Category Archives: Consulting

July 9, 2018 · 12:08 pm

The Company We Keep

I’m sure you heard the same thing from your parents as I did. Don’t hang around with a “bad” bunch of kids because you get known by the company you keep and their lousy reputation will stick to you whether or not you’ve engaged in the same bad behavior. You probably haven’t thought about that quote in terms of your business but there are some things going on these days that might cause you to do so. Let me explain.

If you’re a brand (and every company is) and especially if you’re the person responsible for marketing that brand, you’d have to be under a rock not to be aware of what’s going on with social media and data protection. I’m not talking about hacks in which data is stolen. I mean the willful use of your private data by these companies as part of their business model in ways that you never contemplated nor to which you explicitly agreed. I received an email the other day from the folks at Business Insider which contained some of the results of a study of confidence in social media companies’ ability to protect users’ data. The study was conducted among their “BI Insiders” (disclosure, I’m one of them) and the results aren’t great news for Facebook in particular:

Over half (56%) of Facebook users have zero confidence in the platform’s ability to protect their data and privacy. This was the lowest level of confidence of all platforms and highlights the uphill battle Facebook faces to regain the trust of its users. To be fair, users weren’t all that confident in the other platforms either, but the gap between Facebook and the others is significant — at least 18 percentage points from all other platforms. Meanwhile, LinkedIn came out on top for the second year in a row.

The problem for you is that your mom was right: you’re known by the company you keep, and if your brand is active on these services, your reputation is damaged as well. According to the Edelman Trust Barometer study...

Consumers are not forgiving when it comes to brand safety. About half of the survey’s respondents said that it was a brand’s own fault if its advertising appeared alongside hate speech or other inappropriate content online; 47 percent said that the points of view appearing near advertising and marketing are an indication of that brand’s own values.

This is what I found to be of great importance to any brand:

70 percent of digitally connected people around the world think brands need to pressure social media sites to do more about fake news and false information proliferating on their sites, and that 71 percent expect brands to pressure social media platforms to protect personal data.

In other words, if you’re keeping company with social media and they’re misbehaving, you need to exert the influence you have as a client and get them to change. Leave the platform if you must to get their attention – that’s what consumers are doing. If you don’t, you’re risking getting blamed for their bad behavior.

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June 27, 2018 · 11:12 am

Can We Distinguish Fact From Fiction?

How good are you at distinguishing fact from fiction? As I’ve written before, I think that is one of the two most important things anyone can learn in their professional (and personal) lives, with the ability to express your thinking clearly orally and in writing being the other. The folks over at The Pew Research Center studied whether members of the public can recognize news as factual – something that’s capable of being proved or disproved by objective evidence – or as an opinion that reflects the beliefs and values of whoever expressed it. The results aren’t particularly surprising but they also are a good reminder to any of us in business.

First, the results. I’m summarizing here but you really should read the entire study – it’s fascinating and gets to a lot of what’s going on in the country today:

The main portion of the study, which measured the public’s ability to distinguish between five factual statements and five opinion statements, found that a majority of Americans correctly identified at least three of the five statements in each set. But this result is only a little better than random guesses. Far fewer Americans got all five correct, and roughly a quarter got most or all wrong. Even more revealing is that certain Americans do far better at parsing through this content than others. Those with high political awareness, those who are very digitally savvy and those who place high levels of trust in the news media are better able than others to accurately identify news-related statements as factual or opinion…Republicans and Democrats were more likely to classify both factual and opinion statements as factual when they appealed most to their side.

In other words, confirmation bias comes in quite a bit of the time.  I raise this because I think it happens all the time in business as well. We receive data that doesn’t support the direction in which we’re taking the business but we reject it as biased. We get complaints from customers but dismiss them as opinion even when there are facts to support the customer’s unhappiness. It all comes back to what the study measured – many of us can’t distinguish fact from fiction.

We need to pay attention to the source of what we’re hearing. Does the data come from an unbiased, third party or is it an opinion? Is the person who is telling you something doing so based on first-hand experience or are they just repeating something they’ve heard elsewhere? Do multiple sources independently report the same information (not quoting one another, in other words) or are you basing a business decision on a single source? If you’ve spent any time in business, you know that even “trusted” sources – your analytics, your financial reports and others – can be manipulated. Always seek the unvarnished, fact-based truth and learn to ignore opinion unless it’s labeled as such. It’s hard to do that, but you’re up to the task, right?

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June 18, 2018 · 11:17 am

The World Cup Of Business

The biggest sporting event on the planet began its final phase last week. Soccer’s World Cup, which began its qualifying process over three years ago, is down to the final 32 teams and will crown a champion over the next month.

I’ve been very lucky in my life to attend almost every big sporting event at one time or another but nothing compares to this tournament. For those of you less familiar with the world football scene, The World Cup is national teams playing one another. Football (it’s only called soccer here in the U.S.) is by far the sport played everywhere and it incites passion like no other. What’s most interesting about this is that most of the world football leagues are very international in composition. A club might have half its players from the “home” country but an equal number who play for a different national team.

Take, for example, the Spain/Portugal match of the other day. Cristiano Ronaldo is Portugal’s star and is beloved there but he plays for Real Madrid in the Spanish League (La Liga) and is equally beloved there. Some of the players on the Spanish team are his club teammates but they were tasked with stopping him the other day.

What does any of this have to do with your business? If you’ve ever worked in a medium to a large company you’ve probably seen the internecine warfare that often develops between departments. The sales department might be fighting with finance, marketing might not have any love for research, and legal often has nasty things to say about everyone. I liken it to a national league. All the clubs (departments) live in one country (business) but they are extremely competitive and want to be seen as the winners. There has to come a time, however, when the rivalries take a back seat to the “national” interest, in this case, The World Cup; in the case of a business, maybe it’s when other businesses or marketplace circumstances (countries) are on the attack and the entire enterprise is threatened.

Part of managing in an environment where the departments are extremely competitive is keeping the mindset nationally-focused and not club-focused. You need to let your team know that undermining another area serves no common purpose. It’s dangerous and unproductive. Set a World Cup mentality and then try to inspire the same sort of national fervor that the tournament does. You with me?

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