Corporate Eye

...compare, compete, excel

Cynthia Giles

Cynthia Giles

Corporate Blogging? Make It Great, or Don’t Bother


Grand Canyon

Hard to believe it’s been over a year since I bookmarked this post on the Sitepoint blog:  15 Companies That Really Get Corporate Blogging.  But now that I’ve come across it again, the information is still interesting.  The author referred to a then-recent Forrester study that looked at 90 blogs from Fortune 500 companies, and found that “most corporate blogs are ‘dull, drab, and don’t stimulate discussion.’ Sadly, two-thirds hardly ever get any comments, 70% stick strictly to business topics, and worse 56% just republish press releases or already public news.”  I would imagine there has been a little improvement since then, but I doubt it’s much.

Anyway, I went looking for the report, found that it is paid content and the original post got its information from a Wall Street Journal article that is no longer available.  But I did find a newer—and freer—Forrester paper on corporate blogging, which you can get with a fairly painless registration.

Highlights:

“Only one in six consumers trust company blogs.”

“Like any other marketing channel, blogging can work. But it’s not about you; it’s about your customer.”

“Honest and transparent blogs will get noticed.”

So–what’s special about those 15 companies that “get it”?  The answer is absurdly simple:  They provide interesting/useful/meaningful content.   Or as Sitepoint put it—“informative, fascinating, and a joy to read even for people who aren’t die-hard fans of the company.”

I actually visited every one of the 15 companies, although not every one of their blogs, which would have added up to dozens.  I covered at least 20 blogs, though, and at each one, I applied a simple test:  “If I were thinking about a career at this company, would their blog(s) encourage me to apply?”  Here’s what I decided:

Yes, in almost every case.

At Southwest Airlines, I found “BlogSouthwest,” with some great Halloween posts extolling the fun quotient of that SWA-perfect holiday.  (I can testify—it’s all true.)  At Lenovo, I discovered a smart, wide-ranging blog called “Design Matters,” which I would probably subscribe to if I had any time left for more feeds.  BBC has a substantive blog called “The Editors,” offering a behind-the-scenes view of current events.  The “Fast Lane Blog” at GM looks like paradise for a techie auto junkie.  And it was oddly seductive to read the supposedly inner thoughts of Marriott’s apparently tireless CEO at “On the Move.” Even Quicken’s “What’s the Diff” was fairly charmful, with its mission of “exposing the gap between average and excellent.”

At a couple of companies, the blogs seemed perfunctory—lacking enthusiasm and/or substance.  A couple of others offered blogs so super-technical that I couldn’t make a connection (though they probably have appeal for their target audiences).  But on the whole, my cruise through this group of corporate blogs was more interesting than I expected.

And I’m sure there are many other good examples out there.  Plenty of bad ones too, though!  So I’ll close with another highlight from the Forrester paper:

“If your strategy is to create a blog about your company and its products, give it up.”

But if your strategy is to offer something of value to readers—information, ideas, insights, inside intel, or just plain fun–then it’s worth the effort.


(Thanks to Jason Rogers for sharing his trip to the Grand Canyon.)


Corporate Communications and Social Media: Genie Will Not Return to Bottle


Aladdin

Google’s new Sidewiki application lets web visitors share their opinions right next to any online content.  Visitors who turn on Sidewiki (which has to be downloaded from Google) can see what other Sidewiki users have said about the site they are viewing.

There’s a lot more to it, but the first main point is—it’s caused quite a stir in some quarters.  The estimable Jeremiah Owyang titled his post Google’s SideWiki Shifts Power To Consumers –Away From Corporate Websites, and outlines a scenario about what’s to come (and what social media strategists should be doing about it).

Media strategist John Zappe follows up with Google Gives HR Something New To Worry About.  Salient quote:  “Just imagine the mischief a disgruntled job seeker or employee can wreak by posting their story directly to your site. Side by side with your video of happy employees talking about the fun and interesting work they do is a post — or multiple posts — from current and former workers denouncing your message as bogus.”

