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A Place of Gathering

Ben Franklin got a lot done in his time, and much of it was done through community collaboration. One of the ways that he was able to develop so many local programs, like the library system that he invented, was through the mechanism of a Philadelphia club he established in 1727 called the “Junto”.

“I should have mentioned before, that, in the autumn of the preceding year,  I had formed most of my ingenious acquaintance into a club of mutual improvement, which we called the Junto; we met on Friday evenings. The rules that I drew up required that every member, in his turn, should produce one or more queries on any point of Morals, Politics, or Natural Philosophy, to be discuss’d by the company; and once in three months produce and read an essay of his own writing, on any subject he pleased. Our debates were to be under the direction of a president, and to be conducted in the sincere spirit of inquiry after truth, without fondness for dispute or desire of victory; and to prevent warmth, all expressions of positive opinions, or direct contradiction, were after some time made contraband, and prohibited under small pecuniary penalties.” - Ben Franklin, Autobiography - Chapter 7, Establishment of a political and philosophical Club

The Junto consisted of businessmen, craftsmen and landowners who were active in the local community and who gathered under the auspices of “mutual improvement”. Everyone shared their specialties, tips on bettering their businesses, daily experiences; basically the group grew together and helped develop the community from the inside out.  It was from this core group that the revered American Philosophical Society grew.

Dave Carroll ( @aquarius ), Assistant Professor of Media Design at The New School,   Venessa Miemis ( @vanessamiemis ), New School associate and author at the blog Emergent By Design, and Bernd Nurnberger ( @cocreatr ), are a few of the folks putting together a platform that brings a digital spin to this idea. Aptly named Junto, the platform they are developing allows creatives, academics and business leaders to engage each other online through voice, video, text and file sharing, under the same notion of “mutual improvement” that Franklin had in 1727.

Junto as a platform supports global collaboration, and through the very process of development it shows the power collaboration to bring ideas forward.  With more focus on what we can accomplish together, and less focus on ideas of competition that keep us apart, we can move the world into a more sustainable age. Franklin’s effect on the global stage was significant when all he had was pen, paper, and the good sense to share information and collaboration with his peers, imagine what is possible when this is aided by advanced communications.

What kind of collaboration is possible within your own community?

Are you missing out on potential partnerships that would bring new life to your town?

Cross Pollination

A well rounded education provides the groundwork for a successful business. Looking past our square and stunted notions we find a wealth of resources in places we’d normally overlook.

In 1998 Vice Admiral Arthur K. Cebrowski and John Garstka took lessons from WalMart and began applying them to what they termed “Network-Centric Warfare”.  By looking at changes in the economy from a business perspective they were able to rethink effective strategies for the Department of Defense. As demonstrated by the popularity of Sun Tzu’s Art of War this odd exchange of information isn’t just one way.

“Nations make war the same way they make wealth.”

Vice Admiral Cebrowski points out the world of the military and the world of business often mirror each other. The social web makes it difficult to employ rigorously staged campaign strategies, and it turns out the same thing is happening in warfare.  “Irregular” or “asymmetric” strategies, used to combat terrorist organizations and guerilla forces, provide insight into techniques that work within the 21st century social web as well as they work on the 21st century battlefield.

Col. John R. Boyd’s essay “Destruction & Creation”  is another example of profound cross over.  His understanding of decentralized command structures predates the work of Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom (Starfish & the Spider) and their analysis of successful ‘leaderless’ organizations.

“No-Sword”

The fencing master Lord Yagyu Munenori, who was trained by the Zen priest Takuan Soho, provides the most effective military solution for today’s business issues.  Munenori says that at the height of understanding a swordsman can defeat their enemy without drawing their sword.

This “No-Sword” technique is the perfect martial strategy for today’s digital environment.  With consumers ever savvy to corporate sleight of hand, the successful business is the one who has no tricks up their sleeve.  At the height of understanding their business shouldn’t an entrepreneur reach the same effortless peak?

Can you sell without selling?

Getting Acquainted With Your Neighbors - Twitter Best Practices 3/3

Because social media operates based on connecting via common interests, every re-tweet, mention and direct message becomes insight into your audience. Developing new content based on prior re-tweets, mentions and direct messages helps develop relationships with the people you want to talk to by targeting posts specifically to their interests.

