Generally speaking, I keep my posts on TLNT below 800 words. I’ve dipped into 1,200 word territory on occasion but that’s pretty rare. Now, I would be interested in doing a long form series for TLNT but what has been better for online publications, at least as far as I know, has been a series approach. So let’s say I want to drop somewhere between 5,000-10,000 words on a specific subject. Instead of putting that all into a single online piece, you create a series of it for the week and, in so many words, milk the long form subject the way you put your biggest story in the back half of a magazine.

It keeps the content brief for people who want to jump in and out of the story but good for the folks who love to read longer stories.

For this blog though, there is no formal word limit. I’ve gone over 1,000 words numerous times. Especially when my blog was more popular, longer posts were the norm. When this blog sucked, sometimes the posts wouldn’t go beyond this point (you’re at the 235 word mark by the way).

The big failure in evangelizing blogging as a platform is the reduction of the discussion of blogs as the sum of their technical attributes. How long should it be? How do I SEO optimize it? Should I tag or categorize? What platform should I use? Should I allow comments? How many visitors am I getting? How much money am I making per pageview?

This is where I’m supposed to say this stuff is important but I’m not going to say that.

What people don’t spend enough time on is thinking about their writing. When you focus in on word counts rather than telling a good story, you’re destined to fail. If you focus and write a compelling story but it is too long, you have a lot of options. If you write a crappy story within your pre-destined word count, the only way to fix it is with a rewrite.

There are a lot of technically competent blogs out there. Folks who did their homework and have the technical situation down. But, let’s be real: the content can daft on some of the most fantastically constructed blogs. Because they couldn’t imagine going over 600 words, they never cover issues with any sort of weight or breadth that have a few more words allows you to do. Or that their link baited titles are so SEO optimized to the hilt that it feels formulaic, just like their self-linking in the post content itself.

There’s a legitimate alternative out there. Think a ton about what you’re writing about, read multiple takes on the subject, think about who is interested in it, think about why you’re interested in it, write something interesting, edit (for clarity, simplicity and completeness), and hit publish.

For some folks, that will be 200 words. For me, sometimes it is almost 2,000. Or 200 words. (Okay, it’s never 200 words)

The fact of the matter is, I spent a ton of time on that post. Reading (and re-reading) material about the subject, thinking about it, thinking about my approach and then thinking about the key points I wanted to cover.

I’m not the quickest thinker in the world. It means I’m not the greatest conversationalist in the world, nor am I prone to amaze you in a casual conversation. And please, I’m not fishing for compliments or having a fit of false modesty. I’m not above being egotistical here but even I know my personal limits.

Luckily this piece isn’t going to be 2,000 words, though. The advice I have today is pretty simple:

It’s easily panned advice, akin to “act naturally.”

But the process of making that leap was actually fairly important for me because it meant I spent a lot less time trying to translate what I was thinking to what I was writing. If you give me a topic that I know well, or can research well enough, and ask me to write something about it, I can do it in fairly quick time. It’s not automatic but the process is smoother. If I know what I want to write, I sit down and do it in a sitting. Usually less than an hour or two.

That’s not to say that if your natural style is littered with typos and grammar errors, you should be content with that. I’ve tried hard to eliminate spelling and grammar issues, though I have my own personal challenges. That’s also not to say that your writing style can’t improve (albeit, slowly, especially in the beginning). The important part was stripping my writing down to its foundations, finding what’s working for me and what wasn’t and starting to make incremental improvements on my style and mechanics from there.

The problem, at least for me, was that it took me basically taking everything I learned in formal writing for business and killing it word by word. And for people who have spent their entire career writing in a specific way to a specific audience, that becomes the barrier to you finding your own voice.

If there is a shortcut, I wish you would have told me that five years ago. I don’t think there is though. You wrote your way into those habits, you’re going to have to write yourself out of them.

“You’re still up?” the groggy voice called out.

“I know,” I replied.

I was in full burnout mode. I worked at a job I was disenchanted with, I was trying to do side work to pay off medical bills and I was continuing to blog. Like an insane person, I continued to toll away at it hoping that something good would come out of it. There was no rhyme or reason to how I would get ideas or if they were actually any good. When someone asked me what I did to blog, I told them I waited until my wife went to sleep and the house was quiet and I’d write whatever hit me. Uncomfortable laughs would ensue.

