Mozart and the Art of Content Marketing

I love the play and movie Amadeus. The portrayal of both the vulnerability yet precociousness of genius has always intrigued me, and also how it impacts on those less gifted but still creative.

My favourite scene is the one above. Everyone’s viewpoint is played out on a daily basis in our lives.

Who is His Excellency to question the creative process? The end product is exactly what the creator wants it to be, exactly what he hears in his head. The audience will have to accept it.
Why doesn’t Mozart accept constructive criticism? After all, without the receptive ‘ordinary ear’ of the audience his music will never gain its true reach.
The chance for mediocrity to triumph is to show those who are more gifted and creative to be somehow elitist and out of touch with the audience.

What about if Mozart was a content marketer and not a composer??!!

On Tuesday morning I will be taking my place on a keynote panel at Social Media World Forum to discuss Social Content Strategies. I’ll be leaving the cottage industry of recruitment and HR to debate with the great and good from Google, BskyB, Adobe, New Look and Brandwatch and we’ll be talking, amongst other things, about:

Why is content becoming king in social? Why should brands become content creators?
How good content strategies can re-humanise brands and develop emotional connections between content and the customer

I’ll be thinking about Mozart as I prepare…there are only so many pieces of content the human brain can assimilate in a day.

What do you think?

The Cult of #TruLondon

Last Thursday saw the curtain come down on TruLondon7 (actually it was 8 for me if you include TruNora) and from last week’s attendees it was probably only me, Bill and one or two other stalwarts that have been at every one.

Jobsite weren’t sponsoring this time so I was able to experience the event purely as an attendee and track leader for the first time in a couple of years. And I was also able to see it through the experiences of first time attendee colleagues from the wider Evenbase & DMGT Group like Clair Bush (Broadbean) and Bethan Davies (RMS).

This event seemed quieter than previous ones. I’ll be writing about the takeaways and learning points elsewhere, so here’s what I think about TruLondon itself and how it’s evolved…and where it is now. All views my own, obviously…

The conversations may not seem to change but the people having them do.

There seems to be a (mis)conception that an event like Tru needs to push the boundaries; that the conversation constantly needs to evolve. There were tweets on the timeline along the lines of ‘are they still talking about…’ and regular Tru advocate and track leader Steve Ward had blogged about his frustrations in this respect.

I think we expect too much. Sure, there were a number of new topics discussed but then several tracks last week did contain much of the usual content. A lot of the key recruitment themes that usually get debated at #Tru – candidate experience, social recruiting, social sourcing, should recruitment be part of HR – were out in force again, most of them with the same track leaders as before, but the participants had changed. Different people were having the conversation and new people were grasping these concepts for the first time.

And with different people then the conversation is never quite the same.

It’s social.

There are people that I only get to see at #Tru events, and there’s a strong social side to these gatherings. Whilst we may have online interactions and the odd catch up at other events, it’s TruLondon that brings a group of people together twice a year to share thoughts and ideas and to generally hang out and have a good time. They come from the US and Europe, and further afield. Last week gave me the opportunity to meet Paul Jacobs for the first time…all the way from New Zealand.

It provides business opportunities.

Some of the people I spoke to go to other Tru events. Whether it’s the Nordics or the Baltics, Europe or Asia, there are quite a few people to whom these events represent a chance to develop International contacts, gain knowledge of upcoming global trends and launches, and spread awareness of what they do. It’s developed a sub-industry of its own.

TruLondon is like an academy.

Maybe the greatest strength of TruLondon is to introduce attendees to the conversations that bounce around the intersection of social media, recruitment and HR, sometimes called the people space. As I mentioned earlier, there are many who come to these events for the first time and who leave energised by the ideas they hear and the potential and opportunities that they bring to their businesses.

The unconference format of conversation and sharing over presentation and demonstration enables them to learn from others’ experiences in a wholly different way. It’s more personal and more informal, with everyone helping and giving of their time. It’s like a launchpad for the journey into social business.

It can be random and disorganised, and that can get frustrating, but it’s also part of the charm…you never quite know where the next idea is going to come from.

You get out what you put in.

If you’re going in the hope of finding potential consulting gigs or job opportunities then you may well be disappointed. It’s a global community thing and that is probably the most important point. There are opportunities to be had – I’ve written before how most of the attendees at the first events now have jobs in this space, me included – but they come from being part of a wider network. There are always new people to meet, and old friends to talk to.

The twitter stream may seem quieter that previously, as newbies aren’t quite up to live tweeting yet and the old timers have tweeted much of it before, but this shouldn’t be mistaken for there being nothing to say.

