Why Linkedin best practices are a myth

By Neil Patrick

There’s no universal social media best practice, so stop looking for one

Last weekend over coffee, Gary Sharpe of Blue Dog Scientific and I were discussing LinkedIn Pulse. I think it is fair to say Gary has established himself as something of a renegade authority on LinkedIn.

He is an agent provocateur, evangelist, firestarter. He’s also a champion of fairness, a scientist and a driven man. He has an uncanny knack of spotting elephants in rooms that only when he points them out, do the rest of us recognise them.

Dr. Gary Sharpe of Blue Dog Scientific

Gary and I have shared values and core beliefs about things like authenticity, trust, collaboration, transparency.

We have also independently evolved entirely different ideas about how we use social media platforms in our day to day businesses.

It’s not that we disagree about much, but rather that we have totally different manifestations of our online presences.

Gary’s online presence mirrors who he is, what he cares about and what he wants to achieve. And so does mine. Neither of us copied any best practice or more prominent thought leader. We each figured out our own strategy that was right for us.

So who is right and who is wrong?

The answer is that we are both right. Because there is no such thing as a one size fits all solution.

But as friends and collaborators, we thought it would be interesting writing some content for each other. Gary has posted about our shared ideas and beliefs here. If you want to get some really authoritative insights into Linkedin, then you'll find much of interest on Gary's blog.

Why it is good that we are different

Gary has a great deal more courage than I in how he has taken on his mission to improve everyone’s user experience of LinkedIn. He ribs me that I am risk averse. I rib him that he plays with fire too much.

The fact is that we are each being true to our own personalities and backgrounds. If I tried to be Gary, I would inevitably be at best a weak impersonation and at worst, come over as a complete fraud. And vice versa.

Why I don’t post on LinkedIn Pulse

I write a lot of blog posts – there are around 400 on this blog alone, not to mention a ton of others scattered all over the web. But you won’t find me posting on LinkedIn Pulse. Gary on the other hand posts on Pulse almost daily. Often with biting critiques of the very platform he is publishing on.

My rationale for not posting on Pulse is this; I believe that LinkedIn like any corporation serves its shareholders first. Second it serves its customers. At best, its members (that’s us) come a very lowly third.

And as Gary has consistently reported, we users are getting an increasingly poor deal as LinkedIn continues in its quest to drive up revenues and profits. Worse, when we publish on Pulse we are providing our labours to LinkedIn for peanuts.

They acquire our content by the bucket load every day. We get an increasingly paltry compensation for our hours of toil. Our work may bring us a few comments and plaudits from our friends. We may trigger the odd new contact who likes what we have said. But this is a very poor ROI in my view.

My mantra is this:

Don’t build your house on rented land. Especially when the landowner has absolutely no vested interest in retaining your goodwill.

How I connect with people without using LinkedIn

We all want to find and build worthwhile professional relationships. This makes LinkedIn the natural platform choice for most of us. And just as Gary has built his following and network through his blog, LinkedIn and Google plus, I have built mine through my blog and Twitter.

I consider LinkedIn “high stakes” social media. The most senior people are rarely on the platform. They are too busy being successful. And most other people don’t want to be pestered by strangers. Either to connect or to read our latest musings, however profound or insightful they may be. People want choice and they want control. I get that. And I respect it.

Send out too many invitations to connect with people you don’t already know and you’ll potentially be classed by LI as a spammer, especially if you trigger a few IDKs (that’s when an invitee responds with the “I don’t know this person” button).

So I never invite connections from someone on LinkedIn I don’t already know from somewhere else. And the result is that I may have a smaller LI network than some, but it’s with people I like and who hopefully like me. This is the foundation for relationships which are meaningful and valuable.

Twitter on the other hand is low stakes. Every day I gain about 30 or 40 new Twitter followers. Most are what I call ‘randoms’ – people whom have absolutely no reason to follow me, because we have nothing in common. Yet within those 30 or 40 will always be 3 or 4 people I do want to get to know better. Many of these people subsequently request to connect with me on LinkedIn because I am nice to them on Twitter – I comment and interact with them. I share and favourite their posts that I like. Everyone is happy.

Why LinkedIn is still immensely valuable to me

A few weeks ago, the CEO of a business in my locality posted on LinkedIn he was looking for a board level marketing consultant. He wasn’t a first degree connection of mine, so despite this being exactly the sort of work I specialize in, I never saw his post. The first I knew about it was when people I was connected to started recommending me.

