Releasing the balloons: social media as opportunity

I'm sorry you were so unhappy., originally uploaded by The River Thief. Copyright Ruth Seeley 2008.

While following up on a comment I'd made the other day on Kris Krug's blog, I noticed some of the resources he's made available on his site. For those of you who haven't heard of Kris, check out his blog and his photos on flickr. He's an extremely gracious young man (having finally achieved 'older woman' status I'm allowed to refer to him as such). I thought it was hilarious that the very first person I met at the kickoff dinner for NV08 was one of its chief instigators and organizers, but in my new, far more relaxed approach to networking (i.e. I have no expectations other than the trading of information about myself and receipt of same in kind), I am often pleasantly surprised by the people I meet without even really trying.

Today's find was SmashLAB's White Paper: A Primer in Social Media, which can be downloaded as a PDF.

What a pleasure it was to read. It's recent (March 2008), and while it's not encyclopaedic in its scope, it has reinforced something that occurred to me earlier in the week: social media presents opportunities that were always available to companies and individuals, but which few, if any, chose to employ. There were, however, some exceptions and workarounds. Here are three:

Very early in my career, I worked for Maclean Hunter in the old Maclean Hunter building at the southeast corner of University and Dundas in Toronto. This was the heart of Chinatown, close to funky little Baldwin Street, as well as to the Art Gallery of Ontario. There were tons of restaurants in the area. But on rainy days, people tended not to go out to lunch, and made their way to the cafeteria instead (Torontonians don't have that same ability to cheerfully endure rain as Vancouverites. They don't do well with snow either. In fact, the only thing they do seem to be able to endure weather wise is extreme heat and humidity, which finally drove me out of town).

Let's face it, it was cafeteria food - a step up from the slop served in high school, university and hospital cafeterias, but not exactly cutting-edge cuisine. Still, it was cheap and not totally nauseating. One of the things I noticed on the occasions I had lunch there was the the vice president of the consumer magazine division and publisher at the time of Maclean's magazine, Lloyd Hodgkinson, was always there whenever I was. In fact, he sometimes sat at my table. Other times I saw him sitting with other employees from a variety of different magazines. What I never saw was Lloyd sitting with a cabal of other executives at or near his level in the corporation.

I was once sent to talk to him about something, and while waiting to see if he had a moment to talk, he came out of his office and answered his (absent) secretary's ringing phone. I waited till he was finished the call and then teased him about - well - basically about the tail wagging the dog. And in the nicest possible way, he immediately set me straight. Basically he said, it's my job to ensure Maclean's subscribers are happy. And if they're not, I want to know about it. But, I said, doesn't the circulation department look after all that? Yes, he said, but if someone has taken the trouble to call me, I want to hear what they have to say, and make it right if I can. (I am, of course, paraphrasing here, since the conversation took place sometime between 1981 and 1983, and while I do have almost perfect short-term recall of conversations that really and truly interest me, it has been a while, hasn't it?)

I also think a lot about my stint with Coles Bookstores at the time of its most frantic expansion by opening new stores (as opposed to its later engulf and devour strategy, when it consumed first the Classic and later the W.H. Smith book chain). This expansion (I think the number of stores was supposed to double in less than three years and penetrate the entire US market in that time) was putting horrific strain on the existing stores. Making projection was well nigh impossible, given that we were operating with shrinking salary budgets and trying to cope with no less than three increases in the minimum wage within a year and a half. It was a challenge, let me tell you, and we had to get very creative indeed to keep the store adequately staffed and try to control shoplifting (our security device at the time being a single larger mirror). I heard stories of managers becoming so frustrated that they quit without giving notice and mailed their store keys back to head office. It was hard to get a district manager to visit your store (they were supposed to do a circuit of all their stores every six weeks) so you could raise issues and get some support for improvements; they were all being conscripted to help with the expansion too. Head Office seemed pretty busy too, and while there was a newsletter of sorts, it didn't really contain the kind of news that was important to us. Much to my surprise, our best sources of information were the publishers' sales reps, who did visit us faithfully (even though we did everything but our mass market ordering through head office).

