Slow down Tweeters

A public relations executive was quoted in recent article saying that for Twitter to succeed, it must be valuable tool for tweeters and tweetees alike. Irrelevant or overwhelming content will kill it. His advice is for tweeters to slow down. Good advice, if you subscribe to even a few tweeters. You can be overwhelmed with content, most of it of little other than social networking. It's Facebook, but instant.

Put 'em through the buzz saw (2)

Three more for the trash heap:

1. Strategic.
2. Solution.
3. End-to-end.

Put 'em through the buzz saw

Three buzzwords we should permanently retire.

Key. Key messages. Key initiatives. Key priorities.

Absolutely. Just say yes.

Moving (or going) forward. Is there any other way?

What are your candidates?

5 more power writing tips

1. Embrace simplicity and clarity. Use clear, simple, conversational language, which leads to better understanding.

2. Tell a good story. People like to read about people; they don't want to read about programs, processes or policies.

3. Find some interesting voices. Make sure your interesting people say interesting things.

4. Take some chances. People want to be entertained as well as informed. Have some fun.

5. Rewrite everything. Write it, revise it, write it again.

What's in a word? Plenty

5 good writing tips from a pro

1. Push for specificity. Corporate writing is generally too vague, so you should invoke E.B. White's Rule No. 16 from The Elements of Style: "Prefer the specific to the general, the definite to the vague, the concrete to the abstract." Instead of the abstract, demand writing that is about something we can grasp. Focus on the interesting, not the mundane.

2. Use more words. There's a bunch out there waiting to be plucked from obscurity and entered into the corporate lexicon. Companies use the same words over and over, and many of them have lost their meaning. If everything is strategic, then what isn't? We are stuck in the language of corporate life. English gives us anywhere from 250,000 to 1 million words to express ourselves, but it feels like most companies keep using the same 12.

3. Find better verbs. This is where the language really fails most corporations. Companies talk to each other, and their customers, in stilted, dry language; and verbs are the biggest culprit. Strong verbs drive sentences; dull verbs slow them to a crawl. The problem is that companies are using the same verbs to explain everything. We're leveraging our synergies. We're implementing core competencies. Use action-oriented verbs that paint a picture.

4. Pursue the active voice. Make it a rule that writers turn their sentences around and focus on the subject+strong verb+object construction. Active writing is faster and cleaner, and it requires fewer words. This one simple act instantly lifts your writing out of its lethargy.

5. Omit needless words. Not only are we choosing the wrong words or the same words, we're using too damn many of them. Most corporate writing could stand a decent haircut. Here's a little test: Count the number of words in your story, print it out and then cut it by 10 percent. Don't take out any useful detail or information; remove only words that didn't have to be there in the first place. Then, take a hard look at your first sentence. Make it shorter.

Multitasking fuels your brain

Social media at times is a blur of seemingly meaningless updates. But University of Washington researchers say the interaction it spurs can stimulate brain activity; the social part of the brain affects which computational skills a person picks up.

Multi-tasking -- updating Twitter status, instant-messaging friends, or answering text messages and e-mails while doing something else stimulates new patterns of sequential processing. In short, networking online is at least acting as a brain innovator, promoting new paths of discovery and interactivity in the brain, researchers say.

Maybe all that juggling is paying off.

Yeah, but what do I get out of it?

Another interesting example of how employee demographics are changing the workplace.

A study conducted by Kelly Services, a world leader in workforce management services, outlined a global shift in workforce dynamics driven not by pay, but by a desire for fulfilling jobs.
- 51% of Gen Y responders are prepared to accept a lower wage or lesser role if their work contributes to something more important or meaningful.
- 62% of Gen X plan to look for a new job within a year.
- 46% of baby boomers, 35% of Gen Y, and 42% of Gen X say their career goals are not being advanced in their current job.

The overriding theme is people want their jobs to provide a degree of emotional fulfillment, even if it means sacrificing money and status to achieve it. Various employee types and motivation:

- Recognition for work and time structure.
- Recognition of their values and conviction, and are engaged by knowing their opinions matter, their conviction is respected, and that the mission of the organization is being upheld.
- Playful contact, preferring that their interactions be upbeat, fun, and stimulating.
- Knowing that they are unconditionally valued as a person.
- Solitude
- Lots of action in a short timeframe.

