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Does It Matter Who Gets to the Future First?

you-are-here

To put the title question another way–if the tools and skills (and website) you have now are getting the job done, do you need to be panting after the “next new thing”?

Back in 2003, Dale Dougherty of O’Reilly Media coined the term “Web 2.0” to distinguish the interactive, social-media-driven Internet we have all become familiar with from the static, document-driven Internet now known as “Web 1.0.”  And soon after, “Web 3.0” began to be described as an evolution that would be:

  • Artificially intelligent (that is, able to “think” meaningfully, rather than just shuffle facts)
  • Semantic (with data organized so well that machines don’t need much human intervention to figure things out)
  • Virtual (looking more like a “real” world rather than the familiar text-and-graphics version we see now)
  • Ubiquitous (with lots of integrated devices, platforms and media that operate together seamlessly)

But subsequent developments have complicated that early projection of a smarter, sleeker web.  For one thing, it appears that most people don’t particularly care about entering a visually virtualized world online.  Once the new wears off, the experience is just not worth the cost of development and the overhead placed on desktop processing.  For another thing, there’s now so much useless and redundant data choking the web that organizing it has evolved into an entirely different kind of problem.  And beyond that–we’re already awash in ubiquity.  Think iPhone.  Think wifi.  Think Twitter . . .

Does anyone really want more??

So Web 3.0 has become more of a marketing label than a technology vision, used to hype concepts like cloud computing, products like bing and twine, and an array of start-ups, expos, conferences, etc.   Meanwhile, the cognoscenti have moved on to other ways of talking about the future of computing and the role of the Internet.  (You can get a feel for this sort of speculation at sites like Tetherless World and The Singularity Institute.)

In more practical terms, however . . . what’s really crucial for the near future is a shift from working with key “words” to key “relationships.”  And that brings us back to recruiting and the next new thing.

As a recent commenter (on the KSAs post) pointed out here, the whole process of online recruiting today is disproportionately driven by keywords.  Here’s a true (and truly absurd) example:  When my resume–which includes experience in data warehousing–was public, I regularly received job offers for warehouse jobs.  The forklift kind, not the business intelligence kind.  And I’m sure that if recruiters were looking on LinkedIn for dock workers, I’d probably still be getting notified of such “opportunities.”

So the answer to today’s title question is:  You bet.

Whoever first gets hold of a tool that will find and read resumes in context for meaningful relationships will get to the best employees fastest and make the best hires in their industry.  That tool–at least in my fantasy–will:

  • Scour the web for passive candidates and sift through gazillions of applicant submissions in a twinkling
  • Create “candidate portfolios” that include profiles of their social media presence; summaries of past positions and employers in terms of relevance; evaluations of writing and organization in the resume/cover letter; plus much more
  • Bring to your desktop the cream of the prospect crop, with all the tools your need for personalized candidate communications, and
  • Provide a big-picture presentation of the entire candidate pool (with source breakout), as well as a statistical analysis of all the candidates and their rankings, flagging outliers (candidates with potential value that might not be recognized on the basis of standard parameters) and recommending improvements for future searches

Vendors: Write in if you have this tool.

(Thanks to chokola for the evocative photo.  FYI, the particular “here” in the photo is Williamsburg, NY.)


Pay to Play–Intern Style


money

Again, I’m a little bit shocked.  First I found out that aspiring government employees pay to have other people write their KSAs, and no one seems to notice.  Now I’ve learned that prospective/recent college grads (or their parents) are paying to obtain desirable internships.

According to a story in the New York Times, there’s a mini-industry growing up around the unpaid internship market.  The options available to aspiring interns range from matching services to auctions (yes, really), but the big boat in this regatta will take the student from resume to interview to offer to apartment, with tourist amenities thrown in.  All for under $10,000!

Companies say they regard this as a useful service, providing them with better interns while reducing the effort required to acquire them.  Parents say they regard it as a worthwhile investment.  And one assumes that the interns consider it a splendid opportunity–and/or a  way to get something of value without a lot of effort.

Is this okay?  On the one hand, market opportunities are always going to be exploited by somebody, and apparently the demand for internships has been sky-rocketing.  In terms of the fairness question–arguably, only better-off students can afford to spend their summers accruing unpaid experience instead of flipping burgers to fund the next semester anyway.  So perhaps it doesn’t make any real difference if the well-funded compete amongst themselves?

