Autocorrect FAIL: Sorry About Your Feces

D’oh! That was supposed to read “Sorry about your fever.” Thank you, autocorrect.

These days, it seems that everyone with a smart phone has been bitten by its email autocorrect monster. Even little Hannah, who received this alarming message from her father: “We’re going to divorce next month.” Oops, dry those tears, little girl. It was supposed to read “Disney.”

My latest foray into autocorrectitude: When my esteemed client’s name was changed  from Tina to Tuna. Now there’s a pretty good way to scuttle a business relationship, yes?

“Autoincorrect,” as the phenomenon has been labeled, has become so prevalent that noted tech columnist David Pogue has taken to blogging autocorrect follies from reader submissions. And, as was inevitable, a website called Damn You Auto Correct chronicles smart phone exchanges in which adorable babies become affordable ones, hotel vacancies become vasectomies, and a lanai with a view becomes a labia with a view.

Oh sure, you could turn off your autocorrect feature. But then the same fat-fingeredness that triggers the function will instead yield a profusion of typos. (I’m a notoriously inaccurate typist, so without autocorrect, I can easily take several minutes to fire off even a brief message.)

So, the answer to all this? Keep hoping that the Microsofts and Googles of the world keep refining their language processing algorithms. In the meantime, we’re all reduced to texting transsexuals.

Translators! Translators! Texting translators!

© 2011 Fatt Lipp. All rights reserved.

You’re Welcome, Mark Zuckerberg

I can envision how it all went down. Last month, Facebook honcho Andrew Bosworth had a big New York Times interview coming up — a golden opportunity to promote his company’s revamped messaging service. He consulted with Mark Zuckerberg, who advised Bosworth that he needed a hook, an eye-opening sound bite, to jar the reader. So Bosworth began frantically searching the web.

And he came across this Fatt Lipp post from last September — and this passage, in particular:

“The medium is no longer the message. The medium is merely the delivery vessel for your message. Do you know what the message is? The message is the message.”

“Eureka!” shouted Bosworth. He showed the post to Zuckerberg, who grinned broadly and said, “You’ve got it, dude.” So Bosworth jotted down his version of the above, and verbalized it as follows in this December 20 front-page NYT article:

“The future of messaging is more real time, more conversational and more casual. The medium isn’t the message. The message is the message.”

I really do have to start copyrighting my Fatt Lipp thoughts. I really, really do. In the meantime, though, I have this message for Bosworth and Zuckerberg: You’re welcome.

Viva L’Incompétence!

Legend has it that when iconic baseball manager Casey Stengel first surveyed the on-field ineptitude that was his New York Mets in the team’s inaugural year, he threw up his hands in exasperation and bellowed, “Can’t anybody here play this game?”

It was a funny line then, in part because competency in society was the rule, not the exception.

Cut to last Friday’s Wall Street Journal and this article:

Elections Board Bungles Ballot

The New York City Board of Elections printed ballots that incorrectly instruct voters to fill in the oval ‘above or next to’ their favored candidates’ names. The ovals on the ballot are neither above nor next to, but below the candidates’ names.

Now you might think that with all the sturming, dranging and chad-hanging over voter ballots during the past decade, people would be extra careful about this sort of thing. But nope. Incompetence wins out again.

Is this blog post headed toward a hand-wringing, curmudgeonly lament? Not to worry. To the contrary, I am absolutely loving our society’s steady decline into pandemic mediocrity. Why? Because it lowers the bar for excellence. I say the more barely passable business people in the world, the more highly valued we competent professionals become.

So you go, society! Keep on grading school tests on a curve. Keep on giving out trophies to all youth sports participants, not just winners. Keep on promoting students who haven’t mastered their current grade level. Keep on showing people that you need only approach something resembling mediocrity to succeed.

The happy result is an army of individuals who will believe that near-adequacy is sufficient for even the most mission-critical tasks…forcing their frustrated superiors to seek outside expertise (like me) to get the job done not only right, but with the high quality it demands.

Now, if those superiors, and their superiors, are also incompetent — and do not value excellence — then, yikes! I’m in big, big trouble. But I’m willing to take my chances.

Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers?

In the eye-opening contrarian headline department, you must admit that the above is a pretty good entry. And the fact that it comes from a recent article in the venerable Harvard Business Review makes it just that much more noteworthy.

But co-authors Mathew Dixon, Karen Freeman and Nicholas Toman present an interesting premise: Customers are far more likely to dump you for bad service than to reward you for excellent service. So stop focusing on exceeding customer expectations, and instead focus on shoring up your basic blocking and tackling.

