Dahle Communication

Know Your Audience - IBM marketing should read this article

An important feature when speaking is knowing who your audience is. This is one of the most vital pieces of information you need to have if you are going to be successful. However, this is not just for public speaking. With any form of advertising or marketing, you need to know your audience.

I was reminded of this when my wife came home from work one day with a pen from IBM that was sent to her office. It is a $150 pen in a very nice box that was sent with a letter. The letter talked about how they have done their research and feel that they could help improve her employers bottom line. Sounds like a great deal right? One problem - the company she works at has been bankrupt since last year and is closing its doors on Wednesday.

So, they clearly did not do their research. They probably did some research - maybe they looked at some old data and looked at a couple of key things - but they clearly did not know their audience.

Make sure you have done your research. Make sure you have prepared yourself for your audience. Fine-tuning your speech based upon your audience is so important it cannot be ignored. Take the lesson from IBM to heart - if you can do this, you are going to take one step closer to being a successful speaker.

Should Obama become the Hulk?

(note: the drawing comes from a friend of mine Tim Keller who does a weekly moleskine drawing along with M. Scott Hay - check it out!)

On April 20th, a BP owned off-shore oil platform exploded and started spilling oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Since that time, millions - if not billions - of oil has spilled into the Gulf and is starting to reach the shorelines of several states along the Gulf Coast.

This should be the story. The story should be the focus on BP and the fact that maybe oil isn't such a great resource for us to rely on. However, it has turned into a daily digest of the President's 'mood.'

Is the President angry? Why isn't he more angry? Should he be angrier? He isn't showing enough emotion on this topic!

Those were just some of the comments over the past couple of months. Of course, as politicians do, they caved to some of that pressure and in an interview Obama tried to show some anger and said he wants to "know who ass to kick." 

This was wrong. Obama was trying to please the wrong people. If people are more concerned about the President's mood than with the problems that we are going to have with cleaning up all of this oil, then he will fail. Seth Godin doesn't mention the President in his new post, but his point can easily be applied here.

However, Fareed Zakaria does talk about it. I have a lot of respect for Zakaria. I have talked about how his intelligence is a great asset to have when communicating your ideas. His latest article talks about how Obama caved to the media frenzy instead of focusing on having the government actually do something.

It will be interesting to see tomorrow what President Obama says in his Presidential Address to the nation. I don't care much about his emotion, and I think the media has gone overboard with their analysis, but I do understand the need for emotion.

If you want to be a great communicator, you need Pathos. You need to have emotional proof. The audience needs to believe you and want to listen to you. Obama has failed in this respect regarding the oil spill - and while I think we should be focusing more on BP and what they are going to do to fix this problem - Obama does need to convey a strong message on Tuesday.

If the past few months doesn't teach you anything else, you should learn that communication can change the way people think about something and what they focus on.

Google is driving me mad!

I'm a fairly tech-savvy person. I'm up-to date on most tech things that come out, I pretty much manage a lot of my on-line accounts and I try to keep up on it as much as I can. I will admit that I am no tech expert and am woefully inadequate when it comes to some things.

With that being said, Google - whom I usually love for their simplicity and ease of use - is starting to absolutely drive me nuts! The way they register domains and the DNS system that they use is so un-user friendly that I am writing a post about it. I'm usually pretty patient, but it is getting out of hand.

Because of the mess that is the Google DNS system (to be fair, it is ENOM, but that is who Google decided to pair with) that I decided to transfer the domain to Godaddy.com. I thought this might be fairly easy to do - however, this is also becoming a hell of a lot more work than it should be.

I know I sound irritated and angry because I am. Ease of use and proper communication is key to a successful business. If you don't communicate with your clients well, they will leave you and probably tell others not to do business with you. Google - I love a lot of what you have to offer, but you bungle your web registration service. You need to drop ENOM and use someone else. Needless to say, I am never going to register a domain name with Google again.

Sorry to vent everyone, but this poor of communication and resolving the issue is the core of service - and it is something that irritates me a great deal.