11 September, 20185 September, 2018 Louise McGregor Buzzword

Ego Surfing

It’s a term coined almost twenty years ago, referring to the act of searching for your own name, pseudonym, or handle online to see what information appears.

We often place a negative association on displays of egos, and references to ego surfing on the internet are generally negative or sarcastic.

But ego surfing can be a smart thing to do.

Just as companies manage their online presence and their online reputation so should you, I think this should be an ongoing action, but I’m sure people think of it more when they’re job seeking.

If you’re a random, unfamous person like me, the occasional search on major search engines will be enough. Here’s how I do it;

Use a browser I don’t use very often
Log out of any accounts, particularly Google
Clear browsing history and cookies
Search for my name, and the name of the blogs I write
Search for the key topics I write about in the hope that my name/blog appears connected to those topics.

It’s important to use a “clean” browser to do this as Google will give you adjusted results based on your location, browsing history and login.

If you find content that shouldn’t be publicly available you have a few options to remove it; WikiHow provides a list of actions you can take. In some cases Google will remove content that they index if it could lead to identity theft (although they won’t remove your date of birth). In some situations EU residents can ask to be “forgotten” by Google when information is dated and has a negative reputational impact.

There are therefore two very good reasons for searching your own name; to check that your name isn’t associated with negative information and to make sure that the content you are publishing is building your reputation in your field of expertise.

The algorithms used by search engines prioritise content that is useful, rewarding content sources that provide useful content, and ranking content higher that is clicked on. Most people won’t click on “next page” of a google search so it’s really important that your content is on the first page of results, in fact there’s a joke in Search Engine Optimisation about hiding anything you don’t want anyone to find on page two of Google results.

If you find that your prized content is not ranking highly in search results the thing to do is create more quality, useful content, generate more links to that content and wait. If you’re a public figure and find you are turning up in search results connected to negative events, the way to change that is to start doing a lot of good things, media will create reports on the good things and that’s what will appear connected to your name in a very short time.

Algorithms can have inherent bias, but they mostly reward content that is useful, often clicked and newsworthy.

The sculpture in the header image of this post was set alight, and burnt in a matter of minutes. So much for an ego.

Image: Art: Ego | Michael & Sandy | CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

6 September, 20185 September, 2018 Louise McGregor Digital, future of work

Who’s paying for remote working

By 2020 72% of workers will be working remotely according to Microsoft, which explains the motivation for the partnership they’ve entered with Spaces to create a new workspace at Schiphol in their old office building. Many of us already do work remotely for at least part of our week. I can work from one of two offices or from home, I just need my laptop and wifi, in fact we have such good tools available that no-one would even know which location I was working from.

Remote working has been on the rise for at least the last decade, as tools have improved it’s even become a more productive option. But who is it good for?

Proponents of remote working schemes often promote the benefits to the employee, and they do exist.

saves on commuting time
more flexibility to manage personal appointments (eg deliveries)
fewer interruptions which boosts productivity
some report a boost to morale, or in HR terms, high engagement

There are also significant benefits to the employer,

a productivity boost
shrinking office space – for example companies calculate desk space at 0.7 desks per FTE

But work is social, and we’ve learnt how to work and manage teams in a social context, so what happens when some of that social context is removed? Is this whole hot desking thing really good for everyone? Not necessarily.

Anyone who has worked in a flex-desk office will recognise some of those issues, but smart design and good tools solves at least some of them. In my current company we tend to sit in teams of colleagues so finding each other isn’t hard.

So what about the real costs? Well there’s a financial saving for companies but are there extra costs for employees?

In a recent Buffer survey of people working remotely around the world employees bear the cost for internet connection and workspace if a co-working space is needed. So the financial burden of office space has been passed to employees, given that 28% of the respondents report earning less than $25,000 per annum this seems exploitative.

If we’re all working remotely when will companies recognise this cost to employees and start finding ways to compensate? Perhaps that will become the deciding factor for remote workers looking for a new job. After all if location isn’t a factor in a job search we can be hired by anyone, anywhere.

