Touch. Tod Maffin
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terms-of-use agreement is 2,268 words long. Since the average person reads roughly 250 words per minute, the nine minutes it would take one of us to read the agreement would be longer than it would take to drink our coffee. That means most of us would be ready to leave before we were in a position to accept the terms and do anything meaningful online.
Privacy policies are another conundrum.
Tod’s website privacy policy is written in clear language. And, because the “personality” of his brand is friendly and even a bit non-traditional, it reads like someone speaking:
Man, I hate nosy browsers. I hate them worse than you do.… Still, there’s that whole “balance” thing — should I strip all good functionality out of my site and make it marginally functional but butt-ugly (I’m looking at you, Craigslist) or make it a more helpful site at the expense of some cookie-collecting?
I’m opting for the second.
What I Know About You: The only information my site collects about you are things that every single other web server in the world collects — your IP address, what web page your browser requested, and some basic info about your computer (your operating system, screen resolution, etc.). All websites collect this info. All of them. In fact, there’s no way to not collect this info. It’s just how the Web was built.
What I Do Not Know About You: Unless you manually fill in a form giving me that info, I have no idea who you are. I don’t know your age, your phone number, your email address, your street address, or why your mom calls you “Bosso.” Nothing you do on my site identifies you without you knowing about it. I mean, I suppose you could be filling in a Contact Me form in your sleep, but if that’s the case, you probably have bigger problems to deal with….
Don’t Blame Me: Also, my site uses some pretty standard third-party services (like Wufoo to make forms, Google to keep track of analytics, AdRoll to present you with reminders about my site in banner ads when you’re elsewhere on the Web, and so on). All these people have their own privacy policies, most likely written by people far more intelligent than I. I don’t have any control of what their sites or cookies do, but I wouldn’t use them if I thought they were evil. You should probably read their own policies if you’re freaked out about this stuff.
Of course, his light tone might not be appropriate for your brand. Still, there’s likely plenty of room for your official documents to be made less, well, officious.
By the way, you can read Tod’s entire privacy policy at http://todmaffin.com/privacy.
Clarity, of course, does not imply complete organizational transparency. You don’t need to publish everyone’s salaries online (though at least one company, BufferApp.com, does exactly that — and outlines the calculation it uses to determine what it pays people).
Clarity is about simplicity in your communications and directness in your phrasing. Legal, human resources (HR), sales, contracting, shipping and receiving … every department in every organization will benefit from clarity
Humanity
Finally, the most important factor. In all your efforts, you should strive to inject humanity into the mix. While many organizations find it difficult to make humanity part of their day-to-day operations, it’s actually easier than you might think — even in the digital age.
Mark has often referred to this as making “digital eye contact.” That is, being able to gain the undivided attention of an audience, no matter how small or large, even for a moment. It is possible to make eye contact online in a way that’s analogous to making eye contact with your lunch companion, the people you’re having a coffee with, or the conference hall you’re addressing. You need to be your human self, speak in a human tone, and use human language and human-relatable experience.
Instinct
Human companies have learned how to trust their “organizational gut feeling,” as articulated by the people in the trenches. If you’ve hired properly, you’ll have a team of smart, sensitive, feeling people. Their first instincts are often the best for your business.
For instance, consider how many organizations end up crippling their own efforts by trusting data over instinct. Suppose you issue a detailed Request for Proposal (RFP) to build a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform. You’ll receive vendor proposals, each detailed by the requirements outlined in your RFP. But these data points don’t make up the entire picture. Immeasurable factors like “I just got a funny vibe from the sales guy” are as important (if not more so) than the line items detailed in the vendors’ responses.
While most organizations use the simple response-evaluating equation of Ability + Price = Decision, you should also factor intuitiveness into this calculation. Thus, decisions should be more along the lines of Ability + Price + Gut Feeling = Decision.
Back in 2000, Tod founded a dot-com company called MindfulEye, which developed artificial intelligence to understand the meaning behind online chatter. With this software, companies could gauge the subjective mood of public opinion on the Internet. With a few clicks, you could see a chart of people’s opinion of a given company. Tod’s company went public in eighteen months, and this category would later be known as sentiment analysis.
Several venture capital firms were vying to be the company’s second-round funder. Tod and his partners met with three such firms and evaluated them based on their past performance, skills of executives, and the proposed valuation and terms. But at one of these meetings, Tod’s group got a bad vibe from one of the vying firm’s leaders. They couldn’t put their finger on it, but something struck them as odd — perhaps a sense of distraction, perhaps of looking for a quicker stock turnaround than they wanted. Still, that group’s proposal on paper seemed strongest, and they discounted their gut feelings and went with that group.
While MindfulEye did well, they later found their instincts had been right — that firm probably wasn’t the best partner for long-term growth. MindfulEye grew to about twenty people before being caught up in the dot-com bomb and was unable to secure additional funding rounds. Trusting their gut would have placed the company on a more fruitful path.
Stories
Another component of building humanity into your organization’s mix is using anecdotes and storytelling as part of the corporate ethos. Leaders certainly need to communicate important information to their troops, but each time you do, you should look for a human story to articulate the impact on your actual customers, employees, shareholders, and partners.
This will be easier for some departments than others. Many marketing groups already develop character portraits to represent the people in their markets. (“Jill is a thirty-year-old junior executive who loves to travel and is trying to be better at fitness.”) But this kind of anecdotal information can and should extend to all parts of your organization.
Your legal team should try to understand someone’s motivation for using your brand imagery without your permission. (Perhaps they’re a superfan and are trying to connect with your firm or share their enthusiasm to attract others to the products and services you offer.)
Your human resources team should define custom benefits packages based on the real-world needs of your employees, not just accept what’s offered by a benefits administration firm.
Your customer service team should rely less on scripts and instead try to picture the way people are interacting with your product or service, to better empathize with frustrations.
The ability to relate to people and communicate that quality in stories isn’t restricted to the Type-A personality leaders like Steve Jobs and Richard Branson. It’s a skill anyone can learn, one that gets better with practice. One simple way to start is to identify what specific problem people had prior to using your organization’s services and then paint a picture of how your service has improved their lives.
Start now.
How You Relate
Likewise, you should strive to understand how your market understands you.
When