Scott Berkun's Blog, page 48

Quote of the month: Steinbeck on writing

Steinbeck on writing:

Writing is a very silly business at best. There is a certain ridiculousness about putting down a picture of life. And to add to the joke – one must withdraw for a time from life in order to set down that picture. And third one must distort one’s own way of life in order in some sense to simulate the the normal in other lives. Having gone through all this nonsense what emerges may well be the palest of reflections. Oh! It’s a real horse’s ass business. The mountain labors and groans and strains and the tinniest of rodents comes out. And the greatest foolishness of all lies in the fact that to do it all, the writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true. If he does not, the work is not even worth what it might otherwise have been.

All this is a preface to the fear and uncertainties which clammer over a man so that in his silly work he thinks he must be crazy because he is so alone. If what he is doing is worth doing – why don’t more people do it? Such questions. But it does seem a desperately futile business and one which must be very humorous to watch. Intelligent people live their lives as nearly on a level as possible – try to be good, don’t worry if they aren’t, hold to such opinions as are comforting and reassuring and throw out those which are not. And in the fullness of their days they die with none of the tearing pain of failure because having tried nothing they have not failed. These people are much more intelligent than the fools who rip themselves to pieces on nonsense.

…but I believe the great ones, Plato, Lao Tze, Buddha, Christ, Paul and the great Hebrew prophets are not remembered for negation or denial. Not that it is necessary to be remembered but there is one purpose in writing I can see, beyond simply doing it interestingly. It is the duty of the writer to lift up, to extend, to encourage. If the written word has contributed anything at all to our developing species and our half developed culture, it is this: Great writing has been a staff to lean on, a mother to consult, a wisdom to pick up stumbling folly, a strength in weakness and a courage to support sick cowardice. And how any negative or despairing approach can pretend to be literature I do not know. It is true that we are weak and sick and ugly and quarrelsome but if that is all we ever were, we would milleniums ago have disappeared from the face of the earth, and a few remnants of fossilized jaw bones, a few teeth in strata of limestone would be the only mark our species would have left on the earth.

From Writers at Work, The Paris review interviews, 4th series.

Steinbeck’s advice on getting started

When I’m supposed to be writing but don’t quite have the nerve, I read. I have a special stack of books of interviews with famous writers about writing, and I read them and take notes when all else fails. I often type up those notes as a way to get the fingers moving, and soon I shift over to whatever writing project I was supposed to be doing in the first place. Today I found some good advice from John  Steinbeck:

On Getting Started

Now let me give you the benefit of my experience facing 400 pages of blank stock – the appalling stuff that must be filled. I know that no one really wants the benefit of anyone’s experience which is why it’s so freely offered. But the following are some of the things I have had to do to keep from going nuts.

Abandon the idea you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished you are always surprised.
Write freely and rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material.
Forget your general audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person – a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.
If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you still think you want it – bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole you can come back to it and then you may find the reason it gave you trouble was that it didn’t belong there.
Beware of a scene that becomes too dear to you, dearer than the rest. It will usually be found that it is out of drawing.
If you are using dialog say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech.

From Writers at Work, The Paris review interviews, 4th series.

How to Thank a Customer

Some people just give good thanks. I bought a t-shirt online awhile ago from Sean McCabe, an artist who works in handdrawn forms. Apparently he’d now reads some of my blog. Yesterday I received a charming little package in the mail, with a handwritten note.

Inside was a print of the design of the shirt I’d purchased. The whole experience was filled with thoughtful touches.

If you like his work, check out his portfolio and his online store.

 

What I learned going back to UX school

Last week I was on an expert panel, giving feedback to final project presentations at the HCDE 518 User Centered Design course at the University of Washington, taught by . Its always fun to see what students are doing. They are the future after all.  My fellow experts were Matt Shobe, Larry Sisson and Marcos N.

7 teams each has 12 minutes to present. Our job was to ask tough questions and critique their presentations from a professional context.

