What get’s tweeted gets done. Can Social Media provide accountability for our businesses?

According to Seb Coe, the former British 1,500m Olympic champion, there’s a correlation between how much you tweet and how you perform.

Lord Coe expressed concerns
that tweeting is a distraction 
for Olympians.

Lord Coe, who is head of the British Olympic Organizing committee, noted this week that the people who find time to tweet, also seem to find time to lose.

“I have found quite a close correlation between the number of tweets at competitive times and the level of under-performance,” says his Lordship.

It’s an interesting question for sure. To what extent can social media updates, that require such a small input of time and energy, distract you from what you should be focused on?

Colleagues of mine spend a lot of time defending social media, because it takes so little to fire out a tweet, or update Facebook. I think it’s a reasonable defense.  The question is really what the wider cost is. What Seb Coe seems to be saying is that talking to your audience a lot, may put you at risk of disappointing them.

But if you think about it, there are also positive possibilities. To what extent do we alter our behavior in order to satisfy our virtual audience?

I know people who like to sound clever on Facebook updates. No kidding; I have had people confess to me after a couple of beers that they make a real effort to sound smart and engaged when they post. They feel like it’s a way to make a good impression, on friends, on family… they’re fueling their own ego. They will read news sites and newspapers, looking for the day’s smart story, so they can be seen to post it. If that sounds pathetic, OK – but they’re still reading the newspaper. They never did before. In their attempts to look engaged, they have accidentally become engaged.

Another friend of mine posts all his runs to Facebook, via the Nike + app. So-and-so has just completed his 3.01 mile run in 28 minutes. He claims to train more often and run faster because he knows it will be seen and measured.

In reality Social Media represents a great way to encourage accountability. What gets measured, gets done, right? So why not openly encourage your staff to post their successes on every social media? Even create your own social media networks inside your company to encourage bragging. It might help the staff reach to achieve for something to brag about.

So the end of the day, an Olympic athlete shouldn’t need Social Media to report on progress. They should have medals to wave around. They should have newspaper clippings.

But for the rest of us, there’s no harm in wanting to look better, especially if it encourages us to actually do better. 

Do you have thoughts? Can Twitter help with productivity? Should athletes put the smartphone down?

Richard Spragg writes on various subjects including global engineering staffing and global engineering jobs.

Must everyone evolve from innovation to advertising in the end?

It’s a long time since Google built the world’s best search engine. It’s quite a long time since the development of Google Maps, or Google Earth. At the time, these things were revolutionary and made significant contributions to daily life for a lot of people.

What’s Google’s latest innovation? It’s not a rhetorical question. Google+? Surely not. Even if it’s a new offering, it’s not exactly innovative. No more than Google Mail anyway.

Where’s the innovative beef?  

Nowhere. That’s where. Google is an advertising company. It’s raison d’être is to sell advertising space on its media to private organizations in return for money. Rather a lot of money in fact. Google made $38bn revenue in 2011. Not all from advertising, admittedly, only 96%.

James Whittaker, the disgruntled employee who’s fair minded and heartfelt resignation letter garnered so much attention earlier this year pointed to this evolution from innovation to advertising as the death of the company he seemed to honestly love. The Google I was passionate about was a technology company that empowered its employees to innovate. The Google I left was an advertising company with a single corporate-mandated focus.

Social Media advertising - the next great 
internet bubble?

Facebook has been on the same trajectory. Gone are the constant additions in functionality and tweaks to the way Facebook works. Not entirely actually, there have been various substantive adjustments in the area of advertising, and how ads appear on our pages.

Twitter, it seems, is next. The descent from innovation to advertising is first seen by the developers who  are the first to know what’s coming, but only in the same way that the canary in the mine shaft is the first to know what’s coming.

Lately there are rumblings from the development community that they are being pushed towards developments, for example expanded tweets with image functionality, that scream advertising. Prepare ye the way of the sales people.

Underlying this inevitable evolution is a fact that nobody round the social media boardroom table seems to be nearly worried enough about. The concept of social media advertising is enduring a substantial wobble. GM pulled all of their Facebook advertising, claiming it simply doesn’t work. And over the last few months, the marketing consulting industry has started to gather around the idea that the much prized ‘likes’ may not be worth that much.

Social Media’s big players are blowing a huge bubble, and only one thing happens to bubbles in the end. 

See also - The Death of Facebook
Richard Spragg writes on various subjects including global engineering staffing and global engineering jobs.

The death of Facebook. It's not beyond imagination...

Paid social media advertising doesn’t impact sales enough to warrant significant expense. That’s the conclusion reached today by GM, who pulled $10m of advertising spend from Facebook.

The move is mildly embarrassing for Facebook on the eve of their long anticipated IPO, but I don’t think anyone there will be leaping from the window ledge anytime soon. Other than making the Winklevoss twins’ morning cornflakes taste slightly better, it is unlikely to affect the company’s valuation.

GM is pulling out of paid advertising

But it should.

It is another straw placed gently on the back of the distraction advertising camel. Facebook, much like Google, is essentially an advertising company. The social functionality exists only to collect data and drive advertising revenue, just like Google’s search engine. The fact that it’s free to the user is the source of its popularity. But make no mistake, you are not the customer, you are the product. The staff, managers, executives and share holders are in the game to sell you to advertisers for a lot of money.

I’m not objecting to that in principal, I’m objecting to it as a long term strategy for these companies.

