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Archives for October 2011

Key Google Employee Heads to Twitter but Shares Google Success Insights First

For nine years, Karen Wickre managed the Google blogs product and everything that goes with it as senior media liaison. This month, Wickre announced on her personal blog that she was leaving Google and heading to Twitter where she’ll take on the role of editorial director.

However, before she heads to Twitter, Wickre shared her insights about Google’s culture and success on her blog and it’s a great read (follow the preceding link to read it). For anyone who has wondered what makes Google not only a coveted place to work but also so successful, Wickre’s blog post is a must read. To sum it up, here are the things that Wickre talked about in her post:

  • Wisdom of the crowds. Wickre writes, “There’s also crowd-wisdom to be found in teams, where everyone is free to have thoughts and suggest ideas that get serious consideration. And no small number of these succeed.”
  • Questions are valued. Wickre explains that at weekly Google All-Hands meetings, employees are encouraged to ask questions about anything and everything. She explains, “Questioning product development or strategy (even about what’s already underway) is fair game. The point of asking is to understand better, raise unconsidered angles, improve on something or bring it to light. The assumption is: asking > information > exploration > greater intelligence > better outcome.”
  • Humor is strength. Wickre writes, “There is a humorous sensibility that makes much of the work more pleasurable and improves the output of ~30,000 people.”
  • Creativity is encouraged. Wickre explains that Google encourages its employees to have outside pursuits. She writes, “Many avocations are celebrated with company exhibits, talks and meetups.”
  • Agility is key. Wickre cites Google’s flexibility as one of its most valuable assets. She says, “It would be easy for an unbelievably successful company to start codifying The Playbook and refer to that and that alone for all future roadmaps.”

Wickre’s insights are spot on and show that she truly “gets” the Google environment. Twitter is fortunate to have her joining its team. I’m constantly amazed at how poorly the Twitter blog is maintained with nothing more than product news and updates published. The Twitter brand should have a powerful and distinct brand voice, and hopefully, Wickre will be given the opportunity to develop that voice.

In the meantime, review the five factors of Google’s success listed above. Are they integrated into your company culture? And looking at this story from another angle, does your brand have someone like Wickre leading the charge to build your brand voice? If you don’t you need to get started right now!

Image: Flickr

Battle of Ideas: A Philosopher’s Holiday


If, like me, you’re feeling a tad jaded, what with the clocks going back and having to dig your winter coat out again, perhaps a workout for your brain would be just the thing.

Ready for the Battle of Ideas 2011?

Sponsored by SABMiller, Shell, PWC and the Royal College of Art (together with many other partners and supporters), this is a two-day festival of public debate organised by the Institute of Ideas in London – this weekend, 20-30 October.

75 different debates are scheduled with 350 speakers covering a wide range of topics, and while they’re naturally not all directly related to corporate communications, they all look intriguing.

Those that seem immediately relevant (my grouping, not theirs!) include:

CSR

  • Is big business ruining food?
  • Profiting responsibly

Discussions of profit, ethics and sustainability, asking whether CSR is more than smoke and mirrors, and whether it can help restore trust in business.

Innovation

  • What is innovation good for?
  • Idea factories: manufacturing and making in the 21st century.

Two different sessions, with different angles, exploring innovation, design and production in a creative economy.

Activism and Whistle-blowing

  • Loyalty in an age of whistle-blowing and Wikileaks
  • Rise of the clicktivists

Is whistle-blowing bravery or betrayal? Is the internet enhancing debate, or making it more superficial? Interesting questions about protest…

Employees

  • Interns or slave labour?
  • Warning: women at work

Two hot topics this year… glass ceilings and the Davies Review, anyone? And should you be taking on interns at all?

The web

  • Online communities: cyber-village or antisocial network?
  • Is technology making us smarter or dumber?

Two sessions – among others – asking how the internet is changing our behaviour both on- and off-line.

Interested?

The Battle of Ideas website has a few font issues, but the way that each debate has a page with related pre-reading and details of the speakers, and that the various debates are linked and cross-linked in strands and across themes is very nicely done. It would be good to see related debates linked at this detailed level too.

You can buy tickets via the Battle of Ideas website; some of these are ‘satellite events’ with a different payment arrangement – and some are free to attend.

Just the thing for those of us who love ideas and discussion…

Brands Haven’t Given up Direct Mail Yet

A decade ago, consumers’ mailboxes overflowed every day with a plethora of direct mail sent from every type of company you could think of. Today, our mailboxes are a lot less cluttered, and that’s a relief for mail recipients. The reason is simple — postage is expensive! However, direct mail isn’t dead yet.

It could be argued that direct mail offers a significant opportunity to brands today simply because there is far less clutter in consumer mailboxes than there is online or in email in boxes. However, email is far more cost-effective and efficient, particularly when it comes to turnaround time, testing, and tracking. Brand managers can track the performance of an email marketing campaign by the second, by individual click, and more. Tracking direct mail is not quite as easy or accurate. It’s also incredibly easy to integrate email marketing into social media and content marketing initiatives. Again, it’s not quite as easy for direct mail.