I once took a creative job search techniques seminar. During this day-long event, the instructor gave us tips on how to get to the person who had the power to hire us. He suggested that if we were having trouble getting past the person's secretary or the receptionist that we lurk in the area and wait till said support staffer left her desk, then basically rush the office of the person we wanted to see. I came as close as I ever had to having an apoplectic fit at hearing this suggestion. I had done temp work as both a receptionist and an admin assistant. I had done so when the organization I was working for was hiring. Trust me on this one, not a single person who gave me attitude when I was trying to set up an interview with them (or who was following up on their application), was *ever* hired by any of the close to 30 organizations for which I temped. Because, of course, when reporting back on interviews arranged or passing on messages regarding who had called, I transmitted not only the bare bones of who, when, and how to reach, but also the substance and tone of the interchange.

The smashLAB white paper quotes Yahoo Senior VP Jeff Weiner, referring to blogs, forums, and social media in general, as saying that there has never been a tool like this in the history of market research. "We can now tap into timely responses from the public, at very little cost."

I beg to differ just slightly here. There has always been a way to tap into timely responses. The information has always been available to those who wanted it, without going to the expense of costly market research. But in order to tap into that information, corporations would have had to actually engage with their staff and suppliers and to listen to what those who were dealing with the complaints and getting feedback on products at the sales level were actually saying. They would have had to open their ears and listen, and instead of going through the motions of staff days where cake and hotdogs were consumed and paintball pellets were shot in a teambuilding fiasco, they would have had to actually get down and dirty and make a two-way flow of information not only possible but probable. They would also have to have understood how destructive the creation of silos within organizations was, and that if personal-empire building within companies was permitted, the company's death knell had probably already been rung.

The smashLAB authors say, towards the end of the paper, that the communities created by and flourishing within the social media context 'tend to respond best to authentic, honest and respectable dialogue and conduct....Effective social media efforts build relationships between companies and consumers.'

Indeed they do. But the true value of social media is that these relationships can be built and maintained quickly, easily, and cost-effectively, and that the Zeitgeist is finally such that we, as consumers, now have the ability to access, act, react, and interact with those who are trying to market to us, and that we are now perceived as having critical mass. We always did have critical mass. We just didn't used to be quite so organized about exercising it. Nor has it ever been so easy for us to communicate with corporations. And they have the ability to benefit from our collective wisdom as end users.

One final point re the white paper: another lightbulb went off for me in the discussion of the 'WalMarting Across America' blog fiasco. What WalMart did wrong was not so much not being transparent about the fact that the trip was corporate sponsored or that the idea had originated with its PR firm, Edelman. What was really wrong was that they presented only the stories of happy WalMart employees. Had they been transparent even to the point of showing the good, the bad, and the rather homely, it's unlikely they would have been 'outed' as they were.

For decades now (well okay for almost exactly two decades), I have been saying (you might say ranting but that glass is both half empty and half full - that's the definition of half ;)) that the reason women were better at sales than men was because women understood - on an almost instinctive level - that selling was as much about listening as it was about telling. More and more I think Helen Fisher is right in her book The First Sex: the early days of the 21st Century are indeed the first time in the developed world's history that there is a critical mass of educated women freed of the responsibilities of child rearing and capable of effecting change on a meaningful level. And if you don't believe me, read Kris Krug's charming redress of gender imbalance regarding tech folks to watch in 2008.