(That’s not very sustainable by the way)

Eventually, blogging led me to good things — or more precisely, good people — to save me from myself. In retrospect, it was entirely by luck that any of this happened.

Fast forward to this summer and I’m sitting in the social media lounge at SHRM’s annual conference with Trish McFarlane talking about what’s taken place since 2006. I’ve met hundreds of wonderful professionals, been given great opportunities and essentially changed careers. And I look around and I see other people’s lives enriched by social media. It’s a good thing.

Then I see other things that I am less sure of: influence ranks, social media evangelism on par with the greatest TV preachers, politics and competition. I see new people blogging about HR issues but they don’t register on my radar as quickly as before. The HR issues I used to talk about here have moved (and evolved) to TLNT.

It goes without saying that the atmosphere will change. Not to get philosophical on you but what exactly is this all for? Why did I sit there alone in the dark in the early morning hours obsessed about finishing a post that would be read by a few dozen people? Was I hoping to influence people? What was I wanting to influence them about? Was I building a brand? What did I intend to do with it? And if I did luck out and become one of the best blogs in this small niche, what would I do after that?

Namely: what was my end game? And maybe I didn’t know exactly what I eventually wanted to be when I grew up, at least I could have a better idea as to how to chart a course.

While I believe there are many right courses, I also believe there is one wrong one: the “I just want to share information and network with peers” blogger. Only because that is absolute bullshit. That might be fine for a while but after you’ve invested hundreds (or thousands) of hours into something like blogging, you want more than to share and to network (though they certainly are very, very advantageous parts of being a part of this community).

The real difficulty is actually being honest with yourself about it and then carrying through in your actions.

That’s what I’ve been looking forward to talking about at HRevolution for the last four months. And while the conversation could go in a lot of different directions, I’m hoping the one people leave with is a point in the future when it comes to blogging (not just a nebulous idea).

Your body, mind and spirit (along with your significant other) can only put up with so many sleep deprived nights.

Got it? Okay good.

* * * * *

This is a pretty silly post title, right?

Especially if I want people to read my post and become regular readers. Getting a discount code is purely transactional. I wouldn’t get a single reader if that’s all there was here. And there is a pretty good lesson about it that is relevant to HR technology space.

Technology only works well when it is done in conjunction with your overall strategy.

People familiar with blogging and basic SEO know why I picked this post title. As far as I can tell, I’ll be the only page on the internet with a page title and h1 tag that specifically says “HR Technology Discount Code”. That’s search engine gold, baby. Add in Las Vegas and the year in the first line of text (along with the date of the post) and you’re pretty well covered. In the next few days, I expect to see a steady stream of traffic flowing in…

And leaving just as quick.

Head and hand moving in concert

My goal isn’t to get people to come to my blog to then just simply leave though. My goal is to attract long-term readers, get them to read through more of my material and connect in some way (subscribing, following on Twitter, etc…). A post title like this doesn’t encourage any of that.

I’ll get great technical results, sure. In fact, this post went about as perfectly as it could. But it didn’t align with my overall strategy for my blog so it could be considered a major failure.

One of the things they’ll talk about in Las Vegas is the importance of making your technology choices in concert with your strategy. In sessions, you’ll often hear horror stories of attendees going out with RFP’s that are a hundred times more complicated than they need to be (or a hundred times less complicated, though that seems more rare). All because they were sold on technological capabilities before they considered their core strategic necessities first. There are many people there that will be trying to fix past technological pains and you don’t want that to be the legacy you leave.

As much as I think the HR tech show is for the geeks of our industry, it can be just as helpful to those guys and gals in more traditional HR leadership roles telling those geeks what they need. It’s easy to become enamored by the shiny objects known as HCM software (especially when you’re running a piece of software on a server in the basement with a decade’s worth of dust on the cabinet).

If you don’t figure out your strategy, you could end up like me: running a post title that seems like a good idea (and is technically sound) but totally doesn’t fit the profile nor the goal of this blog. Only, I’m guessing your boss probably takes it a lot harder than the boss of my blog when you screw up like that.

