Home Office Design Tips — From a Financial Advisor?

In my occasional series of crappy newsletters, here’s another, sent by a financial planner.

The only professional I want to get office design tips from is an interior designer or furniture vendor.

With financial reform and the worldwide economic meltdown on most everyone’s mind, sending a newsletter with fluff like this makes me question whether this advisor is in the loop or out to lunch. C’mon, talk to me about something you’re a credentialed expert in!

Oh, the money saving tips? Crap I could get from Reader’s Digest like take your lunch to work instead of eating out and get DVDs free at the public library instead of renting them. You must be kidding.

This is another fine example of sending something for the sake of sending something. This advisor needs an editorial calendar. Big Time.

Oh, and the last straw? She actually PAID a vendor to give her a proverbial communications black eye.

If your boilerplate requires you to disclaim giving financial advice, at least print some material that verges on the topic!

Sheesh.

The Triumph of Snail Mail?

Although I write a lot about e-newsletters and social media communications I’m always on the lookout for merging them with old school direct mail. I was prepared to skip this WSJ article on direct mail because at first glance it pertained to retailers.  Then the article told of an insurance broker using humorous postcards (including the one above) to great effect and I stopped skimming. The broker told the WSJ that when he stopped sending postcards clients complained — many of them collected the cards  as “cubical art.” When he resumed his postcard campaign, he scored a $270,000 new account.

This reminds me of the days when computers replaced handwritten correspondence and press-on labels — I opened the printed envelopes first. But now the novelty of a handwritten address gets my attention. Same with email — the novelty has worn off and most of us are filtering, unsubscribing and otherwise purging senders from our busy lives.

The article offered this as best practice for snail mail:

The idea is to send something that’s more appealing than “junk” mail and potentially more noticeable than an email message, says Eric Anderson, a professor of marketing at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. That allows business owners “to offer a personal touch the larger firms may not be able to have,” he says.

How well do you know your tribe?

I’m all for using whatever works for your audience, your tribe. I recently read Crush It! by Gary Vaynerchuk, known to many as the Wine Library TV guy. He’s crushing it on social media, especially video, and shares both his philosophy and tactics in the book. I picked up a thing or two from Gary myself (once I slim down I might even try some video!).

On the other end of the spectrum, one of my clients’ tribe is not web savvy, so she takes extra pains to label hot spots on her website (”click here”) instead of relying on them to mouse over without a prompt.  She recently discontinued her printed newsletter, started a blog and sends an email with each blog post.  I, on the other hand, don’t want to clog my subscribers’ inboxes with each blog update — a monthly newsletter with links to the past month’s posts works for my tribe.

Let’s start a productive conversation. I shared my content recycling strategy here – what’s yours? Here’s a little something on email’s dominance over social media – is this the case for your business? Please share your experience combining any and all forms of business communications/channels/media.

PIMCO’s Ring of Fire

Scroll down for writing prompts, bloggers & newsletter writers.

In my occasional series of publicly (and respectfully) editing business writing, this time I offer unsolicited advice to PIMCO, a leading global investment management firm, which publishes respected and widely-read newsletters.

Today I read  The Ring of Fire, written Mr William H. Gross, a founder of PIMCO who oversees the management of more than $800b of fixed income securities (among many other things). It started off well enough with a personal reflection on his long and distinguished career and the careers of others, but I’d have shortened this part by a couple of paragraphs.

Then the segue:

There have been numerous changeups and curveballs in the financial markets over the past 15 months or so. Liquidation, reliquidation and the substituting of the government wallet for the invisible hand of the private sector describe the events from 30,000 feet. Now that a semblance of stability has been imparted to the economy and its markets, the attempted detoxification and deleveraging of the private sector is underway.  Having survived due to a steady two-trillion-dollar-plus dose of government “Red Bull,” Adderal or simply black coffee, the global private sector is now expected by some to detox and resume a normal cyclical schedule where animal spirits and the willingness to take risk move front and center. But there is a problem. While corporations may be heading in that direction due to steep yield curves and government check writing that have partially repaired their balance sheets, their consumer customers remain fully levered and undercapitalized with little hope of escaping rehab as long as unemployment is at 10-20% levels worldwide. “Build it and they will come” is an old saw more applicable to Kevin Costner’s Field of Dreams than today’s economy. “Say’s Law” proclaiming that supply creates its own demand is hardly applicable to a modern day credit-oriented society where credit cards are maxed out, 25% of homes are underwater, and job and income creation are nearly invisible.

