Do Nice Guys Finish Last?

Guest Blog from Mark Fogel- Corp. VP of HR and Adm. at Leviton
Human Capital Business Leader of the Year.


Do Nice Guys Finish Last?
So that was a topic of conversation that Jody and I engaged in as we killed some time at a regional HR conference recently. To tell the truth we found our conversation a lot more stimulating then the sales pitches of local staffing agencies and benefit consulting firms soliciting our attention and potential business (more on this in a future entry).

So the questioned posed was whether nice guys finish last, specifically in business (but really in any setting)???

My answer was NO they finish first, but only if they are competent and earn respect along the way.

Nothing new, Dale Carnegie has been preaching this to management for decades, and Marshall Goldsmith has been putting his own Buddhist spin on this recently. Treat people in a kind way, help others succeed, and if you have nothing nice to say don’t say it.

However, that’s really not enough to tip the scales. I believe that there is more to the formula; competence and respect. Two key ingredients that should be obvious but never overlooked. Competence is the easy one to spot almost immediately. You can become competent by learning and applying your skills but respect is another story. Respect is earned over time. It’s visceral and you can feel it when’s it is present.. Respect can be earned by being competent but only if you treat people nicely (it’s really a bi- product of being nice and competent).

So here is Fogel’ formula for success:

Nice + Competent + Respect = Success

Most employees will go the extra mile for a supervisor they like, and think of as competent, and respectful. Will they do the same for one that they think differently of????

Bullies, narcissists, and Machiavellians, and an occasional sociopath, usually get short term results out of fear but rarely win in the long term. Take a poll in your own firm and circle of friends, I bet most will agree with me.

So what are you all waiting for, take Mark's advice and be nice!!!!!

Today's Hot Marketing trend started with a Plastic Bowl that Burps

Word of Mouth comes alive with Ford’s Big Drive conducted by House Party marketing.

While this may be big news in the marketing world- this type of one-to-one channel marketing started years ago with an ingenious concept of tupperware parties. Small colorful containers were displayed at the home of a friend and the "burp"- when the air got sucked out of the storage unit before finally closing- was tried by everyone. MaryKay party goers had even more fun when they got to play with product samples before buying. But now it looks like the boys are finally getting into the game.

More than 4,000 people applied to be hosts for the Ford parties.

“It’s making sure you’re truly connecting consumers with the product from physically to virtual ways” said the Ford’s experiential marketing manager Connie Fontaine, who is based in Dearborn, Mich. The house parties are meant to address the notion that the Ford brand “has a perception issue” compared with competitors, Ms. Fontaine said. Research has found that those perceptions can be dispelled “when we get people into the products, to drive the products,” she added.
“We’re realizing there are a lot of Ford owners out there who are already advocates for the brand,” Ms. Fontaine said. “Why not help them do an even better job of being advocates for us?”

So Ford owners are being asked at the house parties to discuss their cars and let the guests see them, sit in them and even drive them. Said Kitty Kolding, chief executive at House Party in Irvington, N.Y. “We find people who have strong brand affiliations and give them reasons to do something they do anyway, speak positively about the brand,” Ms. Kolding said.

House Party clients pay $100,000 to $250,000 for the parties held on their behalf. The hosts are not paid; instead, they receive gift packs as thank yous.

As an employer, you can start your own house party by inviting your employees to build your brand. After all, you’re already paying them so the gift pack is optional.

Free White Paper
Find out more about how to harness the power of Word of Mouth Marketing. Drop us an email at BRANDEMiX!

Social Networks- Important or In Passing?

Not a day goes by when I don’t hear about someone confused about how to network through social networking sites or seeing a conference on the same topic. In the big business picture, how important will social networking be to achieving real business goals? According to pre-2008 marketing studies, blogs and white papers, very. Yet, reading a recent article from the Economist put my mind to rest that this is only the beginning of an even bigger trend- using a technology we’re all familiar with, and possibly addicted to.

