What’s the best way to tackle management of digital teams to keep engagement and output high? I’ve been through two Internet booms and busts in corporations, nonprofits, and startups — so I’ve made plenty of management mistakes by commission and by proxy. Posted over at Harvard Business Review, five common mistakes I’ve seen or made myself.
Category: General
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Friday 5 — 09.13.2013
- So, the iPhone 5C/5S launched and turned out to be more evolutionary than revolutionary. Is Apple more about fashion than electronics these days?
- Infographics are everywhere, and their stepchildren “snackables” are likely clogging your social media stream. “Get me an infographic” has replaced “Make me a viral video” as the new top-down, digital/social mandate. Here are five questions executives should answer before requesting an infographic.
- The best way to make compelling and shareable content has been a battle between two camps: the automated and optimized for search crew versus the heavily human editorial approach. Here’s how Techmeme is striving for the right mix by having humans power the headlines.
- How are adult smartphone users using location services? According to Pew 74% of them are lost like me, and use their phone to get directions or other information based on their current location. While more users report activating location as part of their mobile social posts, fewer are using explicit geosocial services like Foursquare to check in.
- If you were planning to tweet your way to the top, a position with a social media title may not be the right path. Turns out social media jobs have slowed because social is everyone’s job now. A savvy digital team will turn to empowering the enterprise rather than hoarding the know-how.
Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Please let me know what I’ve missed in the comments below.
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The best news email knows mobile, adds voice
What do effective news headlines emails have in common? First of all, they’re mobile in design and content. Here’s a daily email received yesterday from the New York Times:
This email arrived at 4:43 a.m., when I’m still about four hours from a laptop encounter. How could this headlines email perform better for mobile? Start with the subject line — this version teases only one story, so it’s a single-shot opportunity to grab a reader who’s thumbing through all the early morning messages. Next, look at all that navigation taking up valuable screen space. The navigation narrates the static departmental structure of the institution rather than engaging the reader, and the links don’t work on mobile. And that big CUSTOMIZE? It goes to a page designed for the desktop. Finally, as the user scrolls through the ~12 screens of content, nearly every story has a thumbnail image, many of which are extraneous or tough to parse at that size.
[tweetable hashtags=”#news”]This email feels like a missed opportunity for what’s arguably the strongest brand in news.[/tweetable] Why not optimize for mobile readers who are likely stumbling to their first cup of coffee? There’s a second, larger opportunity to add editorial voice to this message. Don’t give me a laundry list of the entire Times — I’ll get that on a tablet or laptop, later. Instead, tell me what someone smart about today’s news thinks I should be reading.
Compare the Times message with the same day’s Quartz weekend brief. There are four teasers in the subject line so if I’m not interested in global rebalancing, then maybe women on Wall Street? And the brief is built for mobile, with a clean, readable font.This email projects a strong editorial voice. The New York Times leads by telling you about itself as an institution — in case you were wondering, here are all our editorial departments. Quartz engages you up from with a greeting and narrative in the second person that your high school English teacher taught you never to use. As you scroll, the links appear more naturally in the text, underscoring the idea that this was written by a human rather than a cut-and-paste of headlines. And it follows its own reporting with “Five links elsewhere that made us smarter.”
[tweetable hashtags=”#mobile”]Email isn’t dead. If anything, millennials are more plugged into email than ever[/tweetable] via savvy services like the Skimm or PolicyMic or even Upworthy. What’s different is the content strategy — the best email newsletters engage you early, can be read easily on mobile in an elevator or a Starbucks line, and have a voice that keeps you opening them, day after day. -
How to solicit smart comments
Articles about the complex issues affecting women in the workplace are lightning rods for impassioned conversation. This New York Times article on gender equity at Harvard Business School was bound to elicit strong opinions, just like the original 2003 Opt Out Revolution piece and its 2013 sequel (spoiler alert: damned if you do, damned if you don’t). [tweetable hashtags=”#content”]How can editors ensure thoughtful conversation and minimize ad hominem, all-caps outrage?[/tweetable]
Midway through the HBS article, the Times article introduces a full-width block with three specific questions to respond to:
It’s an Oprah’s book club type of approach, with an entire section of questions for readers to consider. Rather than a mass call for comments, it’s a prompt for directed discussion. The mid-way through placement is smart, giving readers questions to consider as they (presumably) finish the piece. Mid-stream blocks with calls to action can be surprisingly successful. Analytics pros will be taking a hard look at the comments originating with a click here versus those starting from the text block at the bottom.
