Miss Communications

Crap for Cash? Welcome to the Content Farm

The Web, as we all know, is a wonderful compendium of knowledge. Where else could we find fast answers to all our burning questions, from ordinary to obscure?

How tall was Abraham Lincoln? Biography.com tells us he was six feet four.

What is the currency of Aruba? WorldTravelGuide.net says it’s the Arubin Florin.

What are the health benefits of walnuts?  Healthmad.com suggests, “Besides containing antioxidants, beans originating from Europe is also increasing immunity/immune body.”

Huh?

Yes, one of the brutal truths of the Internet is that, while there’s plenty of information to be found, not all of it has value. There’s a great deal, in fact, that’s being cranked out by random writers who may or may not be experts in the topics they’re writing about – and who may or may not understand the language they’re writing in. They’re simply doing it for the money and selling their stuff to Web sites known as “content farms.”

Some of the Web’s content-farmed text is obvious. That quote about antioxidants, for example, comes from a write-up titled “Sleeping is Difficult to Cope with Walnuts?” Most of us would recognize that as a good article to skip.

But other content farms aren’t quite so clear to the casual reader. They present articles that are written more or less comprehensibly – but in truth, the information is hacked out by people who know little or nothing about the topics. The authors have simply rounded up some facts, quickly rewritten them, and sent their stuff off to the farm. The going price is usually about $5 to $15 per piece, but sometimes it’s as little as five cents.

In an article written last summer for MediaShift, a section of PBS.org, author Corbin Hiar interviewed a number of writers who had worked for content farms, and their comments were telling. The most interesting, perhaps, came from a journalism graduate from a prestigious school, who had previously gone into content-farm writing for some temporary income. As she summed up the work, “I was completely aware that I was writing crap.”

The tacky business model that content farms rely on – crank out as much low-cost content as you can, then sit back while the page hits and AdSense bucks roll in – was probably an inevitable step in the snake-oily, new-frontier progress of the Web. But if we’re lucky, such monetization machines won’t last forever. In fact, the content farms’ gig may soon be up.

Search engine companies are fielding complaints that the content farms’ strategy hits us all far too often, populating our earnest searches with useless, low-quality stuff. Now Google and others are considering how to filter out the offenders, and we may soon have an opportunity to block these sites from our search hits.

Until then, of course, it’s up to each of us to carefully evaluate any information we stumble across – online, and everywhere else.

Oh – and don’t bother Googling “How to avoid content farms in your search hits.” I’ve already tried it, and apparently nobody’s cranked out that article yet.

New Words Don't Refudiate the Truth

At the end of each year, a lot of word-nerdy organizations make a set of announcements that most people don’t even notice: They look back at the year’s writings, uterrances and online dictionary hits, and they choose the annual Words of the Year.

One such word-voting organization is the American Dialect Society, which selects winning terms and phrases in a number of categories – including most useful, most creative and most likely to succeed.

For 2010, the ADS chose “app” as its overall winner – that cute, short form of “application,” as in, “No, I’m not addicted to my iPhone; I’m just downloading another app.”  ADS’s chair of its New Words Committee explained in a press release that, while “app” has been around for ages, the phrase “There’s an app for that!” made the word “newly prominent” in 2010.

As it turns out, it took a run-off vote at the ADS session to determine that “app” should beat out “nom.” That term, as you may know, can be an eating-related verb, as in “I’m hungry, let’s go nom,” or a deliciousness-related interjection, such as “That looks scrumptious! Nom!”

Little “nom” still took home a tasty award, though: It was voted most useful overall.

Other ADS winners included “gate rape” as the most outrageous – that’s a randy description of the latest TSA enhanced-pat-down techniques – and “refudiate” as the most unnecessary – that’s a mix of “refute” and “repudiate” that Twitter typist Sarah Palin let slip.

The new Palin coinage made an even bigger splash with the folks at The New Oxford American Dictionary, who picked “refudiate” as their solitary Word of the Year. It beat competitors such as “vuvuzela” (that not-to-be-forgotten, non-musical instrument from World-Cup-in-South-Africa fame), “gleek” (a fan of the TV show “Glee,” who’s likely to be a geek) and “retweet” (the echoing of a tweet on Twitter, which is how Palin’s “refudiate” was made famous in the first place).