When you re-post a person’s content with added commentary, not only do you promote their ideas, interests, organizations, and brand, but you also give them the opportunity to engage you in relation to ideas they are already comfortable with, ie. their own.

When you help people promote their brand information, original content, and support their personal goals, you also promote loyalty. You never know who is going to be your most vocal supporter. A CEO may spurn you, but being on close terms with their digital neighbor can be an easier way in the door.

Common Courtesy

Engagement requires a certain level of etiquette. Remembering to reply in a timely manner is important if you want to keep the momentum of your engagement opportunities going. It’s also important to remember never to identify your emotions with your digital persona.

If you identify yourself with your digital persona you might find yourself in situations, conversations and exchanges that can quickly lead to arguments. Always keep yourself a bit distant from your digital alter ego. Never start, continue or support arguments. When a conversation takes a negative turn, find a way to reach agreement as soon as possible and move on. Everything you say, post and promote is recorded in the digital environment; keep in mind you’re leaving a trail that will define you for years to come.

What You Put in the Pie

Your content should promote relationship development. The purpose of digital media is to engage others, not to promote your brand. Success in digital media relies on allowing the other person to choose engagement leading to successful interactions. In sales, marketing, networking, developing contacts, whatever your end goal, providing an opportunity for the other person to engage you is more effective than trying to force the issue.  When the other person makes the choice to engage there is always a greater level of success.

Define your content approach ahead of time. Focus on general themes so that you allow for spontaneity and can approach a wider audience.  Post “around” your topic to create a sense of depth. This means covering every aspect of your topic. For instance a graphic designer would not only post on current industry trends, but also theoretical pieces, historical information, kitsch phenomenon and all the attendant areas affected by graphic design.

On Twitter most of your content will be based on comments directing people towards links. It is best if you have a blog or dynamic website that you can direct people to that continues the themes developed by your Twitter posts. When posting a link to your blog or website write unique tag lines that further develop your brand.

Rather than just posting the article title or a flat explanation, try being creative. Avoid generic statements like “New blog post” . Your Twitter feed should become more than just a link dump.

Focus on:

• Surprising juxtapositions
• Unique word play
• Kean cultural observations
  
• Novel insights
  
• Attention to detail
  
• Direct contact/engagement
• Interesting questions
• Knowing your digital neighbors
  

Keep personal posts to your Twitter account on topic and infrequent; it’s more important to add value for your audience through additional comments to the posts you re-tweet from them. This develops your persona, while simultaneously developing relationships with key members of your audience.

Define your posts through commentary. Commentary develops the atmosphere of your persona. Use the kernel of information provided by the person you are re-tweeting, and when possible, add original content around the specific link or idea; to give the original source credit while adding new material use “via @originatorstwitterhandle” after the post.

Color and Tone

In all of your digital interactions keep your tone personal, but professional.  When replying to a mention, RT or direct message be friendly, positive, and personal. Remember that formal language can sound stilted. The days of strict, formal interaction are fading fast. There is a time and a place for formality, but in most of your digital interactions you’ll find greater success erring on the side of the personal.

There are no hard rules when it comes to tone and it’s best to remain agile in your approach; reply based on the tone of the message received.  Remember that your personality is going to be gauged on the tone of your posts. Your audience will get to know you, and to form a sense of intimacy, based on your digital persona, not your flesh and blood person.

Use humor rather than sarcasm unless you are working with a sarcastic brand. Sarcasm has a way of falling flat in digital communications. If your audience is not expecting to be met with sarcasm it can end up being offensive. Humility, honesty and integrity are better engagement tools than vicious satire, and with the stress of contemporary living, good-natured humor is often more effective than sarcasm.

Remember too,  a good neighbor is one who is relevant to the community. If you’re not bringing value to the table, your taking someone’s time that could better be spent elsewhere.

“I’m eating a hot dog…” - Twitter Best Practices 2/3

How often you speak is as important as what you say and how you say it. Digital media offers the ability to remain constantly in view of your market, partners and competitors. This availability should be used as a strategic asset. The temptation to seek complete control, to over think and over edit, needs to be tempered against the potential to overflow with information, especially on a platform like Twitter.

There’s a lot of give and take when it comes to how many posts are appropriate to put up in a day. Complaints abound over Twitter feeds filled with “hot dog” posts; those posts that announce some innocuous detail of daily life like “I’m eating a hot dog…” and do very little to with communication or relationship development.

