Saying Goodbye
Saying Goodbye
Seth Godin’s post yesterday of the same title has this good advice for businesses who are shutting down:
It seems to me that you ought to say goodbye with the same care and attention to detail and honesty you use to say hello. You never know when you’ll be back.
The same should be said of companies and employees. We always try in interviews to be as kind as possible to candidates who we are not going to hire. I’m sure we don’t always get it right at all levels, but I always make a personal phone call and usually send a handwritten letter to finalists for senior jobs. Once, when I had to “ding” a candidate for a VP level job who was expecting an offer based on something I said, I even sent him a bottle of his favorite wine. You don’t have to go to those extremes all the time, but sending a candidate a letter or more formal email or giving him or her a phone call if they’ve taken the time to come in and interview goes a long way towards building your company’s brand as an employer. And you never know when a candidate who isn’t a fit for one position is a perfect fit for another position. Calling back is much easier if you say goodbye the right way the first time around.
I try to do the same thing with employees who leave the company, regardless of who terminates the employment relationship. I do my best to see or at least call the departing employee on or near his last day to thank him for his service and – if appropriate – let him know that the door is always open if he wants to come back someday.
And we ask the same of employees who leave of us – that they say goodbye the right way. We ask departing employees to give us as much of a heads up as possible that they’re considering looking for a new job (without retribution, of course). If people have decided to leave, we ask for three weeks’ notice instead of the traditional two or less. Again, we don’t get this from everyone, but we do get it from many. And for people’s “lame duck” time, we ask them to stay focused and complete the documentation and transition of their responsibilities in as orderly a manner as possible.
There’s just no good reason to burn a bridge, even if for whatever reason you feel wronged by an employer or an employee.
It's The Little Things
It’s The Little Things
My credit card expires at the end of this month, so Citibank just sent me a new one. I’d guess that about 50 web sites, maybe 75, have my credit card on file and know that it’s about to expire. Only two of them — that’s right, only two — Typepad (my blogging software from company Six Apart) and Mobil Speedpass sent me reminders to come back and update my account. And at that, Mobil sent its reminder via snail mail. Typepad’s was an easy one-click right to my account’s profile page on the web site.
How is it that only one or two companies got it right? This is one of those little opportunities to remind customers that you are thinking about them and their needs.
As for the others, I guess they’re just going to reject some upcoming transaction or auto-bill. I guarantee you that at least one of them will screw me as a result (my money is on someone in the telco world). For all the other companies with whom I transact online or via Mastercard, I am now scouring my last few months worth of Citibank bills and then going web site by web site, updating my card’s expiration date. Reminds me of the days before we launched ECOA where you had to go update your email address one web site at a time…
The Social Aspects of Running a Board
The Social Aspects of Running a Board
I’ve posted about the the topic of Boards of Directors a couple of times before, here and here. We had one of our quarterly in-person Board meetings yesterday, which I always enjoy, and one of my directors pointed out that I never posted about the social aspects of running a Board. Since this is a critical component of the job, it is certainly worth mentioning.
A high functioning Board isn’t materially different from any other high functioning team. The group needs to have a clear charter or set of responsibilities, clear lines of communication, and open dialog. And as with any team, making sure that the people on a Board know how to connect with each other as individuals as critical to building good relationships and having good communication, both inside and outside of Board meetings.
We’ve always done a dinner either before or after every in-person Board meeting to drive this behavior. They take different forms: sometimes they are Board only, sometimes Board and senior management; sometimes just dinner, sometimes an event as well as dinner, like bowling (the lowest common denominator of sporting activities) or a cooking class, as we did last night. But whatever form the “social time” takes, and it doesn’t have to be expensive at all, I’ve found it to be an incredibly valuable part of team-building for the Board over the years.
You’d never go a whole year without having a team lunch or dinner or outing…treat your Board the same way!
In Defense of Email, Part 9,732
In Defense of Email, Part 9,732
I commented today on our partner Blue Sky Factory’s CEO, Greg Cangialosi’s excellent posting in defense of email as a marketing channel called Email’s Role and Future Thoughts. Since the comment grew longer than I anticipated, I thought I’d re-run parts of it here.
A couple quick stats from Forrester’s recent 5-year US Interactive forecast back up Greg’s points con gusto:
– 94% of consumers use email; 16% use social networking sites (and I assume they mean USE them – not just get solicitations from their friends to join). That doesn’t mean that social networking sites aren’t growing rapidly in popularity, at least in some segments of the population, and it doesn’t mean that email marketing may not be the best way to reach certain people at certain times. But it does mean that email remains the most ubiquitous online channel, not to mention the most “pull-oriented” and “on demand.”