The project was: Apply user research to a major cloud service and redesign it (Dropbox, SkyDrive, iCloud)

Things I learned:

Students have fresh eyes. While many of the students in the program are not undergraduates, because the project is in the school environment their take on things is different, and there are always surprises. It’s really enjoyable to listen to student projects talk about their assumptions, ideas and designs. I was supposed to be there providing “real world” commentary, and I did, but I learned a few things and heard quite a few surprises. If ever you get the chance to do something like this in your field, I recommend it.
Group presentations are hard. There were 7 teams, with 4 or 5 people each. Everyone was required to participate, and making a single, clear, coherent presentation when you have to divide it into 5 parts for 5 people is just hard. Part of the challenge of giving feedback was separating artifacts of the presentations from the research and designs themselves.
Generative vs. Evaluative. While I’ve known there are dozens of different methods, I’d never heard them divided into two piles: one for coming up with ideas (generative) and one for evaluating ideas (guess what that pile is called). Nice.
Technology moves in spirals. Many of the teams were ambitious, adding major new functionality. Being an old dog, I can recall when the web was often sold on the promise of simplicity and single purpose designs, a huge relief from the heavy all-in-one collaboration tools of Lotus Notes and SharePoint. But the cloud is maturing and, according to these students, the need for collaboration at work will push complexity back in. Setting up of course the next wave of simple tools to poke holes in it all over again.

Cool things I saw

Team 6, Matina Fresenius, Allan Luik, Ashley Saleeba, Don Wesley and Jessie Xue, focused on the challenges of sharing files through DropBox.

They surveyed DropBox users through Social Media and  Craigslist.
73% used dropbox through the web portal
Wide range of content file types
92% wanted preview before downloading shared files from others (it had been requested on dropbox forums in 2009)

They observed 11 real users and recorded the key places they struggled.

The result was a design that changed this:


To something like this (which Dropbox actually implemented before their file presentation):

Group 3 took on iCloud. They were one of the most ambitious redesigns, and had the bad luck of going last. Their good luck was picking iCloud, which no one else had taken. They were Sarah Emerson, Andrea LarsenBronwyn McNutt and Zulka Ramirez.

Among the research they did was a Wants & Needs analysis, where they work with users to prioritize possible improvements to the existing design.

Then they built a paper prototype (I so wish more people used this awesome and fast method), using a “Netflix style” view of all of your content.

Group 7 (Brian Espinosa, Royal Stuart, Lori Tompkins, Adrienne Trudeau, Dasha Valchonak) was one of the few teams that reported on before and after results for their redesign. In a briefing, it’s data like this that tells most of the story.

People throw around sayings like “Easy to Use” or “Intuitive” but without some data those are merely opinions. When it comes to measuring ease of use, there are well established things to track:

Success rate: What percent of users can even do the thing its supposed to let them do. Often this is well below 100%.
Time on task: how long does it  take users to do the thing it supposed to do. Better designs take users less time.
Error rates: how many mistakes or confusions does the user have.

Team 7 did quite well in their redesign. However I’d have preferred they call it a usability study, not a test. A test assumes there are right answers and that you do it at the end. A study suggests is more about collecting data to make better decisions. Yes, it’s a pet peeve.

While many of the redesigns were ambitious (as Shobe said “making a bit tent”), one of my favorites focused sharply on one scenario: how to improve collaboration as simply as possible. My notes failed me on which team this was, but based on research, they decided the most valuable feature to add to Dropbox was the ability to add comments to Dropbox files. This would allow someone updating a document to leave a short note about what the change was, or ask/answer a question without having to open the document. And they focused on the mobile design for the feature first, with a design that seemed simple and slick.

 Sloppy claims in User Research

I’m always cranky about how anyone in any field uses ‘research’ to justify things. Of course these were students and they were being graded primarily on their redesigns and presentations, not the details of their research. However I kept track of sayings and statements that had this been a professional situation, I would might have challenged.

