Fering Communications Blog

Monday, 17 December 2012

You Can't Not Communicate

Let me preface this post by saying that the title of this post is the same as a book written by David Grossman, but the content of this post is not based on that same book. I do own the book but (note to Mr. Grossman: you shouldn’t read the read of this sentence) haven’t read beyond the first twenty or so pages because they really weren’t that inspiring. So regardless of how closely this blog post may or may not be to the book of the same title it was neither taken from nor inspired by the book of the same title.

You are always communicating—it is impossible not to. You have the choice of actively controlling the message that you want to communicate or passively communicating a message that may or may not be what you want. Either way you are always communicating.

Say, for example, you’re out of the office for a few days attending an industry conference. By turning on your email out-of-office assistant you are actively communicating to anyone who emails you that you have limited availability and it might be a day or two before you respond. If you didn’t they might think that you’re ignoring them or don’t value them enough to reply. Hopefully this is not the case, but by not actively communicating you are losing control of the message because you can’t not communicate.

The same is true if you’re working on a project for a client. If you provide regular status updates—even if those updates describe that there is no activity on the project or that you have encountered issues but you are working to resolve them—you are communicating a message that you are on top of things. If you don’t provide regular updates your client might perceive that your silence means that you are on track and everything is a-OK, but alternately they might think that you’re having problems and don’t want them to know. Your communication doesn’t have to be much: a quick phone call or short email might suffice or if you want to really impress them you could provide regular and formal project status reports. Either way, you can control the message by actively communicating or you can passively communicate and leave your message to chance. (Shameless plug: contact us and we'll help you create a professional project status report or other technical documentation.)

Have you ever been to the website of a company that provides a product or service that you need, checked out their company blog and seen that the last posting was made months earlier? What message does that project? Maybe you think that they’re so wonderfully busy that they just don’t have time to maintain their blog. Or maybe you think that they can’t afford the resources to keep their blog current or that they’re not good at following through on things that they start. Do either of those thoughts fill you with enough confidence to engage them? Probably not.

Conclusion

In today’s world we are always communicating whether we like it or not. You can take charge of the message by actively communicating or you can do nothing and passively communicate a message that may or may not be accurate. Your communication doesn’t have to be fancy—an automated reply email, a quick phone call or a full blown project status report are all ways that you can actively communicate the message that you want.

Got something to say? Leave a comment below, we’d love to hear from you! Got a question that we can address in our blog? Contact us through our website or email me directly and we’ll put our crack team to work and let you know when we post a reply.

Thursday, 29 November 2012

Take Time to Celebrate the Goodness in the World

Sometimes it’s nice to step back from the rush of day-to-day business and take a minute to appreciate some of the happier things in life. The news is filled with scandalous affairs, geopolitical tensions, imminent financial doom and so much other negativity that sometimes it’s nice to observe the happier things that life sometimes bestows upon us.

Two such incidents happened to me recently that I’d like to use this platform to share:

First, a few weeks ago my aunt and uncle vacationed in Florida, driving down the Atlantic coast for two days. When they arrived, my aunt realized that she had lost her purse. It contained her wallet, cell phone and other personal items. They scrambled to think about where she could have lost it and when she phoned the McDonald’s in South Carolina where they had stopped for lunch she was relieved to learn that her purse had been turned in earlier that afternoon. The young man on the phone offered to take it to the local UPS store, package it up and ship it to her. She gratefully accepted and the next day she received her purse with its contents entirely untouched. The only thing it cost her was the overnight shipping, which she gladly paid.

McDonald's: You Get a McTwoThumbsUp!

I found myself in an eerily similar situation just last week: I traveled down to Atlanta on a business trip and, on arriving at the airport on the way home, realized that I didn’t know where my passport was. What worried me was that I didn’t remember seeing it at all during my three day trip. Luckily, I had my Nexus card, which allowed me to get through the border and back into Canada without my passport, but I’d heard horror stories about lost passports and didn’t look forward to sorting through that process. As I sat on the plane thinking about my lost passport I remembered the missed call I had on my cell phone the previous day … and the message that I had not checked so far … When we landed I checked my messages to hear that my passport had been turned in to the Lost & Found at the Atlanta International Airport—the airport I had left only a couple of hours earlier! (Note to self: do a better job of checking voicemail messages!) I called the Atlanta airport and arranged to have my passport couriered back to me with my only cost being the courier fee.

