heartharmony.com.au

I’m always on the lookout for new creativity techniques – and this bunch from New Scientist is brilliant.

1. Lie Down

Two of the world’s great authors,  Nabokov and Truman Capote, could not think unless they were lying down or stretched out on a couch. And yes, there are dedicated scientists who have studied if lying down on the job actually makes a difference. Darren Linicki and Don Byrne at ANU in Canberra have found people solve anagrams 10% faster when lying down compared with standing. I can see a rush of office memo’s being drafted requesting couches!

2. Strike a Pose

You know that lovely statue by Auguste Rodin -The Thinker? Turns out he may have been onto something. Joel Crestenet and Vincent Dru from Paris West Uni found volunteers who struck “The Thinker” pose, performed much better on creative thinking tasks.

3. Look Left & Right

This is even more esoteric – it appears that simple eye movements left and right across your field of vision help you think more laterally.

Extra bonus points if you look right and left while you are striking a pose! Me … I’ m going to find a nice couch to stretch out on.

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance Copywriter

I love networking – meeting new people and finding ways I can refer business to fabulous other businesses is one of my joys. But there is a side of networking that isn’t as bright and shiny, that I really struggle with.

Let me back up a bit. Many networking clubs and leads clubs push the concept that when you meet someone that you connect with at one of their events, you should contact them and “book a coffee” meeting with them. The intent behind the meeting is to learn more about each others business, so you can work out who may be good clients to refer to them.

On the surface this looks innocuous … but what often happens is the coffee meeting turns into a “let me pick your brains about a problem I am having in my business for free”.  Many businesses take the “coffee chat” as an opportunity to get free consulting or mentoring – all under the righteous banner of networking.

But is it such a bad thing?Let’s take it from the perspective of the consultant and translate the “let me buy you a coffee” request into what they are hearing and experiencing.

Most consultants translate that phrase to “I want you to take 1-2 hours out of your day without being paid for it. I want you to give me the benefit of your professional expertise to solve my business problem. Yes, I do know that your other clients would pay for this advice – but I am going to buy you a cup of coffee in exchange.  And if you challenge me or suggest that I should book in an appointment time – I will get angry at you … after all … I am buying you a coffee“.

And let me tell you – these meetings invariably never turn into any referred work, consulting work or sales. The meetings are all one way.

Does this happen often for me? Most weeks, I get 2-3 requests to be taken for a coffee. Unless the person is in my close friendship group, I have now taken to turning all coffee requests down (and curling into a ball under the table, with my fingers rammed in my ears  whenever the leader of the networking group suggests that we all need to meet for a coffee!). And yes, I feel like a right royal heel at times – but coffee does not pay the bills.

I mentioned this challenge on my private Facebook page, and had many consultants and freelancers either chip in with their war stories or simply agree that this was a common occurrence for them.

What about you? Do you have a similar problem? What do you do to solve it the dreaded “networking coffee” dilemma?

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance Copywriter

A few days ago, I shared a link on Facebook to one of my favourite modern artists – Jason Fitzgerald – and I had a few comments back from people – what do you see in his work?

Jason is a client of mine, and I have to admit I am not usually a great modern art fan. There’s stuff that I love, and things that leave me cold. But when I first met Jason, I spent a bit of time talking with him to get to understand why he does what he does. And now that I understand his story, I see his work with new eyes. You see – the “back story” behind why people do what they do is always compelling.

So let me fill you in about his story and then perhaps you will understand why I adore his work.

Jason was always drawing as a kid. Even now, you can put a pencil in his hand and it takes off and does its own thing. But, Jason was also scared of traditional art classes, so did metalwork and woodwork at school instead.

At the end of year 12, his careers counsellor handed him a brochure for art college. He kept that well-creased brochure for years, periodically looking at it while he did a trade in French Polishing instead. You see, he didn’t think he was good enough to be an artist.

It took until Jason was 28, watching the sunset over the Swiss alps from Mt Pilatus in Switzerland, that he thought, “Why not go back and chase the dream – Why not just do it!” At that moment he felt a massive bolt of energy course through him, and from then nothing stopped him.

He enrolled in every art class he could find, with his studies finally taking him to Griffith Uni as a mature age student at 35. He finally knew he was an artist, that he was good enough and he had to make up for lost time. And by then his love of timber had taken root, which meant that he was naturally drawn to wood and timber as his media. He has now won many prestigious art prizes and is rapidly gaining a positive reputation in the modern art world.

I asked him about his creative process – and what makes him suddenly decide to create a piece.

“It all starts when my eye is caught by something around me. It catches a defect, a scar, timber stacked unusually … angles and markings where things have moved creating a new design. I grab bits of timber and try and re-create that glimpse, that moment.