But on the other hand . . . students who can afford to pay for play in the internship market probably already have a lot more connections than their less-fortunate peers.  Should they also get the resume boost of a high-value internship–without an asterisk that says “placed by a paid broker”?

Another thought:  The student who gets ushered into an internship (and doesn’t even need to find an apartment or figure out the city map) may not be getting the full benefit of this step toward professional and personal maturity.

To get the placement side of the story, visit this website for a leading provider.  Then, if your company utilizes interns, you might consider these questions:

  • What is the point of the intern program? Free workers, potential employees, community service, or . . . . ?
  • Is the intern program clearly and effectively presented on the corporate website?
  • Do you know when intern candidates are being “packaged”? Does it matter?
  • Would it be more cost-effective for your company to work with an intern broker? Would that be consistent with your program goals?

In truth, I’m not sure whether this is a big deal or I’m just being cranky.  The program I looked at seemed to promise something like summer camp (take your pick–New York, L.A., Las Vegas, Barcelona, Sidney, Shanghai!) with a bonus of “real world” credit for doing unspecified tasks involved with marketing, fashion, television, finance, etc.

So maybe I just want to be an intern!  Or maybe I just want to think bright, hard-working, un-rich young people have an equal chance to do unpaid work in exchange for undiluted experience.


(Thanks to Daniel/borman818 for the “money shot”!)

Twittering Investor Relations

Twitter keeps tweeting, should IR be listening?

The business community has been intuitively skeptical of Twitter’s possible utility to companies since it’s inception.  The list of reasons that Twitter would be useless to most businesses isn’t short.

The allowable message size is too small.  What could anyone possibly say in just 140 characters that would be of any value?  Users are primarily younger, technologically savvy teens, and twenty-somethings who don’t like to be “harassed” by the corporate world, and who wouldn’t have any money anyway except for movies, music, and cars. There is no way to monitor and manage the inevitable replies to any message posted by the company.

And, then there is that terminology.  Can a serious company really be expected to care if its tweets are re-tweeted on Twitter?  The list goes on.

This post is Part 2 in our series.  Get Part 1 here: Investor Relations Twitter Difficulties

For Investor Relations groups, the list is even longer.  There is no ability to include any form of disclosure in a message that is just 140 characters.  Regulatory agencies haven’t given any clear guidance on what is or is not permissible to be discussed on an open forum like Twitter.  People using Twitter aren’t the kind of people who invest in stocks anyway.  Do Warren Buffett, George Soros, Bill Miller, or Bill Gross tweet on Twitter?  Of course, not.

With a compelling list of business reasons stacked against any serious company using Twitter, why would any Investor Relations department even consider making Twitter part of their communications arsenal?

Perhaps it is because of the media’s incessant coverage of all things Twitter such as the breathless headline where AdAge claims Twitter’s news coverage is worth $48 million each month.  Perhaps it is because of attention grabbing publicity stunts like Ashton Kutcher’s race against CNN for 1 million Twitter followers (Kutcher won), or Oprah Winfrey’s arrival as a celebrity Twitter tweeter.  Perhaps the idea of a full-fledged company blog seems like too much, but surely, anyone could handle 140 characters at a time.  Or, perhaps, the official corporate blog has proven itself to be a wide ranging success and something like Twitter seems like a good way to expand on that success.  Of all the possible reasons, perhaps none is more true than simply being worried about falling behind while competitors with a head start race off to good fortunes.

Whatever the reason, IR is coming under increasing pressure both internally and externally to address the runaway train that is Twitter.  Senior executives want to know what the Twitter strategy is.  Investor advocates are vocal about getting vital information to the “little guy” on Twitter and not just to high-floor number Wall Street analysts at industry events and on conference calls. Formally developing a solid, fact-based response to these concerns whether positive or negative is fast becoming a top priority for IR departments.  If you haven’t been asked about what you and the company plan to do about Twitter yet, you will soon.

Is That Tweet Official?

One of the biggest difficulties in understanding just what companies are actively involved in Twitter is getting a handle on just who is and isn’t running an official corporate Twitter profile.  Just because there is a Twitter account at twitter.com/BigCoolCompany doesn’t mean that it is related to Big Cool Company at all. It may be someone who has no connection to the company and just likes to talk about it, for better or worse.

Often, official looking Twitter accounts are actually just the personal accounts of a company’s employees.   The catch is that it can be somewhat less than clear under what circumstances these employees are tweeting under.