These two separate incidents show how much good there still is in the world. My passport could have been thrown in the garbage or worse, used for more sinister means. My aunt’s purse could have been rummaged through and her identity and valuables stolen. But in these two cases the good nature of two complete strangers shone through. It’s nice to celebrate the goodness that does exist in the world, even though it seems like the mainstream media (CNN, Fox News and TMZ: are you listening?) chooses to glorify the negative, evil and depressing events in the world.

To the kind sole who found my passport and turned it into Lost & Found: thank you for your kind act and for making the world a better place.

Steve Hartley, Managing Partner

Fering Communications Inc.

Website: www.feringcommunications.com

Email: steve.hartley@feringcommunications.com

Monday, 26 November 2012

Why Your Company Needs a Style Guide

A few years ago when I was working as a salesman for a different company I sat across the desk from a customer while he was engrossed by a report. I was immediately curious about what he was looking at and after he put the document down and we began chatting I tried to discreetly steal glances to find out what he had been reading. After we chatted for a while we were interrupted by one of his colleagues and he stepped out of his office to discuss an issue that had just occurred. Alone in his office, I finally got the chance to freely look at the report and I was surprised to find that it was a production report generated by the computer system that I had sold him a few months earlier. I was shocked that it took me so long to identify something created by the company that I worked for. Instead of using the logos, fonts and colours consistent with our sales materials our technical team had used the default attributes chosen by their programming tools.

It is so important to build your brand into your business and everything that is associated with it. Every piece of sales & marketing material should have the same look and feel that is central to your company’s image. This includes your website and blog, whitepapers and case studies and product specifications. The same look and feel should extend through your training manuals, installation guides, specification documents and other technical documentation. On a whole, every piece of written or visual material your customers will see should look and feel the same and a style guide plays a key role in delivering that.

A style guide is a document describing the fonts, colours, style, voice, tone, layout and other attributes of your brand—everything that the various people and departments will need to adhere to so your branding is consistent and uniform. You want your prospects and customers to know that they are looking at something produced by your company without having to search for whom it was written by. Written and visual communications that are not consistent can look unprofessional and leave your customers confused.

Below is an infographic covering the basics of what a style guide is, why it is important, who should use it and how to go about creating one if you don’t already have one:

Establishing a style guide can be difficult in the early going—especially if multiple people or departments are involved. Start the process by appointing someone to champion the process and engage key individuals to invite their input and win their support.

You should also keep in mind how your style guide affects resources outside of your organization like bloggers and content curators—the standards described by the style guide will need to extend through their work, too.

Conclusion

A style guide is a document that defines the appearance, voice, formatting and other aspects of a company’s written and visual materials. Having a well-defined and consistent look and feel will make your company look professional and customers will feel comfortable doing business with you. If you need help creating or updating your style guide give us a call, we’d be more than happy to help!

Wednesday, 7 November 2012

Five Ways To Make Your Next Presentation Awesome

Most presentations suck. They are long and boring and lack focus and enthusiasm. Some presentation slides are filled with overused template backgrounds, fonts and colours while others are a smörgåsbord of colour, animation effects and slide transitions that dilute the message and distract the audience.

