The Importance of Effective Online Communication
Filed Under my career, technology
Jakob Nielsen’s 29 September Alertbox newsletter talks about the importance of the About Us section on a company’s website. In my opinion, this is the first section you should look at when establishing (or, as is often the case for me, re-establishing) a company’s online presence.
Nielsen points out that, unfortunately, not everyone gets this section right:
Task success for finding out what the company or organization does actually dropped, from 90% to 81%. In place of a frank summary of the business, marketese and blah-blah text ruled the day on many sites.
And it’s not just “blah-blah text” that’s bad, often there’s no text at all: just a big list of links that leaves you wondering where you should go next.
Some Australian Examples
Since Nielsen’s research was US-based, I thought I’d do a quick check of some Australian websites to see how they measured up in this area. Since I wasn’t going to do a scientific study like Nielsen’s I figured I’d pick an industry and take a subjective (though knowledgeable) look at the the sites of the largest players.
I picked the telecommunications industry and looked at the ‘About Us’ landing pages of the five big telcos in Australia:
| Optus has the worst page of the lot: ‘About Optus’ has no text, no explanation, and the none of the links in the main content area actually tell you anything about the company or where you could possibly go next to find the information you’re looking for. |  |
| Vodafone’s ‘About Vodafone Australia‘ page does have some text…but it doesn’t tell you anything either. You have to go to ‘Company Information’ > ‘Company Overview’ and then decipher the marketese to figure out what it is that Vodafone does (and even then you’re not quite sure). |  |
| 3 has a pretty bad page too: all you can tell from the ‘About 3‘ page is that “It’s good to be 3″ and that this company seems to be Australia’s first 3G network — though, even then, you have to click on the ‘Find out more about 3′ link to be sure. At least they have a clearly-worded ‘Find out more…’ link that tells you where to go next for more information. |  |
| Virgin, meanwhile, has gone to the other extreme: its ‘Company Info‘ page is chock full of words which is somewhat intimidating at first sight. Fortunately, the writing on this page is short, crisp, and clear. Strangely, the top three links in the left navigation bar (’Company Info’, ‘About Us’, and ‘Our Story’) all point to this same page. |  |
| Telstra has a great page. Its ‘About Telstra‘ page quickly tells you what the company is about, what it does, and what it wants to do. To complement that, the left navigation bar has clearly-worded links which makes it really straightforward to dig deeper for more information. And I love the “No one else can do what Telstra does.” tagline :) |  |
I guess Nielsen has a point, huh? :)
Seriously, though, have the web strategists (or webmasters or online marketing people) at Optus, Vodafone, and 3 not read something as basic as, say, Steve Krug’s ‘Don’t Make Me Think‘? I guess not.
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Social Media in Management
Filed Under blogging, careers, life, my career, social media
CIO Magazine’s Sue Bushell has written an interesting article, called ‘Management 2.0? That’ll Be The Day‘, on the challenges that CIOs — and companies, in general — are facing with the advent of social media technologies in the workplace.
In his book, The Future of Management, Gary Hamel suggests that organizations today face a new set of business challenges that the existing management model does not match. The drone worker of yesterday is giving way to the engaged and vocal employee of today who expects a company culture that replicates the collaborative nature of Web 2.0 — in other words Management 2.0
The name Gary Hamel will, of course, be very familiar to anyone who has done any MBA and has studied the (frequently incorrectly-used) Core Competency concept.
The article is long but useful as it gives managers a lot to think about and hopefully look into:
Managers have a general sense of what Web 2.0 tools are — especially when it comes to applications they’re familiar with like YouTube, Facebook, or Linkedin. But they still struggle to understand these technologies, discover their real business value, address the risks and figure out how to best use them.
This, by the way, is where someone like me would come in: I know both management (theory and practice) and technology (uses and implementations) and can help senior management come up with an implementation of social media that enhances project management, decision making, and internal communication and collaboration.