OK, before you look at my table of edits below, ask yourself “What does he want me to know? What should I expect next?” Myself, I didn’t predict that he’d head into a global economic analysis since the segue focused exclusively on America. This isn’t fiction, or even narrative nonfiction,  Mr Gross, this is business writing. Point the headlights where you intend to steer the vehicle.

Surgical edits to what WAS written

Instead of	I’d write
There have been numerous changeups and curveballs in the financial markets over the past 15 months or so.	The financial markets threw us a number of changups and curveballs these past 15 months or so. (drop the passive voice)
Liquidation, reliquidation and the substituting of the government wallet for the invisible hand of the private sector describe the events from 30,000 feet.	The invisible hand of the market has been replaced by the government wallet and we’ve seen liquidation and reliquidation. (the sentence is more active now and that cliche– ‘30,000 feet’– removed)
Now that a semblance of stability has been imparted to the economy and its markets, the attempted detoxification and deleveraging of the private sector is underway.	Now that the economy and its markets have achieved some semblance of stability, the private sector’s detoxification and liquidation is underway. (isn’t that more clear?)
Having survived due to a steady two-trillion-dollar-plus dose of government “Red Bull,” Adderal or simply black coffee, the global private sector is now expected by some to detox and resume a normal cyclical schedule where animal spirits and the willingness to take risk move front and center. But there is a problem.	However, there is a problem in the thinking that the private sector can resume a normal cyclical schedule after two-trillion-dollar doses of government “Red Bull,” Adderal or plain black coffee. It just doesn’t work that way. Here’s why: (and then go into bullets)

I’ll say this, the article is full of writing prompts

My editing scalpel safely retired to the autoclave, I took some points from Mr Gross’ article to help bloggers and newsletter writers in search of a juicy topic.

• The PIMCO Ring of Fire includes the US, Japan and six European countries whose public debt is most likely to reach 90% of GDP (with an ensuing 1% fall in growth). If you look at the graph (a nice one) you’ll see that the countries identified as less likely than those in the Ring of Fire to stumble are Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, Canada, Norway, Finland, Denmark and Australia. Mr Gross says these countries are “considered to be most conservative and potentially more solvent, with the potential for higher growth.” If you’re a Forex trader advisor or investor, does this have any bearing on your recommendations or holdings?

• Mr Gross argues for tilting growth-focused (and currency) assets toward countries like China, India and Brazil. What’s your position and why, advisors and investors?
  

• If you want to avoid developing economies, Mr Gross says look north to Canada, our more conservative neighbor (I wrote about this here). He also says to avoid the UK. How does this inform your investment strategy?
  

• Last year Denmark (one of the countries farthest from the Ring of Fire) was named “The happiest country on Earth” by social scientists at Blue Zones Project . ABC ’s 20/20 story homed in on the social egalitarianism of Danes, who don’t derive great personal status from their job choices. “Denmark is what is called a ‘post consumerist’ society. People have nice things, but shopping and consuming is not a top priority. Even the advertising is often understated. Along with less emphasis on ’stuff,’ and a strong social fabric, Danes also display an amazing level of trust in each other, and their government.”  Comment on what this might foretell about the path of American deleveraging– do the Danes lead you to believe the deleveraging Mr Gross describes might not be all that bad after all?

• While we’re on the subject, Danes pay some of the highest taxes in the world — between 50 percent and 70 percent of their incomes. In exchange, the government covers all health care and education, and spends more on children and the elderly than any country in the world per capita. What say ye about health insurance reform, Americans?

