Facebook's Position on Twitter's Labeling

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg weighed in on Twitter’s decision to fact-check and label some of President Trump’s tweets. In response to protests after the death of George Floyd, one tweet promised “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” Twitter hid the tweet with a note that it “violated the Twitter Rules about glorifying violence.”

Another tweet claimed that “mail-in voting will lead to massive fraud and abuse,” and Twitter posted a warning to “get the facts.” Until now, Twitter had not enforced its policies for the president’s tweets.

Facebook is taking a different tack. CEO Mark Zuckerberg described the company’s position:

"I believe strongly that Facebook shouldn't be the arbiter of truth of everything that people say online. I think in general, private companies shouldn't be, especially these platform companies, shouldn't be in the position of doing that."

The Wall Street Journal editorial board defended Zuckerberg’s decision: “We wish Facebook would take a lighter touch when it comes to political speech overall.”

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Discussion:

• What’s your view of Twitter’s actions? Why do you think the company began labeling President Trump’s tweets now?

• Should Facebook follow suit? How might each company’s mission play a role in its actions?

Amazon's Email Template

A Reddit poster claims that “Amazon accidentally sent out their email template and it’s hilarious,” but others say it’s fairly standard.

Using a music analogy, the template author encourages varied sentence structures and a strong call to action or CTA.

Discussion:

• Do you believe this is an Amazon original that mistakenly went public? Why or why not?

• What principles do you take away from this example?

• What would you add? (Hint: Something about skim-value?)

Business Writing Advice

Dr. Sharon Cannon at UNC-Chapel Hill Kenan-Flagler (@smccannon) tweets great articles for business communication faculty and students. This week, she found one by Devon Delfino, “How to Improve Your Business Writing Style.”

Delfino offers nine principles:

1. Identify your primary goal in business communications

2. Focus on your readers’ needs and professional goals

3. Cut to the chase in business writing: Focus on clarity over quantity

4. Streamline structure and organization

5. Fine-tune your tone and business writing style

6. Use an active, human voice

7. Include clear calls to action

8. Aim for brand consistency in your business writing style

9. Do a final check

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Discussion:

• Read the entire article, which offers more good advice. Which principles most align with what you’re learning in your business communication class? Does the article offer something you haven’t learned?

• I would add one point, particularly, which is to adjust your tone to that of your organization. Every department and company has its own style. What differences have you observed from your experience?

• What advice would you add?

Google’s XYZ Resume Formula

A Ladders article offers good advice from Google for writing resumes. Some information is basic, such as tailoring resumes for each job and skipping the objective. The company also suggests the XYZ format for bullets to focus on accomplishments: “Accomplished [X] as measured by [Y], by doing [Z].”

The author provides this example:

• OK: “Won second place in hackathon.”

• Better: “Won second place out of 50 teams in hackathon.”

• Best: “Won second place out of 50 teams in hackathon at NJ Tech by working with two colleagues to develop an app that synchronizes mobile calendars.

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Discussion:

• Does your resume follow this format? How can you improve the descriptions?

• Check your resume bullets for the start of each. The first words next to the bullet will be read most often. Do they emphasize your main point? How can you reorder text within bullets?

Message from Zoom CEO

People who never heard of Zoom are now relying on the company to provide flawless service, but of course we experience problems. In a blog post, CEO Eric Yuan describes how Zoom use has “ballooned overnight” and what the company has done to meet demand and improve the service.

Yuan also expresses gratitude to Zoom users at the end of the post, demonstrating business communication principles and leadership character:

Transparency has always been a core part of our culture. I am committed to being open and honest with you about areas where we are strengthening our platform and areas where users can take steps of their own to best use and protect themselves on the platform. 

We welcome your continued questions and encourage you to provide us with feedback – our chief concern, now and always, is making users happy and ensuring that the safety, privacy, and security of our platform is worthy of the trust you all have put in us.

