How do you sign-off your email? And, why does it matter?

I’ve noticed recently that my preferred ‘kind regards’ seems to have fallen out of favour – according to this post from Mashable, ‘regards’ or ‘best regards’ only work for Victorian ghosts –  and my use of ‘cheers’ (when I know the lucky recipient of my email a bit better and have loosened my metaphorical tie) should be consigned to the same box where I keep my old tartan lined Harrington jacket and Complete Madness tape.

It seems that ‘thanks’ has become a more common sign-off – even when the writer has nothing to be particularly thankful for.

Of course, it does matter how you sign off your email but it doesn’t hurt to be flexible. Like any communication, you should perhaps think about how you tailor it for your audience rather than rigidly sticking to your usual method. There’s a bit of ‘mirroring’ psychology of in all this and adapting to the intended recipient’s style rather than slavishly sticking to your usual sign-off. Try and experiment with a few different sign-offs and see if anyone notices.

So, farewell then, (too much?). Back at ya (worse!). All the best (better)

So, I was at the Taylor Swift gig last Friday at Wembley Stadium – either I’m a fan or I have a tween and a teen who are, or both…you decide.

It’s called the Reputation tour after her last album and, as she talked about the name, I thought she gave the best definition of public relations that I’ve heard in a long time. Of course she didn’t call it public relations – not many do any more – but she talked about reputation as: ‘what people say about you when you’re not in the room ‘.

Most of the definitions of public relations from various industry bodies are quite stiff and go something like ‘the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organisation and its publics’. I’m picking on the Chartered Institute of Public Relations here but you get the point. Not very memorable and quite dry.

Taylor’s version though strikes home the power of PR over other marketing disciplines. Get your reputation management right, get people talking good things about your business when you’re not even in the room and you can avoid all that Bad Blood, get it wrong though, sour your reputation, and you’ll never Shake It off.

If curiosity killed the cat, then there were a lot of dead felines at the Chelsea Flower Show recently. And why? The brilliant Antithesis of a Sarcophagi garden exhibit designed by sculptors Gary Breeze and Martin Cook; a block of granite concealing within its monolithic maw a beautifully planted garden – only evident through a few tiny viewing holes.

Anything to see here?
The genius of this exhibit made fine work of one of the oldest tricks in the book – delayed gratification. Don’t give everything away at once; make them work for it. It’s amazing what people, even a future king and queen, will do if they’re significantly intrigued. In this case, garden lovers queued around the block – sorry – for up to 45 minutes just to see what secrets the granite block was hiding.

Make them work for it
There’s a lesson here for the corporate communicator. We’re all used to making information as readily available as possible but why not, on occasion, make the audience – external or internal – work a little to find out what you want to tell them? Don’t show everything at once, keep the real find hidden and make them do a little work for it.

It goes against the grain to hold something back but if somebody has to make an effort to find something out, chances are, the message they take away is likely to be all the stronger for it. The catch? You will need a very good hook to entice your audience to go the extra distance and take matters into their own hands.

What’s your ‘granite block’?
Perhaps you don’t have a 44 tonne block of granite handy but if you can come up with a hook to do the same thing – a brilliant headline, a great image, a task to perform, an irresistible challenge – and entice your audience to go and find out some more, the results could be more effective than simply dishing it all up on a plate.

Sometime less can really be more.

You’re at a gathering; drink in hand; the conversation flowing…someone cracks a joke, and in the laughter that follows you think of a great retort and give it both barrels. The trouble is, not everyone hears it, so you repeat it again to the person next to you but by then the moment has gone.

The Germans have a word for it – witzbeharrsamkeit – which roughly translates as shamelessly repeating a joke until everyone present hears it.

Given it’s General Election day today, it feels as if there has been loads of ‘witzbeharrsamkeit’ going around – although, admittedly, it’s not generally jokes that have been endlessly repeated over the last month but manifesto pledges, or party sound bites.

Politicians often talk about ‘cut through’ – those messages that really resonate with the electorate and stick in the mind. The trouble is, and this is the same challenge whether you’re trying to be the Honourable Member for Croydon South or communicating a business restructure to 10,000 employees, simply sending out some messages is not the same thing as effectively communicating.

And if you insist on trying to repeat a message that has failed to engage its audience, it won’t necessarily make a communication any more effective, in fact, it could become as embarrassing as our well travelled joke.