• In the most recent study of happiness, directed by University of Michigan political scientist Ronald Inglehart and administered from Stockholm, “the survey found that freedom of choice, gender equality, and increased tolerance are responsible for a considerable rise in overall world happiness. The results shatter the more simplistic and traditionally accepted notion that wealth is the determining factor, says Inglehart.”  Is it possible that we Americans can learn to see ourselves — and each other — differently after this shared economic hardship?

Where’s the News in Your Newsletter?

My inbox is clogged with so-called newsletters from people who must have made a resolution to “communicate more” or “do more marketing” in 2010.

Most of them are, in a word, crap.

In two words, self serving.

In three words, not worth reading.

Win a lifetime gift certificate for my services

If you can find the “news” in this “newsletter” I’ll work for you for the rest of my life for free!

(Redacted) brings proven, practical solutions to business challenges with a clear focus on the bottom line. We represent (verbal diahrrea). Our Practice Areas include:

CONSULTING and TRAINING (8 bullets)

COACHING (4 bullets)

If you’ve read this far you’re one in a million.

CAREER TRANSITION (2 bullets)

SALES PERFORMANCE AND REVENUE GROWTH (5 bullets)

(Redacted) mission is to assist organizations in developing and sustaining inclusive environments where all employees can do their best work (blah blah blah).

We work with organizations (yada yada yada).

If you’ve read this far you’re one in a billion.

An advertisement lodged into a newsletter template

This is  best described as an awful ad or an internal document designed to remind the staff who they are and what they do. Releasing it to the public is a sure way to lose subscribers or gain a reputation with your service provider as a spammer.

Not sure what to write about?

Afraid you’ll run afoul of federal CAN-SPAM regs?

Anything I can do to help? 704-907-2811

Best advice: ask yourself, “Would I read this if it came from someone else?” The sender of this advertisement would surely have to answer “No.”

Editing the Fed

I’ve been so bold as to edit Prince Charles and the pope, so why not the Cleveland Federal Reserve Bank?

Consider the Fed’s analysis of Canadian vs. American housing and lending trends.

Why Canada might be “a country that got things right”

The report led off well enough:

Housing markets in the United States and Canada are similar in many respects, but each has fared quite differently since the onset of the financial crisis. A comparison of the two markets suggests that relaxed lending standards likely played a critical role in the U.S. housing bust.

It’s written in easily-understood prose and comes to a succinct conclusion. But if you read the report (and re-read once or twice), you’ll agree that my re-write would have been a better approach, not just by virtue of the writing, but also by virtue of the more comprehensive (and candid) conclusion:

Unlike the U.S., Canada has not experienced a dramatic increase in mortgage defaults, nor has any Canadian bank required a government bailout. This article explores the differences between the two countries’ monetary policies, financial services structure and regulation, and the kinds of mortgage products offered. While the primary culprit behind the American financial services crisis was the rise in subprime loans,  those products, and indeed the housing bubble itself, were enabled by monetary policy and financial services regulation.

Conclusions drive structure

An introduction like this would have led to an entirely different STRUCTURE of the paper, as well.  As written, the Fed meandered through data on housing prices, loan-to-value stats, delinquency rates, central bank target rates, and benchmark mortgage interest rates before getting around to contextualizing them. Most readers’ eyes were glazed over by then.

I would have taken the inverse approach, noting the differences in subprime booms between the countries (and the American bust) and then comparing and contrasting the factors that DROVE those differences, including monetary policy and regulation.  I would also have quoted sociologists on the differences in risk tolerance between us and our “neighbors to the north” as we so often call them.

The Fed is not apolitical, so I guess I should give a nod to the possibility that it was motivated to obfuscate.  Alas, these are the times in which we live.

Burned by Boilerplate

As we hurtle towards 2010 some financial advisors and life insurance agents keep communicating like it’s 1999.

The boilerplate communications racket

In the past week I got two identical Thanksgiving e-cards from different reps of the same general agency. Uh oh. It started with an email inviting me to “click here and view the card on a secured site…” which launched a browser, inside of which played a little flash file of autumnal photos — an animated version of the cheesiest Hallmark card ever printed. It was “customized” with the name of its sender.

Awash in meaninglessness

This week I got this email from a rep that said:  “Every few months, I try to keep my clients and friends up-to-date with current financial issues or critical concerns…” and once again I was invited to view this important update by linking to a secured site.

