Deliver that sofa by 10:00AM, and please skip the Adult Bookstore on the way back

In this age of colossal growth and ubiquitous access to social networking platforms, increased individual ownership of smartphones and tablets, wifi connectivity pretty much everywhere, and with organizations and Human Resources departments seemingly on high alert at all times - monitoring Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and industry blogs for any posting or comment that might bring the brand and organization into disrepute, it is sometimes easy to forget the 'real-world' and even mundane ways employees carry the brand and organization message out into communities and with current and potential customers.

Case in point - today's New York Times online 'You're The Boss' blog has an interesting piece titled 'Monitoring the Private Lives of Your Employees; which almost refreshingly has nothing at all to do with keyword searching, Twitter stalking, or online sentiment analysis. Rather the piece asks a practical and almost overlooked question in today's digital age - whether or not a business owner (and by extension and implication the HR function), should be concerned that a branded and logo'ed company delivery truck was spotted by a member of the community in the parking lot of 'adult-oriented' establishment.

The specific example cited in the piece refers to a vehicle not directly owned by the company, but by a supplier, but the author of the piece, Paul Downs, rightly broadens the question to imagine it actually is one of his own delivery trucks at the adult shop, and proceeds to explore the question of the right or appropriate level of employee monitoring needed for this kind of scenario. Here is part of Mr. Downs take on the matter:

When we do send our guys overnight, we don’t pay them for every hour they are away from home. Yes, I cover the meals and hotel bills, but they aren’t on the clock the whole time. So how diligent should I be in supervising every minute they are away? There are reasons to object to porn shops, so I wouldn’t be thrilled to hear that my truck had been spotted at one, but there is other behavior that can cause a problem. Should I forbid my people from getting a beer or two with dinner?

Small-business owners can choose how militant they want to be regarding their employee’s behavior. Big business seems to be quite puritanical these days: drug tests, smoking bans, weight-loss programs — all of these make sense from a cost standpoint but they are also quite intrusive. With a smaller company, I don’t have either the desire or the resources to monitor my employees’ private lives. We do have policies about showing up at work drunk or high — I have only had to enforce them once, and in that case I didn’t hesitate to fire the offender on the spot. But should I concern myself with what they do on Friday and Saturday nights? Personally, I don’t believe it’s any of my business as long as everyone shows up ready to work Monday through Friday.

Mr. Downs position as a small-business owner might be informed (and constrained), by a lack of resources, i.e. I doubt his company can afford or even needs a 'social media monitoring team', or even cares to invest some limited effort in simple automated tools for tracking brand mentions and comments online. But even if he had all those things, or some of them, he might not have ever found out about the 'delivery trucks stopping at the adult bookstore' deal.

And from the tone of his comments in the article in the Times, he probably doesn't care. His position of 'I don't really care what they do in their free time as long as they are ready to perform on Monday', might be an old-fashioned attitude in our modern, digital age. But it is also one that recognizes all the social media policies, IT-enforced blocks or restrictions on access to social sites, and fancy and expensive tools and technologies for monitoring engagement, messaging, and sentiment online, won't do him one bit of good if one of his delivery truck drivers decides to make the Adult Emporium his preferred lunch stop. That may or may not be an issue for Mr. Downs, but that kind of thing has been an issue since well, forever.

To control that type of behavior, you really only need to hire the right kind of delivery drivers, which is something I bet Mr. Downs has a pretty good handle on.

What do you think - are we getting too caught up in what employees are doing online and forgetting their impact as brand ambassadors out in the real world?

Have a great weekend!

The Wisdom of Crowds?

Although not a Broadway fan, (I think the last Broadway show I actually saw was 'Showboat', you know the 'Ol Man River one), I am a big comics fan, and such have been casually following the saga of the 'Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark' show, a Broadway musical adaptation of Marvel Comics most famous hero.

You may have heard something about this show, even if you are not a Broadway fan - the backstory is quite interesting. It's filled with mega-stars from U2 (Bono and The Edge), writing the music, a series of mishaps and injuries to several actors during preview performances, middling to scathing reviews from audiences and critics, and finally a major re-architecting of the show and the replacement of the show's original director Julie Taymor.

Ms. Taymor's ouster as the director and leader of the production not only says as much about her creative vision, (or lack thereof I suppose), as it does about the role and influence that audiences have over the creative process and results of that process, and how these audience voices are amplified in the social media age.

Last week Ms. Taymor offered a couple of very interesting observations about the show and her dismissal, and I think these insights might also have more broad implications for leaders and creatives of all stripes. 

