You will be corrected (if you're wrong)

The alternate title to this post is, 'It's just about impossible to BS your way to the top, or even into the bottom any more.'

If you haven't checked it out yet, I would recommend the latest Malcolm Gladwell book titled David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants, a fascinating look at how we think about (apparent) disadvantages and obstacles in business and in life, and how, often, these kinds of challenges prove not to be disadvantages after all.

One of the 'underdog' examples in the Gladwell book is from about 20 years ago and tells the story of a guy who during a shared cab ride from Wall St. out to LaGuardia Airport in New York, talked his way into an interview (and was a few days later, hired), to be an options trader at at a big financial services firm. The catch was that in fact this guy had zero job experience, no industy connections or references, and did not have the kind of educational background that would have gotten him past the first few knock-out questions that the bank would have had in place (had there been such a thing at that time). But he was able, in that one hour in the cab, to pitch and present himself as a sharp, experienced person that was worth pursuing.

Long story short, he went on to be really successful in that job trading options, (he essentially taught himself, was smart, and a bulldog that out worked everyone), and has gone on in his career to become a rich and powerful executive at one of the big Wall St. powerhouse firms. Great story of someone who was able to overcome some disadvantages, turn at least a couple of them into assets, and succeed where it might have seemed that a middling and non-descript career was probably his most likely outcome.

Great story for sure, but what I almost immediately thought about after reading it was how there is probably no possibility of it happening today.

The 2014 equivalent of the 'Guy conning a busy manager in off the cuff conversation to give him an interview for a position he has no education/experience to qualify for' might be something like a guy hitting up a hiring manager with a well-crafted and interesting LinkedIn connection request, (because LinkedIn is now so big and out of control they have a couple of shared connections), but that shows a profile with thin, and not relevant job experience, an educational story that doesn't 'fit' the candidate profile, and no meaningful recommendations or endorsements. If the hiring manager even noticed the request, and this is a bigger if, forwarded the profile over to anyone in HR or Recruiting to review, there would be little to no chance of the guy getting a second look, much less a call in for an interview or a job offer.

And I totally get why that makes sense, it is hard enough for many jobs to find people that are qualified or nearly qualified so they can hit the ground running (as your hiring manager demands), and there are a raft of other kinds of jobs where you are turning away really good candidates, so in either case chasing after any kind of 'No way he is a fit, but what the heck, he's got charisma, let's call him in for an interview anyway' type of candidate is kind of a long shot no one has time for.

I'm not saying if this is bad or good, really, it's just how it works today. Today, the guy in Gladwell's book almost certainly would not get hired at most established firms. You would check his story first, and you'd find it lacking. LinkedIn is the new scoresheet.

He'd have to find another way in to the industry (or start something on his own).

Thanks to the social net (and more advanced technology), we can now know just about everything about anyone who wants a shot at working for us.

I wonder if that has made hiring easier or harder.

Have a great week! 

You don't have to social network to make it

Cleaning out some old 'saved for later' items in my RSS reader over the weekend and I re-visited this gem from Bob Lefsetz, 36 Things We've Learned which ran a few weeks back on the Big Picture site. 

In the piece, which is simply a series of observations about the modern music industry (but certainly could be relevant to any number of fields of endeavor, particularly ones that have undergone significant change and disruption from technology, social networks, or other external influences), Lefsetz shares this 'learning' regarding social networking, which is below:

22. You don’t have to social network to make it.

You’ve just got to do great work, constantly.

An interesting observation at least, if not a true 'learning.' But one that at least made me think for a little while. In our little corner of the world, the Human Resources/Talent Management space, it seems like lots of people, many of whom I know and respect quite a bit, the 'early social tech adopters' have spent lots of time and energy and pixels exhorting the 'rest' of the profession to get on board with social technology and social networking in a professional context.

Still in late 2013 I see folks giving presentations and talks aimed at mainstream HR professionals and designed on 'selling' the benefits and importance of social networking for these HR/Talent pros. These kinds of sessions usually take the position of trying to convince the slow adopters or disbelievers that they have to get on board, or risk getting passed by or marginalized.

But I wonder, or at least I ask you to wonder for a moment, if that advice is actually true, or at least mostly true. What if Lefsetz is right, and doing great work is really what is needed and that trumps the need or desire to simply 'network' more, (social or otherwise).

The last CHRO I worked for (at a publicly traded company with 5,000 employees), achieved that lofty position in 2011 or so without having so much as a LinkedIn account, much less a professional blog, active Twitter feed sharing the latest from Harvard Business Review or a leading or even participating in one of the daily Tweet chats on HR and Talent topics. 

