Best Practices

As recession eases, time to hire Misfits, Troublemakers, Square Pegs

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

I have been talking to a potential guest (for an upcoming session on my radio show) on HR practices and social media. She’s Patty Van Leer, Chief Interactive Strategist at, NAS Recruiting, a division of McCann Worldgroup, advises companies on how to motivate and engage employees.

Most HR agencies are also asking their clients to plan for a new wave of  talent that only know (and will certainly expect) to have access to a range of engagement tools. Gone will be the days when you walk a person over to a desk and give her a notepad, some pens, and a login for an email address. The picture could be scary or exciting, depending on your perspective.

As the gears of our economy begin to re-engage, and talent acquisition becomes a priority once again, what will we do with these always-on employees?

Park Howell makes an interesting point. He applies the lens of ‘Rudolph Thinking’ to look inward for managing business tough times. Park’s blog post, “The 15 characteristics of Rudolphs and how they can help steer your company thru the fog of the recession” refers to one of our favorite books on the show, The Rudolph Factor. (Its author Cindy Laurin was a guest on our radio  show.)

You see, Rudolphs make great employees despite the fact that –or perhaps because –they are a bit ‘weird.’ They are weird to most people who are just doing their thing, doing what they are supposed to be doing according to their job description.

Rudolph’s are also the ones who defy their job description, stick their snouts out, and are quickly labeled misfits.

It reminds me of the line Apple used (‘Think Different’) when it celebrated the ‘rebels’ and misfits’ who believed in the personal computer back in 1997. The narration went:

“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes.”

Where do you find these  ‘square pegs’ and Rudolphs?

And when you do, what must you do to motivate them, and unleash their creativity?

Luckily I’m also having Jay Baer as a guest on the same show. He’s dealing with some of these prickly issues in a chapter in his upcoming book, The Now Revolution.

If you like to get some answers to some of these questions (or have some of your own), ping us via Twitter at @your3bl, or email me here: angelo AT hoipolloireport dot com

Is ‘logistics’ campaign by UPS a bit too soft?

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

I’ve been following the We [Heart] Logistics campaign for UPS since it launched last month.

On the face of it, the tagline seemed a bit too mushy for my liking, considering that logistics in its true sense is a lot more than getting a shipment from point A to point B. (Granted that’s perhaps the brief, to soften the mathematical features of it all!).

Not many people knew that logistics has been the heart of what UPS had been doing for years. There’s a sizable part of a chapter on this in The World Is Flat, where Tom Friedman talks of ‘insourcing’ –how UPS manages hubs for companies such as Toshiba. Computer service hubs, mind you, not shipment distribution hubs. All this is tied to sophisticated logistical feats of its supply chain –that most of us see as just trucks.

So as I began monitoring the news of the interception of package bombs from Yemen on an UPS plane, I realized that UPS is missing a huge opportunity here. Very little related to its ‘logistics’ shows up in the feeds on social media. or Google, Yahoo and Bing which are nourished by social channels.

I wondered what’s taking Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide so long to update the campaign to tell us, for instance how UPS intercepts bad shipments, how the technology and human intelligence works in synchrony. Enough of people dancing in the streets with heart-shaped icons. Tell me UPS, why logistics is more than bar codes, and why our shipments will be safe. Why business is better off because of your vast network of 96,000 vehicles, 268 planes and bicycles.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s79MWIcITuc

Social media driving you to distraction?

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The jury is still out whether social media is making us more distracted or not. I’ve met many people who claim that the best way to ‘work’ (and it’s within quotes for a reason) is to turn off the wi-fi and stop mult-tasking.

Like that’s easy!

But forget external communication for a moment. Could socially interactive apps make us more productive when we collaborate? I could give you five reasons why (and a few good books to read on the subject). But for now, here’s a presentation my colleagues at GreenNurture just posted to SlideShare.

I would use it for any ice-breaker, or at the start of a discussion in an organization!

Is Social Media Distracting Your Employees?

Podcast on Green Teams

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We had a jam-packed radio show on Green Teams this Wednesday.

If last week was all about the external aspects of greening an organizations -buildings and facilities management– this week was all about how health care organizations build green teams. The best practices, and the learning moments.

  • Colleen Cusick of Johns Hopkins Health System talked about the sub-groups in the team that take leadership in many sectors of a health care system.
  • Joan Plisko talked about the corporate culture that drives behavior, and the need to have everybody on the same page.

Here is a link to the podcast: http://bit.ly/your3BL13

Barrier for social collaboration: integration not motivation

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I’m attending a webinar right now on ‘Leveraging Social Software for Increased Employee Engagement and Performance’ with Michael Fausette and Steve Paul.

Interesting slide here, earlier on, based on attendee poll.

The biggest barrier to collaboration appears to be:

NOT lack of collaborative tools

BUT: lack of integration with other systems, and that some in the organization won’t use the tools provided

The product being featured is Spaces, an enterprise platform for collaboration from Moxie.

Perfect timing for a discussion today on our radio show, at www.your3bl.com, where we are taking about Green Teams –Part II of our series. The typical tools teams have always been comfortable with are IM and email, while the more social tools such as Wikis and Twitter or even Sharepoint, pose too steep a learning curve to team members.

I’m going to ask our listeners to take a quick poll during the show to tell us what type of tools they are using today, and what they might consider for their team.

