Ringtones at Work

Experts on per­sonal brand­ing love to offer advice on how to improve your per­sonal image, get noticed (in the right ways), expand your social net­work, etc. I won­der how many are advis­ing busi­ness peo­ple to pay more atten­tion to the impres­sion cre­ated by their choice of ring­tones while at work?

We’ve all been there. It’s an impor­tant meet­ing; you’ve been told to turn off your phone and not to check email. But some­one for­got to silence his phone, and it rings at just the wrong moment. The sound elic­its a room full of wry smiles, and we think, “Bad boy! Glad I remem­bered to mute my phone.”

This sit­u­a­tion is embar­rass­ing on two lev­els. Not only does every­one know this guy ignored the meeting’s ground rules, but his choice of ring­tone may reveal per­sonal pref­er­ences that can appear unpro­fes­sional in a high-stakes busi­ness context.

I’ll bet you can think of lots of exam­ples, like the Rolling Stones fan whose phone announces, “I Can’t Get No Sat­is­fac­tion.” Unless this guy is an advo­cate of Net­Pro­moter scores, his ring­tone is prob­a­bly ques­tion­able in a work set­ting.  (Sorry, inside joke.)

Speak­ing for myself, I’ve tended to stick with Apple’s pleas­ant but generic ring­tones, the ones that ship with the iPhone 3GS. I exper­i­mented once, con­vert­ing an Acoustic Alchemy song to an iPhone-compatible ring­tone, but the result was too quiet to be use­ful, so I reverted to Apple’s tones after miss­ing a few calls.

And then a cou­ple of weeks ago I got an email from the pres­i­dent of an “exec­u­tive ring­tones” com­pany who was hop­ing to show­case his company’s solu­tion in this blog. He wrote:

We believe our prod­uct is solv­ing a work­place epi­demic. Inap­pro­pri­ate ring­tones. I have been inter­viewed by For­tune and Busi­ness Week on the topic and would love to see if there’s room in your blog for a post about us.

Rob Mar­reel, pres­i­dent, Exec­Tones LLC

Wow, a “work­place epi­demic.” He made me curi­ous. I real­ized I hadn’t thought much about the prob­lem of unsuit­able ring­tones at work. But he’s right; I’ve taken note when other people’s ring­tones made me think twice about their choices.

I’ve also run for my phone more than once, think­ing it was my phone ring­ing, only to dis­cover some other iPhone owner had selected the same generic ring­tone as I… So there’s merit to hav­ing a ring­tone that’s dis­tinc­tive with­out being offen­sive or inap­pro­pri­ate at work.

We chat­ted by email and agreed that I would try out Exec­Tones’ prod­uct, a “best sell­ing pack­age of busi­ness pro­fes­sional ring­tones,” and then write about my impres­sions. [Dis­clo­sure: no exchange of money on either side.]

My Expe­ri­ence: Some Usabil­ity Issues

Today I began my trial expe­ri­ence with Exec­Tones. It’s been a some­what rocky start, but now I have a very pleas­ing ring­tone to replace my generic Apple ring­tone. Here’s what happened.

Con­fig­u­ra­tion: Apple iPhone 3GS, iTunes and Win­dows 7

Some­how I man­aged to down­load a set of ring­tones that are intended for instal­la­tion via a Mac. Unfor­tu­nately, my iPhone syncs to a PC, because of my reliance upon Out­look for busi­ness. This mis­take plus my unfa­mil­iar­ity with cus­tom ring­tone pro­ce­dures caused the first set of hassles.

After wast­ing about half an hour try­ing a vari­ety of approaches, I learned there’s no way to get Mac-specific ring­tones into iTunes’ Ring­tones folder on a PC. Drag-and-drop won’t work if the ring­tones are not already in the right for­mat (.mr4).

Apple’s error mes­sage makes you think it’s impos­si­ble to get a third party’s ring­tones into iTunes with­out going through the Apple Store and pur­chas­ing the ring­tone there.

From our email dia­log I knew that Exec­Tones has been suc­cess­fully sell­ing both Mac and PC ring­tones to iPhone own­ers, so there had to be a way…

First, I tried the self-service option, which is my nor­mal pattern.