Luckily, we’ve taken our years of knowledge and experience garnered through hundreds of presentations and compiled the top five things to remember when making your presentation:

You are the Star of the Show – Not Powerpoint, you. If you dropped your laptop in the parking lot on your way into the presentation and it smashed to pieces, you’d still be able to give the presentation. Maybe not as effectively but you’d still be able to do it. The presentation wouldn’t be able to go on if you got sick and couldn’t make it even if you emailed your PPT file. Never forget that you are the presentation and Powerpoint is a supporting tool.
Always ask, “So What?” – Never forget the reason that you’re there—to convince your audience to do something: buy your product, sign up for your service, give you a chance to bid on a project. Every thought, idea and premise in your presentation should matter to them. They’re not there to listen to how wonderful you are, they’re there to learn about what you can do for them.
Use Stimulating Visuals – The old adage of a picture being worth a thousand words holds true for your presentation slides. Powerful and relevant images can leave an impression on your audience that written words cannot. Check out websites like Shutterstock, iStockPhoto and others for professional grade images. A Google image search will yield plenty of other graphics but try and stay away from stretching low resolution images—nothing makes a presentation cheesier than fuzzy images that have been stretched too big.
Limit your bullets and don’t read to your audience – There’s nothing more boring than when someone loads up a slide and then reads the bullet points. In a 2007 report, Professor John Sweller of the University of South Wales found that “it is more difficult to process information if it is coming at you in the written and spoken form at the same time”. If you’re reading your slides, chances are that your audience is sitting with glazed eyes because of sensory overload. The solution? Minimize the amount of text on your slides. Using keywords as prompts is fine, but avoid lengthy sentences. Better, consider using infographics, images or charts. Your audience will thank—and more important remember—you.
Practice, practice, practice – You can’t practice a presentation too much. Know the content and sequence of each slide inside out. Know why you included each slide and how it supports your message. Practice in front of your colleagues, in front of a mirror, in front of your dog. Just practice. When it’s time for the real thing your confidence will shine through in your voice and body language.

Conclusion

Chances are you’re going to have to give an important presentation at some point during your career. Giving an interesting and effective presentation isn’t the easiest thing to do, but fortunately it’s not the hardest thing to do, either. If you make yourself the star of the show, deliver a meaningful message, make your slides visually stimulating and engage your audience you’ll be well on your way. And last but definitely not least, practice makes perfect so make sure you leave plenty of time to practice and you’ll give a confident, smooth and effective presentation.

Monday, 15 October 2012

How to Write a Great Business Letter

Emails are by far the most common form of written business communication and are becoming shorter and more abrupt. Text-speak is slowly but surely making its way into the business lexicon (OMG! LOL … :). People are becoming accustomed to communicating in bursts of 140 characters or less.

It seems like the ability to craft a well-written, well-formatted, convincing and persuasive business letter is a dying art. However, at some point in your business life you’re probably going to have to write an important business letter: to get a sales appointment with a prospective customer, to close a sales opportunity, to be considered for a promotion, or to engage someone in creating a strategic partnership.

Here are some points to keep in mind when you’re faced with the daunting task of writing a great business letter:

Understand the Purpose: Before you even open up your favourite word processor you must understand what the purpose of the letter is – if you don’t then the letter will lack focus and effectiveness and you could lose credibility with your reader.
Focus on One (and Only One!) Point: Your letter will be more effective if you only focus on one key point. Every word of the letter should support your key point. This could be difficult if you feel that you have several things that the reader will be interested in, but isolate the most important point and focus on it.

Make Your Letter About Them: It makes little difference to them if your company has over 1,000 employees worldwide, offices in nine countries and has been in business for over 50 years. None of this helps them at all. If you want them to read past the first few lines then you’ve got to quickly get to the point where it’s all about them.
Focus on Value: Quickly establish what value they could get by dealing with you. In the business world the value that most people are looking for is financial: they want to either increase their revenues or decrease their costs. Many people focus on features – like how their product is so much faster or smaller or newer than the competition’s – but if you don’t emphasize the value that translates into (… our machine works 20% faster and can reduce your labour costs by the same amount …) then your reader won’t be motivated to engage with you. There are other values that you could deliver, such as an emotional value, a social value or an environmental value but in the harsh world of business (and please excuse the pun) you’ll get more bang for your buck by focusing on the financial value.

