Please Ignore the Last 7 Years

As I watching the Michigan - Notre Dame football game on ABC TV this past Saturday I was surprised to see that the 'expert' analyst assigned to the broadcast was Matt Millen.

For anyone not familiar with Millen, he was a top-level player in the National Football League, playing on several championship teams, then a well-regarded broadcaster for a few years, before becoming the President and CEO of the Detroit Lions of the NFL in 2001.

From 2001 - 2008, when Millen was mercifully fired, the Lions record was 31-84, by far the worst in the NFL during that span, and Millen, as the executive in charge, made several colossally bad decisions in evaluating talent as evidenced by the series of failures of Lions first round draft selections.

In the last few years of his tenure with the Lions, 'Fire Millen' chants were commonly heard at Lions games, in fact, the 'Fire Millen' chants popped up at hockey, basketball, and college events in Detroit.

An online petition to aimed at convincing Lions ownership to fire Millen generated 36 pages of comments.

Why is any of this interesting?  I am thinking about what the interview for his new gig must have been like.

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ABC Exec: So Matt, tell me about your last position, what was your greatest accomplishment?

Millen : Well, in 2005, I managed to get a multi-million dollar contract extension.

ABC : Wow, you must have been doing a fantastic job!

Millen: We did win 6 games in 2004

ABC: Wow, that is almost mediocre!

Millen: That was a fun year.

ABC: How about your relationship with the customers?

Millen: They were always talking about me.  I did generate lots of publicity.

ABC: You do have an impressive resume.  Can you leave the names of a few references?

Millen : Sure, I can give you the names of some of my teammates and coaches from when I played

ABC: Well, you have not played in almost 20 years, is there any one else we can call?

Millen : How about my old play-by-play partner, Tim Ryan?

ABC: Tim Ryan?  Is he still around?

Millen : Sure, he is doing great.

ABC: How about a reference from your most recent position, with the Lions?

Millen: That one did not really work out so well, I kind of want to forget about it.

ABC: So the last position you held for 7 years, the one with the most responsibility, prestige, and power, there's no one willing to give you a positive reference?

Millen: Yes, that is pretty much it.

ABC: Can you at least tell me about how you left the organization, what happened the season after you left the team? Were they in a position to succeed?

Millen: They were 0-16.

ABC: You're hired!

Twitter, Ralph Nader, and the other 97%

I plead guilty to the charge of contributing to the hype, buzz, hyperbole, or whatever term you care to use surrounding the astronomical growth of Twitter.

I have spent way more hours than I care to calculate tweeting and reading tweets.

I have written probably 10 or so blog posts about Twitter, (and for a little blog like this one that is quite a bit).

Twitter has been a great resource for me, (and quite fun at times I admit).  But I feel the need to point out a couple of things about Twitter that I think are relevant and important.

Yesterday the internet monitoring firm ComScore released a report on Twitter usage that indicated approximately 4 million folks in the United States accessed Twitter in February 2009, which was a 1,000 percent increase from a year ago.

Wow, incredible. 

Did you also know that the US Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates non-farm US employment to be about 137 million?

For the math challenged, that amounts to less than 3% of the people employed in the US visited Twitter in February.  (Actually the real percentage has to be lower, there is no way all of the 4 million Twitter visitors are all employed, but the precise percentages are not the important thing).

You know how much 3% is?Photo - Mike Licht

That's about how much of the popular vote that (kook) Ralph Nader received in the 2000 US Presidential Election.

3% is an incredibly small percentage, but just about the perfect size for an effective echo chamber.

For the HR professional and the HR Technologist, this is an essential statistic  that bears attention.  The vast majority of experienced, capable, and effective HR practitioners are not on Twitter, don't care how many followers you have, are not versed in the art of crafting Tweets to increase the likelihood of the 'retweet', and don't know who Scoble or Brogan or Kawasaki are.

That does not make them less intelligent or valuable to the organization.

Sure 4 million people are on Twitter.  But HUNDREDS of millions are not (at least yet).

And they run HR departments, own small and medium size businesses, and makeup the VAST majority of the working population.

Look, I said before that I think Twitter is an awesome and powerful platform, but it is not the end-all, be-all that is going to solve HR's pressing issues.  It is what it is.

And right now it is about 3%.

(Now hurry up Twitterfeed, and pick this up so it gets to Twitter so that someone will actually read this)