The concept of community commenting is not actually new—there have been boutique apps that provide the same functionality.  It’s just that Google has such a huge reach.  And Sidewiki integrates with the popular Google toolbar.  So the potential impact really is worth considering . . .

If you’re wonk-ish, the Doc Searles Weblog offers a good start at outlining the debate with Whose Side(wiki) Are You On?

It’s interesting that the Sidewiki launch came along just days after a post in which HR thought leader John Sullivan declared:  Your Employer Brand Is No Longer Owned by Your Firm.  His picture is a lot bigger than just the potential impact of Sidewiki—and the title conveys the one fact everyone needs to be aware of.

In two words:  Done deal.

Did companies ever have the control over messaging they imagined they did?  Probably not.  But that doesn’t matter now.  What matters is that Genie has left the bottle, and won’t be going back in.


(The luscious illustration comes from Aladdin und die Wunderlampe, a German children’s book by Ludwig Fulda, with illustrations by Max Liebert.  Thanks to Project Gutenberg for making it available.)

Interesting Insights from the 2009 Groundswell Awards


Groundswell

If you haven’t heard of the Groundswell Awards—not to worry.  It appears this is just the third year for the fairly small competition, sponsored by Forrester via the Groundswell weblog which apparently spins off the book named Groundswell (stick with me here) by Forrester analyst Josh Bernoff and consultant Charlene Li.  Everything I know about the awards I learned from reading the Forrester Groundswell Awards Rules, which says:

“Entries should represent excellent and effective use of social technologies to advance an organizational or corporate goal.”

Sounds good!  And there is a recruiting-related category in the awards, which we’ll get to in a minute.  But first, here’s what especially interested me about the Groundswells:  (a) the structure of categories, and (b) the proportionality of the submissions.

Submitters have to choose a category that best fits what they see as the strength of their submission.  The categories loosely parallel the ideas in the book, and they go like this:

Listening. Find out what customers are really saying in order to understand them better.

Talking. Spread messages about a company.

Energizing. Get a company’s best customers to evangelize its products.

Spreading. Get customers or users within a company to encourage others to adopt a product or service. (B2B only.)

Supporting. Help customers support each other to solve each other’s problems.

Embracing. Integrate customers into the way a business works, including using their help to design products and improve processes.

Managing. Empower employees and managers within an organization.

Social Impact. Improve society with non-commercial applications.

Even apart from the social media component, this list strikes me as a pretty good anatomy of all the things a corporate Careers site needs to do.  Just put “visitors/prospects/applicants/candidates” after each verb, and you would have a fine strategic outline.  That is—“Listening to visitors,” “Energizing prospects,” “Embracing candidates,” “Managing applicants,” and so on.  (Social Impact applies via messaging about corporate responsibility, green-ness, etc.)

Now for proportionality.  Groundswell helpfully offers mini-views of all the submissions, so we know how many submitters put themselves in each category.  Just guess which Business-to-Consumer category had the most entrants by far . . . .

That’s right.  TALKING.

In spite of all the wisdom out there about listening, most companies are still focused on pushing the message.  Business-to-Business was more evenly distributed—but showed even less interest in Listening than the B2Cs.  Here’s the Groundswell breakout:

Groundswell Submissions

Topic to consider:  Does your company’s Careers site have a listening component?  How hard would visitors have to look to find the listening component?

The Groundswell award for something to do with employees is (somewhat oddly) Managing, and for some reason, it’s bundled up with non-profits.  But in any case—this year’s winner is UPSjobs Problem Solved, “a ‘spreadable’ social media campaign to efficiently and more cost-effectively attract, engage, and recruit jobseekers.”

But I found one of the other entrants especially interesting:  The Employee First campaign at India’s HCL Technologies, where “all 55,000 employees of HCL Technologies are given intranet access allowing them to read the reviews of HCL’s CEO Vineet Nayar and the company’s top 20 managers.”