But she did great work. Had great mentors. Built a great and loyal team. Earned the respect and trust of the rest of the C-suite.

Spent the time doing great work and not worried at all about social networking.

Or to take a slightly different take on the issue, just ask yourself this question today - is that hot article or blog post being shared all over social media today really any good? Does it really have any non-obvious important insights? 

Or is it just being tweeted a lot?

Happy Monday. Look out above your head in case an Amazon drone is buzzing.

Soon, Google will be able to Tweet for you

What's the worst thing for the average person trying to deal with the incredible growth of social networking?

I'd probably say it is the ridiculous amount of time and energy that adults spend wishing each other 'Happy Birthday!' on Facebook.

But for many other heavy users (and business and professional accounts) of social networking one of the main problems is simply keeping up with the flow of information, finding ways to sift and organize the constant streams of updates, and finding the time and energy to respond, engage, and interact in both a timely and relevant manner.

It is exhausting. A professional connection of yours is always posting about a new job on LinkedIn, someone you are hoping to curry favor with is updating their Facebook status with their latest vacation pics or athletics triumphs of their kids,  or some colleagues are mentioning your latest blog post or presentation on Twitter.

You should take the time to say 'Congratulations!' or to 'Like' the fact that little Joey scored 4 goals against a bunch of 6 year-olds, and to say 'Thanks!' to everyone that says something nice about your work on Twitter. You should do those things. 

But like I said it is exhausting. And time consuming. And kind of boring.

Enter your friends at Google who are seeking to patent a system/solution for the 'Automated generation of suggestions for personalized reactions in a social network.' 

From the text of the patent filing:

The popularity and use of social networks and other types of electronic communication has grown dramatically in recent years. With the increased use and popularity of social networks, the value of these networks has increased exponentially. However, this also means that the number of messages and information each user must process has increased exponentially. It is often difficult for users to keep up with and reply to all the messages they are receiving. Therefore, it is important for user to keep to most critical message based on their interests and more importantly, based on how other users reacted to that message.

Many users use online social networking for both professional and personal uses. Each of these different types of use has its own unstated protocol for behavior. It is extremely important for the users to act in an adequate manner depending upon which social network on which they are operating. For example, it may be very important to say "congratulations" to a friend when that friend announces that she/he has gotten a new job. This is a particular problem as many users subscribe to many social different social networks. With an ever increasing online connectivity and growing list of online contacts and given the amount of information users put online, it is possible for a person to miss such an update.

Ok, we get all that.  Too much data, too many contacts, missing updates and opportunities to engage. So what does Google propose to solve these challenges?

The present disclosure overcomes the deficiencies and limitations of the prior at least in part by providing a system and method for generating suggestions for personalized reactions or messages. The system according to the present disclosure includes a suggestion generation module. In one embodiment, the suggestion generation module includes a plurality of collector modules, a credentials module, a suggestion analyzer module, a user interface module and a decision tree. The plurality of collector modules are coupled to respective systems to collect information accessible by the user and important to the user from other systems such as e-mail systems, SMS/MMS systems, micro blogging systems, social networks or other systems. The credentials module cooperates with the plurality of collector modules to allow access to those other systems. The information from these collector modules is provided to the suggestion analyzer module. The suggestion analyzer module cooperates with the user interface module and the decision tree to generate suggested reactions or messages for the user to send. The suggested reactions or messages are presented by the user interface module to the user. The user interface module also displays the original message, other information about the original message such as others' responses, and action buttons for sending, discarding or ignoring the suggested message

Awesome. In case you missed the process flow buried in the dense verbiage here it is simply put:

Since Google knows so much about you (using data from 'e-mail systems, SMS/MMS systems, social networks, and other systems') it thinks that it could generate for you the kinds of personalized reactions you would be likely to post on social media and then post them on your behalf. It still would allow you or a corporate brand marketer to be in the approval process, a dialog or UI would be presented to the user and would ask for an approval before each tweet was sent.

Think about it. Instead of just a calendar pop-up or a Facebook notification telling you that 'So and so's birthday is today', the new Google social media robot would have your appropriately crafted reply all ready to go. Instead of scouring LinkedIn all day for the career ebbs and flows of people that you are interested in, just have the social media robot keep watch for you and let you know only when something that truly requires your attention surfaces. Note: This will hardly ever happen.

I dig it. I hope it gets made. That is what social networking really needs too.

More robots.