For effective solutioning, you gotta orientate

The challenge, at the end of the day, is to ensure we have the bandwidth to optimize.

We all suffer through poorly written internal communication demonstrating the author has fallen in love with bizspeak, where perfectly useful words have been misappropriated for a new use.

How does this descent into indecipherable acronyms and meaningless jargon happen?
Lynn Espinoza, the president of Speak! Communications, suggests it’s because every company has both its own culture and its own language. We all move so fast that it’s  more efficient to develop corporate shorthand. These short-hand references are meaningless to the outside world but well understood within the corporate micro-culture.

That works to a point, she says, but says the rationale doesn’t work for the awful jargon, however. Upper management uses jargon to sound powerful; lower levels use it to sound important, she argues.

Whatever the rationale, it impedes effective communication, both oral and improvement. And if we don’t each make an effort to get back to basic English, we’ll be doomed to read pronouncements such as: "It's all a matter of the specifics of who you're looking at and what you're talking to depending on where you are in the world."

Your favorite words or phrases?

So the Wall Street Journal reports that e-mail's reign is over. Twitter and Facebook are now king.

Further, the WSJ says this " promises to profoundly rewrite the way we communicate — in ways we can only begin to imagine." There's usually several reasons behind a technology shift, but the article suggests the "always-on connection" created a host of new ways to communicate that are much faster and more fun than e-mail.

Fun and immediacy are great, but are we losing a sense of proportion and context? Sheer speed can overwhelm us with information, and demand hasty reaction or response. We may also lose some personal touch when we don't use e-mail.

It always seems to come down to moderation. Everything has a place, but there's no one solution.

Why we have trouble juggling

A growing body of studies suggest that juggling several activities at once may be less valuable than many people assume.

The reason, researchers say, is that the brain can effectively perform only one difficult task at a time. A Michigan professor found that when someone tried to multitask, important neural regions must switch back and forth, taking time and creating inefficiencies.

UCLA researchers used brain imaging to show that multitaskers were less effective learners. According to that research, a person focused on a single task remembers what he has learned using the hippocampus, a part of the brain critical to storing and recalling information.

But when that person multitasks — like trying to learn something new while driving — the brain relies more on the striatum, a part of the brain used more for learning motor skills.

The researchers concluded, “Don’t multitask while you are trying to learn something new you hope to remember.”

“The brain is fundamentally built to unitask,” says Clifford Nass, a communications professor at Stanford.

And here's another sobering thought. Research shows that the brains of heavy multitaskers can become so accustomed to hopping from task to task that they have trouble focusing on longer, more in-depth ones.

This is your life

October is work/life month --an article on IBM's intranet offers six secrets to help you effectively integrate your personal life and your work life.

I don't like the term work/life, which suggests they are somehow separate components. Work is more tightly integrated in all of our lives than even 5 years ago, driven by our ability to stay connected 24/7, heavier workloads, and the need to work with colleagues in different time zones. I think in terms of life balance, keeping in perspective my various roles as an IBMer, husband, father, son, etc.

Take the bull by the hand

Any good writer will appreciate William Safire's “rules for writers”: Remember to never split an infinitive. Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors. Proofread carefully to see if you words out. Avoid clichés like the plague. And don’t overuse exclamation marks!!

See if these don't help when you solution a problem.

Unhealthy news

The health of employed Americans is trending downward in a number of important areas, according to a report by the Families and Work Institute. Only 28% of employees today report that their overall health is “excellent,” down from 34% just six years ago. The researchers also found that men’s overall health has declined more rapidly than women’s. The report discusses the relationship between the workplace environment and employee health, underlining the significant role that employers play beyond providing health insurance and wellness programs.

We interrupt to bring you news

Stanford University researchers published a study showing heavy multitaskers perform badly in a variety of tasks. They don’t focus as well as non-multitaskers. They’re more distractible. They’re weaker at shifting from one task to another and at organizing information. They are, as a matter of fact, worse at multitasking.

