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Follow SAIT Corporate Training on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/saitcorporatetraining/?viewAsMember=true
Connect directly with Jennie and Craig on LinkedIn:
Have burning questions about leadership that you'd like us to address? Email them to leadership.questions@sait.ca and let your voice be heard.
This is the Leading Beyond Any Title podcast, your guide to transformative leadership. We're your hosts. Hi, I'm Craig Hess.
Jennie:And I'm Jennie Gilbert. Each episode of Breakfast will bring you weekly quick lessons and conversations about topical leadership challenges. You're guaranteed to leave with one big idea, two applied strategies, and three questions to consider that can help enhance your leadership every day.
Craig:We'll bring you insights on how to lead beyond any title and unlock your own leadership potential.
Jennie:And we both hope you enjoy this episode.
Craig:It is 8. 01, so over you to kick things off.
Jennie:Let's go there. I'll just wait for the screen to load for those of you who are here. with us live. If you're not, and you're with us in podcast version, then you'll be welcome to find these within our show notes as well. So this morning, I thought we'd start with a little two plus two in a kind of way. And it dawned on me earlier this week that one of the reasons I really appreciate where we live. And for most of us here, we're joining in Canada and there's always a very high contingent. From Alberta and then from Calgary, although we do know last week, I think, or two weeks ago, we had somebody from Nigeria, so we are a little bit global, but you don't have to go very far to find a simply delightful view. And we also know that we are currently held in an age of busy, an age of overload and an age of distraction. The value of our pause has never been more important. And whether that is a pause to find the quiet in between the noise in your head and the noise in your world, or whether it's a pause just to check your energy or your mood before you enter into your next conversation, or given our topic today, Respond to that email, or whether it's a pause simply to filter what you're going to say in your next sentence. I'd like to add to those pauses, and I think because a lot of the time, wherever we are, that view will be great, that it's worth recognizing our land is pristine, our land is beautiful, and include in that pause just a moment to recognize. And acknowledge, as we do, that we are situated here in Calgary on the traditional territories of the Blackfoot Confederacy. That includes our indigenous people of the Treaty 7 region in southern Alberta, and they are the Siksika, the Bukhani, the Ghani, the Sutena, and the Stoney Nakoda First Nations. So thank you for joining us. Thank you for making your pause on a Friday to hang out with us and learn in this room today.
Craig:Perfect. Absolutely. And thank you, Jennie, for once again, kicking things off so well. We are joined this morning by Tamara Shepard. Tamara is one of our fantastic facilitators here at SAIT amongst many other things that she does. Tamara is a returning guest with us, probably the time before that you joined us, Tamara might have been one of our best attended and most engaging sessions. And I always chuckle with Jennie when we come to this topic, because we tend to spend a bit more time, perhaps on the, let's call it the softer side of leadership, all the things you can't necessarily tangibly touch, but I think that's what we're but business writing is something we do every single day and it's such an important piece and I think that's why it drives such engagement. And as we were talking about kicking things off this morning I know you were eager to. Really just pose a question to folks to get the chat going and with that, folks, please do follow along, throw your comments in the chat. If you have a specific question for us, please try and put it into the Q& A section versus the chat section. Tamara, over to you to pose your question or questions. To the audience.
Tamara:Awesome. Thank you so much, Craig and Jennie. Thanks for hosting me again. I'm so pleased to be here to talk about a subject that's really near and dear to my heart business writing and how we can improve our human connection with one another through our written work. We all know that it's not going anywhere, that this is one of the most prolific ways that we are communicating now. And. so much. It's just ramping up. We have way more more options, more choices in terms of writing for work. So how do we actually become better at this? And Jennie, I loved your land recognition moment this morning and just Reminding us every once in a while to take a pause, and we all know that in this world of busyness and rapid fire communication, that's becoming more and more challenging. So my question to everyone this morning is, do you feel like your attention spans are diminishing, shrinking, getting shorter. Let me know if you feel like there, there's something going on there in terms of the way you're wired. 100%. I see lots of thumbs up and yeses. Absolutely. I totally agree with you there.
Craig:I like the no, because somebody said no, because they're
Tamara:not on social media. Too many mindless scrolling.
Craig:There you go. My partner and I listened to a podcast yesterday saying our attention span is 47 seconds. I'm going to argue that might be combined. We
Jennie:might make 47 in here actually.
