reaction | Ian M Rountree

Education and Social Media

May 19, 2011 by Ian 3 Comments

There’s a lot of discussion in professional social media circles – from publishers, to consultants, to agencies – about education. Clients need it, businesses need it, the public needs it – but so do the professionals working in these very complex, highly unorganized fields.

There’s now very little stringent education directly related to social networking as a business communication tool; while there are plenty of dyed in the wool professionals, the building of a knowledge base accessible through higher education seems slow in catching up. This isn’t even a theory versus practice problem – I think it’s an educational system problem.

How can we create education for new kinds of professionals, when education itself is failing?

This article from MENG Blend on May 17th tells a strong story about the state of education in general:

[…] even though the real ROI of college over time is well-documented, college completion rates are falling rapidly. On average, four year public schools graduate only 37% of their students within four years. The story at community colleges, which account for 46% of all undergraduates, is even worse: just 25% of those at 2-year colleges graduate within three years of the time they start.

Damning, isn’t it? [Read more…]

The Worst Attitude For Customer Service

December 30, 2009 by Ian 1 Comment

“You can’t please everybody.”

While it is possible to commit no errors and still lose sometimes, believing any variant of “can’t please everybody” instantly ruins any customer interaction you’ll ever have, because you’re leaving room for the possibility of a less than perfect experience.

I say this is the worst for customer service, because it’s not specific to any given industry. No matter who you are, in what locale or business, you have customers. Sometimes it may not feel this way – especially if you’re behind the scenes, doing IT or intra-business support, but the only thing that changes here is the terminology, not the process. Sometimes your boss is your customer; this comes back to the difference between bringing a service to market or a product. Which you’re focused on determines the terminology, but the same remains, if you leave any room for less-than-awesome, you’re leaving room for failure.

I suspect this is an area where just about every business on the planet can use some improvement. And people as well; while we want to participate in our brands more than ever, compromise is a necessity. People are, in general, more tolerant than we give them credit for, if we give them the right, valid information in a timely manner.

It takes a little practice, but consider it this way: When someone says “Thank You,” how do you respond? Do you say “You’re Welcome” because you’re happy to have helped?
Or do you respond “No Problem” and run the risk of diminishing their experience because, in effect, you’re claiming it was worth so little of your time it’s had no effect on your day?

Employing the “Can’t please everybody” defence when you’ve failed may be strict truth, but it also removes the responsibility from your own shoulders. It means you’re unwilling to do the work and find the root of the problem.

And while walking away from the right wasting efforts is sometimes a good idea, the Walk Away Now philosophy is NOT (Say it with me, N O T) intended to be employed without any effort to learn why whatever it is you’re walking away from was a bad idea at the moment anyway.

Tis the Season for Best of Year Lists

December 20, 2009 by Ian 1 Comment

Making the morning rounds in my RSS feeds, I happened upon a post from Penelope Trunk about Brazen Careerist’s Top 50 Companies to Work For list. Penelope’s post about how it was made is fairly interesting itself, but the list struck me as an oddity.

There are a lot of banks on the list. As well as other financial institutions. Somehow, I expected to see more tech companies. Google is at #4. Yahoo! is at #23. Apple and Microsoft? Not even on the list. Obviously there are things going n behind the scenes here that make these companies less than attractive to Gen Y. Wonder what that is?

But where is Gen Y actually working? Maybe retail, I thought. It’s where I got stuck, having made the boneheaded decision not to go to college.

Surprisingly, the only retail companies there were Abercrombie & Fitch, and Target at #11 and #48 respectively. Maybe this is less of a surprise to people in the US. A&F is not exactly my style, so I can’t speak for their culture at all outside of hearing that the dude who’s in all of their posters at their storefronts actually works at their %th Avenue store in NYC… Posing in front of his own fifty-foot tall poster all day. Thatt’s high-scale intensity right there. On the other hand, Target never impressed me when I was spending time in Minnesota. Outside of large-format Goldfish crackers, it was fairly standard, and no one ever looked happy. But that was eight years ago, maybe corporate culture has changed.

Or maybe it hasn’t. Many of the greenhorns I see coming into my store as recruits seem to have a totally different handle on the work environment than I do, and I’m only seven or eight years older than they are. I’m aware of a maturity gap – that much is visible – but in a lot of cases, there’s an attitude gap that can’t be explained by maturity.

Trying to teach “proper priorities” to someone not in your generation is like trying to explain Outliers to a kiwi fruit. Until you understand the nature of the gap, it’s impossible to address.

I don’t know if there’s an answer for this. Or even a direct action to be taken. But awareness is worth it, even if all it does is reduce your stress without making your task easier.