Image : money via pixabay

30 August, 201826 August, 2018 Louise McGregor Communication, social media

Building a Content Calendar

Using social media creates a content monster that needs to be fed. In most organisations a lot of thought and planning goes into the concept, design and development of content. Today’s post is a framework for building that content plan. I am focusing on social media, but the principles of building this plan work for other types of content.

Think about your content in terms of layers.

Content can be broken out into three types; evergreen, events and spontaneous. Each requires a different approach but when used together will increase the impact of your social media presence.

Evergreen Content

Sometimes also called drumbeat content, evergreen content can be planned and developed ahead of publishing.

Use dates that are important in your industry

Think more broadly than company specific dates. For example Philips, manufacturer of X-ray machines, posts on Marie Curie’s birthday.

Build out from campaigns and events

If you’re running a campaign on a specific product build brand content that supports your campaign message. For example, if a bank is running a campaign around savings products then the brand content could include articles on the psychology of saving.

Build a theme

Even if there is no specific date to connect it to you can build content around a theme, for example designate May as “Internet of Things” month and produce content around the trends, technology and developments in this field, of course you can connect this content to your own connected products,

Build a series

Use a specific rhythm to activate one idea. For example there’s a “Meatless Monday” trend in certain healthy circles if you’re a food company you could use this and promote vegetarian menus every Monday. Alternatively use a series of longer articles to go into depth on a specific area of your company’s expertise.

* To make this work

Research relevant dates for you and determine which themes/ series you want to build on.
Develop quality content, which means spending on design, photography, writing or filming the content you need.
Don’t be afraid to re-use this content, either posting highlights onto twitter/facebook, or repurposing it for other platforms.
Keep cultural differences in mind, not everyone celebrates the same thing, in the same way, or even on the same date. (Mother’s day is widely celebrated – but not on the same date).

Events

There are already a number dates to use on social media; those company announcements, conferences, events and campaigns that your company attends or produces.

Product launches are known months, or even years in advance, adding brand content to support the launch can increase the impact of the campaign.

Company leaders attend and speak at events throughout the year, decide which of these would be of more general interest, take any “infographic” or suitable images from presentations and re-use them on social media.

* To make this work

Add the known events and campaigns to your calendar, include the event/campaign contact person.
Work with the event/campaign lead to develop content that supports their plans.
Use a simple hashtag for your own event/campaign and encourage a wider audience to publish under it.

Spontaneous

Your company wins an award, there’s the announcement of a merger (or divestment), you’re finally in the ranking you’ve been working towards, you hear of an significant date that matches your company’s portfolio – on the date itself. Every content team I’ve ever worked with has “last minute” content needs. So while I’m a big fan of planning ahead you also need a little flexibility to take advantage of these opportunities.

* To make this work

Prepare likely potential images for your asset library, eg relating to awards ahead of time. The more diverse your asset library is the more likely you are to have a suitable image to hand.
Use your social listening tools to monitor awards in your industry, and watch for the announcement of relevant rankings.
Maintain good contact with the colleagues who handle last minute announcements. Explain to them that you don’t need to know the content of the announcement which may be confidential, but if you know the timing and the sort of content they’ll need you can work with that. Encourage their input into the asset library to build relevant assets.

Putting the three layers together we can see that the impact of your content, whether measured in exposure or share of voice, increase when the layers are combined.

Planning Ahead

All three forms of what does a content calendar need good planning to be successful, but how far ahead to you have to plan?

The honest answer is “it depends”.

For this blog I have a plan that’s about 2 months ahead, with a content deadline of about a week before publication. But that timing needs to change if you’re collaborating on content with a team or you have approval steps needed. Large organisations are more likely to have deadlines further ahead of publication and the plan for content themes is probably running 6-12 months ahead. Making that “Spontaneous” category harder more important in order to stay relevant.

Tools

I use a google calendar, I can look at anywhere, on any device, I can add assets and links as I go. But my blog drafts are written directly into wordpress (not best practice). That works for a one person company and would probably scale up to a small team. For large companies there is an amazing array of sophisticated tools on the market. They enable planning and collaborative development of content, publication, sharing/editing of posts and assets, and reporting on content performance.

None of this is that hard to work out, but maintaining quality content requires a rare combination of creativity and discipline, with a dash of flexibility to take advantage of those out of the blue opportunities.