Craig:Exactly. Oh, that's fantastic. So Tamara and Jennie, I guess we all
Tamara:have that familiar feeling, right? Where we feel like. Something's going on and our brains are almost turning to mush. We can't focus, we can't concentrate we lose attention really quickly. So now the question to everyone is why? Why do you think that this is happening? What's going on in the world that is?
Craig:Social media is showing up there big time. I know that certainly is an impact for me.
Jennie:And the social media is endless too, I think, unless you're, and we see it a couple of times in the chat there, unless you're really on top of it and, I know, remove it from your phone, stop the notifications, take all those steps to help you, then it is there and it is constant.
Craig:Yeah, I think something else that I would add in here right now is, I'm sitting here looking at three different screens. I've got you on one. I've got another screen with notes. I've got the other screens here with the chat and the recording going. I've got the slides. If you forget to shut off your notifications for all your emails and teams messages or slack messages popping up, it's constant. It's coming everywhere all the time. That's certainly, I think, yes, we do more faster than ever before. The question is, do we actually do more and do we do it better?
Tamara:Yeah. There's that productivity question in there, right? We have access to all sorts of hacks and tools and tricks and techniques. And yet, are we becoming more productive? I'm not sure if that's the case in my world. I like some of the comments that I'm seeing come up through our chat here too. I am also wearing one of those watches that notifies me and tings and bings at me constantly. Too much content, fast pace. It's the world we live in. It's the information. Access to information. This is causing our attention spans to be almost splintered. We have too many things to focus on one at one time. And we all know that multitasking is a myth. It's a lie that it increases our stress level that it reduces the quality.
Craig:Yeah yeah, so sorry to accomplish
Tamara:any,
Craig:we're having a little,
Tamara:yeah.
Craig:Yeah. We're having a little scene. There you go. Speaking of technology, we're having a little technology glitch here, which interferes with communication. And I guess the question it poses for me then, Tamara, is if we have to try and cut through all this clutter. We are, for the most part, a lot of us are working via screens, via communication tools, whether it's, as I mentioned them all before, email, Slack, text, et cetera. How do we start writing better? Or writing to match the time that we are in, right? So maybe that's we could go down that path now to talk about, okay, we know we've got an issue here. We know we have. Deficit in the attention economy, perhaps.
Tamara:Yeah.
Craig:How do we address that? We have
Tamara:to play the game. It's an, it's a new field based on what's happening in the world with technology. And so when we're on a new field, there's a new game, there's new players. So we have to have some new rules in terms of, in order to play the game and to compete effectively. So you may have all heard, as I have there's a. An anecdote or a myth about the goldfish, right? The average attention span of the professional or the worker adults today has reportedly diminished from the year around 2000. Where it was about 12 seconds, and when the study was done in 2015, our attention spans had purportedly decreased to that of about eight and a half seconds, and we all know the the adage. Where it says a goldfish has a longer attention span than the average adult. So goldfish has an average attention span of about 9 to 10 seconds and we're hovering around 8. 5. Now it feels true, doesn't it? We're all just so distracted, but it's not actually true. That anecdote is based on one study that was done many years ago by a very famous company that we all know about. Turns out that Microsoft did a study about attention spans, and just as a quip in the introduction to this study, referenced the goldfish. So that's where it came from. So that illustrious goldfish is Dominated the scene in terms of net attention spans, but it really has nothing to do with our attention spans and the scientific study was not necessarily a scientific study about psychology and increasing science towards biology. It was all about consumerism, right? How can we, at Microsoft, increase the odds of keeping people's attention or eyes on the people? So that's where it all came from. It's a consumer study for marketing and advertising. Yeah, really fascinating stuff and that has been referenced so many times, but it's a singular study done for Microsoft for consumers. So what was the point of it? How can we earn your more ad revenue? That's the whole point. And when we're talking about ad revenue, we have to introduce the attention economy. So In the attention economy, your eyes are the capital, right? And it is a limited resource. So it becomes a highly competitive market to get, to capture your eyes, not only to capture them, but to retain them so that you're focusing on what they're trying to sell you. And you may be relieved to learn, as I was, that our brains are not actually being turned to mush, that we're not permanently damaged. That those neural pathways aren't being rewired so that our attention span are dramatically diminished to that of less than a goldfish, eight and a half seconds. That's a joke. That's a myth. Let's debunk that right now. What is actually happening is we are becoming trained to make decisions on the content that we want to consume more quickly, right? So every time we get fed a shiny bite of information, we either It's come in and bite it and get hooked, or we spit it out and say, not for me. So we're training, we're being trained to quickly decipher or filter out what's of interest to us. And we can do that within a couple of seconds, milliseconds now, I would say. Scroll, scroll swipe. So the attention economy is all about keeping your eyes on the page. So even though we feel like our brains are changing and our attention spans are getting worse, we're just, content providers are just becoming better and better at hijacking our attention. And quote unquote, they say that, we are hijacking your attention. Because attention is currency. In the attention economy. That makes sense. It makes too much sense. Yeah. For me, it was just this big aha moment. Okay. And a relief. Okay. We are not actually being changed, altered. We get a choice still, right? We still have power over this, but we are in the attention economy and we are competing and we have to get work done and we have to get people to respond to our messages. And it's a very busy playing field and it's becoming busier and busier, as you all are aware.