Stop by the HCL Careers site to read more about Employee First, and the “Five Fold Path to Individual Enlightenment.”  Very interesting.




Two Simple Rules for Better Job Descriptions


Decoder Ring

I recently had occasion to look at a job description for an IT contract position.  I could recognize a lot of the words, but the way they were put together gave me almost no clue what the company really needs someone to do.  So I called a friend who’s pretty far up the IT food chain and read it to him, just in case I was being dim.  Neither of our secret decoder rings was up to the task, however, so we could only speculate about what the job might really be—or who could do it well.

This description came from a big company and went through a reputable recruiting agency.  In this case, of course, part of the problem relates to the process itself, since in many cases outside recruiters cannot talk to the hiring manager in order to clarify the description and requirements.  So if the hiring manager—or whoever wrote the description—is not very good at describing jobs, an HR intermediary may not know the difference, and the mystery document will just get propagated out to the recruiter(s) and passed on to the prospects.

Internal processes can be just as problematic–and when a confusing or inadequate job description makes it onto the Careers site or the job boards, job-seekers are at a considerable disadvantage, since they have nothing else to go by.  In these days, when applications are many and keywords often rule, applicants have to figure out how to highlight their qualifications; and that’s tricky when the requirements are not clear.

In the description that prompted this post, I found several common problems, such as:

  • Requirements that just say “Understanding of X”.  (The spectrum of interpretations that can be applied to “understanding” is broad indeed!  Define the word?  Know X when you see it?  Eat, sleep and breath X?)
  • Requirements that seem to be repeating other requirements in different words.    (Is there a subtle-but-important distinction?  Or just two different authors?  Perhaps a careless revision?)
  • Requirements that use names in a vague way, and/or acronyms.  (Is the requirement referring to ” X the product” or “X the methodology”?  Is that unfamiliar acronym a variant, a typo, an internal reference, or just something that hasn’t made it to Wikipedia yet?)

I could go on.  But the net result is that candidates for this position will not have a good idea of what’s involved in the job until/unless they get as far as an interview.  Therefore they won’t be able to make an informed decision about applying or not.  They won’t be able to tailor their resumes appropriately.  Et cetera.

And the manager(s) will spend unnecessary time looking for the “right” person, who might not even be found.  A lot of misfire hires result from failure to define and describe a job effectively.

People can learn to write better job descriptions, and they should.  But in the end, there are two really basic practices that will make a huge difference:

  • Use simple sentences.
  • Use simple words.

Just following those “simple” rules will eliminate ambiguity most of the time.  And don’t take my word for it.  Get some good advice from HRDailyAdvisor.  (Yes, they’re selling something, but the advice is good anyway.)


(Want your own “decoder ring”?  Get it from the Exploratorium.)

A Ten-minute Tour: Ideas and Info on Timely Topics


Stopwatch

Here’s the itinerary:

1.Start at Inflexion Point and read The Future of HR—Why “Do Nothing” Is an Option to see why Mark Stelzner thinks the “transformation” of HR is highly desirable, but probably unlikely.  (My paraphrase, in a nutshell:  Second Law of Thermodynamics.)

2. Click on Comments and scan the interesting discussion that follows.  Susan Burns wonders “whether or not HR is evolving in sync with the broader transformation taking place in business? With the societal and cultural shifts taking place locally, regionally, nationally and globally?”

3. Skim through Deloitte’s HR Transformation Survey, mentioned in the Inflexion Point post. One highlight:  Of the C-level executives surveyed, more than 90% think Compensations/Benefits is the HR task most likely to be outsourced, less than 40% point to Recruiting/Staffing.  Another highlight . . . more than 80% see cost savings as the key driver for HR transformation, while a mere 30% want to free up HR for a more strategic role.