Whilst many of us have ‘moved on’ in terms of what we do in terms of social business, we mustn’t lose sight of the fact that there are many who are just starting.

The conversation has a way to go yet.

The most serendipitous moment for me came during a track on video when this tweet popped into my timeline. It’s from a political tweeter, so completely unconnected with the TruLondon conversations, yet somehow sums up why these conversations will be continuing for some time yet…

Fluff and Nonsense

Fluffy

Many of you probably saw a post from Forbes last week about the 14 things successful people do at the weekend. A fluff piece if ever I saw one – you only have to look at the title to see that. But an OK fluff piece. A few contributors offer advice and it’s pulled together as a post.

I was amazed that they found 14, and thought they’d stretched it a bit with a few of them. The key points were to make time for friends and family, socialise, get exercise, take in some sport or culture, switch off from technology, relax etc. And to avoid chores (number 1 on my list every weekend). I’d had a fairly chilled weekend myself, a bit of a home alone one, and had managed to do pretty much all of those, and I didn’t really give it much thought beyond that.

When I wrote about lists a few months back I made mention of this type of content. It’s subjective, not to be taken too seriously and passes a few minutes. As someone who curates content for others I have learned that these fluff piece do seem to engage and to get people interacting – hard as it may be for the social HR/Recruitment commentariat to stomach, but some less social savvy followers enjoy it.

And so I shared the Forbes post on LinkedIn, not to everyone’s approval. The overall view was that the post was patronising, and we didn’t need Forbes to tell us how to spend the weekend. Which is true…except I’m not sure how many readers would have thought that the article was a checklist of things they ought to be doing.

As I said at the time of the HR Power Tweeters list furore, I think some are in danger of over intellectualising the thought processes behind this type of content. There’s a place for all of it – the navel gazing posts, the think piece posts, the humorous posts, the photo montage posts, the list posts…and the fluffy posts.

And, of course, even the cat photos… 😉

With This Policy, I Thee Wed…it’s the Valentine’s Day #HRCarnival

Valentine

It’s my honour (you’ve got a Brit this time so it’s my blog, my spelling I’m afraid) to host the HRCarnival in this week of love, champagne, chocolates and…pancakes! OK…Mardi Gras 🙂

I put a call out for love themed blogs, but in amongst the incurable romantics some of you HR people just can’t leave the business alone…so I’ve some proper work ones too!

And there’s also a final section from me.

So here goes…

Spreading the Love!

First off I’m extending a warm HR Carnival welcome to first time contributor Jane Watson, an HR Manager from Toronto whose Talent Vanguard blog is a personal favourite of mine. Jane and HR are in a long-term relationship, though here she tells us about one or two things that she wished she’d known at the start!

Next we have Emily Jasper from The Starr Conspiracy telling us about the things she loves and why it’s important that Work Loves The Things You Love too. Even the moose!

Ian Welsh will get the pulses racing with his blog Love in the Filing Room – a cheeky Valentines look at his first job. OK, it’s not quite 50 Shades of Admin…but then I didn’t want to have a parental guidance sticker on this post!

From HR with Love is Shauna Moerke’s post. And our loveable, huggable HR Minion (without whom these carnivals wouldn’t happen!) doesn’t disappoint in this call out for all HRs hopeless romantics 🙂

Nancy Saperstone from Insight Performance offers us 5 tips for increasing the love in your company. ‘Engaged employees are happy employees, and happy employees feel the LOVE!’

”Do what you love, and do it often” says Anna Lettink. She’s spreading the love and in this blog – This Is Your Life – is talking about love for our place of work.

Ben Eubanks’ Upstart HR blog is sending thanks to the great managers who make our day special. He still hearts his last boss and in A Tribute to Great Managers he tells us why.

Here’s Steve Browne, an HR blogger and engager par excellence, and who gives us Eat. Sleep. Do HR. – do you do HR or rock it? I think we all know which one Steve does!

At TribeHR they’re bringing the love in to HR. Feline love. There’s a great visual on their HR and Open Lines of Cat Stories blog too!

Business as usual!

I’m sure not every reader wants to get slushy and lovey dovey just because its V*l*nt*n*s Day, so they can just skim through the last section and get down to business… Continue reading “With This Policy, I Thee Wed…it’s the Valentine’s Day #HRCarnival” →

Time to End Talk of This Phoney War

And so the dreaded expression ‘War for Talent’ rears its head again on my twitter timeline. You know some of the context…

Salaries at some levels are increasing, it’s because there’s a war for talent
Companies can’t find the skills, it’ll create a war for talent

Never mind that there’s abundant talent out there waiting for an opportunity; a willing workforce only a few days or weeks’ training away from filling that ‘skills gap’.

