In order to get what can loosely be called a ‘web strategy job’ in Australia I did quite a bit of research and analysis on how different companies hire for that position and I thought it might be useful to share what I’ve learnt. This serves two purposes:

• Others who are looking for jobs in the same area might find my analysis useful.
• Those who know more about this area than I do can improve my understanding of it.

Here’s hoping this blog post accomplishes a bit of both.

What Do You Mean by ‘Web Strategy Job’?

So what exactly does a ‘web strategist’ do? Well, it depends on the industry and company that job is in. In general, though, a web strategist is someone who takes care of everything a company does online. This includes:

• managing the company’s online presence (website, intranet, social media presence, etc.)
• figuring out what the company should be doing in the online space over the next few years; i.e. creating a web strategy and making sure it is aligned with the company’s business, marketing, and communications strategies
• implementing that strategy

This job can be in different departments and at different levels of seniority within a particular company. To explain this further I have come up with the How Companies Build Their Online Presence table (below). The columns on this table represent company size and the rows divide companies into those that consider their online presence to be strategic and those that don’t (yes, this is an artificial, binary division while, in reality, there is a range here). [1]

The text in the cells describes the solutions that these companies implement in order to build and maintain their online presence (yes, I am generalizing here). The jobs that I spent the last few months looking for are the manager-level web strategist/online manager positions described or implied in the green coloured cells.

Interestingly, over the last year, I have worked in companies in all three of those green-coloured areas:

• Shell is a very large company that uses its online presence strategically (both internally and externally)
• Melbourne Business School is a medium-sized company that uses of its online presence strategically (and increasingly so)
• Linfox is a large company that doesn’t use its website strategically but makes very good use of its intranet

Melbourne Water sits in the strategic row and is a large company.

Where the Web Strategist Fits in All This

As mentioned earlier, the web strategist jobs in those green-shaded boxes exist at different levels within different companies. That is why, over the last few months, I applied for jobs that spanned a range of tasks, skills, and seniority levels. In some small companies, for example, the primary driver of the web strategy is the specialist consultant hired on a 3-6 month contract. In some larger ones, the strategy is driven by a small group of people who are, in turn, led by the web/online manager.

There are pros and cons to being in each of those positions. For example, a short-term specialist-level consultant may not have the time, influence, or opportunity to have a major impact on a company’s overall web strategy. That said, this consultant sits outside the internal politics of that company and can be more blunt and direct about what that company needs to do without having to worry too much about what people think of him. A full-time online manager in a large company, meanwhile, many find corporate inertia working against her for the first six months but, once things get moving, will benefit from it. And because this manager knows the inner working of the company, she may get things done more quickly and more effectively.

The sweet spot for me was to get a middle management position in a good-sized company that made good, strategic use of its online space. There is huge potential (and lots of fun to be had) in this role because companies in this position are often quick to move and are willing to make a real impact online. Fortunately for me, this is exactly where Melbourne Water sits.

What About the State of the Job Market?

Of course, all this analysis is useless if it doesn’t help you get a job – particularly if no one is hiring for the position you really want to get. Because of that, I was also looking for less-than-perfect jobs or jobs on the periphery of where I wanted to be. The idea was that I would work towards the role I really wanted.

Speaking more generally: One good thing about this type of job is that every organization needs a website regardless of how the economy is doing (and Australia’s isn’t doing that badly). As a result, web strategists, website managers, and specialist online consultants are still getting hired. And though there are very few perfect jobs out there (and many companies are hiring less senior people to do the same job that more senior people were doing last year) I did come across a whole bunch that were great places to start. Read my previous blog post for more on that.