Many people in the professional world BS their way through talking about research – particularly with the bias of “the research magically says the thing I wanted it to say before I started doing the research”. Everyone is guilty here. But if you call yourself a reseracher its fair to expect more in the way of research ethics. Its not hard not to be sloppy.  Sloppy sayings include things like:

“Our research said…” - research never ‘says’ anything
“Our study indicated people want X” (Couldn’t an evil person design a study to get people to say they want X or Y or Z?)
“We had compelling evidence…” What does compelling mean?
“Our findings proved…” - What does proof mean? Could it have been used to prove other conclusions?
“It was obvious…”
“The redesign had great success…” – by what standard? What metrics were used?
“Many..” – Is that 1 or 2, 3 of 5, 5 of 20?
“We found that users…” How many of them? All? 4 of 7? 2 of 7?
“Intuitive…”  - should be a banned word. Better off talking about tasks and usability measures.
“Most cited…” - maybe only one thing was cited.
Naming a percentage without mention of quantity  (e.g. 100% of 1 user doesn’t mean much)
“Users want… ” - this is always speculative data, as what users want and need are often different
Anecdotal vs. Substantive data (e.g. “What we heard in the usability study” – is that one person? More? What?)
“They wanted…”

Sloppy use of phrases like these sets off alarm bells for my BS detector. Even if there is nothing sketchy going on, its the researchers job to ensure there is no room for doubt. All researchers should assume they have to earn the trust of their audience. As a result, I have a list of questions I often ask people who claim their design decision is right based on research:

How many participants were there? Was that enough to have high confidence in the data?
How did you compensate for recruitment bias? (all participant recruiting has bias)
Do you have specific criteria for ‘success’? If not, how do you know it was better?
How do you know your questions and methods didn’t lead participants to the answers you wanted? (Did you counter-balance, etc.)
What questions can not be answered by your research?

It was unfair to poke hard at this in a student presentation – and I tried to clarify the point and not beat them up much about it. But here on the blog I can ramble on and on about it, assuming anyone is still reading.

The best recommendation was to have a couple of slides hidden at the end of the slide deck with detailed summaries of the research (# of participants, methods used, specific data on results, etc.) in reserve, to pull up if you have a hard-ass like me in the audience, which the more UX work you do, will happen sooner or later.

Thanks to Doug Pyle for inviting me, and all the students for letting me hear their presentations.

Calling London: Anyone want me to speak?

I’ll be in London for a few days in February 2013 with some time. Anyone interested in having me speak somewhere?

Leave a comment or contact me directly.

The truth about choosing book titles

As I’m getting fan opinions on title ideas for my next book, I’m reminded of the thrills and pains of picking book titles.

#1: Advice is cheap, titles are hard

Everyone is very happy to tell you how to pick a title, and in particular, that you are doing it wrong.

A special joy comes from people you know telling you that your title ideas stink, yet who can’t offer a single viable alternative. “Gee, thanks” you’ll say, to which they will offer “Hey, you’re the writer.” Both complaints are valid of course, but neither solves the problem.

There is plenty of good advice, but no quantity of advice magically generates a title for you:

Hyatt offers four approaches:: Make a Promise, Offer Intrigue, Identify a Need, Explain the Content
Some say to promise how to change something
Lulu has an automatic Titlescorer, but its algorithm is sketchy at best
Some argue for tricks of alliteration and spoonerisms
Others believe in titles with satisfying numbers: 10, 7, 99
You can learn from what the web teaches about headlines from various sources

The other problem is a quick skim of the history of popular books or the current top 100 shows dozens of violations of all the above advice.

#2: This is all very subjective

We all suffer tremendous taste bias on titles. We assume our instincts and likes are matched by everyone. There are many kinds of taste, good and bad, which means there is an unbelievable amount of contradictory  advice about titles, almost as much as there is about writing books themselves.

If we rounded up the wisest book editors and the smartest title creators and gave them a list of book titles for soon to be published books, they’d passionately disagree about which ones worked and why. And most of them would be wrong about the results (See #4).

Insiders love to point to previously published books as examples of good titles, but that’s cheating. What would validate their expertise is a record of what they thought of the title before it was released. If you want an honest opinion from an expert ask them to tell you about books with “great” titles that failed, or books with “bad” titles that did well. There are many of both.

