Tag: Technology

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Thoughts on #Ubergate


The media is up in arms over Uber because they threatened to dig up dirt on the personal lives of people in the media who don’t write nice things about them. They aren’t taking it lying down, either. They are deleting the app everyone! I repeat: THEY ARE DELETING THE APP. That’s as severe as it gets for tech journos.

Now, the real reason they are deleting the app is because intimidating the press is a shitty thing to do. That’s reason enough. Even though some media outlets do dig into the personal lives of tech executives (ahem, Valleywag), most don’t — at least proactively.

Lumped in with all the real reasons are two other reasons. One of them is privacy — which I’m going to leave alone for the sake of brevity — and sexism.

For months now — and if you’re in the tech press, you have no excuse to NOT know this — there have been plenty of stories about Uber’s highly suspect to downright crappy, sexist advertising and company culture.

And now, of course, Uber’s getting piled on with other stories of crappy things that they’ve done that the media chose to ignore until they were the ones being threatened.

All of this is just a reminder that the press can, and often is, self-serving to a tremendous fault. That the reason that Uber got away with a lot of these other stories is because they were swept under the rug for more favorable coverage. The people who actually were paying attention and had an issue with Uber’s sexism abandoned the platform months ago. People pretending like this was the straw that broke the camel’s back? Really? Don’t play that.

Believe me: I don’t feel bad for Uber executives. Nobody should, even if you feel a little bad for the drivers stuck in the mess. The media, with their pronouncements of deleting apps and retreading old, buried stories, are as much enablers as they are the victim here. Just let the record show that very few of them were unwilling to take two seconds to delete the app and another minute to find an alternative when they were being horrible competitors or sexist jerks.

It was only when members of the media were directly threatened by an Uber exec that the anti-Uber rage caught its predictable storyline. That only serves to give tech companies one lesson: do whatever else you like, but don’t rock the tech press honey pot.

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Five Ways to Manage Your Content and Maximize Your Influence


I’ve seen a few people talk about the fact that they have (or don’t have) access to LinkedIn’s latest “thing that isn’t job searching”: LinkedIn Influencer. Now, like other business celebrities, you too can exert your influence on the multitudes of LinkedIn users. You create content on LinkedIn, LinkedIn’s algorithms hopefully share it far and wide, and then you become influential.

I won’t pick on LinkedIn too much — though I will note that if everyone is an influencer, no one really is — but it’s the same thing I’ve seen with other content syndication and non-paid writing gigs. You’ll get great exposure! Write for us often!

I’m not here to judge you if you want to write content for free. I know I have. But, I also mostly get paid to write. That’s important to me, I like doing it and I don’t worry too much about people who don’t get paid.

I am going to judge you if you have a poor strategy when creating content for somebody else, on their platform, for free, and all you hope to get from it is name recognition. The face of content is changing on the web but don’t be stupid about it. Here are five tips to make the most out of your digital content presence:

  1. Don’t just write on LinkedIn (or Forbes, or Huffington Post, or someone else’s site). Unless you are getting cash money to write for these folks, you should probably be judicious in how you use these sites. Understand the terms, particularly their ability to use the piece you create on associated sites and originality requirements.
  2. Create a social hub. You can use WordPress.com, Blogspot, Tumblr, or any number of blogging sites (or you can host it on your own). Copy (or excerpt, if what you wrote has to be original) pieces that you write for these other websites to your social hub and share the pieces from there to your social networks. Any original pieces should obviously come from here.
  3. Buy a domain name and direct it to your hub. Blogspot and Tumblr are free to use your own domain name with, but the domain name will cost $10. Don’t be cheap and just go for whatever.blogspot.com. That’s a fool’s game. While you don’t necessarily control those sites where you can host your social hub, you do control your domain name which means moving content becomes possible as well as always being able to capture your own traffic.
  4. Include links back to your social hub in everything you write. Even if it is a paid assignment, I’d rather have a link back to my site than an abbreviated bio and it never hurts to ask. If you’re being asked to contribute to a site for free (or you’re doing the contributing to a site), this is the bare minimum. Allow people direct access to where they can find more stuff from you.
  5. Spread your words to different audiences. If you write about the same topics, for the same publications, you’re going to hit a saturation point with the audience. Unless you’re writing to be a writer, you’re usually writing to sell something else (yourself, your business, your idea). Hit diverse publications, especially initially, and if you find one publication does better than most for you, focus there.

