arcCA asked members of the AIA California Council and others to reflect on the etiquette of communication in the age of electronic media. These are their thoughts.
Toning In
Michael Malinowski, AIA, has led Sacramento’s Applied Architecture, Inc. for 35 years, with a focus on historic adaptive reuse, infill development, affordable housing, and helping over 1000 diverse homeowners shape their personal living environments. He presently serves on the AIA National Board of Directors and was previously AIACC’s Vice President for Communications and Public Affairs, where he was a driving force in moving the California Council to contemporary communication platforms.
From often quoted research of Professor Albert Mehrabian, Professor Emeritus of Psychology, UCLA:
7% of message pertaining to feelings and attitudes is in the words that are spoken.
38% of message pertaining to feelings and attitudes is paralinguistic (the way that the words are said).
55% of message pertaining to feelings and attitudes is in facial expression.
It’s no wonder we find ourselves more frequently insulted, put off, and frustrated by our communications these days.
It’s been my observation that architects, as a rule, are busy—perhaps, as a rule, too busy. For me, it’s been relatively non-stop, starting in college with all night studio marathons and continuing to this day. Even when business is “slow,” I’m still going FAST. In fact, I’ll admit (to the delight of my wife Kris) that she has nailed my habit: as soon as a glimmer of free space opens up, with the unbridled optimism of a child (or—better analogy?—state legislator with a temporary budget surplus) I pounce on that glimmer of light in the tunnel with a passion of new ideas.
With so much to do, it’s unfortunately easy to treat as wasteful indulgences such important things as pleasantries, cheerful chat, and even conversation. After all, the business part of talking can be more efficiently managed by email. But can it?
The shortcuts to simple, slow, and rich communication that technology has put at my disposal are not so good for sharing feelings and attitudes, as professor Mehrabian has documented. In fact, they are terrible.
Need to bark orders? Email works great! Get in touch with the inner feelings of a co-worker or friend, not so much. Without the visual clues of meetings, or even the subtle tonal variations of talking, 93% of the feeling and attitude associated with messages evaporate.
Slowing down: that’s hard. It means letting go of things that seem important and getting less done in a day, an hour, a minute. It’s a struggle I’ll add to my to do list …
When What Is Really Needed . . .
A former partner with Flad Architects, K.C. Ramsay, AIA, founded KC Ramsay Consulting (www.kcramsay.com) in 2008 to help architects and their consultants understand their own value, win the right projects, gain recognition, earn a profit, and have more fun. K.C. has served on the AIA North Carolina Board of Directors and was a member of the first class of the national Young Architects Forum.
Never ignore another person when communication is needed.
Never tweet @anotherperson when a text message is needed.
Never send a text message when an email message is needed.
Never send an email message when a phone call is needed.
Never make a phone call when a face-to-face meeting is needed.
. . . and . . .
Never “call a meeting” when what is really needed is simply an honest conversation.
Social Etiquette: Invited or Imposed?
Kenneth Caldwell is a writer and communications consultant based in San Francisco, the author of designfaith.blogspot.com, and a frequent contributor to arcCA.
Architects are often hesitant to communicate with their clients beyond a project. And then they complain when they have no work. The old cliché turns out to be true: “Out of sight, out of mind.” But what is the etiquette for contacting clients in an age of constant and instant communication? Consider the concepts of invited or imposed. If you are sending an email that suggests a response, or at least a reading, that is a kind of imposition. If you post something on Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, or a subscribed blog, that is essentially invited, because your contact has chosen to view your photos, thoughts, or ramblings. If you are imposing, be cautious. If you are invited, be generous but not stupid.
When I suggest that architects figure out a (more or less) strategic approach to staying in touch with their clients, they say, “Our clients don’t want to be bothered with mailers, blogs, emails, or God forbid, phone calls.” Well, they don’t if the content isn’t interesting. Or, worse, if the sender isn’t interesting. Architects need to get out more and see some dance, some art, some Occupy protests. Read some Michael Kimmelman, Robert Reich, or John Irving. Connect the dots. That is the first bit of advice.