Further Research

So that is a summary of what I have learnt about web strategist jobs in Australia over the last couple of years. I encourage you to do your own research on this topic. To do that, I recommend the following three things:

• Subscribe to online job feeds from Seek, MyCareer, CareerOne, and SixFigures. This will teach you a great deal about the state of the job market and will help you adopt the lingo that hiring managers and recruitment firms use to match candidates to open positions.
• Talk to people who are in the industry and find out more from them. This is particularly useful if you are targeting a narrower segment in the market (e.g. web strategy jobs in the education sector). Also read their blogs, interact with them online, and get in touch with them through LinkedIn or your own networks (then meet up with them for a coffee or something).
• Talk to recruitment agents who recruit in this area. I mentioned three firms and three recruitment agents in my previous post but there are many others – you just need to find the ones that work best with you.

And when you learn stuff, blog about it so all of us can learn from your experiences.

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[1] The words ‘strategy’ and ‘strategic’ are used very loosely in everyday speech while, in actual fact, they mean something very specific. Let me clarify that here: when you say something is ‘strategic’ you necessarily mean that it is relative to your competitors. Take your website’s ‘Contact Us’ page. If, along with your office address, you were to give your office’s Melways Map reference, this would not be considered ‘strategic’ because this is common practice. If, instead, you embedded a Google map that showed your office’s location exactly (assuming, of course, that your customers found this useful and that it helped your business) this would be a ‘strategic’ move since few companies tend to do that and this gives you an advantage over your competitors. Note, however, that if you had decided to include that Google map without considering your competition, it would simply have been a ‘plan’. A ‘strategy’, on the other hand, is action taken specifically with your competition in mind (i.e. in order to gain an advantage over them).

My perseverance has paid off: after applying for 33 jobs over an 8 month period, I am now the new Websites Manager at Melbourne Water. I’ll write more about this job in a later blog post but right now I want to present the stats I accumulated and the lessons I learnt during this process.

Active Job-Search Period

The 8-month period during which I was looking for a job featured the following non-hiring periods:

• the global economic downturn – 2 months, from mid-October to mid-December
• the Christmas holidays – 1.5 months, from early December to mid-January
• my trip to Pakistan – 1 month, from early February to early March

So, for all practical purposes, I was unemployed and actively looking for jobs for about 4-5 out of those 8 months before I got hired.

Types & Levels of Jobs

The 33 jobs I applied for during this period were of these types:

• By management-level jobs (13) I mean those that involved project management, stakeholder liaison, team management, and strategic planning.
• By specialist, consultant, and business analyst jobs (15) I mean those that involved working as a knowledge or domain specialist within a larger team. The specialized skills required for these jobs included SEO techniques; web writing and online production skills; social media awareness; requirements-gathering experience; a consulting background; and general website/intranet redevelopment experience. Naturally, all of these skills were also required for the management-level jobs that I applied for.
• By junior-level jobs (5) I mean those that I turned out to be overqualified for. In most cases this happened because the company in question didn’t think the online channel was of strategic value to them and was therefore looking for a relatively junior person to create their web strategy and maintain their website and intranet. In most of these cases I withdrew my application once I found out more about the job.

I very nearly got one of those specialist-level jobs but the company I was interviewing with instated a hiring freeze (due to a newly-announced restructuring plan) the day after my final interview. The interview had gone really well, though, and I was confident that I would had been selected.

Also, those 13 management-level job applications include my successful application to Melbourne Water.

Reasons for Rejection

The reasons I was given for not getting 32 of those jobs included:

• By too little experience (3) I mean the job was too senior for me. In one case, for example, I was told I didn’t have experience in working with ad agencies on large multi-channel marketing campaigns.
• By experience mismatch (3) I mean I had enough overall experience but the company was looking for someone with a slightly different set of skills. For example, they were looking for more sales/marketing oriented people than technical or communications oriented ones.
• By cultural mismatch (4) I mean I had the right experience and skills but I wasn’t the right person for that particular job, team, or company.
• By too much experience (5) I mean I was overqualified for the job. I usually discovered this during the preliminary phone discussion with the recruiter at which point I would withdraw my application.
• By job already filled (3) I mean that, by the time I applied for the job, the company had already hired a candidate (either on its own or via another recruitment firm).
• By no answer (8) I mean I simply didn’t get a response for the company (2 cases) or the recruitment agent (6 cases) to whom I had applied. In some cases I got no answer even after telephoning them a number of times and leaving messages asking for a call-back.
• By no good reason given (3) I mean I got a generic and completely useless reason for my application being rejected. For example: “Thank you for your recent application for the above position; we have now had an opportunity to consider all applications. Very careful consideration has been given to your application and whilst you have many relevant attributes, unfortunately, on this occasion your application has not been successful.” In some of these cases I asked for further detail but I almost never got any.
• By too many candidates (1) I mean the recruitment firm had already filled its quota of interviews for that particular job.
• By hiring freeze (1) I mean the company stopped its hiring process before making an offer of employment because senior management instated a hiring freeze.