One last note: these rules will probably change tomorrow. That’s a problem because I actually wrote this post yesterday. What won’t change is this: ownership and control should always be in the back of your mind if you’re going to play this game. How do you continue to cut out the middle man and take your message directly to people who want to hear it while expanding that audience?

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This Surprising 20 Second Video Explains the Decline of Journalism


Sorry, you were tricked. There is no video. But before you go, you should realize that when you click on stories with this kind of title, you’re always being tricked.

When people talk about consumption in the US, they often talk about the mindless stuff we buy. The biggest offender in these critic’s minds are these Black Friday type of events where people stand in line for hours to save a few hundred dollars on a bigger TV. And there is even more outrage about stores that are open on Thanksgiving now for shopping.

When I think about awful consumption patterns though, I think the way we consume information about our world. I don’t want to sound too much like a guy who thinks you should get off his lawn, but while the internet has the great potential to free information from the bounds of corporate or government control, it also has the ability to play to the lowest common denominator.

This isn’t a recent phenomena, either. Upworthy is one of the worst offenders of playing to this demographic (and has a spoof article generator to show how formulaic the whole system really is) but it would be unfair to leave out sites like Buzzfeed, Viral Nova, or even, at times, The Huffington Post.

I think there is something great about getting to the point quickly, or working on provocative titles that invite a reader into a story. There’s also something about being entertaining or funny. But look at this title: “This Surprising 20 Second Video Explains the Decline of Journalism.” Or this one “This Puppy Taught Me More In 1 Minute Than Anyone Else Has Done In A Lifetime.” What do you get out of that? Do you really think you can get to the core of the decline of journalism or life itself in less than a minute?

Of course not.

Yet, we see these types of articles get traction with readers, time and time again. For example, The Atlantic is running a big series on how energy usage is shifting. None of the articles over the last month have more than a few hundred shares. Meanwhile a post about how Hawaii will ruin you on The Huffington Post has over 10,000 shares.

We can do better, right?

There’s no easy solution and there might not be one at all. We’re not going back to having three TV stations and one local newspaper (and I don’t think that is better).

It’s easy to blame young people for this trend but young people have never consumed the most news (and, at least anecdotally, that’s not who I see sharing this vapid nonsense). While social media contributes to it, there’s always been a market for this and there probably always will be.

Unfortunately, it comes at a time when dollars for advertising are already tight. Journalists will have to decide if they want to go down this path, consumers have to decide if this is the type of media they want to support, and advertisers will have to decide if eyeballs are all that matters.

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Sourcing: Beyond Cool Tools to Talent Acquisition Evolution


I’m a big fan of cool tools. I have an iPad Mini and a Pebble watch. I’m typing this on a Chromebook (and I can’t wait to get the HP Chromebook 14). If there is a writing app out there, I’ve tried it. If there’s a note taking app, I’ve tried it as well. Both usually get relegated because of my love for Google Docs.

As we are wrapping up SourceCon though, what stuck out to me wasn’t so much the latest tips and tools to help those closest to the ground. The biggest takeaway was that sourcing — as a defined, widespread function across multiple industries — is beginning to drive some real, significant, and recognized strategic advantages.

Sourcing old-timers will dispute the notion that sourcing is just now beginning to drive strategic value. And you can go back to the earliest iterations of how sourcing really started and you’ll see many great examples of how sourcing has driven bottom-line results for decades. No joke. I’m not minimizing it one bit.

