Fire the consultants, now

A friend who works for the IT division of a large financial services company received a company email yesterday. A full five-scrolls-of-a-Blackberry long, it began by announcing that as employees were no doubt aware, in response to the global economic crisis, departments had been “rightsized” in 2009. Over subsequent years, teams had “responded to the new economic situation by engaging external talent to fulfill specific project requirements and respond to client needs”. However, as the result of a “detailed resource analysis”, it was now imperative that these resources be “optimized” and the company would therefore be embarking on a “major reinternalization program”.

A simpler way to write this email might have been: “A lot of your colleagues were fired five years ago. Since then, the rest of you have been hiring consultants to replace them because you had far too much work to do and the clients were starting to notice. But the last bill from Accenture was eye-watering so you need to fire the consultants, now.”

Apart from being badly written, this email is liable to inspire panic in anyone who actually manages to understand it – crucially, it doesn’t explain whether managers are allowed to hire new employees, or are expected to do the work themselves. In fact it’s the perfect example of why HR departments should be kept well away from internal communications.

Many companies do internal communications less well than external communications. The victim of lack of time, lack of money, and horrific internal politics tends to result in an un-coordinated approach whereby a continual stream of organisational memos by HR drowns out any interesting stuff on strategy, new tools or indeed anything that would help employees do their jobs better or feel proud to work for the company.

The rather worrying result is employees who may know their company has an equal opportunities policy, but who have no idea what its objectives for the year are (or indeed how what they themselves are doing contributes in any way to the company’s success).

Digital offers lots of innovative ways to communicate better (or to use current jargon “engage”) with employees, from social intranets or wikis to internal apps. But the baseline has to be writing in plain English so that people can understand what you’re saying. The rest is a nice-to-have.

Overcoming malscribophobia: the campaign for plain writing

I’ve been suffering for a while now from malscribophobia. For anyone who hasn’t heard of this debilitating condition, it’s an extreme intolerance of bad writing, manifested in sudden flushes of rage at missing apostrophes, spurious capital letters, excessively long sentences and the like. 

It’s been getting worse. It began with English and has recently spread to French. And here’s the thing they don’t tell you: there’s a lot of bad writing in French.

The problem is, French is a language that appreciates “style”. Even the phrase used to describe being able to write well - “avoir une belle plume” – buckles under the weight of “style”. When style is prized over substance, or confused with cliché, the results are disastrous.

Take the guidebook to Venice I bought for this year’s holiday. Published under the brand of a well-known travel series, it should have been informative, with some choice historical anecdotes, clear recommendations, and visual and linguistic devices to help you navigate the book (and most importantly, decide what to do after the morning’s third cappucino).

Instead, what emerged from the pages was a step-by-step massacre of both Venice and the French language. You’d need to read the whole book for the complete, awful experience, but here are a few of my favourites:

1) On the complex reasons for the decline of Venitian domination of the Mediterranean, and the completely unrelated fact the city is home to Vivaldi:

“Après avoir perdu sa suprématie maritime, Venise découvrit le pouvoir de la musique”
("After losing its naval supremacy, Venice discovered the power of music")

2) On the fact that the relics of St Mark were lost at some point in history (crucially, it doesn’t bother to explain when, or whether they were ever found):

“Les voies du Seigneur furent parfois obscurcis par la poussière des travaux: on égara par deux fois les réliques du Saint”
("The way of the Lord was sometimes not easily visible through the clouds of construction dust: the Saint's relics were lost twice")

3) And finally, on the reasons why the glassmakers of Murano would choose to demonstrate their skills in public (incidentally they don’t – expect to see a handful of very overpriced shops):

“Aujourd’hui, conscients de ne pouvoir être égalés, le verriers oeuvrent au vu de tous…”
("Today, in the knowledge they cannot be rivalled, the glassmakers work in full view…")

If overstylised and meaningless sentences like these weren’t enough to bring out a severe episode of malscribophobia, the titles and icons used to guide readers through the book would tip anyone over the edge. 

Every single phrase came from the same banal list of infantilised and lazy travel-speak. So each area had “Les incontournables” and “Le meilleur du quartier” (with a little heart next to it – perhaps this was supposed to convey why the list was different from “Les incontournables?”) A separate list of things were “100% venitien” (unlike, one presumes, everything else in a guidebook about Venice?) and an extraordinary number of things were in a patronising diminutive: “une petite faim”, “un petit café”. The overall impression was of a restaurant guide for 7 year-olds.

The immediate solution was easy – throw the book in the nearest canal – but the wider problem remains. Malscribophobia doesn't actually exist – I made that bit up – but bad writing is everywhere. I’m making it my resolution for the rentrée to be even more intolerant of sentences with no meaning, uneccessary clichés, and patronising turns of phrase. The campaign for plain expression, writing that actually means something, starts here.

Actionaria - what do retail shareholders want from communications?