Part of the 70% or part of the 30%? I just don't know

Birkenhead Lake, originally uploaded by The River Thief. Copyright Ruth Seeley 2004

As mentioned in my last post, I decided to read Paul Quarrington's King Leary even though it had been selected as this year's Canada Reads book. I'm a Quarrington fan from way back, and this is the third of his novels I've read. Home Game, as I recall, was hilarious, although it led me to confuse Pemberton and Penticton for quite a while (have I said, 'Don't bother me with details,' recently?). Residents of both communities would be understandably enraged* though - I get it now, having lived here for six years (although I've still never been to Penticton and Birkenhead Lake, pictured above, is the closest I've come to spending any time in Pemberton - we may have stopped for gas there). I read Civilization a couple of years ago and loved it.

I've been following the Hockey Night in Canada (HNiC) theme song controversy as CBC blew the negotiations to keep the song, and I have mixed feelings about the whole thing. There is nothing quite as Canadian as hockey (I'm not sure how the Russians feel about it, but it's hard to imagine a European of any nationality being quite so passionate about any single sport). In my research, I (somewhere) came across the statistic that 70% of all Canadians consider themselves hockey fans. I know my Taiwanese ESL students were hard pressed to figure out what was going on during the playoffs the year before last. They were much more interested in basketball, and the Canuck flag waving and the horns honking and just the getting in the cars and driving about to celebrate a sports team's victory were puzzling customs and ones I was hard-pressed to explain to them. For the best coverage I've encountered regarding the breakdown of negotiations for the HNiC theme song, here's the story from The Tyee re what went wrong and why. (I'd like to know how I'm supposed to know when to leave the room though if I don't hear the familiar 'doo do doo' doo doo' of the old song.)

Since yesterday was Father's Day, it seemed like the perfect time to delve into King Leary. My dad was the first hockey fan I met, and we had a little ritual for the Saturday night games when I was growing up. Dad and I would go to the corner store and pick up a package of Callard & Bowser toffee and we'd eat it with Mom while watching The Saint, which immediately preceded HNiC (that's almost pronounceable; more so if you have any Ukrainian friends and have been trained in the subtleties of pronouncing names that begin 'Hr' or 'Hn'). Given how highly censored my television watching was, I'm amazed I was allowed to watch The Saint. Roger Moore was totally irresistible in his youth though, and it was television in the 60s, so I suppose it was pretty tame (would love to see it in reruns just to see what I missed in terms of innuendo the first time around).

For a reason I never really understood, my father was a Boston Bruins fan. We lived in Ottawa, and of course Ottawa didn't have a team between 1934 and 1992 (although why I should take the word of some guy who lives in HAWAII on hockey history I'm not sure). He liked them because they were the underdogs, and for many years he viewed it as his personal mission to help them win the Stanley Cup through the sheer force of his devoted fandom.

HNiC, in those days before telephone ringers could be turned off or phones could be unplugged, was a 'no-call zone' for my father. It wasn't really okay to call between periods or during the post show either, as the selection of the three stars was almost as important as the game itself. Getting the recognition right was almost as important as skating, passing, foiling shots on goal, and playing like a gentleman. (Although it was kinda scary the way he'd get all worked up when the gloves came off. 'Fight!' he'd yell, really loudly. 'Fight! Fight! Fight!')

One of my uncles decided to be a pest one Saturday night and called repeatedly while the game was on. Dad answered the phone the first two times it rang and explained that the hockey game was on. The third time my uncle called Dad didn't bother to pick up the receiver - he just picked up the whole phone and threw it across the room. For a few days after that talking on the phone was an interesting experience - you had to lie on the floor in the dining room and gently hold the wires together as they fed into whatever the pre-cursors to jacks were called. Eventually he fixed the phone. In another twist on improved technology, you always used to be able, in the days before helmets and mouthguards, to spot a hockey player by his front teeth. They'd usually be capped by the time he was 16, and the thin blue line of the old tooth capping procedure was visible if you looked for it.

