Karan Chadda

Global marketing, analytics and digital leader

Uncategorized

Own the phone

I’m not ashamed to admit that in my youth I spent some time selling credit cards in a call centre – it paid some bills, the people were nice and I learnt a lot. For two consecutive summers, that unexpected call during Corrie was me. Although not the most fun job I’ve ever had, I was actually quite good at it; easily exceeding my target of three an hour, every hour, every day…

One of the reasons I was good at it was that I quickly learned how to ‘own the phone’.

Most people make a call or answer one so they can speak to people. There’s a conversation, a back and forth. It’s a sound-based medium and people expect sound. It struck me that most awkward points in a telephone conversation aren’t when both people are trying to speak, it’s when no one is.

Silence just isn’t what you expect to happen on the phone. It’s awkward, it makes people uncomfortable and they want it to end. So how did I use this little insight to my advantage?

Well, I worked out that when I asked a question and then said nothing, the silence would build pressure. The pressure would build and build. Eventually, the other person would answer. Not because they wanted to, but because they wanted the silence to end. Once they’d answered my question, I knew they’d answer all my questions, that they’d want to avoid that awkward silence.

Now, this little trick didn’t help me persuade more people to sign up for a credit card, but it did mean that people listened to me and answered my questions. They took me seriously and I didn’t waste leads.

The flipside is true too. If you ask a question and the other person doesn’t respond, the pressure builds. If you rush in with another question or clarify your original question, then you’ve lost. Deep down, they know they don’t have to answer your questions. They don’t have to talk to you. You’ve lost that call and you have wasted a lead.

Only one person can own the phone.

Cheeky chorizo

Having a young child has had a big impact on when I eat – he eats, then we eat, which means we eat late. Treating this as an opportunity rather than a burden, I’ve started hunting out quick, simple snacks and meals

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The recipe is incredibly simple. In fact, it’s probably too short to be a recipe. Just slice up some chorizo, bash up some garlic and pour over some decent red wine. Set aside for a while (I leave it for an hour or so), then whack it in a hot pan for a minute or two and serve. Boom, a nice little tapas-type snack.

An additional bonus is that it leaves you with a sensible amount of wine to share mid-week.

Old ideas revisited

Last week there was a brouhaha (or twitter storm) about a website with Shell branding which made preposterous comments about drilling for oil in the arctic. Some were taken in by it, others quickly spotted that it was a spoof. The truly shocking aspect of the whole affair was the number of people who thought it was a new and novel idea.

Back in 2001, animal rights activists set up a spoof website attacking the Bank of New York for its work for Huntingdon Life Sciences, a medical research firm that conducts research on animals. The site, called BankofNYKills.com, was a replica of the Bank of New York’s website with the content changed to highlight the activists’ grievances. BankofNYKills.com spoof website wasn’t the first of its kind by a long shot. The practice is as old as corporate websites.

What has changed since then is how well coordinated the best spoofs are. The recent mocking of Shell reached public consciousness around the Rio+20 summit, where arctic oil exploration has been a big issue. The spoof website was just one tactic forming part of a broad range of articles, tweets, Facebook messages and videos designed to keep awareness high.

Spoof defence

Companies’ fear of spoofing is very real. Back in January, the FT reported that Blackstone Group had hired a firm to purchase hostile domain names, including the wonderful blackstonesucks.com. The hope is to purchase all the spoof-able domain names before activists are able to use them. It’s a tactic that costs a lot and is destined to fail.

In reality, there’s little companies can do to stop spoof sites from springing up. People are creative and domain names are abundant (and growing). Companies can move quickly to have sites taken down, but with the speed of distribution that social media makes possible, it’s likely that the spoof will have achieved its goal before it’s taken down.

Ultimately, if a spoof site gains traction, then you’re probably facing a well planned campaign and focusing on the site isn’t the solution. You still need to acknowledge and deal with the spoof, but you’ve got a bigger reputation issue to deal with.

This piece was originally posted here on the CommsTalk blog.

Nudge nudge, tweet tweet

Having had a chance to play around a bit with #newnewtwitter, two changes strike me as particularly interesting, one is a small change in mobile browsing and the other focuses on anonymity. It seems to me that they are both changes designed to alter users’ behaviour.

Placing Twitter at the centre of mobile browsing

On the updated iPhone app you can no longer copy a link and paste it into a browser. This means you have to browse through the app’s built-in browser. Facebook’s app takes a similar approach. It means that if you want to view the content someone is trying to share, you need to do it through Twitter and without leaving Twitter. So you stay on Twitter, it acts as the hub for your mobile browsing.

When you couple this change with Twitter’s new discover tab (an amalgamation search and trends with a new stories service), it’s clear that Twitter is making a serious play to challenge Facebook and Google as people’s starting point when exploring the mobile web.

Nudging people away from anonymity

Names now take precedence over Twitter handles. Is this a way to make online relationships more personal? Is it a small change in the larger push to make Twitter big in China and other countries where the government has a preference against anonymity? Or is it a move to placate Western governments who, now feeling some pressure of movements organised through social media, are less enamoured with free speech when it’s coupled with anonymity?

Regardless, one thing it will definitely do is make users associate people by their names instead of their Twitter handles. This means that, unless you’re writing under a pseudonym, people will associate you with your tweets. It won’t be @quirkytwitterhandle said something, it will be Trevor said something.

Obviously, there are easy workarounds to this change, for example you can change your name in the settings to your quirky Twitter handle. Most people won’t do this though and, over time, this will change behaviour. I suspect people will moderate their tweets because they will recognise that those tweets are directly associated with them instead of their chosen online identity.

So, two very different changes, but both designed to change behaviour and both more significant than they initially seem.

This post also appeared on the Huffington Post.