Corporate Eye

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Consumers Friending Brands on Facebook Via Engagement

Consumers Friending Brands on Facebook Via Engagement

facebook_logo_imageIf you believe Facebook chief revenue officer Mike Murphy, then it is possible to convince Facebook users to friend brands on the social networking site.  According to an article from AdWeek, Murphy claims that, “ads on Facebook have a significantly higher engagement rate than ads elsewhere on the Internet.”

That’s possible since ads served via Facebook are typically well targeted.  But how does that advertising engagement rate translate into friending brands and building relationships with them that lead to sales?  A new partnership with Nielsen should make it more apparent.

Facebook and Nielsen signed a deal that will allow marketers to measure performance through more than the ubiquitous click rate metric.  The new metrics Facebook and Nielsen plan to deliver to Facebook advertisers and brands is one that will allow them to identify branding goals and serve ads that match those strategies.  For example, one of the first tools offered is called Learned Targeting which serves ads to Facebook users that have been identified through their online behavior and demographics to be more likely to become fans of brands on Facebook. [Read more…] about Consumers Friending Brands on Facebook Via Engagement

Another Front in the Global War for Talent


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USA Today headline:  More of world’s talented workers opt to leave USA.

The loud public conversation in America about the complicated topic of “illegal immigration” has drowned out another significant concern that impacts business.  But “reverse immigration” may soon attract more interest.  According to Duke University’s Vivek Wadhwa, “What was a trickle has become a flood.”   He projects that “in the next five years, 100,000 immigrants will go back to India and 100,000 to China, countries that have had rapid economic growth,” adding that “for the first time in American history, we are experiencing the brain drain that other countries experienced.”

The article cites several reasons for the exodus:

  • These experienced and well-educated workers have excellent career opportunities in their own countries.
  • Family ties and cultural roots draw many people homeward.
  • Money goes further in their countries of origin, offering potential improvements in quality of life.
  • Immigration delays frustrate some, who are tired of having an uncertain status and may face waits of up to ten years for permanent residency.

How does all this impact recruiting and employer branding in the U.S.?  Perhaps not much in the immediate term.  Most of those leaving are actually leaving good jobs they already have—so at best they were passive candidates who will just not be available in the local pool.  But over time there will be a greater impact if certain talent areas are depleted faster than they are replenished.  This effect is most noteworthy in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math (often referred to as STEM).

For companies that are really thinking strategically about staffing, the key may be in helping to create the future labor force, rather than just waiting to see what’s available when workers are needed.  A thought-provoking discussion recently in The Chronicle of Higher Education surfaces many of the problems affecting STEM education and touches on the effects of industry-education partnerships.

See what all this looks like from the other side—and get some interesting ideas—in How the Disciple became the Guru, a white paper from Global Engineering and Entrepreneurship @ Duke.  As the report explains, in India “several industries, including IT, have learned to overcome another major deficiency: India’s education system. They have adapted and perfected western practices in workforce training and development, and now take workers with poor education and weak technical skills and turn them into highly productive technical specialists and managers able to compete on the world stage.”

Final thought:  Smart companies doing business multi-nationally may find ways to take advantage of this trend.  Sometimes it’s a good idea to “think locally, and act globally.”

A Look at Rolls-Royce’s Investor Site

This week I visited Rolls-Royce’s investor site and found much to like.  Similar to a well-engineered engine, the site seemed to do exactly what it was supposed to with a minimum of fuss or wasted energy.

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To start, the tab for investors is the second tab listed on the top banner on the Roll-Royce home page.  No hunting involved here, as you would be hard pressed to miss the link.  The main investor page is well laid out, with the main links listed down the left hand side of the page, plenty of white space and a generally pleasing color palette, although there appears to be three or four different shades of blue printing employed, which is about two  more than I would prefer. Otherwise, things are where you can find them and digging into the tabs leads you to good information.  For example, the Share Price Data tab gives you an option to create your own share price chart with custom dates and comparisons to the FTSE All Share and FTSE Aero Defence indexes.

But then I dug just a little deeper, and of course, I found something that just didn’t sound right. Knowing that Rolls-Royce has been through many changes over the years, I wanted to see how they described themselves and their businesses, so I went to the Company Profile page. Here’s their introductory sentence in the section titled “Company overview”: “Rolls-Royce, is a global business, providing and supplying integrated power systems for use on land, at sea and in the air.” This is a sentence that reads as if it was lifted from a corporate mission statement written by a consultant. It begs to be explained, but of course, it isn’t.  What do they mean by integrated power systems?  I think Rolls-Royce is trying to say that they do more than make engines, but they are saying it in such a vague manner as to obscure the issue even more. Considering that the large majority of Rolls-Royce’s sales and profits come from their businesses of making civilian and defence aircraft engines, you would think that they would want to expressly acknowledge this fact.  Instead, eager to position itself in the greater power systems global market, we  have the use of the phrase “integrated power systems”. This can mean anything from alternative energy to electrical transmission grids. This is fuzzy writing.

