The Bandage Of Social Media Won’t Stop You Bleeding Talent

// May 9th, 2011 // No Comments » // Recruitment Marketing

It’s been said before that we have moved into an age where adopting the new has overtaken mastering the old. We embrace platforms and technologies as they surface, usually in relation to how submerged we are in the innovation pool. The more time you spend on social media, the more likely you are to know something new is coming, and the more likely you are to try and integrate it into your people strategy. It’s why HR and recruitment people get involved in social media. We like to see the trends coming, and to experience the information, analysis and viewpoints of our own community.

The problem with this is that we become addicted to novelty. We get addicted to trying to get the new thing up and running. Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare, Tumblr – the list of possible ways to engage talent , particularly passive talent, grows as we spend more time in this world. We have conferences on how social platforms can build brand engagement, on how LinkedIn can find us the names of possible talent, on how metrics and online interaction can create loyalty. It’s a shiny new world, and it gives us all something to talk about. And I have no doubt that there are plenty of strategies that allow companies to use social media to bring passive talent to a greater understanding of what they offer. No doubt at all.

However, this addiction to novelty comes at a price. We have ignored mastery for diversity. We’ve become handymen instead of craftsmen, explorers instead of refiners.  Most of all, we’ve become people who go out and buy bandages instead of going to a doctor. We have diverse and complex systems to manage our active candidates that contain communications templates, can tie in to existing communities and give us a multitude of ways to parse talent. And I believe that, in the majority of cases, our teams of recruiters know enough about this software to get by, and nothing more.

(I’m going to use PageUp as an example here, just because it’s easier to name a system. PageUp isn’t the problem; in fact, it’s an excellent system that almost no one is using to full capacity.)

If you have PageUp, your recruiters most likely get trained in how to do the day to day work in the system, and very little about the advanced areas. They won’t be unilaterally educated about updates or new features. They’ll be technicians, good at using one functional workflow to answer a need – the need to fill a role. They won’t be masters, or gurus, or (insert your term for the PageUp wizard in your business here) – they’ll have a fit-for-purpose understanding. This has been the case everywhere I’ve worked, and from discussions with other people in the game, it is common enough. Common enough, in fact, that organisations with strong social recruiting efforts spend more time refining their social campaigns to attract passive candidates than they do talking to existing, active ones.

If we compare the relationship between candidates and your brand to human relationships, then we are investing in looking good on RSVP instead of learning to be a better spouse. In short, we go speed dating online and never use the phone numbers we collect. We are ignoring those who are already attracted to us in favour of converting the unallied masses to our brand. We are making conversions from brand ambivalence to brand alliance through marketing and online engagement, and then rewarding that conversion with silence and ambivalence of our own. “Treat them mean, keep them keen” doesn’t apply to what we do. We foster discontent with every missed opportunity for better interaction with our existing, active candidates, and often we do it because we’re time-poor. It’s like saying  “When sales pick up, we’ll do some marketing. “ Bad advice. This is the area in which most companies can grow the most, can return the best ROI, and can make the most significant gains in reduced time to fill, cost per hire and recruiter workload in. It’s so simple that’s it’s overlooked by default.

Advanced skills (mastery, if you will) in all the ways you can pipeline talent and use PageUp (or whatever system you’re using) is a less public, less expensive, less marketing intensive way of making gains in the war for talent. It requires harnessing the knowledge of your experts and sharing it so that everyone in your team becomes highly proficient in all the aspects of the system. It provides, in return, more channels and opportunities for measuring ROI, better deployment of resources, faster results, lower time to get new staff up to speed and, above all, thicker and deeper communications channels to the people in your talent pools who really want you.

Social media has pulled our focus, because it’s public and shiny and democratic. It’s visible and engaging and fun. People like using it. And it absolutely has its place in engaging passive talent, in building brand perception, in being a brand authority and in joining the conversation about your employment offering. It’s important, however, to make it a balanced part of a strategy that mixes passive contact with nurturing existing candidates, a strategy that encourages loyalty by rewarding the most loyal, active candidates with the most attention.