Image: Desktop via Pixabay

28 August, 201826 August, 2018 Louise McGregor Scam File

Sextortion

I got a slightly panicked message from a friend recently. There was an email, mentioning porn use and a demand for $1900 to be sent to a bitcoin address. “I don’t have bitcoin” wailed my friend.

I asked for screen shots of the email. It’s full of technical detail about malware and screen views that is just plausible enough to be concerning. The threat is to release evidence of your activity on porn site via a video with a two camera view – one a screen capture and one a webcam – to all your Facebook and email contacts unless you pay within one day. My friend was worried.

After looking at the images of the email I answered “Total Scam”.

The combination of the high urgency and the vagueness of the actual “misdemeanor” captured made me suspicious and a quick search of a few phrases from the email showed that others had received the same message with the same demand. It’s cleverly crafted to trigger fear and shame – and then you’re very likely to pay up. Classic social engineering.

It’s a case of “sextortion“, using your sexual activity to bribe you.

In this case the sender knew my friend’s email address and password, the email address contained my friend’s name so the email looked credible. However there have been some massive data breaches of legitimate sites; Linkedin, Amazon, Facebook, Sony. The data now for sale to criminals includes email addresses and matching passwords. This means that the email sender did no research, just parsed the email address into name and fired off an email, he’s relying on a percentage of recipients will have used a porn site recently. (PornHub releases their statistics annually, as reported here by Forbes, it was 81 million views per day on their site in 2017)

So while this makes the scam email appear more credible it’s probably due to a data breach rather than any sophisticated hack.

Here are the clues that an email is dodgy

somethings unspecific
high urgency, threat
stuff you wouldn’t want to discuss with anyone
the amount is less than a lawyer
the text will be reused in other scams or come up in a discussion online (google the text)

So most of us live where porn is legal, but most visitors of porn sites don’t want that discussion with our friends/parents/partners or colleagues. (Fair warning to all friends, family, colleagues and random strangers: I REALLY don’t want any discussion of your porn habits).

Here’s what you can do to protect yourself:

Use a separate email address that does not include your name for any “naughty” sites. By naughty I mean stuff that might be legal but embarrassing.
Use different passwords for everything. This might have come from an old old Linkedin breach. The list of passwords and email addresses discovered in the security breach is then sold online and cyber criminals will then try the combination on other sites, or use the address to attempt to extort money from you
When you hear of a data breach on a site you use change that password immediately
Keep track of your passwords in a list somewhere as well as saving them in your browser, it’s too hard to remember 100 passwords, so write them down, just don’t tape the list to the your laptop bag.
Private browsing, here’s how to do that on firefox or chrome
You can report stuff to the local police or cybercrime unit, realistically there isn’t much they can do, chances are the sender of the email is in another country.

My friend didn’t pay, it’s been a couple of weeks now and there’s no sign of an email from the scam artist, and I am a friend of theirs on Facebook.

Image: Butt via pixabay

11 July, 201810 July, 2018 Louise McGregor HR

T-Shaped Career

I’ve been asked many times whether I’m a generalist or a specialist, and I’ve always struggled to put my self on one side or the other of the divide. Turns out there is a way to describe someone who has elements of both in their career.

T-shaped. The stem of the T applies to the specialist part of your career: your field of expertise or the subject you can go deep on. For me that’s digital. The top of the T applies to the more generalist part of your career, the areas across which you have some knowledge and can collaborate on, often with more of an emphasis on the soft skills.

In my case I know something about, and have worked on projects in, branding, design, marketing communications, human resources and content creation. Most often these projects have had a digital dimension, although I worked on a marketing campaign for Schiphol airport many years ago that was distinctly not digital. (But included a visit to the air-side of Schiphol without buying a ticket which was cool). So the top of my T is communications.

It occurred to me the same pattern exists in relation to other fields. Someone might be interested in sports generally but fanatical about football, another person may love art, but have significant expertise in a single period of art or focus on one medium. Even social justice issues might land the same pattern. If you are against one form of justice then you are against all forms of injustice. That’s the top of the T, but there’s very likely a particular cause that you go deep on: in my darker moments I suspect it’s whatever part of your identity is most likely to get you killed.

