Business Insight Zone

Here are the top five posts, ranked by page views, published on this blog in June.

1. Dell’s big Twitter returns: let’s not break out the champagne just yet.
2. eMusic, Sony, and the future of the music business.
3. A thesis about stress in the workplace.
4. Using Hoover’s in your job search — for free.
5. E-mail: the root of all evil?

Note, though, that all of these were beaten by a post that went up at the end of May: “Social media and the acid-bath of ROI.”

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Image by woodley wonderworks.

This morning I made the early drive from Austin to Waco to speak at the Waco Social Media Breakfast. It was a great, friendly crowd, and we enjoyed excellent food at the Cafe Cappuccino.

My friend Bryan Person, who brought the Social Media Breakfast concept with him last year when he moved from Boston to Austin, wrangled the technical details to live-stream the session. Here’s the video (52 minutes’ worth!) of my talk:

If 52 minutes is too much of a commitment, you might prefer the five-minute audio I did with Bryan after the session for his daily podcast series. Here it is:

I hope I’m starting to get the hang of this — this is my third time to speak at an SMB. If you like, you can read writeups of my Austin and San Antonio talks in the archives.

Life is so much easier when smart people say what you’ve been wanting to say. In this case, the smart person is David B. Thomas of SAS, who takes up the defense of “Social Media Manager” as a job title.

Why I am right and Chris Brogan is wrong.
(At least about this one thing.)

. . .

Right now my title might sound odd to people on the cutting edge, but it sounds pretty forward-looking to the people I most need to influence. By the time it starts sounding odd to them, I’ll probably be out of business cards anyway. Plus, I’ve been saying since before I got the job that if I do it right, I will eventually make my current position irrelevant.

A few weeks ago — after returning from Chris Brogan’s Inbound Marketing Summit, as it happens — I took the picture at the top of this post. Chris and I are friends, and I certainly understand and respect his take on “Social Media Manager,” so I thought it was funny that I wore that badge at his conference.

Anyway, I considered putting the photo to use in a post of my own on the subject, but let the idea slide once other things intervened. Now I’m glad that Dave (who, by the way, has a delightfully scorching dry wit in person) has laid out the case so clearly.

I’m doing a fair bit of traveling over the next couple of weeks, which means:

1. Any comments that land in the moderating queue (typically because you’ve never commented here before) may take longer than usual to process.
2. I probably won’t be replying to your comments as quickly as usual.

Please let this not deter you from rampant, trenchant commenting!

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Photo by Robert S. Donovan, used under a Creative Commons license.

Debated with myself whether to write about this, but then my friend Gini Dietrich said it better than I could have — and from the perspective of a P.R. pro:

Should Apple Have Disclosed Jobs’s Liver Transplant?

. . . I disagree that Apple and its board think Jobs’s health is a private matter. He has made himself a public figure synonymous with the brand; he is the face of the company. Many believe his health is instrumental in the stock performance of the company. While the U.S. has strict medical privacy laws, Jobs’s role as the company’s visionary trumps his right to privacy.

What she said — Apple could have done this much better.

Related story on this topic:

• USA Today: Jobs’ liver transplant shows money can make a difference

And three more posts from the archives:

• Steve Jobs’s health: a brief note. (28 July 2008)
• Banking on the founder’s mojo.
• Steve Jobs, rock star.

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We talked about it earlier this week, and sure enough the dominoes have started falling in the IPO market. Early returns:

• Chemspec International Limited: Ehh.
• Duoyuan Global Water Inc.: Offered at $16/share, opened at $22.65, closed its first day of trading at $21.87. Nice work when you can get it.
• Medidata Solutions, Inc.: Offered at $14, opened at $18, but tapered off into the mid-$16 range. Not bad.

Meanwhile, some in the IPO business are predicting better times ahead. Case in point:

IPO Comeback Starting Now, Cleantech Investors Say

Mind you, in this case “ahead” means “in the next 12 months” rather than “really soon.” My hunch is that the next 12 months is a good range of time to be talking about for a real, steady, sustained flow of IPOs. I think there’s still too much volatility and uncertainty in the markets to expect a real surge within the next few months. We’ll see.

John Wilshire, writing at Feeding the Puppy, offers an excellent overview of the marketing appeal of social media:

Dell and Twitter; thousands not millions

I encourage you to read the whole piece, not least for its engaging graphics. The upshot of it is that marketers used to target millions of potential customers/consumers to reach the thousands who would actually be interested and consider buying. But social media channels allow a radically different approach:

. . . the cost of communication, sharing, and conversation is now so low that companies (and their agencies) have available to them the approach that they arguably would have wanted in the first place. Just talk to the thousands.

Wilshire focuses on the example of Dell’s @delloutlet account on Twitter, which I discussed at length last week. He’s particularly acute in discussing (1) the low cost of time and effort to make @delloutlet a success, and (2) the longer timeframe you have to give to social media as you build up a genuine audience.

The whole piece is well worth a read.