And if yours is an organisation that sacrifices good candidate care and dismisses active, motivated jobseekers for trying to hook the passive ones, you run an additional risk. If you sow dissent in those who love you, your social media presences may become the field on which you reap the annoyance, vitriol and disappointment of those hearts you’ve broken or spurned.

Talent Communities Around Brands Aren’t Communities At All

// May 8th, 2011 // 1 Comment » // Behaviour

Kevin Wheeler, as always, is thought-provoking. His recent post on ERE.net about social media trends struck a chord with me, on one issue. He suggests that ‘communities’ as a term is inaccurate, and that ‘special interest groups’ is more applicable to what we’ve been building with online engagement in the talent space. Some comments agree, some disagree – I’m sure almost all have an opinion. Have a read. It’s good stuff.

And given this is my blog, I have an opinion too. And it’s that ‘communities’ is inaccurate for a completely different reason.

A community is traditionally a collective of people united by a common interest or trait. Seth Godin called them tribes to great effect in his book of the same name. Communities have a social hierarchy as well as a united view, and a universally accepted cultural set of rules. They are driven by passion and the desire to create a universally more rewarding experience for all members. And more often than not, they are anarchic, self-governing collectives. Which is why they aren’t what we’re looking for.

A closer term, in my view, is ‘congregation’. A group of people united by a common desire for information, who come together in a dedicated space to interact laterally and be educated by a pastoral figure. Within the congregation, there are accepted rules of entry that are set by the leader, about participation, protocol and etiquette. There are dedicated channels for interaction and a sense of ‘the one’ (pastor) talking to ‘the many’ (the congregation) for mutual benefit. The pastor offers information, insight and guidance about how their knowledge can improve the lives of the congregation. The congregation interacts both vertically and laterally to create both social and assistive interaction.

The reason that congregation seems a more appropriate word is that communities offer little scope for an externally ordained expertise. In a community, you’re an expert by universal acclaim – people know what you know through ongoing exposure to your viewpoint. As leader of a congregation, your expertise is established first, and you make yourself approachable. You are an authority figure first, separated from the community level of knowledge by virtue of position.

We can’t build talent communities because, as representatives of the company, we cannot be equals with those who are petitioning our employers for jobs. We are authority figures by default, as the gatekeepers of the kingdom they are trying to enter. We cannot participate in anarchic discussion – we can foster it, monitor it, report on it and correct it, but we as company faces cannot join it as equals.  We have something to sell, and communities aren’t about selling – they’re about the free exchange of opinion.

I’m not suggesting we start using ‘talent congregation’ as a term, but I think the difference between a community and a congregative model is important. As recruiters and employment marketers and HR people, we are (to use a quaint model that seems applicable) the priests and nuns and monks of the church of our brand’s religion. We are acolytes that serve a faith, a faith that our employment experience is real, tangible and deliverable. We believe in a vision, and our interaction with a community that wants to be educated in that vision (and how it can make their lives better) is not equal. Our authority exempts us from being included in their curiosity, and we are, as a result, separate.

People are unified by shared interest. And it’s that interest that makes them people we can hire, people we can talk to. However, unless we are personally interested in the same thing, we aren’t part of the community. We’re something else, and we must act accordingly, whatever the name we give them. Knowing this is more important than naming it.

Evil Plans

// April 11th, 2011 // No Comments » // Career Development

Having recently devoured Hugh MacLeod’s exceptional “Evil Plans”, I’ve decided to make a few changes to the way I do things. Like resigning. And booking some overseas travel. And changing my life. More on that to come.

Like Seth Godin’s ‘Tribes’ and ‘Poke The Box’, ‘Evil Plans’ is a guidbook to adventure by shedding an almost surgical light on what’s possible. I can’t recommend it enough, and as a short blast of good sense and inspiring stories, it’s definitely worth a read. However, tied to the theme of this blog, I found amidst the messages a very simple idea that we often ignore. And almost always, ignore at our peril.

