CRA Inc

Beyond Bullets

Don’t know how we’ve managed to miss this site: Beyond Bullets, a weblog devoted entirely to the effective use of PowerPoint (with a good dose of new media theory tossed in as well).

Companies That Cry For Blogs

MarketingProfs writes about Ten Companies That Missed Great Blog Opportunities. On the list: Newman’s Own, Teva, and DaimlerChrysler, which gets this critique from the profs:

Dan Barry reports in the New York Times that DaimlerChrysler has created what it called the “first ever” living window display when it challenged a family of three to live for five days in a 2004 Dodge Durango SUV parked in Times Square.

Just a silly PR stunt? Maybe. But it got a full column in About New York on the cover of the New York Times Metro section.

That’s no small feat, certainly. But they’ve missed a great opportunity for multimedia promotion. A blog of the family’s experience would have been interesting. Although streaming media from the site (or even a Web cam) would have been perfect for this stunt, there was not a word about it on the Dodge Durango site or the Chrysler site.

“IT company gives workers free beer; wins award”

A recent Register article describes what sounds like a truly great place to work:

A US software company that gives its workers free beer on Friday afternoons has been named the “Best Small Company to Work for in America”.

Analytical Graphics, Inc (AGI) also gives workers access to a free laundry service, free meals - breakfast, lunch and dinner - all week and access to free snacks, confectionary and drinks. And if there are concerns that all this free nosh might pile on the pounds, there’s also a gym. Which is free.

In fact, AGI spends around $1m a year on freebies and perks for staff, according to the Detroit Free Press. As a result, workers are more productive, motivated and enjoy coming to work - while the company saves buckets loads of dosh in recruitment and training.

Is there a downside? Perhaps. Employees tend to be more sensitive to, and conscious of, what you take away from them (versus what you give them). Since it does not appear that AGI explicitly ties the provision of these perks to organizational performance (if they do, the article doesn’t mention it), the company probably cannot ever scale back the beer and other freebies, even modestly, without jeopardizing productivity and morale.

Service with a Smile

Scottish Gas is trying to improve the service provided to their customers by sending call center employees jokes throughout the day.

Even on the other end of a phone, the effect of a smile is contagious. There is no doubt that it assists with sales and resolving customers’ inquiries.

The Saturn screens in the office mean that we can turn on hi-tech ‘laughing gas’ in the form of jokes and light-hearted messages for employees – as well as the daily business information – which help to create a positive atmosphere.

Read the entire article here from The Herald…

44 Percent of Large Companies Employ Staff to Read Outgoing Emails

From ZD Net:

Large companies are now so concerned about the contents of the electronic communications leaving their offices that they’re employing staff to read employees’ outgoing e-mails.

According to research from Forrester Consulting, 44 per cent of large corporations in the United States now pay someone to monitor and snoop on what’s in the company’s outgoing mail, with 48 per cent actually regularly auditing e-mail content.

The Proofpoint-sponsored study found the motivation for the mail paranoia was mostly due to fears that employees were leaking confidential memos and other sensitive information, such as intellectual property or trade secrets, with 76 per cent of IT decision makers concerned about the former and 71 per cent concerned about the latter.

(Via GP)

Detecting Deception

Science News highlights the current research on detecting deception:

“How can you tell when people are lying?” From Botswana to Belgium, the number-one answer was the same: Liars avert their gaze.

“This is . . . the most prevalent stereotype about deception in the world,” says Charles Bond of Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, who led the research project. And yet gaze aversion, like other commonly held stereotypes about liars, isn’t correlated with lying at all, studies have shown.

…

By studying large groups of participants, researchers have identified certain general behaviors that liars are more likely to exhibit than are people telling the truth. Fibbers tend to move their arms, hands, and fingers less and blink less than people telling the truth do, and liars’ voices can become more tense or high-pitched. The extra effort needed to remember what they’ve already said and to keep their stories consistent may cause liars to restrain their movements and fill their speech with pauses. People shading the truth tend to make fewer speech errors than truth tellers do, and they rarely backtrack to fill in forgotten or incorrect details.

Read the whole thing.

‘No, communication is terrible!’

Inside the Mind of Jeff Bezos shares one of his more iconoclastic moments:

If Bezos’s personality is decidedly noncorporate, so are some of his ideas about how to run a large organization. One of Bezos’s more memorable behind-the-scenes moments came during an off-site retreat, says Risher. “People were saying that groups needed to communicate more. Jeff got up and said, ‘No, communication is terrible!’” The pronouncement shocked his managers. But Bezos pursued his idea of a decentralized, disentangled company where small groups can innovate and test their visions independently of everyone else. He came up with the notion of the ‘two-pizza team’: If you can’t feed a team with two pizzas, it’s too large. That limits a task force to five to seven people, depending on their appetites.

Of course, this “communication is terrible” message was coming from the head of a company with a very strong culture and a clear mission, trying to innovate at all costs.

The Power of Color

MarketingProfs has posted an interesting article on the use of color in branding. While the article is primarily focused on external communications, we believe internal communication professionals can learn much from branding experts about effectively creating internal symbols and internal branding, and the piece is worth the read.

From the article: “To make the most of your color, ensure that it…

# Supports your brand attributes
# Is relevant to your target audience
# Is always the same shade and hue
# Is visible to all members of your brand community, inside and outside the company
# Is understood and appropriately used by all employees
# Is featured on all your communications materials and sales tools
# Is different from your competitors’ colors
# Works in all parts of the world where you plan to do business
# Is applied to more than just your logo
# Comes with guidelines on its use for partners and affiliates”