The folks at Merriam-Webster get in on the notable-annual-words act, too – but they take a group-behavior, rather than expert-voter, approach: Since 2003 the company has publicized its Web site visitors’ top 10 look-ups and called them the Words of the Year. For 2010, “austerity” took the top spot with more than 250,000 hits. Others included "pragmatic," "moratorium," "doppelganger" and "ebullient."

The Merriam-Webster winners are interesting not only because they show current usage in the popular press; they also prove that, for all the advisories to dumb down one’s writing and all the complaints that looking up terms is an onerous task, there are still writers who aren’t afraid of the occasionally big word, and readers who aren’t afraid to check it out.

Altogether, Word of the Year announcements tend to be more amusing than deeply informative: What do we do with the knowledge, for example, that top linguists consider “spillionaire” (a person made rich through oil cleanup funds) and “prehab” (preemptive rehab enrollment to stave off a relapse) to be highly creative; or that “skyaking” (jumping out of a plane in a kayak) is unlikely to succeed?

We laugh – and we remind ourselves that English is a living, changing thing.

And if any crusty old language-biddies attempt to claim otherwise, we note that they’re simply refudiating the truth.

Cleaning Up? Do a Little Unsubscribing

There’s something about January that makes us want to clean. That shiny new calendar page appears, and suddenly we have no patience for the junk that snuck up and settled into last year’s cracks. So we tidy up the papers on our desks. We throw out all the clutter in our closets. And if we’re very, very smart, we clean up our email inboxes and unsubscribe to a bunch of mass-mailed crud.

Yes, email comes in many forms, and somewhere in between the devious and illegal spam and the stuff we need for work lies a vast expanse of
e-newsletters and other (mostly) junk.

Sometimes we get onto people’s mass email lists deliberately, having stumbled across an intriguing businessperson who seems to have something to say.

Sometimes we get onto these lists mistakenly, getting trapped in the web of “Please enter your email address” when we’re simply asking for information or ordering something online.

And often we get onto these lists because some peoples’ business models stink: They collect every email address they can get their weasel paws on, then they fire off constant inbox interruptions to remind us that we, too, can part with our hard-earned cash.

But no matter how we get onto these email lists, we often find that we want to get off. That’s when “unsubscribe” becomes our friend.

Often it’s tempting – and easy – to simply relegate unwanted mass emails into the junk mail folder, because that generally keeps them from mucking up the inbox. But there are at least a couple of good reasons to use the unsubscribe function instead.

First, automatically sending emails to the junk folder doesn’t entirely take them out of our way.

We usually need to give the junk folder a quick perusal before deleting its contents, or we risk missing messages that were sent there by mistake. So when unwanted emails get sent to junk, they still take up our time and add to our workload with pointless tasks.

And second, when we decline to unsubscribe to useless emails, we neglect to give their senders any feedback – and we miss an opportunity to … dare we hope? … make the email world a better place.

No, it’s not as if most of us are going to fill out an unsubscribe form with in-depth details like “Your newsletter started out strong, but now it’s just a re-hash of the same old stuff,” or “It’s annoying that you’re always in sales mode; I was hoping for some industry insights, instead.”

And even a die-hard word nerd is hard-pressed to say “Your write-ups are so sloppy and dull that I’ve now developed a negative image of your company” – although she might want to. (Ahem.)

But at least a little input, such as “Don’t need it” or “Too salesy” – or even the simple act of turning the newsletter away – tells senders “You’re mistaken if you think these emails are turning me into a prospect.”

And that’s something they need – and possibly want – to know, as they do a little clean-up of their own.

Can Thank You Notes Be Typed?

The holiday season is a time of year when people do a lot of nice things for each other, and therefore it’s a time of year when we all say “thank you” a lot. Thank you for the invitation; thank you for the hospitality; thank you for the thoughtful gift.

Of course, some occasions call for more formal thank you efforts than others, and sometimes a little voice inside our heads – one that often sounds suspiciously like Mom – tells us it’s time to write and mail an actual thank you note.

Many times we ignore that little voice and tap out a little thank you text or a thank you email, instead. But in an era when we get far too many electronic messages and far too little enjoyable mail, let’s consider the idea that physical, tangible thank you notes deserve a comeback.