Craig:Yeah. So you triggered a couple of questions for me, Tamara, as you're going through that. And I don't know if it's as simple as saying, If we are trying to communicate to others through our emails, through our memos, I don't know, does anybody write in memos anymore? Or is everything just an email? All right, a good grief. If I have to open the attachment as opposed to just reading it in the email, like that's another comment. Are we suggesting that we have to figure out how to hijack other people's attention?
Tamara:Absolutely. That's I'm not even suggesting that I'm blatantly stating that,
Craig:right? If we want to compete on
Tamara:this field. How do we do that, right? How
Craig:do we, how do we feed them the shiny bits we want them to eat?
Tamara:Exactly. If attention is currency and companies are competing to separate you from that capital, we have to do the same. And we're competing against multi billion dollar, hundred billion dollar, trillion dollar companies that have very savvy techniques on how to do this. So let's learn from them. Let's pick this up. They do it by using what's called persuasive technology. And persuasive technology is something that we're all familiar with. We're just not really, it's there in the background, lurking to capture our attention. And persuasive technology could be the alluring frequency of that ping in your phone, right? It's push notifications, it's likes, it's tags, tagging your name or hashtags. It's those little red dots on the apps that you're looking at that are telling you attend to me. You have 22 messages. It's the flash, right? It's the sound bites. And that brings me to TikTok. ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, right? Isn't a social media company.
Jennie:I think we've just frozen there for a second, but we can pick up on a couple of things whilst we get Tamara back. I didn't know that TikTok's parent company wasn't a social media company.
Craig:Yeah. Yeah. And for me, it's interesting. She touched on a couple of things. Now, when you take a look at emails with Outlook, we're getting the, if you add somebody in the body of the email, it's flagged in that subject line and that's no trick, right? That's exactly one of the shiny objects. I think for me too, Jennie is when I think about this really comes down to, When you're trying to communicate on mass or by a written word, how are you building, we've talked about this before, how are you building that trust? You need that trust. You need the reason for people to start engaging with your messaging. Everybody always reads something that comes through the president. Maybe they do. Maybe they don't. All right. Maybe there's some folks who just say, yeah, forget it. But how are you hooking them in to get that piece? And we could talk about subject lines. We could talk about all those other pieces and Tamara, I see you're back now. But I'm just trying to think of
Tamara:trying
Craig:to get to some of the tactical and practical here that we can share folks to who are sitting
Tamara:here
Craig:looking at us today saying, I got a message I got to send out to my team or to my coworkers. They really need to read this. It's important. How do I do that without other than just using the little red exclamation point, which it seems 10 out of 10 emails are now red exclamation points.
Tamara:That's fair. All right. I'm sorry about the glitchiness here. I'm not sure what's happening. You guys are frozen. I'm assuming I'm frozen too so I left off talking about persuasive technology and yeah, you're right. Sylvia, the connection does seem to be bad here. I do have all my bars. I'm not sure what's going on, but Persuasive technology is what we can learn from when we're talking about writing in the age of TikTok. So let's take a cue from what they're doing. They're sending out bytes. We need to send out bytes too. And we definitely have to keep eyes on the page. So when you're doing that, of course, there's three things that people see when you send a message. Those three things that people can see on their very small screens. Many of us are looking at our emails and our messages on our mobile devices. Now, there's three things that you can see in your inbox. Yep.
