Welcome to Conspire’s Fun Friday Links, a weekly collection of interesting discoveries from around the Web. Most of the time, the goal is to get you thinking differently about innovation, collaboration, business culture, and life in general. Other times, we may toss an infographic or fun video your way. Submissions are welcome, and you can send them to conspire@mindjet.com for consideration.
Why Customers Want to Connect with You, Not Just Your Brand
Though there are resentful mutterings on both sides of the work/ life balance argument, it’s a cold, hard fact that our personal and professional lives are becoming increasingly intertwined. As a result, new challenges and questions are popping up for business leaders surrounding how they, their employees, and their companies are presented and positioned to customers. More importantly, perhaps, they want to know what the right way to engage with an audience even is these days. From Inc.:
“[Amy Jo Martin, CEO of Digital Royalty] says she sees CEOs wondering all the time whether it’s appropriate be themselves online, or if they need to take a more buttoned-up approach, given that all of their customers and business contacts are reading what they put out there.
‘The reality is, it’s 2014 and it really is about work-life integration versus separation,’ Martin says. ‘We aren’t any different in the morning versus three 3 p.m., versus 10 p.m. We really need to integrate those worlds.’
According to Martin, many company leaders spend an inordinate amount of time working on their company’s brands and not enough time developing their own. As a result, they miss an opportunity to humanize their organizations, which is a mistake.
‘The truth is humans connect with humans, not logos,’ Martin points out.”
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Study Reveals Stress-Reducing Email Strategy
Want an excellent excuse to stop obsessively checking your email, and quit feeling obligated to respond immediately to every incoming message? You got it. From Mashable:
“Researchers asked 124 adults to limit checking their email to three times a day for seven days. For the following week, participants were encouraged to check it as much as possible — which amounted to, of course, what their habits were like before the study began.
The participants filled out a daily 10-minute questionnaire related to their stress levels, and as a result, less frequent email checks made people much happier throughout the day.
While the average person checks email 15 times a day, the study suggests three times is the right amount to keep added stress away.”
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Why Cloudy Days Help Us Think More Clearly
It’s not abnormal to feel a little more fuzz-brained than usual in these grayer months, but your perception might be playing a bit of a trick on you: though cold and dreary weather = hibernation and holidays for most, it turns out that a little fog might be exactly what we need to jumpstart our mental clarity. From Brainpickings:
“Just as melancholy, that raincloud of the mind, expands our capacity for creativity, so does actual gloomy weather — clouds, it turns out, offer something possibly more tangible, certainly more pragmatic, than ‘contemplation [that] benefits the soul'; their proverbial silver lining is more than proverbial.
In Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces That Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave (public library | IndieBound), NYU professor Adam Alter, who studies behavioral economics, marketing, and the psychology of decision-making, opens one particularly pause-giving section with this unambiguous proclamation:
Sunshine dulls the mind to risk and thoughtfulness.”
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