Only Fools Rush In: What Marketing & Communications Professional Need To Know About Threads

by Brandon Glenn | Aug 30, 2023 | Blog

Now that it looks like the much-anticipated but always-farfetched Elon Musk vs. Mark Zuckerberg cage fight is unlikely to happen, we’ll all have to settle for X vs. Threads.

By now, we all know that Threads is Meta’s answer to Musk’s struggling X (formerly Twitter), which continues to deteriorate amid plunging advertising revenue and rising hate speech. Threads holds the record for fastest-growing consumer app, jumping from zero to 100 million users in less than a week after its launch in early July.

Threads was billed as a kinder and gentler version than X, or “Twitter without the rough edges or news,” as The Guardian phrased it.

As a quick primer, here are some of the basic facts about Threads:

• Users log in to Threads using their Instagram credentials and can port over their entire profiles. No Instagram? Then no Threads.
• After creating a Threads account, users are free to delete it. But doing so also deletes the corresponding Instagram account.
• Threads can be used only via the mobile app, but a desktop version is reportedly on the way at some point.
• Threads’ feed is algorithmically organized – not chronologically, as X is.
• Posts can be up to 500 characters and can include photos or videos that last five minutes.
• Threads has no search functionality, hashtags, or advertising.
• It is not available in the European Union due to regulatory concerns.

The waiting is the hardest part
Unfortunately for Meta, what appeared to be an early success story has now crashed down to reality. Following its peak in the days after launch, Threads saw its number of daily users plummet 79% globally in just a month, according to Similarweb. Relatedly, the average amount of time users spent on the app dropped precipitously, from 14 minutes per day down to 3 over the course of just a month.

These early returns don’t mean that Threads is doomed to fail; just that it’s having significant growing pains after dreams of its overnight success proved to be wildly optimistic.

So, with the Threads hype, followed by its near-inevitable crash back to Earth, what is a diligent and curious marketing and communications professional to do? In short, watch and wait.

It is advisable to secure desired usernames while they’re available, but business-to-business companies should not feel compelled to rush in at this early stage to “join the conversation,” especially since the conversation seems to be dwindling. Instead, marcomm professionals can prepare today for a possibly-more-relevant Threads tomorrow by seeking out answers to the following three key questions:

• Is our target audience here? Admittedly, without search functionality, this one is tough to answer. However, for most business-to-business companies, the answer is likely to be “not yet,” and quite possibly, “never.”
• Is it worth the effort? Evaluate the time and resources that Threads would require and consider whether they would be more efficiently directed elsewhere.
• What’s the strategy? Due to the differing natures of the two social networks, posts to Threads should not be mirror images of posts to X. Experts advise producing humanizing content that shouldn’t be only brand-focused.

While Threads may hold some promise in the future for marketing and communications, companies should not feel obligated to jump on the platform simply because it’s the latest shiny object to briefly attract public attention. As Amendola Jodi Amendola shared last year, the PR landscape continues to evolve, so it’s best to take a cautious approach, monitor your competitors’ social activities, and keep an open mind.

While this approach may lack the excitement of a bloody battle between two petty, infantile, and thin-skinned ultra-billionaires, it’s what makes the most sense for public relations professionals as Threads seeks to gain traction with a business audience.

Why Your 60-Minute Meeting Is 30 Minutes Too Long

by Brandon Glenn | Feb 22, 2023 | Blog

We’ve all been there – sitting in a meeting that could have easily ended a half-hour ago – but for some reason, the meeting just crawls on and on.

One person may go off on a tangent that may be mildly interesting but has no relevance to the meeting’s objectives. Another person may ask a question that they would have already known the answer to if they were paying attention five minutes earlier. Yet another may deliver a 5- or 10-minute monologue that only has relevance to one other team member at the meeting and could have more easily and efficiently been handled via one well-written email.

Regardless of the reason, business meetings too often turn out to be a waste of time and resources. That was a major conclusion of the book “The Surprising Science of Meetings,” written by Steven G. Rogelberg, a professor at the University of North Carolina – Charlotte and perhaps the world’s “leading expert” on business meetings.

“Poorly conducted meetings clearly hurt leaders, teams, departments, and organizations,” Rogelberg writes. However, that is not to say that meetings should be eliminated. In some cases (when performed properly), meetings are a necessary means of exchanging ideas, arriving at decisions, and keeping team members informed.

Most companies view bad and unnecessary meetings as an inevitable cost of doing business, but it doesn’t have to be that way. It’s simply a question of making meetings more productive and valuable to all participants – and a big part of that is choosing the right length of time.

Meetings in Corporate America: Too many and too long
On an average day in the U.S., 55 million meetings occur, according to Rogelberg’s research. That represents five-fold growth over the 11 million daily meetings that happened in 1976, according to a Harvard Business Review estimate.