Craig:We got, you
Tamara:can just, yeah, if you can let me know. I know that you can hear me. I'm excited
Craig:how those
Tamara:three things, what are the
Craig:three? You got our attention number
Tamara:one. Number one is you, your name. When I see Jennie's name or Craig's name come up. I already have a relationship with you. I already know. Your reputation of sending messages that I'm interested in, that pertain to me, that add value to my life. Build up your reputation of being that person who is intriguing, who who writes in a way that captures my interest and adds value to my life. So your name carries a lot of weight. That rapport building is really important. So it's the human connection and oftentimes we are missing that, right? Human to human connection. We really need that. The second thing and the most important thing I think is your subject line. What is your subject line saying? That's the headline. That's the flashy lure. It's at the end of your hook. So make it tasty. Make it shiny. right? Make it appealing to your readers. And I know this may sound crazy, but make it visually interesting. Make it visually interesting. I promise you that if you add a question or even an emoji to your subject line, it is more likely to be opened. So adding intrigue, creating curiosity stating of course what the topic is, but can you frame this in a way that gets me to bite? Yes, you can add emojis to your business writing. We're often told not to use emojis. And a few years ago, I swear a few years ago, I would have been on team no emojis because I read an article that said, if you send a smiley face in your business communications, you're going to be viewed as less competent at your job. And I've had to completely backpedal on that because again, the game has changed. Highly visual. We are extremely visual in the way that we're consuming information. We like short content form and. Emojis make your subject line stand out in very crowded inboxes, and I am not saying that lightly. We're talking crowded inboxes. So if you want to stand out, you have to do something different. This is one way that you can add visual interest to your subject line. And yeah, a lot of people are going to say they do look unprofessional, and here's the kicker. My rule of thumb when I'm using emojis is to be the second to use it. So I'm going to wait, and if you Pop a little smile in to add personality and tone of voice to your message. I feel like I've got permission now to add the same, but let's start paying attention. What is it about certain emails that intrigue you? Do you notice that they, when you get a little rocket, does it catch your attention? When you're invited to a meeting, is there something there that's catching your attention? If it's working for you, it's going to work for others. So pay attention, learn from that.
Craig:Exactly.
Tamara:Okay. And the other thing that the third thing, most important to catch people's attention is the first, few words of your message. Because before I open it in my inbox, I see that preheader space. And that preheader space is most valuable real estate on the page. And if you've been in any of my classes, you know that I try and hammer this home, make those few first few words count, check your mobile device, check your inbox. What do you see? You see the first one to three lines, you can set your mail up so that you can see that. And don't waste that space with things that are not adding value or not intriguing or hooking your readers. So paying very careful attention to that. It's a crowded inbox, right? I asked ChatGPT 4. 0. Yesterday, how many of, how many messages are being sent daily around the world? And ChatGPT40, of course, instantaneously responded with, That's a really troubling question. There, it's almost impossible to calculate, but, Suggests over 300 billion emails are sent every day, over 100 billion WhatsApp messages are sent every day, and then if we add to that everything else, our SMS, our Teams messages, our instant messaging, our Facebook messenger, everything else that we're using Slack. We're talking in the trillions every day. Now, think about that. There's seven plus billion people in the world. We're creating and consuming that much content. It's bonkers, right? So the game, the field, the players are changing. We need to keep up. We need to shift gears and keep up. So we need to hook. We need to use that persuasive technology in order to capture our reader's interest and get them not only to come in and take a bite and get hooked. But to stay there for a few minutes so that they can actually read and digest the information that you are trying to send. So the next part of our messages have to add value to people's lives. They need to be snappy. They need to be short. They need to be visually appealing. The content has to be value based and add interest to your readers lives, right? So hook them in, take a quick
Jennie:look. Short and snappy. Go ahead. I'm just saying, there's so much good stuff in here, like those three things we could talk for days, like a beautiful day on each one. But I heard somebody say at some point, your subject line is your shop window. And as you said, like in our email boxes, we've got hundreds daily. I know the three of us are receiving easily over a hundred a day. And how do you stand out? So you might use an emoji. I don't know that I've ever used an emoji in a subject line, Tamarav, just for the people listening, when we say short, when we say snappy, when we say it's a hook, is it. Is it a question? Is there some kind of formula to think of? I know you send me, okay, a third quarter update. I'm asleep and I'm not opening your email. Is there any kind of magic? When we say persuasive technology, it's pretty scary to some. They're like I don't have that creative brain. How can I be persuasive in an instance to stand out? What are some short sort of solutions that we could use? Yeah,
Tamara:this is where our storytelling hats need to come on, right? We need to have the emotional appeal. And and that human connection again. So what do we love about a good story, right? They, the building of up to the climax. So it's actually fun to try and come up with subject lines. So instead of third quarter analysis, the numbers don't lie, right? Something that's going to capture my interest, or, check out what's happening this quarter. Something that's going to intrigue your audience it feels like a little bit of game playing, but we're going back to storytelling too. Stories work with humans, right? And that's who we're communicating with. That's whose attention we're vying for.