I’ve given my opinion on the gratuitous use of this phrase before here and here but there seems to be a never-ending need to talk up a lack of creativity and vision in talent acquisition as a phoney war.

So I’ve turned to source material – the book that the original authors of the ‘War for Talent’ report published in 2001. In it they put forward the case that winning the war for talent isn’t about frenzied recruiting tactics but the principles of attracting, developing and retaining highly talented managers, which will be applied in ever evolving ways.

Next time you think of using the phrase read this and think again…

“Excellent talent management has become a crucial source of competitive advantage.

Companies that do a better job of attracting, developing, exciting and retaining their talent will gain more than their fair share of this critical and scarce resource and will boost their performance dramatically.

Our War for Talent research shows this. The companies that scored in the top quintile of our talent management index earned, on average, 22 percentage points higher return to shareholders than their industry peers. The companies that scored in the bottom quintile earned no more points than their peers.

Certainly, many factors other than talent management are driving return to shareholders but this data provides compelling evidence that better talent management results in better performance.

Clearly, having more capable people isn’t the only thing companies will have to do to win. They will also have to set high aspirations and enact the right strategies and performance initiatives. They will have to energise and align all their people so they deliver their best performance. But talented leaders are needed to make these other performance drivers happen.

As companies respond to the war for talent, they will develop more powerful and more sophisticated approaches to talent management. Over the next decade we believe talent management will advance as far as marketing did in the 1960s and quality did in the 1980s. Some companies will advance in building this capability; others will fall behind.”

It’s a mind-set not an act. It’s about creating a business that aspires to give the best a place to thrive and be happy. It’s not about throwing money at people and it shouldn’t be an excuse for a lack of training and up-skilling.

A recruitment campaign devoid of strategy, creativity and transparency isn’t a war. It’s a resounding defeat.

So, What Do You Do?

I have just returned following a few days away. A short break usually means some random conversations with fellow holidaymakers and travellers, and at some stage in each conversation there will be the inevitable question…

‘So what do you do?’

In days gone by a quick ‘I work in recruitment‘ or ‘I recruit HR and Marketing people‘ was usually enough to ensure a change of subject but over the last two years it’s been slightly different.

‘I work in digital marketing’ will often induce glazed eyes but sometimes I feel quite bold and fess up with ‘I’m social media manager for a large digital recruitment business’

The conversation will then go something like…

Them : What, you mean Twitter and that stuff?

Me : Yes. It’s a bit more than that (insert quick explanation about creating content, brand monitoring and community engagement)

Them : Don’t get the point of that Twitter stuff. Or Facebook. Just another fad if you ask me.

Me : We’ll, I think it’s probably gone beyond the fad stage (insert an overview of the numbers and reach of the platforms, the rise of social business and peer recommendations etc)

Them : Sell it to me then. Why should I use it?

Me : Well I don’t like ‘selling’ it to people, but what line of business did you say you were in (insert examples of how social media impacts their industry or job, find out hobbies and interests and attempt to show the value of connecting with like-minded people)

Them : Well I can see that you’re passionate about it but I’m not convinced. The wife does Facebook. She spends all her time looking at photos that her friends put on there. Who can be bothered I ask myself.

Me : (thinking that I should be talking to the wife) Think of it as communication…

You get the picture. The conversation can sometimes go on quite a while with me increasingly adopting an almost exasperatingly apologetic tone as if I’ve got an embarrassing addiction that I need to defend. (Maybe I do)

So tell me…how do you guys explain what you do…

A Bad Candidate Experience Can Come Back to Haunt You

I wasn’t at the RAD Awards 2013 on Thursday but I gather there was a moment when the host, comedian Jack Whitehall, gave a company the impression that they had won an award, only to cut short their joy by saying that they hadn’t. Someone else had won it.

The reason he gave for doing is that he had applied for a job at the first company he mentioned ( the one he teased in to thinking they had won before letting them know they hadn’t) but he never heard back. It was his moment to get back at them for being ignored.

When I was at CIPD12 I wrote about the findings of their Our Young People research which included:

“Young people remember how you treat them for their whole lives, as customers, consumers and employees. In particular many spoke of their frustrations at not getting any replies or acknowledgements to job applications…seeing it as rude and damaging to confidence and aspiration”

Jack Whitehall is 24. Clearly his bad experience stayed with him, even though he’s found success in another field.