I am comforted by the fact that their engineering appears to be better than their writing.

What’s the Real Number?

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In my random walk down the streets of the FTSE 100 investor web sites, I decided to visit one of the biggest.   At first blush, I was impressed by the site.  A clean, spare design allowing you to find what you want with a minimum of clutter and prominently featured in the center, a Financial Summary with some impressive looking numbers and graphs.  “Aha”, I thought – “lead with your strengths.” The numbers and graphs showed a steady progression of revenues and adjusted operating profit.  But if there has been one lesson learned from the Bernie Madoff scandal, it has been to be suspicious of a stair-step progression of profits.  Real life tends to be less linear.

Sure enough, when I looked at the numbers a little closer, the profit this company is displaying is Adjusted Operating Profit, which they define as “before amortisation of goodwill and intangibles, profits less losses on the sale of PP&E and exceptional items”.  This is not what you would call your normal Net Earnings.  In fact there is a term for this type of financial disclosure.  It is referred to by sophisticated financial types as “earnings before the bad stuff”.

Being a naturally curious type (some might say cynical) I went looking for the real profit number.  You know, the one that companies are required to show as a result of following standard accounting practices.  Under U. S. disclosure practices, if you deviate from GAAP accounting standards in presenting information of this type, you are required to prominently disclose the reasons for doing so and provide a reconciliation to GAAP accounting.  No such luck here on the main Investor page, so I went to the Financial Results page.  No such luck there either, where you are confronted with a segment breakout of financial results, but the line for profits by segment is accompanied by an asterisk telling you that they are referring to – wait for it – “adjusted operating profit”.  They even compound the sin on this page by calculating their Margin percentage using the adjusted operating profit number.

In fact, the only disclosure of the actual profit number that I found on the web site was in the Downloads section, where you can access the company’s annual report.  You actually have to go back through a number of annual reports to reconstruct the numbers for Reported Profits.  When you go through this exercise, you find that results are nowhere near as linear as the company wants you to believe.  Reported Profits declined in 2005, 2006 and 2008 from the prior year’s Profits, or, three out of the five years shown.

So the question is, do they really think that investors are that stupid or do they really believe that such things as amortization, selling off parts of the business and restructuring costs don’t count?  Either way, as an investor it would make me nervous.

Strategy, Social Media, and the Dangers of the Shiny Object


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Commenting on a recent article by Jeremy Owyang, Albert Maruggi (founder of marketing firm Provident Partners) remarked:

Just spent a couple of days with health care marketers from a cross section of hospitals. I also had a session with a billion dollar plus business insurance company on their modest, and I mean modest social strategy.  My radar highlights significant hype fatigue, maybe even disappointment with the social space.

The problem may be adopting social media without a strategy.  Maruggi’s comment includes a link that leads to a few other links, which lead to posts that are (a) short, and (b) worth reading:

These posts are all written from the marketing point of view, so as you troll through them, remember that a big part of recruiting is marketing the employer brand.  But consider this also:  marketing the company as an employer is NOT the same as marketing the company’s products and services.  In fact, there can sometimes be a very big difference.

So while it might be a strategic mistake from the product marketing perspective to chase every “shiny object” (in this case, new social media platforms and technologies), it might not be a mistake from the recruiting perspective.  From the product marketing view, strategic focus may be on effectiveness with the largest possible audience—while recruiters may need to reach very specific groups of people.  The super-techie, super-social-media types might actually be impressed to see recruiters turn up in some edgy online locations, so if those are the folks you need, it’s a different situation.

Back at home base, Jeremy Owyang’s post was about three essential qualities for corporate media posts.  He says, look for people who:

  • Fulfill meaningful business objectives (“These individuals will be able to use brand monitoring tools, have analytical abilities, and be able to benchmark their efforts that tie back to business metrics–not social media metrics.”)
  • Bridge both internal stakeholders and customers (“This quality requires the professional to be able to relate to internal teams that may not understand the social culture, be empathetic, be able to communicate and train them . . . “)
  • Show credibility with the technology (Beyond expertise with current technology, they need to be “capable of learning new technologies, evaluating, and then applying for business needs.”)

Summary?  Whether it’s technology or people—keep strategic concerns in mind when making social media choices.


(Thanks to jayniebell for the great glitter.)