“Consumers’ impulse to punish bad service — at least more readily than to reward delightful service — plays out dramatically in both phone-based and self-service interactions, which are most companies’ largest customer service channels,” according to the authors. “In those settings, loyalty has a lot more to do with how well companies deliver on their basic, even plain-vanilla promises than on how dazzling the service experience might be. Yet most companies have failed to realize this, and pay dearly in terms of wasted investments and lost customers.”

Viscerally, I have a hard time swallowing that notion. (Granted, it could just be my chronic acid-reflux.) I can recount at least a few current business relationships that I’ve retained and reinforced by going the extra mile for my clients. Come to think of it, as a consumer, I have absolutely rewarded companies who have gone over the top to delight me. (Shout-out to the Audi service department.)

But the authors back their premise with compelling quantitative and qualitative research. They even offer up five tactics that every company should adopt to implement what they call “low-customer-effort approaches to service.”

So, a question for you, reader: Given a limited customer service budget, what should a company emphasize first? Minimizing customer complaints, or maximizing customer delight?

Marshall McLuhan Is Still Dead

Oh, those zany marketers. There they go again. Mistaking social media tactics for social media strategy.

According to a recent study, nearly 50% of companies that use social media don’t have strategic plans to guide their activities.

“Our SM strategy? Why, Facebook and Twitter, of course.”

Uh, nooooo, those are tactics. They’re enabling technologies. They’re platforms. Maybe, if you stretch, you can even call them media plan line-items. But a Facebook and/or Twitter account certainly is not a strategy. The medium, social or otherwise, where you choose to deliver a message is not a strategy.

Remember Marshall McLuhan’s “the medium is the message?” Well guess what? McLuhan’s been dead for 30 years. And that canard died with him. The medium is no longer the message. The medium is merely the delivery vessel for your message. Do you know what the message is? The message is the message.

Your communications strategy must begin with “what do we say, and to whom.” That is, marketplace branding and positioning, presumably based on market research. Only once that component is nailed should you examine when, where and how the message should be disseminated.

There’s actually a very good, tangential column by Gannon Hall, COO of Kyte, on this very subject. In the Sept. 13 edition of BrandWeek, Hall posits:

“Marketers have to focus on delivering more personalized content to customers and website visitors. Tailoring the message helps drive customer engagement and loyalty to your brand, and it’s crucial to building the types of two-way conversations that result in long-term relationships with prospects and customers. By creating quality content, adding value and focusing on the needs of your audience across platforms, marketers can spark chatter, increase engagement and round out a truly comprehensive social media strategy.”

Got it? Content before context. Message before medium. Always.

RIP, Mr. McLuhan.

The #1 Résumé Flaw

Got a friend. Looking for a job. Forwarded me his résumé for an audit. His comment: “I don’t think it shows the depth of my experience.”

The résumé was three pages long. Three pages. It DEFINITELY showed the depth of his experience.

What it didn’t do was tell his story in digestible format. Three pages of nearly solid grey, almost begging a prospective employer’s eyes to glazeth over.

As you might imagine, I’ve polished a goodly number of résumés over the past year or two. And by far the biggest  flaw in those I’ve received is not so much in their content, but rather in their structure and organization.

Friends, you must look for ways to break up content into little bits of info. Make copious use of  headlines, subheads, bold lead-ins, and bullets. Make it easy for the reader to take a visual breath every 15-30 seconds or so.

Start there, and you’ll have taken a giant step toward creating a more successful résumé.

Sound good? You’re welcome.

Generating A Lot Of BUZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ: Vuvuzelas Attack Miami, Baseball Team Loses.

It must have seemed like a good idea at the time.

Wait, that’s not right. It cannot POSSIBLY have seemed like a good idea at the time. And yet, inexplicably, some marketing whiz employed by Major League Baseball’s Florida Marlins did it anyway.

By now, you’re aware of the Attack of the Vuvuzelas at the World Cup, right? These fan horns from hell, which you can listen to here, sound like a swarm of killer bees on HGH (or atomic mutant bees, if you’re into 1950s sci-fi). At once enjoyable to thousands of horn-blowing fans and irritating to, well, everyone else on the planet, vuvuzelas have inspired worldwide consternation. Nothing so annoying has become such a huge news story since Justin Bieber.

Anyhoo, back to the Florida Marlins marketing team. They apparently got the idea that the instrument that makes the world’s most migraine-inducing noise would be a perfect promotional giveaway to 15,000 fans.

File the unfortunate results under “P” for poetic justice: Not only did the vuvus go over just about exactly as you might suspect in the popularity department, but they also cost the Marlins a victory. The Fish lost because a strategic player switch that their manager relayed to the umpire was misunderstood amid the BUZZZZZZZZZZZZZ.

