Incoming Email Subject Lines, Ranked

Most Email is terrible. But some emails are actually fun to receive. Some. So for your day off from work/school/whatever it is that you have to worry about tomorrow but you are trying not to think about today reading pleasure, I submit this incomplete, yet definitive ranking of Incoming Email Subject Lines.

Here we go...

15. 'Whitepaper: 5 Tips for Managing Gen Y'

14. 'REMINDER: 'Your credit card payment is due in 5 days.'

13. 'You may already be a winner!'

12. <Subject: Blank>

11. 'It's time to check-in for your flight tomorrow.'

10. 'New comment on 'Easter Candies, Ranked'.'

9. 'Steve, please add me to your LinkedIn network.'

8. 'Up to 70% off for the Brooks Brothers clearance sale!'

7. 'Your Amazon.com order has shipped!'

6. 'New price drop on Las Vegas Hotels!'

5. 'Out of the Office: I am out of the office today...'

4. 'This meeting has been canceled, and removed from your calendar.'

3. 'ALERT: A Direct Deposit has been received into your account.'

2. 'Your upgrade on Flight 239 has been confirmed.'

1. 'You have no scheduled events today.'

Have a great Monday and for folks in the USA, a nice Memorial Day. Thanks to all the brave men and women who gave their lives in defense and service.

CHART OF THE DAY: Messaging Apps vs. Social Networks

While you were busy growing your empire on Facebook these last few years, something interesting has been happening in the non-US parts of the world and in particular, among those crazy kids that won't get off of your lawn. 

Global usage of the top 'messaging' apps, (like WhatsApp and WeChat) have caught up with global usage of the top social networking apps, (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram). Here's the chart, courtesy of Business Insider, then of course, some FREE comments from me after the data. 

Some quick thoughts on what, if anything this trend might mean for for HR/Talent pros:

1. Messaging, like regular old SMS texting, is always going to be the most effective way to get people's attention. If you can get into a candidate or prospect or employee's 'white list' of messaging buddies, then you can capture some valuable attention and even more valuable mindshare. Of course this is easier said than done, so for now most of us will just keep emailing....

2. Communication preferences and habits, as evidenced in how some of these messaging apps dominate in certain countries and among certain age cohorts, vary quite a bit around the world. While the US has been slower to adopt messaging compared to say Asia, other parts of the world see messaging as their de facto communication medium. Some of this is probably due to the greater tendency in many non-US parts of the world for internet usage to be almost completely a mobile-device scenario. And for many of these users, Mobile = Internet = Messaging. Whatever the reason, any HR pro that has to operate globally has to be aware of how local audiences want to and expect to interact and communicate.

3. Some of the elements that have fueled the growth of messaging apps are bleeding into workplace or enterprise apps as well. The best recent example would be Slack, a corporate communication platform that works on both smartphones and computers, and seems to be succeeding where other attempts to create corporate social networks, i.e. the "Facebook for the Enterprise", have struggled, by replacing e-mail as the main communications channel inside firms.  Organized around short, direct and group messages, organized into topics or projects, Slack seems to be catering to the same kinds of people who have adopted messaging apps overall. 

Anyway, one last thought, take a look at what kinds of apps your kids are using these days too. Chances are they are using much more messaging and less 'social networking' than you think.

Have a great day!

One day in blogging, a partial list of pitches

Blogging has been pretty good to me over the years. So has doing the HR Happy Hour Show/Podcast. Both of these things have opened up plenty of doors, created some interesting opportunities, and enabled me to meet some great people along the way. One other thing about doing this is (and back when I started I had no idea was even a thing), is that once you have been blogging or podcasting for a while, you get on the radar of lots of news folks, PR firms, and other organizations that would like you to know about and potentially help publicize their news, product launches, their client's new book, or some event they are promoting.Jasper Johns, White Flag (which is what I am waving towards my Inbox)

Most of these outreach messages are perfectly professional, offer up some kind of interesting content or news that in theory might be interesting to me (or readers and listeners), and I honestly don't mind getting them one bit. I don't/can't respond to all of these PR pitches, (there can be lots of them in any given day), but I still appreciate them. Even after all this time doing this it is still sometimes surprising that (some) folks are interested in what I think, have to say, and want to connect with the audience. 

Why blog about the behind the scenes stuff that goes on with blogging, even a small, niche blog like this one?

I don't know, it just seemed interesting to me today. Which continues to be the primary reason I blog about anything (note for any PR folks who might read this). But just in the last hour or so as I was checking some email, planning out the day, I received four or five of the aforementioned 'pitch' emails, in quick succession. That seemed kind of unusual, and so I checked back at the last 24 hours or so of my received emails and I thought that, wow, I have gotten a ton of PR pitches already this week. So since I brought up the topic, and I am too far down the path of this post to start over with some other, better idea, I wanted to share a partial list of the PR pitches (mostly Email subject lines only) that have arrived in my Inbox in the last 24 hours or so. 