Finally, I interviewed for seven of these jobs:

• Twice I got rejected after a single interview
• Five times I got rejected after multiple (usually two) interviews

One of the experience mismatch jobs and three of the cultural mismatch jobs were the ones that I went through multiple interviews for. The fifth was the hiring freeze one.

How this Fits with my Job Application Philosophy

In my opinion, these are fairly decent statistics. I say this because they reflect my job application philosophy which includes the following heuristics:

• Only apply to those jobs you think you have a good chance of getting. This is, of course, based on the job ad, an optional detailed position description, or simply a verbal description of the role.
• If, while writing the cover letter, you find that you’re not convincing even yourself that you can or really want to do this job, abandon the application.
• Don’t apply to too many ‘reach’ jobs that might be just out of your skills and experience range. You’d only apply to these types of jobs if you though you could grow into the role quite rapidly.
• Don’t apply to too many ‘backup’ jobs for which you are qualified but from which you won’t gain anything other than a little more experience and line on your CV. You’d only apply to these types of jobs if the hiring company had a great brand, was one you really wanted to get into, or was one in which you could see yourself getting promoted through relatively quickly. For example, if Google offered me a junior-ish job I’d jump at it!
• Take the time to tailor both your resume and cover letter to match the requirements of the job at hand. Assuming, of course, you fit the basic requirements in first place.
• Do your research on the company and make sure that (a) you can do the job, (b) you want to do the job, and (c) you would work well in that company.

What Have I Learnt From All This?

Aside from the obvious “it’s no fun to be looking for a job during an economic downturn” I have learnt that perseverance, smart application techniques, and patience all pay off in the end. I have also learnt that it’s crucial to look for cultural fit between you and your potential employer and that it’s important to identify both good and bad recruitment consultants and recruitment firms.

The perseverance bit is important because I’ve learnt that lesson the hard way. This is now the third difficult hiring period I’ve been through in my life. The first was back in 1998 when Pakistan and India tested nuclear weapons because of which the number of overseas work and study visas awarded to Pakistanis was slashed considerably. The economic sanctions that were subsequently imposed on Pakistan didn’t help the local job market either. The second was when the dot-com bubble burst in the US in 2001. I was working for the Pakistan branch of a Silicon Valley consulting firm at the time and had just received my US work permit visa. My plan had been to go join that company in Silicon Valley but, instead, I quit my job and started working for a Pakistani firm instead. This actually turned out to be a fortuitous occurrence because that Pakistani company was the one that got me into creating web strategies and developing and using Content Management Systems.

Having patience is also important because in the past I have made one or two hasty career decisions that, in hindsight, I wish I hadn’t made. I don’t actually regret having made those decisions because I love where I am in my life and in my career. It’s just that I could have been further along my career path had I not gone with the first option that came my way.

I have also learnt that cultural fit between employer and candidate plays a key role in the hiring process. I already knew this in theory, of course, but it’s good to see it being played out in practice as well. I am really happy, for example, to have received a few specific rejections because I realized that, even though I could have done the jobs themselves, I wouldn’t have had fun doing them. This is also why I rarely get disappointed or upset when I don’t get a job that I’ve applied for. This is particularly true if I’ve had a couple of interviews with that company and, as a result, know quite a bit about my manager, my team, and the company in general. Also, I generally interview well and am honest about who I am during the the recruitment process. So, if after multiple interviews the company decides they don’t like what they see then they’re probably right in not hiring me because I wouldn’t fit in there.

