The Sounding Board

Checklist for your next speaking gig

Confessions of a Public Speaker author Scott Berkun celebrated the paperback release of his book (check it out!) by offering up a checklist to help people make the most of their next presentation. If you, or someone in your company, is on the speaking circuit - whether it be major industry conferences, or smaller seminars - Berkun's checklist for before, during, and after the event, is well worth reviewing and bookmarking for future use.

Happy speaking!
Stephanie

Taming the Email Monster

TED Curator Chris Anderson called out the problem in a blog post earlier this month:

We all love the power of email connecting people across continents. But... we're drowning in it. 

Every year it gets a little worse. To the point where we can get trapped spending most of our working week simply handling the contents of our in-boxes.

And in doing so, we're making the problem worse. Every reply, every cc, creates new work for our friends and colleagues.

We need to figure out a better way.

A "better way" is exactly what Anderson is pushing with Email Charter. Signing the charter is a mutual agreement to help end the madness through 10 simple rules:


10 Rules to Reverse the Email Spiral


1. Respect Recipients’ Time
This is the fundamental rule. As the message sender, the onus is on YOU to minimize the time your email will take to process. Even if it means taking more time at your end before sending.

2. Short or Slow is not Rude
Let’s mutually agree to cut each other some slack. Given the email load we’re all facing, it’s OK if replies take a while coming and if they don’t give detailed responses to all your questions. No one wants to come over as brusque, so please don’t take it personally. We just want our lives back!

3. Celebrate Clarity
Start with a subject line that clearly labels the topic, and maybe includes a status category [Info], [Action], [Time Sens] [Low Priority]. Use crisp, muddle-free sentences. If the email has to be longer than five sentences, make sure the first provides the basic reason for writing. Avoid strange fonts and colors.

4. Quash Open-Ended Questions
It is asking a lot to send someone an email with four long paragraphs of turgid text followed by “Thoughts?”. Even well-intended-but-open questions like “How can I help?” may not be that helpful. Email generosity requires simplifying, easy-to-answer questions. “Can I help best by a) calling b) visiting or c) staying right out of it?!”

5. Slash Surplus cc’s
cc’s are like mating bunnies. For every recipient you add, you are dramatically multiplying total response time. Not to be done lightly! When there are multiple recipients, please don’t default to ‘Reply All’. Maybe you only need to cc a couple of people on the original thread. Or none.

6. Tighten the Thread
Some emails depend for their meaning on context. Which means it’s usually right to include the thread being responded to. But it’s rare that a thread should extend to more than 3 emails. Before sending, cut what’s not relevant. Or consider making a phone call instead.

7. Attack Attachments
Don’t use graphics files as logos or signatures that appear as attachments. Time is wasted trying to see if there’s something to open. Even worse is sending text as an attachment when it could have been included in the body of the email.

8. Give these Gifts: EOM NNTR
If your email message can be expressed in half a dozen words, just put it in the subject line, followed by EOM (= End of Message). This saves the recipient having to actually open the message. Ending a note with “No need to respond” or NNTR, is a wonderful act of generosity. Many acronyms confuse as much as help, but these two are golden and deserve wide adoption.

9. Cut Contentless Responses
You don’t need to reply to every email, especially not those that are themselves clear responses. An email saying “Thanks for your note. I’m in.” does not need you to reply “Great.” That just cost someone another 30 seconds.

10. Disconnect!
If we all agreed to spend less time doing email, we’d all get less email! Consider calendaring half-days at work where you can’t go online. Or a commitment to email-free weekends. Or an ‘auto-response’ that references this charter. And don’t forget to smell the roses.

I've signed the charter, and hope you will too. And if you have other tips on calming the email madness, I'm all ears!

-Stephanie

Live Blogging - Digital Media Conference East

• Leslie Bradshaw, President & COO, JESS3
• Vyqué White, Director of New Media, USO
• Joe Chernov, VP of Content Marketing, Eloqua
• Matt Spielman, GM Northeast/VP Strategic Partnerships, Eventful 
• Sonny Ganguly, Chief Marketing Officer, WeddingWire

From Left:  Linda Hagopian, Hagopian Marketing, Elizabeth Shea, President and CEO, SpeakerBox Communictions, and Paul Duning, Publisher and Co-Founder, CapitolCommunicator - Hanging out, pre-conference

The calculus of buying a song tomorrow just went d...

The calculus of buying a song tomorrow just went down from $1.29 for a legal download to $0.00099 (25,000/$24.99) for ... a legal download. Which am I going to choose? Who has so much money and so olittle tim ethat they wouldn't look online or get a rip for a friend and save themselves 99.997% of the full cost?

Misunderstood Words and Other Pet Peeves

Source: Grammar.net

I recently came across this infographic of 10 commonly misunderstood words in English and it instantly spoke to me. I am certainly not an expert on language and word definitions. However, when I am uncertain about the meaning of a word, I will either look it up or just use a word I do know. I figured it's better to use small words you understand than to use a word incorrectly and risk making a fool of yourself.

Two things in particular stuck out to me about this list.