The trick is that social media integration in an enterprise needs to be a long-term project and not something you hire a consulting firm to do for you in a few weeks. It needs to grow experimentally, possibly slowly, and from the ground-up. And while it will probably change a number of times as it develops — which means it’s not something you can really plan for in advance — you can start with a few basic governance rules (who does what and what everyone is in responsible for), some content guidelines (that cover privacy, security, and intellectual property), and a simple usage policy (like the two-word “be careful” policy that is often a good start).
Speaking of governance…
Challenges of the Multi-Generational Workforce
The discussion on how to manage a multi-generational workforce — which is an issue for many managers these days — reminds me of a blog post on banning Facebook that Toby Ward wrote on the Intranet Blog about a month ago:
Beware of Facebook! It will crush your productivity and hijack your employees!
[…]
Employees prefer to be treated as adults. Judge their performance and actions instead of counting their minutes spent doing “productive work.”
Trust me, the threat and problems stemming from a ban far exceed the embrace option. Prescient Digital Media’s Julian Mills last week highlighted the findings of one recent survey that warned of the perils of banning Facebook:
- 39% of 18 to 24 year-olds would consider leaving if they were not allowed to access sites like Facebook and YouTube
- A further 21% indicated that they would feel ‘annoyed’ by such a ban
- The problem is less acute with 25 to 65 year-olds, of whom just 16% would consider leaving and 13% would be annoyed
Of course “consider leaving” doesn’t mean they actually will leave but it does mean that they probably won’t join your company in the first place. Especially if they announce your blanket banning policy on the Facebook group about your company that you didn’t know existed.
I know that I, for one, wouldn’t want to join a company that bans sites like Facebook or doesn’t let you blog, read blogs, pay your bills, read the news, check your e-mail, or basically have a life outside work while you’re at work. Limiting YouTube usage makes a little more sense since there’s a bandwidth cost associated with online video but, even then, it shouldn’t be banned outright.
As Ward said in his article, companies shouldn’t be taking the Taylorist approach to management. Of course you’ll get employees who’ll take 30 minutes to make themselves a cup of coffee or spend an hour on Facebook every now and then — but that’s okay as long as they (a) get their jobs done, (b) don’t stop others from getting their jobs done, and (c) don’t use-up too many freely-provided company resources (like bandwidth or, for that matter, coffee).
I guess all I can conclude with is that, with the advent of social media and the existence of a multi-generational workforce…well, the next five years are going to be really interesting
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My Elevator Pitch & Unique Selling Proposition
Filed Under careers, my career
As I wrote in my previous blog post, I met with another recruitment consultant from Hudson this morning. In order to introduce myself to her, I did some work on my elevator pitch and further developed my Unique Selling Proposition (USP). In fact, I typed all this up and and gave her a printout of it. And, since I’m applying for an Internet-related position and the best place to learn more about me is indeed online, I added a section on that too.
Here’s what I came up with:
(Extended) Elevator Pitch
Experience: Six years of experience in IT consulting and management, over five of which were spent in the strategic planning, technical development, business integration, and marketing of websites, web portals, intranets, and social media sites. Overall, eight years of work experience.
Training: MBA from the University of Melbourne’s Melbourne Business School (see list of courses in this blog post, which I also included in the printout).
Immediate career goals: A management or consulting role that involves the alignment of business and marketing strategy with online strategy. This could include the formulation (i.e. research and analysis), implementation (i.e. administration and management), or further development (i.e. testing and advancement) of such a strategy. An online strategy includes internal and external marketing and communications and the use of social media to communicate with stakeholders internally and across the value chain.
Unique Selling Proposition
- Uniquely positioned between IT, marketing, and senior (strategic) management – with a background in IT and experience in all three areas
- Management and consulting experience in small start-ups, large multinationals, local and global non-profits, and government organizations
- Have been developing websites professionally since 1997; specialize in the use of social media
- Possess excellent written and oral communication skills; have experience in teaching and training
Online
- Website: http://insanityworks.org/ameel
- Professional blog: http://insanityworks.org/acme
- Personal blog: http://insanityworks.org/randomtangent
- LinkedIn profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/ameelkhan
- Twitter stream: http://twitter.com/ameel
Comments?