A while back I got into a discussion with Tom Peters over Carly Fiorina’s role in reshaping Hewlett-Packard. He held that Mark Hurd’s success in improving HP’s operations would have been impossible without the groundwork that Fiorina laid to remake the company’s culture — and to give HP enough scale, through its acquisition of Compaq, to go toe-to-toe with both Dell and IBM.

Peters liked my eventual formulation of Fiorina as “Leader A,” the one who starts the revolution, and Hurd as “Leader B,” the one who implements the needed changes that build out and sustain that revolution.

Now I’m wondering if something similar has happened at Ford. Consider this excerpt from a comment Wally Bock left the other day:

[Mulally] benefitted from being hired by Bill Ford after Ford had done the CEO job for a while. Both parts of that are important. Bill Ford, as a Ford and key stockholder, had a leverage that no “hired hand” could ever have, inside the company, inside the family, and inside the board room. But it’s also significant that he had tried on the CEO job and had an idea of both how tough it was and what was needed. A year earlier, I’m not sure he’d have made as good a decision.

What do you think? What other examples of this phenomenon come to mind?

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Related:

• Ford’s Sustainability Focus.
• Would you give up scale for quality?
• Mark Hurd’s 3-minute management clinic.

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Image source.

Hair-Splitting Doesn’t Make for Happy Employees

At his excellent Gruntled Employees blog, Jay Shepherd wrote a good post on “Nickel-and-diming your employees.” He lays out an example of a company with pointlessly nitpicky rules about when its traveling salespeople can buy meals on the company tab. Then he appeals for common sense in the writing and application of rules like this. Here’s the kicker:

Employers: resist the urge to have policies like these. Treat your employees like adults. If they spend unreasonable amounts on meals or other expenses, talk to them about it. If it’s a persistent problem with a particular employee who’s taking advantage of the company, fire that employee. But don’t assume that all your employees are trying to bilk the company for an extra airport donut.

Amen. Compliance and cost control are good things, as I remind myself every time I use D&B’s precise-but-fair system for filing expense reports. You don’t want people stepping out of bounds with their expense accounts or anything else. But Shepherd is exactly right here, and to my mind what he’s really calling for is . . . management.

When in Doubt, Write a New Rule? No.

I’ve worked in organizations where the infractions of one person, or a handful, were answered not by individual correction, but by the bureaucratic institution of new rules. Because one person was clueless, or selfish, or whatever, everyone had to jump some new hurdle. And honestly, I’ve never even had it that bad — the horror stories from some of my friends would make you grind your teeth.

By contrast, I’ve also had great managers who took it upon themselves to offer correction at the point of need.

• Somebody’s coming in late and taking too many smoke breaks? Talk to that person and lay out a better schedule for them.
• Somebody’s making reams of photocopies for the Cub Scout pack on company equipment? Create a non-threatening opportunity to talk it over one-on-one, explain why it’s a problem, and set clear expectations for the future.
• Somebody’s demeanor in meetings stifles discussion and wins them enemies? It’s an opportunity for pointed coaching, not aversion.

One of the best conversations I ever had with a manager came many years ago. He laid out my performance, starting with the good things, then pointed out some aspects that were lacking, and made the connection between those aspects and the way bonuses were calculated. Then he said something like, “We love what you’re doing in a lot of ways, but X and Y cost you money this year.” He said it in the tone of a friend offering candid advice to a friend; it was clear he said it because he would rather I did succeed. It was some of the best feedback I ever got.

That’s what managers — or the good ones, anyway — do.

Simple, eh?

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Photo by Traci Todd, used under a Creative Commons license.

Goldman’s tower of finance in Jersey City.

What financial crisis?

The Guardian gives the skinny on Goldman Sachs:

Goldman to make record bonus payout

Staff at Goldman Sachs staff can look forward to the biggest bonus payouts in the firm’s 140-year history after a spectacular first half of the year, sparking concern that the big investment banks which survived the credit crunch will derail financial regulation reforms.

A lack of competition and a surge in revenues from trading foreign currency, bonds and fixed-income products has sent profits at Goldman Sachs soaring, according to insiders at the firm. [ . . . ]

(Hat tip: the Wall Street Journal’s indispensable MarketBeat blog.)

• Item: Looks like Warren Buffett made a really good investment in Goldman last year.
• Item: It’s not just Goldman that’s doing so well. According to the Guardian piece, Barclays, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley are also reaping major rewards.
• Item: Just like two years ago, “there sits Goldman Sachs, immaculate in a tailored suit, cool as the other side of the pillow, basking in the glow of a quarter in which earnings rose [a ton] from the same period a year ago.”

The more things change, the more some things stay the same.

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Related:

• Must-read: Michael Lewis on the Meltdown
• Keep your powder dry in business.
• Good context on Goldman Sachs.
• Company of the Day [21 September 2007]: Goldman Sachs.

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Photo by Aby Jose, used under a Creative Commons license.