Between the audience growth here at SourceCon and the maturity of the topics and tools that enable sourcing though, what you’re seeing is an active evolution of how talent acquisition is understood and done on a very essential level. Sourcing is moving beyond the early-adoption phase. Just like it would be insane to manage any sort of requisition load without an ATS, it is increasingly difficult to ignore the essential nature of sourcing for talent acquisition.

Consider me a biased source. I was the SourceCon editor for over a year. But I have no dog in this fight anymore. But this has been festering for years and if it weren’t for a recession that gutted corporate recruiter budgets and decimated agencies, it would’ve happened years earlier.

Three trends that are pointing to this evolution to me:

  • The ranks are getting larger — It’s not just about SourceCon either. The money is getting better as Editor-in-chief Jeremy Roberts talked about in the opening keynote and there are more corporate roles for those who want it.
  • The conversation is changing — Beyond doing the job, we’re now talking about expansion, structure, and strategic initiatives that are critical parts of a larger corporate view.
  • More mature software platforms — The rise of mature sourcing tools is more than an isolated canary in a coal mine. It is an indicator of corporate spending and investor optimism.

As sourcing continues to move beyond early-adopter phase, I think you’ll see:

  • More leadership involvement — Not just increased sourcing leadership but talent acquisition and yes, even HR leaders are going to be taking more notice and be deeply involved in sourcing. The expansion of sourcing is going to have more stakeholders, not less and will require working more closely, not less with these key roles.
  • Talent shortage time — Talented sourcers are rarely without a job for very long. Sourcing expertise, especially at the strategic level, is going to be short for years. There are many educational opportunities for sourcers but look for more companies to build these teams internally.
  • The wide and fuzzy gray line — The line between sourcing and recruiting is going to become more clear, but not for awhile. As sourcers start act more like candidate marketers (focused on demand generation and branding), there will be a clear delineation between the two.

And of course, we’ll still have cool tools. In fact, if the last two years are any indication, the tools of the trade are getting cooler. But, I’m particularly excited about the growth and evolution of sourcing as a necessary functional component of talent acquisition teams everywhere.

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Talent in the Cloud: Revolution or Devolution?

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Carmen Hudson recently shared an article about the future of hiring, referencing Elance’s new private talent cloud:

The cloud cuts out waste and that’s why people love it. Companies and individuals call upon storage space in the magical ether as they need it, without spending a penny more than they use. Gone are the days of servers idling half empty in a building, barely used hard-drives cluttering up desks. Everything becomes more efficient, organizations get leaner, the fat is trimmed.

But what if the fat that the cloud cuts out isn’t machine fat at all? What if it’s human fat?

I’m not talking about Fitbit making you fitter or some freaky new plastic surgery in the cloud procedure. I’m talking about applying the principals of the cloud to managing the human workforce. Imagine, instead of just drawing on servers and processing power on an as-needed basis, companies also draw on people that way. A workforce that operates like the cloud, swelling and shrinking at a moment’s notice.

The way organizations are using people in their organization is changing, and it is diverging with two radically different paths and two different promises.

One ideological path takes us away from humans as resources into something of an organizational alignment. Finding people and teams with shared ambitions, moving toward a common goal. The other further entrenches people as resources, to be bought like any other good. Plug and play and if one resource burns out, replace it with another to meet your objectives.

Funny enough, both promise freedom and progress and play with the idea that business ambitions are simply a collection of human ambitions. They just try to go about solving for that reality in a different way.

I don’t have anything smart to add in here other than to acknowledge that this, more than many of the other articles I typically read on the subject, made me think about what work in the future might look like.

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The Cost of Availability and Transparency

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I’m on my fourth wedding ring (I’ve only been married once though). I’ve lost a lot of things really important to me (my favorite Portland Trail Blazers hat is in the back of seat pocket 17C on an American Airlines flight, if you ever find it), but the ring thing is always most embarrassing.

Personally, I’ve loved the feel of tungsten carbide rings since my buddy Sam got one when he married. So I got one too, from a traditional jewelry store. I lost that one a very short time later in the Columbia River just north of where I live now. I went to Zales to get a second one only to have it crack. Of course, I went back to them only for them to tell me I should’ve bought a protection plan (for a year old ring that was nearly as hard as a diamond?). Clearly, it was defective but they wouldn’t take it back.

