by Caroline Leach | Oct 9, 2016 | Corporate Communications, Social Media
Our incoming messages are exploding.
LinkedIn messages. Facebook and Twitter notifications. Emails. Texts. Snaps.
Just reading and responding to everything could be more than a full-time job.
You need a strategy for when you do and don’t respond.
And I don’t subscribe to the philosophy that no response is the right way to say no.
In our hyperconnected world, our humanity and good manners can too easily go by the wayside.
Sometimes it’s because we can’t help the person and we need to say no. In those cases, have a standard professional response you can copy, paste, edit and send to say you’re not interested at this time, but you’ll keep the info for future reference.
Some messages are easy not to respond to:
- Automated sales pitches, usually via LinkedIn and Twitter
- Connection requests immediately followed by a sales pitch, again, usually via LinkedIn and Twitter
- Connection requests in LinkedIn from people you don’t know and that aren’t personalized to explain why they’d like to connect with you
- Tweets that mention you as a way to draw you into an issue for which you can offer no meaningful response
Some messages deserve a response. And while it would be easy enough to ignore them, giving a response can set you apart and enhance your company’s reputation:
- Customers of your company who need help getting an issue resolved. Respond to that customer right away. Be a friendly, helpful, human face and voice. Connect them with your company’s customer care team for a rapid response.
Interesting stat: 78% of people who complain to a brand in Twitter expect a response within an hour. Another one: 77% of people feel more positive about a brand when their tweet has been replied to.
(This is where I remind readers that opinions expressed are my own.)
- People from your alma maters, past and present employers and other professional groups who ask for your advice or an introduction to a colleague for networking purposes.
- Connections, colleagues and friends who post valuable content. Read their link, give them a “like” if the content is something you want to be associated with, and leave a short and upbeat comment that adds a constructive observation to the dialogue. Social media is all about reciprocity.
And some messages fall in between.
An example? A request to connect to one of your connections, without a clearly stated reason.
Recently a LinkedIn connection asked to connect to a colleague, to invite her to an event. I suspected it was a sales pitch and didn’t want to spam my colleague. I asked the requester for more info. Never heard back. End of story.
Suppose you do decide to respond to a message to decline a request and you get a response asking for something else.
What then?
Here I take my cue from a wise colleague, Tina Morefield. She’ll send a response. One response. And after that, no more.
Unless, of course, it’s from a customer who needs your help. In that case, keep responding until the issue is resolved to the customer’s satisfaction. Because our customers are the lifeblood of our organizations.
When do you respond? When do you not respond?
by Caroline Leach | Sep 27, 2016 | Corporate Communications, Social Media
Everyone needs a great headshot.
Why? Social media profiles. Executive biographies. Email signatures. Conference badge photos.
Having a great headshot helps build your personal brand.
But sometimes being photographed is the last thing we want to do. Here are 12 ways to get a great shot and have fun in the process.
Just do it. Get a new photo taken every few years. I waited 5 years since my last headshot, which was way too long.
My colleague Roger Hyde‘s team had created such a perfect environment years ago, complete with a wind machine, that I was hesitant to do it again.
But thanks to the gentle coaxing of photographer Jessica Sterling, my husband Kevin and I finally took new headshots.
Decide what message you want to convey. What do you want your headshot to say about you? It should amplify your personal brand – what you want to be known for.
I wanted a new photo I could use in a corporate environment. It also needed to work in other contexts in my professional and personal lives.
Pick a great photographer. Ask your colleagues and friends for recommendations. Or use social media to find someone local.
On a tight budget? Find someone who’s starting out or team up with friends who need headshots.
If you’re planning a professional event, bring in a photographer for attendees to get their pics done.
The global youth media company Fullscreen did this at a recent women’s leadership event – brilliant idea!
In my case, I had the good fortune of knowing Jessica Sterling from work, and I was familiar with her visual capability with people and organizations. I personally retained her services, and so it began.
Check out other headshots for inspiration. Look at headshots of people you admire. Check out leaders and standouts in your field. Find images that express what you want to convey. Think about how you’ll express what makes you unique. Share samples and discuss ideas with your photographer.
Personalities shine through in the speaker headshots for the upcoming TEDWomen 2016 conference. I can’t wait to attend this in October and hear from these fascinating women and men.
Have your makeup and hair done. Bring in the professionals!
Whether it’s your own go-to hair and makeup glam squad, or a stop at the Dry Bar for a blowout and Sephora for a makeover, have your hair and makeup done.
Thank you, Emma Willis and Countour Fosse!