On a more practical note, I have learnt that it is important to quickly identify ineffective or bad recruitment consultants and recruitment firms and then stay away from them. This is easier said than done, of course – especially if those recruitment firms keep advertising good jobs! The flip side of this is that it’s important to identify good recruitment consultants and recruitment firms and then stick with them. For example, I had excellent experiences with Michael Page (specifically with Angela Van Hazel), Hudson (specifically with Sarah Blaney), and RDBMS Resource Solutions (specifically with Jessica Burns) and I would highly recommend these firms and those recruitment consultants to anyone who is looking for a job.

What Now?

So the current job search phase in my life has ended. My contract with Melbourne Water is for 13 months, however, so I’ll be back to looking for a job within the year…but that’s okay. The more time I spend in the industry – getting to know companies and building networks of contacts – the easier it will be for me to get my next job.

Meanwhile, though, I’m going to work hard, do a good job, and have a lot of fun. I’ve been at Melbourne Water for just over a week but I already love the place and the people who work there (cultural fit rocks!). The future looks bright.

I enjoy making presentations and think that’s something I’m good at doing. I haven’t, however, made a TED-style presentation before and I don’t expect to make one in the foreseeable future either. However, I am interested in all kinds of presentation styles, types, and formats.

If you’ve watched any of the TED talks you’ll know what I mean by ‘TED-style presentation’. And if you’ve watched both old and new talks then you’ll know how that style (and the overall presentation format) has changed over the years.

So what is the TED presentation style and format? Presentation Zen’s Garr Reynolds can tell you, complete with a copy of ‘The TED Commandments’ that have been sent to speakers almost like a style/philosophy guide for making presentations at TED. If you’re a fan of TED, make sure you check it out.

Alison Green from the Ask a Manager blog recently wrote a good article in the US News & World Report called ‘Why You Didn’t Get Hired’:

The job looked perfect for you. The description matched your experience and skills so perfectly, you could almost visualize yourself at your new desk. But now you’re staring at a rejection e-mail and can’t figure out what happened.

The article makes a good read, particularly in the current hiring climate. Though, if you’re at all familiar with hiring, getting hired, or the recruitment industry then none of what’s in there will come as a surprise to you.

Why This is Useful Anyway

Still, the article gives a good checklist to go through before applying for any job. I know that I self-select myself out of a number of potential job applications for some of the reasons listed in the article.

For example, I can tell when I’m under-qualified for a job and, unless I can clearly and succinctly justify why the company should take a chance on me despite my (apparent) shortcomings, I don’t bother applying for that role. Note that I’m not underselling myself by doing this, I’m simply being a realist.

Taking Self-Selection a Step Further

Indeed, before I apply for any job with a company I’m not very familiar with I learn all I can about the company and its employees. Naturally, a lot of my research is online since that’s the area I work in but my research has, in the past, included locating people who work for that firm and, through them, finding out first-hand what the culture there is really like. And I have, on occasion, not applied for an open position that I was qualified for after completing this research and realizing that I wouldn’t be a good fit there.

My research continues well into the interview stage, by the way. For example, just by looking at the office and the employees who walk by when you’re waiting in the reception area can tell you a lot. Specifically, it tells you what the company values and what it prides itself on. To give you an example, one organization I interviewed at had a huge world map on the wall with a dot representing where all its major offices were (over thirty of them across four continents) and a set of clocks that were set to the local times of major regional offices. Obviously, being global was important to this company. This kind of information is not only useful for the interview but twice I’ve realized early on that these weren’t places I could see myself enjoying working at. (The proudly-global company wasn’t one of them, by the way.)

