Andrew Hennigan's Blog

Today's rich ecosystem of software apps is possible because the people coding them build on the work of the coders who came before them. Tools like Flipboard are only possible because they build new levels on top of existing products like Facebook and Twitter. And finding things like the physical location of users is trivial today because the coding work has already been done.  This brings two huge benefits to both developers and users. First of all, the time taken to build a new app is much less. Second, it allows people to implement creative new app ideas without getting bogged down in coding basics. Singly is a startup that makes the development of social-network-based apps even easier because it provides a standard interface for Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and other networks. Instead of having to learn the API interface details for each of them, a developer can send standardized requests to Singly, which takes care ...

Watching the coverage of SpaceX's first mission to the International Space Station on NASA TV turned out to be much more interesting than I expected. One thing that really surprised me was the comparison between NASA's ISS Flight Control Room in Houston and SpaceX's mission control at their Hawthorne, Florida facility. SpaceX's mission control is noteworthy for its minimalist, almost spartan style based on basic tables you might pick up at IKEA and simple computer monitors. Almost nothing else is visible. In comparison NASA's flight control room looks unmistakably luxurious and extravagant. In all fairness the NASA facility was probably first built in the age of paper documents and CRT displays, so this look is probably a legacy. But intentional or not the comparison sends a clear message about SpaceX. Most organizations have a communications department that, with some help from corporate legal, will evaluate meticulously every word -- and punctuation mark --...

In the post  Use Social Network & Media Sites To Build a Strong Presence for Your Business  I explained how a small business could use sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to build a strong online presence. As long as you are creating profiles on these sites purely to get better search results you can probably manage all the updates directly through each site. Later you will probably want to use these accounts more actively to engage with people and also to add fresh content that will boost search results. Social media professionals rarely visit sites like twitter.com. facebook.com and so on. They prefer instead to use tools that allow them to view and update several accounts at the same time. There are many of these tools but two of the most popular are Tweetdeck and Hootsuite. Tweetdeck is an application that you have to download to your computer; Hootsuite is a website so it is enough to create an account. Otherwise the two t...

When I am diagnosing communication problems I see that the errors fall mostly into two categories. The first is saying the wrong thing ; this is a problem of influencing and not trivial to fix. The other is simply having too many words, which is much easier to correct and much harder to excuse. Using fewer words works on several levels. First of all busy people are more likely to read what you have written if it is concise. They are also more likely to read it accurately, since scanning wordy text at high speed may give the impression of having understood when you have really missed some critical word. Finally, when the writing is done artfully, a shorter text is much easier to process because your brain cannot handle more than 7 +/-2 "chunks" at a time, so the parsing of denser information is intrinsically less reliable. Good writers have known this for decades, and "omit needless words" was one of the most important mantras in Strunk & White's legen...

Most organizations have rules requiring that a PR staffer be present or listening on the call when someone does media interviews. This "minder" is actually there to help both the interviewee and the journalist to make the interview a success, rather than being just the PR police. Some people will not feel comfortable with having a minder but I have found that it helps if you explain why it is in their interest. There are, in fact, some very good reasons why they benefit from having a PR pro present during a interview. Here are the top five: 1. PRE-INTERVIEW BRIEFING . Before the interview starts your minder can quickly brief you about the journalist, their publication, stuff they have written in the past, things they are working on at the moment and the news headlines that the journalist might have seen and could ask about. This helps to avoid surprises and makes you look much smarter. 2. TAKING NOTES . During the interview ...

Every time I talk to job seekers I hear about companies that don't reply to applicants they don't intend to hire. Perhaps they care little for good manners, but I believe that by doing this they are also going against the interests of their own company.  Either they simply can't empathize with the applicants point of view or they are taking the very narrow view that since they don’t want a person it doesn’t matter if they hate the company. But this ignores the possibility that one day you might change your mind and want to hire them. More importantly it completely ignores the fact that this treatment creates a negative feeling that often translates into lost sales. Since I am a consultant it’s been a few years since I went job hunting but I can remember the names of all the companies that failed to send a polite letter. I still avoid their products when possible. Another company sent a very polite rejection letter and I continue ...

Like it or not, customers, suppliers, partners and even friends are going to Google the name of your business just to check up on who you are. If they see something reasonably solid they will feel reassured, but if they find nothing, very little or just irrelevant links they are going to be suspicious. Luckily most people are content to look at the first page of search results. Very few people look at page two and even fewer click on a link to read more, unless they see something that looks bad.  This means that to impress people all you need to do is make sure that the search results on the first page look good – the first ten links in the list. You can’t actually control what appears in search results directly, but you can create pages that will appear on this page. Search engines like Google use secret algorithms to rank results, but basically they put the most important sites on top. If you could get an article on the front page of the New York Times, Le Monde, Il Corrie...