Sophisticated consumers, empowered with technology are simply tuning out the messages that companies like GM have been paying so much money for. It’s not just the simple mechanics of it all – skipping through ads on your DVR, ignoring phone numbers you don’t recognize. It’s also a function of automatic behavior driven by ad-saturation. Who opens e-mails that are clearly unsolicited now? Who isn’t throwing the junk mail straight in the trash? Do you even notice the ad banners on the news site you’re reading anymore? Did you click on any today?

There are better ways to engage with potential customers than waving something bright and shiny at them and luring them to your tent with clever catchphrases and good looking people.  

Marketing is different now. If you want to engage people, you have to make a contribution. You have to be able to show them some evidence that you’re worth their time.

‘Content marketing’ is a phrase still best known to those of us inside the marketing discipline. Some of us call it ‘Inbound Marketing’. At Talascend we call it ‘giving stuff to your customers for free to encourage a conversation.’

Cash is not necessarily the currency of customer engagement any more.

The problem for Facebook and Google is that they depend entirely on old fashioned distraction advertising revenue for their income. While this remains the case they are driving their unstoppable juggernauts toward a cliff face.

They would argue that nobody has made a bigger contribution to our lives than Facebook or Google and I’d agree with them. These two fabulous and innovative companies have made my life easier and more fun and I don’t have enough backslaps and thanks to dish out to Mark and Larry and Sergei et al. Here’s to you all and well done. I’m glad you’re billionaires. You deserve it.

But how will the businesses you’ve built sustain their growth and profitability when they depend so entirely on yesterday’s advertising practices?

GM aren’t pulling out of Facebook, only the paid ads. They will, says the usual Marketing execu-mouthpiece, remain committed to distributing content through Facebook, they just won’t be paying for it thank you very much. They have found it to be ineffective.

What GM has discovered will surely not differ substantially from what others will discover. GM afterall is one of the largest advertisers in the US and you can bet on the fact that they have a lot of very smart people using a lot of very clever technology to be sure they’re right about this. Even without the statistics they have access to, all logic tells me that GM are absolutely right. Others will follow.

Facebook’s ad revenue is not keeping pace with its growth. Facebook’s profit fell off in the first quarter of this year and its revenue growth rate is now slowing down. The numbers aren’t impressive anyway. Facebook generates just $3.50 per user in advertising revenue. If it has to increase the presence of ads to increase engagement from advertisers it risks losing product (us).

Everyone’s always looking for the potential death of Facebook. This is it. Content marketing is the future, distraction advertising is the past. Facebook, for all its youth and modern identity is operating a fundamentally old fashioned model and if GM’s decision turns out to be the first of many, then we’re seeing the first major crack appear in the Facebook machine.

I'm asking you... do those companies who spend millions on advertising banners on Facebook get your business?




Richard Spragg writes on various subjects including global engineering staffing and global engineering jobs.

Time, the old enemy, is why recruitment agencies are still so valuable.

Recruiting, like fishing, is time consuming - whoever you are

There’s an awful Eckhart Tolle-esque quote sweeping Facebook and Twitter lately. It says ‘It’s not about time, it’s about choices. How are you spending your choices?’ Spreading this cringe-inducing banality appears to be some kind of competitive sport on social media.  It makes me long for the days of gas lamps and messenger pigeons.

But, there is a point underneath: What you choose to spend your time on is important. 

Time management is a misnomer. You can't manage time. It doesn’t matter how well organized you are, you can't put a 25^th hour in the day, or slow the clock down. What we refer to as time management is simply making good choices about what to do and when to do it.

With each now development in the sphere of staffing over the last 15 years, people have been claiming that the recruitment industry is under threat. The internet was going to kill off Recruitment agencies; then the job boards and now social media. But Recruitment agencies are not going anywhere, and the reason is this: there are better ways for employers to choose to spend their time. Each new product or online service that arrives in the employment sphere does not change this fact.

The major job boards, through every possible marketing investment up to and including Superbowl advertising, have greatly increased their resume resources (and credit to them - they have built great businesses and made a lot of coin.). But in doing so, all they’ve done is to make the lake employers are fishing in larger – they have not made the fish any easier to catch. The universal uptake of social media and the pushes made by Linked-In particularly to raise revenue through recruitment services (136% increase in the last 12 months) is only serving to make the lake even bigger yet.

What matters is still the fishing.

Nobody has the time to sit and fish for hours on end except professional fishermen. Let them do it. They will catch fish to order, and you don’t have to pay a dime until the fish is in your hand. That has to be a better plan than spending what time you can running down to the lake and casting your line in the water.

The Recruitment industry represents a basic example of a sensible division of labor.  Finding, attracting and cementing new hires are tasks that require full time focus. It doesn’t matter how many tools are made available to employers, potential hires still need to be found, courted, convinced and onboarded through a process that is sometimes sensitive, often intricate and always, always time-consuming.

There can surely be no greater individual piece of evidence in support of this theory than the fact that recruiting companies outsource their own recruitment. There is a thriving market for ‘Rec-to-rec’ recruitment (agencies who only place other recruiters). It might sound ridiculous, but it's common sense. The job is better outsourced to people who have slightly more experience of the specific needs of the process and all the time in the world to do it. The flashiest fishing rod will not improve your ability to catch fish - you need skill and time. Many employers have the skill, but few have the time. At the end of the day, you can't eat a fishing rod and you can't hire a resume. 

So I'd advise anyone who's hiring this year to remember: Even Recruiters know that recruitment is a job that would be better outsourced. The reason the recruitment industry has thrived despite all the developments in the global job market is because there are simply more valuable ways to ‘spend your choices' as an employer.




Richard Spragg writes on various subjects including global engineering staffing and global engineering jobs.