First - on the immediate feedback loop of social media:

"It's a new time," she said. "Twitter and Facebook and blogging just trump you. It's incredibly difficult to be under a shot-glass and a microscope like that. When you’re trying to break new ground, the immediate answers that audiences give are never going to be good.”

Second - on succumbing to the pressure of social feedback:

"There's always something people don't like. It’s very scary if people are going more towards that, to have audiences tell you how to make a show. Shakespeare would have been appalled."

Getting past the notion that Ms. Taymor sort of compared a musical about a comic book hero to Shakespeare, I think she does make some important points, or at least raises some good questions. It has never been easier for fans, customers, citizens, employees, candidates - any engaged group of people to gather and wield significant influence over organizations, institutions, and leaders. We have seen this play out time and time again in the corporate world, particularly in the areas of branding and logo re-design.

But, as Ms. Taymor suggests, is that always a good thing? As a leader, or anyone that is involved in creation of products, services, processes, art, literature, whatever - when is staying true to your vision and version of the truth and what you believe in more important than bending to the will of the crowd? Sure, Taymor's 'Spider-Man' may have been a bad show, but is it at all possible that the more accessible, simpler version that now exists is artistically at least, inferior to her creation and vision?

Shakespeare probably did not run 'Romeo and Juliet' by a focus group and he certainly did not monitor the buzz on Twitter.

The question today is do we always have to listen to all the shouting online?

Or can we believe in our creativity, decision making, and direction despite some heat on the backchannel?

Summer Hours and Fear

By now you have likely heard something about the latest 'fired for something you Tweeted' tale, this one from the Philadelphia area where Social media specialist Vanessa Williams was fired from the Lehigh Valley Economic Development Corp. after using its Twitter account last weekend to tweet the following:

You can argue about the relative offensiveness of the tweet and whether or not the agency overreacted in its rapid termination of Williams following the Tweet, but it seems to me beyond doubt that this Tweet only became noteworthy, and the publicity surrounding the affair massively augmented by the decision to fire Williams, rather than simply issue a clarification, retraction, apology - whatever, and move on.

While I have no access or insight to private communications between members of the Lehigh Valley community and the agency following the 'Summer Hours' tweet, and thus don't know if the tweet truly resulted in a flood of outrage and angry calls and shouts about 'wasting the taxpayers money', I can see from the LVEDC's timeline that the public Twitter 'backlash' to the tweet was pretty tepid. In the moments after the tweet was sent, it appears only one other Twitter user, @KBlumenau, directly engaged with the LVEDC account on Twitter, and even his comments were not outrageous or all the angry. LVEDC, for it's part, offered a few responses about how 'no one is leaving early' and 'how the finance department was making deals'. Kudos LVEDC, I am sure we were all in fear that a couple of slack hours on a Friday afternoon in June would destroy the Lehigh Valley economy.

Certainly after the news broke the the LVEDC had fired Williams, and the news of the firing began to spread on the web, a flurry of tweets, most all of them expressing disappointment and disagreement with the firing decision for what most observers took as at worst an honest mistake. Williams herself has hired a lawyer, and wants to have her 'name cleared'.

We talk quite a bit in the blogging/tweeting/social communities about transparency and openness. And how organizations that come to more fully embrace the new modes of engagement and communication that social platforms provide will be the ones that can innovate more rapidly, attract (and retain) more dynamic talent, and be able to respond to customers in a meaningful and proactive manner. And of course many of us try to convince our organizations or advise other organizations that this kind of openness is really the way forward, and gives us the best chance for success and plays a role in crafting the kind of organization we'd be proud to work for.

But in order to do that, obviously, organizations need to trust that their newly empowered people will do the right thing, will act honestly and responsibly, especially when acting and participating in public forums on behalf of the company. Trust is essential. And the LVEDC had already taken that step, by placing their trust in Williams to Tweet on the official agency account and as part of her job duties. The LVEDC trusted Williams to do the right thing.

The problem was after the mildly inappropriate 'Summer Hours' tweet (again, very arguable), the LVEDC didn't trust that their community would not over react and become enraged at the most slight perception there was something amiss at the agency. The reason Willliams was fired, and the ongoing interest in the story is completely centered around the LVEDC's lack of faith in the community, businesses, and people they serve. The LVEDC assumed the worst of them, that they could not understand a simple comment about summer hours and golf on a Friday in June would bring the whole house crashing down.

If you don't trust your employees, then social media probably is not for you.

If you don't trust anyone, well, you have bigger problems than social media.

Ambition and Curiosity

There is (yet another) interesting discussion happening on Bill Kutik's HR Technology Conference LinkedIn group about the social media and social networking in the workplace, and the relative pros and cons of the opposite sides of the argument.  As is the case in Bill's group, the discussion is intelligent, balanced, and reasonable - unlike what you might find in other forums attempting to discuss these issues.