After all, writing thank you notes is not a difficult task. Sure, you can make a big production out of crafting your own handmade cards and pulling out the calligraphy pens - but you can just as easily start with pre-printed stationery (always an appropriate choice for business) or simply pull out some paper and jot down a few kind words.

One etiquette question that’s long been alive is whether thank you notes must be hand-written or whether they can be typed and cranked out on a printer.

Many swear that only hand-writing will do - but if you’re leaning toward using the printer anyway, here’s a helpful guideline: Part of the grace behind sending a written thank you is that you’re showing you care by putting forth a bit of personal effort. If you don’t exert yourself – at least a little – the note can easily seem insincere.

In social correspondence, hand-writing your note says, “You’re so important to me that I’ve given this letter the personal touch,” no matter how wobbly your penmanship may be. If you decide to go with the ease of typing, instead, you’ll need to make up for it with a couple of pages of newsy updates, a detailed explanation of how much you enjoyed the favor or gift, and possibly a nice photo or a drawing from your kid.

In business, of course, it’s important that thank you notes be reasonably neat or you risk saying not only “Thank you” but “Here’s an embarrassing look at my sloppier side,” as well. If your handwriting is truly abysmal and you can’t wrangle it into shape for even a few sentences, printing your note might be the way to go – but that means you’ll have to write a few extra-meaningful, extra-impressive sentences to make up for the impersonal touch. Be sure to sign it by hand, at the very least.

In the long run, the issue of whether to hand-write or type a thank you note is much less important than the questions of whether to send them, and when. And the answers are please do, and today would be a great day to begin.

Long or short, fancy or plain, typed or hand-written – a heartfelt, genuine thank you note is a rare treat these days.

And when’s the last time you felt that way about an e-mail or a text?

Ego Is Not Leadership

If you’re a reader of business books, you’re probably familiar with “Good to Great,” a huge-seller from author Jim Collins, based on research about companies that took a sharp turn toward the profitable and stayed there – performing at least three times as well as the market for at least 15 years.

One of the interesting insights Collins’ research team found about good-to-great companies was that the corporate leaders – the CEOs who led the initial charge and then kept it going – were all relatively modest people. The words “quiet,” “humble” and “self-effacing” kept coming up in interviews with people who knew the CEOs. Not one was a hot-shot egotist; not one was big on talking about himself or herself.

In fact, one of the methods researchers use to measure people’s egos is to consider how often they talk about themselves, by counting the times they use first-person singular pronouns – such as “I,” “me” and “my” – in their speaking and writing. Collins makes reference to this in “Good to Great,” chiding that at least one non-great leader used the word “I” almost three times as often as “we.” And in a recently publicized paper titled “It’s All About Me: Narcissistic CEOs and Their Effects on Company Strategy and Performance,” Penn State researchers Don Hambrick and Arjit Chatterjee note that they studied transcripts of interviews with CEOs to see how often first-person pronouns cropped up.

Of course, talking about you isn’t an altogether rotten thing. Personal stories can be enlightening, and a willingness to tell them can show audiences that you’re not afraid to share something of your inner self. But when speakers and writers do a whole bunch of I-talking and I-writing, it truly can start to signal “I’m all about me,” and it can turn people off.

If you want to be known as someone with an enormous opinion of yourself, one of the easiest ways to live up to that reputation is to talk about you, you, you. But if you want to avoid looking like a narcissist – or if, what the heck, you truly want to bring others into the discussion – the logical way to do that is to reduce your use of “I,” “me” and “my.”

One way is simply to turn things around. When you find yourself leading into an anecdote that doesn’t need to be focused on you (“I was reading an article…”), focus instead on where the real information is (“A piece in ‘Fast Company’ says…”). Turn chronicles about personal thoughts (“I realized…”) into ideas that others have also considered (“We’ve all thought about…”). And most importantly, when you’re taking credit for something (“I’ve directed my team …”), focus on the broader contribution of others (“The entire department is working toward …”).

Overall, it’s not imperative that you splice yourself out of everything you say, speaking only of others in a selfless attempt to portray modesty that you may or may not feel. But it is important to show the world now and then that you understand something every intelligent adult should know: Baby, it’s not all about you.

