Junior High School

This morning I woke up mad. Not just mad – furious, livid, apoplectic. What could disrupt a good night’s sleep and have me wake in such a foul state? Junior High School. More to the point, I am mad that I made a conscious decision to go back to Junior High School, a place I hated every single day I was there. After yesterday, I really have to question my sanity.

Junior High School is a place where everybody is just starting to understand right and wrong, but they chose to do wrong anyway. Junior High Schoolers call people names and get all bent out of shape when someone doesn’t like them. Nobody takes kids from Junior High School seriously. You certainly don’t go the local eighth grade classroom to find your next CEO.

And yet, here I am again. What the hell is wrong with me? I came back to HR after arguably successful stints in the business world because what we do matters. If we can pull our act together we will be the next drivers of corporate competitiveness. We will replace sales and marketing as the topic of conversation at the corporate board table. We will, that is, if we can act like adults. But instead we seem to be in a quandary, wandering around pinching each other and seeing how much dope we can smoke in back of the school before we get suspended.

John Sumser writes an article that is in bad taste and hurts people’s feelings. So what? Bill Gates gets called a thousand time worse than a “spoiled child” in print every day. Does he quit? No, he understands that’s the price of business in an aggressive marketplace. “Bill’s a billionaire and should expect that” you say? So is your point that you aren’t worthy of the attention or that you can’t stand the heat so you will never be a billionaire? Sounds like a chicken and egg problem to me.

If you don’t like what John writes then here is a great idea: don’t point a lot of people to his site. Don’t drive his traffic numbers up. I believe in a rational market, and in a rational market people don’t buy what they don’t like. But in our world if we don’t like what someone is doing we jump up-and-down and then make sure that people do more of it.

Man, I pray for the day when we are worthy of being called bad names in print. Fast Company dignified our profession with their article. I couldn’t believe that people got upset about that. A serious general news publication finally notices us and we bitch about it. Unbelievable. I guess our vision of the ultimate hell is Time magazine doing a cover article about how recruiters are scum and HR generalists are dolts. We should be so lucky. Finally we would start to get some capital to do the things we need to do.

Everybody who has ever peeked at a tabloid raise your hand. Does it make you less likely to go to the two-timing starlet’s movie or more likely? Lot’s of data say’s it makes it more likely. So you know who was the real winner in Sumser’s article? Heather. That’s right, Heather. The crowds that go to see her will be bigger, more people will read her, and Microsoft will increase their return on investment. Hey John, can you call me an asshole in print? Please? Oh, I know…. Tell everyone that I have some horrible disease that I got from shacking up with a male prostitute during the filming of one of my many forays into the world of gay porn. Thanks!

And to Heather’s point: it’s a value for value world. If your employer determines that they get value from your blog without any metrics then more power to them. To all of you out there saying that blogs are about “buzziness”, I have another B word for you: bullshit. To quote Bill Gates (who stole it from Steve Jobs) “Real artists ship.” Period. No market, no art. If Heather’s investors don’t need metrics to determine their return that’s their right. But to believe that something of value can’t be measured is the biggest stretch of the business imagination since the Pet Rock.

We have serious business to do people. Blogs are fundamentally changing the very nature of the capitalist system. Up to this point all corporate power was based on information asymmetry. Blogs are taking that away. Businesses have to increasingly provide real value to get customers, not just consumeristic, jingoistic crap. This is a good thing. Let’s do what it takes to keep this train rolling. Poking your finger in the eye of the corporate masters is the best possible way to convince them that this is just a passing phase, and that they can go back to their evil ways.

Yesterday I got a call from someone who questioned how I could be friends with John Sumser. “He is just so obnoxious and mean.” Junior High School, man. That’s what it is. I was the kid who always liked the geeks and wore funny clothes to school to dare the bullies to do something about it. So, in that spirit, let me say “John, you are my friend, what you do is a credit to this industry, and how about we start a business together?”

Comments

[Heather]

Jeff...I told you I was going to do this (in the collegial spirit of respectful disagreement) and here it is:

What is the *right* metric to measure blogging when the intent is to build one's employment brand?

I'm totally open to changing my mind on the orginal topic but it will take a convincing and specific argument to do that (give it a shot...calling BS isn't specific enough for me).

And also, now I must challenge you to a dance off (because arm wrestling and drinking contests aren't my thing). : )

(As always, with much respect, buddy)

[Jim Durbin]

There is a real danger in demanding bloggers create metrics t gather traffic, publicity, and inbound links.

Blogging is not easy to do - it requires passion on a topic. When you're writing for an audience to hit artificial targets, your "voice" changes, often becoming less authentic.

Without that authenticity, the blog soon dies from boredom.

The real measure of a blog is what type of community springs up around the topic. Everyone can't be a portal, but everyone can be part of a community. Without a wide variety of voices, that community lacks the vigor to stay relevant. And it is that community that people come to read.

The problem with using metrics of any kind in blogging is there are no metrics broad enough to apply to all blogs. There are none sufficient to determine if a community is successful or navel-gazing.

Thus, human beings, in this case decision makers at corporations are left trying to determine if the blog is "worth it."

In my view, it is the individual blogger that most benefits from jumping into a blogging community. The worth to a company comes when that blogger stays and shares new sources of information, publicity, and serves as a conduit to the outside.

This is the challenge with blogging. Business consultants like you (Jeff) and John Sumser want to use blogging to spread your message because it is effective to you to do so.

