustration software program used expressly to create good design — unlike PowerPoint, which is only good in a really tight pinch.