Make ________ Not War

Garth Beyer
Our Last Night. (I’m in between the two band members on the left)

Just the other week I took a nice four-hour drive down to Joliet, IL to see the band Our Last Night. Once my friends and I got there, we had to wait another five hours while other bands played. Bands we either didn’t know or they dragged on stage last-minute because the originally scheduled bands didn’t show up. After plenty of headshaking, not headbanging, Our Last Night was up to play.

As the saying goes in the hood, the music was “an orgasm in my ears”. However, this post isn’t about to promote Our Last Night, it’s what I discovered from constantly checking their Facebook page, waiting for them to upload this photo that I shared above. While I waited I saw other photos of the lead singer wearing the same shirt that he wore to the concert I saw. Even in the pictures that were taken at locations they played at after Joliet, he was still wearing the same shirt.

Finally, curiosity kicked in and I once again went on their Facebook page only to see a professional photo-shoot of Trevor (lead singer) and his brother sporting Johnny Cupcake t-shirts. Trevor was, of course, wearing the same shirt that you see in the photo above. The link was provided, I was sucked in.

Meet Johnny!

The creator of Johnny Cupcakes was, you guessed it, Johnny! Look above! There he is showing off his “Make Cupcakes Not War” t-shirt. Johnny is a multi-millionaire and he has his story. He doesn’t have a specific motto, he doesn’t have a thousand testimonials (although it would be all too easy to get them), and he doesn’t have a college degree. Most rags-to-riches stories you hear have some special opportunity in them: a person runs into an investor, an idea gets picked up by the newspaper, an anonymous person donates a hundred thousands dollars to a persons blog post of an idea, they use Kickstarter, or they know someone who knows someone. Very rarely are the stories… simple.

Johnny has a very simple story, a story that represents so many noteworthy themes and lessons.

  • Never giving up
  • Waking up early or pulling all nighters
  • Avoiding drugs and alcohol
  • Start selling whatever you can, buy in bulk and sell
  • Even having a smashed up car won’t stop you from making sales out of the trunk of it
  • Everyone loves surprises
  • Take risks
    • “These trade shows cost an arm and a leg…but you gotta spend an arm and a leg to make more arms and legs.”
  • Sometimes you have to leave what you like to do what you love
  • Add value to you and your product, no matter how crazy people think you are for the choices you have to make
  • Confusion sells
  • Upset customers sell even more.
    • In response to the question “why don’t you sell cupcakes too?”, Johnny says, “Well, if I did that then people wouldn’t be upset. And, if you think about it, those upset people advertise for me!”
  • Turn your customers into friends and truly connect with them. You can become a millionaire due to the help of 10,000 people. You don’t need 100,000.
Mac Miller representin’

Just an FYI: You’re going to see Johnny Cupcakes everywhere now. Congratulations, you’re part of the tribe!

“Do More Of What Makes You Happy” – Johnny Cupcakes

You can visit Johnny Cupcakes website by clicking on the picture above.

 

Stay Positive &Vote Cupcakes For President

Garth E. Beyer

Overcoming Communication Palisades: Part Two

Garth Beyer

Yesterday you learned a four-step process to overcoming communication palisades. Now I am happy to present the Public Relations checklist for overcoming communication barriers, also known as the 7 C’s of Effective Communication.

7 C’s of Effective Communication: Clarity, Conciseness, Consideration, Completeness, Coherency, Courtesy, and Correctness.

1. Clarity: The more you focus on something, the more clear it becomes. Make sure you maintain your focus by only communicating a specific message by using concrete wording and adding emphasis only to the message itself, not tangents of the message.

2. Conciseness: Many reporters will take pages of notes on an event and go back to high light only the important facts. Being concise is creating a message out of only those highlighted features. Conciseness involves minimizing word usage; it is the combination of “brief” and “point”.

3. Consideration: Quite plainly, know your audience. Stick your feet in their shoes and wear them out. Consideration is about tweaking the words that you have used to focus on what you want to deliver, so that they also adhere to the wants and needs of the audience who will receive the message. This is your opportunity to empathize.

4. Completeness: Completeness is about representation, about credibility, about conveying all the facts accordingly. In conveying all the facts, it answers any questions that may be sparked by the presented information. When you work on making something complete, it is the only time that it is expected to add more information to the focus so that it answers those questions.

5. Coherency: While a message may have all its facts, do they flow? Making a communication coherent insinuates adding transitional phrases, checking and re checking the wording, and breaking the message into segments while maintaining the connections.

6. Courtesy: Remember the end of Overcoming Communication Palisades: Part One?    Be human and stay positive.

7. Correctness: Being straightforward, get an editor. In fact, get five editors, a few friends, and a couple of co-workers or other people in the PR field to review your message. Just do it, you may never realize how much it matters, but if you don’t do it, you will. That’s the unsatisfying result of correctness.

As everything in PR and communication, there are always more ways to look at definitions, tables, concepts, etc,. Other C’s that get thrown into the fray: credibility, content, context, continuity, capability, channels, and concreteness. All of which involve some part or another of the concepts I have presented.