This classic Miss Communications column was originally published August 10, 2007.

NaNoWriMo: Writing Is Fun

It’s almost November, and for many people that means more than just blustery weather coming in and blow-hard political ads finally going out: It also means National Novel Writing Month – or NaNoWriMo – is on its way.

In case you don’t already know, NaNoWriMo is an opportunity to spend November hunkered down, ignoring the outside world and churning out 50,000 words of rough-draft fiction in only 30 days. Why? Well … why not?

In past years Miss Communications has sung several of NaNoWriMo’s praises and pointed out lessons it offers in life. For example, NaNo’s quantity-over-quality approach (write like mad while your inner editor takes a rest) reminds us that a needs-to-be-worked-on draft is better than no draft at all. And the cram-it-all-into-one-month approach (the project ends at midnight on December 1st) brings deadlines and planning to the fore.

This year I’ve been looking into the kids’ version of NaNoWriMo – dubbed the Young Writers Program, or YWP – because several punkinheads in my life are planning to give it a go. As a result, I’ve learned another important lesson about big projects and challenging oneself in life: Everything’s more interesting when you make it more fun.

NaNoWriMo’s YWP is based on setting a challenging-but-reasonable goal as well as having a good time. Participants aim for word-count targets according their grade level, and the adults behind the program have devised a number of ways to keep the amusement level high – such as starting with a drawing of your characters and plotting the story’s events like a roller-coaster ride.

The kids’ section of the NaNoWriMo Web site includes a “Dare Machine” that helps writers spice up their storylines with suggestions like “We dare you to write a scene involving a giant toad, four ballerinas, and a bucket of tangerine juice,” and it offers workbooks that help kids think about what makes a book “great” or “gross,” how not to write boring dialogue, how to reward yourself for hitting milestones, and more.

And to keep the motivation going, there are “word-count chore coupons” young writers can give to the grown-ups in their lives. After all, nothing encourages you to finish an assignment like having to having to pick up dog poop if you don’t.

Of course, not everyone wants to spend November indoors, and not everyone wants to write a novel – but we can all learn a thing or two from NaNoWriMo’s let’s-have-a-good-time approach.

Imagine, for example, how involved we’d all be at work if meetings were less boring and slide sets were less “gross.” And imagine how motivated we’d be to hit milestones and deadlines if there were rewarding celebrations and entertaining odd jobs (hmmm... what's the corporate equivalent of dog poop?) on the line.

Altogether, the creators of NaNoWriMo – and especially the YWP – have put a great idea into (pun-intended) play. Perhaps it'll give us all some good ideas.

Many thanks to Jewels Hall-Payne at the Poudre River Public Library District for details and information on NaNoWriMo’s YWP.

Celebrate Information Overload Awareness Day

There’s a phase in human development when we can remember a full day’s events without the slightest problem. Classes and tests, sports and music lessons – ask the average high schooler what the schedule for next Tuesday looks like and you’ll get a full run-through, from breakfast to bedtime.

Ask an adult and you’ll get a blank stare, followed by “I have to look at my calendar.”

Part of the problem, surely, is that we’ve lost a lot of brain cells along the way – but another part is that working adults are consistently overloaded these days, with both tasks and information. There’s too much to do, and there's too much bombarding us while we do it.

If you’re interested in getting a handle on the overload in your life, consider participating in Information Overload Awareness Day on Wednesday, October 20th.

Information Overload Awareness Day is the brainchild of a research company called Basex. The organizers recommend a number of ways to participate in the day, including cutting your e-mail output by at least 10% (avoid replies to all, forwards, and anything that’s not truly necessary) and using more thorough search strings when looking for information on the Web (it’s much more efficient to search for “wireless modem reviews,” for example, than to take pot luck with “modems”).

Here are a few more suggestions on how to turn back the overload dial.

Unsubscribe to mailing lists. We all get too much e-mail, and a lot of it’s newsletters that we don’t need or read. If you’ve ended up on several useless mailing lists, celebrate October 20th by hitting the “unsubscribe” button – or, at the very least, mark some as “junk” so they won’t show up in your inbox anymore.