Jennie:There's them. There's that one liner, isn't there? Facts tell, stories sell, which comes back to your point. We're selling. We're trying to capture. We're selling.
Craig:So if you'd had a bad quarter, you could send, I wish this email wasn't true.
Tamara:Yes. Brace yourselves. Yeah,
Craig:that too.
Tamara:Sylvia, I like that you put in here, I still prefer the good morning Sylvia or Sylvia instead of hey Sylvia. I love that you said that because we teach people how to communicate with us as well. So I am going to, if I am a savvy communicator, if I'm a savvy business writer, the next thing that I'm going to do is really analyze my audience. Do you think that consu, that marketers are analyzing their audience? 100 percent they are. They're putting on their Sherlock Holmes caps and they're grabbing their magnifying glasses and they're trying to figure out who you are and how you operate. And I'm going to do the same. When I'm communicating with you, I'm going to tweak my message based The way that you're teaching me, you prefer to be communicated with. So if you're giving me a Hey, Tamara, you know how I'm going to respond to you? Hey, Jennie, I'm going to play that game. So we're building rapport and that's part of, can we do that in writing? Absolutely. It's part of the audience analysis. So
Craig:Let me double click on that one for a second though. I'll play devil's advocate here. Because we just talked about how important. the first line following the subject is. And so if we show
Tamara:up, yes.
Craig:If we're trying, yeah, it's going to show up. So what I'm trying to say is, do you want that? If you're using that first line to also be your hook, do you want it to be good morning?
Tamara:Yeah. So typically when you start a conversation, of course, you're going to have a greeting. So I do not omit the greeting. On the first email in the thread. All right, so the first email in the thread is where we start the conversation. If the conversation is continuing, the next few emails, I may opt to leave that out entirely. Again, it's an audience analysis thing. Who am I dealing with? What era? What generation? What style? What tone? What formality? Are they familiar with? I'm going to Play to them, but for the next few messages, I start to wean off that good mornings and the hellos and the highs and the haze, because again, it is eating up that valuable preheader space, right? We're just now bantering back and forth. It's almost like our emails are becoming text messages. That's, there's, they're becoming shorter and shorter.
Jennie:And I was curious too when you say analyze your audience, I think for the leaders who have joined us, which is a large group there's an easy shortcut here too, and that's to ask your people, have a conversation about what our team communication looks like. Cause we have so much team only communication that we could take a number of shortcuts. Within there that they cut down the 10, the tension as in my own, Oh gosh, have I got this right? Kind of thing. If I know full well that Craig doesn't expect a good morning on the fifth email of the morning, then fair enough. That's easier. Yeah.
Tamara:Fantastic. Having conversations, not only about the style or tone of your emails, which is your method of communicating too, because we have options. We're not necessarily on every day. That's on average. I'm going to
Jennie:send
Tamara:TikToks, please, in future.
Craig:If you could send me all your notes by TikTok dance, uh, themes, Jennie, that would be brilliant. Yeah, for what you wish for. Yeah.
Jennie:Yeah.
Tamara:We did have to play the game a little bit and I remember somebody actually coming into my I would send emails and I'd be crickets. I wouldn't get any response and I was wondering what I was doing wrong. And then finally someday, one day I was in the classroom on campus at SAIT and I got a knock on the door. It's. This person popped their head into my classroom and said, Hey, Tamara, I know that you're sending me emails, but, I don't really check my emails that often. My preferred style of communication is texting. If you want to get to me, fire me off a quick text and, that I always have that with me and I'll respond right away. And I thought that was awesome. Absolutely fantastic. I didn't say my preferred method of communication is email, so you should respond to my emails. I adapt to their style, right? What works for them? And that was a valuable tidbit of information. So I'm paying attention. I'm adapting to my audience all the time.
