I’m Shela Bannasch, filling in for my boss Paul M. Johnson while he is attending the ISPA Expo this week. As I am a young whippersnapper, I spend a lot of my time on the Internet and, when I’m not perusing the Facebook or watching cat videos, I sometimes like to read interesting articles and stuff. This week, I’m examining one of my favorite places on the Internet – Wikipedia.
I’m a big fan of Wikipedia as both a source of knowledge and a source of entertainment. I may go there with the intention of looking up some actor’s filmography, but through a series of links, I find myself an hour later reading about the ghost town of Centralia, Pennsylvania. It’s fascinating. And while it may seem like a waste of time, it has made me pretty good at trivia.
In 2002, Leggett & Platt purchased a portion of the former Northwestern Steel & Wire facility. Following major renovations in the melt shop and rod mill, the plant began operating in early 2003. Sterling produces more than 500,000 tons of wire rod annually.
Interested in working at Sterling Steel? Check out http://www.leggett.com/sterlingsteel
In 2013, Schukra Berndorf, a Leggett & Platt company, was named one of Austria’s leading employers for a second consecutive year. Founded in 1980 and located about 20 miles southwest of Vienna, the branch is comprised of long-tenured Berndorf locals. They continue to produce outstanding financial results and quality products.
Gunnar Seen, Plant Manager of Schukra Berndorf, attributes much of the branch’s recent success to their 205 employees. “There are two significant pieces to our company culture,” he states. “The first is the dedication and devotion of our people; the second, their pride to carry on the Schukra name.”
Before I moved to the relative flatness of southwest Missouri from Phoenix, I went on a hike every day on a suburban mountain near my home. It was part of my daily routine, and I’d keep track of the number of days in a row I was able to get it done – I remember reaching 50 a few times. The hike lasted just a little over 30 minutes, but the 500-foot elevation gain made it solid exercise. But it had another benefit: it left me with my thoughts. I’d often come up with concepts for print ads or headlines or creative ways to make fun of my friends on my way up the curvy trail to the peak. Without any office-related distractions such as e-mails, phone calls, and visiting coworkers, I could focus on one “problem” for enough consecutive minutes to usually reach a satisfying solution.
“Talk like society talks” – and write like society reads via Talentzoo
This is a short blog entry about a topic that everyone in marketing communications has to address: when to “dumb down” their writing or even eschew grammar rules to fit the common vernacular. The example given is a hospital billboard that reads: “We make you feel good.” Although most people say they feel “good” rather than “well,” it is grammatically wrong. Many writing mediums, such as journalism, stick to long-held rules of grammar, but marketing, in most cases, has no such restraints.
Corporate best practice entails leveraging the synergy of elastic communication in human capital to maximize ROI efficiency gains at the corporation in terms of the holistic enterprise.
If the previous sentence took five minutes to slog through and made you want to smash your computer screen with a hammer, it’s because it was chock-full of B.S. – or what many refer to as “business speak.” And business speak is toxic to effective communication.
Departments often use unique processes and systems, and those unique processes naturally tend to develop their own slang terms – be it words, metaphors, or acronyms – that people repeat over and over. And eventually, people start using those words casually in everyday conversation. But while the terms make perfect sense to a select few, many people don’t understand them!
This Harvard Business Review article explores the challenges of cross-cultural workplace communication. The most important aspect of it seems to be the directness of language. The comparisons within this piece focus on British communication, which tends to be indirect, and Dutch and German communication, which is more direct. Most interesting, I think, is the mention of “upgraders” – words that emphasize and strengthen the other words around them – and “downgraders,” which do the opposite. In the Dutch and German style, upgraders are used. For example: “That is totally inappropriate.” In the British style, which seems very similar to how we communicate here in the U.S., a downgrader would probably be used instead: “That is a bit inappropriate.”
This article from The Economist opens with a funny observation by the late British novelist Kingsley Amis, who as a skeptic of advertising was ahead of his time. Today, we live in an age of mass skepticism, and the landscape for marketers is as fraught as ever. Havas Media, a marketing agency, has done a series of worldwide surveys that indicate that people care less and less about brands. Its surveys revealed that a majority of people in Europe and America would not care if 92% of existing brands vanished. Of course, there is still the worship of brands (think Apple products), but lately advertisers have had to work harder. According to this piece, they have four avenues: acknowledge the skepticism; drown the skepticism with humor; disarm the skepticism with honesty; and make the case that buying your product will do good – like heal the planet or help the poor.