Within a few hours, four people who knew me well had all put my name forward. And sure enough this led to a meeting and the start of a valuable business relationship.

None of this happened because I had posted on Pulse. It happened because people in my network thought enough of me to put me forward. For all sorts of reasons, they had goodwill towards me.

We win goodwill not by brilliance, but by caring about others

The thing that each of the four people who recommended me for this gig had in common was that in different ways, I had helped every one of them previously with their work. In some cases, it had been advice, or I had previously worked with them. In others, it had been simple friendship and encouragement.

This was no clever strategy on my part. It was no brilliant post which established my authority. It was just people being nice to me, because in the past I had been nice to them.

My approach to social media works for me because it reflects who I am and what I want to accomplish. Not because I have copied anyone else’s strategy. And Gary does the same thing. So we are entirely different but also entirely the same.

Vive la difference!

The new C-suite titles – stop sniggering at the back!

By Neil Patrick

Over the last few years, there have been lots of stories about a spate of new senior job titles, which evoked great mirth or at least a little derision.

Last week I was discussing this trend with my good friend, Marcia LaReau, President of Forward Motion Careers. We both felt that the sniping was wide of the mark and obscured the reality of what's really happening.

In a Forbes article in 2012, C Is For Silly: The New C-Suite Titles, Jeanne Goudreau noted that many large organizations have adopted new and often amusing titles at the top executive level. A quick search revealed the following firms and titles:

Kodak and Dell — Chief Listener
Facebook — Chief Privacy Officer
Microsoft — Chief People Officer
AOL - Digital Prophet
Zappos - Chief Happiness Officer

Nearly every department head has been knighted with new, inventive ‘chief’ titles likely dreamt up by the marketing team in collusion with HR.

The detractors were quick to criticize. “It is all corporate Kindergarten playtime title-making,” said Mark Stevens, author of Your Marketing Sucks. “It’s a puppet show. These people have absolutely no power. Most of these vanity titles don’t even report to the CEO.”

Mark felt  this trend was “too much idle time and interest in making the company sound “cool.”

Peter Cappelli, management professor at the University of Pennsylvania, commented that the new titles are meant to signal—internally, to customers or to governments—that a particular function or task is important and that the people at the top are listening. They may also be a form of ego appeasing and identifying who the important senior people are. Peter said, “The main question is whether there’s any real substance behind them.”

All this misses the point

I’m not entirely in agreement with these commentators. Yes some of these titles sound a bit odd after decades of us being used to senior job titles changing very little. And yes they may not always carry the power that the title infers. We all knew what was what and who was who in the ‘old’ hierarchy. It was easy to understand.

The reason I think these comments are missing the mark is that they assume it’s simply vanity and corporate posturing at work. Sure, there is always some of this going on, but this isn't what’s really at the root of these changes.

What is really happening is that the most developed organisations have recognized that in the new era of super-connected consumers and business, the old hierarchies which reflected the analogue world are no longer very helpful in addressing the challenges of the digital economy.

IBM carried out 17 studies over ten years, and conducted 23,000 face-to-face executive interviews to obtain insights into how private and public sector leaders think. They explored how the C-suite is evolving in the digital era and how they are working together in support of the enterprise.

Collaboration trumps competition in the digital age

Whereas competition, power struggles and silos were characteristics of the analogue world, the digital world demands cross-functional collaboration. Many of today’s most senior people climbed their career ladders when competition and winning at all costs was the name of the game. But today, sophisticated employers recognize that silos, power struggles and internal rivalries destroy value and sap the strength of the organisation. Leaders that cannot easily foster collaboration across the disciplines face a rapid decline to obsolescence.

The IBM study reported:

“ The most collaborative leaders are self-aware, emotionally intelligent, good at listening and building relationships. They lead by inspiring others. But as everyone knows, we get the behavior we reward. And the qualities for which business executives are usually rewarded – ambition, assertiveness, a goal-orientated attitude and so forth – aren't directly associated with the ability to collaborate.”

What you call something or somebody is important. It sets expectations for both the job holder and those around them about what they are there to do. This is a further reason why the adoption of new senior job titles is helpful to everyone and not just a vanity play or attempt to appear ‘cool’.