Your Time in the Room

Think of Twitter as one big room and your posts are your presence in it. 1-2 posts every 2 hours seems to be ideal for keeping momentum and development going on personal accounts. This can be adjusted depending on the goals of the Twitter feed. For example a business account can continue momentum with fewer posts. 1-2 posts every 3-5 hours seems to be ideal for keeping momentum on business or organizational accounts.

If the account is merely targeted towards providing a point of contact for PR or news updates 1-2 posts per day or per week is possible. Keep in mind, unless you are representing a business, organization or brand that already has a loyal following, remaining quiet will limit the development of your presence on the Twitter platform.

Setting It All in Motion

This may seem overwhelming, you may be thinking “I can’t even update my blog once a month…1-2 posts every 2 hours!” But that’s where reciprocity comes in. You’ve heard it’s better to give than to get? Well on Twitter this motto helps you maintain an active presence and develop relationships while mitigating the amount of time you spend on the platform itself.

Applications like Hootsuite and Tweetdeck allow you to schedule and monitor your posts, as well as create sets of key word searches to find other accounts posting within your target audience.  Set a specific time during the day to schedule posts for the upcoming day/week/month. This takes as little as 15 mins–1 hour, depending on time period you will cover.

Everything that happens in digital media builds precedence for future activity. When dealing with media that has immediate global reach and can be logged, searched and accessed in the future it’s wise to have a plan for what you’re putting out.

Keep It Focused, Keep It Loose

Setting aside a block of time to schedule posts helps support a cohesive focus for your account and also helps you strategize. Make sure to leave room in the schedule for posting “real time” information as needed. Keep blocks of time open where you can post free form information or responses while keeping your feed uncluttered.

It’s best to check back and monitor every 1-2 hours for re-tweets, mentions, and direct messages. Each event is an opportunity to engage. If someone re-tweets your posts, it’s an opportunity to thank them or strike up a conversation; a mention where someone asks a question or comments on a Tweet presents an opportunity to begin a conversation.  Direct messages are the most ‘intimate’ form of engagement on this platform and allow for private conversations.

Key word searches can also provide areas for engagement. By conducting regular key word searches on brand related or interest related topics you can conduct business intelligence, monitor mentions of your brand, company, or organization, and develop relationships with new people through targeted conversations.

Entrepreneur, are you a polymath?

Edward Tufte, appointee on the Obama administration’s Recovery Independent Advisory Panel, is a very diverse persona. Starting out as a Yale statistician he went on to self publish a book that changed the way businesses look at design. After becoming one of the leading thinkers in infographics he transitioned into the role of an accomplished installation artist and now sits on a presidential advisory panel.

With the wealth of technology, techniques and information out there can you think of a valid excuse not to be as multifaceted in your own career?

Deadly Myopia

For the corporate professional specialization is a key to success, working within a large organization each individual plays a specialized role. For an entrepreneur this kind of narrow focus becomes deadly myopia. The amount of networking, wrangling and on the spot decision making necessary to run your own business requires that you look beyond specialized job skills and become a bit of an uber mensch.

In his short essay Destruction and Creation, Col. John R. Boyd lays out a primary basis for human existence:

“Studies of human behavior reveal that the actions we undertake as individuals are closely related to survival, more   importantly, survival on our own terms. Naturally, such a notion implies that we should be able to act relatively free or independent of any debilitating external influences—otherwise that very survival might be in jeopardy. In viewing the instinct for survival in this manner we imply that a basic aim or goal, as individuals, is to improve our capacity for independent action.”

This is easily adapted to better understand the economic and professional position of the entrepreneur or small business owner. Without the large investment capital of a corporation we need to constantly keep in mind ways to “improve our capacity for independent action.”

On a Desert Island

If you knew that you were going to be stranded without any outside help you’d probably want to spend some time gaining the skill set necessary for survival. Although our businesses exist within a complex economic environment we often find ourselves going it alone. Do you have time to hire all the help that you need? Or the money? Can you always turn to your local network for advice or assistance?

Becoming mutli-faceted allows you to be agile and self sufficient. This doesn’t mean building a mote around your business, it means being able to help yourself and others when resources are scarce and challenges present themselves. This makes us valuable to our communities, to our peers in business world, and in the end it will help us better serve our clients.