Sadly, I could not find an FAQ on ExecTone’s web­site that would help me under­stand what I needed to do to install an exist­ing ring­tone on an iPhone con­nected to a Win­dows PC. At that point I did not know there was a file for­mat com­pat­i­bil­ity issue that was caus­ing iTunes to reject these ring­tones. I couldn’t find any rel­e­vant help resources online.

So I emailed the pres­i­dent to explain my sit­u­a­tion. He real­ized I had down­loaded the wrong set of ring­tones, and there­fore had incom­pat­i­ble file for­mats. He quickly pro­vided me with the cor­rect URL to down­load the PC-compatible set of ring­tones (.mr4 for­mat). Once down­loaded, you run a .EXE file to install them in a folder on your PC and then trans­fer them into iTunes.

Because I am using Win­dows 7, I encoun­tered another glitch dur­ing instal­la­tion: the .EXE file that unzips and installs the files on a PC trig­gers a com­pat­i­bil­ity warn­ing: Win­dows 7 warns that the pro­gram may have failed to com­plete suc­cess­fully… Luck­ily, all went well, but there was an anx­ious moment or two.

Once unzipped, the result is loads of business-oriented ring­tones that you can eas­ily trans­fer to iTunes’ Ring­tones folder via drag-and-drop.

They all land in the Ring­tones folder “checked,” which means all of them will trans­fer to the iPhone dur­ing the next sync.

This is not a good idea, for two reasons:

1. There are too many choices for prac­ti­cal pur­poses. The iPhone takes a long time to scroll through them all so you can test-play and then select the one you really want. It’s much faster to sam­ple and pre-select your pref­er­ences on the PC, and then trans­fer just the ones you really want to your iPhone.
2. The ring­tones named “noti­fi­ca­tion” aren’t use­ful on an iPhone. Apple cur­rently allows users to cus­tomize ring­tones only, but not the alerts and noti­fi­ca­tions you hear when an SMS mes­sage, for exam­ple, arrives. (If you’re using a Black­berry, the cus­tom noti­fi­ca­tion sounds may be more useful.)

I often learn by doing, sigh. After trans­fer­ring the full set to my iPhone and encoun­ter­ing the scrolling chal­lenge, I decided to try again — by nar­row­ing my selec­tion on the PC via iTunes and then resync­ing with a much smaller set of choices.

Within iTunes I learned how to select mul­ti­ple ring­tones and then right-click to get the option that lets me des­e­lect them as a group. (De-selected ring­tones won’t trans­fer to your iPhone, but they will remain avail­able in your iTunes library.) I pared down my pref­er­ences to a more man­age­able num­ber and then resynced my iPhone. Now I’m left with a lovely set of ring­tones on my phone.

Peo­ple who are more expert iTunes and ring­tones users than I may be able to avoid the has­sles I encoun­tered today. Thank­fully, the instal­la­tion lessons are now behind me.

These Ring­tones Sound Pretty Nice

Exec­Tones offers quite a num­ber of choices, group­ing ring­tones by mood (calm, peace­ful, upbeat, etc.) or sug­gested role (CEO, exec­u­tive, young pro­fes­sional, etc.). In many cases there are vari­a­tions on a theme, to give you a choice of higher or lower notes and chords, or syn­the­sized instruments.

These ring­tones sound really lovely on my PC; how­ever, some of them are a bit too much when played on an iPhone 3GS. The iPhone’s speaker isn’t quite up to the chal­lenge of play­ing these ring­tones with their intended fidelity. For exam­ple, ring­tones with lots of tre­ble notes, when played at the iPhone’s high­est vol­ume set­ting, reveal some unpleas­ant audio arti­facts. So I’ve selected a ring­tone that plays in a lower reg­is­ter, a sound that seems well suited for my phone’s audio out­put capabilities.

And yes, as promised, this pack­age of ring­tones is much more “busi­ness appro­pri­ate” than many of the ring­tones that are cre­ated from people’s per­sonal music library.

So, thank you to Exec­Tones for mak­ing my phone more dis­tinc­tive with­out rais­ing eye­brows at my choices.

Tagged as: business ringtones, ExecTones, iPhone, personal branding

Revised on March 31, 2010