“We will look back to 2008 and think it archaic and quaint that we had to go to a destination like Facebook or LinkedIn to be social,” says Charlene Li at Forrester Research, a consultancy. Future social networks, she thinks, “will be like air. They will be anywhere and everywhere we need and want them to be.” No more logging on to Facebook just to see the “news feed” of updates from your friends; instead it will come straight to your e-mail inbox, RSS reader or instant messenger. No need to upload photos to Facebook to show them to friends, since those with privacy permissions in your electronic address book can automatically get them.

The problem with today's social networks is that they are often closed to the outside web. As a result, avid internet users often maintain separate accounts on several social networks, instant-messaging services, photo-sharing and blogging sites, and usually cannot even send simple messages from one to the other. They must invite the same friends to each service separately. It is a drag.

Historically, online media tend to start this way. The early services, such as CompuServe, Prodigy or AOL, began as “walled gardens” before they opened up to become websites. The early e-mail services could send messages only within their own walls (rather as Facebook's messaging does today). Instant-messaging, too, started closed, but is gradually opening up. In social networking, this evolution is just beginning. Parts of the industry are collaborating in a “data portability workgroup” to let people move their friend lists and other information around the web. Others are pushing OpenID, a plan to create a single, federated sign-on system that people can use across many sites.

The opening of social networks may now accelerate thanks to that older next big thing, web-mail. As a technology, mail has come to seem rather old-fashioned. But Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and other firms are now discovering that they may already have the ideal infrastructure for social networking in the form of the address books, in-boxes and calendars of their users. “E-mail in the wider sense is the most important social network,” says David Ascher, who manages Thunderbird, a cutting-edge open-source e-mail application, for the Mozilla Foundation, which also oversees the popular Firefox web browser.

That is because the extended in-box contains invaluable and dynamically updated information about human connections. On Facebook, a social graph notoriously deteriorates after the initial thrill of finding old friends from school wears off. By contrast, an e-mail account has access to the entire address book and can infer information from the frequency and intensity of contact as it occurs. Joe gets e-mails from Jack and Jane, but opens only Jane's; Joe has Jane in his calendar tomorrow, and is instant-messaging with her right now; Joe tagged Jack “work only” in his address book. Perhaps Joe's party photos should be visible to Jane, but not Jack.

This kind of social intelligence can be applied across many services on the open web. Better yet, if there is no pressure to make a business out of it, it can remain intimate and discreet. Facebook has an economic incentive to publish ever more data about its users, says Mr. Ascher, whereas Thunderbird, which is an open-source project, can let users minimize what they share. Social networking may end up being everywhere, and yet nowhere.

Great news, now I can relax and go back to my Scrabulous games.

Talent Wars- Part 1

In a new, ongoing series- BRANDEblog will look at talent rivalries from the HR perspective. Here is the first, with help from a recent NY Times article:

MICROSOFT vs YAHOO
You Decide

Stanford’s College Recruiting event last fall saw crowds everywhere, but only lookers at the Microsoft and Yahoo tables, versus the lingerers at Facebook and Google.

Tomorrow’s workforce is looking for more than money- particularly in the realm of engineering, where the battle for talent is fierce. They want an opportunity to work on tomorrow’s technology, along with the risk/rewards of young start-ups where the payout if the company is sold could be huge.

One soon-to-be engineer said that the potential buyout of Yahoo by Microsoft reduced his interest in either, and chose to pursue opportunities with Mozilla, creator of the Firefox browser.

Josh Becker, a venture capitalist with New Cycle Capital in San Francisco, said Microsoft’s profile in the Valley would be significantly raised “if they took over an iconic company like Yahoo.” But, he added, “whether that would translate into a sense that Microsoft is a cool place to work remains to be seen.”

Some of Yahoo’s current employees would be opposed to working for an even larger organization, where corporate was more than 850 miles away.
Others saw a Microsoft deal as a greater way to beat Google- the arch enemy.