All the same, just because a Twitter account isn’t twitter.com/BigCoolCompany doesn’t mean it is NOT the official company Twitter account, like ebayinkblog (more below). Or, do you see where the Corporate Eye Twitter account goes?

corporate-eye-twitter-account

Some Twitters have the company’s explicit permission to post on Twitter, but are not endorsed by the company, meaning any postings are the employee’s opinion and responsibility and not the company’s.  Meanwhile, some twitter users have either no permission from their employer, or that permission is implicit, meaning that not only are their tweets not the official position of the company, they aren’t even acknowledged by the company.

Corporations Tweeting on Twitter

learning-studying-together One of the high profile Twittering companies lately is eBay.  The online auctioneer started a corporate blog in April 2008 and within a couple of months, corporate blogger Richard Brewer-Hay was tweeting on Twitter as well.  The Twitter profile is called ebayinkblog, which at first blush may make it seem to be an unofficial Twitter account.  However, the “Bio” section of the account clearly states its position as, “The Twitter feed for the official eBay corporate blog…” which is called eBay Ink.

A recent Wall Street Journal article notes how once tweets containing information about quarterly earnings and other financial info began appearing, eBay’s attorney’s showed up and required regulatory disclaimers on some of the tweets.  If even a technology savvy Internet based corporation like eBay seems nervous about what goes up on Twitter, what does that say about the chances of a useful IR Twitter account at other companies?

Actually, it turns out the answer isn’t as clear as it might appear.  While eBay does have an official, active Twitter account, other technology giants do not.  Microsoft, Cisco, Dell, Oracle, Google, EMC, Texas Instruments, and Amazon all have corporate Twitter accounts.  There are dozens of IBMers who have Twitter accounts, though there is no official IBM account.  Likewise, there is no official Intel Twitter profile, despite how close twitter.com/Intel comes to looking like it is.

Just because a company has a Twitter account doesn’t mean that they do anything with it other than sending out customer offers, responding to customer complaints (usually from other Twitter users), and promoting marketing events.  Indeed, EMC VP Chuck Hollis notes in his social media blog (as opposed to his “day job” blog, both hosted at emc.com) that many companies do nothing more with their Twitter accounts than re-post a one-line with links to press releases.

However, Mr. Hollis goes on to note the vast potential of social media sites like Twitter.  If this company bigwig gets it, maybe that fear about your competitors taking off and leaving you in the dust isn’t so far fetched after all.

Investor Relations Twitter Beginning Strategy Steps

Without a clear cut path to point to, what should the savvy IR Department group do?

First, make a list of your direct competitors.  Twitter is not a zero sum game.  Your competitors do not have to lose for you to win and vice versa.  However, the world of Twitter is just too big to try and monitor everyone, so start with a short list of your closest competitors.

Monitor what they do with the official Twitter accounts if they have one.  Pay particular attention to what they do and do not tweet regarding things like financials, analyst meetings, conference calls, regulatory findings and so on.

Next, start Tweeting; not as a company official, but as a private citizen.  Use your name or a pseudonym, but leave out your connection to your employer.  You want to be able to practice your tweets.  There is a whole world of etiquette and terminology to learn.  It’s best to do that as Joe Public instead of as the official spokesperson of Big Cool Company.

Search out friends, family, and coworkers, then follow them.  Read their tweets.  Pay particular attention to what they “re-tweet.”  Also, watch what, if anything, they blast from other Twitter users.  What is considered spam, or rude, or newbie mistakes.  Then, start making your own tweets and see what the response is like.

Once you have your feet wet, it is time to make a more in depth analysis about Twitter’s possible future at your company, particularly on the IR Website.

Next up: How To Use Twitter Power for Investor Relations

Grab the Investor Relations RSS Feed to keep up with our whole Twitter analysis.

Effective Techniques on Corporate Websites

I am continually pleasantly surprised to see how some companies find innovative and creative techniques in their stakeholder relationships. These companies realize the power of their websites and use them to make their company standout.

Gerber

The first site we will visit is Gerber Products—

Note the Story reference and the Timeline. Mouseover the dots and a historical factbite is displayed.

Nice, but these are what I will call Stage 2 innovations (good but not super creative).

Gerber

Click on Corporate and see —

— a compelling offer to get you to sign up for customized information as your child grows.

Take it and they have you as a dedicated visitor for years.

AstraZeneca feedback form

Next is a tool used by AstraZeneca and it is one that will cause you to smack your forehead and say “why didn’t I think of that?”