Later, during the actual interview, I try to figure out which of the items in the job’s position description are important, necessary, optional, and added bonuses as far as the interviewer is concerned. If you’re lucky, your interviewer will tell you their preferences explicitly. If not, you have to figure it out from the company introduction and the overview of the role than they often give you at the start. Figuring out what they really want from you becomes particularly challenging when, for example, you have multiple interviewers who have differing priorities. And these priorities could differ both from each other and sometimes from what’s written on the position description itself.

For example, I once went through a three-round interview process and made it down to the last two applicants but got rejected because the head of the department – i.e. my potential boss’s boss – preferred a web strategist with a marketing agency background over one with an IT background (despite my MBA). My potential boss, on the other hand, really liked me because he had a marketing agency background and so he was looking for someone to complement his skills, not reinforce them. Indeed, he said exactly that during my interview with him. So when I highlighted my technical background during my final interview – this one with the head of the department – I ended up giving her a specific reason to reject me. Still, what I loved about this company was that they were clear about why I didn’t get the job and they were willing to state this reason openly and unapologetically – something that a lot of companies don’t do, even if you ask them.

So What Have We Learnt?

The point of this post, then, is two fold. First, if you didn’t get the job you thought was perfect for you, there are two reasons for this: (1) there was someone for whom this job was even more perfect or (2) you figured wrong and the job wasn’t perfect for you in the first place (i.e. maybe you were under-qualified or over-qualified, maybe you didn’t fit the team culture, maybe you underperformed at the interview, etc.).

Second, it’s crucial to debrief yourself on why you didn’t get that job. And be honest because sometimes the reason you didn’t get the job is you (i.e. you messed up the interview, you didn’t have an accurate understanding of what the job was about, you weren’t qualified anyway, etc.) and not the company (i.e. they didn’t understand you completely, they were too quick to reject you and probably didn’t read your entire resume, they’re just plain wrong, etc.).

Final Thought

Actually, if I could add one more thing it would be this: Don’t get disheartened.

I’ve had my fair share of job rejections over the last few months but I’ve also rejected tens of applicants who applied to jobs that my company advertised and for which I was the hiring manager. I’ve actually been in situations in which I’ve had three applicants who I know can do the job equally well – with some minor, mostly inconsequential differences among them, of course – and I’ve had to reject two of them. And, on occasion, I haven’t had a clear-cut, easily explainable reason for why I chose one over the others. In other words, the applicant I hired basically lucked out.

So when I’ve been rejected for a job I really wanted and knew I could do incredibly well – this has happened to me twice in the last year, by the way – I’m pretty sure it happened simply because I was unlucky that time. And I know that it’s only a matter of time before things go the other way and I’m the one who gets lucky. Of course, I just hope this happens sooner rather than later!

The Workplace Internet Leisure Browsing (WILB) study that I talked about a couple of weeks ago has since been featured on Episode #49 of the University of Melbourne’s Visions Video Podcasts.

Also, you can read excerpts from the the study on the Deloosh Market Research blog:

Abstract

This study finds evidence showing that employees who use the Internet for non-work related tasks during work hours are more productive than employees who do not. We speculated that Internet leisure browsing is an unobtrusive interruption which suspends metal fatigue, resulting in higher net concentration during a workday than when Internet leisure browsing is unavailable.

Finally, there’s a study that shows empirically what most of us have known all along: personal Internet usage at work actually boosts employee productivity.

The study was conducted by Dr. Brent Coker from the Department of Management and Marketing at the University of Melbourne and you can read about it here:

• University of Melbourne Media Release – Freedom to surf: workers more productive if allowed to use the internet for leisure
• Ars Technica – Study: surfing the Internet at work boosts productivity
• Michael Specht – Internet usage at work makes you productive 

According to Coker’s research:

“People who do surf the Internet for fun at work – within a reasonable limit of less than 20% of their total time in the office – are more productive by about 9% than those who don’t.”

It’s About More Than Just Productivity

But it’s not just about productivity, as Specht points out, it’s also about trusting and respecting your employees.