Entrepreneur…are you a polymath?

Happy Birthday Edgar, Thanks for the Advice!

Edgar Allan Poe may seem an unlikely advisor in the burgeoning carnival of social media, but his visually oriented writing style is the perfect accomplice to a devilishly effective digital marketing campaign. “Visual” language is the ideal technique for a medium that doesn’t provide proper context for the non-verbal cues making up more than 70% of our communication.

Visual Language

As the French critical theorist Jacques Ellul pointed out in his book The Humiliation of the Word:

“We are dazed by sight — by an image or a vision. The word takes us to the edge…only when descriptive and painting extremely precise images.”

He quickly goes on to discuss Poe’s narrative style as an early example of the visual language that would come to define Western fiction. This visual language is a necessary component to any digital conversation since it recreates the emotional expression left off by text based communication.

Examining the Elements

Examining the elements of Poe’s prose we can find some very helpful clues for writing in an effective and actionable voice perfectly suited to the digital domain:

1. Who am “I”: Poe is famous for his use of first person narrative. In fact this is a common trope in ghost stories or as they get called in the American idiom “Weird Tales”. This technique is a simple psychological trick that forces the reader to constantly repeat “I” as they read. After the first paragraph the reader begins to visualize the story as if it were literally happening to them.
2. Where are we?: From the dim ossuaries of the Cask of Amontillado to the multi-colored pageantry that portends a decadent end in The Masque of the Red Death, Poe is a master at providing small visual clues that help the reader picture the setting. The key here is that he only focuses on a few important items, allowing the mind of the reader to create the rest of the picture. When the reader is engaged in actively participating in the “creation” of the scene it’s more easily integrated into their conscious understanding.
3. The high and low: Poe spices his stories with arcane references to Leibnitz, Persian folk tales, and Greek philosophy which give them an air of sophistication and high culture. However, his time at West Point didn’t leave him a stranger to the bowery and burned out fringes of society. Writing is about communication, and full communication is a vertical process, sticking to one end of the tax bracket or the other will leave your writing pale and empty. This goes for diction, syntax, grammar, etc. Loosen up; digital media is about conversations not the Chicago Manual of Style.
4. More with less: As one of the first practitioners of the contemporary short-story Poe was an early adopter of the ‘micro’ format that has progressed down it’s diminutive path to now include messages with no more than 140 characters of type. Living in an urban center like Boston during the industrial revolution, Poe’s style was affected by the speed of “modern” life. Writing for money meant that he had to pay attention to what his audience wanted and with the world moving faster, longer books didn’t look to be best sellers.
5. Who done it?: Another first that Poe brought to the fictional forefront was the detective genre. Readers become more engaged when their enwrapped in a mystery and if the story is published in a serial format they’re more likely to buy the next installment when they’re left on edge. Engaging clients in your company’s digital media efforts requires a similar approach. Whether they are solving a mystery or following a story, the development of your brand’s media outreach should reflect a progression that leads them deeper into the conversation.

9 Axioms of an Enlightened Marketer

With all the talk in the media and trade mags of a new Renaissance, we’ve been taking some time to evaluate what exactly that might mean. Since the staff at XNet have never looked good in plunging necklines or crushed velvet we’ve decided to move the clock forward past the average futurist’s line of sight, buckle on our shoes, and start settling in for the Post-Neo-Renaissance Enlightenment.

We hope that things may have rounded out by then so that Marketing is no longer the handmaid of Deceit. To spur this desperately needed transition along here are 9 marketing axioms that eschew baroque emotional appeal and embrace the cold elegance of reason:

~ : 9 Axioms of an Enlightened Marketer : ~

1. We are conversationalists, not carny barkers. Conversing leads to engagement, barking just moves the shills along.
2. Engagement requires active participation. Remote islands with hostile inhabitants are rarely visited by the vacationing set.
3. To participate you must be present at the party, to be present you must be an agreeable guest.
4. A good message is mutually reciprocated like a brotherly handshake, not endured like blunt force trauma.
5. Uniqueness and quality are not easily copied, be wary of best practices that have gone stale.
6. Even with the philosopher’s stone of marketing in hand, conjuring in front of the wrong audience will get you burned at the proverbial stake.
7. No matter how artful, aesthetically pleasing, coercive or perfect, a product or service’s marketing message is only worth as much as the product or service being marketed.
8. However, a well crafted message that spends more time on universal concepts than on product placement can transcend its use-value to become valuable in itself.
9. When you realize that Shakespeare, Milton & Goethe were marketing their ideals you realize the bar for professionalism is set much higher than they told you in business school.