It appears on most of the website’s pages and simply asks the visitor for information.

This is a well thought out feedback form and is an easy way to get user information.

Next, Corporate Eye deals with all stakeholder groups, so what better to look at than websites that display how they deal with their stakeholders?

Edison

This takes us to Italy’s Edison, which was profiled in a recent post—

This is only a portion of the page. Note how Edison identifies how it relates to each stakeholder group. Visit the MAP to see all stakeholder groups.

Another company that uses a similar stakeholder map is UK and Netherlands based Unilever.

Pepsi competition

There are more creative techniques and future posts may cover these. But for now the final technique for this post comes from Pepsico.

The technique involves design. The Pepsico home page is a perfect example of elegant simplicity. Perhaps I was drawn to this because I favor minimalist photography (shameless pitch–see my online article on Minimalist Photography).

Well designed, uncluttered. Pepsico uses creative navigation–do mouseover on the lower navigation icons and more navigation links are displayed. Very nice indeed.

If you have any examples please post them.

Don’t forget – you can click on any of these images to see them expanded.

Integrating Twitter with the corporate site

Do you have employees who tweet on your behalf? Are you wondering how to authenticate them?

Wal-Mart's Twitter page

You should have a look at the Wal-Mart site, which is a great example of a range of best practices in this area.

Do click on this image to expand it, or open the Wal-Mart Twitter page in another window, so you can see it…

On this page, Wal-Mart clearly identify the twitterers by name, department and job title, together with a 140 character bio, an image and a link to their Twitter account.

It states that these – and these only – are the official spokespeople on Twitter for the company, and that anyone else you find tweeting is not speaking on behalf of the company. This is very clear, and does a great job of authenticating the corporate twitterers.

The page also pulls in their recent tweets, and uses tabs to separate the twitterers by country (US, UK and Brazil) rather than lumping them all in together. Again, this makes sense, not only because the different regions are likely to have different interests and projects, but also because the US/UK and Brazil teams use different languages.

The Walmart Twitter guidelines are available on the corporate site, and are clearly linked to from this page (top and bottom). The guidelines themselves are clear – and the copy neatly integrates Twitter with the Walmart purpose:

Twitter asks a very basic question of its users: “What are you doing?” And we know the answer to that question – we’re working every day to help people save money and live better.

The rest of the Twitter page is well done, too, incorporating related resources in the sidebar: images, video and a location map.

My only quibble is that it took me some time to spot the link to this Twitter page. I arrived direct –via Twitter, of course– and wanted to work out where the page sat in the corporate site.

And it took me a while to find, though the breadcrumb trail clearly indicates it is available from the home page. I was surprised by this — because very few corporates link to their twitter accounts from the home page — and spent some time looking in the main content on the home page and others, and failing to see it. I also checked the sitemap, and again, it isn’t listed as a main page.

However, it is there, and is available from the footer bar on every page, including the sitemap. My suggestion would be to include this as a link from the About section – perhaps in the sidebar – and list it as such on the sitemap. Incidentally, I wonder why these site services pages aren’t listed in the sitemap proper, only in the footer on that page (as on every page)?

Quibble aside, I think this is very well done, and demonstrates a number of best practices for integrating at least one social media outpost with the corporate website.

Twitter and Investor Relations, Why So Difficult?

Take a look around in virtually any magazine, newspaper, trade publication, or website and you are bound to find numerous articles about Twitter, like this one here on Corporate Eye about creating value on Twitter.  Publications and webpages with a technical audience (and authorship) are likely to proclaim Twitter as the future of all communications, and issue grave warnings that you are already falling behind in this critical new universe.  Those resources dedicated to marketing and public relations may be less effusive, but are also likely to be completely on board with all things social media, including Twitter.

On the other hand, media with a legal or regulatory focus are more likely to sternly advise you of the inevitable lawsuits that will plague your company if you even think about Twitter in the wrong way.  Mainstream investing publications seem to split the difference, calling on readers to aggressively use and promote a corporate Twitter account, while at the same repeatedly cautioning investment professionals to mind the possibility of violating securities related rules or regulations.

Twitter’s IR Conflict

The difficulty surrounding using Twitter or other social media, sometimes referred to as social marketing, stems from multiple factors.  All too often, these intertwined concepts are glossed over, or simply ignored.  Unfortunately, in business, ignorance is almost never bliss.