– Spend on email marketing is $2.7b this year, growing to $4.2b in 2012. Sure, email by 2012 is the smallest “category” by dollars spent, but first of all, one of the categories is “emerging channels,” which looks like it includes “everything else” in the world other than search, video, email, and display. So it includes mobile as well as social media, and who knows what else. Plus, if you really understand how email marketing works, you understand that dollars don’t add up in the same way as other forms of media since so much of the work can be done in-house.
What really amazes me is how all these “web 2.0” people keep talking about how email is dying (when in fact it’s growing, albeit at a slower rate than other forms of online media) and don’t focus on how things like classifieds and yellow pages are truly DYING, and what that means for those industries.
I think a more interesting point is that in Forrester’s forecast, US Interactive Marketing spend by 2012 in aggregate reached $61b, more than triple where it is today — and that the percent of total US advertising going to interactive grows from 8 to 18 over the five years in the forecast.
The bigger question that leaves me with is what that means for the overall efficiency of ad spend in the US. It must be the case that online advertising in general is more efficient than offline — does that mean the total US advertising spend can shrink over time? Or just that as it gets more efficient,
marketers will use their same budgets to try to reach more and more prospects?
New Daily Read
New Daily Read
If you haven’t seen it or heard about it yet, run – don’t walk – to sign up for either the RSS feed or daily email digest from Silicon Alley Insider, a new publication that’s a sort of NYC based version of ValleyWag. SAI is run by famed analyst Henry Blodget and was started by former DoubleClick CEO and CTO Kevin Ryan and Dwight Merriman, now serial Silicon Alley entrepreneurs (at an epic pace, no less).
The writing is easy and has a bit of that tabloid feel to it, but that’s a nice change. The fact that the publication fills a void that’s been open for years since the disappearance of Jason Calacanis’ Silicon Alley Reporter is somewhat unexplainable, but I’m glad to see the void filled. It’s still early days for the publication (the site says "beta" on it), but it’s a must-read if you’re in the Internet business…even if you’re on the west coast!
Where There's a Will, There's a Way
New Media’s Influence on the Traditional
New Media’s Influence on the Traditional
Last week, DMNews unveiled its new look and feel and format (of the print publication) at the DMA’s annual convention in Chicago. Hats off to Publisher Julia Hood and Editor-in-Chief Elly Trickett for diving in and coming up with some great improvements to the publication so quickly after taking the reigns.
What I find particularly interesting about the new format is that its design and even content structure seem to borrow heavily from the world of online media, such as:
- A top-of-page “navigation bar” that tells you at a glance what articles are on the page (email, circulation, multichannel, legislation, lists, etc.) so you can flip pages and figure out quickly where to stop based on your interests
- MUCH shorter news briefs
- More “fixed” topic sections that are (I think) meant to be recurring in every issue…”Gloves off,” “Duly noted,” “Nailed it”
- “Key points” call-outs of an article etc. instead of all the long form of the prior generation of the publication
- A section called “data bank” that is almost like an analytics widget
I had been ignoring the print edition for several months, assuming I’d catch any critical articles to me via the web site, keyword feeds, and the email newsletter. But this new format will definitely have me back to at least flipping through the print edition looking for relevant articles.
The Highest Form of Flattery
The Highest Form of Flattery
Competitors copy us all the time. Sometimes it’s big things like product features or strategy. Sometimes it’s little things like marketing collateral or a logo or product name. Those are always a little annoying, but really, there’s nothing one can do about it. As we say at Return Path, it’s the price we pay for being a market leader. And to be honest, I’m sure we do the same on occasion, whether inadvertently or on purpose.
But we spotted one today that’s so incredibly egregious and just plain silly, I don’t even know where to start. A competitor — name will be hidden to protect the guilty — just ripped off our boiler plate language at the top of all of our job descriptions. I know this because I personally wrote the copy for ours, and I did it before this competitor even existed. At least I think they did…let’s compare:
Here is ours:
If you’re obsessed with creating a world class organization and looking for a great company to call home, we want you! Return Path is a growing, thriving company full of smart, motivated people. Our 140+ employees are a tightly-knit, super-focused and incredibly dedicated team. We work hard, and we’re passionate about making email work better for both our clients and their customers.
And theirs:
If you are a smart, dedicated top performer, we want you! Company X is a growing, thriving company full of smart, motivated people. Our employees are a tightly-knit, super-focused and incredibly dedicated team. We work hard, and we’re passionate about safeguarding the credibility, rendering, and effectiveness of our clients’ digital communications.
You be the judge!
People are People, Part II
People are People, Part II
In Part I, I talked about the diminishing distinction between B2B marketing and B2C marketing, and how getting the right message to the right person at the right time blurs those traditional boundaries. I have a different thought on the same theme today, spurred on by Elly Trickett, who is DMNews‘ fantastic new Editor-in-Chief. Elly wrote a great editorial in the October 1 print edition of the publication that I just caught today entitled “Don’t Forget Your Consumer Side,” in which she recounted a speech she made to an audience of marketers where she asked them to come up with examples of trigger-based digital marketing they had received, and one member of the audience replied with the statement, “We’re not consumers.”