Use a Professional Tone & Format: The only acceptable tone for a professional business letter is a formal one. Refrain from using abbreviations and use a professional format (click this link for an example and check out our blog post on writing tone). Typically you would print, sign and mail the letter but it’s becoming more common to send the letter electronically as a PDF or other non-editable document.
Tell the Reader What You Want Them To Do Next: In the final portion of the letter, set up what you want to happen next. This could be a call-to-action to get them to do something (“Call us now …” or “Visit our website …”) but it could also be something less actionable (“I will call you next week to discuss this further …”). Either way, the letter is only one part of a longer process and you should finish your letter with what the next steps in the process are.

Conclusion

If you’re in the business world you’re going to need to write a great business letter sooner or later. If you truly understand what your reason for writing the letter is before you start, use every word in the letter to support that key point, focus on the value that the reader will get by acting on the letter and finishing with a direct and definitive path for moving forward, then you’re on the right path to crafting a professional, engaging and persuasive letter that’s got a good chance of achieving your objectives.

Friday, 28 September 2012

A How-To Guide for Getting Your Online Content Found More Often

Do you want a fast and easy way to improve your search engine rankings so that your website and content marketing gets found more often? Having fresh content that is rich with keywords and phrases is a must, but you also need to make sure that the search engines know about your site and make regular visits to see what’s new.

While we’re all familiar with search engines thanks to our friends at Google and Microsoft, people are generally less familiar with web directories. Web directories are huge libraries of websites on the internet. Unlike search engines that use “spiders” to automatically crawl through the different pages on a website and catalog the results, most directories are manually compiled by volunteer editors. Search engines crawl through web directories so appearing in web directories will help your search engine performance.

While the reasons to be favoured by search engines and web directories are well documented, let’s quickly review why you want to let them know that you exist rather than waiting for them to happen upon you by chance:

Improved search engine ranking – If the search engines don’t know about your site, you’re not going to rank in search results. The search engine “spiders” will probably encounter your content sooner or later, but why wait?
More inbound links – Registering your site with web directories means increasing the inbound links to your site, and that’s good for directing more traffic to your site but also for increasing the credibility of your pages. Search engines keep a close eye on the web directories so showing up in the web directories will also help your search engine performance. Also, web directories are searchable and some people use them to find companies that they’re looking for.
Keywords and key phrase targeting – When you register with search engines and web directories you get to specify your keywords and phrases. By selecting the keywords and phrases that are in your sweet spot and are consistent with your content marketing platform you’re going to show up in the searches that you want to show up in.

Here are the top search engines and web directories and a brief note on how to sign up:

Google – With 85% of the search engine market share, this is a must. Go to www.google.com/submityourcontent and there are four options that you can choose from. You’ll want to start by clicking on the ‘Website Owner’ tab and then the ‘Add your URL’ link but you should look at the other three options on the page. You should also submit a sitemap so Google knows how to index your site – http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ is a great site that will build your sitemap.xml file, for free, that you can submit to Google.
Bing – While Yahoo has the second largest search engine market share, Bing provides the organic search results for Yahoo so by registering with Bing you’re also registering with Yahoo. Go to http://www.bing.com/toolbox/submit-site-url, enter your URL and you’re on your way. You can also submit your sitemap to Bing through their Webmaster Tools to make it easier for Bing to crawl your site.
DMOZ.org – This is the biggest directory on the web. To submit your site, go to www.dmoz.org and drill down to your business category. Drill down as deep as you can and when you’re in a deep as you can get click the ‘Suggest URL’ link near the top of the page. Enter your URL, title and site description and you’re on your way. Be careful in submitting: these entries are supposed to be objective and are reviewed before they are accepted so don’t use the site description part as a selling platform. Simply state what your business does and include your keywords and phrases.

If you submit your site to Google, Bing and Yahoo you’ll have more than 96% of the search engine market covered, but if you want to go for the full 100% you should also register with Baidu, Ask, AOL, Excite and Lycos. There are other directories that you can find through various search engines – see what other directories are available and appropriate for you particular business.

Conclusion

A strong content marketing platform is vital for many small businesses. Creating fresh and engaging content that will resonate with your target audience is great, but you can boost its effectiveness by submitting your site to the major search engines and web directories. By doing the minimum of submitting your website to two search engines and one directory you can significantly improve your online visibility and get more traffic to your marketing content.