#3: Many titles are cliches

Most advice chases past successes. And the popular advice leads towards books that sound the same. Since this advice is well known many books aim for the same crowded bullseye.  The paradox is they will say: “Your idea is a cliche, so take this advice (which will lead to a different cliche)”

Most genres have crowded namespaces with familiar patterns. Aiming here defeats some of the purpose of the title: to uniquely identify the book. If you follow too much of the advice you hear, soon you’ll be in questionable territory:

The Art of Blah
Transforming Foo
Breathing for Dummies
How to Blah and Blah
The Joy of
The End of
Extreme Coughing
The playbook/guidebook/handbook

Breakthrough Cheese
How to (“How to” So cliche it’s abbreviated H/T)
Short word: long long long long long subtitle filled with keywords (or see: Gladwell Book Title generator)
Outrageous Claim: How something or other will do something or other

Remember that for every cliche there is an original idea for a book title that started it. And you can bet when that author pitched that title, they were told mostly why it wouldn’t work.

But know that cliches can be good if you time them right. They fade in and out year to year, being abused, abandoned and then suddenly rise as cool again. Depending on how many book titles you look at a day, your place, and your reader’s place in that timeline is different. What seems played out to you might be on the rise for your audience.

It can sometimes be effective to use a cliche if you’re going after an audience that hasn’t seen a book aimed that way (e.g. Confessions of a Public Speaker), since it won’t seem cliche to them, as the cliche is a shortcut to expressing the style of the book (e.g. 101 Things I learned in Architecture School).

#4: The title serves many functions

The non-book writing majority of our species has no idea how many different functions the title serves in the machinery of selling books. It will be used for any of:

to convince someone to be interested in the book  
The cover
The Amazon listing
Advertising, marketing and branding
Any  t-shirts, flyers or other promotional material
In presentation slides
The domain name
In book reviews (and in the title of book reviews)
The thing the author will say 5000 times in interviews, lectures, radio and tv appearances (should they be so lucky)
As a one line bio on TV or for magazine articles
As the brand name for other ventures (courses, conferences)
The thing readers (hopefully) will say to their friends 5000 times

Each of these has slightly different requirements and you can’t nail them all at the same time. Most of these are improved with brevity.
#5: Titles aren’t predictive of sales

Two facts about books:

There are many great books with dubious titles, and awful books with fantastic titles.
Many popular books suck, and many awesome books are unpopular.

Book publishing is not a meritocracy. Even if it were, dozens of decisions influence the outcome. There are many reasons books become popular, or not. Some books become popular in spite of their author’s choices. Other books do everything right, and never do very well.

One factor in the overstating of title importance is insecurity and ego. At the time an author and a publisher are deciding on the title they are both at their greatest emotional insecurity: the book is not finished and not released. Their fears only puts more pressure on the decision, not less. Another reason is people other than the writer want to make their mark on the project and the title is the single most prized sentence in the entire book writing enterprise, and it’s easy to express opinions about it (whereas opinions on the text of the book itself requires hours of investment). Many books are chosen by editorial committee and you can guess which ones they are.

Titles of course have an impact on a book’s success. Often its all a potential buyer ever gets to see, and if they can draw interest the book crosses its first of many hurdles in the improbable struggle of getting noticed. But titles only help so much. Most people hear about books the same way they hear about new bands. Or new people to meet. A friend or trusted source tells them it was good and it was called  <NAME HERE>.  The title at that point serves as a moniker.  It’s the thing you need to remember to get the thing you want to get and little more.

#6. We feel different about titles after we read the books

Many titles are meaningless until after you read them. Consider the day any of these were first published: The Mythical Man Month, Catcher in The Rye, Catch-22, To Kill A Mockingbird, Moby Dick, Eats, Shoots, and Leaves, Eat Pray Love. After these books were successful of course the titles seem great. But you wouldn’t have said that before the book came out. Or go further and ask about REM or Led Zeppelin or RUN DMC. What? Names for things sometimes are just names for things. They let us refer to a thing, and that’s it. If we love the thing we eventually love the name. You didn’t marry your spouse purely because of their name, right? Or what city you live in? Or what company you work for?