Talking to a co-worker after reading this book about employee evaluation and performance management, this book came up. I was talking about the way performance management seems tied to salary review, and can be seen by employees as a justification of denied reward- i.e, a system which identifies reasons to deny pay rises, not reward them. And by different paths, my colleague and I hit upon the same phrase. Employee reviews need to be about helping people achieve their own ‘evil plans’ – about helping them get paid to do something they love doing anyway.

We’ve made a horrible error, somewhere. We’ve made ‘performance review’ into a gauntlet that employees need to run, with the idea that, if they get through relatively unscathed, there’s a slightly larger pot of gold at the end. We’ve let money become the benchmark – it’s universally applicable, so I guess that made sense, once upon a time. Money means a better life, right? More cash, nicer things, bigger holidays. The universal standard for increased happiness – the mild increase in personal freedom that having more money implies. And yet, this isn’t really true at all. And it’s sucking the will to work out of people’s hearts.

Why aren’t we using an employee review differently? Why isn’t it a process of levelling up, RPG style, to the next professional plane? Why isn’t it a chance, not to withhold money, but to map out the next stage of a career? Why are we trading on satisfying  KPIs with minimum numerical value, without giving those numbers meaning by showing where the brackets end? Why is it about your performance instead of your skills? Why is it about what you didn’t do on paper, rather than what you did do in real life? And why is it something that so many employees dread, or loathe, or deride?

The answer to the last one is simple. We haven’t made it fun. We’ve made it mandatory. We’ve made it a ticked-box, a satisfied process, a checklist item on the ‘be a good manager’ sheet that’s overtaken common sense and good education. We’ve made this whole thing about ‘do this and you might not be disciplined/get more cash’ instead of saying ‘Let’s see what we can do to make you better/get you a better job/build your skills.’ We’ve made performance the benchmark, not people. We’ve reviewed outcomes and not progress.

Read ‘Evil Plans’ – I guarantee there’s something in there for you. And when you’re done, ask yourself if your organisation is helping people live their own evil plans. Ask yourself whether you’re building careers and crafting passionate, engaged people. And ask yourself whether your organisation is driven by satisfied targets, or by the ideas, dreams and joie de vivre  of your people. Because if it’s people, then reducing them to a measurable, subjective, minimum-standard performance review is the easiest way to ge them to look for new challenges elsewhere.

Work tips from my time playing video games – Chime

// November 25th, 2010 // No Comments » // Behaviour

For those of you that don’t know it, Chime is a surprisingly enjoyable puzzle game. The player is required to use pre-defined shapes to build over an area, by creating modules which build up a point score. These modules then contribute to a whole-of-map coverage area. When 100% coverage is reached, the level clears. Additionally, the game is timed to music, with each differently shaped module creating a melodic element that plays over the background music.

It’s fun and relaxing and complex, and it’s taught me a few basic concepts completely outside the game itself.

It’s almost impossible to build a perfect solution.

In Chime, the building blocks are multiples of five units. The smallest possible active module you can build is nine blocks. So unless you manage to get the right sequence of parts and are fast enough to utilise them the right way, it’s almost impossible to build a solution which covers everything without needing to go back and fill in the empty spots later.

Every decision leaves artifacts behind that can hamper you later.

As the building blocks are different shapes, the creation of modules often means that afterwards, there are left-over artifacts from your previous solution. Often, these are either a good place to start making new plans, or something that gets in your way later on. And they often impact future plans in unforeseen ways when you’re building in a different area.

These artifacts become less important over time.

In Chime, the beat line of the song chases from left to right across the game arena, and every pass weakens the artifacts of previous modules, until they disappear (and take your multiplier with them), clearing the board. The colour changes as these get weaker as a signifier. Which means that, after a certain point, you stop trying to include the artifacts of past solutions into your new solution, and begin building from scratch. Factoring past consequences of your designs is only good up to a point – there comes a time when the remnants of a previous solution need to be ignored.