Despite the reduction in the amount of direct mail consumers receive in their mailboxes these days, marketers are still looking for ways to guarantee their direct mail pieces stand out from the pile of bills and local car dealership postcards that arrive every day. Considering the fact that banks and financial companies continue to be some of the largest users of direct mail marketing, it’s not surprising that they’re also the ones that continually try to stand out from the crowd in an effort to communicate, “Don’t look at that other pre-approved credit card offer — look at me!”

Many of these companies are sending direct mail via overnight and express delivery carriers. For example, in the United States, companies are bypassing the United States Postal Service and sending direct mail via FedEx and UPS. Just a week or so ago, I received a mortgage-related offer from a financial institution via overnight delivery (not through the United States Postal Service) that I actually had to sign for. Not only is this an added expense for the sender, but in the United States, it can be illegal.

Direct mail is hanging on, but as consumers and media have evolved, so must direct mail. There are definitely still opportunities for brands to connect with consumers via direct mail campaigns, but the rules have changed. It’s not just about trying to stand out in a cluttered mailbox anymore. It’s about sending a really great offer and integrating that offer into your entire marketing plan (which includes online marketing, social media marketing, and even email marketing). We’re in an interesting phase of brand marketing evolution where an appropriate tagline might be, “Integrate or die.”

Image: stock.xchng

Measuring and Communicating Your Best Asset

This is the second in a series of three interviews focused on careers, employer brand and social media: Paul (Corporate Eye CEO) interviews Andrew Mayo, Director at Mayo Learning International, and President of the HR Society here in the UK.

Companies often claim that their people are their best assets, but just how do you measure and communicate the importance of people to a company?

Good applicants – like investors and other stakeholders – will review the corporate website and the annual report to find out more about a company. Obviously company culture, talent development and employee engagement all matter to current and future employees, but they can reveal a surprising amount about the company for other stakeholders, potentially supporting the case for investment.

But measuring, and reporting on, human resources isn’t easy, and nor is it easy to compare the results between companies.

Do listen as Andrew gives us some valuable insights into people related measurement and discusses how companies promote employer brand, measurement of – and reporting on – human capital and employee engagement, and the risks that social media can pose for human resources.

I’ve broken the interview down into smaller pieces, so that you can quickly find particular points you’d like to hear about. I’ve also included the whole interview and a transcript.

Part 1: Attracting Talent and Employer Brand: The Balancing Act

Key topics:

  • company brand vs employer brand
  • attracting vs filtering applications
  • appealing to graduates vs experienced candidates

Soundbites:

“The first thing that has always mattered most to new graduates is not, as often thought, the salary and benefits particularly. It’s the training they will get… but also ‘What kind of work will you give me?'”

“I’m often amazed how people come to interviews and they’ve done practically no research on the company itself, they’ve just been focused on the job.”

[audio:https://www.corporate-eye.com/main/audio/andrew-mayo-interview-pt-1.mp3] Length: 11:47
Download: Andrew Mayo interview: part 1

Part 2: Measuring and Communicating Human Capital

Key topics:

  • annual reporting on people: ‘our best assets’
  • difficulties in measuring human capital
  • what the numbers can reveal about the company

Soundbites:

“… Vodafone, Shell and Smith & Nephew have done good work in producing numbers and comparing with previous years and even in some cases saying ‘These are our targets’. For me, that tells me a lot about the strength of the workforce and the strength of the company ethos, the strength of engagement of the people and so on.”

“Figures like ‘We only went outside to the market for 20% of the vacancies that arose’ tell me they’ve got a very robust internal development and growth system…statistically, that correlates with sustainable business performance, and so that tells me this is a company worth investing in.”

[audio:https://www.corporate-eye.com/main/audio/andrew-mayo-interview-pt-2.mp3] Length: 7:12
Download: Andrew Mayo interview: part 2

Part 3: Measuring and Communicating Engagement

Key topics

  • efforts to standardise measures
  • the measures that matter:
    • labour turnover
    • absence rates
    • what employees say

Soundbites:

“Engagement means we actually care and we’re committed to what we’re trying to achieve here.”

“The problem is that at a corporate level in an annual report you’re going to report an average, and an average is always the enemy of truth.”

“The three measures I think are relevant are labour turnover…absence rates… [and] to ask people carefully thought out questions. Not only about ‘are you engaged?’ but also checking out the factors that you know lead to engagement.”

“Research in engagement says that there are a relatively small number of things that really make a difference to people, and whether they understand company strategy or not is not one of them.”

“Engagement correlates with performance as well. And the more engaged a workforce is, the better an organisation it’s likely to be both for its customers and for investors.”

[audio:https://www.corporate-eye.com/main/audio/andrew-mayo-interview-pt-3.mp3] Length: 8:36
Download: Andrew Mayo interview: part 3

Part 4: Social Media, Human Resources and Employer Branding

Key topics:

  • issues for HR: privacy, currency, cynicism and authenticity
  • importance of monitoring social media
  • cynicism and the need to provide evidence

Soundbites:

“You can’t stop anybody asking the question ‘is there anybody out there that’s worked for X?’ However from a company point of view that’s extremely dangerous. You don’t know whether they had a good experience or a bad experience. They might have worked five years ago and the company’s completely different today. So organisations have really got to take an initiative here.”