If you care to listen in, here is a link to the live stream: http://bit.ly/Your3BL
The show is at 7.00 pm (Pacific)

  • Ping us at @your3bl
  • Email us at contact@your3bl.com
  • Call us, toll free at 1866.536.1100

Your audience will forget your bullet points –just stick to one

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

I’ve been wrestling with how much information is just enough when presenting, and how much is too much. Over-communicating, like over-sharing, is a present-day malady, influenced by our penchant to provide too much details even to our close networks.

In business presentations and training sessions, some speakers have this tendency to add so many sidebars to the main thing that you often catch them saying “now where was I before I went off on that tangent..?”

Bullet points are one solution when one is prone to over-communicate. Short sentences. Rich metaphors. But even bullet points could be overdone. I have caught myself veering off the ledge hitting the bullet point icon too hard, when I should have hit the delete key instead.

So instead of saying this

  • I end up saying
  • things like this
  • hoping the idea
  • will stand out!
  • Wrong!

So here’s a revolutionary idea. When you have five  things to say, don’t, let four drop to the cutting floor. No one will miss them, I promise.

As in this simple video for Jet Blue, you could communicate one idea well.

Shrink the link, a craft worth learning

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If you’ve ever played around with Tiny URL and Bit.ly you will know that there are a few ways to shrink your links.

The easy way is to simply use the automated feature and let Bit.ly or TinyURL do it for you. The better way is to use the custom feature –still free!– and tighten things up so your readers recognize it is related to your content.

I tend to use this custom feature more these days, especially when I have repeated use of a specific URL. When should you consider using a custom URL?

  • For streaming audio of a fixed radio or TV show
  • The registration page of a micro-site created for an event
  • As a link to a photo album being updated regularly with news or event coverage
  • A contest that typically targets social media users through different channels. Perfect for Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook
  • When you want to email a link to a group, or embed it in a link to a  survey

But there is another way to go about this  for branding purposes. Take a look (on the right) at what Twitter uses. The URL is condensed to http://t.co. What’s that .co domain? It is the country domain assigned to Columbia! Speaking of new domains, there are others worth considering.

  • The .ly domain is the country  domain for Libya. It is used by Bit.ly/
  • If you are in the medical profession, you could register a domain ending in .md -the country domain for the Republic of Moldova, an Eastern European country.  However, to register a country domain you need to prove that you have a legal or business reason to do so.
  • The best known one is .tv –the country domain for Tuvalu. There’s a whole lot of information on how to use the.TV domain here.

So the next time you are planning an online campaign, consider how you could do this using your URL. It’s often an afterthought right? It shouldn’t be.

I haven’t even touched on the tracking features available with Bit.ly or Ow.ly/ That’s the topic of another post!

Fan or Friend? Here’s that handout for the webinar

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

I’ve been conducting a series of webinars on social media, and we reached the halfway mark last week. The series was called Passport To Digital Citizenship.

The topics have been:

  • “Hit the Ground Blogging!”
  • “To Tweet Or Not To Tweet?”
  • “Facebook as your Hub”

In this webinar we talked about fans and friends –especially the difference between ‘lower case’ friends and ‘upper case friends.’ How do you engage your network? How do you turn on your hub? And most importantly, how do you get ready for an increasingly mobile user?

If you attended the 3rd webinar, here are two handouts. you may find useful.

I had one participant suggestion –to create a discussion group on Facebook.

Infographics pack stories – you unzip the meaning

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

The way I see infographics it’s not just to tell a story. That was the purpose an infographic was originally intended to serve.

I see it performing a different function in a media-saturated world. Fighting the attention economy!

Inception infographic

Take a look at this. It’s not evident first what it’s trying to ‘say’ about the movie.

It’s a way of letting the reader unpack a level of meaning that would be different from the next reader.  It’s perfect for movies and complex narratives, where there is no one universal meaning. Great directors compress ideas and leave it for moviegoers to discover those nuances.

Oddly enough, journalism and advertising works in the opposite direction –even though both like to be also known as genres of storytelling. They like to bring pure clarity, and therefore unpack the details for the audience. (Check this simple, timely one on BP’s spending.) Worked until about five years ago. Today, consumers, newspaper readers (some call them media snackers for good reason!) don’t want that level of explanation.

Maybe you don’t have the capacity to embed an infographic into your commmunictaion, but you could learn the secret of leaving the reader to unzip his or her own meaning.

Quotes for the week ending 24 July, 2010

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Resuming my snapshot of the best quotes from around the world on communications, marketing, media and social media.

“An increasingly addictive activity”

SocialMediaAtWork on a recent Experian study that says social networking may be addictive.

“The future of infographics will be about telling stories. Telling them in an interesting and compelling way.”

Charles Apple, on the use of info-graphics

“the journalist isn’t a writer; he is a technician.”

Jolie O’Dell in a gret long post on ‘How to tell a journalist from a blogger.”

“When people feel they have some kind of social relationship with others in the company, there tends to be greater collaboration between them.”

Human Resource Executive, on the potential and perils of social networking in the workplace.

“The $35 iPad lookalike from India”

The rage about the Indian tablet developed by the government of India.

Blurs the Lines Between Online and Offline.”

Guest post by Yael Davidowitz-Neu at Convince and Convert, on the ‘Six degrees of influence’ in C to C programs.