Category: Work

The Pursuit of Happiness

Tara Hunt is someone thinking creatively about marketing and other business topics, and what I appreciate about her is that she isn’t afraid to relate the world of business to the world of the personal. I loved her recent blog entry Happiness as Core to Your Business Model because it again effortlessly aligns the goals of individuals with the goals of business. She relates the four elements of happiness as defined by the American Psychological Association (autonomy, competence, relatedness, and self-esteem) to the three core concepts of Web 2.0. (openness, collaboration and community). I think it makes sense. I think everyone would like to work at a place where the business goal was to bring happiness to others.

In fact, I may have taken my last job for that reason. I felt good about selling wine because of the experiences I was offering. Family gatherings, social events, parties; all are places where people feel connected to each other and where the pleasure of enjoying our product would enhance (in most cases) people’s good feelings. Of course, I don’t think my employers thought about this directly, but it was a positive that 95% of the people who worked for us were wine lovers (in one or two cases, perhaps a little too enthusiastic in their appreciation) and one of the perks of the job was meeting people at events and enjoying our products at our own company parties.

The barriers, of course, were competence and self-esteem. The world of wine can still seem stuffy and class-conscious and there are enough wine snobs around to make even the most eager student feel stupid. I think this is why so many wine web communities sprouted around the same time. WineLog and Cork’d are great ways to share your drinking experiences with others, and Gary Vaynerchuk’s Wine Library TV video blog makes learning about wine fun.

Now, how do I begin to apply some of these concepts to the new world of accounting I find myself in? 😉

Job Description 2.0

David Meerman Scott, author of The New Rules of Marketing and PR, has an interesting blog entry about what a job description for a marketing or public relations practitioner should sound like in this new age of social media. I think the main quality required is curiosity:

You’re curious about new things and always try stuff like Skype, Second Life, Twitter, Ryze, XING, digg, and reddit early.

People who are willing to try new things and are not afraid of a little dabbling should be getting work. Perhaps this is what Joe Thornley was getting at in his assertion that he won’t hire people who don’t blog. I reacted strongly to that statement, but I can definitely see where he and others like him are coming from. They want people who are using the tools already, who don’t have to be taught to use them. But that’s where the educators can seem just a little off base. You can’t teach curiosity, or passion. Joe feels he can figure out who someone is from reading their blog and following their online trail, and he’s right. But should educators be counseling people to create these things in the first place? I mean, if a 50 year old professor has to tell a 20 year old student about new technologies on the web, then something feels amiss.

Is Blogging Now A Career Move?

It started with a well-meaning post from Joe Thornley, of Thornley-Fallis Public Relations, one of the savviest PR companies around. Their embrace of social media cheers me up immensely, and Joe writes interestingly and often about how blogging and other social media tools can be used as part of an overall public relations strategy. But when he called blogging an essential for new PR practitioners, a red flag went up for me. He advises students:

I do not hire entry level people without looking at their blog, following their twitter stream and checking their Facebook presence. I want a sense of who they are over time, not just when they are in my office. I want to know what they think on the issues they care about and how they express themselves. I want to see whether and how they connect with others. And I can find out all those things from their social media presence.

It’s not really Joe’s post specifically that bothered me. It’s how it will be interpreted by students eager to line up that first job. I’ve already seen what I call “the rise of the pundit” drain all the personality out of a huge part of the blogosphere. Eager to show how much we know, many of us now use our blogs as soapboxes, hoping to be noticed and hired. Maybe I’m just a crotchety old blogger, but I miss the days when blogs were an extension of a person’s whole life, not just of their job.

In fact, the advice Thornley gives to these students makes me afraid that their “blogs” will be nothing more than collections of sycophantic links to the people they want to notice them, or empty boosterism of a career they’ve yet to fully try on. When the doubts come, and the disappointment, and they finally have something interesting to say, will they be afraid to say it on their blogs?

I’m rehashing a lot of what I said in my comment over on Joe’s site, but one thing I want to repeat is that it would be a real shame if the blog became just an extension of the resumé.

I’ve had a few wobbles lately about crossing the boundary here and talking about work, but ultimately, I want this space to be a true representation of what I am thinking about and struggling with over time. If I was beginning my blog in 2008 instead of way back in 2000, I don’t know if I’d be able to hold that conviction with any confidence. And I find that sad.

Rebecca Blood, pioneer weblog historian, wrote way back in 2000 in Weblogs: A History and Perspective:

As corporate interests exert tighter and tighter control over information and even art, critical evaluation is more essential than ever. As advertisements creep onto banana peels, attach themselves to paper cup sleeves, and interrupt our ATM transactions, we urgently need to cultivate forms of self-expression in order to counteract our self-defensive numbness and remember what it is to be human. We are being pummeled by a deluge of data and unless we create time and spaces in which to reflect, we will be left with only our reactions. I strongly believe in the power of weblogs to transform both writers and readers from “audience” to “public” and from “consumer” to “creator.” Weblogs are no panacea for the crippling effects of a media-saturated culture, but I believe they are one antidote.