But thinking of my career as T-shaped helped me rethink where to focus a recent job search and where I want to spend time developing new skills. It’s also changed how I look at the careers of others, going beyond the title and the narrow skills list to think about cross over skills for teams and ongoing work. It’s been a liberating way to think about careers, more holistic than box-ticking.

What’s in your T?

Image: Doors choice | via pixabay

12 June, 201811 June, 2018 Louise McGregor Buzzword

Breaking Down Silos

The metaphorical silos in a company can be seen as representing boundaries put up by an organisation to keep a group of people focused on accomplishing their goals, and preventing interference with progress by outsiders, so there’s a positive purpose.

But we talk about breaking down silos because when silos are rigidly maintained within a company it creates problems. Silos form in large companies to support the hierarchical structure of the company. It rests on an old model of thinking about work; that managers know what needs to be done and are responsible for directing all those under their responsibility to complete that work.

For me silos are are an outcome of an overly hierarchical company culture, one where people are unwilling to share knowledge, solve problems together or co-operate in any way. The business directory defines silo mentality as;

a mindset present when certain departments or sectors do not wish to share information with others in the same company. This type of mentality will reduce efficiency in the overall operation, reduce morale, and may contribute to the demise of a productive company culture.

Visible signs that your organisation is in silos;

people talk about “us” and “them” meaning different departments within your company
you need agreement from management of two departments to get co-operation from another department
you need permission from a manager to approach someone in another department
departments in your company store their information online in team sites or shared drives that are only accessible for department members
you do have lunch with colleagues, but only ever from your own department
your personnel directory is searchable by name, or department, but not by expertise
when you look for specialist expertise, for example a Spanish-speaking tax expert with experience in Latin America, you start by emailing someone who speaks Spanish

Yes there is a need to focus on the work, and that may mean that a project team shuts itself off from the organisation in some way. Yes in regulated industries there may be a need to put boundaries between certain parts of the organisation; the term used for this in banking in Chinese walls. In agencies temporary boundaries are often put in place around a project to prevent sharing of client information.

In general I wouldn’t consider anything temporary as a silo; just as you don’t move a grain silo easily, silos within companies take time to be established. I agree that there are regulatory boundaries to be considered, and while I’m probably guilty of understating those in my enthusiasm for improving knowledge sharing across a company, I’m certainly not thinking of them when I call for us to “break down the silos”.

I watched a TED video that talked about what might be one of the greatest silo breakdowns ever, and it comes from the US military. General Stanley McChrystal states;

The fact that I know something has zero value if I’m not the person who can actually make something better because of it.

He explains that it’s almost impossible to know who is the best person to use each piece of information, and that the army therefore moved from a “tell only who needs to know” to “we need to tell, and tell them as quickly as we can“.

It’s this philosophical shift I am referring to when I talk about breaking down the silos.

In some companies the need is urgent, and in those cases the phrase needs to be upgraded to “tearing down the silos”.

7 June, 20181 June, 2018 Louise McGregor Buzzword

Moving the Needle

I was reading an article on Wal-Mart’s e-commerce business recently and I came across the term “to move the needle”. Since I spend more time sewing on buttons than I do driving cars at the moment the first mental picture I had was troubling. Turns out not that needle.

The expression refers to moving the needle on some instrument of measurement such as a car speedometer, possibly more specifically the analogue Vu meter used in audio recording. In a more abstract form asking whether something “moved the needle” is just asking whether there was a noticeable improvement in the results.

In the Wal-Mart article they were referring to the e-commerce side of sales, which at 0.3% of US sales (by value) is barely impacting the billions in total sales. So although sales are at over $200 million it’s not yet moving the needle. I may not be the only one unfamiliar with the term, the headline reads “Wal-Mart’s e-commerce business: Can it move the needle, be material?” I’m pretty sure those last two words have been added since I first saw the article.

In another take on moving the needle, Lisa Earle McLeod applies the term to personal changes, and shows how making small, consistent changes is significant. She says “You don’t accomplish big things overnight; you move the needle every day.” Exactly.

What are you doing to move the needle today?

