| I've worked in places where we've hired professional writers to get out our message. At first, like any smug technologist who thought he had a perfect grasp of the English language, I thought they were a waste of money. But what I didn't realize is how well professional writers can empathize with readers. First off, I'm not too upset with the email I received. But your email suffered from mixed messages. In 1999 here in Toronto there was a huge snowstorm. We received 1.2 m of snow that month. We ran out of places to store the stuff (e.g., once it's ploughed in a city you can only pile it so high, it must be trucked elsewhere at some point). Everyone was beginning to get pissed at the city government for how it was handling a situation which, remember, was out of its control. All they could do was react. I remember one memorable news briefing in which the head of the department responsible for clearing our roads got up and issued a statement. I'm paraphrasing from memory (and assembling some facts via Google). But it went something like this: "We have 800 city staff, 1400 contracted workers, and over 500 military personnel currently working around the clock to clear the snow. They are collectively using 2000 pieces of heavy equipment including ploughs, ice melters, salters, and front-end loaders. That said, Toronto has 5600 km of roads and 7945 km of sidewalks. We cannot clear all roads and sidewalks instantaneously and it will take some time. We believe we can clear the highways and main arterial roads in the next 24 hours. If needed, military personnel in Bison vehicles will respond to 911 calls in order to transport victims to the hospital. It will take several more days to clear side streets and we will need your help. You will be notified when your street will be ploughed. Please remove parked cars so that we can accomplish this task more easily. You will not be ticketed for parking elsewhere during this time. If you do not move your car, it may be towed to an adjacent street at no charge." The mood seemed to change after that. The statement single-handedly accomplished the following things. It: -clarified the scope and magnitude of the problem we were facing in a manner that everyone could understand -reassured people that the government was on top of things by providing specific facts -set manageable expectations A statement like the following would have been way better received I think (I'm making up some facts of course): "Wakemate launched 75 days ago as a 2 person startup. We began pre-orders 50 days ago to incredible demand. In fact, we have received over 5000 pre-orders which is above and beyond our wildest dreams for initial demand. We are currently working 7 days a week around the clock in order to get you your Wakemate as quickly as possible. But we are sorry to inform you that we will not be able to meet our original deadline of January 25th. Instead, we anticipate that we will be able to fulfill our pre-orders over the course of the next 90 days. So that we may more effectively address the orders, we need to know what device you will be using the Wakemate with and who your service provider is (link to survey). This information will allow us to prioritize shipment and provide you with more specific shipping dates. You will receive another email by February 15th detailing such information. Should you have any questions or concerns about your pre-order, please email us at..." (leave the whole premium feature spiel for the follow-up email as there is nothing that customers can do to utilize these features now anyway) |