Given that I had spent a few hundred dollars on rings and because my head was hot due to me not getting my cracked ring replaced, I searched for tungsten carbide rings online. And I found out my favorite retailer has them and they are a fraction of what I paid in the past. So after I lost some weight to the point where my ring no longer fit, I didn’t hesitate to go back to Amazon again for ring number four.

I honestly should’ve known better, too. I bought my wife’s engagement ring online in 2004, sight unseen. Why? Because the price was unbeatable, seller’s reputation was impeccable, and the return and resizing policy were awesome. Didn’t need any of that by the way because I nailed the purchase and size.

The reason I bring this up is because transparent pricing and availability is one of the last big disrupters in the enterprise software space. While businesses don’t necessarily shop like consumers (and that’s not necessarily a bad thing), the way that people are evaluating enterprise software is beginning to shift. I’ve heard of well-networked HR pros pulling RFP’s from other HR pros for the vendors they are shopping.

People always want to challenge me on this, too. People always negotiate big purchases! Really? Because the Costco Auto Program doesn’t exist. Because sites like Zillow don’t exist. Oh, and I guess Salesforce doesn’t just do this, right on their stupid website?

I’m not saying somebody is going to pull out their Amex Black Card and put their ATS purchase on it through a web portal (though, they could and they might in the future), but I am telling you that the RFP process is garbage and that someone is going to come in some day with all of your pricing in the region and demand the least lucrative deal on the planet.

And you’ll probably say yes, if only because you want to crack into the mind of an HR pro that comes to the table that prepared.

Laurie Ruettimann had a good post about this and the whole thing is worth a read. Here’s the pertinent quote:

But there is a new generation of human capital and HR professionals who have graduated from top-tier labor programs, have a strong relationship with their colleagues in finance and procurement, and will start evaluating human resources technologies differently. And there are new sales and marketing professionals who have stopped condescending to their clients and now assume that human resources professionals are “educated buyers” with a greater understanding of how technology works.

Someone in your segment will dictate the cost of transparency and availability. If you’re not enabling your buyers to make better purchasing decisions, someone else is. Either that or information availability for buyers about the market is already well beyond your expectations.

Personally, I’m just glad I don’t have a wife who knocks me every time I lose, break, or grow out of a ring.

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Yes, I Would Like to Buy Your HR Software, Solution, Platform, Technology Suite


People ask me what’s the biggest change from being an editor at a trade publication to being an editor at a marketing firm. Topically, there aren’t many differences. When you’re writing for content marketing, you want readers to take notice. And HR people want information about the issues they are facing in their jobs. Stuff that will help them today, and yes, hopefully get them thinking about buying your wares.

Of course, how I deliver those words are anything but the same.

At ERE, we delivered information a couple of different ways. Primarily though, that would be through a blog post of some sort or maybe doing a podcast or video. For bigger pieces of information, we would deliver that in a conference session or a webinar.

At The Starr Conspiracy, we do a greater variety of pieces. Some of them you get to see, like when we get to work on white papers and webinars for the firm. Most of the time though, you won’t know it’s by us. I know, weak.

The biggest change though isn’t the types of pieces I’m writing but the terminology that I’m now using. I’ve been illuminated to the differences between a solution versus a platform, a suite versus software, and when to use the word technology (hint: every time). There’s an HR technology élite that care about these terms deeply (along with other terms like SaaS, cloud, architecture, and big data).

I’m not saying it doesn’t matter. It clearly does, at least to some folks. I’m a stickler for words.

I’m also not so sure most buyers care as much about these terms, though. For example, if I call an applicant tracking system a platform, would a customer just assume that other technology providers could build on that platform or, at the very least, have a well-documented API that has applications built for it? Does it matter to the end buyer or are we just talking features, benefits, and typical “What’s in it for me?” type of questions?