There’s a nice segmentation of the comments at the bottom, where you can read the comments not only by question but by author: all, business school alumni, recent graduates, men, and women. Again, the questions remain highly visible at left and up top.
Previously, I took a look at the rising use of annotation — here’s a good example of an annotated piece on opting-out at Medium. These are all valiant swings at a pernicious, unsolved problem: how to benefit from the wisdom of the crowd while keeping comments from devolving into an angry lowest common denominator? The article on the HBS gender equity experiment will no doubt put this approach to the test.
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Friday 5 — 09.06.2013
- We know almost everything about the iPhone 5C except the most critical one: price. Mobile pro Benedict Evans breaks it down.
- Price point for the new iPhone is highly correlated to its global #2 performance in the face of Android’s dominance. Market share stakes are high with an estimated total of 1.8B mobile phones shipping this year, and 2.3B units predicted by 2017.
- Does it seem like you spend about twice as much time online as you did three years ago? Apparently, you’re right, and those smartphones and tablets are to blame.
- If you’ve ever sheepishly deleted your browser history, rest assured that you’re in the majority. According to Pew, 86% of internet users have taken steps online to remove or mask their digital footprints. Perhaps more surprising was the news that 21% of internet users reported an email or social networking account compromised or commandeered without permission.
- At last — big data comes to the women’s sport pages! Check out this awesome rapgenius analysis of the New York Times wedding section. Weddingcrunchers.com is a database of ~60K wedding announcements published in the New York Times from 1981 to 2013.
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Try it: Google define
Language is always changing, but the arrival of consumer technology over the past 25 years has meant a sharp uptick in our new day-to-day jargon. Terms like modem, pager, or smartphone enter and exit the common usage with remarkable frequency.
FlowingData this week pointed out how Google’s “define: <word>” feature now displays word etymology via flowchart and graphs word usage over time. Three words graphed over time tell a story of technology adoption and attrition:
You can clearly see where telegraphy emerged in the mid 1800s, and how the flat line begins around the time the last telegram is sent in 2006. Telegram remains in the language as a common noun and as a relatively popular name for newspapers, but the arc aligns with the technology in use.
Next, let’s track fax technology, which clings on doggedly in the finance, law, and healthcare sectors. A sharp rise in the 1990s, but not the subsequent flatline many might assume.
Finally, have a look at tweet:
The word tweet meaning “the chirp of a small or young bird” has been around since at least 1800. You see a minor spike in the 1920s, when Jazz Age musicians produce and record “When my sugar comes down the street, all the little birdies go tweet tweet tweet.” But the real hockey stick spike starts in 2006 when Twitter enters the scene.
As a language geek I love how we can track and quantify language usage in more simple, visual ways. Analyses like souped-up concordances can not only track macro usage trends, but perhaps even diagnose dementia in individual authors. As visualization tools become more common and accessible, we’ll have more ways to analyze and add context to our understanding of the language we use.
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Coming to terms with tech proliferation
The virtuality of the debate has made it difficult for us to grapple with the consequences of the proliferation of the world outside of this bubble …Now that the effects of the tech world invade the physical environment, we have to figure out the necessary philosophical and intellectual framework to deal with it.
— Evgeny Morozov quoted in From Example to Excess in Silicon Valley
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Friday 5 — 08.30.2013
- The New York Times put up an interactive feature on startups to watch. It’s an interesting list of new ideas (Myo) and mass eyeballs (WhatsApp), and a clean way to get reader feedback close to the content, like annotations. Nitpick: the design seems a little unnecessarily spare, and I’d like to be able to share each item rather than the whole story.
- Web analytics startup Parse.ly finds that Feedly is the big winner in the feed reader market post Google Reader, and that the Outbrain content discovery platform is driving more than 50M page views. More coverage here.
- More internets = more spam, but these algorithms are killing Twitter spammers even before they start. This methodology could be applicable to other social media services. Based on several metrics including content analysis, the system in one model identified and deleted 95% of problematic accounts registered across 27 services.
- This week marks ten years of Skype — now, “to skype” is even a verb. Here’s a terrific timeline of internet telephony.
- In the U.S. it’s Labor Day weekend. Here’s a great video reminder: it’s time to put down your smartphone and eke out the last moments of summer.