Mind you, the link between candidate experience and consumer/customer perception is nothing new…we were talking about this nearly 3 years ago and will no doubt be talking about it for years to come.

If you’re ignoring candidates then expect more embarrassing Jack Whitehall moments until something changes.

HMV and the Inexorable Rise of Social and Digital

I suspect there will be few readers who haven’t heard about this afternoon’s Twitter jamming series of tweets from @HMVtweets under the #hmvXFactorFiring hashtag. The company eventually managed to access the account and delete the tweets, clearly oblivious to the fact that the damage had been done, the tweets screenshotted and shared, and everyone knew. And that you can delete tweets but hashtags often have a life of their own.

The tweets were sent by Poppy Rose, an intern. Here is her explanation – they came as a series of tweets but I’ve put them together in one piece…

“I would apologise for the #hmvXFactorFiring tweets but I felt like someone had to speak. As someone without a family to support/no mortgage I felt that I was the safest person to do so. Not to mention, I wanted to show the power of Social Media to those who refused to be educated

Just to set something straight, I did not ‘hijack’ the HMV twitter account. I actually assumed sole responsibility of Twitter & Facebook over two years ago, as an intern. When asked (this afternoon), I gladly provided the password to head office. I also set another member of staff up as a manager on Facebook, and removed myself from the admin list. I didn’t resist any requests to cooperate.

Since my internship started, I worked tirelessly to educate the business of the importance of Social Media – not as a short-term commercial tool, but as a tool to build and strengthen the customer relationship, and to gain invaluable real-time feedback from the consumers that have kept us going for over 91 years. While many colleagues understood and supported this, it was the more senior members of staff who never seemed to grasp its importance.

I hoped that today’s actions would finally show them the true power and importance of Social Media, and I hope they’re finally listening.

Now, I should probably go and hide for a while…Thank you so much for your supportive tweets! Much love to the HMV staff & customers”

Clearly it would seem that certain members of the management didn’t really get social. But then they didn’t really get digital either.

It was only a few weeks ago that this blog (written last August) from a former advertising advisor went viral too. After being warned, in 2002, that the company was facing threats from supermarket discounting, downloadable music and online retailers, the MD said…

“I accept that supermarkets are a thorn in our side but not for the serious music, games or film buyer and as for the other two, I don’t ever see them being a real threat, downloadable music is just a fad and people will always want the atmosphere and experience of a music store rather than online shopping”

It would be a shame if the narrative following today is about Twitter because it’s really about people having a voice – and it’s also about those who understand and embrace change and those who don’t.

Power to the people.

No More E-mail Any More at #HREvent13

It’s hardly a secret that I’m no big fan of e-mail…I’ve covered it in a few blogs. I find it unsociable, a conversation killer and too rooted in process and procedure.

No surprise then that an #HREvent13 session on transforming from an e-mail culture to one of social collaboration would get my attention. It was run by blueKiwi who are part of Atos – maybe not the easiest company to champion in these times but they are large so I was interested in how this transformation came about.

Simply put, it arose during a brainstorm on how to engage and empower the future workforce…a business world without e-mail was a subject up for discussion.

Here are some nuggets I picked up during the session…you may have seen one or two on my twitter fed:

“E-mail is annoying. It’s not a collaboration tool, it’s a communication tool and a task management tool”

“A move from e-mail to social collaboration is not just about systems & technology but really about organisation, culture & attitude as well”

“Social collaboration increases agility, productivity, speed & effectiveness through better talent mobilisation, knowledge sharing & communication”

“Next generation communication tools are necessary to attract & retain new generation talent not just in Europe but worldwide”

“E-mail based management style is creating distance between teams and management which diminishes engagement”

“Introduction of social collaboration flattens hierarchy. Everyone has the same voice. Management behaviours need to change”

OK, so it’s one business in a sea of electronic mail but here are my thoughts…

E-mail is not a natural communication medium to the next generation (apparently only 11% of 13-19 year olds use it to communicate with each other)
The future flexible, contract, project based, locationally free workforce need a collaboration tool not a communication tool
A move away from e-mail is cultural and psychological, rejection mainly a fear both of the unknown and of loss of control
Management mind-set and behaviours are the keys. Current e-mail usage is too centred on task assignation/management and control

Moving from e-mail to social collaboration requires significant change management – the presentation dealt with how this was being done. HR plays a key role, and the creation of a network of internal ambassadors is important.

Ultimately it’s also about showing employees how it will make their job easier, tasks quicker, productivity higher and allow quick access to essential information.

The end of e-mail? It’s all in the mind…

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Spreading the Love!

Business as usual!

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