Your message and other things you say

I think I’ve got the blog back up, on a new and improved version of Wordpress. I suppose that’s a good thing. My cursory glance shows it to be working, although the admin interface is a bit different and my categories appear to have disappeared.

Sorry mom and my other two readers for the hiatus.

Hire a web guru to do web guru-ish things

Trying to book a flight for an upcoming trip.  Against my better judgment, the nonstop flight woos me and I try to book on an anonymous airline108 that tries to parade as the airline of the country.

When I get to “purchase ticket”, it tells me to be careful and not hit anything twice, double booking, etc.  I watch for two seconds and switch to a window to book a hotel.  A few minutes later I return to the website to be greeted by a message that said their server timed out, the IT guys went on strike, or a nuclear bomb destroyed their reservations facility.  I hit the back button on my browser to be greeted with a confirmation page that has retained none of my information.

Now I have no idea if they’ve billed me or not.  I’ve got no confirmation email and my guess is no.  So I click the little “chat with an agent” button to be greeted with a nice window telling me all agents are busy.  If I want to get an agent, I should close the little popup window and click on the same button I just clicked to get this notice.  I don’t think I want to spend the rest of my night trying to see if there are agents chatting with customers (my guess is they all went home at 5pm EDT).

So which is easier:

1. Spending probably an hour of my time trying to confirm that I don’t have a flight booked and trying to rebook it, or
2. Confirming with my credit card that no charges went through and/or canceling them if they did and booking on one of the three airlines I normally travel and KNOW their web site works.

Hmmm…
No wonder they went bankrupt.  Glad our tax dollars saved this airline from destruction.

Make it easy for customers to buy.

Thanks to my ISP ‘improving’ the offering to me (without my choice, notification, or approval), the blog has been down for four days.  I finally did my own research to at least get it to where it is, but there’s a bug with the version of mySQL that they have ‘upgraded’ me to that has posts in reverse order.  For those of you still reading via the web site (and why on earth haven’t you moved to RSS yet?), that is a major problem.  Check the calendar widget to see when a new post has been made.

Sorry for the inconvenience.  I don’t expect that I’ll be renewing my contract with this provider, and may even jump ship before it comes due.

Don’t take away features and functions that work without notification and workarounds.

At a technical conference, the audience had just sat through about 100+ minutes of technical detail and demonstration. It was interesting stuff (to them) but was quite a bit on the dry side and was a parade of facts and features. The conference organizers had invited a keynote to liven things up at the end of the session.

The speaker trotted out on stage and opened with, “Wow. That was a LOT of information. I guess you understood most of that, but I didn’t. I have no idea what it is you folks do.” That sure isn’t Rule #1 compliant, now, is it?! He then proceeded to mispronounce the name of the company who had hired him twice in the first 10 minutes of the keynote.
While the egregious (I love that word) error is not knowing the audience, a smaller error is admitting it, and essentially separating the audience from the speaker. A speaker should strive to build bridges between the audience and himself, not alienate and separate himself from them.

Know your audience and connect with them.

Been traveling quite a bit.  Always interesting to see other places and experience different things.  Well, for the most part.

So I ran across a radio station in the Midwest that had a morning show contest I thought was interesting.  Anyway, usually, I think these things to be absolute drivel, you know, but this one was right up my alley.  So these, um, callers had to speak for 20 seconds on a given topic (I think the topic this particular day is “talk about the things we might find in your refrigerator“) and not use the (non-)word “uh” or “um“.
So, anyway, it turns out it’s hard to find, uh, random-person-on-the-street who can do this, uh, without saying “uh“.  They went through several tries of buzzing people off the air before someone was able to complete it, and were I coaching the winner, I’d say they even failed.  You see, they didn’t let loose with an “um” or “uh“, thus winning the prize, but they had enough “and“, “so“, “anyway” words that have the same effect.  So, basically, you see, these words don’t add, like, you know, anything to our message.  Once we clear such words out of our message, it’s amazing how clean and clear it sounds.  It’s, like, simple, uh, when you can, uh, eliminate the words that don’t say uh-anything.
Our goal as presenters is to eliminate anything that distracts from our message.  The low-hanging fruit is non-words.  It’s really not as hard as you might think.  I have developed the habit to use almost no ‘um’s and ‘uh’s — I find the so/and/anyways harder to control.  All they are is the speaker’s attempt to gather his/her thoughts.  A pause is almost always a more effective way to do that, and it doesn’t pollute the listener’s reception, either.

So, anyway, how would one accomplish this?  Simply put, uh, it involves slowing down.  There are easy ways to do this — the best and easiest involves using eye contact to drive speech.  Awareness helps, but at some point a skill to avoid such words must be practiced and utilized to make it happen.  Find a way, enlist a coach, practice.  So, anyway, you should do it.

Eliminate non-words from your, uh, communication.