Image; Pixabay

5 June, 20182 June, 2018 Louise McGregor Customers, Digital

GDPR – Privacy Data in the EU

If you’re in the EU you will have been bombarded with messages in the last few weeks, emails from everything you’ve ever subscribed to, forced logged out of apps, and screeds of new terms and conditions to read. It’s all because of GDPR, the European General Data Protection Regulation.

The GDPR is a new law on data privacy in the EU and it relates to companies, individuals and organisations processing personal data for commercial use. It’s meant a lot of work over the last 3 years for anyone working in digital and a lot of lawyers. It grants citizens very specific rights over their personal data, here’s the list of rights from the EU official site:

The responsibility rests with companies to obtain clear consent from you, and you must opt in to receive information from them, the law states that “pre-ticked boxes are not considered to be valid consent under GDPR”. The law also recognises that consent is not always possible, for example an employee cannot consent to be supervised by CCTV for a productivity issue – since there is a power imbalance between the employer and the employee. The penalties for companies are steep, up to €20 million, or 4% of the worldwide annual revenue of the prior financial year, whichever is higher. No wonder companies are working hard to set up good privacy systems.

As an individual, a consumer and an employee I like the principles of the law. I’m glad to see a comprehensive overall of how our data is used, and that the EU is using its power to counteract the power behind US tech giants who haven’t taken as much care of my data as I’d like. But oh boy it’s exhausting to read everyone’s terms and conditions and sort out what I’m going to agree to. And not all companies present it in the easiest way. Here’s the notification on data sharing from FastCompany

Seems OK right?

That’s until you scroll and find out that there are 53 companies other than Fast Company who get access to your data, and they get your data not just from Fast Company but also from other sites which use these companies – that’s code for tracking cookies being set on your computer so they know which site you use. I work in digital and I have heard of about 8 of these. There’s no way anyone has time to look through the conditions of all these sites and evaluate what is being done with the data.

Some companies weren’t able to make their sites GDRP compliant in the two years since the law was passed and I got this message

Me: “You promise??!!”

19 May, 20184 May, 2018 Louise McGregor Buzzword, Communication

Win-Win Situation

We’re often encouraged to look for the “win-win” outcome, or a situation will be described as “win-win”. Generally it’s used to point teams to look for outcomes where all parties will benefit.

It’s common parlance now but it comes from game theory, specifically from “non-zero-sum” theory. That is a game some outcomes have a total greater or less than zero, best illustrated by the prisoners dilemma.

Imagine that two prisoners can either betray the other or remain silent with the following potential outcomes.

Rationally prisoners will betray, since that gives them the best outcome when they don’t know how the other will behave. Which gives you an indication of how hard it is to get to a win-win situation between two parties with competing interests.

The above table becomes abstracted and generalised to the following;

In addition the win-win should be a new solution that delivers positive outcomes to both parties, in practice a compromise can be called a win-win when it delivers less to each party and is in fact a lose-lose, but with both parties losing less than in a dual defect situation. Given that there is a rational advantage in defecting, and often in defecting early, it can take tricky negotiation to get both parties to co-operate.

Image: Adventure via Pixabay | CC0

17 April, 201816 April, 2018 Louise McGregor Buzzword

Hotwash

This came up on a powerpoint slide of the day’s agenda “4 – 5 pm Hotwash”.

Evidently it means immediate review, according to Word Detective it comes from the US Army where it describes the debrief that occurs immediately after a mission or patrol, possibly from the literal talking while showering, more likely from the practice soldiers have of dousing their weapons in hot water after an exercise.

I’d never seen it before, and nor had any other colleagues in the room. So I’ve asked people what it makes them think of, most people said either laundry or hot tubs (which might say more about them than the subject). But the most descriptive was “hotwash sounds like a painful spa treatment involving large muscular women twisting your body in weird ways”.

In this case it was referring to the last hour of an assessment day, when all teams will discuss their assessments and we’ll check any major inconsistencies.

If I’d been writing the agenda I would have put “4 – 5 pm Review Assessments”, but then, I’m not a management consultant.

Image: Weekly Laundry | Stefan | CC BY-NC-SA 2.0