Tag Archives: business

December 20, 2013 · 9:55 am

Kitchens Without Garbage

It’s the last Foodie Friday before Christmas and this week  I want to talk about garbage.

Garbage

(Photo credit: Editor B)

It’s on my mind because last night I watched an interesting episode of Chopped, the Food Network’s show where cooks have to use a basket of ingredients that don’t seem to go with one another to make great dishes in 30 minutes.  The baskets last night all consisted of “garbage” – food that most home cooks often toss out.  Herb stems, bread ends, fish heads and other generally discarded items made up the ingredient lists.  The cooks did well and as food professionals they demonstrated the principle that nothing should be wasted by  a professional.  Or as The Dead would say, “one man gathers what another man spills.”

Jacques Pepin has said this for years on his TV shows – use everything, throw nothing out.  He even takes leftovers and turns them into new dishes.   Which of course is an excellent thought for all business professionals, especially as most businesses move into content creation (surely you’ve heard that everyone is a publisher, haven’t you!?).

Some of my clients fail to observe the immutable law that there is no garbage can on the internet.  While something shot for a TV commercial may not be usable in that 30-second format, the web has no such time constraints.  The speech given at a small conference to an interested audience of a hundred people can become a blog post and then summarized for inclusion in an email newsletter (talk about making something new out of the leftovers!). The audience of a hundred can now be thousands with very little extra effort.

Everything we create in our business lives has some value.  Perhaps that value isn’t to us in the moment but tossing anything of value out when there are so many ways to slice and dice it into something quite tasty is more than a waste.  License it out, recut it, format it for another channel.  The trash bin is the last place anything ought to go.  Agreed?

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December 18, 2013 · 11:08 am

Has Facebook Played Marketers For Suckers?

Facebook logo Español: Logotipo de Facebook Fr...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Nearly every client I have worked with in the last few years has had a presence on Facebook and the few exceptions have felt as if they should have one. As you can tell from a number of my posts here on the screed, I’m generally a skeptic of any medium over which a marketer doesn’t have control. Today’s news just reinforces that and makes me wonder if Facebook has been playing the marketing community for suckers. Let’s see what you think.

Facebook puts a fair amount of energy into recruiting brands and other businesses to set up pages.  Once those pages are established, anyone who does it right can tell you that supporting the pages is like the plant (Audrey II) in “Little Shop Of Horrors”: a constant refrain of “feed me.”  Where does that content reside?  Facebook.  Who controls how much of it your “fans” see?  Facebook.  In fact, Facebook themselves said a year ago that pages organically reach about 16% of their fans on average.  Yep – 84% of the people who like a page won’t generally see it unless they take a specific action to seek it out.  In their words: “Newsfeed uses an algorithm to rank content based upon the likely interest to a user to help deliver the most relevant and valuable content.”

That was then.  Facebook recently changed how that algorithm works (which is, obviously, unknown to the brands making investments in the platform and totally out of their control).  Here is one what study found:

Facebook’s December News Feed algorithm change is so far punishing brand pages, regardless of how interested fans are in that page’s content, according to a new analysis by Ignite Social Media. Ignite analysts reviewed 689 posts across 21 brand pages (all of significant size, across a variety of industries) and found that, in the week since December 1, organic reach and organic reach percentage have each declined by 44% on average, with some pages seeing declines as high as 88%. Only one page in the analysis had improved reach, which came in at 5.6%.

So the 16% has dropped to around 3%.  Of course, Facebook is more than happy to have brands pay to promote their content, the very content that keeps the platform interesting and vital.  Many studies have shown that organic content drives better results than paid yet organic is almost impossibly hard to get front and center.

My take is this.  Facebook may just be playing a con where the mark doesn’t want to give up the investment they’ve already made.  Even if unintentional (BIG stretch there!), they seem to be finding ways of restricting the reach of page fans by page owners as a way to force them to advertise.  These same owners already had to spend money with campaigns to build up fan bases.  Now you want the brands to pay again to reach an audience that has already said they want to receive page updates by “liking” the page.  Put yourself in the place of the social media person at a business who has to explain that one.

People are not the customer on Facebook.  Paying brands are.  As with any business, Facebook won’t be around for the long haul if their priorities are making a buck rather than serving their customers’ needs or by playing them for suckers.  That’s my take.  What’s yours?

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December 16, 2013 · 9:04 am

You Never Walk Alone

Here we are, winding down another work year, and I thought this might be a good time to look at some food for thought on leadership.  Why now?  Well, at this time of year there are frequently year-end reviews going on and employees hear from their leadership as to how the employee has performed in the manager’s estimation.  Much more rare is the manager hearing from the subordinate with respect to the manager’s performance.  I suspect if the worker bees could speak up, they’d talk a fair amount about how the boss lacks interpersonal skills and a sense of mistaking pushing their employees in the right direction for leading them.   It’s a critical distinction.

It really boils down to character.  Many people get promoted into leadership roles and forget that they didn’t get there by themselves.  In fact, they lose sight of the fact that the single greatest skill a boss can possess is, in my opinion, the ability to motivate others in a positive way.  Turns out it’s not jut my opinion:

The flaws most commonly tripping up our at-risk leaders were related to failures in establishing interpersonal relationships. Far less frequent were fatal flaws involved in leading change initiatives, driving for results, and — we’re happy to report — character. That might explain how they’d managed to get as far as they had. But past a certain point, individual ambition and results aren’t enough. As they climb higher in an organization and the ability to motivate others becomes far more important, poor interpersonal skills, indifference to other people’s development, and a belief that they no longer need to improve themselves come to haunt these less effective leaders the most.

That’s from the folks at Zenger Folkman who do leadership assessments and training.  The good news is that bad leaders can become good ones if they’re willing to accept that they have issues.  The biggest of these may be the premise that they are somehow isolated from the team – above them in more than rank.  Bad leaders confuse who they are with what they do and substitute a title for earning respect.  None of us walk alone in the world and especially not in the work world.  Only when we acknowledge that and learn to work with and through others do we reach our full potential.

Make sense?

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