Ann Morton, chief operating officer of Maine-based advertising firm The VIA Agency said, “We adopted Chief Knowledge Officer because we feel it’s a better representation of what’s really needed to be an effective advertising agency today. It’s about bringing wisdom to our clients, not just information.” 

The agency’s “CKO” oversees strategy, planning, analytics and research capabilities. She conceded, however, that as more unique titles crop up, leaders should be careful that the title reflects the job and the person’s experience. Using the word “ninja” in a job title isn't big or clever…

Whilst important sounding titles proliferate, in reality, the C-suite is shrinking

Just as technology is stripping out jobs at all levels of the organisation, the C-suite is being impacted too.

This evolution of structures is leading to the blurring or even merging of senior leadership roles. In the analogue world, the Marketing Director headed up all the activities delivering customers to the business, identifying and satisfying his or her needs. Their key skills base was around things like market research, product development, packaging, promotion, media planning, and customer retention. Data and insights were slow in coming and often expensive to obtain. But today, a marketing director obtains immediate and actionable insights from a flood of digital data.

This might be electronic point of sale information, social media reactions, website traffic tracking, or any other number of digital information streams. And because most marketing directors earned their spurs in the analogue age, many are feeling a tad uncomfortable as their world has undergone such a rapid and radical transformation.

One outcome is that some organisations are merging the CMO and CIO role or at least requiring that the Marketing Chief knows as much about IT and digital as they do about the more traditional marketing skills sets. Suddenly being just a marketing or just an IT expert is no longer enough.

You can enjoy the joke by all means, but it’s not corporate vanity or silliness that is behind what’s happening. It’s a very real attempt to adapt to the nature of a digital economy.

The Stephen Covey insights you’ve not heard a million times before

By Neil Patrick

Today I've been revisiting the work of the late great Stephen Covey and his best-selling work “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.” The book has topped the best seller lists selling more than 25 million copies worldwide since its first publication in 1989.

Most of us have at least an awareness of this book and its ideas.

But it’s so old! Covey proposed that his teachings were universal and unchanging. But 1989 was a different world and the question I had was, is this still relevant today?

Stephen R Covey
Source:By Abras2010 (FMI Show_Palestrante_Stephen Covey)

It turns out that Covey had already answered this question. Much less well known than the Seven Habits book is its sequel, Covey's 2004 book; "The 8th Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness".

In this book, Covey recognised that mere effectiveness would not suffice in what he called "The Knowledge Worker Age". He said that, "The challenges and complexity we face today are of a different order of magnitude." The 8th habit essentially urged: "Find your voice and inspire others to find theirs…"

This slideshare from Sompong Yusoontorn summarises the book very well:

The 8th Habit By Stephen R. Covey - Summary from Sompong Yusoontorn

In the Seven Habits book, Covey described the opposing ideologies of the scarcity mentality and the abundance mentality. An outlook which views the world as one of scarcity, stimulates primitive urges of possession and control.

The more scarce we view something to be, the stronger the urge to try to control and possess it becomes.

And one thing there is a scarcity of is jobs.

The scarcity mentality is the default setting for how most people view the world. Our whole society is built on it. Competition for scarce resources is the very nature of the capitalist system. Acquisition and ownership are the goal and we are encouraged to view those who own the most to be the most successful. The whole system encourages a win-lose outlook which is the antithesis of a collaborative society.

And the collaborative society is the future. Whilst on the one hand technology may be the biggest destroyer of work yet experienced by mankind, it is paradoxically also the greatest ever enabler of opportunities.

The Abundance Mentality flows out of a deep inner sense of personal worth and security. It is the paradigm that there is plenty out there and enough to spare for everybody. It results in sharing of prestige, of recognition, of profits, of decision making. It opens possibilities, options, alternatives and creativity.

The Abundance Mentality takes personal joy, satisfaction and fulfillment and turns it outward, appreciating the uniqueness, the inner direction, the qualities of others. It recognizes the unlimited possibilities for positive interactive growth and development, creating new Third Alternatives.

Success does not mean victory over other people. It means success in effective interaction that brings mutually beneficial results to everyone involved. ...Public Victory is an outgrowth of the Abundance Mentality paradigm.

Regardless of the growth or demise of capitalism, those who engage in collaborative solutions to problems will have the brightest futures.

Those who retreat into possessiveness, isolationism and protectiveness, will sooner or later become marginalized and irrelevant.

To quote Covey : “The Scarcity Mentality is the zero-sum paradigm of life”.