 Improving business impact of technical writing and UX writing outlines how to increase the business value of two writing disciplines that directly affect customer experience.
Before diving into that, the backstory shares how I developed an unusual point of view while practicing service design and experiential social media—and how this led me to technical writing and UX writing.
Then the main event: I offer five ways organizations can substantially improve the business impact of technical writing and UX writing.
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Africa [credit: Mapswire.com]
Africa is a nascent innovation powerhouse, and its leadership will become increasingly obvious during the coming decades, but the seeds are already visible as this post reveals: Africa’s population is exploding, and its young people are adopting tech alternatives to countries’ long-insufficient health, education, and financial infrastructure.
If you’ve been interested in international development for long, you have seen many prognostications about “Africa rising” over the years only to see them fade into oblivion. Predicting profound economic shifts is like predicting earthquakes; you study the driving forces and your algorithms crunch the data.
That isn’t stopping Helga Stegmann. She has led “user experience” agency Mantaray since 2006, and she gave a riveting talk last week in Chicago hosted by partner agency BoldInsight. In my experience, user experience folks rarely have their hands on the pulse of disruptive economic change, but the reason she is an exception reflects that Africa’s economic transformation is happening at the grassroots level (as with most revolutions), and her key orientation is user experience design, so researching users across rapidly evolving interfaces in devices. Follow along with my notes of her remarks […]
 How to Boost Employee Support for Nonprofit Fundraising reveals that, although employees can be tremendous supporters of nonprofit fundraisers, managers have to navigate some subtle waters to engage employees.
The key to “engagement” is making it voluntary and meaningful to employees as people. I say this because many organizations expect support, but expectation diminishes the voluntary requirement. When management harbors the attitude that employees owe them to promote the fundraiser, this will backfire. Here’s my response to a situation in the Nonprofit Technology Network forums.
A web/social media specialist for family services nonprofit sought advice for increasing employee participation in their annual fundraiser. Most of the responses explained how to use email signatures (someone even suggested appending promotional text to employees’ email signatures globally!). Someone else suggested gift certificates. I took a different tack.
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 The Potential of Female Leadership explores what lessons we may learn from bonobos’ matriarchal social structure, so we can build stronger, more collaborative human communities and groups. Bonobo Handshake is an enthralling insightful book, which I review here. A tremendous bonus is its similarities to and significant differences from Chimpanzee Politics (reviewed yesterday).
Bonobo Handshake was on the same library shelf as Chimpanzee Politics, but it is a very different book, and in delightful ways. At the same time, it offers intriguing insight into bonobos’ behavior, which differs significantly from chimpanzees’ and holds interesting lessons for human societies and groups. Although Woods is not a primatologist per se, she has conducted extensive research with her husband, who is, so explaining scientific experiments forms a key part of this book.
Bonobo Handshake is rare in a surprising way. Deftly and subtly, it contrasts the joy, harmony and matriarchal structure of the bonobos with chimpanzees’ and humans’ patriarchal societies and violence: the wars in and around the two Congos result in the […]
 True love for customers reveals how nonprofit, commercial and government organizations of all sizes can create much stronger relationships and business by transforming how they relate to customers.
Philosophers, clergy and psychologists have long acknowledged love as the most powerful force between humans. Love connects people like nothing else can, I think because love touches and binds together so many parts of the brain simultaneously: Love stimulates the reptilian brain because it’s related to survival. It is central to the limbic brain, which is grounded in emotion and memory. And love throughly engages the neocortex in art, ideals, and many other forms.
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 Why T-Mobile Needs a Chief Customer Officer shows how customers’ omni-channel interactions with enterprises demand profound integration of business processes, and how firms’ failure to “go all the way” in breaking down silos ultimately threatens business. Most firms don’t go far enough, including T-Mobile, and their silo-centric efforts fail to get the job done. To illustrate the point, I’ll share how T-Mobile alienates fans like me by not delivering what they promise.
This story also shows that the need for a CCO is particularly acute in mature economies like the U.S.A. and Europe because their silos were built decades ago, and their legacy processes often adversely affect customer experience.
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 Customer experience and experiential social media shows how you can succeed in transforming your customers’ experiences with your firm by adopting a refreshing and effective human approach. Transforming customer experience enables most firms to become more resilient and profitable.
If you’d like to watch this post instead of reading it, click the thumbnail button.
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 Customer success and experiential social media identifies three pitfalls that too often prevent customer success initiatives from attaining their potential for improving customer experience. In case you’re not familiar with the customer success movement, I outline its origins and scope, so you can appreciate the pitfalls and avoid them.
If you’d like to watch this post instead of reading it, just click its thumbnail.
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 Employee engagement and experiential social media shares my insights into one of the biggest challenges faced by business today—the employee engagement crisis, and how firms can change the game. Fewer than a quarter of employees are engaged, a slightly smaller quarter are “actively disengaged,” and the majority is blasé and punches the clock.
If you’d like to watch this post instead of reading it, click the thumbnail button.
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 This Drive to Trust trailer offers a quick behind-the-scenes look into why I’m doing it. Drive to Trust is CSRA’s major initiative this year. We’re partnering with firms in all kinds of industries to show that trust-building in digital public achieves marketing goals much, much better than promotion. These daring organizations will learn how to change how they relate to people, and they’ll become much more competitive.
If you’d like to watch this post instead of reading it, just click the thumbnail button.
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