Simplify your slides. PowerPoint is often a vehicle for overloading our colleagues, and it’s our responsibility to stop that mess. Next Wednesday, pull up any slide that you regularly introduce with “Sorry about the tiny font” or “I know it’s hard to see what’s going on here” and cut it down. Considerably.

Carve out some uninterrupted time. If you work in a cubicle farm, you know it’s difficult to find time when you can focus, uninterrupted, on your tasks. Quietly observe IO Awareness Day by escaping to a calmer place or by displaying a “Do Not Disturb” sign for a while – and buckle down to get some real work done.

Stop trying to multitask. Most people think they’re really good at doing several things at once, but research tends to prove we’re not. To drive this point home, the folks at Basex are offering an online event (see InformationOverloadDay.com) that brings speakers, authors and other experts to a Web-connected computer near you. The only asking price is a simple pledge not to multitask during the event.

Altogether, information overload costs organizations and entrepreneurs a huge chunk of productivity – and money – everyday, but the solution lies within all of us. On October 20th, let’s remember to stop overloading ourselves and each other, and let’s start focusing those last remaining brain cells on getting our work done.

Let's Apply Smarts, Not Automation, to E-mail

The overwhelming nature of e-mail was in the news this week as Google rolled out Priority Inbox, a new feature that organizes your incoming Gmail messages according to their presumed importance to you.

The idea behind Priority Inbox is pretty simple: It tracks your inbox behavior, determines which e-mails you open fastest and respond to most, then pops those messages to the top of your queue, marking them as “important” as opposed to “everything else.”

The algorithm looks at the sender’s name as well as keywords within the message, and it gets more accurate over time. In fact, you can help train the system by giving it this-is-significant or this-doesn’t-matter hints.

No matter how well Priority Inbox works as an automated filter, of course, we all understand that it won’t be perfect. Imagine, for example, that you’ve received a happy update from a long-lost relative or a surprise query from a potential employer: Without any past behavior signaling that you’d consider these e-mails important, Gmail would squirrel them away with “everything else.”

And while these types of e-mails might be rare, they illustrate an important point: When it comes to understanding information, people out-perform machines. And it makes sense for us to capitalize on that human advantage rather than give it up as another lost art.

The idea that we should constantly automate is a common theme in American business. Once we apply the right structure, the thinking goes, our work can be done more quickly and predictably, requiring little cerebral input from us. It worked for Henry Ford, after all, so why not broaden the brush?

But there are other common themes in American business these days, too, such as “Please respect me as an important person, and not just a cog in the wheel,” “Please understand my talents are unique, and don’t replace me with a less-skilled worker,” and “Please don’t threaten my business and take away my livelihood by preferring cheaper/faster goods from somewhere else.”

The problem is, these thoughts don’t mesh well with “Let’s keep making our tasks so easy that we don’t really have to think” – because it’s incongruous to expect that our intelligent human input should be minimized but our impressively individual roles should be assured.

Automating certain tasks at work is a handy and helpful thing, but sometimes it’s just another kind of waste. If we truly want a workplace where our skills have value and our personal output can’t be cloned, we need to apply our minds and our talents in ways that no algorithm can match – instead of performing our work so mindlessly that a system needs be developed to rescue us from ourselves.

The only reason we need a function that wades through our copious screeds of e-mails and decides which ones matter and which ones don’t is because too many of us are sending out, on balance, too little that’s “important” and too much of “everything else.”

Let’s put a stop to that problem, and let’s stop turning our jobs into a series of mindless tasks, by tapping into our intelligence and talent on a regular basis – for example, before we hit Send.

Let's Rethink the Executive Exit

It’s hard to decide which would be the more rewarding role these days: that of Mark Hurd, former CEO of Hewlett Packard; or that of Steven Slater, former flight attendant at Jet Blue. Would it be more gratifying to admit a few of our flaws, get ushered through the door and collect a check for $12.2 million – plus stock options – on our way out? Or to tell off a passenger, blow the door wide open and grab a couple of beers as we leave?

In case you’ve missed any of the excitement, here’s what’s happened in the past couple of weeks: First, former HP CEO Mark Hurd resigned after the board of directors “asked” him to. Ostensibly the falling-out was tied to $20,000 or so in fishy-looking payments, but those who are good at spotting corporate bull suspect the board was looking for an excuse to pull the plug.

