If you haven’t read this Fast Company interview with Harvard Professor and business strategy guru Michael Porter, you should … if not for your own business acumen, then for the fact that the senior leaders of your organization (and likely your internal clients), probably will.
The error that some managers make is that they see all of the change and all of the new technology out there, and they say, “God, I’ve just got to get out there and implement like hell.” They forget that if you don’t have a direction, if you don’t have something distinctive at the end of the day, it’s going to be very hard to win. They don’t understand that you need to balance the internal juxtaposition of change and continuity.
There are many online survey applications from which to choose, but all of us at CRA have a special place in our hearts for one in particular (and regularly recommend it to our clients): Survey Monkey. Why? The great service we’ve received and the great functionality it affords (and the price can’t be beat). Go check it out for yourself…
User-interface guru Jakob Nielson’s latest Alertbox column pleads with marketing managers to Keep Online Surveys Short. It’s also good advice for internal communicators:
One goal beats all others when designing a customer survey for a website: maximize the response rate. Low response rates can create actively misleading survey findings because they’re likely to be based on a biased sample of your most committed users as opposed to most users (who have better things to do than take your survey).
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How can you get average users to respond? The highest response rates come when surveys are quick and painless. And the best way to reduce users’ time and suffering is to reduce the number of questions.
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Survey bloat is a natural consequence of having a diverse group of marketing managers, all of whom want customer feedback on their special issues. Please resist the temptation to collect all the information that anybody could ever want. You will end up with no information (or misleading information) instead.
According to recent research people lie more on the phone than by email:
Jeff Hancock of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, asked 30 students to keep a communications diary for a week. In it they noted the number of conversations or email exchanges they had lasting more than 10 minutes, and confessed to how many lies they told.
Hancock then worked out the number of lies per conversation for each medium. He found that lies made up 14 per cent of emails, 21 per cent of instant messages, 27 per cent of face-to-face interactions and a whopping 37 per cent of phone calls.
People seem to realize that email leaves a written record that might come back to haunt them.
We’ve been linked by another business blog resource, The Nub. From the site:
The Nub is unique. It is the only daily-updated webzine that is dedicated to people-orientated business news. Our irreverently serious mix is designed to inform, generate ideas and entertain. In this world of information overload, we cut through the clutter and bring time-pressed readers the choice nuggets.
It seems to be all that, and a bit more, and benefits from a distinctly British flair to boot. Read The Nub here.
We are often asked by clients looking to forums for on-line information sharing, “Isn’t a blog the same thing as a discussion board?” The answer is “no,” but without lots of exposure to blogs, it can be difficult appreciate those differences at first. How are they different? Tech intellectuals who think deeply about such things have been carrying on this conversation for the past year or so, and the bottom line is that it’s still hard to define (although this blogger gives it a shot).
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