Aberrant Advice

It’s easy to get sucked into “best practice” blogs and tip lists hoping to find that little gem to really revolutionize your business. With busy schedules, active personal lives and an urge to participate in our communities the temptation to take short cuts is an ever present thorn.

Unfortunately our very cognitive structure means we lack objectivity when approaching this kind of information on the web. Savvy website designers have a bag of neuroactive grifter’s tricks that would make Felix the Cat blush. While looking for “best practices” we often end up filling our head with the run off content from someone’s marketing campaign. Content created to lure web-crawlers usually has little to do with providing real value and all too often in our search we’re subjected to a mélange of unexpected psychological cons.

Smiling Faces Tell Lies

One of the most prevalent tricks is as simple as a smile. Images of smiling faces tap into “mirror neurons” tricking our brains into an immediate sense of camaraderie and emotional well being. This mirror effect works best in face to face meetings, but remains successful even when still images or representational forms are used.

Easy Curves

Another trick relies on easy curves. Our ability to recognize a pleasing image is related to how that image is processed in our brain. Crisp, professionally finished websites provide the round curves and image abstraction that neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran and cognitive philosopher William Hirstein posited are necessary for our brains to quickly process visual information. ( See their article: The Artful Brain )

By using this fact in strategic design, websites can lead the viewer to another automatic neurologically based form of engagement. These processes are keyed to such clearly identified brain traits that they don’t need to be artful in their execution to be effective.

The Dreaded Wheel

The most subtle is something we all learned in grade school art class. That long forgotten friend the Color Wheel is a psychological tool kit often overlooked due to its inconspicuous nature. Within this humble wheel lies the key to evoking everything from a sense of nausea to salivating desire depending on the conditioning of the subject. Seems silly but research suggests more than gold at the end of the rainbow, it’s our psyches that are tied to the board by those 24 chromatic con-men.

The Mark Inside

You may think yourself a well tenured professional immune to such paltry parlor fair, but as W.S. Burroughs, American Academy of Arts and Letters, pointed out: “Hustlers of the world, there is one mark that you cannot beat: the mark inside.”

We’re betrayed by our own brain’s functionality into concessions we might not otherwise actively decide to make. Even when designers aren’t fiddling with Photoshop color enhancement to stimulate your occipital lobe, low tech bait and switch still works the crowd like magic. For a few cobbled tidbits strung together to bait web crawlers we often sacrifice our innate ability to develop viable strategies.

If you’re truly searching for “best practices” Burroughs has some additional insight that might help:  “Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer.”

Good business doesn’t come from cookie cutter solutions.  You’re the only one who knows what your business does best and it’s going to be you who develops the solutions that bring it to the next level.

Resources:

Wikipedia: Neuromarketing

Neuroscience Marketing Blog - Where Brain Science and Marketing Meet

Neuromarketing: The New Science of Marketing Without Marketing (YouTube)

Andre Marquis - Google Tech Talks - Links Between Biometric Measures and Consumer Response to Media

Rules of Engagement

An important lesson gained from Ad:Tech is the necessity of engagement in all marketing efforts. Engagement is the quality that allows a person to interact, interpret and implement some aspect of your marketing message in their daily experience. It’s the quality that helps a piece of marketing go “viral”.

The major rule of engagement in business is the same as it is in war: never underestimate the other person and never overestimate yourself. Keeping your message focused on yourself leads to a very boring message and as the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard put it, “the only thing worse than being bored is being boring.”

An engaging message is about the other person, but it is about the other person recognizing themselves in the reality that your messaging provides. When you underestimate the other person you can end up offending them, putting yourself in a position where future messages will require their active permission to be heard.

A good message, an engaging message, doesn’t require permission, it’s immediately accepted with active participation.

Exposure

We open up to participating in personal engagement when someone opens up to us. The same is true in marketing; the more open (perhaps even vulnerable) a message seems the more likely it is to engage another person. Again this is not about focusing on you or your company, it’s about relating to the other person through commonalities.