It’s entertaining to consider the names of many publishers: HarperCollins, Simon and Schuster, MacMillan. These names mean nothing as names since they are the actual names of their founders. What rule of naming was followed here? Sure, companies are different from books, and these companies have done very well. But consider Random House, which was named because the founders wanted to publish “a few books on the side at random“?  None of them exemplify a strategy based on the importance of a name choice in the success of a venture.

#7: Only a few things really matter

Of all the advice I’ve read, been given, had thrown at me, or pulled out of of more experienced authors, here’s the core of what matters:

Short. Easy to say. Fits anywhere. Easy to type, write, tweet and text. Unless you are Fionna Apple.
Memorable. The more specific, original and short the title, the easier it is to remember. Or write down. Or type into amazon. A title can be both cryptic and easy to recall: Life of Pi means almost nothing to someone who hasn’t read the book. But it’s just 3 one syllable words.
Provocative. One way to be memorable is to be provocative. To achieve this likely means dividing your audience: provided half of that division is very interested, it’s a win. It’s better to split a crowd than to bore everyone. Many books make a provocative promise that’s impossible to deliver on. You need to decide how close to an infomercial you’re willing to be.
Easy and fast to say.  At parties, on TV, on Radio, the name should be easy to say and enunciate. The fewer the syllables the better.
Author wont get sick of saying it 1000 times. Anyone selling the book, including the author, will say the book title thousands of times. Consider what you will think of the title the 5000th time or five years from now. You want something you’ll be excited about each and every time you say it.
Matches the soul of the book. Only people who have read the book can help here. Many novels make the title pay off after you’ve read it and in some ways make the title more potent than other kinds of titles. Organic titles, meaning titles pulled from something in the book itself (a story, a term, a name, such as The Perfect Storm), can work well.

#8: What to do: Make a big list

The best solution to subjective creative challenges with cheap materials (e.g. words) is to make a big list of candidates. As big as possible. Include anything you like, including cliches. Take your time, over days and weeks. Show the list to lots of people with the goal of making the list bigger. Often there are hybrids and variants that you’ll discover only by growing your list.

When you’ve made a big list and don’t find many new ones, make a specific list of your criteria (see above). Then slowly work to winnow down the list.

#9: Use modern tools like polling and A/B Testing

When you have a small list of titles you like, get some data. Tim Ferris, Eric Reiss and others have graciously popularized the methods they used for applying A/B testing methods for picking book titles. From experiments with their websites, to using sample google ads for book title candidates to compare how people respond. This is excellent. Data should inform opinions. It can’t answer every question but it can verify or disprove assumptions in ways no amount of debate can.

However, A/B testing can never generate the candidates for you. It also never tells you how to break ties. And it can’t tell you anything about how well the title matches the book. You might find a title that gets a fantastic response, but isn’t a good match for the book you wrote.

 #10:  Remember A title is just a sentence

If you’re a writer you will write hundreds of thousands of sentences in your career. Only your name is going on the book: put some confidence in your own judgement.

Vote for the title of my next book

I’ve been hard at work on book #5. It’s about the year I spent working at WordPress.com.  I want you readers to be more involved: an easy place to start is helping pick the title for the book.

Book Synopsis: WordPress.com, the planet’s 15th most popular website, has no headquarters: everyone works from wherever they want in the world. They don’t use email and have an open vacation policy. New work ships dozens of times a day to a live website used by millions of users. How is all this possible? What can other companies learn from their radical methods? In this book you’ll learn insights into leadership, management and the nature of work by following Berkun, bestselling author and former Microsoft manager from the early web, as he tells his story of trying to lead a team of young programmers and designers at the heart of this fascinating, brilliant company.

How voting works: This is the first round. There might be a second round. If you have a write-in candidate for title or sub-title, please vote anyway and leave your candidate in the comments.

Take Our Poll

And which subtitle?