But, in the process of re-creating, I am drawn somewhere else. I use things that are raw, broken and discarded, and craft something new – building on the repetitions in nature and the organic growth of things, where lots of little things become oneness.”

“My works grow and tell me when they need more. Sometimes they grow quickly and at other times they lay dormant until new growth appears. I create and control, yet am controlled by what I see. I have an urgent desire to build and create. It simply happens and I am as much part of the organic growth as the piece itself. “

“And yet … in a moment … it is done. I think it is when there is a perfect unity of aesthetics and balance, that’s when my pieces are complete.”

“I love finding beauty in brokenness, creating a piece that is visually stimulating and that holds attention rather than being something you simply walk past.”

“In life, I am fascinated by how on one level chaos reigns, but when you look closely enough at something, each element is completely controlled, planned and perfectly imperfect.”

“You can visually skim over the surface of an object and just see it as raw, broken and distorted, or you can engage and look deeper to experience the simpleness and naturalness of it.”  

So now, when I look at his pieces of work, I see someone who didn’t feel they were “good enough” but decided to go for it anyway. I see someone with the hands of a creator – placing pieces of timber so precisely and specifically that they appear to be random. I see past the brokenness to the beauty within … I see metaphors for life by a philosopher who uses timber instead of words.

Jason Fitzgerald has an exhibition at the Jan Murphy Gallery in Brisbane until the 22nd October 2011. It is worth checking out – and seeing his work with an understanding of the back story.

This is one of my favourite pieces (which has gone into a private collection darn it).

Swarm Warning - Jason Fitzgerald

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Copywriter

I had an interesting conversation with my dad the other day – he is in his 80′s now. But when I asked him how old he felt inside he said “I am not sure …  about 30 maybe”.

So I started to ask a whole pile of other people of all ages how old they felt inside. Most felt somewhere between 20 and 30, no matter how many birthday candles were on their cake.  Me … I feel about 26 inside, even though my outside tells a different story.

Inside – we believe we are young and ageless. Yes, we can go through the motions of celebrating milestone birthdays, but somewhere our psyche says we are young and evergreen, and that those birthdays are happening to other people.

Cognitive dissonance is where your mind tries to hold two conflicting ideas simultaneously – in this case “I am getting older” and “I feel young”. Our mind tries to find a workaround and can mentally deny our age unless significant evidence happens to the contrary.  Which is why people trying to sell stuff to “old folks” doesn’t always cut it, and people trying to manage us differently because of our age are ignored. You see, we don’t believe they are talking to us – they are talking to the old people, not us.

So, if you are in sales, HR or marketing, remember that inside the skin of most people is a person who is young, enthusiastic, vibrant and full of dreams. Ignore that young person at your peril!

Try it yourself … How old do you feel inside?

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance Copywriter

RIP Steve Jobs

Have you noticed that good spelling seems to be going the same way as the dodo? When I was going through school, every blackboard would have the ubiquitous spelling list on it, with words that progressively became harder as you travelled through High School.

Somewhere in recent years, spelling seems to have dropped off the radar. But good spelling does matter!

Poor spelling risks lives

A few weeks ago, there was a major chemical fire in Canberra. The emergency services sent out an alert to local residents via SMS telling them to remain indoors. The problem was that the alert had a number of key spelling errors. Apparently a number of elderly people ignored the warning – after all it just looked like on of those spam emails you often get, complete with poor spelling.  Nerida Gill blogged about the problem. Luckily in this case, no one died from the spelling errors – but it was an unnecessary risk.

Poor spelling costs your business great candidates

Last week my daughter was applying online for casual employment. She is a top student, barely takes any days off, and gets straight A’s for effort & behaviour. In other words – a great candidate for a junior casual. She went to lodge her application on the Hungry Jacks website – and she called me over to look at their site. It was full of spelling mistakes (which could be overlooked at a pinch). These were compounded by simplistic and laughable “screening questions”. Her comment – “well they are obviously not a good place to work for – they don’t really care about their HR if they don’t check their careers site”. Hmnnn.

Poor spelling distracts from your message

Recently, a chain of tile stores took out a very expensive TV campaign based on their slogan “You’re not going to believe it”.  The slogan was repeatedly sung, while the words flashed up regularly on the screen … only problem was the printed words said “Your not going to believe it”.  Ok – what’s a few letters between friends. But all I could see was this typo. And the ad was repeated week after week – with no edits. So all I could think about was how many people it takes to make a TV ad. You have writers, voice over talent, graphic designers and ad agencies.  They never have anything “go live” without approval from the client. How many people in that loop saw the ad – and how many people obviously can’t spell?

When it really does matter, you need a proofreader to check over your work.  No-one can pick up all their own errors (as my blog attests).