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Digital Problem Solving at the Berkman Center
One of the best parts about working in digital strategy is that you’re surrounded by compelling and unsolved problems.
[tl;dr for current Harvard students: we want to figure some out — sign up here.]
The commercial web and email have been widely adopted for only about 20 years, so individuals and organizations are still figuring out ways to be and to interact online. In organizational settings from higher ed to corporate, digital natives are learning and working on teams with digital immigrants. We’re nearing an inflection point for a new organizational understanding of the role that digital, social, and mobile technologies play in community members’ lives.
The rise of social media, in particular, adds a new kind of complexity. Today, 72% of online adults use social networking sites. Facebook is only a decade old and has 1.15B users. Twitter is a significant enough news platform that it gets hacked right along with the New York Times. LinkedIn is a major content company, soon to admit teenagers to the professional fray. Music, travel, and fitness are just a few of previously private activities that now often reside in social shared spaces online. Given all these changes wrought by our new digital/social/mobile world, how do we think about new understandings of privacy on social networks and how expectations of privacy jibe with people’s organizational roles?
All these changes create new and interesting problems to be considered and solved about how organizations and their constituents interact. At Harvard we have myriad organizational social accounts, and of course students, faculty, and staff have their own. What are the new social norms for interaction?
Luckily Harvard’s Berkman Center has pulled together a pilot initiative around these digital problems and more. We are looking for current Harvard students to help define the questions we should be asking and develop some initial hypotheses. Please join me, along with faculty members including Misiek Piskorski and Joe Blitzstein and Harvard College senior and entrepreneur Zach Hamed. Read our guiding principles, and sign up here.
Source: Pew Internet
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How to ace an interview with substantive content
Mashable recently posted a selection of tips aimed at entry-level job seekers on how to make a good first impression in a job interview. They’re reasonable tips, and worth mentioning because they aren’t always heeded. But they focus on the surface elements, like dressing appropriately and shaking hands. Let’s face it, though: those are tables stakes in a highly competitive job environment. If you’re looking to ace an informational or entry-level interview, you’re going to need style and substance. Consider the following- Lead off with strong content. That means your résumé is current and spellchecked, and matches what’s on your LinkedIn profile with minimal customization. Consider ways to add your own voice. Résumés for entry-level positions that have leapt out of the pile include a prospective developer who listed logic lessons learned from flipping burgers, and a content producer who formatted her résumé like a Twitter profile. When you’re reading 50 résumés and diligently trying to give every candidate a fair shake, a relevant flash of personality stands out.
- Use the internet to arrive prepared. It’s disheartening interviewing someone with a good degree and/or internships who shows up without rudimentary knowledge of the organization or its mission. Do 30 minutes of homework on the organization, recent news, and the people you’re meeting. When candidates show up asking for Mr. Hewitt, the front desk lets me know. Come prepared with three questions — that way, you have a spare if the first two are answered during the conversation.
- Take notes. It’s helpful to have a device or old school note pad to jot down questions as they arise, or record items for follow up. If you have interesting experience and seem committed to your search, I’ll be trying hard to come up with relevant people and paths to pursue. Recent candidates have shown up without anything to take notes with or, halfway through, pulled out a notepad and asked me to go back and repeat them.
- Make your thank you note — yes, email is fine — work for you. During your interview, take quick notes on topics discussed. After the interview, scan recent headlines for a relevant article, read it (that part’s important!), and forward it along with a brief comment. Don’t worry if it seems too basic or if you think the interviewer might have read it. You’re saying, “Hey, I paid attention. Here’s something relevant and potentially useful.” While stationery is lovely, an content-rich follow up is even better.
- Keep the interviewer posted. If something works out as a result of an interviewer’s reference or not, let them know. Good news about a job or an update on a continued search are both welcome. Sending a follow up gets you noticed as someone who takes initiative and threads the needle — both highly sought-after traits.
By all means, cover your bases with the attire and posture, but know that a show of substantive content will be a strong differentiator. And today’s digital and social landscape means that it’s easier than ever to showcase your ideas — through a Twitter feed, a Google+ account, a well-developed LinkedIn profile, or even a personal blog on an unrelated topic. None of these tips is expensive or onerous, and trying them just might set yourself apart in a competitive hiring situation.
Photo credit: pennstatenews