Think about the media messaging you’ve seen become prolific in the past, what is one of the most common themes that comes up?

Vulnerability.

Images of children, families, people in situations that expose their human frailty or the overcoming of that frailty; images that focus on commonalities amongst a larger group. These are themes that catch the attention and cause a message to be repeated, to become engaging. People repeat the message because they recognize themselves, their own victories, overcomings and failures in the message.

I’ll Be Your Mirror

As mentioned in a prior post, the movie American Beauty provides a great example of how carefully crafted (it might even be said - scientifically crafted)  imagery can invoke a sympathetic response and engage an audience.

This kind of messaging focuses on the following:

• It engages the audience in relating themselves, via pre-existent cultural cues, to the characters and setting the message presents. American Beauty presents the stereotypes of husband, office worker, house wife, disturbed army vet, insular teenage girl, etc. How can your marketing utilize character types/common settings to capture the viewer?
• It  takes the viewer’s previously held believes, values, and cultural position and realigns them to bring them into the reality presented by the messaging. In a car commercial it is assumed that the viewer drives a car and understands/relates to the driving experience. What is unique is that the commercial represents a specific company’s attempt to place their brand of car into the viewer’s assumed common experience.
• It becomes a mirror for the viewer to recognize themselves and to potentiate an ideal existence in the future. This means that the message  becomes a reflection of not only how the viewer currently sees themselves, but also provides suggestions for how the viewer should expect to see themselves in the future, ie. a customer seeing an ad might think “I recognize that person is similar to me, but with X product they look like a better version of what I am/want to be.”
• Finally, it assumes a reality to the message beyond the message itself. Good messaging doesn’t sneak around pretending no one sees it, it walks down the street like it owns the city and assumes people will follow. A successful message with a baseball player in it will assume to be, and achieve the illusion of being, the definitive message with a baseball player in it.

Are your messages asking for permission or are they engaging the audience in participation?

How Many Employees Does It Take To Stitch a Blanket?

From 2003 – 2005 Google only had one electrical engineer designing its servers . If you’ve heard of the massive data center operation Google runs this might come as a surprise. It also might be surprising that this single engineer helped design one of the most energy efficient and stable data center operations in existence.

Small and medium size businesses often find themselves in situations where it seems there’s just too much to do and too few hands, heads and hammers to do it. There always seems to be something getting in the way or slowing down crucial projects.

If this sounds like where you’re at there might be something in those last two sentences you read over too quickly… the word “seems”.

Tear Out the “Seems”

It doesn’t take an army to run a business even if it “seems” that way. As we’re fond of pointing out, with today’s technologies all it takes is a clear head and a solid plan to operate an internationally relevant SMB.

The illustrator/consultant Hugh McCleod is developing the idea of “global micro-brands”  to provide a model for this way of thinking and he’s just one of many discovering what Google discovered in 2003…even if it “seems” impossible, sometimes all it takes is one person.

Don’t mozy through the “seemingly” impossible day to day tasks of running a business, tear the “seems” out of your thinking and put your effort into the real task of stitching up a successful business.

Ask yourself, what’s makes the task seem impossible?

1. Are you focusing on something other than completing your current task? Prioritize what you are doing. It’s ok to be distracted, but be honest about being distracted and organize yourself accordingly.
2. Are you really working towards another goal? Don’t waste effort moving in one direction when you really want to be going somewhere else. Be honest about what you want and what you are willing to do to get it. Don’t try to eat the whole cow when you only want a burger.
3. Are you confident in your plans? Things move forward quickly when they’re motivated by confidence. Even if doubts linger it’s better to move forward confident in your actions than to stumble half hearted into failure.
4. Are you a dreamer or a doer? Some people like to read books about foreign countries, others like to travel them. The French poet Gerard de Nerval, upon visiting Egypt, remarked to an artist he knew “It is better that you stayed in Paris, there is nothing here of the Egypt we know, only the modern world…” Point being, it may be that you’d rather talk about success than work towards achieving it.
5. Have you applied what you’ve learned? We read up on best practices, go to seminars, networking events, webinars, the whole gamut of preparatory actions, but rarely do we put into practice the core lessons. Make sure you’re getting some ROI out of all that training and not just overlaying new words on old habits.