Today, on average, non-managers attend eight meetings per week, while the number for managers climbs to 12. Chief executives may spend a whopping 60% of their time in meetings, according to Rogelberg.

Though most of us may prefer not to think about it, there is a time and cost associated with every meeting. An estimate by Xerox once found that meetings among its 24,000-employee development team cost the company over $100 million a year. Separately, an estimate from Lucid Meetings found that the U.S. spends $1.4 trillion per year on meetings, or roughly 8% of the nation’s annual gross domestic product.

Despite all this expense and investment, meetings often fail to accomplish much of anything productive – just ask the attendees. A 2014 survey of nearly 2,100 U.S. adults found that nearly half of respondents would rather do anything unpleasant, such as standing in line at the DMV or watching paint dry, than attend a status meeting. Further, more than one-third of respondents said status meetings are “a waste of time.”

Separately, a 2005 Microsoft survey of 40,000 global workers found that 69% said their meetings were unproductive.

30 minutes is the magic number
It’s all enough to make one ponder: If so many of us seem to agree that corporate America spends too much time in meetings that often fail to accomplish their objectives, then why don’t we cut down on the amount of time we spend in meetings? Judging from a couple of Google searches, I’m not the only one.

Luckily, there’s a simple way to reduce the amount of time we all spend in meetings: Never allow them to exceed 30 minutes.

Plenty of other meeting-weary attendees have come to the same conclusion:

• “Scheduling meetings for more than an hour is non-productive,” writes Time Management Ninja. “You lose people’s interest, energy, and attention. Even worse, meetings will always expand to fill the allowed time.”
• “I maintain if individual prep work is done beforehand by each participant and the meeting starts on time and stays on focus, everything included in a reasonable hour-long agenda could well be covered in 30 minutes with plenty of time for meaningful, yet not excessive banter,” says Nate Towne on LinkedIn.
• “I believe that all meetings should be 30 minutes or less,” writes Tessa Palmer on Medium. “And not a second longer. If you can’t say what you’re going to say in half-an-hour, then you’re doing it all wrong.”

While doing away with hour-long meetings might seem like a dramatic shift to some, I believe it is more doable than many of us assume. Instead of hour-long meetings, try 15 – 20 minute huddles, SparkHire suggests. Come prepared with an agenda, ask attendees to brainstorm ideas by themselves ahead of time (a technique known as “brainwriting” that I’ve previously advocated), limit the number of participants to only those absolutely necessary, and start with what’s important.

So next time you’re tempted to send out a notice for a 60-minute meeting, pause, take a deep breath, and think about what you could do beforehand to cut that time in half. Your teammates will undoubtedly appreciate it.

The Oxford Comma: Yes, No, Or Who Cares?

by Brandon Glenn | May 25, 2022 | Blog

The Oxford comma represents the rare example of a debate among grammar nerds that has spilled over into pop culture – at least a little bit.

From Vampire Weekend beginning a song with the pressing question of “Who gives a f— about an Oxford comma?” to a court case whose outcome hinged on the lack of an Oxford comma, few questions of grammar have captured the popular imagination like the debate over the appropriate usage (or lack thereof) of this one little punctuation mark.

First, let’s examine exactly what the Oxford comma – also called the Harvard comma and serial comma – is, which is more confusing to explain than understand through an example. The debate over the Oxford comma revolves around whether to include a comma before a coordinating conjunction such as “and” or “or” in a list of three or more items.

Here’s an easier way of thinking about it: Does the last comma belong in the following sentence? “The fruit bowl included apples, bananas, and oranges.” Oxford comma supporters would say that it does.

Adding to the debate, some of the top “authorities” on writing offer differing opinions on the Oxford comma, with the Chicago Manual of Style recommending it, and AP Style generally opposing it, except for cases in which omitting it would lead to confusion or misinterpretation.

And that is what really gets us to the crux of this debate. Grammar is about clarity, not memorizing seemingly arbitrary rules to separate “right” from “wrong” in writing. Here, the often cited “Ayn Rand example“ can be instructive.

Consider the sentence: “This book is dedicated to my parents, Ayn Rand and God.”

In this case, the lack of Oxford comma seems to indicate that the writer’s parents are (somehow) Ayn Rand and God, while inclusion of the Oxford comma would more clearly illustrate that the writer is referring to three distinct entities.

To me, this seems to be the most compelling argument for the Oxford comma, while most arguments against it claim that it is often “unnecessary and pointless.” Indeed, in some cases the Oxford comma may be unnecessary, but because it doesn’t detract from the quality of writing or its clarity, I advocate for its usage.

Ultimately, what’s more important than deciding whether to use the Oxford comma is consistency in application. The worst Oxford comma-related outcome is when the same piece of content sometimes uses it, and sometimes doesn’t.

Unfortunately, in the end it’s somewhat of an unsatisfying answer, but it is also the one that makes the most sense when it comes to the Oxford comma: Decide whatever you like but make a choice and stick with it.