There’s a finite amount of time before you have to abandon a larger solution.

As you build modules, each module has a finite amount of time during which you can add to its overall size before it’s deployed. This timer resets whenever you add more volume (another full side) to the module. However, as modules become bigger, it’s harder to add a full side before the timer runs out, because there’s more ground to cover. At some point, you must decide a solution is finished before the effort of trying to add more to it becomes futile, and stops you capitalising elsewhere.

Looking beyond the primary function of a tool can lead to better results.

Most of the shapes seem to have an obvious application, but it’s surprising how many different combinations can be used to create differently-shaped modules. As the game progresses, you are required to adopt different sets of building blocks for differently shaped arenas. There’s a substantial difference in how well the game flows when you begin to look past the obvious application of shapes, and start looking at which gaps need filling, rather than how to combine your tools perfectly.

Repetition breeds unconscious competence.

I haven’t played this game to death, but I have played it a lot. Enough, certainly, to know that I’m faster now because I know how to create success from a score (and coverage) perspective. That didn’t come with study – it came with repetition, the ability to deploy solutions quickly and effectively. There’s an unconscious competence bias to games like this – the less you have to think about which actions are required (press X, move stick, press A, etc) the more you can focus on the big picture, and work faster.

It is either growth or decay – nothing is a constant solution.

In Chime, you’re either building a solution or waiting for one to embed in the background so you can build over it. The game is always a race against time, and your solutions are either in construction or in the background. Artefacts from previous solutions are either employed in a new solution, or they’re becoming obsolete. As soon as a solution is deployed, it becomes part of the established background, and new solutions, new problems need to be tackled to advance.

If you know your playing field well, you can fill in the tough spots first

The five arenas in Chime vary substantially in shape and size – including different corners and void areas. Once you realise that specific solutions are required to cover the trouble spots first, the game becomes a lot easier to plan and manager.

Emotional Talent Acquisition – Process Or Purpose?

// August 11th, 2010 // 1 Comment » // Employment Branding

I’ve been engaged recently to be a ‘secret shopper’ for some friends. I’ve been applying for jobs through their corporate websites, and reporting to them on the resulting experience as a candidate. In some of those cases, I’ve done phone interviews as well, to skills test the internal recruiters. It’s been rather fun being a mystery candidate and evaluating the types of conversations and experiences everyday applicants are exposed to.

One of the things that struck me regularly was the utter lack of emotion in these calls. I rarely felt like I was talking to a person, let alone a brand ambassador for the employment experience. Often these calls were very one sided. “Tell us about you, and if you make it to interview, you can ask us some questions then.” In some cases (two recruiters in particular, both from the same company) the calls were very authoritarian. There was a clear sense of reading questions off an interview guide, of a rigid adherence to process that forbade any humanity sneaking in. I was literally told by one recruiter that he didn’t meed more information about my job history – a yes or no answer would do.

In a couple of cases, I was ‘set up’ as a passive target, a possible headhunt. One of these was even for a company that I’d already ‘applied’ for, and a different recruiter contacted me to sound me out. They used the same script they use for applicant-based recruitment, right down to “Where did you hear about this opportunity?” It will suffice to say this didn’t resonate well with me, the talent who was contacted because they had been identified as a good fit, particularly as the caller didn’t get my name right, and hadn’t read the ‘souring report’ they’d been supplied.

Whether systems of thought or technology, most recruitment systems encourage adherence to process. They encourage control – of the candidate, of the data, of the experience. Systems are all about universal experience, and a functional return on time spent. However, that control can come at a cost – the sense of automation rather than process. For the recruiter, ‘adhering to the process’ can be a synonym for ‘doing a good job’, particularly if the metrics which measure performance are built around the system itself. For the talent, it’s a massive turn off to feel like you’re talking to a machine, not a person.