I’ll be heading to Actionaria tomorrow, the annual show for retail investors in France. It’s mainly out of nosiness – having produced a brochure for one of my clients, I’m quite keen to see what the competition has come up with.

Retail investors are a small but important group – typically they are “sticky” shareholders. In it for the long term, goes the conventional wisdom, they are loyal to existing management and can help counteract price volatility resulting from trading by high turnover institutional investors, or market stress.

But what retail investors want – and therefore how companies should communicate with them – tends to be a relatively neglected area of research. Three facts stand out:

The first is that retail investors invest overwhelmingly in household names. In recent research by Investec Wealth & Investment, over half the 2,000 interviewees declared they were more likely to buy shares in well-known companies. Moreover, the same proportion would continue to hold such shares even if they performed poorly.

The second is that they want a simple story. They want to know what the company does, how it makes money and its vision for the future.

The third is that retail investors overwhelmingly use the internet to make decisons: research by the SEC shows that 4 out of 10 private investors will visit a company’s website to gain information.

What does this mean for communications?

First of all, if you’re not a household name, time to demonstrate how you fit into people’s lives. IMI proudly announces on its homepage, for example, that it “converts industry knowledge and market insight into design-engineered solutions”. This doesn’t mean much to most people. Dig deeper in the website and you discover they play a crucial role in areas of concern to the general public, such as clean energy, energy efficiency and healthcare. There’s material for a compelling retail shareholder story here – but it isn’t being told.

Second, make the most of the "third party" channels these investors rely on: press, and retail brokers (particularly in the UK and US). Not only do they reach a wider audience, but their independent view makes them valued by small shareholders. Tell your story simply to journalists and brokers. Then keep telling it.

Finally, invest in your website. Navigation is key – your audience is internet-friendly but not necessarily internet savvy. Ensure your IR site and annual report are no more than one click away from the homepage. Both the homepage and the IR landing page should provide an overview of what the company does, with information logically arranged so investors can quickly and easily locate what they need. Shareholders should have the option to subscribe to regular email alerts, or dedicated shareholder newsletters to keep them up-to-date with the company and generate further loyalty.

The limits of fluent

I was once checking in at a remote airport in the middle of China when I saw a sign behind the airline representative that made me erupt in a fit of giggles. “We take your bags and we send them all over the world!” it proclaimed proudly.

Trying to convey to the well-meaning Air China representative why this was so funny proved to be a non-starter. “It is not correct?” she enquired, sadly. “Yes and no. It’s hard to explain. But it doesn’t matter”.

It didn’t matter, of course. My bags arrived in Beijing, and subsequently at Heathrow. But this mistake – the result of someone who thought they could speak perfect English being allowed to print a sign - is repeated ad infinitum around the world in contexts where it does matter. Where the worst that can happen isn’t that a foreign tourist might have a good laugh on the last day of their holiday – it’s that you will look unprofessional to potential customers.

There’s a very odd phenomenon – let’s call it monolingual hubris – where people who are really, really careful about their own language, and would be horrified to send out anything with a misplaced comma or wrong adjectival ending, think it’s absolutely fine to publish something they’ve written in another language without getting it thoroughly checked first.

I know, because I’ve suffered from monolingual hubris myself: I once tried writing a website in French. It took me days. Weeks, even. I felt terribly clever when I’d finished. Gramatically it was virtually flawless. There was one small problem. It just didn’t read like French. It was the website equivalent of taking your bags and sending them all over the world.

There are a few exceptions to this rule, Samuel Beckett being the obvious one. But most of us are not Beckett. I’m fine with that, and now announce cheerfully to clients that I don’t write in French, but can introduce them to a great French copywriter if they need one. 

Happy Halloween - or why content strategies needn't be scary

I woke up this morning to a deluge on Twitter of things vaguely related to Halloween. Once I’d got over the photo of a pumpkin carved to look like Yoda, (and retweeted it, obviously) I noticed a couple of scary-themed tweets from some more serious-minded companies like Mintel, Penguin and Salter Baxter. The latter, a corporate reporting agency, announced it planned to tweet scary sustainability facts throughout the day.

Really? you might say. And yes, this kind of thing only works if it’s done properly. But it did remind me of a conversation the previous week: a big B2B brand, the kind that tends to make money rather than headlines, who announced to me, “we know we need to say more but we just don’t have very much news”.

On the one level, their comment was right – few people want to read about deals signed between companies in a specialist field. On another level they were totally wrong – they have a lot to say, because what this company does has a direct impact on most people’s lives. They just need to find the right format to say it – and the right hook to get people reading.

This company is not alone. Lots of companies have things to say on themes that people find interesting, without necessarily having ready-made news hooks like an acquisition, a brand new product or an event.