I haven't weighed in on the discussion on LinkedIn, (sorry, Bill), because I am a selfish blogger and needed some content, and I had a kind of different take on the topic, one that veers slightly away from the practicalities of the debate, and drifts more into the philosophical. I think while the debate about blocking these sites tends to center around data security, productivity, message control, etc.; the real issues (even if companies don't want to admit them), are much more about the ideas or concepts of ambition and curiosity. 

Ambition in the sense of aspiration, of becoming something bigger, greater, and more meaningful in whatever measures that are relevant to the organization.  Curious in the framework of inspiring interest, discovery, or of seeking and (hopefully) finding new meanings, connections, and ideas.  

It seems, at least on the surface, that organizations that have moved to actively block or restrict access to social networks and internet based productivity services using the practical and typical concerns about security and the like are quite possibly betraying a lack of ambition and curiosity. Sure, no organization or leader would admit to this, no one would flat-out state, 'Our firm has limited goals for future growth and innovation, and we are not terribly interested about what is happening with out competitors, customers, partners, and community.'

Of course no leader would admit that, since even if it were true, the admission would send share prices plummeting, drive smart and talented employees for the exits (or at least to LinkedIn to update their profiles), and drive a stake in employee enthusiasm and morale.  Sure, the connection between open, unrestricted, and organizationally supported access and engagement on social networks to improved business outcomes is, for now, still spotty, sporadic and tangential. It is still difficult for social media proponents and aficionados to clearly articulate their arguments when faced with the security and 'not important to the tasks at hand' talking points.

But what the reluctant or skeptical are more easily convinced of, is that the threats to their empires and their livelihoods are likely to come from new competitors. Ones that are smaller, more nimble, more adaptable; and by necessity are forces to avail themselves of all possible resources, full access and exploitation of social network connections certainly chief among them.

Small, aggressive, and dangerous start-ups don't worry about 'time-wasting', and they are willing to accept whatever security risks may arise from the social web - happy to trade off some level of risk for the vast benefit they see and can derive from these networks.

Now that we are into 'beating a dead horse' territory, I will close with this - the organizations that are taking over today, and will dominate tomorrow, have a wide, broad, and expansive view of the world. And they realize the world does not solely consist of their own employees, and the relationships they share with each other.

Great ideas are everywhere, if your eyes and ears are open to find them.

Please Retweet

I know, we are all overloaded.

Blogs, Facebook news feeds, Twitter streams, LinkedIn discussions.

Friend requests, new follower alerts, updated profiles, experiences, skills....

RSS feed reader absolutely overflowing.  That is until you (somewhat guiltily) proclaim 'Reader Bankruptcy' with a blanket 'mark all as read' click.  Don't worry, your friends will never know that the blog posts that they spent ages poring over and parsing every last word of to make sure they were just right were subjected to burial in the mass landfill of unread clutter.  At least they won't be lonely, I'll bet there are about 273 (about three days' worth) of 'Mashable' posts alongside them.

There is no time.  Or not enough time anyway. So folks that blog have to realize this.  So little time for the audience to read these posts, even less to comment on them, and certainly no time or tolerance to manually cut and paste an interesting post's URL into TweetDeck, or HootSuite, or whatever to actually share it with their networks (who are all likely too busy themselves).

Enter the 'Retweet' button.  Most all blog posts today carry the little green thingy.  A small, simple, and clever device meant to make the sharing of the post or article almost effortless.  One click, a quick permission to grant, one more click - and voila, the piece is shared on Twitter, and the little 'retweet' counter ratchets up by one, like a kind of dynamic tote board of popularity (or antipathy).  The retweet button is a kind of bailout for the reader, telling them effectively 'no need to work too hard to indicate you enjoyed the post by commenting', just spend 26 seconds on a few clicks and we as bloggers will get the idea.

I rarely check the traffic statistics of this blog.  I have no idea how many e-mail subscribers there are (although one nice lady subscriber in Kansas is 'out of the office' a lot).  But I can see that little 'retweet' button on all the posts.  So sure, it is a little dismaying after posting what you think was a solid piece to see that little counter sitting on 3 or 4 after a long day waiting patiently for just a bit of attention.

So here is the little experiment for today - will writing a post with 'Please Retweet' as the title actually help the promotion and sharing of the piece? Will it matter that the piece itself has about 400 words of nonsense all leading up the big payoff - the little green button?

Just be glad I went this route, the alternative was going with a post called 'Like me on Facebook', which is a little demented, creepy, and sad.

Please retweet!