“People are cynical, and they’ll be cynical of what any company tells them. So whatever you put on the website, you’ve got to back it up with as many facts as possible”

“It’s a big challenge for HR… it really needs the best image possible to be able to attract people. And yet a lot of the things which cause the image of a company to be a problem are out of their control.”

[audio:https://www.corporate-eye.com/main/audio/andrew-mayo-interview-pt-4.mp3] Length: 10:32
Download: Andrew Mayo interview: part 4

Here’s the whole interview, in case you’d rather listen to it end-to-end; and the transcript, for those who prefer to read.

[audio:https://www.corporate-eye.com/main/audio/andrew-mayo-interview-full.mp3] Length: 38:10
Download: Andrew Mayo interview (whole interview)
Download: Transcript

Many thanks to Andrew for taking the time to talk to Paul.

Who were we speaking to?

Professor Andrew Mayo has nearly 30 years experience in industry. For the last decade he has been a Fellow and Programme Director at the Centre for Management Development at London Business School, Associate Professor of Human Capital Management at Middlesex University Business School, and Director of the highly regarded consultancy company, Mayo Learning International. He holds degrees in Chemical Engineering, Operations Research and Management, and a Diploma in Finance and Accounting, and is a frequent conference speaker and author. His specialities are in HR Strategy, Workforce Planning and Human Capital Measurement.

Will Google’s New Dynamic Search Ads Change the Way Brands Advertise?

Google announced a redesign coming to its popular Google AdWords program called Dynamic Search Ads last week. While the program is still in beta, Google is claiming that Dynamic Search Ads have been in development for two and a half years and just might change the entire way Google sells advertising in the future.

Dynamic Search Ads will be generated for advertisers based on the content found on the websites where the advertiser wants to send customers. Google reports that advertisers in the beta program are seeing 5-10% increases in clicks and conversions for Dynamic Search Ads and a “satisfactory ROI.” Advertisers won’t have to give up their traditional keyword ads through Google AdWords to use Dynamic Search Ads. Currently, Google is marketing Dynamic Search Ads as a complement to keyword-targeted advertising.

When an advertiser participates in the Dynamic Search Ads program, the advertiser selects the website content to target its ads. Google indexes pages in the program and dynamically generates an ad when a person conducts a relevant search. The ad will include a headline based on the person’s search query and the text of the ad will “be based on your most relevant landing page.” Once the ad is generated, it enters the auction process and completes using the normal AdWords process but if the advertiser already has an eligible keyword-targeted ad in the pipeline, the keyword ad will be used.

Advertisers can choose whether they want to target their whole websites, specific categories of products on their sites, pages with specific keywords, or pages with certain text in the URL. Furthermore, advertisers can use many of the features used in traditional AdWords campaigns, such as adding negatives, accessing reports, and more.

Advertisers can get on the Dynamic Search Ads interest list by signing up online or larger advertisers can contact their Google account representatives directly.

It’s certainly not surprising that Google is heading in this direction — it’s not the first time the company has tried something like Dynamic Search Ads. The trick is to convince advertisers that giving up some control to Google is a good idea. Only performance metrics will determine whether Dynamic Search Ads are truly a good idea or not. For consumers, Dynamic Search Ads would be a coup if they resulted in fewer spam ads, higher quality ads, and more relevant ads.

What do you think of Google Dynamic Search Ads? Will it change how brands advertise online as Google suggests? Leave a comment and share your thoughts on what Google is referring to as “the future” of AdWords.

Emotional Brand Advertising Is More Impactful than Logical Brand Advertising

In a recent study that was published in the Journal of Neuroscience, Psychology, and Economics (via Neuromarketing.com), researchers from UCLA revealed some interesting findings that show how people neurologically respond to different types of ads. Using real ads, the researchers studied subjects’ brain activity as they viewed a combination of real ads based on emotion and ads based on logic.

Following are two ads from Pfizer (not used in the study) that show the difference between an emotional brand ad (left) vs. a logical brand ad (right). You can click the images to view them larger.

Pfizer smoking  Pfizer Glaucoma

According to the study, logical ads have a greater affect on brain activity than emotional ads in terms of stimulating more of the brain. However, emotional ads were found to be more impactful. The researchers explained that the brain responds in a profound way when presented with emotional ads. When study participants were presented with emotional ads, “activity was lower in areas of the brand that help us inhibit responses to stimuli.” As a result, emotional ads successfully seduce consumers to buy products rather than persuade them as logical ads do by presenting information.

What can brand managers and advertisers take away from this study? It’s time to do some testing! Experiment with logical and emotional advertising and see how each performs. As this study demonstrates, it might make sense to skip all the text, information, and logic, and appeal directly to consumers’ emotions regardless of the category where your brand resides.

Human beings are inherently emotional and our emotions affect our decisions in all aspects of our lives. That includes advertising. This data supports what marketers have continually tried to convince executives and the data-driven leaders in companies — appealing to emotional triggers works.

What do you think of these study results? Have you experimented with emotional and logical advertising for your brand? Leave a comment and share your opinion and experiences.