It’s getting harder to fly that idealistic flag, but I’m not ready to give up yet. The question is, how do we teach students to be fearless when they are being taught to blog in college to make them better employees?

Word of Mouth is Real

Just browsing around this morning, I came across a great example of word of mouth marketing. Michael McDerment is a successful Toronto entrepreneur behind the innovative FreshBooks.com online invoicing service. In a 2005 entry on his own blog, he recommends a company called Landmark Merchant Solutions as a “great business partner” for small companies looking for payment gateway services. In the comments to that entry, there is a link to a bulletin board where an amazing conversation has unfolded. Apparently, Landmark isn’t such a great business partner after all.

Shady business practices, drug abuse, sexual harassment, lawsuits. And I’m only about a quarter way down the page. The thread starter has been participating in this conversation for more than three years now. Word of mouth is real.

Transparency, Not Spin

I’ve been doing some career soul-searching again lately. Even though I’ve been at my current job less than six months, I’m becoming restless and bored. It was definitely time for a change when I decided to take this position, and I’m certainly not complaining about the compensation or benefits. It’s just that I’m not sure I feel right for the job. Strangely, I feel both too stupid and too smart for what I’m doing. Too stupid because I know little about the world of accounting and “professional services,” and too smart because I feel my job function is too narrow and leaves me waiting for other people’s input far too much of the time.

As I look back over my resume’s alarming zigs and zags, I have to ask myself why I’ve kept moving around. It’s not like I’ve been on any kind of direct career “path,” with each move taking me closer to some working nirvana. Some jobs I took for money, some for love, but all felt constricting sooner or later. I often joke (half-seriously) that I’m a profoundly lazy man. But I think I’m just bored by my opportunities. Pardon the boasting, but I was once considered a “gifted” student. I skipped a grade and would have skipped another had my parents allowed it. I was a good student in university who gave up the idea of grad school for teachers’ college. When no job opportunities came my way there, I took the first well-paying job that came my way, in social work. But I panicked about being on a very limiting career path and jumped ship to work in, gasp, retail sales. The money was great, the prospects dismal. Then a brief sojourn as a web designer, until the first dot.com bubble burst. Back to sales. Then back to web design for a wine importing firm. Lots of freedom there, and I learned a lot about marketing. But again, a very limited career path. And working in a highly regulated market was tough, as was working for a small business. So now, a jump to a huge corporate firm, to be a “writer” and a “web producer.”

It sounded very promising six months ago. A great opportunity with a large company. Great salary and benefits. But I feel lost most days. My workmates are nice but almost pathologically unsocial. My work function is very constrained, and there’s very little of the web involved in it. The corporate culture is extremely risk-averse, and though I was ostensibly hired for my crackerjack writing skills, most of my personality has to be ironed out of my writing so that it will match the corporate (non) style and avoid lawsuits.

I read about some of the people I know from South by Southwest starting up companies and I’m jealous. I try to convince myself I’m not really lazy, just unchallenged. But my “gifted” past seems so long ago now, and I worry that I can’t learn any new tricks. I’m a collaborator and a strategic thinker, and I’m trapped in a cubicle by myself working on details.

Lately, I’ve been a bit of a voyeur among the public relations (PR) blog crowd. A few months ago, I attended the Talk is Cheap unconference, where I learned how PR firms are embracing the web and doing some truly innovative things. I think I’ve become infatuated. I’m somewhat encouraged when I read that people come to the field of public relations from all kinds of places, including some of the places I’ve been. I think what I truly want is to work for a nimble company, one that can react quickly and intelligently to what’s happening in the world. I realize that I’ve never really worked for a place that could be described that way. I also realize that I need to work somewhere where I can speak my mind, and where I don’t have to learn the org chart to get my job done.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be writing so openly on my blog about this, but only the people that really matter to me will read this anyway. I’ve learned a lot about myself and about what I’m good at over the course of my admittedly scattered work life. And I’ve learned from a lot of people, some of whom I’ve never met, about what work can be and how to get the best out of myself. I’m sorry that this entry seems a bit self-pitying. But I encourage you, if you’ve read this far, to engage with me on some of this stuff. What makes your job great, or rotten? Do we expect too much of our careers, in terms of fulfillment, or opportunity?

On Wednesday night this week, I’ll be attending an offline gathering for PR folks interested in social media. I hope to find out more about the field and see if I might not be able to find a place within it. One thing that blogging has taught me, and that the social media PR people are saying is that honesty and transparency are more valuable than spin. So if I get into any conversations, whether after one beer or three, it’s going to be all about the authenticity. It’s the one constant that my resume has no room to include.