I personally dislike companies that prohibit what Coker calls Workplace Internet Leisure Browsing (WILB) with the justification that when you’re at work, you should be doing nothing but work. That’s just silly because it’s a completely unrealistic notion of what work is. Work is a subset of life, not the other way round. So you can’t exactly ignore the rest of your life – or, indeed, the rest of the world – while you’re at work.

[There are, of course, exceptions to this rule. It’s okay to apply principles of Taylorism to, say, when you’re working in the kitchen at McDonalds. It’s just that you shouldn’t extend those principles to when your employees are not doing those specific kinds of tasks.]

The problem with a lot of companies is that, while they understand this basic principle (i.e. that there is life outside of work, even between the hours of 9am and 5pm), they aren’t tech-savvy enough to see that this also applies to using the Internet. Companies will, for example, do things like allow flexible working hours so you can do your banking during your lunch hour or go as far as to provide coffee machines and televisions in their kitchens and lounges so you can take a really good break during the work day. And yet, these same companies will block the use of webmail services, social networking sites, and online video sites which, to people like me, are pretty much the virtual equivalent of the kitchen and lounge (and sometimes the preferred equivalent).

So What’s the Problem?

Part of the problem, as has been pointed out in the past, is the generational disconnect between the Baby Boomers, Gen-X, and Gen-Y. That is, there exist numerous members of older generations who don’t understand that, for some members of the younger generation, a good work break could be eight minutes of e-mailing and checking on your social networks, four minutes of going through photos of your newborn niece, and three minutes of watching the latest viral video that’s making the rounds. And this disconnect is understandable. However it is then the job of middle managers to convince senior managers that this kind of personal Internet usage is actually okay.

Another part of the problem are the reports written by generally Internet-clueless analysts on how much companies are “losing” by letting employees access social media or online video sites during work hours. What tends to happen is this calculation:

• Think of an average employee who earns 50k a year; that’s $25 an hour.
• If this person spends, on average, 30 minutes a day on Facebook and Gmail. That translates to $12.50 per day “lost”.
• So, for the 250 days a year that this person works, the company is “losing” $3,125.
• If this company had 400 employees, the company would be losing 1.25 million dollars per year on employees accessing webmail and social networking sites.

Company executives look at this calculation and exclaim: “What?! We’re paying our employees $1.25m to access Facebook and Gmail! Block both those sites!”

The problem, of course, is that while the calculation is essentially correct, the reasoning behind it is flawed. The reasoning being that you are paying your average employee exactly 41.6c per minute to work for you and that every minute this employee does something other than work your money is being wasted. Now if this person was working on an assembly line, your loss-per-minute-not-worked calculation would be valid. But for every other employee, it’s not.

Why is it not valid? Because your employee is human – who has human wants and needs – and it is unreasonable to treat this person like a work-producing automaton upon whom you can do this kind of dehumanising calculation.

To Conclude

My point, then, is that studies like Coker’s are really useful because they empirically demonstrate that you can’t blindly apply principles of scientific management (i.e. Taylorism) across an entire organization.

And because these studies come from a business department of a large and well-respected university – and they use terms that businesses understand (specifically, ‘productivity’) – they will probably do some good.

If nothing else, reports like this tend to make their way into business magazines and give executives something to think about. This particular study may not get companies to unblock access to webmail services and social media sites, but it’s a start.

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P.S. What’s almost funny are the companies that are so completely disconnected for what’s going on online that they don’t even know what Facebook is and therefore don’t have a policy on whether they should block it or not!

Four new MBS Leadercasts have been published recently and they’re all worth a watch:

• ‘Communicating with Customers in the 21st Century’ by Peter Danaher
• ‘Telling the Financial Story’ by Richard Parker
• ‘Types of Change: Diagnosing Your Change Project and Understanding How to Successfully Manage it’ by Paul Kirkbride
• ‘Philosophy and the Future of Business’ by John Armstrong

I’m back in Melbourne after spending a few weeks vacationing in Pakistan. It’s hard to believe but I hadn’t been home in over two and a half years! I didn’t get much time on the Internet while I was there so here’s a quick catch-up post in which I’m linking to some of the stuff I would have otherwise discussed on this blog.

