Category: communication

Friday Five: #CASESummit takeaways

A picture of me taking a phone photo of me with speaker and author Guy Kawasaki during the 2013 CASE Summit. (Thanks, @CASEAdvance, for the photo.)
A photo of me taking a photo of me and speaker-author Guy Kawasaki during the 2013 CASE Summit. (Thanks, @CASEAdvance, for the photo.)

For an excellent recap of the 2013 CASE Summit, check out this Storify curated and posted by CASE’s Jen Doak (@jpdoak). CASE also has a collection of photos from the event on Flickr.

The 2013 CASE Summit, which wrapped up last Tuesday, was by all accounts a success. Record attendance, great presentations and presenters, positive comments all around, packed rooms for nearly every session and a new format modeled on TEDx that people seemed to appreciate.

I gleaned a lot of good ideas and inspiration from the event. Here are the top takeaways in terms of leadership, management and communication.

1. In our communications, we assume too much. According to one of our speakers (Frank Flynn, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford), managers tend to assume that the people we are sharing information with know what we do.

If something is obvious to us, we assume it’s obvious to them. That isn’t so. We tend to undercommunicate, Flynn says. He cited research showing that on 360 evaluations, managers are 10 times more likely to be perceived as undercommunicating than overcommunicating. And as Flynn also noted, communication is typically seen as the most critical skill a manager can have but is also the one on which we are judged most harshly.

The takeaway: Don’t assume people know what I know, and work on being a better communicator.

2. Routine matters. In higher education, when we want to attract attention, we usually devise something that will make a big splash. (That’s also true in other fields.) We launch marketing campaigns and capital campaigns. We introduce a new “brand,” complete with a new logo and graphic identity. The trouble is, if these big splashes don’t translate into routine behavior, then we are not as likely to have our messages stick. People notice the regular, not the irregular. (This again comes from Frank Flynn’s talk.)

The takeaway: If I want to get a message to stick, I must communicate it in a routine fashion and develop consistency in my behavior.

3. Default to “yes.” In Guy Kawasaki‘s presentation on “Enchantment,” he outlined the 10 steps anyone can follow to enchant their stakeholders. (Here’s a good summary of that list.) Many of those tactics resonated with me. But the one that I found most challenging was the idea of making “yes” my default response in any situation.

I worry about over-committing to people, projects, etc. I’m a classic “underpromise and overdeliver” kind of guy. But Kawasaki’s point is that “yes” opens the door to further discussion, while “no” slams the door shut.

Kawasaki posted something about this recently on LinkedIn: Do You Have A Yes Attitude? “A ‘yes’ buys time, enables you to see more options, and builds rapport,” he writes.

The takeaway: Learn to say “yes” more. Or at least, “not yet.”

4. Stories trump data. Andy Goodman‘s entertaining talk on the power of storytelling reminded us all that “numbers numb and jargon jars, but stories get stored” in our memories. Just as we tend to over-rely on the big splash for our communications, so we also assume that bludgeoning our audiences with data and facts will persuade them to support our cause. But data and facts serve us best when they are woven into our stories of real people.

The takeaway: Rely more on stories than data to communicate to audiences, but don’t be afraid to use data to support those stories.

5. We over-rely on broadcast messaging. Sending out mass email messages is not a very effective way of getting people to do something. One-on-one communications is far more effective. We all know this, of course. But what I didn’t know before hearing Frank Flynn talk about this is that broadcast messaging “diffuses responsibility,” sometimes to the point where none of the recipients feels any compulsion to act. When we get a mass email or other broadcast message, we think, “It’s not just me” they’re asking, so surely someone else will help. But when the message is customized and targeted to individuals, the individual thinks, “Oh, crap, they’re talking to me directly,” and feels compelled to act.

The takeaway: Rely less on broadcasting, focus more on personal communication.

Content strategy is fine, but…

Photo via Bob Warfield's SmoothSpan blog
Photo via Bob Warfield’s SmoothSpan blog

I’m grateful to see the higher ed world talking so much about content strategy these days. This emphasis on thinking about content in a way that connects it with our organizational goals is important.

I’m glad that people are writing books and blogs about content strategy, too. And talking about this subject on Twitter. And planning entire conferences around the theme. These are important efforts, and I learn a lot from the content strategists I follow on Twitter and from their blog posts. I’ve learned valuable lessons that I’ve incorporated into my everyday work, and I’m thinking more about the importance of content in context.

But I sometimes wonder if we’re focusing too much on the content side of things.

I sometimes wonder if we need to pay more attention to the content needs or wants of the people we’re supposed to be creating our content for.

In other words, our audience.

The way content strategy is sometimes talked about, it reminds me of supply-side economics. In a way, I suppose it is. As technology has lowered the barriers to creating and distributing all sorts of content, consumers of that content have more than enough options at a very low price point.

But content strategy without regard to audience is misguided. Simply flooding the marketplace of ideas with more content won’t achieve many business goals for any organization.

Entrepreneur and blogger Bob Warfield touched on this in a post last December. “A lot of entrepreneurs,  when faced with the question, ‘What’s the most important thing to do first?’, would answer, ‘Build a product,” Warfield writes. “Big mistake.”

The most important thing to do first is to find an audience.  It may be that building a product is an integral part of growing your audience, but you’re not ready to build a product or grow your audience until you’ve found the right audience to start with.

Audience strategy, anyone?

I haven’t heard the term “audience strategy” bandied about much in the higher ed or marketing circles. But maybe someone should latch on to that idea and run with it.

Maybe it’s because we take our audiences for granted in higher ed. We’re not the entrepreneurs Bob Warfield is talking to. And while we do roll out new products from time to time (new degrees or certificate programs) or new services (online options, blended learning), we probably don’t look at our roles the same way an entrepreneur would.

Most of us work in established organizations. We probably don’t worry too much about finding the right audiences for our content. We have scores of them, and many of these audiences (alumni, current students, members of the community where our schools reside) already have a connection with our institutions.

But we should be thinking more strategically about who these people are.

I recently read about one approach that connects both audience and content in a pretty nifty way. It’s called audience-centric content strategy. It begins with the audience first.

Whether we call it “audience-centric” or by some other name, the important thing is to keep our audience in mind as we design our content strategy. Then maybe the most relevant aspects of our plentiful storehouses of content (the supply) will better connect with what our audience is looking for (demand).