Without the larger blogosphere contributing and linking you, most of whom will lose money every unbillable hour they blog, the whole affair collapses.

Your attempts to lock blogging down to fit corporate decision making is a recipe for ruining the advantages of blogging.

This is where John erred in his logic. And his post, with his comments, showed he is not a blogger nor does he understand the blogosphere.

Here's an analogy. John is like a salesperson trying to convince members of a local charity that they would be a lot better off if they started a company and sold their services.

He doesn't get that it's the passion and the authenticity of flawed people that makes the blogosphere worth listening too.

Heather gets that, and is thus rewarded by readers with their traffic and links.

I started the brouhaha at Recruiting.com because John's version of the blogosphere was wrong. While I disapproved of his remarks, there are plenty of insults he could make about other people that would not rise to the level of getting a post.

[Jeff Hunter]

Jim -

Thanks for this great and thoughtful response. I love your various blogs (I thought the piece about Recruitmax was great, by the way).

First, let me clear something up. I am a corporate hack at a video game company. I haven't consulted in a while. So I definitely don't blog to pick up clients. In fact, most of the "clients" I could pick up are furious at the swipes I take at the HR and technology professions. I blog because I am on a personal mission (just as you are, apparently). I am passionate about changing the nature of our prevailing economic system from capital-based to talent-based. My hope is that companies will learn that they can only become competitive by demanding greatness of the education system at an earlier age and therefore change the destructive educational policies that we follow today. The only way to get this done is to get companies to understand the concept of value, develop metrics for valuing talent appropriately, and reward that talent with value that they find compelling. So I am a true believer, just like Heather and everyone else (I would claim more so, as my blog is actually hurting me financially, not helping me – it is truly a labor of love).

So why am I not jumping up and down at your and Heather's take? Ian. That's why. "Ian" you say? Let me explain.

There is this guy who works at EA. He may be one of the funniest human beings on the face of the earth. Everybody laughs with him. He sends out funny emails and items he clips from the web every week and it always good for a hoot. So about 4 months ago I said "Hey Ian, why don't you start a blog and share this with the world? You love this stuff, you spend time on it and I think it may have value to others. I don't know for sure, but I know a great way to see - start a blog and see if a community starts to develop around it.”

So he did. I never once asked him to check his site stats, never once asked him if he was getting any feedback. I just laughed when he put stuff up.

Then he came to me and said "I really love this. I want to do more of it for a living, but I also really like EA. Anyway to have us both win?"

Actually, that had been my evil plan all along. EA is the 800 pound gorilla in the industry. You hear people talk regularly about us being "corporate" (which in the gaming world is not a compliment). Here was someone who was funny and real and loved what he was doing. So I asked Ian to take his next post and comment on something that he thought was funny at EA - take his insightful wit and turn it inside. He did. And he started getting emails from college kids (Ian works in our UR department). They said that Ian was helping them see a different side of EA.

So here is my question for you: if I take Ian's results and go to his boss and say "Give Ian more time to be creative and explore and present this side of us because it is a perfect harmony between what he loves and what we need" and I sell the argument with stats that you and I believe aren't really good indicators of value, but that they (the boss, the investor) likes, have I somehow damaged Ian and his future blogging career? Is the fact that Ian "does it because he likes it" the main rationale I should bring to his management in order to get them to do the right thing?

Just curious. This is a real, unvarnished "existence proof" of the value of corporate blogging. I tell anyone that wants to blog "do it because you love it", but I sell it to investors by real returns (which usually involves some sort of measurement).

I prefer to see the "and" in these situations, because that is exactly how blogging (as a tool of decreasing information asymmetry and focusing companies on creating value instead of spin, not as a vanity press or a mission platform) will thrive.

Again Jim, I want to thank you for your comment. I am really honored you stopped by and decided to stay and chat.

[jason]

Jim you laid out some of your best stuff man. You are right about almost everything you wrote. It's gotta be your wife. You get smarter by the day. I just left you a voice message to let you know this was your best comment ever.

I think though where you may be a little off is that I do think that John Sumser understands the blogosphere. He may not be a blogger who has a blog but he gets the blogosphere. If it were not for that guy, we, (you and I) would not be writing on Recruiting.com

[John Sumser]

There are interesting comments and ideas about this stuff all over the 'blogosphere'. There are even some really great ideas derived from this thread in other places on Jeff's wonderful blog. That's a technical glitch (one of many) that's a part of blogging.

The really exciting parts of community development are not linear. Blog software is, however, extremely linear. Someone who wanted to find the great posts by Martin Snyder that spin out of this conversation would have to know how to find http://www.talentism.com/business_talent/2006/03/response_to_hea.html
Someone who wanted to see my recruitment blogging from 2002 would have to know how to find it in its Radio weblog: http://radio.weblogs.com/0108019/

That's the one of the problems with the linearity of current blogging tools:

They create pencil thin silos of deep information.

The reason for measurement is to refine the definition of your audience and to figure out out how to reach it. As you can read in the comments in the next article on Jeff's website, audiences take various forms and measurement. In today's interbiznet article, I've started a series talking about the importance of curiosity in measurement. Figuring out the what and how of measurement is a surprisingly important part of how you get started. Not all blogs (or all businesses) will be measured in the same ways, they will be measured by the unique factors that make or break their success.

The right measure is the one that you choose because it fits your purposes and helps you get better. In our industry, they say, "You are always getting a performance review whether or not your boss does it annually." The same is true for metrics. Either you choose the ones that you want to use or they will get chosen for you.