The Education Business Blog

Taming email is primarily a behavioral problem. If people can be brief, direct, and considerate things will improve.

I've shared this list of ideas with groups I've managed for the past 10 years. It hasn't solved the problem - but it has helped. Sharing this list sets expectations clearly and helps people change their behavior.

This is not an exhaustive list; please feel free to ad your own peeves and ideas for reducing clutter in the in-box. Also – feel free to call me on my lapses.

Here are the rules - more detail is below the fold.

Brevity

* Be brief - really
* Attachments, use sparingly

Directness

* Include clues in the subject field
* Make the “To” field mean something
* Be up front with requests

Consideration

* FYI should really be NTK (Need to Know not Nice to Know)
* The Round Trip Rule
* Reply All is a Dangerous Weapon – Don’t Shoot Yourself
* When it’s urgent…
* Don’t Take It Personally
* When upset - use your toes not your fingers'
* Don’t argue with a jerk in public – most people can’t tell the difference
* How to nag
* Jokes – The Laugh Out Loud Rule
* Minor issues

Continue reading "eMail etiquette for a busy age" »

Web 2.0 is providing another nudge to the conversation economy. As advertising becomes less relevant the power of engaging your customers in a real dialog increases. Listening should be a core competency at the corporate level.

A productive conversation is Socratic, it focuses more on good questions than on staking out positions, and both parties have to be open to learning something. It is a relatively quiet affair, based on mutual respect. It helps the participants distinguish between facts and opinions and arrive a reasoned judgment.

But most marketers are having trouble letting go of dictating a message to the market. We have been taught that the louder we shout and more often we shout the more likely we are to get results. But what happens when everyone is shouting as loud as they can? White noise.

A brilliant article and a subversive video got me thinking along these lines recently. David Armano makes the case for the conversation economy in this article. At the same time the Bring the Love Back video is a hilarious take on the consumer breaking up with advertising.

In a nutshell consumers/buyers want to be heard. If you are still talking at your customers instead of with them you are missing a great opportunity to earn new business.

Follow for a taxonomy of the kinds of questions marketers can ask to get the conversation going….

Continue reading "Socratic Marketing – Real Dialog = Real Results" »

TORONTO – From the vendor perspective the big story out of IRA this year is attendance which is less than half of the number that attended last year. Final numbers are not available yet but rumors on the exhibit floor ranged from 5,000 to 7,500 and at times it felt like 0. Prior years have ranged from 17,000 to over 20,000. It is a shame because there are some exciting new products out this year from companies large and small.

No one had a definitive explanation for the drop off. It can’t be budgets, because Toronto isn’t any more expensive than Chicago was last year. In fact it has some significant bargains ($2 seats to the Bluejays anyone?). Perhaps it was just too difficult politically to send someone to a foreign country on a school budget. Maybe people were scared away by having to have a passport.

Whatever the cause it seems pretty clear that in the post 9/11 world American educators are not as able or as willing to embrace the International aspect of the organization. This is tragic because it is happening at precisely the time that the rest of the world is growing ever closer.

It is always interesting to see how vendors react to dead shows. IRA did have the decency to notify vendors in advance that the numbers were way down (huge props to them for doing this). Several companies took advantage of this and scaled back their presence, but surprisingly some didn’t. One company went full tilt and reportedly had 125 people there. Thats a quick $250,000. Others, reacting more nimbly and realizing they couldn’t change their floor space, had 80x80 booths that were equipped and staffed as if they were 20x20s.

The real winners were the large companies who were on an off year in the space lottery. Being buried in the back of the hall wasn’t such a big deal – particularly if it meant you had prime space next year in Atlanta.

In my mind this is just one more bit of proof that companies should scale back their presence at these large shows to the minimum needed to save face. Yes – you have to be there and if you are going to be there your presence should entertain and engage. But,
you can reach more people every few days on a well constructed website as you can once a year in an 80x80 booth.

Ren Reynolds over at Terra Novahas a good post today with a budding discussion thread about how the Virtual World industry should put together some agreed upon policies and procedures for children’s’ on-line safety.

For this to work sites need a combination of technical and behavioral approaches.

More below the fold...

Continue reading "Virtual World Standards for Children’s Safety" »

It is easy for a sales force to fall into a comfort zone. Data-driven decision making techniques can help insure that Reps are reaching beyond their current contacts.

In many companies there is a great deal of data about the market. The challenge is to drive this into your field organization so that the Reps and their Managers are probing for untapped market potential on a regular basis.

There are some simple and quick ways to start using data in selling to schools and school districts. This post outlines some ideas for how to encourage your sales force to adopt a more data driven approach.

More below the fold…

Continue reading "Data Driven Selling in K12 – Quick Start Guide" »

Keep it short and simple.

Brevity is a sign of respect for your reader's time and attention.

Really.

In a conversation with Randy Pennington he pointed out that in my post textbooks vs. education technology - clash of paradigms I alluded to the financial paradigms but didn't address them directly.

Theres more...

Continue reading "Clashing Paradigms - Update" »

A new alternate reality game (ARG) launched recently to explore what an oil shock would look like. World With Oil is the game and it is incorporating all of the social media found on the web in this massively multiplayer experience.

The coolest part - it is only 4 days old and they already have resources for the classroom. Talk about the power of social media for learning.

Sign up and join in to learn what it is all about.

The worlds of textbook publishers and education technology companies are colliding. The market is driving this convergence – schools have had technology around long enough that they have figured out how it can integrate in with existing practices. Yet the list of successful educational products that blend print and technology is few and far between.

I moved into the publishing world 4 years ago from ed tech. From my perspective on both sides of this fence the problem has more to do with the vendors clashing paradigms than with customer demand.

The paradigms are radically different along several key vectors and reconciling these will be the central challenge as Riverdeep and Houghton merge and as Pearson absorbs Harcourt (announced today).

Follow me to the flip for a more detailed look at this problem.

Continue reading "Textbooks vs. Education Technology – Clash of Paradigms" »

Has your company ever honed a promotional activity only to see it lose its potency right as you perfect it? The frustrating fact is that promotional activities have a shelf life.

This happens because the more effective you get at targeting a market the faster you tap the folks who respond to a given approach. A company I worked at had honed direct mail to a fine art over 3 years – our response rates consistently topped 2%. All of a sudden our response rates were down to 1%. We knew our stuff was good – it had worked in the past. But over those 3 years we had reached most of the folks who responded to mail.

What can you do when this happens? Follow me to the flip for 3 suggestions.

Continue reading "The Shelf Life of Promotional Activities" »

Most companies switch their marketing messaging too frequently and undermine the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns as a result. The power of repetition is one of the foundations of world-class marketing.

So if it is a bad idea – why do so many companies do it? Find three reasons on the flip – see if any of them fit your company.

Continue reading "Don't Change Your Brand Promise Too Soon" »