by Caroline Leach | Nov 20, 2016 | Careers, Change, Learning, Social Media
Social media got a bad rap during this year’s election process.
Fake news, Twitter trolls and cyber bullying came under fire.
Among American social media users, the Pew Research Center reported that 65% expressed “resignation and frustration about online political conversations.”
It’s enough to make anyone want to quit social media for good.
But don’t do that.
Why?
Because of your 100-year life.
What’s that about, you ask?
Well, more than half of babies born in developed nations in the 2000s can expect live to 100 or beyond, according to the medical journal The Lancet. And if you were born before then, your life will likely be a lot longer than you think.
A new book called The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity got me thinking about this.
Authors Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott are from the London Business School. They look at how anyone at any age can and should plan for their greater life expectancy, turning the extra time into “a gift and not a curse.”
When lives were shorter, people lived a three-stage life – education, work and retirement. These stages were compartments that didn’t overlap.
As early as 1978, Richard Bolles wrote about them in The Three Boxes of Life and How to Get Out of Them: An Introduction to Work/Life Planning. He advanced the idea that you needed to incorporate all three stages across your entire life.
He also wrote What Color is Your Parachute? It was chosen as one of the 100 All-TIME best and most influential non-fiction books published since 1923.
With how quickly the world is changing, Bolles’ advice was and is spot on.
- We need to embrace lifelong learning, actively developing new skills as technology and globalization accelerate.
- We need productive work to provide purpose, meaning and economic sustenance throughout our lives.
- And we need leisure time to enjoy our lives and the people in them, and to refresh and renew ourselves.
Gratton and Scott explore this concept in writing about the interplay between tangible and intangible assets. They define an asset as “something that can provide a flow of benefits over several periods of time.”
Tangible assets “have a physical existence” and include things like housing, cash and investments. Intangible assets are things like “a supportive family, great friends, strong skills and knowledge, and good physical and mental health.”
The authors say that intangible assets are “key to a long and productive life – both as an end in themselves and also as in input into tangible assets.” They divide them into three categories of assets – productive, vitality and transformational.
One of these intangibles – a productive asset along with skills, knowledge and peers – is your reputation. “When a company has a positive brand, or a person has a good reputation, it is much easier for others to interact with them,” the authors say.
“A good reputation can be enormously important as it enables your valuable stocks of skills and knowledge to be really utilized in a productive way,” they continue. “It can also have a profound impact on your professional social capital.”
Why? “A good reputation will be one of the assets that enable you to expand your horizons,” the authors say. “It is the combination of portable skills and knowledge and a good reputation that will help bridge into new fields.”
They go on to write that “over the coming decades, it is likely that reputation will be based on a broader range of inputs. As future careers embrace more stages and more transitions, then inevitably this will create a broader range of information.”
Enter social media.
“Social media will increasingly broadcast your image and values to others and allow others to track and monitor performance,” they say. “So it is inevitable that you will need to curate a brand and reputation that covers far more than just your professional behavior.”
Everyone will need to signal their skills, their capabilities and their values during a longer life that potentially has multiple transitions. And transitions can take many forms – from one functional area to another, from one company to another and from one type of work to another.
Social media makes it easy to do this.
Over time, you can share your skills and abilities through many platforms – a Twitter feed, a YouTube channel, an Instagram stream, a LinkedIn portfolio, a Snapchat story or a personal blog. And these platforms will continue to change and evolve, with new ones emerging over time.
If you want to make your life’s transitions easier and more fulfilling, then social media is a must. And this doesn’t mean being on a few platforms to share photos with family and friends. A deliberate strategy and a plan for your personal brand in social media is imperative.
But where do you begin? Which social media platforms should you use? How do you curate and create content without it taking over your whole life?
Those will be the subjects of several upcoming posts.
by Caroline Leach | Oct 9, 2016 | Corporate Communications, Social Media
Our incoming messages are exploding.
LinkedIn messages. Facebook and Twitter notifications. Emails. Texts. Snaps.
Just reading and responding to everything could be more than a full-time job.
You need a strategy for when you do and don’t respond.
And I don’t subscribe to the philosophy that no response is the right way to say no.
In our hyperconnected world, our humanity and good manners can too easily go by the wayside.
Sometimes it’s because we can’t help the person and we need to say no. In those cases, have a standard professional response you can copy, paste, edit and send to say you’re not interested at this time, but you’ll keep the info for future reference.
Some messages are easy not to respond to:
- Automated sales pitches, usually via LinkedIn and Twitter
- Connection requests immediately followed by a sales pitch, again, usually via LinkedIn and Twitter
- Connection requests in LinkedIn from people you don’t know and that aren’t personalized to explain why they’d like to connect with you
- Tweets that mention you as a way to draw you into an issue for which you can offer no meaningful response
Some messages deserve a response. And while it would be easy enough to ignore them, giving a response can set you apart and enhance your company’s reputation:
- Customers of your company who need help getting an issue resolved. Respond to that customer right away. Be a friendly, helpful, human face and voice. Connect them with your company’s customer care team for a rapid response.
Interesting stat: 78% of people who complain to a brand in Twitter expect a response within an hour. Another one: 77% of people feel more positive about a brand when their tweet has been replied to.
(This is where I remind readers that opinions expressed are my own.)
- People from your alma maters, past and present employers and other professional groups who ask for your advice or an introduction to a colleague for networking purposes.
