Here's the social media video you'll see 1,418 times in 2013

There is no doubt we love, love, love the 'Social Media Revolution' series of videos created by Erik Qualman.

If you have been to any kind of conference, event, presentation, webinar, etc. that had even the remotest tie-back to social media, social networking, or mobile technology in the last 5 years or so, then you have definitely sat through 4 minutes of increasingly incredible social media statistics fly in and out of the frame, while tapping your toes to the pulsating soundtrack courtesy of Fatboy Slim's 'Right Here, Right Now.'

Well the latest version, titled 'Social Media Revolution 4' was released a couple of weeks ago, (embedded below, email and RSS subscribers will have to click through to get your Slim on), and in keeping with the structure, format, and presentation of the first three videos in the series, this latest installment presents numerous facts and statistics about the state and growth of social media and networking.

Take a look below and then come back to read my sincere request of you about this video in 2013. 

Great stuff, right?

Facebook is really big.  Lots of folks sign up for LinkedIn every day. People like to read online product reviews and check out recommendations about restaurants from strangers on the internet. Fatboy Slim (sort of) holds up in late 2012.

So here is my request for 2013 - don't include this video in any presentation you may give, webcast you present, or informal talk you might have with your colleagues. If you find yourself in attendance at an event/presentation, and the speaker cracks out this little beauty in an attempt to convince the audience by virtue of the statistics and volume of our pal Slim that 'social media is a really big deal' then you need to walk out and send a strongly worded letter, (that will teach them), to the event organizers that you expect better from speakers in 2013.

We just can't keep trotting this one out, and we can't keep trying to 'impress' people with it either.

We can't, trust me on this. Someone's head will explode at SHRM13 and with all those HR people in the room the workmen's comp discussions will be epic. Actually, that might be kind of fun.

There is nothing wrong or bad about this video, (or the ones that came before it in the series), but we have, all of us, heard and seen it all before.

Especially the 'Right Here, Right Now' bit, which by the way was released back in 1999.

I think the song is about the Y2K bug.

The Last HR Pro not on LinkedIn

Last week I had a chance to present to a great group of about 100 or so HR, Talent, and Recruiting professionals at a local SHRM event in Virginia. I like getting to these kinds of local HR gatherings - they provide a much better view into the real concerns and challenges in the HR trenches, and usually are bereft of the collection of often jaded and a little too smug and ironically detached, 'professional' conference attendees. Sure, I get it, you are sick of hearing the 71st talk on 'Why Social Media is Important for HR', but in case you have not realized it, actually attending the same presentation dozens of times at events all over the country make you the one who is a little weird and out of the mainstream, not the HR pro at a 300-person company that is trying to figure out how, if at all, having a Twitter account will help her get her job done.

But back to the point - at the session where I was talking to the group about changes and trends in workforce technologies, naturally the use of the public, or consumer social networking sites was brought up, I think in the expected context of how they are being used for various aspects of the talent acquisition function. I asked the attendees to share some examples of how they are incorporating these networks in their organizations, and a few folks shared what they were doing to share job openings and company information on Facebook and source candidates on LinkedIn. Nothing unusual here, a few attendees, (maybe 10% of the group), had some 'active', (not just trolling for candidates), activity on social networks, but what was interesting to me was as the conversation continued, one audience member told the group she had never created a personal LinkedIn profile. I pressed her as to why she was not on LinkedIn, and she promptly replied, 'I just don't have time for it. I'm busy'. I jokingly suggested she was the last HR pro not on LinkedIn.

The group continued to discuss both social networking and other kinds of new technologies that are impacting the workplace and the practice of HR, but I could not get out of my head that in late 2012, there was still one smart, engaged, (she took the time to attend a professional development and networking event), and experienced HR/Talent pro that had not found her way to LinkedIn, if nothing else to set up a shell profile on the site. I even came back to her a couple of times later in the session when the conversation shifted to mobile technology, and how the usage patterns in consumer tech are effecting enterprise tech, I think my comment was 'You are all on your iPhones, updating your Facebook and checking out who has viewed your LinkedIn page, well except for you, (giving a mock-disgusted look towards the one LinkedIn holdout).'

The point of all this? 

I guess a couple of things stood out after thinking about it a little longer.  One, there still exists a pretty significant knowledge and value perception gap between most of the front line, working HR professionals and those of us that think about and use new technologies every day.  There are really still very few 'real' HR pros out there that are as obsessed with this stuff, as it just does not move the needle for them on their day-to-day. Two, while participation and use of these social technologies might level the playing field to some extent between larger and better-financed organizations and smaller ones, that effect is limited. A couple of audience members from very large organizations shared what they are doing with social and branded talent communities, a level of commitment and effort that simply can't be approached by smaller companies.