Microsoft’s culture has been described as the 3 E’s Embrace, Extend, Exterminate and that could mean very bad things for the employees who had options to work for Microsoft before joining Yahoo. Recognizing this, here’s what CEO Steve Ballmer had to say: We hope to have the Yahoo employees be very, very excited about (the deal)," "When you combine the strengths of our two companies, the result will be an incredibly efficient and competitive offering for consumers, for advertisers and for publishers."

So, what will happen and how do YOU vote?

All I can say is that I hope if there is a buy-out, they choose BRANDEMiX, for their change management communications.

*current number of jobs aggregated by Simplyhired

Focus Group Attendees can watch the Moving Object

When I say Volvo you say ?
Safety, Right?

So does everyone else.

Clearly it was a case of a branding job done too well- that’s my summary of Volvo’s central focus group issue covered in BRANDWEEK’s recent article.
 
But instead of patting themselves on the back- they did something quite different- they called in a hypnotist to go deeper and get the TRUE feelings about the brand.

An interesting act following by interesting findings...

Post-hypnosis findings revealed that for some people- Volvo also represented “middle-aged.”

Apparently, unbeknownst to me, hypnosis has been taking off. Clients are looking to go deeper into the brand experience and get to the  real emotional connection that consumers have with their products. Typically there are 8 attendees in each 2 hour session.

But, as the article states- there are also detractors to the process. Some question if the information is relevant at all. Marc Babej, partner with the consultancy Reason, New York, says: "I have a particular venom for this area. These subconscious attitudes have little to do with purchase decisions. Most consumers navigate the marketplace based on the tangible benefits of the product."

As a facilitator of focus groups for our clients, I agree. When I ask my husband if by butt looks big in my jeans, should I hypntise him to get to the real truth of the matter or just accept his “no” as a man who recognizes the tangible benefits of being married.

I wonder if sodium pentothal is right around the cublcle?

 

Big Brother or Biggest Loser?

A recent article in the WSJ revealed that Carriage Services Inc., a Houston funeral-services company, recently discovered that 70% of the workers in its 125-person headquarters watched videos on Web sites like Google Inc.'s YouTube and News Corp.'s MySpace for about an hour a day.


Online video has become an increasing irritation. Worker productivity is being jeopardized as short, often low-quality video clips popularized by YouTube are being joined by better-quality video services with long-form content. According to a study released last month by Nielsen Online, an Internet tracking service owned by Nielsen Co., the heaviest consumption of Internet video is during weekday lunch hours between 12 p.m. and 2 p.m., when most people are at work.

Online video also is taxing already-strained corporate-technology networks. It poses a particular problem for smaller companies, which have limited bandwidth capacity to accommodate bulky video files. Online video files on average are about seven times as large as audio files, and 100 times as large as email.

In December, Internet users watched more than 10 billion videos online, according to comScore Inc. -- one of the single heaviest months for online-video consumption since comScore began tracking it in 2006. And with Web sites such as Hulu LLC and Netflix Inc. set to roll out heftier high-definition video services in the coming months, corporate networks face slowdown in computer traffic, and possible outages.

For companies that have a limited amount of bandwidth, Internet video can be a significant drain on resources, says Paul Stamp, an analyst with Forrester Research. "Without having some kind of a set policy that either controls or blocks video, [companies] run the risk of their networks crashing or, at the least, slowing down drastically."

William Bailey, IT manager at Catholic Charities of Santa Clara County in San Jose, Calif., says he has to block video at the 400-person nonprofit to ensure that the agency's network will remain operational. "It's a real issue when a network can't handle demand, and too much media, particularly video, is usually the reason why," he says.For people like Shawn Birkett, such shutdowns can thwart both legitimate work and extracurricular video-watching. A sales executive with wireless equipment company Moonblink Communications Inc. in Sunnyvale, Calif., Mr. Birkett used to spend about an hour and a half a day looking at online video, often related to his company's customers. Then six months ago, Moonblink blocked all Internet video after IT managers found that streaming audio and video had slowed the company's Internet service.

Now, Mr. Birkett acknowledges, he doesn't get "sidetracked" by nonwork-related video like he used to. At the same time, the blockage makes it difficult for him to check out clients' online videos. He says he has to call his IT department for special permission each time he wants to view customers' online videos. "It's been frustrating," he says.