Is this really news to anyone, or do some rationalize they do it well? Turns out it really is news. The researchers set out to identify the unusual cognitive gifts multitaskers possessed that made them so successful at multitasking.

They’re still looking.

“Multitaskers were just lousy at everything,” said Clifford I. Nass, a professor of communication at Stanford and one of the study’s investigators. “It was a complete and total shock to me. I was sure they had some secret ability. But it turns out that high multitaskers are suckers for irrelevancy.”

The study tested 100 college students rated high or low multitaskers. Experimenters monitored the students’ focus, memory and distractibility with a series of electronic images of different-colored shapes, letters and numbers.

The study’s results were so strong and unexpected that the researchers are planning a series of follow-up experiments. “It keeps me up late at night,” Professor Nass said. “I worry about both the short-term and long-term effects of multitasking. We’re going to be testing the heck out of high and low multitaskers.”

Experts say we don’t really multi-task, but constantly stop one activity to take on another – who can answer an instant message while carrying on a conversation? Is there a tipping point when we recognize we can’t keep up with IM, Twitter, texting and e-mail?

“The core of the problem,” Professor Nass said, is that the multitaskers “think they’re great at what they do; and they’ve convinced everybody else they’re good at it, too.”

Count me in the group that knows it isn’t.

Solutioning, if only I can orientate

The challenge, at the end of the day, is to ensure we have the bandwidth to optimize.

We all suffer through poorly written internal communication demonstrating the author has fallen in love with bizspeak, where perfectly useful words have been misappropriated for a new use.

How does this descent into undecipherable acronyms and meaningless jargon happen?

Lynn Espinoza, the president of Speak! Communications, suggests it’s because every company has both its own culture and its own language. We all move so fast that it’s more efficient to develop corporate shorthand. These short-hand references are meaningless to the outside world but well understood within the corporate micro-culture.

That works to a point, she says, but says the rationale doesn’t work for the awful jargon, however. Upper management uses jargon to sound powerful; lower levels use it to sound important, she argues.

Whatever the rationale, it impedes effective communication, both oral and improvement. And if we don’t each make an effort to get back to basic English, we’ll be doomed to read pronouncements such as: "It's all a matter of the specifics of who you're looking at and what you're talking to depending on where you are in the world."

Your favorite words or phrases?

7 Twitter facts that may interest only me

• 5% of users account for 75% of all activity, and 10% of users account for 86%

• 21% of Twitter accounts are empty placeholders. These are the percentage of Twitter accounts that have never posted a single tweet.

• Nearly 94% of all Twitter accounts have less than 100 followers.

• March and April of 2009 were the tipping point for Twitter. During these months, Ashton Kutcher launched his quest to get to 1 million followers faster than CNN and Oprah started using Twitter.

• 150 followers is the magic number. Twitter users tend to "follow back" all their followers up until about 150 connections. Then the reciprocation rate fell off dramatically.

• Half of all Twitter users are not "active."

• Tuesday is the most active Twitter day. Tuesday stands out as the most popular day for tweets and re-tweets, followed by Wednesday and Friday.

Yeah, but what do I get out of it?

Another interesting example of how employee demographics are changing the workplace.

A recent study conducted by Kelly Services, a world leader in workforce management services, outlined a global shift in workforce dynamics driven not by pay, but by a desire for fulfilling jobs.

• 51% of Gen Y responders are prepared to accept a lower wage or lesser role if their work contributes to something more important or meaningful.

• 62% of Gen X plan to look for a new job within a year.

• 46% of baby boomers, 35% of Gen Y, and 42% of Gen X say their career goals are not being advanced in their current job.

The overriding theme is people want their jobs to provide a degree of emotional fulfillment, even if it means sacrificing money and status to achieve it. Various employee types and motivation:

• Recognition for work and time structure.

• Recognition of their values and conviction, and are engaged by knowing their opinions matter, their conviction is respected, and that the mission of the organization is being upheld.

• Playful contact, preferring that their interactions be upbeat, fun, and stimulating.

• Knowing that they are unconditionally valued as a person.

• Solitude

• Lots of action in a short timeframe.