The line between personal and professional on social networks has been much discussed already, but a new angle (for me) arose over a coffee yesterday.
As a CEO, how do you feel about the information being disseminated about your organisation by current or recently exiting employees? As Marketing Director, have you considered the description of your organisation in the Company Profile pages?
I’ve found these pages on LinkedIn to be enormously valuable in figuring out what is going on at a company I want to talk to – and understand. Take a glance at wunderloop’s profile on LinkedIn.
We’re in quite good shape here: the description of what the company does was written by one of the sales directors, so it gives a decent view. But it’s not the ‘authorised version’ per the company’s Director of Marketing. For a start, the styling of the company as ‘wunderLOOP’ is something that really winds her up. (I’ve asked LinkedIn to change that, so it may not be visible when you visit the site).
Other companies – I won’t name and shame, but I’ve seen some great examples – are less well served by their declared profiles, which can be edited by pretty much any employee.
So far so ho-hum. But here’s the biter: my friend reflected his COO’s deep concern that the details about current employees – and more importantly recent departures and hires – had the potential to breach commercial / confidentiality interests. Are people updating their profiles giving away commercially sensitive information? Is it their data to share?
Of course, my argument is that you’re talking about public domain information being made more accessible, so no big deal, legally.
But to me this mirrors the shift of control we are seeing in marketing communications from controlled information from the organisation to crowd-sourced information. In other words, what matters is not what you, as the organisation, say about yourself so much as what others say about you.
(from The Economist)
I saw some figures from Comscore today that put the global online audience at a little over one billion people – and showing China taking over from the US at the number 1 spot.
Seems a long time since we were arguing about whether online would ever make it to the position of being a significant part of the media mix for advertisers.
Sandlines is firmly of the view that 2009 will be a (comparatively) good year for digital marketers – in as much as everyone is hurting, we will hurt least, according to the latest Bellwether reports.
For me, the key to this is that marketers need to think in terms of the people they are marketing to: ie people not simply figures on a spreadsheet.
In other words:
- audience not ‘impressions’;
- individualised/targeted messaging (the right message to the right person at the right time);
- conversations that listen, not just ’spray and pray’ broadcast.
The technical capabilities to do this are increasingly there, in our hands. Let’s use them! There’s a billion reasons out there to get it right.
| 3.2 |
I’m a bit of a marketing geek – I freely admit it. In fact, my hiring policy has been based around an idea that a good friend of my wife shared with me a few years back. She believes that for a man to be attractive he has to have 10% geek: no more, no less. I’ve successfully applied that principle to building businesses from scratch and it’s a compelling mix.
But one manifestation of my ‘geek’ (frankly I probably knock the 10% ceiling from time to time) is responding to surveys. I guess it stems from wanting to see what marketers are up to and what they’re asking.
Of course, the cynical view is that surveys will (should) always tell you what you want to hear – and a big contributory factor sits in the way the questions are asked. The link is to a result from Google Book Search, btw. There are any number of illustrations of this point if you ‘conduct a google search‘ to support this further.
But the survey I looked at tonight was a classic case of forcing the answer you want. I was being asked about my view of some sponsored web content. Before I looked at the content, I had to visit the site in question.
During the survey, I was asked if I had visited, enjoyed and would be likely to revisit the content. I’d visited three of the eight content areas… but I was unable to continue with the survey unless I ticked a box that said I’d visited it. I therefore had to lie to proceed.
This is not an uncommon issue: there’s a tendency in surveys to insist on answers to questions, and it is simply a question of the survey authors not thinking through the options.
Research does, of course, have substantial value… but please don’t take it at face value. Sometimes people are less than scruplously honest… and it’s not always their fault.
| 3.2 |
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