So what do you think? Does that sum things up nicely?
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Career Update
Filed Under careers, my career
My contract job at Linfox finished recently (I’ll write more about that when I continue my MBA-at-work blog post series) so I spent the last week watching the Olympics (which was awesome). Now that I’ve had a nice break, I’m back to looking for jobs.
An Unsuccessful Job Application
Actually, I did interview for a job during my last week at Linfox — the recruitment consultants at Hudson are very efficient — but, after three rounds of interviews and reaching the final stage of the process (with just two candidates in the running) I didn’t get end up getting it.
This was unfortunate because it was a good job, at a good company, and I really liked the people I would have been working with. Oh well. Such is life.
The Silver Lining
It’s not all bad, though: this was only my second serious job application since completing the MBA — i.e. an application to a permanent position that I really wanted to get and could then see myself growing with over the following year or two — and, in both cases, I reached the final stage before being dropped. [More on my job application philosophy here]
What this means is that I have what it takes to do these kinds of jobs — that is, I have the ‘can do’, ‘will do’, and ‘fit’, as my interviewers from both companies told me — it’s just that one of the other applicants was more appropriate for that particular role at that particular time. In other words, that applicant’s Unique Selling Proposition (USP) was more suited to that role than mine was. In the job I just applied to, for example, the winning applicant had the marketing agency experience that the company wanted.
This is good: this means the company is paying very close attention to the people it is hiring and, when it happens that my USP is the most suitable for that role, that company, and that team, I’ll win out over the other applicants and will know that the company did it for all the right reasons.
Next Steps
So, what next? Well, the people at Hudson have me on their radar — in fact I met with another recruitment consultant of theirs this morning — so I expect to get a good lead from them (they’re very good at what they do). Hopefully that lead will come sooner rather than later.
Otherwise, I continue to look for jobs online and continue to network for openings in the hidden job market. Let’s see how things go. If you know of anything I might be interested in, please let me know. Thanks.
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Online Community Compensation Study
Filed Under careers, my career, social media
The Online Community Report just released its Online Community Compensation Study.
Most of the study’s key findings shouldn’t come as a surprise to people working in this space: the community team employs more women than men, most team members are between 31 and 50 years old, and most have over five years of work experience. However the compensation figures are a little higher than I expected at an average of US$81k (approximately AU$95k).
I also wasn’t expecting women to be earning 91% (on average) of what men are earning. Assuming that factors like experience, industry, average company salary, position in corporate hierarchy, department within the company, importance of community role for company, etc. have all been statistically removed from this analysis — and they probably haven’t all been removed — then the lower salary for women is most disappointing.
Meanwhile, the most heartening result from the study is, of course, the job satisfaction rating which is an average of 4.2 on a scale of 1 to 5 :)
FYI: OCR’s Key Resources blog post category is a great place to look if you want to start or further develop your online community.
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MBA Skills at Work: Part 1
Filed Under courses, life, mba, melbourne business school, my career
I’ve been working at Linfox for almost two months now and I’ve hardly even noticed. Time really does fly when you’re having fun and working your butt off, doesn’t it?
Now that my major project at Linfox is complete — we re-launched Linfox.com last week — I thought it would be a good time to do a quick recap of how things have been at work and how the Melbourne Business School MBA is helping me do my job really well.
But before I get to that…
Actually, funnily enough, the thing I found most immediately useful at my new job was not something I learnt during the MBA but is something related to the work I did in MBS’ Information Technology Solutions department earlier this year. That is: I knew how to use SharePoint really well.
In May, MBS launched its new intranet (called ‘MBS Direct’) based on Microsoft’s SharePoint technology. Just a month before that Linfox launched its own intranet (called the ‘Lintranet’) also based on that technology. Having learnt a great deal about SharePoint at MBS — and many SharePoint tips and best practices from our vendor, Bullseye — taking over from the previous Online Coordinator was incredibly straightforward and hassle-free.
E-Commerce and Information Management
As you would imagine, stuff learnt in Pat Auger’s E-Commerce and Information Management courses is coming in really handy in my new job. Here are two lessons I’m finding most useful at this time.
