Andrew Hennigan's Blog

Five years ago the Wall Street Journal declared the end of the reign of email in the article Why Email No Longer Rules...  They were not the only people to announce the death of email. At the time everyone thought that email was finished and that soon the stuffy old timers who persisted in using it would see the light and move to new tools. Some said that we would all be using new communication tools like GoogleWave, launched with great fanfare in 2010 as the future of mail but then shut down three years later. Others said that we would all use Facebook, Twitter or other social sites. They were all wrong. Now more than forty years after it was introduced email shows no signs of going away and indeed there is no credible alternative on the horizon. You could, people argue, use Facebook messenger instead, except that not everybody has Facebook messenger. You could, others say, use WhatsApp, except that not everyone has WhatsApp. You could use instant messaging, a few argue, but...

When you work in communications you will probably have to ghost write a quote for a press release, a blog post, a social media comment, an article or maybe a speech for a top-level manager in your organization. Often it must be approved by the manager you are ghosting but you have limited access to them; you might also be uncomfortable trying to be the voice of someone you don't normally interact with. Luckily there are some simple techniques you can learn to make this task easier and faster, minimizing the stress and optimizing the results. LEARN THEIR STYLE . Before you attempt to write something in the style of someone else you need to learn how they talk and write. Prepare by reading things that you think they wrote themselves and watch them speak to get a feel for the style and tone they use. You don't have to identify all the style markers because your brain can automatically learn to recognize someone's style. IMAGINE THEM SAYING THE WORDS . When you have wr...

Though every person with Internet access has the possibility to check facts without a trip to the library I still see old myths being repeated in articles, lectures, workshops, videos and TV shows. Hardly a day goes by without me seeing someone saying that we use only 10% of our brains, or how only 7% of communication is in the words, or the old myth about Henry Ford and the "faster horse". Two years ago I wrote about this problem in The Creation of Levi's: Why Writers and Speakers Should Always Check Facts . In this piece I recommended that everyone should at least run a quick Google check before repeating these myths. In search results the popular mythbusting sites are always on the first page. Wikipedia articles usually debunk common myths, too. But there is another technique careful writers and speakers can apply to avoid repeating or even creating myths and misinterpretations: go to the source . I was given this advice as a student. Some professor whose name I h...

Plain packaging for cigarettes is widely seen as a way to reduce the number of people smoking, but the notion that selling cigarettes in uniform, logo-free dull-green packages covered in health warnings will deter smokers fails to take into account both human nature and the way brands work. I wrote about this two years ago in Why Plain Packaging for Cigarettes is Unlikely to Work  but in a way I was wrong. Not only did it not deter smokers it actually had the opposite effect,  but for reasons that nobody seems to have predicted. Advocates of plain packaging believe that smokers and aspiring smokers will be repelled by unattractive plain packages.  This doesn't happen.  Nobody smokes because the packages are cool; people start smoking because they believe that smoking is cool and they continue because they are addicted. Existing legislation also ensures that people are not going to pick up a packet of cigarettes from a supermarket shelf b...

Some products are so successful in the marketplace that their trademark is widely used as the generic name for all products of that type. Google is the most common of these. People often talk about "googling" things or say "let me google that for you". There are many others: Xerox has become a synonym for photocopy, Hoover for vacuum cleaning, Jet Ski for acquatic motorcycles, Frisbee for flying disks or Jeep for compact sport utility vehicles. Outsiders often see this as a sign of success and wonder why the companies who own these trademarks are apparently unhappy about the situation and try to discourage the use of their trademarks as generic names. There is a good reason for this. In the US and some other jurisdictions you can lose your rights to a trademark if it becomes generic and if the owner has not made sufficient effort to stop this. This is not paranoia. Many famous trademarks have been lost by their owners precisely for this reason. Aspirin used t...

After all his troubles with Twitter in the past, you might think that former US representative Anthony Weiner would be more careful, but he is in the news again for favoriting a tweet about sexting. According to the Slate article about this story , he claims that he did this by accident, touching the star symbol while scrolling the page. This happens all too frequently when you are using apps on a touch screen device. Almost every day I inadvertently view someone's profile on LinkedIn while I am scrolling through updates one handed. I can easily imagine that someone could also like or favorite posts that they don't actually intend to endorse. When my fingers slip on a touch screen the consequence are insignificant -- at most I leave someone wondering why I am suddenly interested in their profile -- but for politicians, celebrities and other high-profile social media personalities these mistakes are much more serious. As Anthony Weiner has found to his cost every slip on ...

People like me who teach online reputation and networking take it for granted that using your real name on social sites is a good idea, but a recent question on Quora reminds me that this is not as obvious as it seems. An anonymous user asked  Did you provide your real personal info to Quora when your user account was created?  and explains that he or she avoids using their real identity to thwart data mining. There might be cases when this is a good idea but for most people it is actually better to use your real name because it boosts your online reputation. When people hear about you or meet you for the first time they are likely to Google your name to see what comes up. This test will only find web pages that use your real name because Google cannot know that the owner of the username SqueakyPencil87  is actually John Smith. Some of the people googling your name will just be curious colleagues and friends, but quite often they could be potential employers or bus...