Note: The blog is on vacation the rest of the week. To all the folks in the USA, Happy Thanksgiving! 

You're not just the product, you're the (unpaid) employee too

With the rise and subsequent IPOs or gigantic acquisitions of the largest social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram, an often-repeated observation about the users, (and source of content/value) for these platforms has been, 'You're not the customer, you're the product.'

The idea in the sentiment is simple - the end users of these social networks create all the content via status updates, photos, or in the case of LinkedIn, a catalog of all your professional credentials, and the owners of the networks then package, parse, and sell this information to (variously), advertisers, 'power users', or other services. And as long as the individual value equation for consumers/users remains in balance, i.e. you feel like you are extracting more value out of say using Facebook than your perceived cost of allowing Facebook to sell ad space that shows up in your feed every time you open the app, then you happily will continue to use the service, supply more content/inventory, and keep the machine running.

Remember, you are not the customer, you are the product.

But if you are the product, or more accurately, you are an active contributor to building the product, then would it be too far a stretch to say that you are also the employee?

Take a quick look at this piece on Business Insider about a recent case being raised by some power users of the review site Yelp, that derives all of it's value from the end user comments, ratings, and reviews of restaurants and bars.

A group of reviewers recently filed a class action lawsuit against Yelp, claiming that the company should treat them like employees and pay them for their reviews.

The suit argues that since Yelp's business model and success is dependent on its over 42 million user-submitted reviews, the company technically employs those users and should fork over some cash (wages, reimbursement of expenditures, and damages). The plaintiffs believe that willfully volunteering to share their thoughts about a business makes them employees because Yelp can only make money if it has their reviews.

Yelp, which went public in 2012, told Circa that the case is a "textbook example of a frivolous lawsuit" and said that the law does not support the idea that voluntarily using a free service equates to an employment relationship.

Sounds kind of crazy, right?

I mean, Yelp or LinkedIn or Facebook does not force you to create content for them or to have a profile on their networks.

There really is no hint of an employment agreement or relationship that is established between any of these services and their users. So it does seem on the surface anyway, that the Yelp user's lawsuit doesn't have much merit.

But if we seem to pretty easily accept the entire notion of 'You are not the customer, you are the product', then why doesn't it make logical sense to take it to the next step, in that you as one of the millions of builders of at least an element of that product should not be compensated somehow?

Every time I get an email from LinkedIn pitching me to upgrade to one of their premium, paid accounts of some kind, I have the same reaction (I say this out loud too, although no one seems to listen) :

"Pay for a LinkedIn account? They should be paying me."

And they should be paying you too.

The next evolution of corporate social media management

Just might be something like Beatrix - a new 'advanced virtual social media assistant' that can assist organizations, (or individual 'thought leaders' as well I suppose) in their quests to become 'social media rockstars.'

How does it work?

Unlike more well-known social media management and scheduling tools like Buffer or HootSuite, both of which allow an organization to schedule and plan social media activity, Beatrix not only helps wth the scheduling of social media updates, it actually helps find and select the actual content as well.

Let's say a local pizza shop wants to buff up its social media presence. The organization can then give Beatrix a few keywords to focus on - like 'pizza', 'wine', or 'sandwiches', and the Beatrix algorithm finds interesting content from around the web and sets it up to be shared on the company's social accounts.

Here is what Beatrix says in her own words...

The algorithm creates instant content plans for you. Stuck for things to say on social media? Beatrix will plan out your week. No time to post? Beatrix will post for you at times you specify. Beatrix does everything a social media intern does.

Just like a real assistant, Beatrix emails you a new content plan every week. If you like it, Beatrix will post that content throughout the next week. Or tell Beatrix what's wrong and she'll create a new plan. Beatrix gets smarter the more you use her. And she never misses a deadline

A 'smart' social media assistant that takes your input, seeks, finds, schedules, and shares interesting content related to your business, and keeps you abreast of the ongoing content plan? An automated service that not only decides for you when to post to social networks, but what to post in the first place?

That sounds pretty awesome to me.  Of course maybe it is because I spend ridiculous amounts of time looking for good content to share, (and blog about).

Sure, someone out there is likely to respond with a comment like - 'That's not what effective social media is all about. Companies need to be authentic or personable or real, or some such.'

Maybe.  Or maybe most of us just really want our fans and followers to think we are on top of our industry, and are sharing relevant and interesting content about what they are interested in. 

And if that is the case, then why wouldn't an algortihm be just as effective at that task as a social media intern who is counting the days before he or she can head back to school.

Have a great week!