She set my expectations right up front by promising “up-to-date with current financial issues or critical trends.” I don’t know about you, but I thought  “financial issues or critical trends” might include  something like financial services reform and how this rep is going to go above and beyond the  regs to assure my confidence. Or perhaps a report on how how certain classes of annuities performed… How naive of me.

I clicked the link and got a flash-powered thingy that looked like a PowerPoint deck. The lead screen made the further promise “Providing valuable information of particular interest to you.” Wow, to me!

I then learned that (gasp) “Most people are frustrated by the amount of income tax they’re paying.” Really?

Next came a little lesson on the miracle of compounding interest. Be still my beating heart.

At the end I learned that there was a difference between tax-deferred and taxable income. A targeted message if ever there was one.

And what was the conclusion?  “There could be ways to reduce your tax liability and optimize growth!“  You’re kidding!  Somebody thought of that?

Then there was the lame call to action “Please provide information.” Clicking through I faced a comment box and the warning that I should allow 48 hours for a representative to get back to me. 48 hours? No one in 2009 is going to be that patient. If they want a product they could already buy it online in 48 hours.

You need to stop this. Right now!

I know you work under compliance regs and some companies and agencies are tougher than others.

I also know that these boilerplate services cut deals with the companies and agencies.

Still, there’s no excuse for sending out crap, absolute crap. If your compliance department won’t allow anything besides this boilerplate pablum, abstain altogether.

If your company has an approval process for customized communications, get on the stick! If not, pick the phone off  its cradle and call your clients to wish them a happy new year. THAT will get their attention.

Authenticity can’t be bought, but is priceless

If you’re doing a mass customization communications campaign, do the job properly. For clues of where this boilerplate went into the ditch, look for my snarky comments above in blue.

If this all sounds like work, you’re right. Tell you what, give me a copy of your compliance requirements and I’ll devise a compliant communications strategy.

Devising your Editorial Calendar

Exhortations to “publish, publish, publish” forget the most important advice: publish something worthwhile. To communicate in a meaningful way build an editorial calendar and stock your content pantry.

Building blocks for an editorial calendar

Seasonality. The US tax season drives business to accountants, but also  drives a spike in calls to financial advisors and some attorneys. Surely there is seasonality in your business, too. What seasonal issues do your clients face? Can you come up with one for each month of the year?

Key Messages. One of my clients is a JD-CPA who specializes in estate and succession planning. His newsletter’s target audience are accountants and financial planners. He writes about triggering events in their clients’ lives that might cause them to consult with an estate planning professional, making liberal use of case studies. What are the top ten things your clients need to know? What are the top five mistakes your clients made before working with you? What are the three most expensive errors your clients make when trying to go it alone?

Political calendar. Here in the States, 2010 is an election year, so candidates will be talking about change. Seize the momentum and prepare a series of articles or posts on topics likely to get news coverage. If you play your cards right (or hire a public relations pro) you might have the good fortune of being quoted by mainstream media.

The 24×7 news cycle. You can’t plan ahead for all breaking news, but you can capitalize on it. Once you know your key messages you’ll be surprised how often something in the news prompts you for a blog post or newsletter article.

Build a content pantry of key messages

Back in ye olde days (before 1980 or so!) people stocked “staples” in their kitchens/pantries including flour, sugar, salt, baking powder, herbs, spices…you get the idea. This made it easy to whip up a myriad of dishes with the addition of items that can’t sit on the shelf as long.