The second job-quitter was Steven Slater, the flight attendant who deployed an emergency escape and slid to his unemployment. According to Slater and witnesses, a passenger ticked him off over a baggage altercation, unintentionally whacked him in the head and opened up years of job frustration. At the end of the flight, when the passenger refused to cooperate again, Slater lost his cool, deployed the chute, grabbed the beers and jumped.

To the I-hate-my-job set, both exits seem pretty dreamy – but it does seem unfair that Hurd gets to retire on his millions while Slater could spend years in jail. After all, Hurd’s actions over the past several years have put thousands of people out of work and thousands of families into distress, and most of those still employed at HP say they’d rather leave (two-thirds of HP’s 300,000+ employees reportedly said in a recent survey that, yes, they’d leave tomorrow for an equivalent job elsewhere).

Slater, on the other hand, has helped thousands of passengers fly more safely and comfortably, and his recent moves have entertained millions. Sure, his goodbye stunt probably cost the airline thousands of dollars in delays and repairs, but they’re certain to recover it from Slater in legal proceedings – and Slater’s fans are sure to help him out.

The real pain in the Hurd story is that his work style – slash and burn, lay off thousands and take home millions – has been approved of and encouraged by a Wall Street culture that claims shareholder value is the only real measure of success. But now that his departure is dragging the stock price downward, his exit package is taking an enormous chunk and stockholders are suing the board for gross mismanagement, maybe we’ll finally see a change.

Maybe the next CEO will sign on with a compensation package that communicates “If you do a great job for everyone involved, you’ll be rewarded with a comfortable salary,” rather than “Go ahead and screw up: You’ll still be rich.”

And if the new plan’s authors need a place to start, perhaps they’ll consider getting rid of that ridiculous golden parachute. How about offering an inflatable slide and a couple of beers, instead?

"Professional" or "Businessy"?

What does the word “professional” mean to you?

If you’re like many people, that term brings up a number of positive thoughts from “neatly dressed” and “well-spoken” to “highly talented” and “a consistent source of great work.” For example, “I met the new guy André hired, and he’s clearly very professional.”

But there’s a downside to the word “professional,” too – a hint of negative associations from “slick” and “phony” to “uncaring” and “lacking a human touch.”  For example, “I got a quick response to my e-mail, but it was very cold and professional.”

Altogether, being professional is generally considered a good thing at work, and people tend to behave accordingly – letting their expertise and good manners shine through.

But some folks haven’t quite sorted out the positive from the negative when it comes to professional behavior, and they think they’ll earn a reputation for effective, proficient work by acting like heartless business drones.

Recently I saw a new term that might define these drones better than “professional” does: The word “businessy,” as in “Try to avoid that guy in the suit – he’s really businessy.”

The difference looks something like this:

For a business:
- Being professional means focusing on good work, so that your products and services can help people do what they want and need to do.
- Being businessy means focusing on making a buck, so that your customers won’t know what sort of shortcuts and cheap shots you’ve indulged in until it’s too late.

For managers:
- Being professional means asking your employees for new and creative ideas and giving them real consideration.
- Being businessy means asking for new and creative ideas but responding to each with “Before we can look into this, you need to show me irrefutable proof that it will work.”

In meetings:
- Being professional means opening up intelligent, honest conversations so that everyone can offer insights and great ideas.
- Being businessy means creating a closed, intimidating atmosphere so that people are afraid to say anything unless it mirrors the status quo.

And on a day-to-day basis:
- Being professional means maintaining a work/life balance that makes all those working hours meaningful and worthwhile.
- Being businessy means bragging that you have no time for a life outside the office and expressing condescension for people who do.

These days, a lot of people are moving away from a cookie-cutter approach to business that defines professionalism in a cold-hearted way; based on greed, one-upmanship and the fear of looking human at work.

Instead, they’re recognizing that too-businessy behavior is an outdated stick in yesterday’s mud, and that real professionalism – the kind that makes interesting things happen and gets exciting things done – is motivated by conscientiousness, enthusiasm and the joy of doing things well.

Got any tales of businessy behavior you've witnessed at work? Feel free to expose them here.