4. Side trip:  Rosabeth Moss Kanter offers a list of Top Ten Ways to Find Joy at Work–and the advice is not actually what you might expect.  Favorite quote:  “exerting leadership is the surest route to joy (other than going fishing). The key is setting the agenda and starting the pieces moving towards a purpose-driven goal. If 90% of success in life is just showing up, Monster.com founder Jeff Taylor advises that when you show up, you might as well run the meeting.”

5. Wind up at Learning Putty for 7 Creative Ways to Introduce Social Media to Your Team.  I like them all, but “Give the Gift of Social Media” is my favorite.

    Okay—that’s two minutes for each stop.  Read fast!


    (Thanks to wwarby for the timely timepiece.)


    Down the Garden Path: Anatomy of an Unfortunate User Experience

    Obstacle Course

    I recently took a rather twisty trip through the website of a “membership organization, think tank and educational resource.”  I was trying to access a report,  and since I do that sort of thing a lot—for an assortment of different topics I write about– I’m pretty accustomed to the various strategies utilized to extract (a) information about me, and (b) money from me.  But some extra challenges made this attempt worth a post.

    The following comments are not about this particular organization, which is not only respectable but also provides value.  It’s just that their website offers an excellent example of the “unfortunate user experience.”

    Here’s what happened:

    • I went through the registration process in order to access a specific report.  I wasn’t surprised when it turned out (many screens later) that the report itself wasn’t accessible under the “free” membership level.
    • But I persisted, and it turned out that a briefing-style version of the report is in fact free.  Actually, there are several kinds of free content available on the site, some of it high-value.  But!  You don’t know this until you try accessing a variety of items, and occasionally stumble on something you can view without charge.
    • For some types of free content, including the briefing I was trying to see, you still have to put the item in a “cart” and go through a “check-out” process.  There’s no charge, but every time you “buy” a free content item, the system sends you an email confirming the “purchase.”  And of course you are offered frequent opportunities to “upgrade” your membership.
    • Finally (although I could go on for much longer), the briefing turned out to be in slide format.  Not a problem in itself, but the page is arranged so awkwardly (due to a humongous–yet pointless!–banner at the top) that you have to scroll far down even to see the slide.  And you have to do that for EVERY SLIDE, because the slideshow does not play automatically.  The slide display is a fixed size (quite large), which means you have to scroll down even further after viewing a slide in order to see the notes (which contain most of the information).

    Now here’s why all that is important—and relevant.  This website committed several offenses against the user, and the organization lost brand credibility in the process.  Notably:

    1. Expectations violation. At the beginning I thought of the organization as an information resource, but by the end of my visit, I thought of it mainly as marketing machine.  And a dysfunctional one, at that.  Did I mention that the “new member orientation” slideshow did not work?
    2. 2. Unnecessary inconvenience. And did I mention that every single thing you do on this site results in opening a new tab?  (At least in Firefox—didn’t test in IE.)  In trying to register and access just one report, I ended up with about a dozen tabs.  And that’s only a single example from a series of challenges encountered during the visit.  Each was relatively minor in itself, but they added up to a significant level of aggravation.
    3. Mixed messaging. By the end of my visit I had been exposed to many labels, logos, and taglines, but had no idea about the actual purpose of the organization.  Every page I visited delivered a different message—and returning to the home page provided no help.  It is so crammed with links (including literally dozens of sponsor badges) and things to buy or sign up for that I still cannot tell you what their essential value proposition(s) is/are.

    Your company’s Careers site is probably not in danger of seeming too much like a store.  But it may well be violating expectations in other ways, as well as causing unnecessary inconvenience and delivering mixed messages.   Those failings won’t deter people who need a job from searching the posted openings.  However, they will be a discouragement for quality candidates in search of career opportunities with a quality company.

    The site I’ve been critiquing actually had some very good information to offer, once I figured out how to work the system.  So I’ll visit again—but I won’t look forward to it.


    (The illustration is a plan view of the garden at Chateau de Choisy, a seventeenth-century French palace.)