1. Plethora. Maybe I'm the only one but whenever I see this word used I immediately think of the exchange between El Jefe and El Guapo in The Three Amigos.
2. I was surprised that the list did not include the word "irregardless." Every time someone uses this word it makes me cringe. It makes me want to scream "IT'S NOT A REAL WORD!" Even dictionary.com says "with its illogical negative prefix, is widely heard, perhaps arising under the influence of such perfectly correct forms as : irrespective. Irregardless is avoided by careful users of English. Use regardless to mean 'without regard or consideration for' or 'nevertheless'."

And, while not appropriate for this list, but a pet peeve of mine anyway, I also struggle with people who misspell the word lose as loose. I promise, there is really only one "O" in lose.

Are there any words that are either on this list, or that were left off, that you are surprised by? What's your biggest spelling mistake pet peeve?

--Jennifer Edgerly

iTunes to the iCloud: Forgiving Music Piracy?

Buzz surrounding the announcement of iTunes Match has been more than unequivocal. Most seem to be blatantly acknowledging the Apple product’s intention to provide illegal music downloaders with a clean slate for a small price of $24.99/year, happily swapping their choppy, homemade quality media downloads for the real deal. The new product works by pairing up your music library, whether purchased from iTunes or “purchased/ripped” elsewhere, with songs available for purchase on iTunes. 

The Apple Web site evades the illegal download issue all together, of course, stating: “If you want all the benefits of iTunes in the Cloud for music you haven’t purchased from iTunes, iTunes Match is the perfect solution. It lets you store your entire collection, including music you’ve ripped from CDs or purchased somewhere other than iTunes.” 

Despite all of the upheaval, however, you can’t dispute the facts – Match will save you loads of time frivolously uploading your entire library. The only songs you will have to manually download will be any not found in the 18 million-strong iTunes collection. And, we could all use more time. That is, if you are hell-bent on getting your music to the cloud. Amazon and Google were already on the boat as far as music to the Cloud, and the new iCloud product was surely a way to combat their efforts. 

Issues that haven’t been addressed with Match include what will happen to your music if you decide to unsubscribe – I’m assuming you would keep your music and revert to the free iTunes for the Cloud product, but this hasn’t been confirmed. Also, it looks like you cannot stream music to your phone or other devices, a service offered through both Amazon’s Cloud Player and Google’s Music Beta. 

As far as insinuating approval of music piracy, I guess that will be on the conscious of the user. Personally, however, I’ll probably become a subscriber come fall, when Match is expected to be available. 

To see what some real techies have to say, check out these articles form Time’s Techland, PC Magazine, and The New York Times. 

-Kate N.

#Wheredidthisthingcomefrom – The origin of the Twitter hashtag

We all use them and some are more creative than others, but where did the hashtag come from? And who figured out its function?


Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic posted an interesting article this week, filling readers in on How the Twitter Hashtag was Born. According to the article, the hashtag came from the community and not from Twitter itself. The lightweight solution was spawned from “Groups for Twitter” discussions that would group like content, but Chris Messina’s hashtag idea eliminated the management that is inherent with a group.

- Ali Smith

A Pig in a Poke

Since the dawn of time, English majors of the world have been desperately searching for something—anything—useful to do with their ridiculous training. It’s a history fraught with sadness, booze, frustration, sad frustration, boozy sadness, and the occasional drink. But perhaps things aren’t so bleak as they seem.

Last week, The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal investigated “The Metaphor Program,” a super-secret defense initiative that quite possibly involves the CIA, Seal Team Six, the Carlisle Group, Parker Brothers, Bono, and the League of Women Voters.

In a nutshell, this potentially nine-figure public expenditure (Side bar: Remind me to tell you later about an idea I just had for balancing the budget) seeks to automate the large-scale analysis of foreign and domestic linguistic data (a.k.a. words) in order to parse metaphorical content for any hidden revelations it might contain.

Huh?


They’re reading Bin Laden’s dream journal, okay?

Ha. That’s actually not at all what they’re doing. But it’s a metaphor, see? If you had better software, you’d have picked up on it.

Turns out, metaphors affect the way we process information and solve problems. Who knew? In fact, Stanford's Paul Thibodeau demonstrated just this year that when people are asked about crime using a crime-as-virus metaphor, they’re much less likely to favor harsh criminal punishments than when asked about the same issue using a crime-as-wild-beast metaphor.

Infer what you will from that (though it should be noted both test groups favored the death penalty for Lance Armstrong). But perhaps, if we could unlock the secret language of metaphor, we could use that power to counteract foreign propaganda, or—even better—make our domestic propaganda all the more fun and convincing.

Organizing this whole crazy enterprise is the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity or IARPA, commonly referred to as DARPA’s slow-witted cousin, and—one can only assume—headed by powerhouse project co-commanders Michael Chertoff and Maya Angelou.

I wonder, though, if there are enough English majors out there to staff this project, or if we’ll have to recruit more. And if we do, who will deliver America’s pizzas? These are the questions that keep Obama up at night when he’s pretending not to be smoking.

Now, back to my idea for balancing the budget: Medicare voucher system.

--Jonathan

Third Time’s a Charm - Helios Apollo Award