First up we have Connie Benson who has updated her three excellent posts on online community managers:

• Community Manager Responsibilities and Goals
• Updated Community Manager Job Description
• Community Manager Salary

Next are two posts from Scott Berkun, with the second one lending itself nicely to a discussion you might have with a community manager who claims to be an “expert” but doesn’t actually have much experience in building or managing online communities:

• How project managers establish power
• How to call bullshit on a guru

Then we have Dmitry Fadeyev who wrote an excellent post for Smashing Magazine on:

• 9 Common Usability Mistakes in Web Design

Next, Toby Ward talks briefly about the latest intranet trends as reported by Jane McConnell in the Global Intranet Trends Report for 2009:

• Intranet Trends

Ward also wrote a humorous blog post called ‘25 Random Things About my Intranet’ which, if you want, you can balance-out by his high-level overview article on ‘Intranet Strategy: Planning a Successful Intranet’.

And finally, both Laurel Papworth and Stephen Collins reacted to a Courier Mail article on Facebook and other social media sites being banned at work:

• Facebook: Banned at Work
• Blocking Never Works

Regular blogging will commence shortly.

How do you use Facebook?

Do you, like me, use it as a supplementary publishing platform in addition to your blog, website, online photo gallery, Twitter stream, and so on – even though this online presence of yours is technically within a gated community? If so, then you’re probably already careful about what you upload there. And by that I mean you only upload stuff that you would be happy to share with everyone you know including friends, family, acquaintances, classmates, colleagues, employers, future employers, users of Google Search, and so on. If this is the case, then your privacy settings on Facebook are probably fine they way they are, even if they are all at their default values.

If, however, you use Facebook as more of a private website – i.e. one maintained more strictly within a gated community of your choosing (e.g. something that only friends or family can access) sort of like MyFamily.com – then you might want to read Nick O’Neill’s recent article on ‘10 Privacy Setting Every Facebook User Should Know’.

Facebook gives you a great deal of control over who gets to see which parts of your online profile including your wall, newsfeeds, photos, applications, friends lists, and so on. It also lets you control who gets updated when someone else tags you in a photo or video that they have uploaded. If you didn’t already know all of this, then that article is certainly worth a read.

[Via Laurel Papworth]

What are the first few things that a new CEO should do upon joining an organization?

Based on what the press is saying and what was discussed on the latest episode of This Week in Tech, the CEO should lay out her near and medium-term plans for the company in some big public announcement/address in order to appease the company’s shareholders. In my opinion, though, that’s exactly the wrong thing to do.

Why? Because the CEO’s primary job is not to appease shareholders’ concerns, it’s to fix the company. Yes, the CEO does need to address and appease – and dare I say ‘manage’ – both the company’s shareholders and employees, but the first message he gives them ought to go something like this:

Followed by, “Oh, and this is going to take a while so don’t expect any results for the next eight quarters or so.”

Meanwhile, that CEO needs to start figuring out exactly what the problem with the company is and how she’s going to go about fixing it. Most likely she’ll already have a pretty decent idea of where to look and who to talk to about it, but she should never presume to know the answers based on her outsider’s knowledge and she should never announce her solution to the problem before she’s even taken the time to analyze the problem in any real depth.

If she does make the assumption that she already knows how to fix the company and is arrogant enough to announce her solutions up-front, then she’s no better than a crappy management consulting firm that applies cookie-cutter solutions to unique and complex problems simply because “that solution worked just fine in the last company we consulted with.”

My point is that both Carol Bartz, the new Yahoo! CEO, and Barack Obama, the new American CEO (a.k.a. President), are doing exactly what a sensible new CEO should be doing upon joining a company. And I’m very impressed that they’re not caving to public/shareholder pressure to announce their reformation plans before they’ve even had a chance to settle into their new offices and figure out what the heck is going on there.