feedback handling – Maria Tamming

Since I am in a writing mood after a while, I wanted to get some more thoughts out in text format. I’ve been thinking a lot about how to say something. People take things differently. Misunderstandings happen. Especially in written format. Cultural differences play a role and the harsher the message, the harder it might be to convey an important message without hurting anyone’s feelings. After all, most people don’t like to be criticized and creative people can be extra sensitive. I am still trying to improve myself regarding both – giving and receiving criticism.

Today I want to focus still on marketing feedback. It is very important and often useful, unless the feedback is utterly positive and even when the criticism is constructive, it can be hard to take. Creative arts are also not as black and white as maths, for example. Often things come down to a gut feeling, context and personal preferences and experiences. Think how differently an innocent child and a grownup might react when someone tells them that they resemble a cow. Therefor, sometimes I really struggle with how to explain in short what I think is wrong.

Spelling game

It is pretty easy to point out a spelling mistake but even that is sometimes arguable. If it hasn’t been agreed upon first which spelling should be used, then several options can be correct. Think about the differences of American and British English. Now add to the pile Australian and Indian. They all have differences despite speaking pretty much the same language. Should one use S or Z; add the letter U or not. Is one taking an exam or giving an exam? Riding a lift or an elevator? A lot of international companies have made a decision which language version to use in their official communication and still errors of not knowing better happen all the time if we are not dealing with native speakers and actually also if we are. Yet a concrete decision makes the lives or marketing and communication people a lot easier and there is no excuse for them to not follow it. And nowadays automatic spell checkers do most of the job for us.

Logic errors

Logic errors are so common even if you might not think so and notice them. They happen even to experienced copywriters and not only in technically complicated texts due to lack of knowledge. They happen everywhere and can make you look stupid in front of a more critical reader or listener.

Sometimes it is a question of using a word wrongly. For example, when marketing for agricultural industry, a copywriter needs to know where to use the word “fertilization” and where “insemination” and the difference between “killing” and “culling”. People and animals might be fertile, but fertilizers are used on fields of crops and animals are inseminated. But if you didn’t know that, it is still ok. As a production manager, I will catch it while doing quality check.

Sometimes it is just a simple question of singular and plural like here:

“unit has an ergonomic bristles”

Other times it can be easily missed when scanning a text:

“it can be installed in areas without electricity connection or lack of space.”

The original sentence was longer and carried even more facts, making it harder to spot the mistake, but did you? But if you deduct now the part of the sentence that isn’t really important, it turns into “it can be installed in areas without lack of space.” That can be true, but how often does a marketing text intend to brag about something taking lots of space? Correct me now if I am wrong as I am not a native speaker but I can currently see a few ways to fix this sentence with minor changes.

Option 1:
It can be installed in areas without electricity or with lack of space.

Option 2:
It can be installed in areas without electricity that also might lack space.

Option 3:
It can be installed in areas without electricity or lacking space. (Not 100% sure about this one)

Option 4:
It can be installed in areas without much space or electricity. (My favourite as it seems the clearest)

Question of style

Sometimes there might not be anything wrong – technically – and yet it strikes a nerve. For example, I’ve reacted recently badly to a copywriter starting a catalogue unit text for a brand new product by calling it “entry-line”. Yes, compared to some other products, it is a simple and more affordable solution, but entry-line sounds to me like basic in a bad way. No-one likes to feel cheap or underdeveloped and these are the connotations I have with that phrase. Those might not apply to everyone, but I believe I am not the only one who feels this way. Therefor I prefer to warn copywriters about my perspective so that they can phrase it better. Simple can be good as long as you don’t call a person simple. Also affordable might work because everyone likes a good deal.

Another example of bad style that a product specialist recommended and copywriter used without changing anything:
“We would like to think that with the XXX tomorrow’s farming is already here today.”

Firstly, I’d question the word order but as a non-native English speaker I am never 100% certain about that myself and would like to trust a copywriter who has reviewed it. How does it sound to you otherwise? It hints that our product is very innovative – which is great. The construction that with XXX the future is here sounds a bit fishy to me as well. I don’t have the perfect phrasing ready yet, but perhaps it could say instead: “Product XXX gives you a taste of (what) the future (will be like)”. But I don’t think that taste is the best word here even though we are talking about a food industry product.

The worst thing about that sentence is using the words “would” and “like” as it is done now. There’s nothing wrong with the words themselves but they lack confidence. It sounds a bit like “ideally we could claim that product XXX is very innovative, but we don’t believe that ourselves really either”. And if you don’t seem to believe in your product, why should others?

I know that bragging might backfire in some cultures and this was written in Sweden by a Swede, but how much stronger would the claim be if phrased like: “We think that with XXX tomorrow’s farming is here already today”? Do you see the difference?

Sometimes it feels like there is too much of something. Other times something seems to be missing like here:

“How often do you inspect and service your XXX? It should be at least annually.”

As this example comes from a social media post, I understand that character number might have been limited but this seems like lazy spoken language and yet uses complicated words like annually.

I’d say rather: “It should be done at least annually” but to my ear it sounds even better to say: “It should be done at least once per year.” Do you agree?

I am also adding a few PDF files where you can see work done on symbol logic as well as text. You will see a lot of comments on very simple illustrations because when we received those first drafts, it felt like the illustrators had picked out some random interesting keywords and claims from the accompanying text instead of really thinking through the logic how those things work. For example, what are the features and what the benefits of something. What is the illustration focusing on? A robot or a service? What kind of different things must one symbol cover? What kind of language is used?

I’ve tried to give now very different examples from the actual marketing materials I have worked on and since this is my blog, I allow myself to use more direct speech than I might when I would actually be giving feedback to the creators of those texts. Believe me, I choose and chose kinder words in reality, but I expect all my partners to be grown up professionals and if they keep providing me with poor quality texts, then eventually I will become more concrete and harsh in my feedback. Especially when I am in a rush to finalize something.

I hope you found something useful if you read through all of this. If not more than at least another perspective.

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.

Tag: feedback handling

What to pay attention to in a (marketing) text?