And then, after nursing the Bruins to their Stanley Cup victory in 1970, the creation of the WHA in 1972, and NHL expansion, Dad seemed to lose interest in hockey. We must have watched a few WHA games, because I know we snickered at Bobby Hull's hair plugs. Dad was tolerant of my crush on Derek Sanderson (was he really the first professional hockey player with facial hair? If so, why isn't this considered worthy of mention? Ah, because there was a player in the 40s named Garth Boesch who had a mustache - never heard it referred to as 'lip dressing' before though). He preferred the Mahovolich brothers and Phil Esposito, although he always had a lot of respect for Gordie Howe, Eddie Shack, and Maurice Richard.

To say that hockey is our national obsession is not an overstatement. The commentary on the loss of the rights to the theme song has apparently inspired 500+ comments on some news articles detailing the fiasco. And it has been a bit of a fiasco. CBC should have bought it outright after about the second season. I'd rather focus on the things the CBC does right than on what it does wrong though, which is actually a planned post for some time in the fairly near future.

Before he lost his passion for hockey, Dad would go to the occasional game in either Montreal or Toronto. I'm not sure how he got tickets for the Montreal games, but when he wanted to see a game in Toronto, he would pick up the phone and call King Clancy's office and arrange his tickets that way. It's going to be just one of those unsolved mysteries why he did this - to the best of my knowledge, my father didn't know the King and there was no reason to believe he'd get better seats doing it his way. Nevertheless, that's how it worked for him.

And having just finished King Leary, it couldn't have been a better choice for Father's Day reading. It is, in so many ways, a tender novel, and an accomplished one. It has many of Quarrington's comedic moments, particularly when Leary free associates between his glory days and the present. His final execution of his 'patented' St. Louis Whirligig on Carlton Street in Toronto is just so easy to imagine, as is the young pup's (whom Leary anoints as the new 'King') calm statement that he has six 'airborne manoeuvres.' I'm not entirely sure why Quarrington's changed all the names while so thinly disguising the very real characters. If King Leary isn't King Clancy I'm a - well - something I'm not.

Under all the hilarity though, there are some pretty tender messages about life and love and forgiveness. Before he croaks (because, at his advanced age, it could be any day), Leary is able to actually learn some of the lessons his elders have been trying to teach him for seven decades or so, and apply them. Unable to do anything for the son who killed himself, and not wise enough to help his best friend from his hockey days get sober, Leary is able to finally put it all together and reach out to his surviving son, granting him the grace of a reconciliation before his father dies.

So for me, Quarrington's King Leary was a huge voyage down memory lane. It was also a reminder of a couple of things. First, that one of the reasons hockey is so important in our culture is that it represented a way out for the poorest of the poor from the smallest of small towns (or not even towns, as the King says). The Manny Oz portion of the story, which deals with an aboriginal player whose NHL salary probably supports all of his siblings and both his parents, is heart rending, every bit as much so as the current aspirations of African Americans seeking to end generations of crushing poverty with basketball scholarships.

We once visited a childhood friend of my father's who had made the NHL draft. Not sure if he was from my father's own hamlet in New Brunswick or not, but he only lasted a year and it must have been on one of the farm teams as I can't find him listed as an NHL player. He was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and, by the time I met him, when my father was in his late 30s, he could barely walk with the help of two canes. Second, it reminded me of the poetry in motion that is men skating well - men who can't thread a needle and look odd holding tea cups in their big hands, men who can't dance to save their souls and aren't at ease socially, but whose souls shine through when they cover the ice so apparently effortlessly. And finally, its message of redemptive love - for a sport played superlatively, for a friend, for a child - well, it made me cry a bit.

* For those of you not familiar with British Columbia: Pemberton is located about half an hour north of Whistler by car and was a sleepy farming community until it became Whistler's bedroom community. Penticton, in the Okanagan Valley, lies in what I will not so politely describe as 'wacky religious cult' territory. Not, of course, that everyone who lives in Penticton is a member of a wacky cult. Oh never mind, I'm going to give offense no matter what I say now. I'll make a point of visiting Penticton soon so I have a more informed opinion. :)