I know the price tag here matters as well. After all, if a vendor you’re spending $5M with can’t manage to describe themselves consistently, you might be a little worried about what’s underneath the hood. If it’s a $5k beta test though? I’m thinking you get a little wiggle room.

Despite all that, I think I manage to keep the words uncrossed enough to make sense. The good thing is that in my heaviest writing assignments, I’m not usually worrying about software, solution, platform, technology or suite terminology. I’m trying to think of HR issues, especially recent ones, that we can help people with.

As you can probably tell, that’s probably a good thing too.

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I’ll BYOD if You BYOB


Bring your own device (or BYOD) is all the rage. Device policy and administration is beyond my pay grade. For that, you can talk to Steve Boese. What I can tell you is that there are a couple schools of thought when it comes to thinking about employee wants and technology from the HR perspective:

  1. Screw these guys. We pay them good money, they get to heft around an eight pound ThinkPad and a locked down Blackberry.
  2. Screw these guys. We don’t pay them good money but they are still our employees and have to do what we say. Drop that three year old tech on them!
  3. BYOD stands for buy your own device, right? It can’t cost more to administer these different devices than it does to purchase them.
  4. We should subsidize the purchase? Hell, for that why don’t we just buy them what they want (within a certain group of choices) and retain ownership of it?
  5. We bought brand new computers in 2009! We don’t have them budgeted for replacement until 2014.

This conversation drives me crazy. This is the raging debate about bringing your own device to work?

How about this: why don’t you pick the policy that actually increases the performance and satisfaction of technology users in your organization?

Maybe this seems like a common sense thing to you. I hope it does. But too often, HR (and management, or finance, or whoever you want to assign blame to) break it down to a straight cost discussion or a political power discussion. This is dumb and I’ve dealt with it in the past, too.

For example, we had well paid developers doing programming on single 19″ CRT monitors (those big, boxy, tube monitors) when 22″ LCD panels were available for under $500 a pop. Why? Because buying new monitors was too expensive.

Ignore the stuff out there about huge productivity gains with multiple monitors. Or, take it with a grain of salt. The fact is, you don’t need huge productivity gains (or losses) to gain back an ROI. A very modest increase in productivity (we figured in our calculations to be about 5%, studies said that it could be much more) meant we were getting a return on our LCD purchases within a couple of months. Over the life of a decent LCD panel, it would pay itself off 12-fold in productivity gains. The same could be true of any device you purchase or subsidize so that the employee can be as productive as possible.

Even if it isn’t about performance, shouldn’t employee satisfaction also be a consideration? I’m not saying you have to change to a BYOD policy or a corporate owned, personally enabled (COPE) policy either. Some employees are just going to dig the equipment you provide and mandate they use (and sometimes, that equipment does kick ass). Some of them won’t care. But if it does matter and it does impact performance or satisfaction, isn’t it worth a more thoughtful consideration than disregarding out of hand an additional cost that is likely a pretty small fraction of the total cost of employment?

I don’t really care what you choose in the end. At all. But if you haven’t thought through more than just raw costs on it, I would urge you to consider all of the factors in play here.

What’s your policy on devices? Do you do BYOD or COPE? Is your CIO the tech overlord?

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The Changing Face of Content Authorship on the Web

samsung chromebook

Last fall, I bought myself a Samsung Chromebook for my birthday. Coincidentally, I also got one of the first units because I ordered it directly from Google when they initially released it and they shipped them from California so I got mine quickly. When I received it, I pulled it out and wanted to type something out on it (because I use my computers primarily for writing, that part is pretty important to me). I busted out a long review and posted it on Amazon as one of the first reviews and that was it.

Or so I thought.

The Chromebook has been one of the top selling laptops on Amazon for nearly six months (#1 as of this writing). My review has been reviewed as helpful by 4,842 of 5,048 raters (just shy of a 96%) and has been read by many more thousands of people. It has over 300 comments on it. I get web traffic and e-mails about the Chromebook several times a week.