This is an experience that can be designed for user delight, just like any other. A great phone interview should make the interviewee feel valuable, engaged and connected to the interviewer. If your brand is designed to communicate easy interaction and conversation, your processes need to be built with this in mind. Application, interview, onboarding – all these parts of the new employee experience should reflect the attributes of your employment experience. They should be reflective of your values and principles, and, ideally, your strategy regarding people.

Recruiters shouldn’t just be filling in forms and word-matching CVs to job specs. They are the ambassadors for the experience of being employed by your company. They’re the salespeople trying to make someone change their life, their routine and their job. Their role isn’t to adhere to process, but to satisfy process. And they can do it in such a way that they encourage emotional connection, a pleasant experience and begin to create the sense of mutual respect that forms the backbone of a good employment relationship.

The process shouldn’t get in the way of the people.  The system shouldn’t overtake the core role of a recruiter/sourcer – which is  to find and engage talent that’s ready to join the tribe, willing to endure the change required to change roles, and able to satisfy the duties of the role. Your talent are more than walking skill-sets, they’re people whose emotions are a strong part of the decision making process. And the process should never overtake the purpose.

The difference between “leading” and “being in front”

// July 23rd, 2010 // No Comments » // Behaviour

Being better is always about metrics. You need to define the scale on which you measure ‘good’ before you can become better. “Better” as a label always leads to “better… at what?” So knowing how you’ll measure a good performance (and subsequent improvement) is always the right place to start. The issue is that so many companies use a group metric to label themselves as ‘leaders’.

Leadership is about knowing the path you’re walking, and being prepared to push a few branches out of the way to get there.  Leading an industry, or a market, or a sector, isn’t about comparison to everyone else – it’s about comparison between you and where you want to be. It’s working to reach an ideal, not to outpace a crowd.

Many businesses use competition to define success. “We’re better than XYZ, so we can’t be doing that badly.” “We’re in the top ten in our sector!” The internal picture of success is defined by other businesses, or through financial results. An average across the sector for service/price/skill is reached. The average experience then becomes the benchmark of a decent performance, and as long as the business does better than that, everything’s okay.

This is not leading. This is just running faster than the rest. This is being in front. In front of the curve. Of where you think everyone else is . And as long as your only goal is to be just a little cheaper, smarter or quicker than your nearest competitor, you’ll always find yourself scrabbling. And without knowing it, you’ll let the pack define where you go, rather than having a direction and following it.

Better Experiences, Better Stories, Better Brand

// June 23rd, 2010 // 1 Comment » // Employment Branding

Three years ago, I had a conversation with one of our internal recruiters around the TVP (talent value proposition – like an EVP for a particular talent segment) for his area. He was recruiting IT people for an engineering firm, and attrition was high in that team. People weren’t staying for more than 6 months, and we were looking for a solution.

We sat down and read the ads that had been used in the past, looking for clues. They were pretty standard ads – list of skills, what you’ll be doing here, the usual jazz. There wasn’t much to inspire there, not a lot of cultural discussion. So we started writing new copy for all the ads to talk about the team from a human perspective.

And we hit a snag.

We were looking at recruiting into a team with an obvious problem around staff performance and culture. We were looking at recruiting into a team that suffered such quick turnover that only the staff who didn’t leave became the culture.  We were recruiting fast moving fish into a stagnant pond, and watching them jump out straight away.

We had to choose how to tell this truth to the market. We had to find a way to still hit the targets and attract people, even though we were selling them a culture that would require a massive shift. The old ads had used the company EVP – be inspired, become part of a fast moving team, we’re doing great things, etc. However, the greater business EVP didn’t apply to a functional support area like IT.  The first draft, which I call the dead draft (a cacophemism, the absolute hard truth version) read something like this:

“Join a team where your ideas will be crushed by the indifference of colleagues. You’ll work as part of an undervalued function, delivering services that the larger business will take for granted and making adjustments that no one will probably notice. You’ll sit beside some of the most boring and difficult to work with people we can find, who’ll inspire you to either abandon hope, or quit your job and work somewhere else. Apply now!”