Jennie:So there's an interesting piece in here though, because when we think of our teams now, we have Gen Zed and potentially we start Boomers in the same team, right? That's possible in our workplaces now. And so as a leader, if you're working to everybody's preferences, that's a lot of different streams to be checking a lot of different messages. And so I think it's there and do correct me if you're no different. This is your area, not mine, but we're, as a leader, it's okay to set some boundaries in, okay, I get the preferences. This is a way that I'll come to you quickly, or if this is one on one in our conversation we're carrying. But as a team, here's where we're going to do our communication. And build that expectation. And I think to a degree, what I'm suggesting is keep with the hooks and things. I love this persuasive technology. It's new phrase for me this morning, but is that's our job to do that. But it's also, we have to bring people into those guardrails and keep them there. Otherwise this is going to go all over them really quickly. Yeah.
Tamara:I think you made it like critical point there is have that discussion. Yeah. Set those boundaries. We have a plethora of choice. If you're like me, I have seven email addresses alone. So you know, this is the email or this is the preferred style of communication for this team. Let's all agree that this is what we're going to be doing and this is how we're going to communicate. But oftentimes those discussions don't happen, right? It's so true.
Craig:Yeah. And it's a, to your point, I think we've touched on a few good things, really good things here around. Set the expectations, find out what your team, we're obviously talking internal and we're talking with folks that you're familiar with and colleagues and working with on a daily basis. If you're starting a new conversation with somebody that you've never spoken to before, there's going to be a level of formality that you perhaps go through and Tamara, I really like what you said earlier around, as the conversation progresses, it probably gets a little less formal. You drop the good morning, you drop the hello, or maybe it turns into yo.
Tamara:Right?
Craig:How you doing? That type of stuff, but having those conversations as a team to set expectations, there's a great question in here in the chat around, if their preferences for text message, can you text them saying, please read my email? Sure you can. I don't think there's any reason why you can't. What a leader would need to be able to set with their team is, you listen, Jimmy, Susie, Bobby, I understand you prefer text. The expectation and what this team does is important team messages are going to go out via this method. Thus, I expect you to pay attention to those.
Tamara:Yeah. And not only that, in some instances when you're communicating with business, you have to have a record of conversation too. Choosing the method of communication for certain conversations is going to be important in terms of recording those conversations and keeping those. archive done on file so that you have, you can refer back to them in the future. So be aware of that, have those conversations. And if your emails are not getting read my recommendation to you is not to blame the other person all the time. Have you done the ask? Is this the best way of communicating with you? Or have you actually crafted a message people want to read, right? So that adds value to their life that they don't dread, right? When your name comes up on their inbox, Does the palm hit the forehead and the big sigh, and I can't deal with this right now. I know it's going to be two pages filled with text. I don't have the energy. I don't have the time. So we put it off. They're not going to get read.
Jennie:So how, sorry, how do we work that pre header space? There's a note from Dan earlier in the chat and it's talked about, do we start with the. The I hope you're well and that's my, that depends on the conversation. Most times not. I've heard that it's a really good idea to put in that actually what you're asking or what you're looking for and then back it up. Or are we still looking for that hook and it's a question cause we need to get into their world. There's some sort of. Yeah. So that preheader space for
Tamara:me is. Wasted. If you're throwing in an, I hope this finds you well, right? Or I hope you got out.
Craig:Yeah. I have that's wasted
Tamara:preheader space. Put the point of the message in there.
Craig:Yeah. I was going to say, if I get an email that says, I hope this email finds you. I reply with, I didn't know this email was looking for me.
Tamara:Yes. Yeah. It's it's antiquated. It's old fashioned. I get where it came from, right? To start building rapport and to ease into the message. It comes from the days of building your case and then funneling down to a conclusion. Now we're flipping that model on its head. Let's start with the conclusion, build our case, and then end with some rapport building message. I hope you have a great day. Have a wonderful weekend with the family. That's where you add that human touch, but put that at the end. I'm not suggesting that we don't we don't build rapport that way. I'm suggesting the location of where that shows up on the page is really important. Pay attention to that. So we hook our reader with, the subject line and the preheader space, that shiny bite size, snappy lure, essentially. They'll come in and take a bite. Make sure that when they take a bite, they're getting nutrients. So that there's actually some value that you're adding and then finish off with that that warm, fuzzy, or that opportunity to add a little fun, personality conversation at the end. Yeah,
Craig:Courtney had a question in here and I think it speaks to a bigger point, is it still a best practice to focus on calls to action? And What I'm going to suggest here, and Tamara, this is my hypothesis, you can either validate or poke holes in it, that if you're sending a message out, and you're asking for something specific, a response to this or that it would make sense to specifically call out, I would like you to do this by this time, and if that's not possible, please let me know.