Think of your key messages as a “content pantry.” One of my clients, a mortgage planner, has this in his content pantry:

• A written mortgage planning philosophy
• Case studies of how people in various phases of life can apply his philosophy
• A recommended process for people to find and finance the right house
• Case studies of refinancing strategies gone well and gone badly
• Some mortgage planning tools like a Household Blended Debt Rate calculator
• A list of mistakes people often make when house/mortgage shopping

Add a seasonal calendar

The mortgage planner’s calendar includes:

• First Quarter:
  • Good financial/budgeting hygiene
  • Planning ahead to making deposits on colleges (refi may be in order)
  • Tax season
• Second Quarter:
  • People start thinking about selling their home
  • Get a mortgage plan before falling in love with a house
  • Local stats on home values, appreciation,  school boundary changes & other things of interest to shoppers
• Third Quarter:
  • Basic financial advice (evergreen topics)
  • Reminders to come in for an annual mortgage review
  • Looking ahead at funding college
• Fourth Quarter:
  • September is Life Insurance Awareness month; he talks about the role of insurance in an overall mortgage strategy
  • Year-end/first-of-year planning topics (might include refi)

Ready to publish

This client is basically ready to go. When something hits the news, he already has key messages from which to base commentary. How’d he get to this point? I helped.

You can do this, too. What are you waiting for?

Low-Jargon Financial Blogs & Newsletters

I write blogs and newsletters for attorneys, advisors and accountants. These professionals often need to provide complex information without making their clients’ eyes glaze over.

Professionals  with compliance/malpractice concerns  too often navigate the middle of the road where nothing meaningful is communicated. Some admit they hope readers will pick up the phone and call for clarification “on the clock.” Bad strategy.

Everyone faces this challenge of writing thorough-yet-understandable communications  from time to time. Here are writing tips for newsletter or blog writers who aspire to communicate without using jargon on one hand, or dumbing down the message on the other.

It’s a conversation, not a treatise

• Provide links to jargon, technical definitions and 50-cent SAT words like “treatise.” This way, everyone can get as much info as they need on their own and your writing doesn’t bog down
• Don’t mistake your articles for term papers!
  • Use headers, bolds and links to enable (gasp) skimming
  • Avoid passive voice; use active voice
  • Write to the appropriate reading level of your audience
    • Run your copy through a fog index calculator (tells the number of years of education needed to understand what you’ve written)
    • If you use Google Docs, click Tools>Word Count and find the analysis at the bottom
• You’re not a professor
  • Don’t try to tell everything you know about the subject. Pare it down to the essentials
  • For weighty topics, write a series of short articles
  • Provide an intro to the topic in your newsletter and link to your blog/elsewhere for details. If you can find a video (or make one yourself) your audience will be grateful. Here’s how one of my clients does it
  • Leverage industry videos and handouts (be sure to comply with licensing and copyrights)

Engage readers

• Invite them to leave comments and comment on those of others
• Offer a free worksheet to help them apply the information to their lives — invite them to review the information with you off the clock, if appropriate
• Ask readers to weigh in on a topic by linking to a survey that gives them the option to see how their answers compare to those of other respondents
• Poll readers for future articles on similar/related subjects

Brains need variety

• 

  This infographic is from a parody site

  Use stories – our brains are wired for stories -and people “find” themselves in them.

• Use case studies for the same reasons

• Link to a narrated presentation deck or video to stimulate the story-receptive part of readers’ brains. One of my clients does this very well

• Use  infographics or produce your own charts and tables. FlowingData is a great resource to learn about them and you might find one to use there

What techniques have you or others used to make complex information digestible? What have you seen out there that turns you off? 

A Special Place for Spammers

I’ve been waiting for a good case study to illustrate what I’ve been saying about spam filtering over the last several months.

Last week a global provider of bulk email services had to deal with one of its rogue customers who’d gained a reputation as a spammer. While it did, a large-but-untold number of innocent and spam-compliant emailers couldn’t get their messages into customers’ inboxes.

Aha! The rubber hits the highway. Here’s how it went down:

Spamhaus Project, the international cyber crime fighting organization, placed the rogue emailer’s internet (IP) address on its blacklist of spammers. The rogue’s IP address belonged to the rogue’s email provider, which meant the millions of innocent commercial emailers also using that provider were painted with the same “spammer” brush. The Internet Service Providers (ISPs) who subscribe to Spamhaus’ blacklist wouldn’t deliver anyone’s email from that service until the matter was resolved.

Damage control overdrive with Hotmail, Yahoo! and others

The commercial email service provider had to go into damage control overdrive, suspending the rogue’s account, communicating with innocent emailer senders about the delay to their campaigns, and proving to Spamhaus that they’d taken the right precautionary and reactionary measures required. Until Spamhaus removed the address from its blacklist, ISPs like Hotmail, Yahoo! and others wouldn’t deliver any of the provider’s clients’ email.