Overcoming Communication Palisades: Part One

Garth Beyer

Yesterday I posted a laundry list of various Communication Palisades.

Obviously there are hundreds of ways you can go and tweak each individual one. For the sake of this post, I will share with you the four step process to overcoming any and all of the communication palisades.

Step one: Whether it is before the communication takes place or after, to overcome the obstacles of communication, you must begin (or re-start) by focusing on preparedness and design. This involves returning to the source and encoding steps of the Shannon-Weaver Model. Is your message as specific as possible? Have you chosen the medium of encoding and the channel with the least amount of noise?

Step two: This step is about running ladders in conversation. At every distance, implement a reminder of the source of where the communication originated as well as the reason for communication. This frequent return not only strengthens the connection of communication, but it allows you to maintain the focus as much as it communicates it to the receiver.

Step three: Communication has to have a certain vivacity to it. Communication isn’t effective if it does not get others enthused, excited, interested, and maybe even a little bit turned on… at your ideas. This third step is vital for those who are communicating something bland, something generic that it’s even hard for you to be interested in. As a PR Specialist, there will be times that you have to swing something, but in a positive sense. What makes the swing negative is when you fake your enthusiasm, when you channel deceitful excitement. A true PR professional will work on convincing themselves of the subjects animation before expressing it to another.

Once you convince yourself, it’s much easier to convince others.

Step four: Flirt with benefits. Communication is a transaction and as you can imagine, the only transactions that seem to “work themselves out” are the ones where the other person feels they are getting a huge benefit out of it. Ask yourself, how can you benefit them? But don’t just answer it yourself, tell them!

Whether you are analyzing your communication strategy before it takes place or revisiting ways to strengthen a communication attempt you have already made, following these four steps will get you past almost every barrier.

The most important variable to consider while taking these steps is to be human. Be real. Be honest. Be caring. But above all, just be human.

The “IOU” Paradox And How To Best Give

Garth Beyer

I give a lot. I love to give, I mean, really really love to give. Time, money, resources, tools, and so on, I give it all to those who ask, and even more to those who don’t.

What I can’t stand are the reactions I get when I give – the old “IOU”. Every time I give, it comes out in some shape or form. Here are some examples? Do they sound familiar?

“I’ll pay you back”

“Next time, I’ll get it”

“Why don’t you take this since you are giving me that“

and the worst of all, the “IOU”

Not to start a debate -by all means go ahead if you want- people are naturally good. There are very few people who I have given to that when I continuously asked why they thought they owed me, they came up with a statement which basically said that since I gave to them, they felt they needed to give to me. Balance. Those are good people, but oh so very annoying.

People may be naturally good, but they are also naturally and extremely self-centered. So self-centered that they care more about the need for that balance of giving back to the person who gave to them, than they do the simple fact that the person who gave to them, does not want anything in return. You are insulting the person and degrading the bliss they feel for giving without that expectation when you fulfill an expectation that is not there.

That is all fine and dandy, human nature, all of which you have experienced yourself or can rightly agree with.

But then someone comes along and doesn’t praise you for giving without an expectation, doesn’t say the infamous words of IOU, takes what you gave and never mentions it again. This is where the IOU paradox presents itself.

Despite the ever-present blissful feeling of giving without an expectation of a return, you feel swindled. You question whether they know you gave to them because you cared about them, that you felt their was an invisible but mutual respect for one another, you thought that them not giving you an IOU would make you feel even more incredible, but sadly… it doesn’t.

There’s no winning, but you still have two options. Either you can deal with them never mentioning your gift again, or you can convince them of how deserving they are of it so they don’t feel that it’s a gift, rather, an award for living remarkably.

I prefer the latter.

 

Stay Positive & Want An Award? Who doesn’t?

Garth E. Beyer

Communication Palisades

Garth Beyer

Here is a list of communication palisades, or barriers, which arise in every day life and professional work. Try to imagine specific examples that the barriers have shown up in your life, both for you or your client(s).

  • Already tangled or broken lines of trust and committment
  • Inconsistency
  • Physical barriers
  • Gender, age, degree
  • Hypocrisy
  • Physical behaviors
  • Language, enunciation differences, volume strain
  • Information overload
  • Poorly influenced
  • Audience enthrallment
  • Time crunch
  • Distractions/Noise
  • Woeful retention rates
  • No eye contact
  • Attitude
  • Presentation of information
  • Lack of credibility
  • Sentinels

We will take a look at overcoming these communication palisades tomorrow.

Re: A Manual For Daily Adventure Pt.2

Garth Beyer

The 2nd round was just as fun and adventurous (in an even more unique way) as the first. If you’re just catching up, I’m working on Michelle Welsch’s A Manual For Daily Adventure. She has provided 80 ways to get started shaking things up in your life. I have done four already and including the one’s I am reporting today, I have 62 more adventurous activities to partake in!