Together, let’s build something that can truly make the world a better place!

Yuan image source.

Discussion:

• Analyze the blog post: audiences, communication objectives, organizational structure, writing style, etc.

• What business communication principles does the blog post illustrate? What improvements would you suggest?

• What leadership character dimensions are illustrated in this example?

Too Many COVID-19 Emails?

A Fast Company article criticizes brands for sending emails without real connections to customers. Consumers are getting annoyed at seemingly random emails from companies that happen to have their email. The author offers this advice:

The best way that brands should be responding is if they actually have something to say or contribute. Our patience for marketing fluff is low at the best of times, but now it’s positively toxic.

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Discussion:

• Think about the emails you have received recently. Which were more useful or meaningful to you than others? Why is that the case?

• What advice do you have for companies debating whether and what types of emails to send?

Common Writing Mistakes Infographic

An editor at Macmillan Publishing created an infographic to show the most common mistakes writers make. Misplaced commas, wordy sentences, and run-on sentences get top billing.

The list is interesting and helpful to alert writers to what they should focus on when they revise their work. I wouldn’t try to attack all of these issues on a rough draft.

Of course, some of these mistakes are more serious than others. Although they’re prioritized by frequency, other organizational strategies might be useful.

Advice at the bottom of the infographic is useful for anyone.

Discussion:

• Which of these common mistakes are problems in your own writing? How have you been able to tackle them?

• How else could this list be organized?

• How useful do you find the advice at the bottom? What other advice would you offer writers?

Quantifying a Tweet

When someone in an organization goes rogue and sends a tweet, what’s the potential damage? The NBA found out the hard way that the financial impact could be significant.

In October 2019, Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey supported Hong Kong protests in a tweet. As a result, Chinese advertisers pulled their ads and broadcasters wouldn’t air games. Now, NBA commissioner Adam Silver admits the loss will total “hundreds of millions” of dollars and “probably less than $400 million.” Silver expanded on the damage:

“It’s substantial. I don’t want to run from that. We were taken off the air in China for a period of time, and it caused our many business partners in China to feel it was therefore inappropriate to have ongoing relationships with us. But I don’t have any sense that there’s any permanent damage to our business there.”

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Discussion:

• Review the situation from October. What lessons can managers learn?

• What’s your view of Silver admitting the loss? What are the arguments for and against his honesty?

Kids and Email and Phone Etiquette

A Wall Street Journal article tells us what we probably already know: kids could improve how they email and talk on the phone. Referring to email as seeming like “an ancient craft” and “so last century,” the author gives examples of missing subject lines and salutations.

An HR manager sees issues when young people are in the workplace and blames changing technologies:

“You can graduate high school without hardly ever having made a call. You can do everything online—book reservations, book an Uber. Teens aren’t hearing their parents make calls either. When I was younger, my parents did all of that out loud and I was learning by listening. You’d pick up all that etiquette.”

College students seem to have trouble with the phone as well. Employers tell me students are uncomfortable leaving voice mails and taking their calls.

The article lists basic etiquette guidelines for email from The Emily Post Institute’s Daniel Post Senning.

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Discussion:

• What guidelines would you add to the email etiquette list?

• How did you learn email and phone manners? Or are you still learning?

• How can you help your young siblings or other young people prepare for the workplace?

Tips for Writing Headlines

An infographic written by Feldman Creative and designed by Infobrandz offers tips for writing headlines, particularly for online content. The advice focuses on capturing attention, which makes sense in our cluttered online world: posing a question, focusing on the reader, using a colon or m-dash, and using visceral language.

Read the entire infographic on Ragan.com. Some of this advice is useful for email subject lines, which may inspire receivers to read or delete your email.

Discussion:

• Read the past 50 or so subject lines of emails you have received. Which of these principles are followed? What differences do you notice in marketing and other emails?

• What advice do you find useful from the infographic for online content? What about email subject lines that you write?

