Like most short posts a quick read can leave one happy that one’s brain has not been taxed too much — blah-blah-blah, click-click-click and move on. After all, its only blogging…junk food.
Sometimes — depending on your mood or interests perhaps — short posts can leave you hungry for more. Some posts may even show you were to find something chunkier, albeit on a self-serve basis. Whatever, empty calories — however delicious — will leave you malnourished if that’s all you digest.
Today, my present to you is the gift of choosing what you want to do with this little morsel. You can click-click-click and move on. If you like you can bookmark this page, bury it like a bone and dig it up later. Maybe you’ll enjoy the joke tucked away behind one of the links, even if it’s on you! You pick, it’s your post now.
Early on in my professional career I worked as the Manager of Market Planning for BIS Banking Systems, a U.K.-based subsidiary of the now defunct NYNEX Corporation. That was back in the ’80s.
One of my earliest assignments was to input to the organization’s five-year strategic plan. BIS had never produced a five-year plan before, at least not to the exacting specifications of a U.S. monolith.
The project required my assessments of things like market size and potential for a variety of segments across international banking, computing and communications. Without the aid of anything remotely resembling the Internet, let alone search engines — or in Banking Systems’ case a library even — I took the task in my youthful stride thinking I could get away with semblance over substance.
Well, I was wrong. Expected to slice and dice markets with precise measurement and translate all that with something “strategic” left me stumped from the get-go. In short, I was well and truly buggered.
Blogging for business continues to be a fascinating study for me.
As I continue to wrestle with the potential and problems that go with my efforts I am coming to accept that I cannot always grasp enough of what it all means, reminded of the adage: “There is no comfort in the learning zone and there is no learning in the comfort zone.”
Amidst my current bout of self-examination I can at least say why I started blogging: I wanted to be more involved in the online conversations about my work-related passion and interests, coming to understand at the same time how to use social media to help reposition my then employer RCI Recruitment Solutions. A simple enough task or so you’d think, not! As it turned out the “conversation” too often fell on deaf ears, the audience preoccupied with other things. C’est la vie…
How out of synch are employers with the next-generation workforce when our schools are so out of synch with their students?
In the same way as brick-and-mortar schools can barely contain a wireless generation how well are they preparing them for future jobs the likes of which we haven’t imagined yet?
[Can't see the video? Click here to view on YouTube]
How many entry-level job descriptions read like they were scratched out on chalkboards, the required skills, competencies, attitudes and what-have-you reminiscent of workplaces that predate Google?
An interesting post on Social Media ExplorerDeconstructing Second Life questions the value of Second Life based on a review of the virtual world’s demographics:
The demographics show 8.5 million users, but only 561,000 of those are “active.” While nearly 40 percent of the active ones are age 25-34, only 26 percent are from the United States (with Brazil a distant second a 8.5). The numbers show 57 percent of active users are male.
So, the population is 561,000, not exactly a number global brands raise an eyebrow toward. Only 149,000 of those are in the U.S., so you’re basically trying to market to the population of Eugene, Ore. If you’re trying to reach men, your audience becomes 84,900. Women? Less.
When I spoke with Jim Stroud about this a few weeks ago he mentioned the Q-factor as being important — a counterpoint in the post — but unless you are recruiting techies who also happen to be early adopters, is there any point?
The problem with being a boomer is being so easily bamboozled. The source of today’s bamboozlement is ki work, a “new model” for brokering professional relationships and outsourcing projects.
The site aspires to being a marketplace where ki work acts as the intermediary for globally dispersed talent that is otherwise available in everyone’s virtual backyard.
I don’t understand why reasonably good ideas go to market with nothing more than a reasonably good idea, do you?
I came across a new social network called projectstars, yet another killer startup. The site touts “blog for stock in the largest enterprise business blogging network” as if to suggest the potential payoff for participation might be worth the mind-numbing prospect of having to fill out yet another blessed profile first.
How ironic. In an attempt to free me from the walled gardens of the Web 1.0 internet I find that I am now trapped in the particulars of my online ID, technographic profile, group identity and now with projectstars, my “net worth” too.
projectstars claims to be an online business community for enterprise professionals. I don’t want to appear to be dim-witted but what is an enterprise professional exactly and do they/we really need another business community? And if the site’s purpose is indeed to “share expertise, build relationships, and find projects” one wonders if there have been problems with existing networks liked LinkedIn.
Wired posts The See-Through CEO that explores the advantage corporate top-dogs gain from understanding and managing transparency as a strategic tool. The article weighs the pros and cons of radical transparency — as questionable a term as “totally honest” as if to suggest there are degrees of integrity — and cites some examples worth thinking about.
Back Chat