One Half Amazing!

Great article by Daniel Pink about removing corporate talk or ‘professionalese’ from your vocabulary and speaking more open and honestly to your customers and colleagues.

Go back to that all-too-common phrase: “We apologise for any inconvenience this might have caused.” Would you say that to your daughter when you were late picking her up from football practice? To your neighbour when your dog trampled his flowerbed?

“Any inconvenience” is emotionally anaemic and lacks the specificity to make it meaningful. “We apologise” isn’t much better. It’s distancing almost to the point of dismissiveness. “When you say, ‘I’m sorry,’ you’re owning,” Fried explains. “When you say ‘I apologize,’ you’re renting.”

Professionalese is a renter’s language. It doesn’t expect to be around for very long and has no stake in the long-term prospects of the neighbourhood. It says, “mistakes were made” rather than “we messed up” and claims to “take responsibility” instead of acknowledging “it’s my fault”.

via New York Times

Howard Shultz, Starbucks CEO, announced stores nationwide will offer free wifi starting July 1, 2010.  Previously Starbucks offered two free hours of Web access each day to registered customers.  Now, all 6,700 locations will have access to free wifi. Hooray!

via The Brads

Just past midnight last night, Facebook pushed a feature to their pages that allows administrators to publish posts, links, photos, and videos to fans based on their location and language preference.  A post that is published to Facebook users in a specific location or language will only be visible to those users. Other users will never see the post in the News Feed, on your Page, or anywhere else across Facebook.  I think this is huge for facebook pages.

Some examples of Pages that may find this useful are:

• Global brands who have tons of Fans across the world, may want to talk about a new product that is only available in a certain location.
• Musicians & Celebrities who may want to announce to fans in California that new tour dates have been added across the state.
• Retail shops that may want to let fans in a certain city know that a new shop is opening locally.

FEED is an annual consumer behavior report put out by Razorfish that, in the past, has charted how consumers adopt new internet technologies and digital services. This year they flipped it up a little and changed focus. This year’s report is focused on understanding how digital is changing the way consumers interact with brands and how experience really does matter. Their reports are worth their weight in gold. Great stuff, beautiful design.

Free PDF for Download. I’m also happy that they are now offering a printed version via Blurb

ThinkVitamin had a great comic this week on creating and understanding personas.  Personas are ficticious characters that are created to represent a larger segment or targeted demographic of customer that you’re trying to reach.  They are used to help guide decisions about a product, features or its overall design.

Personas are useful because they put a face on otherwise abstract data about your customers. By thinking about the needs of these fictional characters, you can better infer what a real person might need or want.

Additional Articles on Personas from The Cooper Journal

• The Original of Personas
• Putting Personas Under the Microscope