Most of my clients have been “design first” firms. I ask them, who are your clients? Who are your referral sources? They guess, but they often don’t know. What some simple analysis often shows, to their surprise, is that they exist in a closed loop. Most of their referral sources turn out to be—yup—other architects. Architects outside of practice working for universities, healthcare organizations, corporations, real estate developers, and government agencies. Architects in mid-size and larger firms also send residential commissions to their buddies in small independent practices.
Next, I suggest that their clients and referral services are interested in, yes, design and its visual representation. But even if the referral sources might be interested recipients, architects are afraid of intimacy, unless it’s an old classmate from late nights at Wurster Hall or wherever. Well then, start there. In other words, if a lunch or a game of golf with a friend feels OK, do it.
The kind of encounter that yields results is personal and face-to-face. Figure out what is doable on the continuum from a mass email to a dinner. Move toward face-to-face. Eventually, the imposed could lead to the invited.
Speaking of mass emails, they don’t do much. They are generally a bother to recipients, because they didn’t initiate the communication. Personalized email is far more effective than mass email blasts. However, if you use a program like Mail Chimp to personalize a mass email, it may lessen the effectiveness of the individual communiqué.
Over the years, I have found that most architects get work from a very small group of people. All of us will open personal emails from a friend or a professional we trust. Use that trust to send useful or desired information. For example, if you write a blog about a charity that you work with, most of your closest contacts will be interested in hearing about it. It’s fine to send that along with a personal note. It’s an imposition that most of your contacts will enjoy. But do they want to see the latest pharmacy you designed? Probably not.
Remember that most technological innovations allow us to reach the few among the many. That’s their value. We are selling a highly specialized service, not a tennis shoe or soft drink. A few years ago, architects scoffed at websites and, more recently, at blogs, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. One friend of mine said that Pinterest was witchcraft! It’s not reasonable for every senior level architect to engage in multiple forms of social media. But if they want to stay in touch with their clients and referral sources, they will likely have to engage with some of them.
What distinguishes many of these kinds of social media is the recipient’s intent. People choose to join Facebook or LinkedIn and accept you as part of their circle. This means that, unlike email, there is already a good chance that your “friend” is interested in your activities and opinions—in other words, you are invited to the party.
While they are probably not interested in what you ate for lunch, they are interested in the new design competition at Fort Mason or your latest residence at Sea Ranch. And if they’re not, they don’t have to click on your post. Think of yourself as part of this large, ongoing cocktail party. But if you want to be sure that your friend saw the article you wrote on the new landscape at Lake Merritt, best to send a personal email.
So, ask yourself: Is your communication invited or imposed? Be sparing with the imposed, generous with the invited.
Some Do’s
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- Remember that your referral sources are interested in you.
- Stay interesting. Read. Go to the theater. Follow a passion besides architecture.
- Share yourself. Suggest an event of mutual interest. Send an article. Send your blog post. Send somebody else’s blog post. Post an article on Facebook about a book you read.
- Move towards face-to-face communication. Connect at the edge of your comfort zone. An email is easy. Golf is harder.
Some Don’ts
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- Don’t send out tons of mass emails. The occasional announcement about a design award is fine. Every project win is boring.
- Don’t ask broadly for work. Nobody wants to respond to such a plea. This is about being visible in a mutually beneficial relationship. But it is OK to ask about a specific project or to be placed on a RFQ list.
- Don’t post photos on Facebook that you don’t want your clients to see. Because they will.
Ten Rules for Social Media Etiquette
Amanda Walter, principal of Walter Communications, helps architects, landscape architects, and planners tell their stories and build their reputations. You can find her at www.waltercomms.com, on Twitter at @WalterComms and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/AECIdeaExchange. She is coauthor, with Holly Berkeley, of the recently published Social Media in Action.
Define your goals for engagement in social media.
Why are you participating on the social web in the first place? Is it to share knowledge and expertise? Demonstrate values and leadership in your field? Gain real feedback to improve existing projects? Build relationships in hopes of attaining more future business?
Create your own list of best practices.