Last, and maybe the only fascinating part of this entire post, is that after taking some good-natured ribbing from me, (and even the presenter that followed me), the HR pro who had been the one LinkedIn holdout approached me at the end of the day to let me know that she would be, after all, setting up a LinkedIn profile when she got home.

Good for her!

And bad for you, the 'savvy' HR pro who is all over social media and social networking - that is one more competitor for talent that you have to worry about.

Have a Great Week!

Playing offense on social media

Some time back the great Paul Hebert wrote one of the best pieces in the last few years over on Fistful of Talent, titled, HR Plays Too Much Defense.  You should stop what you are doing and read it, or re-read it as the case may be, then come back for a recent and I think perfect example of Paul's ideas played out in the corporate social media space. I'll wait.

Ok, back? I told you Paul's piece was money.

So here's my example of playing offense, or at least not sitting back and playing defense, from one of those classic 'Love them or hate them' organizations, Goldman Sachs.

Of course you'll remember the recent resignation flame-out from former Goldman Sachs employee Greg Smith, who took to the New York Times op-ed page to trash Goldman's culture, draw attention to their bad treatment of clients and customers, and essentially portray the firm as a horrible, horrible place to work, one where a high-minded and formerly optimistic, but now jaded person like himself could no longer be comfortable with.

Well last week Smith sat down with the Times once again, to talk about his soon to be released tell-all memoir 'Why I Left Goldman Sachs'.  Turns out that according to the piece in Times last week, the 'tell-all' doesn't really have that much to say, in fact the headline of the piece, 'A Tell-All on Goldman Has Little Worth Telling', paints Smith equal parts greedy, out-of-touch, and disappointed with his personal compensation, as some kind of crusader to protect customers and reveal deficiencies in Goldman's culture.

Goldman, upon seeing the latest Times' piece, issued the below tweet from their official Twitter account:

For the @nytimes latest take on the GS VP they made famous, click here: link.gs.com/r4xW

— Goldman Sachs (@GoldmanSachs) October 19, 2012

Man, that's a burn.  At least from Goldman's point of view, the Times' provided the initial platform for Smith's enmity and accusations, and now after some time and more details are revealed by Smith via his memoir, essentially has to admit there really isn't much there there. Goldman's swipe at the Times is, at least to my view, a great example of taking the offense, in a way that is snarky but still measured, and one that certainly seems to be in line with their reputation and culture.

Let me be clear about one thing, I am not an apologist for Goldman at all, and their role in the financial crisis of 2008-2009 has been pretty well documented. Next year a former Goldman trader will be tried for civil fraud for his role in the subprime mortgage scandals. Goldman's hands are not at all clean.

But that makes their little dig at the Times even more refreshing I think.  It is easy, especially when you might not have the most respected brand, to sit back, to try not to offend, to play by a really restrictive set of rules, but like Paul pointed out in the FOT piece, playing defense all the time is playing not to lose.

Do you want to play to win, whether it is in HR, marketing, recruiting, or social?

Then you have to score some points.

And the Goldman example above reminds us even the 'bad' guys can get over sometimes as well.

Your 735 Facebook friends? They're probably not.

I've written before on the blog about the famous 'Dunbar's Number', from the seminal piece of research by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar that theorized that the number of stable, close social relationships, (typically what we'd call 'friendship'), that humans can sustain at any given time is about 150.

In the old post I referenced some additional academic research that suggested that even with the ubiquity, popularity, and increasing familiarity with the concepts of online social networking, that Dunbar's number still more of less holds.  Or said differently, no matter how many 'friends' you make on social networking sites, unalterable things like brain size and the human capacity to form and maintain relationships have not changed, even though your 903 Instagram followers suggest otherwise.

But better than taking my word for it, or reading through a tedious academic research paper, check a recent, short interview with Robin Dunbar himself, that plainly re-states what I know you know is true - no matter how large our social connections grow, we can't truly expand significantly the number of stable relationships that can be maintained.

From the interview on the Technology Review blog:

Q. You famously posited that humans have the cognitive capacity to maintain about 150 stable social relationships. How have tools such as Facebook changed our capacity to handle social connections?

Dunbar: Apparently not at all. It is important to remember that the 150 is just one layer in a series of layers of acquaintanceship within which we sit. Beyond the 150 are at least two further layers (one at 500 and one at 1,500), which correspond to acquaintances (people we have a nodding acquaintance with) and faces we recognize.

All that seems to be happening when people add more than 150 friends on Facebook is that they simply dip into these normal higher layers. If you like, Facebook has muddied the waters by calling them all friends, but really they are not. (emphasis mine).