I’m not going to HRevolution this year. I enthusiastically went to the first two and I was happy to be part of the original crew who bought into it. And this year’s event is already sold out so it isn’t like I’m getting bribed to say nice things about it, that they needed my ticket or required my presence to make it a success. Look at the agenda. It’s going to kick ass.

I’m looking forward to the flurry of writing activity in May as people attempt to digest the event. In my post after the last event, I said that the HRevolution days themselves were the easiest part of the journey. Harnessing that sense of wonder and the feeling like anything is possible the other 363 days of the year? That’s tougher. Taking action on the things you are excited about? That’s tougherer.

I feel like I’ve made good progress in the year since the last HRevolution. I wish I could talk about that with a group of people who get it. I’m going to miss the crew of people who are attending and a bunch of new faces too. That’s always tough.

It’s such a unique event and I hope that everyone who goes enjoys it greatly. And if you don’t go this year, you may be able to catch it next year if you sign up early.

Recruiting Innovation Summit

An exciting development for me professionally is the first conference I’ve programmed with ERE: Recruiting Innovation Summit. I worked with the speakers to get an agenda that will be all about pushing the envelope in talent acquisition. This summit is the next generation of the Social Recruiting Summits that we’ve held the last couple of years. It’s a single track, one day, hard hitting program.

You’ll hear from practitioners, experts, analysts and outsiders. That’s the kind of mix we want to keep going as we move forward on these events.

But before I get too far ahead of myself, the next one is coming up May 17th at LinkedIn Headquarters in the Bay area and there are still spots open.

We will be having another one that will be coming up in the Fall as well and I am starting my search for speakers. I’m looking for some traditional and non-traditional speakers that are really driving innovation. While we definitely want to keep the focus squarely on talent acquisition, it is a good opportunity to expose innovations from other areas of the business and see what lessons can be applied for recruiting. I’m very easy to contact of course so let me know if you have any great ideas.

Does anybody remember their first e-mail address? I do. It was lhaun@pacifier.com. The same company that hosted my favorite dial-in BBS also became my first e-mail provider. And it was great except I only knew three other people who used e-mail (and they lived only a couple of blocks away from me).

So I would check my e-mail address for weeks and not receive anything. What did I do to remedy this? Well, I signed up for some newsletters (about cars because I was still a teenager) and I started conversations online about politics, sports or Ham radio that would spill over into massive reply all e-mail fests.

Which was great, at least for awhile. Then more widespread adoption of e-mail took place and in between newsletters and virtual conversations came e-mails that I needed to read from family and friends. And then later, e-mails from fellow students and co-workers. In between all of those were e-mail forwards from people I did want to hear from but just not on those subjects.

What eventually happened was the initial use transformed into something different as time went on. Now I am rarely involved in an e-mail chain that lasts more than three or four e-mails because then we need to discuss it in real time. Now I rarely receive e-mail newsletters for anything but the most pertinent industry news. Now I rarely have discussions with strangers via e-mail that goes beyond either a “not interested” note or a “let’s discuss this on the phone” note.

What’s Happening With Twitter

When Frank Roche posted about his 10,000th tweet, I was first a little surprised that he beat me to 10,000 (by about 1,200 tweets too!) even though he was on the service only a few weeks before me. But then, I was interested to hear that he thought the best years were behind Twitter.

I’ve told my friend Chris Ferdinandi multiple times that Twitter was easier to manage four years ago. There were maybe a few dozen then maybe a couple hundred people that were on in our niche and almost all of them were worth following. Early adopters of a service usually have similar goals, norms are established and the network is smaller so it is easier to influence (and be influenced).

Now? You can’t watch ESPN without hearing Twitter mentioned. Not a conference goes by where I don’t end up talking about Twitter at some point. It’s a different world out there. You can’t just follow back everyone like the “good old days.” The network feels less tight, less special, and less useful. So does that mean its heyday is behind it?

Twitter is Changing (And We Shouldn’t Be Surprised)

The way we use Twitter is changing. For me, it has become a utility like e-mail or my RSS reader. The people I follow are more than likely people I know or have met at least virtually. Some people I have met I don’t follow because they tweet too much. Some companies I do like I don’t follow because their updates aren’t interesting. Some people I haven’t met but are producers (writers mainly).