Submitted without comment, judgement, or endorsement...

1. Disturbing: Workplace Suicide the New Trend

2. Volcano Calbuca Erupts! Are you Prepared?

3. Innovating Service Summit Webinar Will Feature Internationally Customer Service Experts

4. Lee Hecht Harrison Poll Finds Most Workers Losing Sleep Due to Work-Related Stress

5. Gain Insight to Independent Workers to Build the Best Teams

6. Nepal Earthquake Rocks the World!

7. WiFi Will Run Future Wearables

8. 8th Annual Mobile Excellence Awards Coming Soon!

9. Special Invitation: HR Secrets You Need to Hear

10. The Lavender Graduating Class of 2015 Lacks Legal Protection Moving Into the Workplace

There's a bunch more, but you get the idea. If there is an idea.

Blogging is kind of a weird thing sometimes.

Have a great day!

Expressive, boisterous, and unpretentious

Expressive, boisterous, and unpretentious - not sure they would be the first words that would come to mind if I were asked to describe myself, but according to IBM Watson's Personality Insights Demonstration, based on a text analysis of my post about text messaging earlier this week, those are the most accurate descriptors.

It is a fun tool and exercise to try, (you can play along with any of your, or someone else's writing samples here). Simply paste in a block of text, click on 'Analyze', and Watson will let you know how the text sample equates to personality elements like openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, and more.

The tool even generates a neat narrative explaining the person behind the text sample, who knew that 'My choices are driven by a desire for modernity'. That is pretty accurate, I think. Well maybe. 

What's the point of the tool, if not just for a bit of fun?

According to IBM -

The IBM Watson Personality Insights service uses linguistic analytics to infer cognitive and social characteristics, including Big Five, Values, and Needs, from communications that the user makes available, such as email, text messages, tweets, forum posts, and more. By deriving cognitive and social preferences, the service helps users to understand, connect to, and communicate with other people on a more personalized level.

Better understanding, ability to connect with others, and to enable improved interpersonal communications all sound like pretty worthy goals, so at least I am interested in any technological means to assist us humans with these challenges.

Oh, one more thing, the Watson Personality Insights tool also generates a neat looking graphical analysis of the writer's personality - here is mine from the aforementioned post about text messaging.

Like I said, really neat. Although from the looks of the chart I probably need to work on my 'self-transcendence' a little bit. Whatever that means.

You can take the IBM Watson Personality Insights tool out for a spin here, and if you do, let me know what you think.

The text message is the new phone call

If you find yourself saying or thinking something along the lines of 'I can't believe he/she texted that! Why didn't they pick up the phone and call instead?' you need to stop, take two or three deep cleansing breaths, and join the rest of us in 2015.

I thought about this again while reading about a Major League Baseball player who texted an apology to a player on an opposing team who, due to a borderline unsportsmanlike play, had been injured by the first player in a previous game.

Ask your kids about texting (if you have some). Or if you don't, just find someone between say about 13 and 35 and ask them about the kinds of messages and circumstances where it is completely acceptable to use text (or other messaging tools like WhatsApp) as a medium of communication as opposed to more traditional and formal tools like email or (GASP!), the phone.

I have banged on this drum a couple of times before, and I know recently so has KD, the HR Capitalist. But somehow I still think more widespread, comprehensive, and mainstream adoption of text and other kinds of short message service apps for internal and job candidate communications still eludes all but the most progressive organizations. And I think the problem has nothing at all to do with evidence of the effectiveness of texting, (everyone reads their texts, usually within minutes of receiving them), but rather from some old-fashioned, preconceived notion that somehow texting is inappropriate for some types of communications.

But again, ask a 25 year old about what types of messaging would not be 'appropriate' to receive via text and it is quite likely that you will hear a very short, perhaps non-existent list of subjects and topics where a text is not the desired form of communication. And the kinds of thing that might be mentioned by said 25 year old (extremely important family news, a death of a close friend or loved one, etc.), are also not the kinds of things you would email about either, (the easiest, and therefore default method of communication for 99% of organizations).

Most people send more texts than they receive, read and respond within minutes, and for a growing population of your workforce, have grown up with texting and short messaging as a staple of all their digital communications - with family, friends, and if you would just get on board, with organizations too.

And now with the imminent release of the Apple Watch, and its likely popularity (and tiny form factor), short, to the point, and informal messaging will only get more popular (and essential for organization's communicators).

Stop drafting that next 'All employees' email and see if you can't find a way to get your message across in the medium that more and more of your employees prefer, and enjoy. And one that they actually read.

Have a great week!