Wear solid colors. Solids photograph well and are bolder. Bright colors pop and attract more attention. Too much white can wash you out.
Bring several wardrobe options to your shoot and play around with the pieces. Have different jewelry options.
Blue is my employer’s brand color, so I chose a jewel-toned blue jacket (this is where I mention that opinions are my own). But I also love red, so I brought my favorite Nina McLemore jacket.
Try to smize. While searching for tips on taking a great headshot, supermodel and entrepreneur Tyra Banks rose to the top. Here I learned how to smize. This is all about smiling with your eyes to take a great shot.
Relax and have fun. Cue up your favorite music. Bring a friend who makes you laugh and brings out the best in you. Let your playful side emerge and enjoy all the attention. After all, how often do you get to be center stage for the better part of a day in real life?
Take “behind the scenes” pics. Among the four of us in the studio, we each got some pictures as the shoot was unfolding. These were fun to post on Instagram that day.
Choose the best image to be your personal brand. Look through all the shots on a few different occasions. Mark your favorites. Ask friends for feedback. Think about the brand you want to express. Does your selection capture that essence?
Use your headshot consistently in EVERYTHING. I used to use one photo in “professional” social media platforms (LinkedIn and Twitter) and a more casual one in more “personal” social media platforms (Facebook and Instagram). I tried to keep the two worlds separate, but the lines continue to blur.
So this time I took Guy Kawasaki‘s advice in The Art of Social Media. I picked one picture to use in everything.
Just as a business brand uses the same logo consistently, your headshot is YOUR brand. You should use the same photo consistently in your social world.
When I made a list of where I’d use my new headshot, it kept growing. Executive bio. Social media profiles. My gmail signature (another nod to Guy Kawasaki for recommending Wise Stamp). College alumni profiles. Google. Yelp. AirBNB. On so on.
My headshot is on my camera roll so I can upload it into event apps and anywhere I might need it.
Take advantage of events that offer headshots. Be camera ready to take a new pic at a variety of events that offer photography.
And don’t forget to smize!
by Caroline Leach | Aug 14, 2016 | Corporate Communications, Marketing & Analytics
To my surprise and delight, “communication” topped the list of key skills for data scientists in a CEB Market Insights blog post I read this week.
The post covered the top 10 skills for data scientists and 2 strategies for hiring them. Yet “communication” felt like a lone outlier among a list of highly quantitative skills, like managing structured data, mathematics, data mining and statistical modeling.
But indeed, the Business Broadway study the post cited showed that “communications” recurred the most frequently across a variety of data science roles.
When Thomas Davenport and D.J. Patil named “Data Scientist” the sexiest job of the 21st century in Harvard Business Review, they cited an enduring need “for data scientists to communicate in language that all their stakeholders understand – and to demonstrate the special skills involved in storytelling with data, whether verbally, visually, or – ideally – both.”
As a communicator who pivoted into marketing analytics, it’s heartening to to see data showing there’s a role and need for effective communication and storytelling skills.
And having led communications, the field is dramatically improved by data that demonstrates what works and what doesn’t, and helps predict how various audiences might respond to different communications strategies.
Beyond enabling data-driven decisions, clear communications about data can literally be a matter of life or death. Two fascinating examples crossed my path this morning in an article by Dr. Jenny Grant Rankin called Over-the-Counter Data: the heroics of well-displayed information.
The first example was an early use of data visualization in the summer of 1854. In London, 500 people died of mysterious causes in a 10-day period. A Dr. John Snow made his data user-friendly. He took a neighborhood map and noted the exact locations where people had died.
This pointed toward a local water pump that was the culprit in the spread of cholera. With this clearly displayed data, Dr. Snow was able to convince authorities to remove the pump’s handle in order to stop the outbreak.
Another example took a much more ominous turn. The night before the Space Shuttle Challenger launched in January 1986, NASA engineers and their supervisors looked at charts and data on the rocket’s O-ring function. This is what keeps hot gasses contained. Based on what they saw, the launch was cleared for takeoff.
But the available data was not displayed clearly. It showed failed launches, but not successful launches. And this led decision makers to overlook a critical piece of information – the O-rings worked properly only when the temperature was above 66 degrees. The day of the Challenger launch was 30 degrees below that. It was “so cold it does not even fit on the graph.” It’s still heart wrenching to recall the tragedy that occurred that day.
While thankfully the work of data scientists is rarely a life or death matter, these examples underscore the need for clarity in communicating data. For what cannot be understood cannot be implemented.
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