It’s not about being cool or being part of a clique anymore. After all, anyone can send me an @ message. And for those longer messages, my e-mail is widely available. There isn’t a special crew of people who knows a special e-mail address. It all comes into the same box

It is about getting the maximum usefulness out of the service in as little time as possible. It’s the same way we manage e-mail, calendars, or reading schedules. That may seem cold but it also makes Twitter something that I view like e-mail: indispensable, constantly available (though not constantly monitored) and available to anyone who wants a quick reply to or from me.

I set a goal: I’m going to speak at twelve events this year. My first event was a small one in October of 2009. 12 months, 12 events.

Today is number 14 and my last for the year.

It wasn’t easy. I had some insignificant experience in public speaking, mainly to groups of a dozen or less. I didn’t know what my style was so I tried different things. I forced confidence, smiles and eye contact. I cut down slides (or expanded slides). I eliminated them completely for four of my presentations. I got really bad feedback on one presentation. I got screwed by a conference organizer. But I’m glad I did it because I learned some great lessons along the way.

Throwing yourself into it

I threw myself into speaking because I knew it was the only way I was going to book 12 speaking engagements. I also had an aversion to speaking and I wanted to see if it was just a confidence/skill thing or if it was just something I didn’t enjoy. I thought that was the only fair way to look at it.

So I dived in. The first ones were fine because I over-prepared. No such thing you may say? I could have been mistaken for a robot. A fast talking robot.

One of the middle ones was a complete bomb. I’m fortunate that it was for a smaller organization, a non-local organization and that it only happened once. Do you think you’ve lost the audience when a person in the front row says something like, “This guy doesn’t know what he’s doing up there” so you can hear it?

After that, I started to get slowly better. Rehashing a video of my presentation or listening to the audio of a presentation I gave helped a bunch after I got over how stupid I looked and sounded. I started figuring out how much it made a difference when I was comfortable and enjoyed the subject matter.

Crowds matter

I’m sure there are some studies out there that say something but the crowd matters. Sure, the size matters (I talked to groups from 30 to 300 during the last year) but the biggest difference maker was having 8-12 really engaged people in your audience. People who had interesting questions or stories of their own or people that simply gave you the attentiveness you crave as a speaker.

I had a group of almost 100 people that didn’t have that many people in the audience and I had my smallest group have almost everybody in that group. Which one would I have rather spoke at?

The impact of stories

What I found out was how much better my presentations were when I went off script and told stories. Stories about failed business ventures or successful ones. Funny stories or sad stories. It didn’t matter. When I had a story I could tell authentically, it worked. People listened. And I used those to interconnect with my overall story.

It made a huge difference. I used a quarter of the slides I usually did. People weren’t falling asleep. People would ask me questions.

And what I realized is that’s what I’ve been doing on this blog. Telling my story or telling other people’s stories is what makes this blog accessible. It’s what I was already good at.

Translating the message going forward

Going from a text based conversation to an engaging and interactive speaking gig is a major challenge and I found that most of the time, my message was lost because I was focused on hitting my goal rather than figuring out what speaking venues and styles made the most sense for me. While I don’t imagine I’m going to stop speaking, I’m going to be selective about the venues, styles and content I choose going forward.

I know this is old news to some speaking veterans out there but for those pros who are looking to get into it, I hope this helps when you’re considering speaking. I wouldn’t change the way I did it at all because even though I knew most of this coming into it, I didn’t realize how big of deal some of these “little things” could be.

Whatever the reason, they suck.

You also have a Twitter account and maybe a few hundred or few thousand followers. Do you say what is on your mind to those people (and the world) or do you hold back?

The new challenges in speaking

The first mistake? Saying anything at all.

I saw quite a few tweets recently from the 2010 Illinois Annual Conference and Expo that were particularly brutal to a speaker. It felt like the person was getting piled on.

The comments may have been true. At least from the people who were actually there, it seemed the sentiment was genuine frustration.

I felt compelled to chime in. I said I would’ve waited until the end to approach the speaker and the organizers about the session. I wouldn’t hold back any punches but I wouldn’t tweet them either.

I did this with a few things in mind. Knowing that I’ve sat through bad presentations and fumed. Knowing that I’ve bombed on a speaking engagement and felt really terrible about it. Knowing I prepared for one thing only to have to present another at a last minute and felt frustrated. Knowing I’ve gotten bad info from organizers or unruly audience members and felt betrayed and thrown under a bus.