Tamara:Yes, who needs to do what, by when? Be specific in your asks. It's like we have to play triage all the time. So we need to know exactly when it needs to happen. No more as soon as possible. No more at your earliest conveniences. If there's a call to action in there, make it clear. Make it stand out. Maybe hyperlink it. Maybe surround it by white space or bold it. But it needs to be absolutely pop off the page clear.
Craig:Exactly. Because we scan
Tamara:for those. Yeah.
Craig:We do. And I think that's the other really key point too, is that if you send an email out that doesn't have a call to action, don't expect a response.
Tamara:Yeah.
Craig:There's nothing I hate more than an email that says, thanks for your email.
Tamara:Oh,
Craig:right?
Tamara:300 billion of those a day are getting sent around. Let's not add to the clutter.
Craig:Exactly. I have been known to send an email that says, thanks for your feedback. if I've gotten unsolicited feedback without Any sort of request for anything. So
Tamara:that's an
Craig:entirely different conversation. We taught you's touched on something earlier that I want to drill into just a little bit before we start to wrap up. You mentioned seven letters, chat GPT.
Tamara:Oh yeah.
Craig:Just your thoughts. I
Tamara:did.
Craig:How does this, right? This is a game changer.
Tamara:It absolutely is a game changer. And chat GPT 4. 0 was recently released. I think five may be on the horizon and I want to just clarify too, as I listened to Sam Altman speak, chat GPT 4. 0 is not 4. 0. It's not a version 4. 0. The O lowercase O in 4. 0 stands for Omni. Think about that for a second, Omnipresent, Omniscient, Omniferous, right? So it is all knowing. That's what it's suggesting. Do I use chat GPT? 4. 0? Absolutely I do. And if you're not using it, jump on. It's fantastic search engine, right? It is learning rapidly. I have seen massive improvements in progression since it started. First launched in 2023 to a few months later now, where we're at 4. 0. It's multimodal. It's one in the field of many AI programs that you can possibly use. Is it the be all end all? Absolutely not. One of the words of the year last year was hallucinate. And the reason that the word, one of the words of the year and our English language dictionaries with hallucinate was because language learning models do that. They take information from us. They learn from that, and then they create content based on it, but sometimes they get it wrong. So do not hang your hat on it. There are definitely risks with using chat GPT. Use it as a search engine, get some ideas, and then add your own personality and your own tone and your language to it. We got, people are very savvy when it comes to your message. Yes, I also use AIToodle to help. It's writing.
Craig:Yeah it's interesting. The number of tools that are out there. I found, I find my writing style when I'm just going from draft can be quite rambling and I have loved chat GPT for trying to make me a bit more concise and a bit more brief. But to your point, it is very anodyne and just, you need to find a way to put your personality back into it, right? It's just, it can be very plain. Yeah. For lack of a better phrase, right?
Tamara:So sometimes I even find it wordy. Yeah.
Craig:Yeah. Yeah, that's true.
Tamara:I can take that and then use it. Like you say to start the conversation, to do a little bit of research, to use that as a search engine. But please be aware that it sounds like a robot is writing and it can sometimes make things up.
Craig:Absolutely. Speaking of making things up, you made up. Three great slides for us to close off and share with our audience here at the end. And I think it's time to shift to that. Thank you. It's been a great conversation. We've worked through a couple technology glitches, but we managed to keep communication flowing. Over to you to wrap us up. Fantastic. It's your one big idea.