There are ways to get round this, and PR professionals have been working some of the formulae for years. But in the era of social media and webzines, even B2B brands, have an opportunity to engage with customers, suppliers and other stakeholders directly, on specific subjects that interest them. Take data security, which has become extremely newsworthy as a result of the NSA debacle, and Adobe’s embarrassing admission that as many as 38 million of its customer accounts may have been hacked. Traditionally unglamorous IT companies can use the spike in interest to promote their own views in an engaging way, direct existing customers towards white papers, feature the issue in a webzine…

This is not to say you can create news where there is none. Tweets, blogposts and articles must remain relevant to their audience. But thinking in terms of themes rather than one-off events provides a solid foundation for a content strategy- and has the additional advantage of encouraging brands to focus on the core story rather than disparate events.

Of course if you got this far, you will have spotted the trick. I used the Halloween hook to get you to read about content strategies. However, as you’ve got this far, here’s a reward. That pumpkin carved to look like Yoda.

Translate the desired effect, not the words

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the limits of translation. I don’t mean those moments where you realise there isn’t the right word for something in the other language. Rather, I mean those times when you come across a whole phrase that is so imbued with one country’s culture that its translation into the other will result in something that is frankly bizarre.

Take educational attainment. In France, most people will begin their CV or corporate bio with which business school or grande école they attended. Little matter that they subsequently became the chief exec of a CAC 40 company / prize-winning novelist / President of the Republic. No, the important thing is that they graduated from ENA or HEC.

This speaks reams about the French system and how it works. But if you try to translate it into English, those cultural references don’t carry across. Over the age of 25, beginning your English corporate bio with where you went to university is at best slightly odd, and at worst, tacitly implies you’ve achieved very little since.

This is why, every time I have been confronted with the issue, I have advised French executives to move any reference to what they did when they were doing when they were 20 to the end in the English version, but keep it at the beginning in the French. For me this results in an accurate translation, one that is based on a ranking by value of what the person has achieved in the eyes of each country’s readers.

This is a very simple example, but you can take the idea much further. Take speechwriting, for example. A British or American executive, for example, needs to speak in short, clear sentences to be authoritative. Ideally, there should be humour, to show his “human side” and to convey the impression that he is sufficiently at ease to joke in front of the audience. In France, excessively short sentences make you sound cold, and jokes are definitely an optional extra.

I’m a big fan of translation that raises its hat to cultural assumptions. In fact I practice it myself. My English CV begins with the fact I have 15 years’ experience in corporate communications. The French? “Diplomée de l’Université d’Oxford…”

The art of Anglification Part 2: dare to avoid the borderline

Just over a year ago, I wrote a post on "strategic reflections on transversal actions" – the art of turning dreadfully mangled Franglish into something resembling real English without offending the French colleague who's asked you to read their carefully crafted prose. Having spent the last couple of days reviewing a particularly dire translation as a favour to a friend, I thought I’d add a new “borderline” category to the danger list.

“Borderline” is all the stuff you can just about get away with. Used once, it’s ok. Used several times and the underlying French becomes immediately noticeable, the verbal equivalent of discovering a pile of steak-frites hidden behind the Chesterfield.

So here goes: the ultimate guide to borderline Franglais, and how to avoid it:

• Au service de. As in, une expertise pointue au service d’une approche opérationnelle. The sort of phrase that used to inspire panic in me when I first started writing French. How lofty. How elegant. But really, how utterly, totally meaningless – and, as it turns out upon closer inspection, lazy. In English, stringing together random ideas is considered perfectly normal. Because French finds this horrifyingly non-Cartesian, links are created where there are none. So be daring. Replace au service de with a simple and. Should anyone take umbrage, embark on a smug and lengthy explanation of the relationship between Descartes’ thinking and the structure of the French language.

• Atout. As in un atout culturel, un atout précieux. Frequently preceded by constitue as in X constitue un atout important. Most translators plump for asset, but really, how often do you talk about assets in English, other than when making out your will? Time to be daring again! Replace the whole lot with a single adjective. E.g. La famille et les amis peuvent souvent constituer un atout important - Family and friends are often vital 

• (…) In French, you can write long lists of examples in brackets, followed by “…” at the end when you run out of inspiration. In English, you can’t. It really is that simple. Of course, this being a fairly innocuous difference between the two languages, you can definitely get away with it the odd time, should your life, or relationship with your French boss depend on it. However, where possible, replace with (for example x, x and x).

• Adjectival phrases. Hard to describe, easy to spot. All those sentences in French corporate literature that start out with something like Véritable spécialiste des…., nous… The ultimate borderline, because used once or twice, they’re perfectly English. The problem is overuse. Used over and over again in English, it’s a structure that sounds – well, like French.

Now I’ve started, I could go on for hours. (In fact véritable, in the point above, has just made it onto the next list – a real specialist, a real asset… as if the reader would otherwise expect a load of fakes). Uncomfortably, you will find that the worst overuse of borderline words and phrases is in bad French, but it’s generally safer to avoid tackling that one head-on. Just take pride in the fact your English “translation” ends up being better than the véritable thing.