Develop a list of social media best practices that suit your goals and the reputation you want to have. For your firm’s social media efforts, share these with all employees as guidelines or tips (or, for more formal companies, as a policy). Make sure all employees who post anything to the Internet on behalf of your company have been informed and understand these best practices. A thorough and thoughtful list of best practices is crucial to avoiding a potential PR or legal nightmare that can occur as a result of an employee posting an inappropriate comment online.
Don’t bombard your listeners with content.
Ninety percent of consumers unsubscribe, “unlike,” or stop following companies because of too frequent, irrelevant, or boring communications. While it is important to post on Facebook frequently, don’t exceed more than one or two posts a day. Limit and spread out your Tweets during the business day. Curate your content so that your followers trust that your messages contain valuable information.
Don’t be too self-promotional.
It is in bad taste to comment on another party’s blog post and then to link to your own stuff if it isn’t directly relevant. No one will want to engage with you and become part of your community if you are only posting items to promote your cause, product, or service. Social media isn’t a solitary event—it’s about engagement and building community. Social media is not all about you. Don’t overdo requests asking others to retweet or share your thoughts on their Facebook wall. If your content is good, it will be shared. In other words, the content of your messages is just as important as how often you push those messages out.
Promote others.
If you highlight someone else’s accomplishments, they likely will do the same for you. Your messaging should be centered around encouraging engagement. Again, social networking is about making a connection with your online friends, fans, and followers. It is about encouraging them to react, post opinions, and engage.
Provide a good mix of posts.
To judge if your content stream is too self-promotional or too chatty or lacking in original content, consider this social media rule of thirds: 1/3 of posts should be promoting content from another source, 1/3 of posts should be conversing with specific followers, and 1/3 of posts should promote your own content.
Engage only when you can make an impact.
When posting news and updates on social media sites, strive to add value with each engagement. Each engagement is an opportunity for highlighting a company’s accomplishments and reputation.
Keep personal and professional accounts separate.
In the connected world of social media (unless you are tightly managing your privacy controls), personal accounts are visible to a much broader audience. The things posted on your personal blogs and social media profiles all contribute to your perceived professionalism. To eliminate confusion when you post personal information, such as pictures from family vacations, on your social media sites, create separate social media accounts for work and personal life.
Identify what information should never be made public.
Work with your legal team and speak with your clients to understand what issues cannot be discussed publicly, and make sure that everyone you work with knows this. Some conversations in passing in hallways at companies may not necessarily be open for discussion outside the firm. When in doubt, don’t share this information online.
Engage positively.
When posting information online, be transparent, smart, respectful, professional, and yourself. All posts should maintain a positive tone and stay respectful of others—especially competitors.
How to Generate Social Media Karma in 6 Easy Steps
Blogger, speaker, social media enthusiast, and chocoholic, Ali Goldfield is the owner of ADR Social Media (www.adrsocialmedia.com) and co-founder of The Dialing 8 Project (www.dialing8.com). ADR offers a wide range of social media training, coaching, and consulting services to grow and maintain your social media campaign. Dialing 8 provides ongoing online support for the small business through webinars, live Q&A sessions, forums, and tutorials.This article reprinted from socialmediatoday.com, 20 November 2011, by permission of the author
This week was a pretty good week for me. I made some good networking connections at a small business association meeting, had some pretty cool Google+ Hangout/co-working sessions with colleagues in other parts of the world, and had some good interactions on Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn. All of this left me with a pretty good feeling about what I’m doing and about social media in general.
The week culminated with a tweet from a new cyber-friend. She tweeted that, as a new social media consultant, she was amazed at the generous give and take that goes on between different social media businesses. It was at that point that I really stopped to reflect on how right she was and in looking at how the big names in Social Media operate, how Social Media Karma really does exist.
Whether you believe in Karma or not, if you want to be successful in Social Media, it’s important to recognize how everything that you do online, every post, every comment, every blog you write, adds to the total sum of your footprint in the blogosphere. As someone who is relatively new to social media, I have tried always to put my best foot forward online and follow a few simple rules that I live by in the offline world. They’ve been working pretty well, so far, and have led to some valuable connections online. Here are a few of my rules for generating Social Media Karma:
Be Yourself: This is probably the most important rule of Social Media Karma. It means being real, being truthful about yourself, being transparent about who you are and what you believe, and sharing in an honest way, not just for self-promotion. Just like in the offline world, if you are yourself and genuine with others, they will start to trust you, and then real relationships can be developed.