Take Our Poll

 

If you want to be notified when the book is out: Leave a comment that says “I want to knooooooow when it’s out! WOOT” or something similarly ridiculous. And you’ll get an email when the time is right. Or just subscribe to the blog via the sidebar on the left.

Thanks folks. I’ll be writing more about the book over the next few weeks – stay tuned.

Do you want a bar in your workplace?

Taking the question of how much does your workplace effect creativity in a new direction, the folks at Janelia Farm, a biomedical research lab, have a pub in their office. Complete with ping pong, beer and coffee.

You can watch a short interview about the pub and some of the employees opinions about it:

The ideal situation is an office on a street with a few pubs and restaurants close by. Then you get the best of both worlds, as the people running the pubs will do what they do best. Trying to create a pub atmosphere inside the bureaucracy and limitations of a large organization is a tough road. Of course many offices are in remote locations, miles from their nearest pub. They have no choice but to try and create a space for workers to socialize themselves.

Seattle’s own Substantial has a fully stocked bar in their office. And a fair number of rising start-ups in the SF bay area do as well.

Would you want a pub in your office? Why or why not?

Extreme Makeover: Bad Marketing Email

In response to my claim Jargon Feeds on Lazy Minds, my friend Kav sent me one of the worst marketing emails he’s seen. Rather than complain, I thought why not try and fix it EXTREME makeover style.

Here’s a brief critique followed by a press release makeover.

First, here’s the message – half way between a press release and a product pitch:

Subject: It’s time for a Revolution…a Commercial RE Revolution.

There is a void in the marketplace. Have you noticed it?

For much of the commercial real estate world, the solution is occasionally pulled out because it looks cool; but they can’t really seem to remember how it works. Hidden underneath the pile of instruments we use every day is a much-needed tool. Have you guessed what it is yet?

It’s Collaboration: a social technology tool. Collaboration without context is merely managed chaos. And it requires trust-based teams to provide a context for successful collaborating. Efficiency increases with the alignment of mindsets, purpose and channeling new tools to fully embrace.

With iCORE, we’ve logged many hours creating a new atmosphere of collaboration and teaming while offering the most advanced technological platform designed to facilitate it seamlessly. Long-standing relationships are revered in our business. That’s why we’re approaching channel business in an innovative way, because we understand where the industry is heading.

If your office is land-locked or more importantly, “business-locked”, how do you expand your reach globally?

iCORE solves your “location” problem by placing the capability of reporting and increased optics available at your fingertips, putting you in the know. As a team member, you can manage responsibilities with automated day-to-day updates and document sharing, enabling real-time snapshots of what’s going on with your client, ensuring the best business possible for both you and them.

After all, you’ve invested time, money and effort to build a trusting relationship with your client. And no one wants that to deteriorate. This successful platform of collaboration inspires our team members to provide their clients with the highest level of professional and personal attention that they expect from industry leaders.

Interested in our revolutionary approach?

Begin connecting with a global team by contacting foo @ foo today and increase your global opportunities

The email had some basic HTML formatting which you can see below.

The Critique

The big problem is: what is being sold? A product? A service? You can read the whole thing several times and never know. All of the jargon and fuzzy language makes it worse. In a world of full inboxes this will be deleted as soon as its skimmed. In needs to be clearer, simpler and shorter.

It’s time for a Revolution…a Commercial RE Revolution.

Revolution should almost never be used. It’s used twice in the first sentence. I don’t know what a RE revolution is. Is that a revolution that you do twice?

There is a void in the marketplace. Have you noticed it? For much of the commercial real estate world, the solution is occasionally pulled out because it looks cool; but they can’t really seem to remember how it works

I can’t explain what this means. Are these people with brain damage?

Hidden underneath the pile of instruments we use every day is a much-needed tool. Have you guessed what it is yet? It’s Collaboration: a social technology tool.

Collaboration is not a tool nor a product. Its an activity people do with other people.

With iCORE, we’ve logged many hours creating a new atmosphere of collaboration and teaming while offering the most advanced technological platform designed to facilitate it seamlessly.