Emails Show USC's Potential Role in the Admissions Scandal

Actress Lori Loughlin and her fashion-designer husband Mossimo Giannulli have been charged with bribing University of Southern California athletic officials to get their daughter admitted. Now emails from USC show that the school was courting them by asking for donations and arranging for personalized campus tours. In one email, a university official wrote, “I’d also be happy to flag her application.”

A New York Times article summarizes how accused parents plan to defend themselves against charges:

Motions by several of the defendants suggest they will argue, essentially, that they could not have defrauded the university, as prosecutors say, because the university was actively seeking such donations and offering a leg-up in admissions in return.

In a statement, USC downplayed the special treatment:

“What was being offered to the Giannullis was neither special nor unique. Tours, classroom visits and meetings are routinely offered. The primary purpose of a flag is to be able to track the outcome of the admission review process. It is not a substitute for otherwise being qualified for admission to USC.”

Parents are expected to say that their donations were legitimate, but USC is expected to say that the bribery was specific to the crew team official, who “agreed to pass the couple’s two daughters off as coxswains.”

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Discussion:

• What’s your view of this situation? Do you agree more with the parents’ or with the school’s perspective?

• What, if anything, do the school’s emails reveal? Consider this message to the parents: “Please let me know if I can be at all helpful in setting up a 1:1 opportunity for her, customized tour of campus for the family, and/or classroom visit?”

Boeing Internal Documents Don't Reflect Well on Safety

The lead article in today’s The Wall Street Journal is titled, “Internal Boeing Documents Show Cavalier Attitude to Safety.” In 150 pages of emails and other documentation, employees worry that they don’t have enough time to correct safety issues and refer to regulators as “morons” and “stupider.”

In February 2018, one employee wrote, “Would you put your family on a MAX simulator trained aircraft? I wouldn’t.” A pilot wrote, “I still haven’t been forgiven by god for the covering up I did last year. Can’t do it one more time. Pearly gates will be closed.” Still another employee wrote, “This airplane is designed by clowns, who in turn are supervised by monkeys.”

A defense attorney argues that employees were just “blowing off steam” in their emails.

In the past few months, Boeing’s culture has come to light—once lauded as a place where people felt proud to work but now a place where people feel stressed and remorseful. CEO Doug Muilenberg has since been terminated and replaced temporarily by CFO Doug Smith.

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Discussion:

• Read more about the internal communications. What lessons can employees and their managers take away from this story?

• What’s your view of the emails? Do they indicate big problems at the company, or is the attorney right that employees are just venting to each other? How does the concept of “cherry picking” come into play?

• What should Boeing do to manage this situation? Consider this news in light of the company’s crisis communication planning you read about in another post.

Facebook Memo Goes Public

Facebook executive Andrew Bosworth wrote a 2,551-word memo about the company’s role in the upcoming election and more. Bosworth compliments President Trump’s use of Facebook ads and admits that the site impacted the 2016 U.S. election. A Vox article describes Boswell’s logic:

Bosworth’s memo has much more in there, which is getting plenty of deserved attention, including the assertion that Facebook did indeed help Donald Trump win the 2016 election — by giving him the tools to run “the single best digital ad campaign I’ve ever seen from any advertiser. Period.” And the memo also reveals that Bosworth, a self-described “committed liberal,” fantasizes about using Facebook to prevent Trump from winning in 2020, but won’t.

The memo is also attracting attention because Bosworth compares Facebook to sugar and places responsibility on the user: “At the end of the day we are forced to ask what responsibility individuals have for themselves."

Bosworth ends the memo with a question:

To bring this uncharacteristically long and winding essay full circle, I wanted to start a discussion about what lessons people are taking away from the press coverage. My takeaway is that we were late on data security, misinformation, and foreign interference. We need to get ahead of polarization and algorithmic transparency. What are the other big topics people are seeing and where are we on those?

Boswell image source.

Discussion:

• Read the entire memo . What surprises you most?