Hogwash!
That’s just the kind of comment that gives the marketing and advertising industry a bad name, not to mention leading directly to bad practices.
When we as a profession treat the recipients of our messaging like numbers, we do bad things. We get excited about moving a 1% response rate to a 1.5% response rate (a 50% improvement!) without remembering that 98.5% of our messages fell on deaf ears from being the wrong message, to the wrong person, at the wrong time, sent in the wrong way.
When we as a profession figure out how to treat the recipients of our messaging in more of a Cluetrain Manifesto kind of way (that is to say, as humans, not as “targets,” “prospects,” “consumers,” or “users”), we do our best work. We engage our prospects and customers. We think of them as our audience, not as dollar signs walking around with bulls-eye targets on their backs. We push back when our boss asks us to crank out a rushed email message to make this quarter’s numbers look better when it goes against our better judgment.
So people are people. If you wouldn’t want to receive an advertising message that you are sending out…maybe it’s worth thinking twice about whether or not to actually send it out in the first place.
Impact of a Leader
Impact of a Leader
I had an interesting moment of clarity the other day around the impact of a leader that’s not from the business world but that does have lessons for the business world. This may take a couple of minutes to set up, so bear with me.
One of my extracurricular activities is raising money for Princeton from fellow alumni. For this effort, we use two basic metrics to track success in any given year’s campaign: participation (what % of alumni give) and dollars (how much $ we raise). While dollars raised are escalating year over year as you’d expect with inflation and with an expanding alumni base due to larger classes in more recent years, participation rates are reasonably consistent for given classes, year in, year out.
But there’s an interesting trend I saw on a graph of the numbers that Princeton posts over time, which is that participation rates vary from class to class, much more than dollars given. One class may always have 50% of its members donating; another will always have 75% of classmates donating. You’d expect classes to hover around an average much more closely than the data would indicate.
One of the things that was pointed out to me when I was looking at the graph is that record-breaking participation rates of the younger classes spike up and stay up coincident with the arrival of the University’s current President, Shirley Tilghman, about 5 years ago. I’m sure there are other explanations for this, but this one keeps resonating with me. Why? President Tilghman is an incredibly engaging public figure who really connects with students and alums of all ages. And many (though not all) of the classes with systematically weak participation rates were on campus during the reign of her predecessor, President Harold Shapiro. I don’t mean to malign President Shapiro – I’m sure he was an excellent administrator and fundraiser – but a warm figure and dynamic speaker that students looked up to, he was not. No one I can think of when I was on campus during the Shapiro years felt as connected to the institution of Princeton as I hear current students feeling connected to the institution in the Tilghman years. Again, there may be other explanations for the coincident timing of the drop in participation, but I’m going to run with this one for thematic convenience if nothing else. 🙂
This lesson must translate to the business world as well, especially for larger companies. Leaders that can connect with their people receive payback for that connection in the form of retention, productivity, and quality of work. Leaders that fail to do so – even while competently managing things like finances and Boards – are doomed in the long run to lead companies with less engaged teams, therefore weaker products, therefore less happy customers, therefore lower profits.
Child Prodigies, or Misspent Youths?
Child Prodigies, or Misspent Youths?
I just got an email from a reader of this blog with a subject line of "15 year-old entrepreneur" and a series of engaging questions around starting a business (and actually, quite a good idea for one as well). It got me thinking about being a kid and being an entrepreneur at the same time. The author of this email is impressively savvy and focused on the world of business and startups.
Ben Casnocha is another one. Ben is 19, has already started two companies, and has written and published a book called My Startup Life.
When I was 15, I actually did have an inkling that I was going to go into business someday, and probably even that I wanted to start a business someday. After all, it’s what my dad did, and what both of my grandfathers did. But the key words in that sentence are INKLING and SOMEDAY. I’m not sure it would have occurred to me in a million years to actually start a real business. I suppose I could have figured out how. But I wasn’t interested in doing it, or I didn’t have a good peer network of business-minded teens, or something.
It’s interesting to think about whether or not I’d be a better entrepreneur or CEO today if I’d started entrepreneurial pursuits at age 15 instead of age ~25. Certainly, one makes a huge number of mistakes the first time one does anything, so perhaps better to get those out of the way early. But I have to imagine that there are some things that one learns with age about dealing with other people that can’t be hurried up just because one starts businesses early.
Anyway, my hat is off to guys like Ben and the even younger guy who wrote into me…I just hope they’re making enough time for more standard teenage fun with their friends as well!