Blocking online video isn't easy. As people use the Web for a growing number of capacity-draining functions, from Internet telephone services to peer-to-peer file-sharing, it has become tougher for technology managers to sift through activity on their networks. In addition, the growing use of video as an office tool has made it more difficult to know whether employees are using video sites for work, or for diversion. Stealthy programs like Internet video site Joost NV and peer-to-peer file-sharing service BitTorrent Inc. can cause further problems for IT departments, since the services can confuse network-security measures.

The confusion has created opportunities for small networking companies such as Palo Alto Networks Inc., BlueCoat Systems Inc., SonicWall Inc. and OpenDNS Inc., which offer products and services capable of peering into computer traffic and dissecting it.

Schemmer Associates Inc., an architecture firm in Omaha, Neb., tapped OpenDNS last year to block unwanted video after experiencing substantial network slowdowns. Scott Bennett, network manager for Schemmer, traced the problems to some interns who watched online videos on blogging sites and social-networking portals. In December, Mr. Bennett installed the OpenDNS system that categorizes and filters Web content.

Later that same week, the system received its first major test when a 19-year-old high-school dropout shot and killed eight people, including himself, at a shopping mall across the street from Schemmer's offices. During the ordeal, Mr. Bennett says Schemmer's employees wanted to watch online news reports, but were blocked. Without the new system, says Mr. Bennett, the network would have crashed.

"The system saved me from what could have been a huge problem," says Mr. Bennett. "I had pretty much the entire office come over and tell me how upset they were at not being able to see reports online. And I told them, it could have been worse."

Meanwhile, R.J. Griffin & Co., a subsidiary of J.E. Dunn Construction Group, says it plans to block employee access to Internet video over the next few months. The 600-person Atlanta company is grappling with the housing downturn and is looking for ways to conserve spending. But the company also wants to add capacity to its existing network. Jason Cunningham, IT director for R.J. Griffin, says blocking video could save the company from making a potentially costly technology upgrade.

Mr. Cunningham recently found that YouTube was the most popular Web site visited by R.J. Griffin employees, receiving 3,000 hits a month. To prevent any employee backlash, he plans to issue a report explaining the threat that video poses to bandwidth. He says he dealt with a similar challenge two years ago when the company decided to shut off access to adult-content Web sites after an internal audit found that they were the most widely visited sites at the company.

"I know our people will say we're acting like Big Brother," says Mr. Cunningham of the new online-video ban. "But those pipes belong to the company. If management says we need to protect our resources, then that's what happens."

4 tips on writing a great blog

From today’s ERE Daily | by Kevin Wheeler Reprinted here even though they didn’t mention us.

What Makes a Blog Work?

Blogs are hot. Recruiting blogs have sprouted up on a regular basis for months, and competing writers now vie with each other for readership and "followership." The majority of readers of blogs are Gen Yers, and they are the influencers and indicators of what the future of media may look like.

A survey published last fall by Forrester's Charlene Li indicates that "24% of Gen Yers read blogs, which is twice as often as the 12% of Gen Xers (ages 27-40) and three times the 7% of Young Boomers (ages 41-50) that read blogs."

What makes blogs so compelling?

It's not hard to understand. We live in a sound-bite era. Over the past two decades, people have increasingly turned away from long books and in-depth writing toward short, action-oriented pieces. Books such as Who Moved My Cheese, that are written at a high-school level or lower, are wildly popular. Television led the way by nurturing a generation that reads little and watches video a lot. Hence the popularity of YouTube and magazines such as Discover, BusinessWeek, Fortune, and Fast Company. They have made the short article almost a requirement. Only a handful of publications with small circulations such as The Atlantic or The New Yorker offer readers in-depth articles longer than a few thousand words. Don't get me wrong, here. I am not complaining (well, maybe a little), I'm just describing what is a reality.