• How damaging is the memo to Facebook’s image, particularly with another election coming up? How does a memo like this—posted on an internal site—become public?

• What business writing principles does Bosworth follow, and how could he improve the memo?

Should We Call Climate Change Something Else?

An AdAge writer wonders whether renaming climate change would change perceptions. Reframing is a common strategy for influencing behaviors, thoughts, and feelings. Already, climate change seems to be the evolution of global warming, a less convincing idea, in part, because sometimes it’s quite cold, as President Trump says.

A brand team pondered the following new names:

• Global Meltdown, Global Melting

• Climate Collapse, Climate Chaos

• Boiling Point, Melting Point

• Scorched Earth

Earth image source.

Discussion:

• The author identifies “parameters and guideposts” for the new name: audience, reach, and message. What is important for each of these categories?

• What’s your view of the proposed new names? Which do you like best and least, and why?

Fabricated Letters to the SEC

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is planning a policy change that, as a Bloomberg article describes, “would shift power from investors to corporate boards” and “limit[s] the power of dissenting shareholders.” Unfortunately, when Chairman Jay Clayton announced the change, he cited several fabricated letters of support to the SEC.

The SEC failed to recognize that many letters followed a similar template and included a random line in the mailing address—“A Coalition of Growth Companies.”

Clayton was impressed that the SEC heard from such a variety of people, such as veterans and retired police officers, but people contacted said they didn’t write the letter or agreed to having their name on a letter without understanding the implications.

The Bloomberg article reports Clayton’s response:

The SEC declined to comment on any irregularities with the letters. In a Tuesday interview, Clayton sidestepped a question about how the agency ensures comment letters are genuine. He did emphasize that the regulator’s potential revamp of shareholder voting rules are proposals, adding that there will be ample time for people on both sides to weigh in before any changes are finalized.

“We welcome input in all ways,” Clayton said in the interview with Bloomberg Television’s David Westin. “On this issue, where there are a lot of different views and a lot of different interests, we encourage people to come in and talk to us, send us their comments.”

Discussion:

• How does something like this happen? Who is responsible?

• Assess Clayton’s response. How well is he handling the situation? What, if anything, should he do differently?

• What leadership character dimensions are illustrated by this situation?

T-Mobile's Full-Page Ad

In signature pink, T-Mobile ran a full-page ad in Sunday’s New York Times. The ad also feels like T-Mobile because we see “From the desk of John Legere,” the charismatic CEO and frequent tweeter with comments such as, “One of our best weapons is the ineptness of the competition. #sorrynotsorry.”

For a persuasive message, the ad is curious and a good example for business communication students to analyze.

Discussion:

• Who are the primary and secondary audiences for this ad?

• What are T-Mobile’s communication objectives, and how well does this message achieve them?

• If you were advising the company, what suggestions would you have for revisions?

Plain Language from Financial Advisers

A Wall Street Journal writer asks financial advisers to speak to us in plain English. A new Securities and Exchange Commission rule—described in 564 pages—calls for simpler writing. But the author wants advisers to go further, for example, to use more visuals and categories: “color-coded from red to green, for instance, or arrayed on a scale from 1 to 10.”

Fortunately, the rule includes a summary, although students of business communication will find problems:

The Securities and Exchange Commission (the “Commission” or the “SEC”) is adopting new rules and forms as well as amendments to its rules and forms, under both the Investment Advisers Act of 1940 (“Advisers Act”) and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 (“Exchange Act”) to require registered investment advisers and registered broker-dealers (together, “firms”) to provide a brief relationship summary to retail investors. The relationship summary is intended to inform retail investors about: the types of client and customer relationships and services the firm offers; the fees, costs, conflicts of interest, and required standard of conduct associated with those relationships and services; whether the firm and its financial professionals currently have reportable legal or disciplinary history; and how to obtain additional information about the firm. The relationship summary will also reference Investor.gov/CRS, a page on the Commission’s investor education website, Investor.gov, which offers educational information to investors about investment advisers, broker-dealers, and individual financial professionals and other materials. Retail investors will receive a relationship summary at the beginning of a relationship with a firm, communications of updated information following a material change to the relationship summary, and an updated relationship summary 2 upon certain events. The relationship summary is subject to Commission filing and recordkeeping requirements.