Monday, 17 September 2012

Five Great Sources for Blogging Topics

Coming up with interesting and relevant topics is one of the most challenging aspects about maintaining a blog. If you don’t provide blog posts that resonate with your readers then they’ll stop reading and the number of engaged readers is one of the key metrics in measuring the effectiveness of your blog.

Here are some of the top places that we turn to for inspirations when setting out on a blog post:

Real-Life Stories – Real-life stories are awesome because of their originality. The tricky part to real-life stories is making them relevant. Take for example our last blog post about the bird that hopped onto my hand in a client’s parking lot. Yeah, it’s interesting but my readers don’t really care about just that. I had to put a spin on it that made it relevant so I used it to put a human touch on me and my company. What stories serve as a good basis for blog posts? Anything you’d tell your spouse over dinner or a buddy over a beer.
Life Lessons – Life lessons that you learn from mistakes serve as great blog material because you can show your readership a sense of humility, modesty or vulnerability that they will respect. To err is human and openly discussing your life lessons will add an element of honesty and trustworthiness to you and your company. Also, as well as describing the mistake that you made you can also brag a little bit about how well you rose to the occasion, innovated to correct a mistake or went that extra mile to save the day. Be careful about being too honest, though: you don’t want to give your readers the impression that you’re clumsy, incapable or incompetent.
Current Events – News headlines are a great source of blog inspiration but again only if you can make it relevant to your readership. How many articles did you see this past summer about how we can learn something to do with our businesses from Olympic athletes like Michael Phelps, Usain Bolt or Ryan Lochte? How many articles did you see about how we can apply strategies from Angry Birds to our everyday jobs? Apparently everyone from instructional designers to environmentalists to enterprise software firms could all learn a thing or two from Angry Birds.
LinkedIn Groups – Two particular LinkedIn features are rich with ideas about things to blog about. First, the “LinkedIn Today” section, which shows near the top of the page when you log in, lists top stories of interest. Our favourite source, though, is LinkedIn’s Groups. Join a handful of groups that are related to your business and keep an eye on what is being discussed and you’ll likely find a bountiful supply of blog topics.
Competitors Blogs – Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, right? In a pinch, head over to your competitors blogs and see what they are blogging about. A couple of things to keep in mind, though: First, you should only use their topics as inspiration for your own, so don’t steal their content, that’s plagiarism and generally frowned upon. Second, don’t go to this well too often. If you do you risk them – and potentially some of your prospects or clients – finding out. If you are going to do this, make it less obvious by looking at their archives and seeing what they’ve blogged about in the past, it might seem too coincidental if you use their current posts as inspiration.

Conclusion

A well-written blog can be the cornerstone for establishing an online presence that can help your business grow through showcasing your expertise, building credibility with prospects and keeping your clients up-to-date on your latest offerings. However, keeping fresh and relevant content flowing can be tough. There are many sources close at hand that we can draw inspiration from, including real-life stories, life lessons and current events to name but a few. And, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention that if you need help starting a new blog or continuing an existing one then we’d love to help. Check out our website and visit our Contact Us page to find out how to get in touch and get started!

Fering Communications Blog

Monday, 17 December 2012

You Can't Not Communicate

Conclusion

Other Blog Posts

Thursday, 29 November 2012

Take Time to Celebrate the Goodness in the World

Monday, 26 November 2012

Why Your Company Needs a Style Guide

Conclusion

Other Blog Posts

Wednesday, 7 November 2012

Five Ways To Make Your Next Presentation Awesome

Conclusion

Other Blog Posts

Monday, 15 October 2012

How to Write a Great Business Letter

Conclusion

Other Blog Posts

Friday, 28 September 2012

A How-To Guide for Getting Your Online Content Found More Often

Conclusion

Other Blog Posts

Monday, 17 September 2012

Five Great Sources for Blogging Topics

Conclusion

Other Blog Posts