In this multipart series, we’ll take an in-depth look at Twitter and other social media websites like Facebook and see just what they have to offer top-level Investor Relations departments, and what perils the same sites may expose your company and your IR department to.  Most importantly, we’ll look behind the opinions and statements and reveal the intricate play between the numerous factors that go into making Twitter such a challenging proposition for even the best prepared IR teams.

Social Networking Basics Guide

Although Twitter seems to attract the most attention these days among those in the Investor Relations realm, it is far from the only social networking site.  Twitter was launched in 2006, by then, sites such as MySpace, LinkedIn, and Facebook had been popular for years.

The most common resistance to social networking sites from non-users is that they can do the same thing via phone or email.  While both provide the means to communicate with others, they require a continuous selection of who to include on each communication.  Additionally, in order to keep certain communication separate from others, many people have multiple email accounts that they check with varying frequency.

Further, it is common to forget just who has and had not been included in previous communications, opening the possibility that people you intended to communicate with were, in fact, not contacted. Thus, the potential for accidental exclusion in any broad conversation is higher.  The author actually did not let a favorite aunt (nor more than one client) know when his son was born because he thought the email lists he used had covered everyone while excluding those who would not be interested.

Email,then is best suited for either small or static, homogeneous groups, such as members of a team.

Social networking sites, by contrast, are a way for self-defined collection of individuals to communicate in an open manner.  Unlike email which requires the sender choosing to specifically include you on each email, social networking sites provide for anyone who has been previously included to take part in all exchanges.  As an added bonus, unlike email, social networking messages need not commingle with other communications because messages can be read online instead of through an inbox.

What Is Twitter? Twitter Explained

Not long ago, whether or not you knew about Twitter was largely defined by your age.  Twitter was originally conceived as a way to send short “status updates” to your friends.  “Short” was set at 140 characters in large part because this amount would be an acceptable size for a SMS message, more commonly known as a text message, on any US wireless network.

In the early days, Twitter was used primarily by teenagers and twenty-somethings to find out what their friends were literally doing.  With Twitter, your friend Dave could tell you what club he was planning on going to.  Then, when that location turned out to be lame, Dave could update his status to let everyone know he was moving on to the next location.  When he got somewhere he was happy with, he could report that too.  Using this information, Dave’s friends didn’t have to worry about showing up at the wrong location and Dave and his friends didn’t have to make dozens of annoying cell phone calls just to find out what everyone else was doing.

Other users found Twitter a refreshing way to text their friends faster and easier than by typing on their cell phones.  It was during this initial phase that Twitter earned its reputation as nothing more than a place where you tell other people what you had for dinner and read about what other people had for dinner.

Today, nobody posts an update about what they ate for dinner.

group-communication-stay-in-touch Real Friends and Twitter Friends

One of the difficulties many first time users find with Twitter is the concept of friends. In the real world, friends is a select group of people.  Depending on your demographic, it is possible that many of your friends do not have Twitter accounts.  As such, you would have only a few friends to follow and only a few friends to follow you.  This makes Twitter virtually worthless since other methods are a more efficient way of communicating with small numbers of users.

This may explain why Twitter caught on faster with younger people who are more likely to form and disband ad hoc groups at different times for various events.  Consider a single person who begins their weekend as part of a group of ten, all attending the same concert; that becomes a group of fifty people, some the same and some different than the original ten, at a party after the concert, which then morphs into a group of 15 avid bicyclists planning a Sunday afternoon ride.

For this type of situation, the number of friends is significantly higher than the traditional definition and includes not just person friends, but also members of the same groups, both formal and informal.  Another cyclist, for example, with no interest in the concert, party, or breakfast, can still stay connected about where to show up.

Investor Relations and Investing Friends?

How, then, can such a concept grow to include Investor Relations?  Certainly, IR cannot consider everyone who requests an annual report to be a friend.

Therein lies the possibilities of Twitter.  Thanks to its broadcast nature, comments, suggestions, and even the bane of email-based communication, jokes, can all be “sent” in a way that they can be seen and read by “everyone” without being perceived as junk communication.

Indeed, in a real way, Twitter is the “Send to All” button.  However, where sending a message to everyone in an email is reviled as spam, Twitter, is the ultimate opt-in campaign.

Ready to get started right now?

Hold on.  The devil, as they say, is in the details.

Watch for the next article in our series, or just grab the Investor Relations RSS feed and let it come to you.