1. Making a business case: My boss understands how important both the intranet and public website are to the business; she is, after all, Linfox’s Group Communications Manager. People in top management, however, are more focused (as they should be) on running a logistics company, a couple of airports, and a few other Linfox Group businesses. My boss and I therefore need to demonstrate — in almost everything that we do — the business benefits of maintaining these two sites (which I am in charge of and she is the champion for).
This is where something like Google Analytics comes in. My boss can now tell her boss that, just last week, over 1,000 unique visitors got to Linfox.com via a search engine (we also know the keywords they used to get there) and that, by far, the most popular section on the site is the ‘Working at Linfox‘ one. Now the site’s only been up for ten days so there’s more data to collect before we take things to the next level (like further developing the recruitment section) but already it’s clear what one of the major benefits of having a good website is: you can communicate directly with potential employees in order to get the best and most suitable candidates to apply for jobs that you advertise.
2. Internal communications: Having spent years in IT — which in many companies is the one of the least communicative, least understood, and possibly least-liked departments — I know how important it is to communicate internally the benefits of the work you’re doing. Things are a little different in the Communications department but internal communications is still an important task for me.
For example, two phrases that I’ve found to be really useful are “it’s on the Lintranet” and “search for it”. These are important because the last iteration of Linfox’s intranet took the usual route to uselessness: it had too much stuff on it (it had become a bloated file archival dump) most of which was irrelevant (no versioning, lots of replication) and hard to find (limited search functionality). This new iteration is lean, well-organized, and has versioning, no duplication, and excellent search functionality. However, not everyone knows this.
My job, then, is to (a) keep the intranet in great shape and (b) to tell everyone how great the intranet is. My aim is to make this a virtuous cycle: if people expect it to be great, they’ll make sure it stays great — with a little poking, prodding, and policing from me, of course! So when someone asks me for something, I usually say “it’s on the Lintranet” (since it usually is) and, most of the time, they’re able to find what they’re looking for quickly and easily. If not, a simple search does the trick.
One thing that really helps me here is the direct support I get from my team. This mostly comes in the form of a line in every bit of internal communication that we do that goes something like “you can find (more information about this) on the Lintranet”.
More in Part 2
There’s much more I want to write so I’m going to split this into two, or maybe three, posts. I have yet to talk about:
- Applying people skills learnt in the Managing People for High Performance, Negotiations, and Leadership courses.
- Applying marketing skills learnt in the Brand Management and Consumer Behaviour courses.
- General skills learnt while doing the MBA; such as how to handle multiple projects, deadlines, and priorities without breaking a sweat.
- Observing how things are working at a more strategic level within the company; such how business and corporate strategy are playing-out, what leadership is being exhibited by senior management, what the company’s environmental strategy is, and how intellectual property is being managed.
But more about all this next time.
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I Have a Job!
Filed Under careers, my career
So I haven’t been posting much recently. Why? Because I have a job! Indeed, as of last Wednesday, I am the Online Coordinator (OC) at Linfox.
Linfox, for those of you who don’t know, is Australia’s second-largest logistics and supply chain company, earning over AU$2bn in revenues last year. It employs over 16,000 people, owns over 5,000 vehicles, has over 1.8 million square meters of warehousing space, runs 2 airports, and operates out of 11 countries in the Asia-Pacific region. Yes, it’s big. Not quite as big as Deutsche Post, of course, but it’s getting there. Oh, and it privately owned. (More fun trivia on Linfox in a future blog post, perhaps…like how it transported eight elephants last year and how, every year, it does all the logistics for the Australian Formula One Grand Prix.)
Based in the Communications department, the OC’s role has two main components:
- Project management: maintaining the new intranet portal and soon-to-be-re-launched Internet site
- Internal consulting: helping departments use online communications more effectively
This job is also an excellent next step for my career: it puts me well on my way to becoming a more senior level web strategist/consultant and the Linfox brand is great for my CV.
