Funniest video ever: “Every Presentation Ever”

February 11, 2012 by  

I love this merciless re-enactment of yes, every presentation ever. (The video is a brilliant viral promotion for the book “Habitudes for Communicators” a project of non-profit organization Growing Leaders)

Go ahead and watch the video and you’ll have many of your own memories to share. (In my experience, the only thing missing is a musical intro to the slideshow and a table of snoozing reporters).

The tough question is, “have you ever given one of these presentations and will you admit it?”

How Businesses (& Customers) Will Communicate in 2012?

January 3, 2012 by  

Now in the shiny new year, businesses are (hopefully) thinking about where their communications focus should be in 2012.

Here are some of the broad trends we’ll likely see along with some resources to help you get up to speed.

Mobile

Expect to see more QR codes as those little black and white boxes in the corner of ads get increased attention from consumers. At Small Business Trends, Lisa Barone notes that there was a 400% increase in mobile searches this year, with some shrewd companies sending promotions to customers’ smartphones when customers were likely to be waiting in line on Black Friday.

Check out Barone’s advice on avoiding rookie mistakes in your mobile advertising here.

Video

David Hsieh, VP of marketing and entertainment for Cisco, predicts that video will account for 90% of all internet traffic over the next three years. Currently it’s at 51%. Constant Contact’s Gail Goodman explains how a business can start communicating with customers through video here while Ashley Zeckman at Ragan.com gives some advice for “PR pros” here.

Social Media

Most companies are already using some form of it — 72% of US businesses and 83% of Chinese businesses do, according to a recent survey conducted by KPMG. But the challenges of social media ahead include engaging customers, especially customer reviews, as Google and potential customers place increased importance on public, positive feedback.

Marketing expert Heidi Cohen gives a simple rundown of social media from A to Z here and has a more advanced checklist for small- to medium-sized businesses using social media here.

image by Nandadevieast

Death by a Thousand Pointless Meetings

December 19, 2011 by  

image by EditorB

You’ll know the true test of a group’s communication skills by how well the meetings run. The best and worst meetings I ever encountered were in the same organization, oddly enough.

The worst was a rambling multi-hour gong show, where the two people in charge of the meeting (first mistake) decided a warm and fuzzy collective approach was important to build trust (second mistake). The scope of the meeting was couched in jargon so incoherent, nobody knew what was supposed to be decided. In an effort to “prioritize”, they wrote everything everyone said on giant pieces of flipchart paper.

By the end of the meeting (and by end, I mean at the point where it was actually dark outside so they decided to call the meeting quits), chart paper was everywhere and nobody knew what was going on.

So imagine my surprise when several months later I sat in on a meeting of a different group of people in the same organization. This meeting dealt with staffing and operations for a large project. No one spoke for more than two minutes at a time, and every point was immediately addressed. It was like one of those movies where the president of the United States is in a tense discussion with advisors in the Situation Room.

The entire meeting was 20 minutes long, which is how long they told me it would be before it started.

Alison Green at Askamanager.com gives one frustrated employee some advice on how to run a structured, effective meeting. This column clearly struck a nerve — read on for the comments to Alison’s post to see how other readers deal with the “time suck” of a wasteful meeting.

Should Your Business Use Social Media Background Checks?

December 12, 2011 by  


image by English106

We’ve heard about the trouble employees and job hunters can create for themselves with social media, but Googling a prospective employee’s social media output can be a Pandora’s Box for employers and HR managers. An employer or manager may find useful information, but will also come across personal information prohibited from being used in the hiring process.

“For example, if you see that a candidate ”Likes” a page on mental health issues, the CNIB or a women’s right organization, it could be discrimination to pass the candidate over on that basis,” writes Lisa Stam on the blog Employment and Human Rights in Canada.

And given the tendency of many women to instantly change their Facebook avatars to belly photos, ultrasounds or positive pregnancy tests, even a casual Facebook search for a candidate can put an employer in a vulnerable situation.

Social media background checks by third party companies

Social Intelligence is one of several companies now offering social media background checks. As the California-based company explains on its website, the benefit of a third-party search isn’t finding out more information on a potential employee, but less.

Search engines provide unstructured, ad-hoc results that expose everything there is about a given applicant, including personal information not legally allowable or not relevant in the hiring process. Examples of this include race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, gender identity, disability status, veteran status, and genetic information.

Does it work?

Social Intelligence promises to keep US employers on the right side of the Fair Credit Reporting Act, basically. As Gizmodo found out, this even extends to obscuring any image that might identify someone’s ethnicity. (Despite the fact that if a candidate has already been interviewed in person, the interviewer already knows what he or she looks like.)

One Gizmodo employee who failed the check examines the process here. Mat Honan found that despite his results, hiding an embarrassing social media past can be pretty easy. The company wants to guarantee that they have the correct person, so they only rely on information, such as email addresses, that you have given to your employer. Anything not openly accessible, like a private Facebook profile, is not looked at.

What will Social Intelligence reveal? Companies choose from a list of filters. According to CIO.com, the top concerns of employers are illegal, racist, discriminatory or potentially violent activities. Will it protect employers from discrimination lawsuits? The FCRA requires employers to tell candidates if they’ve lost out on a job due to a flunked background check, so it’s probably just a matter of time before we find out.