Today is National Boss’s Day, and if you’re like me, you think of it as just another conspiracy by the greeting card, floral delivery, and bagel and cookie industries to get our hard-earned money.
(I say this even though I’m very grateful for the carry-in luncheon my colleagues in the S&T communications department threw in my and my assistant director’s honor on Monday. Thanks, guys! It was a great treat and totally unnecessary, but appreciated!)
But even if National Boss’s Day is a corporate conspiracy, maybe there’s some value in recognizing — and thanking — the bosses in our lives. After all, if we are fortunate enough to hold down jobs in this economy, we either are bosses or have bosses, and the people who are bosses always have bosses of their own. And with employees everywhere being asked to do more, many of us are essentially our own bosses most of the time.
So, whether we like it or not, we are like a boss.
So maybe we should like a boss — as in, show some appreciation for their efforts or at least sympathy for their plight.
When it comes to bosses, I tend to agree with Bob Sutton, the author of Good Boss, Bad Boss, who says that most bosses have good intentions and want to do a good job. (There are, of course, exceptions, and we’ve all encountered them. Sutton also wrote about them in his book The No Asshole Rule.) As Sutton writes on his blog, “[M]ost bosses I know work extremely hard and are dedicated to improving their skills” and are “concerned about becoming better at practicing their difficult craft.” While writing Good Boss, Bad Boss, Sutton worried about the plight of supervisors and “how hard it is to be a good boss — the job is never done, it is amazingly easy to screw-up, and wielding power over others makes it all even harder because you are being watched so closely (and are prone to tuning-out your followers — the other half of the toxic tandem).”
“Yet, despite all these hurdles, the best evidence shows that many, if not most, people find their bosses to be competent and compassionate.”
So, whether you are a boss, report to a boss, act in both capacities, or work as your own boss, here are some tips from around the web that can help you be more like a boss, and perhaps even help you like a boss. And if you’re like me and aspire to be a competent and compassionate boss, perhaps these tips will help you on your journey.
10 secrets your great boss never told you. My favorite from the list: “I learned through the grapevine that you made a wisecrack or two about management. I shrugged it off, knowing good people deserve to vent.” I’m pretty sure a boss of mine has done this for me before.
We all know how important it is to incorporate storytelling into our marketing efforts. We also know how, in the social media realm, storytelling and authenticity should complement one another to achieve marketing goals.
Authenticity hasn’t always been that important in traditional marketing. When we see an ad on TV or in a magazine, we’re not all that surprised when a brand incorporates a bit of fiction to sell their products.
But we do appreciate verisimilitude in those stories, right? When the fiction seems to be plausible and connects with us on some visceral level, that’s a winner. That’s why certain types of ad fiction work better than others. The ones that work best resonate with us because the story line is plausible. It’s a vignette that you could imagine actually happening to someone, somewhere. Or you can place yourself in the shoes of the protagonist. The story somehow feels right.
An example of a brand fiction that resonates with me is the Apple “rock god” commercial (video) that plays up the value of the iPhone 4’s voice-recognition assistant Siri. (Thanks to Siri, boy buys guitar, boy learns how to play “London Calling,” boy forms garage band and boy gets called “rock god” by Siri.) My inner teenager can relate to that dorky kid. I watch that clip and in my mind I ponder: Ah, if only the iPhone and Siri had been around when I was a teenage rock god wannabe. Where would I be today?
But sometimes storytelling can lead us down the slippery slope of “truthiness,” a term coined by Stephen Colbert way back in 2005 (video). This, I think, is more of a danger for brands that do much of their marketing in the realm of social media, where authenticity is seen as a virtue, if not a necessity.
The idea behind social media marketing is that it’s somehow more real than the dreck we get from all the other channels — that it’s more true.
Everybody knows the marketing piped to us via TV, radio, direct mail, and print advertising and that bastard child “advertorial” is fake. But social media is a way to shed ourselves of that disingenuous marketing fakery. In social media, we consumers are empowered to talk one-on-one with ourselves about the brands we love, and those we love to hate. And we can talk with the brands themselves.
I thought about these things — about authenticity, transparency and truthiness — after viewing a video by Hootsuite that is designed to help business people (especially bosses) learn about the value of social media in business. Different cuts of the video were posted on the Hootsuite blog under the title “Teaching Your Newbie Colleagues About Social Media.” It’s a well-produced video centered around a cafe that uses social media — and Hootsuite in particular — to connect with customers. Other characters include a cupcake-loving student who promotes the cafe’s product and a lending institution that helps the business owner with financing. It’s a nice story that may have been inspired by the work of another social media dashboard company.
After watching the video, I wanted to learn more about this cupcake cafe and its social media success. Seeing the company’s Twitter handle so prominently displayed in the video, I decided to click on over to @BreadNCoffee‘s Twitter profile, perhaps read some tweets.
There’s was just one problem. The Twitter feed was inactive.
Not only was @BreadNCoffee not following anyone (not even @Hootsuite), but the account also had <s>no</s> only 6 followers and had not yet tweeted. There was no contact information, either. No website, even.
No posts, 6 followers, none following: @BreadNCoffee’s Twitter account, as of Saturday, Oct. 6, 2012
Clearly, @BreadNCoffee is doing it wrong.*
Which means @Hootsuite is doing it wrong. It’s faked authenticity.
Hootsuite developed a nice story line, and I figured they apparently had the presence of mind to grab the @BreadNCoffee Twitter account early on in the process of fleshing out video concept (according to TwBirthday, @BreadNCoffee was born on May 23, 2012) but, judging merely from the presence of the Twitter account, the company appears to be a mere vehicle for Hootsuite’s marketing, just like Apple’s iPhone-wielding teenage rock god. The Hootsuite social media video is truthy. Too truthy for my tastes.
I would expect a company interested in promoting its services as a social media platform to have thought this through a bit more.
But maybe I’m overreacting. It seems many corporate brands don’t view authenticity as much more than a means to an end. This 2011 Forbes piece, “The Battle for Social Media Authenticity,” by Jennifer Leggio, puts the idea of authenticity from a corporate point of view in some perspective.
“Consider a corporate social media strategy meeting,” Leggio writes (deftly weaving some truthiness into her description of the corporate setting). “The team designated to determine social media strategies has a directive to use the tools and develop ideas that drive. The question then becomes, is it wrong for companies to want to build their businesses, market to their customers and use every trick of the social media trade to meet their corporate objectives? Easy answer is no but it’s more complex than that.”
The problem with this contrived approach is that customers are not connecting with brands merely to get deals. Most of the time they generally despise having marketing shoved in their faces. They connect because they want to see the human side of the business and feel like they are a true part of the brand, and that people behind the brand truly care about them. (Emphasis mine.)
I guess that’s what bugs me the most about how Hootsuite developed this ad campaign. I use Hootsuite for personal and professional social media management. Even though I know nothing about the people behind the company, I’ve always considered the service I use to be a product of a social media culture that values authenticity (even if they do tout the “scheduled tweets” function more than I prefer). I somehow feel hoodwinked by Hootsuite’s approach, which feels more truthy than authentic.
* Even though @BreadNCoffee is inactive on Twitter, the company does have a Facebook presence (with 10 fans at this writing) and is on Google Plus. The company is authentic, too. It is located in Nantucket, Mass.
Andrew Careaga 