Plain language in government documents started as an initiative in the 1990s, and the group highlights before-and-after examples.

Discussion:

• How could you rewrite the summary, above, for easier reading?

• Review the Plain Language website. What are your impressions of the group’s work?

Business Leaders Sign Letter to Top Officials

Fifty CEOs and business school leaders signed a letter to President Trump and other top-ranking politicians urging action to allow for more international applications. The letter comes after a report by the Graduate Management Admissions Council showing declining applications.

Report conclusions follow:

[A]llowing top talent to study and work in the country of their choice helps create jobs, not take them. It offers insight into changing trends for historically talent-attracting and talent-supplying countries. Business school applications are a powerful metric—and forecast—of the success of individual economies in prioritizing talent and therefore leading innovation and growth. A survey of these latest metrics shows change in our midst—and for certain economies, warning signs for the future.

In their letter, the business leaders write that the U.S. is “needlessly capping our growth and can do better.” They urge U.S. politicians to allow more movement by taking the following action:

• Removing “per-country” visa caps, modernizing our visa processing system, and reforming the H-1B visa program to make it possible for the most talented people to have a reasonable chance of gaining entry to the United States.

• Creating a “heartland” visa that encourages immigration to the regions of the United States that could most use the vitality of these talented individuals.

Discussion:

• Analyze the letter. Who are the primary and secondary audiences? What are the communication objectives? How do you assess the organization and writing style?

• What persuasive communication strategies do the writers use? Which are most and least effective?

• Analyze the report using the same questions.

• How well does the infographic summarize the report conclusions? What could be improved?

Tips for Managing Email

My colleague at Cornell, Andrew Quagliata, offers helpful tips for those of us who struggle with managing our daily email:

• Don’t check your email immediately after you wake up.

• Don’t begin the workday with email.

• Open your email applications only during designated times.

• Turn off notifications.

• Move emails out of your inbox after you read them.

• Filter messages.

• Establish a priority framework for responding.

• Use signatures for common responses.

• Send fewer emails.

Read more about Prof. Quagliata’s advice on his blog—and you might find more helpful ideas.

Typing image source.

Gmail image source.

Discussion:

• Which of these tips do you find most useful? Which have you tried before, and which are new for you to consider?

• What tools for managing email have you used and found helpful or unhelpful?

Harvard Admissions Decision

A federal judge has decided that Harvard did not discriminate against Asian students during the admissions process. The Crimson, Harvard’s student newspaper, provides an analysis of the case.

In its defense, Harvard revealed its admissions process, which included personality ratings. The plaintiff group, Students for Fair Admissions, criticized the system as disadvantaging Asian students. However, in her decision, the judge cited testimony from admissions counselors, shown here.

The judge explained the role of diversity in her decision:

Ensuring diversity at Harvard relies, in part, on race-conscious admissions. The use of race benefits certain racial and ethnic groups that would otherwise be underrepresented at Harvard and is therefore neither an illegitimate use of race or reflective of racial prejudice.

Although she decided in Harvard’s favor, the judge did provide recommendations to Harvard:

 She recommended that admissions officers participate in implicit bias trainings, maintain clear guidelines on the use of race, and monitor any race-related statistical disparities.

She said the task of considering race in admissions is a “a particularly delicate job” to execute lawfully.

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Discussion:

• What’s your view of this case? Read more about the case in the judge’s decision.

• What’s your own experience during the college admissions process? How might this affect how you view the case?

• Analyze the Harvard Crimson article. What business communication principles do the author follow?