Be Responsive: Respond to e-mails promptly and with a personal tone. Respond to Direct Messages. Most importantly, respond positively and publicly to @mentions on Twitter. The more you mention others, the more likely they are to mention you in a positive and public way.
Be Engaged: By commenting and participating, rather than just being an observer online, you can easily generate Social Media Karma. When you Like other Fan Pages, comment on a status, Retweet, Digg, or Stumble a blog or article you are giving people a gift. And it’s usually a gift that gives back.
Be Acknowledging: If you refer to anyone, whether it’s on Twitter, Google, or Facebook, it’s best to link to them and to their article/blog post. Everybody works hard, whether it’s writing, networking, or curating content, and everyone wants to be recognized for their efforts.
Be Helpful: We are all here to try and make a difference. The more helpful you are, by answering questions, sharing information, providing guidance, the more others will be willing to help you. It’s as simple as that.
Be Grateful: The first rule you learned in Kindergarten was to say please and thank you. Manners work in the offline world, and they sure go a long way online as well. Thank people for following you, thank them for sharing a post or commenting on an article. Thank them publicly and by name. Appreciation makes people feel like you value their efforts and that they are important. This will, of course, make them more likely to reach out again.
Karma is kindness in practice. Not only do your actions online say a great deal about you, but they also say a great deal about how you do business. If you follow these six easy steps, you will undoubtedly be able to generate a significant amount of Social Media Karma for yourself.
On Bragging
Tim Culvahouse, FAIA, is Editor-in-Chief of the AIA California Council.
Some people are comfortable telling others their accomplishments and abilities, and others aren’t. I’m not particularly comfortable doing so, myself.
But bragging—if you want to call it that—is both necessary and important, if one is to share those abilities productively. Not only will “tooting your own horn” help sell your abilities; if you toot accurately and clearly, it will help you find people who will really appreciate you.
Easily enough said, but for some of us not so easily done, so here are four work-arounds:
- Brag about the people you employ or work with. You’ll get credit by association, you’ll be seen as a generous individual with whom people would like to work, your colleagues will feel valued, and, before you know it, they will be returning the favor and bragging about you.
- Brag about your competition. I know, this sounds like a dumb idea, and it can be if you do it in overly broad strokes. But if you articulate precisely a particular thing that another firm has done well, you demonstrate your insight and expertise as well as—or maybe more than—theirs. (Because, heck, they might have stumbled onto that solution by accident, but you recognize it for what it is!) You demonstrate self-confidence. And you give yourself an opportunity to mention something of your own: “We ran into a similar situation, which we resolved a little differently . . . .”
- Brag about someone you’ve learned from: a teacher, a mentor, an employer (or employee), a consultant or contractor, a friend or relative, or a client. Describe something specific that you learned, and you demonstrate your own expertise while sharing credit and drawing your listener into the lineage.
Which brings us to what may be the best method of all:
- Teach something to someone. Take the time to explain—to a client or a potential client or just someone you happen to be chatting with—some bit of specialized knowledge or insight. You won’t have to say you’re an expert, because you’ll be demonstrating that you are.
You can do these things in your formal communications (as, for instance, in this article) as well as in person. Each is an instance of demonstrating your knowledge and understanding, rather than merely asserting it. And without feeling like a big windbag.
The Etiquette of Media Relations
Yosh Asato is principal of Asato Communications in San Francisco and co-curator of Store Front Lab, www.storefrontlab.org.
A lot of the public relations consultant’s work involves demystifying the media, but in truth, there isn’t a lot of mystery here. The design media, after all, are people just like your clients, colleagues, and friends, which means that working from a place of respect and integrity is generally the best path to success. And, as with most situations in life, the rules fall in the realm of common sense. Here are the basics:
- Read their publication or articles to gain a sense of what their interests are. Then, view your project through their editorial eye—what’s unique or newsworthy to their audience. The goal is to create mutual benefit by understanding how your project fits into their professional endeavor—publishing a relevant magazine or article—rather than assuming they should want to help you in yours.