Most of the time, it is a combination of a few factors that lead to a bad speaking experience. Yet, if someone who were prominent were to tweet out that they hated my presentation and thought I bombed, it is only my reputation that suffers. I (very selfishly) worried for my own sake and the sake of anyone who got on the wrong side of a speaking engagement in this new norm.

What do we say? What do we hold back?

Does that make me a bad speaker? Does that mean I can’t take the heat? Probably.

All I know is what I would have appreciated in this case would have been the benefit of the doubt and the opportunity to explain before getting assailed in a very public way.

But people also want instant feedback, instant access to analysis and above all, absolute transparency. That’s why I pointed people to the Twitter hashtag for the event and why I was following off and on for the day. Yet when I saw those very negative tweets, I started thinking about why I had such an immediate reaction to the way the pulse of this particular session was delivered to me, the outsider. It’s not an easy line to draw in the sand.

Is there value to everyone involved in holding back the harshest criticism for a one on one conversation with an organizer or speaker? Is it better to tweet it out so that more people can be aware of the mistakes being made? Should we expect all speakers to have a thick enough skin to not only deal with the reactions of those in the room but those thousands of miles away with no direct connection to the event (sometimes numbering in the thousands)?

Your turn

I’d love to get your take on this. Where is the line? Should there be a line? Are some things left better unsaid on Twitter? What should speakers, conference organizers and PR folks do to prepare for those situations?

Now the easy part is over.

That’s right. Simply coming to #HRevolution might have been a step in the right direction but it was an easy step. Maybe for some attendees, that was a tough step too. It isn’t going to be any easier going forward.

We talked a good game about the future of the HR function, social media, technology and other issues hitting our collective worlds. The question on everyone’s mind at the end of the day was “Now what?” Loads of information was shared. Debates and discussions flowed over into hallways, tweetups and dinners. And tonight people started flowing out of Chicago as quickly as they came in. The question I want to ask when you get to your desk Monday morning: Will your behavior change at all or are the things that inspired you getting shelved until you have more time (which ends up being never)?

While you can get other benefits from attending the unconference, the primary purpose of the unconference style is to get more participation from the audience. Participation demands action.

The hard thing for me is I can’t do these things. I’m not in HR anymore. And when someone asked me about how not being in HR anymore changes my credibility, I had to be honest.  I can inspire action. I can help with finding business cases or contacts or speakers or educational material. But I can’t lead an organization through the fire.

You can.

Making The Choice

Productive change isn’t accidental. You have to make the choice to alter your actions (even slightly). When we talked about breaking out of the social media echo chamber, I tried to emphasize that you have to actually first want to break out of the echo chamber in order to do anything else.

We have a strong group of core people right now but we need your boss, your peers and the people you know from around HR to become a part of this group. And part of the point was introducing them to social media on their terms and in their language. Instead of telling people to go to a blog, copy and paste the content into an e-mail and send it to them. Instead of saying my Twitter friend, say my colleague so and so.

All of these things are small things but they are the result of a conscious choice to provoke change.

Credible Activism

Becoming a credible activist in your own organization for your proposed changes is a risk. A risk that you should be ready to take. Jason Seiden said it best today when talking about facing the fear of failure whenever you first make that choice. You can alleviate that fear by just a tiny bit by being prepared to talk to them about the change on their terms.

Consuming content from the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review and The Economist may not sound like the best use of an HR person’s time but it is actually one of the best ways to learn about the issues that your boss probably cares about. And that’s where a conversation can start.

Interested in additional education? It looked close to unanimous at the unconference that people believed getting a MBA was superior to getting an HR certificate when it comes to building organizational credibility.

Are all of these silver bullets? No. Your organization will have specific ways that you build credibility (which may mean doing things in a traditional way).

Influencing Beyond The Organization

There was a bit of a debate over whether job titles matter. They do, especially when you’re talking about building influence beyond your organization. There are certainly some caveats there but the biggest one is this: don’t waste the opportunity to leverage that title to positively influence. That means when you have the title, you step up to the plate and you take your best swing.