Tamara:All right. So Jennie's just going to pop up my screens here. So we're going to finish off today's conversation with one big idea. And my big idea for today is to pay attention to the attention economy. In an attention economy, remember that attention is a scarce resource and you must compete to capture and retain it. Thinking about short attention spans, people do not necessarily have short attention spans. They're just very savvy at filtering out content that they're not interested in. You must capture and retain interest by being short and snappy, adding some visual appeal. Remember that. Look interesting to keep us on the, keep our eyes on the page. You may want to incorporate infographics or visuals into your messages and other visual elements just to enhance or retain your reader's attention. So remember your, you are, your eyes are capital. So a lot of people are competing for them. You can train, you can still choose what you put your attention on. So that's my one big idea, focus on the attention economy. All right. And the next one is two strategies. So how can we then compete in this attention economy? How can we write differently knowing what we now know about persuasive technology? And I want to suggest using. This hook, look and took a strategy when you are crafting your messages. And I say crafting intentionally because that's exactly what you're doing. You're producing a product, a consumer product for a customer. You're analyzing their needs. What do they need? And then crafting your message for purpose. What is it that's going to capture their interest? So right using the hook, look, think about it this way. The hook. is that lure, the shiny object, the tasty morsel that's going to get your readers to come in and choose to take a bite. The look then has to be visually appealing. It has to be scannable. It has to be easy to read. It has to add value and have a clear call to action who needs to do what and by when be specific. And then finally, Wrap up your messages with the takeaway that took that final lasting impression that you want to leave. And this is where you can, again, add your personality, make it conversational, add those pleasantries that we're looking for to build relationship and build rapport in our writing. And if you need to have that lasting impression be the one thing you want your reader to remember, you might want to pop it again or reiterate it in that. that final sentence. So hook, look, and took. And my second strategy is to be aware of personality and authenticity. So we did mention chat GPT 4. 0. Don't write like a robot. You want to write using a conversational tone. You want to pay attention to your reader, their generation, their style, their format, their tone, and you want to respond to who they are. It's interesting. I've seen a shift in the style of content lately, and it's more organic, and it looks handcrafted. I've noticed even LinkedIn Reels are using templates that look like a sheet of paper with handwritten notes on it. Why? Because people are sick of the polished and contrived messages. They want authenticity and personality and organic messages. So I'm encouraging you to do the same. Let's respond to that. It doesn't need to be necessarily perfect and polished all the time. You want to remember that we're living, breathing human beings communicating. We're living, breathing human beings. So that's my second strategy for writing in the age of TikTok. All right. And I want to finish with three questions. So the three questions are to start paying attention to your messages, which matches messages in your inbox, catch your attention and keep it. Analyze that. Why is that? What is it about that you like? And then can I copy that? Can I emulate that? There's something special about it. What is it? And then on the flip side of that, of course, which messages do you dread or avoid? Are there names that pop up or subject lines that make your eyes start to twitch? Honestly, what is it about those ones that you are dreading or avoiding? And then learn from that. Why is that? What is it that you need to do differently in order to not be that person, not be the name on somebody's inbox that they, gets avoided. Does that make sense?
Craig:Yeah.
Tamara:All right. And then my final and compelling question to you is. Are you writing boring and slow messages? Are you writing boring and slow messages? Because if you are, I can guarantee we're not reading them, right? And if your messages are not getting responded to, you hear crickets, don't blame the reader all the time. Take a look back at what you need to do to change in order to compete in the attention economy. Fantastic.
Craig:We certainly can't blame the readers or the participants today, but we might be able to blame Shaw or Rogers for a couple of things. I'm not sure. That's okay. Tamara, thank you so much for joining us. Uh, Jennie and I will be back in a couple of weeks to continue the conversation that we had another prior guest, John Partington, and to speak about inclusive leadership. Have a great weekend, wherever you are. Cheer hard for Edmonton tonight and Sunday because it will be over by Monday if we do. And as always, Jennie, I appreciate you, Tamara. Thank you so much for joining us. Yes, my pleasure
Tamara:always to see everybody. Thanks everyone. Cheers. Have a good weekend. Thank you. Take care.
Craig:And you can just hit stop on your audacity tomorrow. See ya. Thank you once again for joining us on the Leading Beyond Any Title podcast. If you'd like to stay connected and receive more updates from us, please follow SAIT corporate training on LinkedIn. Stay in the loop with the latest insights and valuable content through the link in the show notes.
Jennie:Additionally, don't miss out on the opportunity to experience Leading Beyond Any Title live. Sign up for our webinars and experience the podcast before anyone else. Finally, make sure to rate, review and subscribe wherever it is that you listen to your podcast. Thank you again for listening.