OK – getting off my soapbox now.

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Brisbane Copywriter

Journalism as a career has been under stress for a few years. With the rise of bloggers and cutbacks to traditional media, there are fewer and fewer journalists out there pounding the pavement for a story.  And now science has jumped in to reduce the numbers even further, if New Scientist reports are anything to go by.

At the moment, finance reporters often trawl through mountains of company filings to find out information about different corporations. But a new company, MarketBrief is levering new technology to take the hours of research and the journalistic write-up out of the equation.

In the USA, company statements are published in a format called XBRL or eXtensible Business Reporting Language. MarketBrief’s software creates articles by extracting key facts from the XBRL data and slotting them into predefined sentences.  It scans about 100,000 pages of filings per day, creating about 1000 articles from the information – with nary a human in sight.

At the moment, this is not great prose, but it serves the need of having real time information available in easily read chunks.

This is great news for investors, but another nail in the coffin of traditional journalists. This is definitely an industry undergoing a major shake-up & it will be interesting to see what happens in years to come.

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance Copywriter

While neuromarketing has quietly been looking inside people’s brains to work out what makes people tick, computer and maths geeks over at MIT have been refining sociometric badges to tap into how people communicate.

What is a sociometric badge (and where do I get one?).

One of the problems in the past, as any good HR or leadership development person will tell you, is that most people have blind spots around how they communicate with others. They can do all of the communication training under the sun, but unless they can see and truly understand the impact their communication style has on others, then they will fall back into their old habits.

A few years back, some MIT doctoral students (Daniel Olguin, Bejamin Waber and Taemie Kim) developed an electronic badge that hangs around a person’s neck. This badge, they so nicely dubbed the “jerk-o-meter”, picks up audio cues and works out how aggressive the wearer is being from pitch, volume and clip of the voice.  This data is then displayed graphically, so a person can visually get an idea of when they are being a jerk.

The next iteration of the technology then measured proximity to other people, and graphically showed people how often they spoke, their speaking time and who they interacted with. The size of the dot showed how much they dominated conversations – a big red dot meant the wearer tended to speak a lot and a teeny tiny white dot meant you were a wallflower. What they found through their experiments, was they over the course of time, that people’s dots tended to become more or less the same size and shape – meaning that conversations and group dynamics were more balanced.

Of course marketers leaped into the fray, looking at the application of the sociometric badges on call centres. They wanted to work out how to make call centre operators more persuasive and to increase their performance. The badges found that the highest performing operators were also the ones who had the strongest social ties with other staff. They also found that it was possible to identify units of speech that make a person sound more persuasive.

The MIT students have now spun out into their own company – Sociometric Solutions and have taken their badges to corporations to help them improve their communication.

Like all new technological advances this comes with pluses and minuses. On a plus side, enhanced communication in a workplace and more balanced team dynamics should result in better business outcomes.It also has application for people who may struggle reading social cues, to help them learn what to look for and how to fit in.

On a downside, I have visions of managers trying to force people to achieve certain sociometric “scores” as part of their performance goals. And of course, there are the snake oil salespeople who will use this technology to increase their profits at the cost of people.

And yes, it is time for another discussion of ethics – how should this be applied and in what contexts?

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance Copywriter

There’s no shortage of information in the world. In fact our global data mountain is estimated to be growing at 40% per annum (Thanks New Scientist for the info!)

And this massive amount of data is spawning a whole new industry – data mining and forecasting. There are companies around the world that are using these huge data sets to try to predict the previously unpredictable. After all, one of the tenets of statistics is that while you can’t predict how one person can act with reasonable certainty, if you get a large enough sample size, you can create averages that will give you a reasonable idea of a population. So to give you an example, Johnan Bollan at Indiana University, Bloomington is looking at predicting stock market movements from sentiments on Twitter.

New Scientist recently ran a contest between a whole pile of these different data set miners, to see who could most accurately predict the sales of each new issue of their magazine. They pitted everyone from economists to a flock of trained pigeons (no actual psychics though). And the result? While there were some amazingly accurate predictions, there were also quite a few weeks of wild misses.

New Scientist did learn that for their magazine, that the colour purple on their covers was bad for sales, and printing the magazine title in black worked well. But even for the most accurate date mining processes, there were weeks where the predictions varied wildly from what actually happened.

And thus the ethics point comes into play.

Every day on Google, our search preferences are taken into account and we are given search engine results based on our previous search history (unless you know the ways around it). That means the world of Google is vastly different from one person to the next. We only see the results that Google predicts we want to see – sometimes that may be correct, but other times we will have information filtered out that we need to know.

The mass media tailors their news stories based on what the masses respond to – which is resulting in a bland blancmange of predominantly local news stories heavily salted with consumer news about where to buy the cheapest cuts of meat. Key pieces of news are filtered out.