Ouch!

This is tough to convey in words, and I acknowledge using some jargon here, so I suggest you visit Spamhaus for flowcharts that illustrate how filtering works.

Follow commercial email rules

The upshot for commercial emailers: if your email service provider advises you to use a double-opt-in subscription process or to certify that you haven’t purchased an email list, or subscribed people without their permission, comply quickly and don’t complain about the extra steps. These procedures are necessary to convince Spamhaus and the ISPs that you’re a compliant emailer, even if someone else using your service isn’t.

This also points out the reason to use a bulk email service instead of sending email campaigns from your own email account. That way, if you are accused of spamming, you’ll have a knowledgeable and experienced company go to bat for you with the international cyber services. If I may be so bold to ask, please consider using my email service.

The Spamhaus Project is a great study for international cooperation. Be sure to hit the tags to the right for more of what I’ve written on SPAM and e-newsletters.

“I loved the way he used PowerPoint”

The anti-PPT bandwagon doesn’t have room for another rider. My only addition to the chorus  is that a bad PPT-based presentation is like a bad dog — blame the owner!

PPT isn’t inherently bad, but, like a Rotweiller, can be placed in the wrong hands and do real damage.

I generally agree with the authors of Real Leaders Don’t do PowerPoint: How to sell yourself and your ideas, “You are the message. Who you are–your character, experience, values–shapes the message your listeners hear.”

Dan Ariely, PowerPoint master

Last year I heard Dan Ariely, bestselling author and professor at my B-school (Fuqua — Duke) speak on behavioral economics and his first book Predictably Irrational.

In staccato diction, he regaled us with tales of our irrational behavior — like why we won’t pay $3000 for a leather couch in the family room while we will pay the same amount for a leather interior in our family car — and he did it with the delivery skills of any comedian’s aspiration.

If he’d been a rock star we’d have whipped out our cigarette lighters and stomped our  feet until he gave an encore.

And yes, he used PPT, including a slide with an x-ray of Homer Simpson’s brain.  See?  I remembered that one.

In defense of PowerPoint

Recall a time when someone gave a terrific, memorable, actionable presentation WITH PPT, as Professor Ariely did.

I’ll wait.

OK, I can’t wait all day.

If you did have the good fortune of attending such an event, you’ll recall that PPT didn’t make it great — it was great because the speaker had something to say and said it with conviction; they knew their stuff cold, engaged the audience, told stories and stayed ON POINT.  Did the PPT help?  Maybe, after all, who knows how it would have gone without the screen?

Reasons for PPT:

• Leave-behind for those who couldn’t make it to the live event
• Guided handout for taking notes
• Satisfies the need for visual stimulation
• Illustrate points graphically

Bottom line:  No one says “I loved the way he used PowerPoint;” but if you’re a good presenter they’ll say “I’d go see him speak again.”

Malcolm Gladwell speaks

A friend of mine had the good fortune of attending The Foundation for the Carolinas’ annual meeting.  You can hardly drag me to one of those, but I wish I’d gone to this one.  Why?  Bestselling author and New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell did the keynote.

According to my friend, Gladwell took a wireless mike and roved the audience, telling stories about a town in (I believe) Pennsylvania and how and why it prospered and failed.  My friend, a public relations pro who is not easily impressed, was awed.

Just the opposite of Ariely, Gladwell is soft spoken.  Where Ariely is irreverent, Gladwell is earnest.  Both can bring the house down.

I’m not a qualified speaking coach — my specialty is the content — but to me this is the bottom line:  You don’t have to be “dynamic” to get your message across.  The book mentioned earlier, Real Leaders Don’t do PowerPoint: How to sell yourself and your ideas, got good reviews and the website and book Presentation Zen is chock full of great stuff. And I’m always here to help.

It’s easy to bash PPT, and you’re welcome to bash away in the comments section.  I’d really like to hear from you about a presentation that thrived WITH the visual support.

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