We took this to the manager. We explained that we weren’t going to solve this by recruiting more people who either hated the culture and left, or hated the culture and stayed. We needed to fix this by being honest, and by fixing the team culture while we recruited people who could act as change agents.

By doing this, we replaced a lot of people in that group. We did it using our own brand, which cut down on recruitment fees. We did it using an honest TVP that explained that the function was changing, and we needed people to a part of the new evolution. We made this new direction obvious to staff and gave them the chance to opt out. We dropped attrition 20% in a year once the new culture was in place. And we influenced change to the point where that group started wanting to tell people outside the business how things were now, and how being an employee was making their lives better.

Building a brand (in employment or otherwise) involves three things – a good story, the right channel and quality execution. Are you spending as much time on creating a good story as you are on telling it?

Social Recruiting And Talent Seduction

// June 17th, 2010 // No Comments » // Employment Branding

Our level of social interaction almost always plays a part in our self-image. The communities in which we operate, where we find prestige, acceptance and camaraderie, become part of our internal value system. From a retail perspective, advertisers have known this for years. It’s the reason why Coke is always being drunk by thin, attractive, socially conversant people on TV, even though many awkward, overweight and homely people probably also enjoy it in real life. We associate products with an image, which we use to rationalise our choices, and to make brands part of our social atmosphere. I wear Prada, therefore I am like the celebrities I admire who also wear Prada.

Online social technologies have made it easier to create our own tribes, and to interact with a wider array of people. As the limits of geography and  chronogeography fall away, our social interactions are becoming faster and more diverse. Want to talk about cross-stitch? There are Facebook groups and discussions forums and probably a Twitter community who will share links on even the narrowest channels of embroidery and haberdashery. Love web design? Hundreds of blogs, communities and places to find inspiration, advice and people who share your passion. The PLUs – the People Like Us.

With this ability comes the opportunity for talent sourcing functions to step away from traditional recruitment and talent identification models towards something more immersive. For the first time, companies have access to the conversations that are taking place around their brands, their employment experience and their fields of expertise. These conversations are taking place on social networks and are searchable, trackable and joinable. They’re happening all the time. And with the right know-how, they’re a devastating weapon in creating expectation and aspiration among talent you’d like to attract.

Seduction is about conversation. It’s about finding common ground for a beneficial relationship, whether it’s a short-term relationship that’s mutually beneficial, or something longer. It’s about presenting an image that’s aligned to shared perception – an honest portrayal of values and benefits, delivered in a mutually-spoken language. Talent seduction is no different – it’s a process of creating connection, establishing a shared platform of interests and mutual benefit, and building trust and respect until the connection is solidified into a transaction or exchange of benefit.

So there are two parts to using social technology platforms to seduce talent. The first part is about content creation and dispersal. You’re going to attract people who share your values, and that includes the value you put on this content. A 3-minute video shot on a handycam might appeal to a certain market, but if you’re going to do a video and you want it to resonate, why not invest more time and resources to make it look better? The same is true of blogs, photo shoots, brochures – any created content transmits both the content and production value to an audience. It’s like a suit – anyone who tells you there’s no difference between off the rack and a bespoke suit has only ever worn off the rack. Putting the effort into your content is investing in your image and brand, and that can only help you appear considered, well-presented and attractive to the right people.

The second part is the conversation. It’s interaction. Being well-dressed is fine for a first impression, but if you sound off like a ladette the second someone speaks to you, it’s going to undo the work you put in to good content. The art of conversation is about listening more than you speak, about thinking before you sound off, and about an evolution of comfort. It’s a balance between sharing stories and responding to other people’s remarks. It’s an opportunity to influence the conversation, which shouldn’t be mistaken for dominating it. It’s creating expectation through shaped communication, not by standing up and screaming about how wonderful you are. And most of all, it’s about personal connection between a brand and an individual’s wants, needs, fears and expectations.