Using a i before the name of things makes everyone think of Apple. I’m not sure if this was an intentional association or not, but its distracting.  Seamless and facilitate are jargon and should be avoided. An “atmosphere of collaboration” is nice but it refers to something you experience with other people. Does the tool enable this? Or do folks at iCORE simply gotten along well with each other? It’s unclear.

 iCORE solves your “location” problem by placing the capability of reporting and increased optics available at your fingertips, putting you in the know.

Why is location in quotes? What are increased optics? Does that mean bi-focals?

Overall its not clear what is being pitched. A product? A service? My best guess is its software for real estate agents to use.

 EXTREME MAKEOVER: The Revised Version

Here is a revised and improved version. It’s shorter by nearly half and is much clearer on the pitch and the payoff.

Subject: How to solve your toughest client challenges

In commercial real estate the challenge is to stay ahead of competitors and in touch with your clients. At iCORE we’ve been working hard for years developing a new tool that solves these problems and more.

Our software provides simple reports that answer your toughest questions. You can automate many of your daily chores and get instant snapshots of what your clients need from you.You should consider the iCore product because:

It automates the toughest parts of your work
Its simple to learn, powerful to use
Industry leaders you respect have endorsed it

You’ve invested your career in building trust with clients.Why not finally use software worthy of your hard work?

You can try it for free for 30 days without obligation.Contact us for more information at foo@foo.foo

Of course whatever is offered now has to backup some of those claims, but there are some things PR alone can’t do for you.

If you were hired to make this over what would you do differently? Leave a comment

99 second presentations

A running joke in the world of presentations is how short can they be? They used to be an hour. Then TED went to 20 minutes, Pecha Kucha to 6, and Ignite to 5. The trend of short presentations has been on the rise for years and one wonders where it will stop.

But then consider TV Ads: they’re 30 seconds long. The good ones communicate incredibly well in a very short amount of time.

Years ago I ran an event at Microsoft called Design Day. Each year we’d experiment with different formats and one year we tried 99 second presentations. It went really well and we did it the next year too. Unlike most speaking events it gives the audience a real chance to participate.

How it works:

There’s a stage and a microphone
You hand pick 5 or 6 speakers to be in line by the wall
The first speaker gets 99 seconds to speak
When they’re done, they hand the microphone to the next speaker
Anyone in the audience can get in line
Speakers can speak more than once
When you run out of time, or speakers, the session ends


What happens:

Before the session starts, explain how it works. Make sure the audience knows they can get in line and get a turn.

At first everyone is nervous, but paying attention. How does this work? they wonder. The format itself creates drama, which is good. If you choose good speakers to staff the line, and invite them to speak about provactive or important topics, soon someone in the audience will stand up. When this happens, everyone starts listening differently, realizing they too can can get in line.

On finding and coaching speakers

It’s a small commitment to get someone to speak for less than 2 minutes. They can practice their material 10 times in half an hour. The surprise of short format speaking is it forces speakers to get to the good stuff. One year we let the hand picked speakers have a single slide if they wanted. This adds to your logistics, but if they want to give the audience a URL or twitter handle, having it on a slide makes this easier.

Speakers who volunteer can and will use less than 99 seconds, since they won’t have prepared. This is good. You’ll be impressed  by the different, clever ways people choose to use their time.

Logistics
 You need to have:

A hand held microphone
A gong or buzzer to cut people off when they hit 99 seconds (you have to be militant about this). A warning sound at 80 seconds is wise.
5 or 10 invited speakers to be the first to go and help set the tone you want. Choose good, provocative speakers that will inspire responses. If you want to play it safe, have a large number of people in the original line. If the session is going to be 30 minutes long, plan for 20 minutes of hand picked speakers. Then even if you fail to get volunteers, worst case you’ll just end 10 minutes early.
Plant a seed in the audience for someone you know will get in line after things start to break the ice.
A time limit for when the session ends.
Afterwards write up a blog post listing all the people who spoke and their contact info – helps people follow up and make connections.

References:


The history of short presentations
Lightning  talks
Advice on 90 second demos