- Support your project with strong visuals and clearly stated, useful information. Presenting your project succinctly and accurately makes it easy for a journalist to grasp your project story and demonstrates that you understand his or her needs. While some, typically very big personalities can get away with a lot of hyperbole, the rest of us should stick with developing a substantive narrative.
- If you are interviewed, remember it is your responsibility, not the writer’s, to keep your foot out of your mouth. The degree of caution needed will vary depending on a variety of factors, including the writer, the story, the publication, and your experience managing “on background” and “off the record” comments. If you aren’t sure about the landscape, simply don’t say anything you wouldn’t want to see attributed to you in print.
- Be generous in acknowledging the significant contributions of other team members, especially any associate architects. There are all kinds of positive reasons for being generous, but the bottom line is that it minimizes any potential grief over project credits, something no one really wants to deal with, least of all the editor or writer.
- Respond promptly and meet your deadlines. Journalists, more often than not, are working under a looming deadline. Therefore, it is important to respond promptly to media inquiries, even if it is to say you’ll be following up later with more information, and to meet any deadlines you commit to. Beyond fulfilling a basic rule of etiquette, you’ll develop a reputation as a reliable source.
- Say thank you and focus on the big picture. Send a thank-you note for meetings, for publishing a project, or writing about your project—yes, just like we were taught as kids. If you must ask for a correction, make sure it is substantive (e.g. your client’s title is egregiously incorrect), and let go of the small stuff, if any. Editors hate corrections, but will make them graciously if warranted rather than persnickety.
- Cultivate your media relationships by staying in touch and becoming a resource over time. They’ll be more likely to make time for to hear your pitch the next time you have one. No one likes to be contacted only when someone wants something. (Hint: social media has made this more informal contact a lot easier.)
Flakiness and the Obnoxiously Busy
Anonymous
A lot of people have said, “Never attribute to maliciousness what can be attributed to flakiness,” but there’s a point at which flakiness becomes malicious. For example, if someone emails several times trying to get an item of information, it’s best just to answer. If you can’t do so at the moment, write back saying, “I received your message, but I can’t answer you now,” or even, “I don’t want to answer now, but you will hear from me in a week,” or something along those lines.
Flakiness is a real epidemic these days. About 70% of the time, in the professional world, when people say they will do something, they don’t do it. For example, if I hear, “We will start (something somewhat speculative that takes real initiative) next week,” I know what they really mean is that, in a month, I will have the same conversation with them again. Is it that bad? Yes. People aren’t lazy, and they always know what side of their bread is buttered, but there is a prevailing lack of intention or awareness. And it’s contagious. Flakiness in the professional world spreads like crazy.
Another, related phenomenon is the omnipresence of the “busy.” Very many people, if you ask them how they are, will say, “I’m buried,” or, “I’m slammed,” or make “I’m exhausted” noises. This is the most irritating behavior imaginable. It’s bragging, saying “I’m SO in demand. You should see my inbox! I turn away and there are a hundred people clamoring for my valuable insights. I’m so powerful, no one can make a move without me. What a burden!”
Really bad behavior. What if the person you are talking to is busier than you? There will always be someone busier, with more kids, with more obligations, with less leisure time, with less time to think or take a shower. And maybe they are busy not because they are powerful, but because they are poor or otherwise struggling, or they are looking after other people. The obnoxiously “busy” are the biggest violators of courtesy and consideration. Plus, I’ve found that the people who complain about how busy they are aren’t very good at getting stuff done.
A Personal Note
Stanford Hughes, FAIA, is a principal of BraytonHughes Design Studios. He is former chair of California College of the Arts’ Interior Architecture Department and was Interiors magazine’s Designer of the Year in 1996.
In this e-mail, immediate-tweet world we live in, there is nothing more powerful that a personal note of thanks, hand written in complete sentences and mailed. These have served our business well over the last twenty-two years.
Originally published late 2012, in arcCA 12.1, “On Good Behavior.”