Imagine you go into a bar, and someone comes up to speak to you. They look like your sort of person, you’ve seen them around at other places you go, they’re outfitted in a style that speaks to you. They say hi. You say something back. They say, in a monotone “Thank you for speaking to me. I look forward to speaking to you! Hooray!” Offputting?

This is an automated response in real life. Whether it’s Twitter, email or anything else. It’s anti-human and anti-connection.

And here’s the kicker – if you know who you are (which in this case means you know your EVP and have an established brand) your targets will also know who you are. It means you can be more conversational and approachable – you don’t have to establish your identity or appear flashy. Your reputation will precede you, because you’ve spent time building it through interaction, and through being consistent. You can establish your value proposition in a social community by demonstrating those values and by being open to discussion with people who want to become part of what you offer.

We identify with those who share our take on things. We are more likely to work for companies who share our views on things that matter to us. Some companies might publish a list of those things on a website, and that’s a start. However, if a company can get into conversations about those values, and use those conversations to create a rapport, they can generate an emotional connection. And those are much harder to sever, and much more likely to make us invest in any relationship

‘Social’ recruiting isn’t about the technology

// May 26th, 2010 // No Comments » // Recruitment Marketing

Recruiting is about people. It’s about human interaction – people identifying with a story, with an idea, with a culture. It’s about creating a common perception that’s driven by people, and related to their social habits. Technology facilitates that, but it certainly doesn’t replace it.

So while we talk about Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and their web-based friends, we’re failing to discuss a fundamental part of the concept – those channels are only as good as the people using them. Not from a skill perspective, but from a content perspective. Who is managing your interaction? What is the purpose of it – to land a candidate or to build the brand?

When we talk about candidate management systems and CRM systems for talent acquisition, we’re replacing human interaction with technology. We’re substituting human connection for reliability, for a consistent experience.  Yes, every candidate gets a response when they apply, but it’s not from a person – it’s from a program. When we adopt systems that search online for social media profile information, are we using technology to spy on people, or to replace our ability to evaluate humans without going through their online personas? Is every communication in line with the employment brand?

As a community of people whose profession is talent, finding and engaging people is what we do. More than ever, technology delivers us opportunity and risk. Ensuring that our communications, regardless of the media, are clear, are going to be interpreted the way we expect them to be, and are in line with the brand and our values as a business, is going to have a more positive impact than being on fifty new social media platforms and using them all randomly.

Get the voice of the brand right. Make it something people want to listen to and engage with first, and then adopting new channels, new strategies and new media becomes easier to manage, and more lucrative.

Rejection And Criticism

// April 15th, 2010 // No Comments » // Behaviour

Rejection.

If a client chooses another option over the one you’re selling, there are two things you can do.

The first is to attack the client directly – accuse them of being unprofessional, complain that you didn’t do your best and deserve another chance, bad-mouth the competitor, complain and use all your sales skills and existing knowledge of the client to try and guilt them into reversing the decision.

The second is to take it on the chin, to wish them well and tell them that the door is always open if there’s anything you can ever do for them. Keep it professional and objective, get feedback on what you could have done better, and stay in touch.

Guess which one means you might get the business back eventually? That’s right – the one most of us don’t do.

Criticism.

There’s a poster on my wall at work that says “If you’re tired of people exposing your mistakes, don’t attack the people. Attack the mistakes.” I’ve seen a few people in the industry respond to criticism by publicly attacking the critic. How does this make you look more credible? If you have issue with the review, address the review, not the reviewer. Attacking people, instead of issues, just weakens your argument. Or, just for something different, be confident enough in what you’re doing to ignore the criticism. If you don’t credit the reviewer, don’ respond publicly – just ignore it. Drawing attention to nasty things someone said about you on the internet doesn’t create anything but antipathy. And I’m pretty sure we’ve got enough of that already.

If it works, do it again. if it doesn’t, do it again. And don’t feed the trolls.