The good news here is that marketing personnel who are put in charge of consumer giveaways now have two case studies of promotions to avoid at any cost: One is the WKRP Turkey Drop (“oh, the humanity!”). The other is vuvuzelas.

What do you think about this? I’d like to hear from you. Thoughts?

HATT TIPP: The Beheading of Donna Reed, Courtesy of Kraft Mac & Cheese

It just warms this creative’s heart when I see an old brand successfully pull off some new tricks. Especially when that brand falls into the category of “traditional old dyed-in-the-wool CPG product.” Such brands, as you know, rarely push the edge of the creative envelope. So when they do, it raises eyebrows…and in this case, the creative bar.

Things don’t get much more boring than Kraft Mac & Cheese, which time-crunched moms have dished out to eager kiddies for decades and decades. Think advertising for the brand, and you’d rightly conjure pablum such as latter-day Donna Reeds with two very white, very blonde urchins lapping up the fattening fare laid gracefully, lovingly before them.

And hey, it’s not without real-world substantiation: My 6- and 4-year-old could subsist solely on KM&C — which makes stocking our bomb shelter an absolute breeze. (Hey, now there’s a campaign strategy.)

But lo! Lookey what’s going on at Kraft. They hired Crispin Porter & Bogusky to jazz up the brand’s advertising. Off with Donna Reed’s head — and buh-bye to last year’s recession-fueled “dollar a box” ads — and in with a campaign that appeals strategically to adults, via both the brand’s built-in nostalgia and its guilty pleasure. The tagline: “You know you love it.”

w00t w00t! Oh, but it gets better. CP&B must have put some of its best copywriters on the project, because the campaign carries such outstanding headlines as:

“Outgrow outgrowing it”

“Imported from your childhood”

…and my fave:

“The most fun you can have with your stove on” (and don’t you love the elbow mac smile?)

That’s great stuff, folks. And even greater when you consider, again, that it’s for a rather schlumpy brand that needed a little goosing. So, a Fatt Lipp Hatt Tipp to Crispin Porter, and to the Kraft marketing execs who must have downplayed the importance of focus grouping (no way any of the above gets by Peoria) and approved this very fun campaign.

How To Lie Like A Corporate Bigwig

One of the hidden benefits of watching those Senate/ Congressional hearings that call corporate bigwigs on the carpet is learning how to lie effectively.

Whether it’s last month’s grilling of the Goldman Sachs team, or last year’s collision with GM beggars, or last decade’s smoke-out of tobacco industry executives (“our research showed that nicotine is not addictive”), you can learn some great lessons on being deceitful in convincing fashion.

If you’re thinking that corporate fat cats lie better than the average kitty, guess what? You’re not being a populist, anti-bigbiz bigot. A recent Harvard Business Review article confirms your suspicions.

In HBR‘s May 2010 issue, Professor Dana Carney of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business tells of her recent study, which found that “a sense of power buffers individuals from the stress of lying and increases their ability to deceive others.”

For most people, lying is stressful and produces involuntary physical reactions, similar to the “tells” that bad poker players reveal. But, says Carney, “Disturbingly, high-power liars don’t display these telltale signs.”

What are those signs? Carney’s research revealed the following tells in bad liars. Avoid them, and you, too, can lie as successfully as a bigwig on Capitol Hill…

1. Speech. Bad liars utter more syllables per second, at a higher pitch, and repeat words and sentences more.

2. Shoulders. Bad liars shrug more. But in trying to suppress the lie, they produce a distinct half-shrug. (Think A-Rod’s interview denying steroid use.)

3. Eyes. Bad liars’ pupils dilate as they fib.

4. Mouth. Bad liars press their lips together and involuntarily smirk when they think they’ve gotten away with a lie. (Yup, A-Rod again.)

There’s lots more good stuff that came out of Carvey’s study. You can read all about it here. I think you’ll enjoy the article.

Honest.

Talladega Days

I don’t know how many of you watch NASCAR racing. My 4-year-old is a car and truck addict, which means dad is engaging in such heretofore unprecedented activities as attending Monster Truck Rallies (I kid you not) and watching zoom-zoom on TV on weekend afternoons.

The bright side: While watching Sunday’s NASCAR event at Talladega — you missed it? really? — I got to see a pearl of a TV commercial from UPS, which very cleverly leveraged its status as exclusive trackside courier to NASCAR.

I have no idea who won Sunday’s race. I think it was some guy in a helmet. But at least part of the afternoon was worthwhile viewing, thanks to the UPS spot (which blessedly forgoes the white-board guy, whose welcome had been well-overstayed).

And now, it’s yours to view, without having to wade through 43 souped-up Toyotas and Chevys going round and round, very loudly and very fast. Enjoy…