I submit to you, quite humbly, that it is probably my most viewed writing on the web. It doesn’t exist on my site and I don’t get anything from it (other than the random visitor or e-mail).

I will tell you, I thought of writing the review here but it didn’t make sense. For one, it doesn’t really fit in with what I typically write about. So I was fine posting it to Amazon because I knew it would get read heavily by those in the midst of a buying decision. I was writing impartially, so I was trying to cover the device — warts and all — even though I was generally a fan of it from first boot.

As the comments started rolling in, I have to admit I was a bit disappointed that my own site wasn’t receiving much of any benefit. Even for those who found me, most wouldn’t be interested in being long term subscribers. The more I thought about it though, the more I was pleased. I don’t make a lot of money on this site but I really don’t believe most blogs generate significant income from advertisements (or any other creative, content-oriented approaches). Instead, I think most people who blog earn opportunities and an audience that would be tough to land otherwise. They may get an opportunity to write but more frequently, they get other opportunities to provide value.

I think if I was so focused on just building stuff on my own blog, I wouldn’t be able to do fun things like write a huge review on Amazon.com and wonder if there is anything to it. I would’ve wrote it here and it would’ve received three comments. I wouldn’t have wrote my article about purple squirrels for the Harvard Business Review blog.

With so many off blog alternatives for writing, it is easy to see why a lot of people abandon the blog concept altogether. One thing I am convinced of is that if you are serious about content creation, you need a hub. This is my hub. I may give out Twitter or LinkedIn sites on my bio as well but all roads eventually point back here. I may have spokes of content out there but if someone wants to get back to me, there is only one place that happens.

It’s not a new or unique idea but it is one that I have come to fully embrace. While I may not write as often as I’d like to here, I know I will always have something to write about and that keeping a strong hub is important. And while I’d like to see this site continue to grow, I know the bigger opportunities will come from outside of me writing a blog post here. That’s why posting externally and trying new things is still important.

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Happy Birthday, Stranger

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I’m not a birthday guy. For my 30th, my wife and family arranged a surprise birthday party for me and it was literally the most surprised I’ve been about anything. Not because I didn’t deserve it (of course I deserved it) but because I’ve never been big on my birthday. It comes and goes.

The party was pretty great, though.

This last year though, I took my birth date off Facebook completely. It wasn’t secret. My birthday can be found (a good sourcer or identity thief could probably locate it). And a few people wished me happy birthday (thankfully, both my parents remembered without the aid of Facebook). For the most part, it went under the radar, including by a few people whose birthdays I know.

Luckily, I didn’t cut them like some would.

My main intention wasn’t to mess with people or try to play the gotcha game with them. In fact, my only hope is to relieve people of the chore of writing a meaningless happy birthday on my Facebook wall without any semblance of feeling. Happy birthday, stranger. As casually and thoughtlessly as a nod to another person as you walk by on the street.

This seems to be one of those courtesy things that made sense when Facebook was truly about a place with just your friends. When I had 25 people as friends, wishing a happy birthday was a natural thing because I’d probably find a way to do it anyway for these people. It just doesn’t scale, though.

As I have seen birthdays hit my Facebook feed, I’ve tried to calendar the ones that are more important to me. For someone with some serious memory issues at times, calendaring is the only way to go. Since I am constantly looking weeks ahead, it helps to remind me better than just seeing the date pop up on Facebook the day of the big event.

For everyone else, though? I’m not wishing you a happy birthday. Not if I’d never be invited to a birthday party or have a reason to know one way or another. Not if we’ve known each other for a long time and we’ve never connected on birthdays.

That might be bad news for Facebook, too. They are trying to make money by allowing users to gift tangible objects through Facebook. I wouldn’t be surprised if they suddenly flipped my privacy settings for hidden birth dates.

If your birthday is a big deal to you, I’ll pick up on that. I’m not dense and I’m not uncaring. But when 200 people are wishing you happy birthday on Facebook, we should also be honest with ourselves about the depth of those sentiments. If you’re a regular birthday wisher, can you remember the people you wished happy birthday to in the last week?