And then there is the trend for politics by poll. Issues are now often determined and pursued based on the poll results rather than balanced debate or principles. Many politicians not so secretly regard question time in parliament as purely a competition to get a 3 second grab on the news, rather than anything actually useful for running the country.

Then you can throw in the odd left field challenge. In the US recently it was found that 12 internet service providers, with millions of customers between them, were hijacking searches made by their customers and directing them to retail websites where the ISP gained a commission if the customer bought. This redirection was silent, unpublicised and happened as an intercept before the individual search request before they reached the search engine. Not surprisingly this is the subject of a class action in the US, and will be a case we will be watching with interest.

This is the time for debate.  And it is the same debate the marketing people are starting to have with neuro-marketing data sets being compared to normal focus groups and traditional methods of gaining feedback from customers. It is the same debate being triggered by Wikileaks and hacktivists.

Is data mining with all its errors, a bad thing? Do we imbue statistics with an almost magical quality that means we accept the results with less question? Does it need to be regulated? And who should determine which data is OK in the public interest to see – and what isn’t?

I would love to hear your thoughts.

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance Copywriter

This week I was one of four speakers at the Hills Chamber of Commerce Breakfast in front of 200 people – talking about how businesses could best deal with peaks and troughs. The first speaker, Lindsay Adams, is past International President of the National Speakers Federation, and regularly flies all around the world to speak at conferences and events.

Anyway, Lindsay had the audience all roaring with laughter at his story about how he built the Chook Mahal in his backyard (you have to have been there). He was followed by a financial specialist from the Bendigo Bank talking about the financial outlook post GFC, and then an amazing business woman from Food Strategy Service sharing her story about how when everyone other business was contracting, they managed to turn a termite infested dump into a high value showpiece.   Talk about hard acts to follow.

I mentally rehearsed my lines … then Lindsay introduced me. I stood. And as I did, my rather gorgeous coat formed a life of it’s own, and swept a full glass of water off a table and smashed it into a thousand pieces. Talk about making an entrance! Water and hundreds of fragments glass littered the stage.

I had two choices – go into panic mode and try and pick up the shattered glass (panic was bubbling and the mother in me was torn about the broken glass), or I could make light of it and get onto my speech – hoping that the other speakers would not cut themselves in the meantime (as well as trying not to move around too much and crunch my own feet on the broken glass).

I took the “acknowledge it, joke about it and get straight into it” option. Why? If I had fallen apart, the audience would have fallen apart with me. They were watching me for cues on how to respond to the accident.

Being a manager is like that. Your staff always watch you for cues on how to deal with a crisis. It could be something small like a glass of water, or it could be major such as a close-down. As a leader, you are on display with every twitch and voice tonation watched and analysed.

They look for their leaders to acknowledge what has happened, find the positives if possible and then get on with making it happen. No matter your politics, in Queensland we saw the Premier of Qld Anna Bligh do that spectacularly after the floods of January.

And how did the speech go? I had very positive from many people in the audience – so something must have worked.  And next time, I will remove all glasses to beyond the reach of my wayward coat before standing up.

What do you do when you stuff up? I would love to hear your stories …

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Brisbane Copywriter

Cast your mind back a few years to when you were learning to drive your first car. Think about how you felt when you walked up with wobbly knees and shaking hands over to the drivers door for the first time, and sat down into the drivers seat. Remember the feeling of overwhelm when you first looked at all the dials, mirrors, knobs and pedals – and thought, “Whoa Nelly!  How am I supposed to remember what everything does and what to do in what order?”

Remember your first attempts at using the clutch – the stalling and bunny hops down the road, accompanied by the sniggers of your little sister or brother.  Now think back to today – when you drove your car without thinking, when you confidently tackled the highway without even putting your mind into gear.

Many businesses getting into the world of the web the first time feel like learner drivers. There’s so many knobs, bells and whistles. There’s new jargon and what seems to be loads of confusing features.

Each week I get at least one or two new businesses contacting me, who have never had a website before. They are overwhelmed by the whole process, scared about what they need to do in what order, and panicking about whether or not they can do it.

Cut yourself some slack!  Building a website, getting into social media, launching into blogging are all just like learning to drive a car. You will get fits and starts. You will ding the car every now and again. And you will make the odd mistake. But the only real way to learn to drive is by driving the car – not by just reading about it.

At some point you need to take the leap into practice and from practice you can move into mastery. Just make sure you are not trying to enter a Formula One race after your first week of driving by trying to tackle too much all at once online, and have a great driving instructor next to you … and all will be well!

Ladies & Gentlemen – Start your engines.

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Brisbane Copywriter