Here’s the main dig with that: when you’re talking about reaching out to those higher level executives and influencing their thinking and behavior, they want to hear it from someone like them. For someone you can’t get to know deeply, a job title that conveys authority can open their mind to ideas that they might have otherwise rejected. That’s unfair but true.

I wish we could have gotten more into how you can do it if getting that title is either impossible or if you’re just uninterested in it. When you’re in that position, you’re fighting the battle of of one by one. Instead of being a speaker where you can influence hundreds at a time, perhaps you can get a dozen or so people in the best case scenario. That’s still a useful function and I didn’t want anybody to get the impression that I was downplaying its importance.

What We Didn’t Say (On Purpose)

We didn’t say:

• Start or keep blogging
• Become a Twitter superstar
• Look at every new piece of technology that comes out
• Sell social media as the solution to everything

We don’t mention it because it is certain to continue whether we want it to or not. The battle to get our community of likeminded HR folks isn’t going to be won on that front. It is going to be won through reaching out to people who are generally unreachable through traditional social media using language that makes sense to them as well as building your credibility and influence.

Are you ready?

Employees don’t know jack about their benefits. They really don’t. But first, a quick bit of history to get you in the mood. In the 1940s employers began offering health insurance to their employees as a way to be more competitive when the US government imposed a war-time freeze on wages, and since then benefits plans have been getting exponentially more complicated. And hemlines, well they’ve gotten more complicated too, but that’s for a different post.

The problem is that benefits communications haven’t caught up with the complexity of plans; leaving legions of employees (at least two-thirds by most accounts) flat out bewildered when it comes to their benefits. Even with all the “flashy” comparison charts and 5 color brochures, people still don’t get that socking money away in an FSA is just about a sure fire way to save nearly 30% .

When your employees aren’t properly educated on their benefits

• You lose out on the FICA tax savings of elective benefit participation
• You have a harder time retaining top talent
• They are less engaged
• They aren’t as productive as they could be
• An angel loses its wings

From our years spent developing hit interactive games like YOU DON’T KNOW JACK we learned a simple but powerful lesson: If people aren’t engaged they won’t learn. With that in mind, here are a few ideas we humbly present on how to make benefits communications work a little better.

People Prefer Plain English

Which example below is more likely to be understood by all of your employees?

1. Beyond the basic benefit, both individual and spouse buy-up options are available. Please note: an election of voluntary life coverage for a spouse can equal up to half your individual life buy-up, although depending on the desired level of coverages, EOI may be required.
2. The company is going to buy some life insurance for you. If you want, you can buy extra. Whatever extra life insurance you buy for yourself, you can also buy up to half that amount for your spouse. Now, depending on how much additional insurance you’d like, one or both of you may need to answer some questions about your health to see if you qualify for it.

If you picked 1 – stop messing with me. It’s not nice.

To get from 1 to 2, try hiring a writer that isn’t a benefits expert. Look for a writer that knows how to tell a good story and gets to the point without relying on the jargon that’s permeated your ears for decades.

Employees want to spend as little time and effort as possible to come to the best benefits decisions

Your employees don’t want to be experts in benefits. They want to race cars on the Autobahn or walk along an exotic beach hand-in-hand with George Clooney. So it helps to get to the point as quickly as possible, and throwing in a little humor every once in a while couldn’t possibly be harmful. Even your attorneys like to laugh, even if they do it in secret when nobody’s watching.

Everyone’s an individual

Darcy in accounts payable is pregnant, Jeff in finance is diabetic, and Parker your new 22-year old analyst barely thinks about his health, much less his health insurance. How can a single benefits manual meet the educational needs of all three of these people? Don’t expect people to leaf through pages and pages of personally irrelevant information; they’ll end up giving up before getting to the good stuff. Instead, break up your educational materials based on certain triggers that matter most to your benefits plans. Put together a one pager on pregnancy and how your plans treat it, same with managed diseases, and maybe even one for the “young invincibles”.

If you’d like to learn more about benefits communications from the Creators of YOU DON’T KNOW JACK, you can download our eBook here or visit us at www.jellyvisionbenefitscounselor.com. Oh, and you can totally email me too (lindsay [at] jellyvision.com). Oooh oooh, or fax me! That would be fun! Now where is that fax number . . . .