This isn't to say that social-networking services don't serve a useful function in facilitating our interactions with our "friends," but what they don't seem to do is allow us to increase the number of true friends.

So what, you might be thinking. We inherently know, no matter how many hundreds or thousands of social connections we make, with whom we want to or even have the capacity to maintain close, stable relationships with, the kind of relationships that Dunbar's number suggests max out at about 150.

And that may be entirely true. But as the lines between personal and professional networking and relationships are almost completely gone for many people in their use of social networks like Facebook, I wonder if we are slowly starting to lose the capacity to distinguish the differences. 

Google+, and to a lesser extent Facebook, do offer tools to help us sort and categorize these relationships into buckets or groups, but for the few people that seem to bother to attempt this kind of stratification of potentially thousands of contacts, the effort almost seems overwhelming. So, eventually everyone ends up in the same bucket, something that we continue to erroneously call 'friends'.

Will there be, eventually, a kind of kickback effect, i.e., will we start seeing more people actively looking to reduce the number of their connections and even the time they spend cultivating and maintaining these ever-growing, (and demanding) networks?

So far the answer to that seems like no, but if more people come to conclude that all the time, effort, and energy spent online doesn't actually add to your capacity to form and maintain additional meaningful relationships, then perhaps we will one day arrive at a place where one's Klout score begins to diminish with each 'friend' added over 150. 

If that were to happen, then maybe 150 would become the new 10,000.

What if no one wants to drive to your office?

Back in January I posted a piece titled, 'Will Facebook Kill the Car?', a look and some commentary on research that indicated American teens and twenty-somethings are driving much, much less than previous generations. Shame on you if you don't remember my take from January, but in case you've allowed your own life, work, families, and worldly concerns to interrupt your thinking about what I think, here is a snippet from that piece, (trust me, I have something new to say about this after re-set) -I should have stayed home

It turns out American teenagers are driving less than their predecessors, and the article offers some interesting speculation on why that may be the case.  From the BBC piece 'Why are US teenagers driving less?' 

Recent research suggests many young Americans prefer to spend their money and time chatting to their friends online, as opposed to the more traditional pastime of cruising around in cars.

Here's more from the BBC:

In a survey to be published later this year by Gartner, 46% of 18 to 24-year-olds said they would choose internet access over owning their own car. The figure is 15% among the baby boom generation, the people that grew up in the 1950s and 60s - seen as the golden age of American motoring.

The internet, and by implication the social connections and activities the internet empowers, (mostly via Facebook), is the gateway to freedom, mobility, coolness - all the things that the car used to represent to the teenager or young adult.

Great stuff, no?

But seriously what jogged my memory about that old post was a commentary I caught over the weekend on Forbes.com, penned by legendary Detroit auto executive Bob Lutz. Titled, 'Generation Y Going Nowhere, And They're Fine With That', the piece isn't about Gen Y's career prospects, or lack thereof. Rather, especially seen through the lens of a grizzled and self-proclaimed 'car guy', it's an examination of the fading importance, excitement, and even utility of the car, and more essentially, the diminishing need of Gen Y, (and truly, not just Gen Y), to actually go somewhere, as opposed to experiencing it all virtually and via social networks.

Lutz talks about the social networking serving as a viable and even improved replacement for things like basic social interaction, commerce, entertainment, dating, and just hanging out with a group of friends on a Friday night. From the Forbes piece:

Armed with the capabilities of their ever-more sophisticated iThings, replete with social networking enabling close, immediate exchange of thoughts and experiences with countless “friends,” who needs to actually get in a car and go to a drive-in?

Financial transactions, purchases, games, movies…all rendering travel to banks, stores, sports events or theaters redundant. Generation Y stands at the forefront of the next chapter in mankind’s evolution: experiencing everything while going nowhere.

We mostly think about new technology and the rise of the social web as contributing towards making our experience of the real world better, more complete, and somehow richer. It's fun to live Tweet at an event, and to share on Instagram and Facebook that killer Key Lime Pie you just made. And when we can't actually be somewhere, we can at least partially experience the real world through the what is being shared online by those who are.

But Lutz takes the argument to its next stage of progession and certainly while coming off a bit old-fashioned and 'get off my lawn-y', he at least raises an interesting question for anyone tasked with mobilizing the next generation to actually go somewhere and be physically present somewhere.

What if they simply would rather stay on the couch, connected to everything and everyone they need, with their iPhones, iPads, Google Glasses, and the dozens of better gadgets that are sure to come?

What if you opened an office or workplace and nobody came?

Sound crazy to you? Maybe it is.

Well even the NFL, the most popular sport in America, is having trouble getting people to actually come to the games. And I bet your office isn't nearly as fun as the Dawg Pound.

Happy Monday!