Why am I concerned about how this job will look on my CV when I’ve only just started it? Because I’m on a three month contract so, two months from now, I’ll be back to looking for another job and preferably a permanent one. Why, then, did I take a three month contract job? Because Linfox and the OC role were not to be missed. Opportunities like this do not come along often and I’m really happy to have been selected for this one.
Of course, what this means for me in a practical sense is that I have a great deal to do in the short time that I’m here. Fortunately, having come off the MBA program at Melbourne Business School, I should be able to handle the speed, pressure, and volume of work quite well. (Thanks, MBS!) Meanwhile, the role will also give me the opportunity to apply all that I learnt from courses like E-Commerce, Information Strategy, Brand Management, Managing People for High Performance, Negotiations, and Leadership.
So here I am. Let the, er, online coordinating begin!
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And I’m Done!
Filed Under life, mba, melbourne business school, my career
And I’m done with my MBA. Actually, I was done on Friday but I took it easy over the weekend :)
This now concludes 20 months of hard work, late nights, early mornings, essays, individual assignments, syndicate assignments, case studies, class discussions, research, and exams. During this period I met a lot of great people who taught me a lot of different things. I also formally learnt a heck of a lot about many different subjects. Specifically, I took these courses during my four study terms:
- World of Management
- Data & Decisions
- Managing Processes
- Accounting for Managers
- Financial Management
- Corporate Finance
- Managerial Economics
- Economics and Public Policy
- Business Strategy
- Corporate Strategy
- Implementation of Strategy
- Managing People for High Performance
- Leadership & Change
- Negotiations
- Marketing
- Brand Management
- Consumer Behaviour
- E-Commerce
- Information Strategy
- Business & Sustainable Development (half subject)
- Strategic Management of Intellectual Property (half subject)
Sounds like fun, doesn’t it? Actually, it was.
And now it winds to a close. All that’s left is my graduation on the 17th and then I can officially say that, yes, I am an MBA from Melbourne Business School, thank you very much :)
Now to find a job so I can start my next adventure…
Speaking of jobs, by the way, I received the nicest job application rejection phone call today. It was from the job I mentioned a few weeks earlier (the one I was most excited about) and, though I’m terribly disappointed that I didn’t get it, I understand that the company needed to choose the best person for the role who, in this case, was unfortunately not me. Still, out of the 200 applications they received I was one of the four people they interviewed and that’s a really good feeling. Oh well. Next time, then.
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I Can Haz Dream Job?
Filed Under careers, my career, social media
I would move to Seattle for this job:
I Can Has Cheezburger? is looking to hire a moderator to work in our Seattle office (Lower Queen Anne area)! You too can works for Happycat!
Moderators screen all submissions, moderate comments and help our users with the dangerous world of lolcats. This is a paid part-time (or possibly full-time position). Due to the nature of the site, moderators work non-standard office hours. You will be joining our team of 3 moderators in enjoying all the fun the Web can offer.
We’re looking for someone who lives in Seattle with a great sense of humor, a deep understanding and love of the Internets and a strong work ethic. Cat ownership is not required.
If you’re interested, email us your resume and/or cover letter at lol@icanhascheezburger.com
*sigh*
[Via Yahoo! News, via Digg]
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Benchmarks for Social Media Experts
Filed Under careers, my career, social media
Great post yesterday by Chris Brogan: What I want a Social Media Expert to Know. Great comments too.
To expand on his post: What a social media expert should also know is that the answers — if you re-frame Brogan’s list as a set of questions — can be different in different situations, with different companies and industries.
The social media expert might not be able to answer the questions correctly — and with a high degree of certainty — in all those situations but at least s/he should know (a) that there will be differences, (b) where to look to find the right answers for that situation, and (c) if there are no right answers, make a pretty educated guess as to what they will be.
I know this to be true, by the way, because I’ve worked both on external-facing web portals and internal-facing intranet portals and some of the answers to Brogan’s questions are vastly different in those two cases.
Still, like he says, social media experts should have answers to all those questions. In fact, I’d expect a good social media job interview to cover most, if not all, of these questions as well.
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