36. Concentrate on nothing except pouring yourself a cup of tea

67. Hide a note for your partner to find (I no longer have a partner so I have written a note for my future partner to find when we kick it off)

24. Stare out the window (How can I not with the view I have over Lake Mendota?)

19. Write a pageful of questions. Don’t worry about answers.

33. Compliment a stranger. (A girl who I recognized from seeing at school pulled her tank-top up really high at the mall. As she walked by I had overheard her and her friend questioning whether it looks good or not -obviously sarcastically, likely making fun of someone- and I replied, “that looks good”. They were zoned out and probably didn’t hear me, if they did they probably gave me a really dirty look as I kept walking. #awkward)

46. List 4 things you are thankful for in this moment. (I typically list five things every night before sleep, but as I read this “to-do adventure”, I pulled my Gratitude Notes out and wrote down: sleepless nights worth staying awake for, sunlight, good tasting water -didn’t get my brita pitcher yet-, deep conversations that lead to action)

47. Pick up your favorite book and head to the park. (I wrote this post in response to taking this action.)

52. Set a new fitness goal. (I decided to have a goal of 50 pull-ups, I can already do 25 which means I’m already half way there!)

11. Stroll through a book store and notice which section pulls you in. (At first I started walking to the New Age Thinking section, but then my feet took me directly to the Writing Reference section. From there I was pulled to old classic novels and from there to Seth Godin’s books. I hoped to end up walking to something new, but what pulled me in is currently relevant to my life.)

17. Start a scrapbook with images you tear out of magazines, newspapers, funny office memos. (I prefer using my huge tack-board as a replacement for a scrapbook. I’ve filled it up much more since I took this picture)

18. Schedule a coffee date with someone you admire. (Scheduled a coffee date with Katie Christensen, entrepreneur and great friend to discuss business ideas and upcoming events.

68. Put your other shoe on first.
I actually didn’t know which shoe I put on first, so I did both… Overachiever?

34. Brush your teeth with opposite hand. (Weird, but not difficult)

69. Be a slob. Don’t make the bed. Leave it on the floor. (This slobbish enough?)

Stay Positive & Always A Bit Awkward

Garth E. Beyer

The Shannon-Weaver Model

Garth Beyer

The Shannon-Weaver Model, also known as the Linear Communication Model and the Mathematical Theory of Communication, demonstrates the process of communicating. It also helps you realize why the most effortless acts of communication can result in complete misinterpretation or misunderstanding.

It was in 1947 that Claude E. Shannon created this theory with the intention for it to be used in facilitating information transmission over telephone lines. Not surprisingly, it took on an entirely new role of being one of the most largely used inter-personal communication models to this day.

The model contains 8 key components: Source, Encoder, Message, Channel, Noise, Decoder, Receiver and Feedback.

Source: The source of communication is an individual creator or group of individuals who have a message they wish to be received by another individual or group. The source, or origin of the message, must also have a definite purpose of initiating the communication model.

Encoder: The encoder, also referred to as the sender or transmitter, puts the message into specific signals that will later be interpreted. The encoder must choose distinct forms of signals to represent the meaning of the message clearly.

A gesture of a handshake can be encoded as an image, but it would not work as effectively if it were put into a text format.

Message: The message is the content that is being communicated from one end of the model to the other. Naturally you will send multiple messages that are precise, rather than a single message which has too many meanings.

Channel: The channel is the path on which the message travels. The encoder, while deciding how to best transmit the message, must also consider the best path on which the transmitted message will travel. This channel can be any medium such as magazine, radio, film, internet, etc,.

Noise: Inevitably the channel is already filled with noise; anything that interferes with the transmission of the message. This can be the radio playing too loudly in the background or the encoder’s own inability to enunciate correctly.

Decoder: The decoder simply does the opposite of what the encoder does. The decoder interprets the original message in a way that the receiver will understand. Additionally, the decoder will act as a filter in the sense that the message will have as much noise removed as possible.

Receiver: The receiver is the individual or audience whom the sender had the intention to deliver the message to.

Originally the linear model of communication had stopped there. It wasn’t until Warren
Weaver worked on the fundamentals of the model and added a necessary component. Weaver made the effect of the model orbicular in the sense that he had attached feedback to the model. *See image above.

Feedback: Feedback is the receivers response to the message. The feedback’s intent is to let the encoder know exactly how accurately the message was interpreted as well as simply reporting whether the message was received or not.

Feedback allows the once linear model to become cyclical so that each party – the individual or group at each end of the model – can continue communication.

As an example, we will stick to the model’s origin by using the telephone.

You, the source, wish to convey the message that you have completed the report early to your boss. The message is then encoded as a voice message into the phone, with the phone, or the phones cable being the channel on which the message is traveling. The noise present is simply your daughter screaming in the background as you were working from home this evening. The decoder will present the message as a voice message for the receiver, your boss, to listen to. Your boss will than reciprocate the process and present you with feedback, whether that is simply telling you that you did a good job or hinting at a promotion in the future.