Today I want to talk about something very important in marketing but also elsewhere. Feedback. It would be nearly impossible to produce a great piece of marketing content in one go. No, not when several people are involved and probably not when only one people is working on it either. Even when that person himself might think so. The more people, the more opinions and usually the better result, but it takes work. Today I want to talk about my learnings on this topic.
Feedback methods
Feedback can be given orally or in a written format. Or it can be mixed. People can scribble their opinions on a printout like was normal to us all at school when our papers got graded. But today there are also all kinds of technological ways to gather feedback. It can be a very generic “Good job” comment or a very specific instruction with what is wrong, why and how to fix it but today I won’t go deeper into that. It can be done in one-on-one meetings or in groups. The more feedback givers there are, the more complicated it usually gets as all feedback has to be compiled, confusing feedback talked through and improved and contradicting feedback resolved.
Best programmes for feedback giving
The best part here is that almost everyone has those. No need to download some special or expensive software. Usually all that is needed is MS Word or similar and Adobe Reader or Acrobat Pro but I’d be careful with the last one as in the wrong hands it can make things more complicated.
MS Word has this amazing little feature called Track changes. If you haven’t started using it yet, I really recommend that you give it a try. As soon as you switch it on, it starts marking all changes you make in a document from deleting a typo to adding a specification to moving big blocks of text around. It also records who made what change and when and uses different colour coding for each person.
MS Word has also a Commenting feature which nicely compliments the changes you make in text. Sometimes you might want to ask someone to clarify something or add something or question some written element but don’t want to just bluntly change it. Use comments and send it back!
I really use Track changes for everything from work texts to helping edit a friend’s motivation letter. Even if someone hasn’t asked to see exactly what kind of edits you have done, it is nice to make it clear from the start. And it only takes one click from the person getting feedback to apply or decline all changes.
The other great program for feedback giving is Adobe Reader – a simple free peace of software we all use for opening PDF-files. But did you know that it allows you to make quite specific comments on any file that has recognizable text? We use it all the time in brochures etc that also have images and need to be layouted nicely.
I guess a lot of people have used the “sticky notes” there to just pin a comment here or there. You’d make the life of others much easier if you marked specific sections of text that you have a problem with and attached a comment to those.
The programme also allows to show where exactly something should be added and mark what should be deleted or replaced with something else. I use all those features constantly.
The marks of changes made can be quite small and difficult to see, but the programme also lists all changes on the right edge. Ad agencies love it because they can go through all requests one by one and easily mark the things they have done, fixed. This way the danger of missing something is minimized, but it still happens sometimes so be ready to find some mistakes repeating through several versions. Unless you’ve found the perfect partner.
I also mentioned Acrobat Pro. I haven’t worked that much with it but it allows you to make some serious changes already in the PDF itself. That, however, can be very confusing because usually the actual changes are done in a programme like Adobe InDesign and if you hide your changes within a preview PDF, they will often remain unnoticed and therefore even if you like how your PDF looks, your (final) editable files will remain unchanged.
I recommend that Acrobat access is given to only crucial decision makers who have the full overview of things and sometimes might have to do a quick fix directly in a PDF.
Mediums for feedback asking
A very common way to ask for feedback on some document is by sending an email with an attachment. That can work fine if only one person’s feedback is needed, but as soon as more people are involved, things get complicated. No project manager wants to get back several parallel versions of the same file and unless all parties are very careful about informing others about their actions, this can easily happen. Even if one person writes to all parties that he or she is currently working on the file, the others might not get the message in time and start working on a version of their own. As a result, a lot of frustration is created and plenty of time wasted. There are some project management tools that might help with it as they will warn others if someone is in the process of editing.
I’ve also gotten to try an online system called Bynder Workflow that is meant to be used for production management and since their main product is an asset bank for images and videos, it is also oriented at those and not text.
It is great because it allows for everyone to work in the same live web environment where a project manager can decide on the process steps and ask for participation from different members when needed. It’s not a perfect tool but if giving feedback on videos is usually a pain in the …, because you’d have to start and stop the video constantly to manually mark time slots where some changes are needed, then here you just add a comment with a simple click on the screen to the exact geographical and time location relevant. Of course it is just as easy for images, but it’s a different story with text because the programme doesn’t recognize it and doesn’t allow the precision levels of Adobe. That is why I prefer the latter.
Since I started talking a bit about project management environments that I have used already, I’d like to mention that after a bit of testing we managed to make MS Sharepoint Project office work quite well with Adobe and MS Word files even up to version handling and final approvals.
Getting back to the mediums of feedback, you can always give feedback on paper but it will be annoying for the project manager who still needs to transform it into a digital format and gather all info in one place before requesting changes from an agency or whomever in charge of execution.
Sometimes when feedback giving in a digital format starts to get too confusing or waiting for all parties to take the time and do it, takes longer than you have, it might be a good idea to have a meeting – whether it is a spontaneous Skype call to go over the file or a face to face for a group, depends on the situation and possibilities. Sometimes I’ve sat in a room with up to 5 people and just read through the whole text or reviewed the logic or images to get everyone immediately on the same page about what to improve and how. That means that I’ve pretty much had to protocol every tiny change but that also means that there is one file that everyone is happy with or at least not screaming about publicly. Sometimes that is already a victory.
Version handling and feedback
As I said in the beginning, good results take time and often the input of several people – if not more. Most likely with whatever marketing deliverable there will be at least 3-5 versions. With a bigger project there can sometimes be 25, but since that is time consuming and expensive, no-one wants that. Agencies would prefer to have everything done in 3 drafts, but try to avoid signing off on paying extra for more. We should all take responsibility for our own mistakes and we all miss something sometimes or get a better idea later but that happens also on agency’s side. If you are working in a company ordering creative work from agencies, then most useful for you is a fixed price for a project.
Anyway, if you end up in the world of versions, it is very important that everyone is aware of which version is most recent and what they should be working on. The worst case scenario is when an overly confident feedback provider cc-s his comments straight to the producer before everything is aligned with other stakeholders. In this case, the production agency might take that as the official list of changes to make, do what was asked and return a new version while others might be still working on the errors of the previous file. Imagine that mess.
Suddenly you have two working files and maybe the changes that were already made are not at all what majority wanted. Now the agency can charge for extra work and the feedback givers might have to move all their comments to a new file. Trust me, that is more annoying as you might think as you can’t just drag and drop things from Adobe Reader. Nope, you’d have to mark the text in each comment one by one and create a new comment in the new document and then paste the text in. Not to mention all the detailed marks about copy changes.
At the same time, sometimes you need to return to an older version and if you have re-saved things on the same Word file, I don’t even know if you can get back. Using an online project management environment might come in handy there.
But I’ve already blabbered enough today. I hope that someone else besides me finds it interesting and useful too.