Given this, the Forrester survey findings are not surprising. Gen Y and the younger portion of Gen X are the prime target audience for blogs. And, when they are well written, blogs are a powerful way of reaching younger employees, candidates, and fellow recruiters.

Our industry has a lot of great blogs that are, again not surprisingly, written by Gen X or Gen Y recruiters.

RecruitingBlogs.com ( http://www.recruitingblogs.com/profiles/blog/show?id=502551%3ABlogPost%3A42426) recently published the results of its annual readers' ratings of recruitment blogs, sponsored by ZoomInfo. Here are the winners of that contest in 10 categories, and I urge you to take a look at each one of them. They all follow the rules for an effective blog that I outline below.

   1. Overall Recruiting: Six Degrees From Dave
   2. Recruiting Blogosphere: Recruiting Animal
   3. Third-Party Recruiting: Hiring Revolution
   4. Best Recruiting Technology: I, Donato
   5. Job Hunting: Wired & Hired
   6. Corporate Recruiting: WirelessJobs.com
   7. Sourcing/Research: CyberSleuthing
   8. Group: Xtra Cheezhead
   9. Recruiting Industry: Six Degrees From Dave
  10. HR: Gautam Ghosh

Effective blogs are tuned to their readership in many ways, including their tone, style, and even their look and feel. But the following four critical elements have to be in place for a blog to gain the traction that it needs to get a high level of consistent readership.
Short and Fun

First of all, each posting must be short. Entries longer than 500 words are not going to be read, probably not even skimmed, by the average reader. The best entries are most likely 200-250 words and contain lots of white space and breaks. Once in a while, a longer post can be effective if the writer is telling a story about something exciting or has the ability to maintain some level of suspense. But even then it may be better to break the story over a few days to bring readers back.

Pictures and short videos are also useful. Jim Stroud, a recruiter at Microsoft, publishes a fun blog filled with humor and videos that exemplify what I am talking about.
Personal

Blogs gain a great deal of power when the writer is a real person. Heather Hamilton at Microsoft pioneered the idea of writing naturally and honestly. Good blogs are not overly edited or sanitized by the corporate PR department. They may have mistakes or reveal personal facts about the writer that lead the reader to feeling some identity with him or her.

Here is a great example from a recent post by HeatherLeigh: "Marketing plus potty humor."

"If you don't appreciate potty humor or clever marketing, don't watch this.

And, can I tell you how proud I am that this was referred to me by my mother? Yeah, sometimes moms rock, even though I am sure they prefer to remain anonymous (and, right now, she is thanking her lucky stars she has a different last name than mine)."
Story-Based

Tell a story. We are all more likely to become engaged when there is a personal connection, some incident that arouses interest and hooks us into continuing to read.

Here's an example from Bob Sutton, Stanford professor and author of the best-selling book The No Asshole Rule. As I read this, I want to find out what he said and what happens in the end. Here's an example from Bob Sutton:

    "I was listening to a great show on the other day on Fresh Air, where Terry Gross interviewed Bob Sullivan, the author of Gotcha Capitalism. I started getting quite agitated by the interview, as Sullivan talked about all the ways that credit card companies, hotels, and especially, cell phone companies 'get us' with hidden charges and related sleazy practices (listen to it here)."

We all tell stories, relate past incidents, and build relationships around shared experiences. The same applies in writing a blog.
Authenticity

Many blogs gain authenticity simply from their personal nature. We all tend to believe people who have a face, a personality, and are, to some degree, known to us. But, on the other hand, it is also useful to link to other blogs, websites, people who reinforce the posted message. If you look at the example above from Bob Sutton, you can see the links to the NPR show and to the book itself on Amazon.com.

Really good blogs use lots of links and associations to add depth and credibility. By doing this, the author builds trust.

Dave Mendoza, in his award-winning Six Degrees from Dave blog, illustrates all of these points. He uses video very effectively, links widely, uses humor, and introduces personal information in a way that makes him a real person.

Writing a blog is not hard, but it requires understanding these basics. It also requires the author to be engaged, have fun, and reflect his excitement to the readership.