- Connections, colleagues and friends who post valuable content. Read their link, give them a “like” if the content is something you want to be associated with, and leave a short and upbeat comment that adds a constructive observation to the dialogue. Social media is all about reciprocity.
And some messages fall in between.
An example? A request to connect to one of your connections, without a clearly stated reason.
Recently a LinkedIn connection asked to connect to a colleague, to invite her to an event. I suspected it was a sales pitch and didn’t want to spam my colleague. I asked the requester for more info. Never heard back. End of story.
Suppose you do decide to respond to a message to decline a request and you get a response asking for something else.
What then?
Here I take my cue from a wise colleague, Tina Morefield. She’ll send a response. One response. And after that, no more.
Unless, of course, it’s from a customer who needs your help. In that case, keep responding until the issue is resolved to the customer’s satisfaction. Because our customers are the lifeblood of our organizations.
When do you respond? When do you not respond?
by Caroline Leach | Jan 23, 2016 | Social Media, Work/Life
Are you looking for more fun in your life? Would you like to connect with friends and family? Do you want to research the fastest growing social network?
Those are the reasons I joined Snapchat today. I want to learn how I can use it in my personal life. And I’m interested to see how businesses are using it to build their brands.
It’s a feeling not unlike the one I had upon joining Twitter. I wasn’t quite sure what to do with it. I didn’t fully know why I was there. I couldn’t yet articulate what I wanted to accomplish.
And that’s okay. Part of learning why you’re in a social network and how you can use it for personal and/or professional objectives is to experiment and play with it.
That reminds me of Guy Kawasaki and Peg Fitzpatrick‘s opening to their book The Art of Social Media.
“We are in the trenches of social media, not in a “war room” back at headquarters,” they wrote. “We acquired our knowledge through experimentation and diligence, not pontification, sophistry and conference attendance.”
That’s what I’m doing with Snapchat. I’m learning as I go. I’m making mistakes along the way.
And while I’m not quite ready to share “how to be social” in this network in the way I did with LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram, that day will come.
Today I set up my profile and found a few friends. To maintain at least a few boundaries, I didn’t click on younger family members or professional colleagues.
To my surprise, a handful of my Facebook friends were on Snapchat, so I connected with them. And I convinced my spouse to join, so we could learn together.
In the meantime, there was an unexpected benefit to joining Snapchat.
Not surprisingly, my daughter doesn’t want to interact with me in social media.
But when I told her I joined Snapchat, we had fun looking through her Stories and Snaps together. She showed me how captions and geofilters work.
Best of all, she finally followed me in Instagram. And I was able to follow her back for the first time.
Now I just need the next big social network to come along, so she’ll be my friend in Snapchat.
by Caroline Leach | Jul 4, 2015 | Corporate Communications, Leadership, Social Media
A birthday calls for celebration and reflection. And our nation’s birthday is no exception.
It’s a perfect day to be thankful for the many freedoms we enjoy in the USA. As a communicator, I believe our freedom of speech is particularly profound.
When our founders penned the Declaration of Independence 239 years ago today with its reference to the right to pursue happiness, they likely could never have imagined today’s world of social media, 24/7 news cycles and Sunday morning talk shows.
It’s distressing and frightening to hear about bloggers in other parts of the world who are sentenced to cruel and unusual punishments because they have dared to share their views.
That’s a right we are fortunate to have every day in America. However, freedoms come with a flip side called responsibility.
Words have impact. They can build people up. Or they can tear them down. Sure, according to the letter of the law you can post hurtful, snarky or even untrue content online. But why would you? What point does it serve? How does it make the world a better place?
Do you want to make the world’s problems worse? Or do you want to be part of the solution? As a realistic optimist, I like to believe people would overwhelmingly vote for the latter.
A very public figure in a recent TED talk on the price of shame called for a return to empathy and compassion. The talk had a call for us to become “upstanders,” by speaking up and standing up for others.
That would improve our world in so many ways. Yes, you can say anything you want. But your words will have consequences, good or bad. And if they’re digital words, they will last forever. So think before you send, post or tweet.
Penelope Trunk had great advice in her webinar called Reach Your Goals by Blogging. For those wanting to develop their careers through blogging, her advice was simple: “just don’t write about where your security clearance goes.”
If you don’t work on a field where security clearances are required, it simply means to think about what’s confidential and sensitive information, and don’t blog about that.
That still leaves a myriad of interesting topics to write about. And it fits well with the Josh Ochs mantra I mentioned in How to Be Social. If you keep it “light, bright and polite” in social media, as Josh recommends, you’ll be in good stead.
That doesn’t mean you have to be an online Pollyanna or avoid addressing big issues head on. But it does mean to think about discussing them in a constructive way, being balanced and looking for solutions.
This will become more and more important the more digital our world becomes. In The Reputation Economy, author Michael Fertik talks about how all kinds of decisions affecting you will be made in the future — based on the digital persona you either actively or passively create.
Make sure it’s the one you intend. Speak as freely as you like, but realize there will be consequences, good or bad.
One of my first bosses in corporate communications had great advice. Highlight the benefits of the company or the particular initiative, he said, and showcase it in a positive light. Tell the truth, act with integrity and address “what’s in it for the audience.”
With that said, how do you balance freedom and responsibility?
Recent Comments