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Carpet Bombing Content Marketing and Trusted Advisors

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Let me connect a few dots. I’ll start with content marketing, and end up with entry-level minimum wage trusted advisors being advertised on Monster.com.

Always Be Publishing

Let’s start with an article about content marketing called “Always Be Publishing.”

The idea is simple enough; instead of talking about yourself, start a conversation. Don’t pitch yourself; instead, “Create a story that looks and feels like a real news story.” The article promises, “The more you share with others and the more often you invite others to participate and converse with you, the more likely your content will be shared.”

Fine, but note that if everyone followed this advice, we’d be inundated with posts on LinkedIn, Quora, Facebook et al, with everyone positioning themselves as a discussion-leading expert, whose objective is to drive more and more traffic, until we drown in traffic.

Oh wait, that’s pretty much what’s happening.

Carpet-Bombing Content

There are two problems with this carpet-bombing approach to content.

First, it is desensitizing. The pharmaceutical industry embarked on something like this for a decade or two, called “reach and frequency.” It meant blitzing doctors’ offices with come-hither wink-nod ex-cheerleader reps whose job it was to perform a canned script, get the doctors to sign a statement, and then leave them free drug samples.

I’m sure content-marketers would insist that this is not a valid analogy, but it’s not all that invalid either. The carpet-bombing of message is common to both. Just as with kids’ advertising on TV, the mind numbs after a while, and all that remains is the dull lizard-brain throbbing at the ghost of the memory of meaning.

The other problem with the “always be publishing” mantra is that it inevitably degrades quality. I remember during the “empowerment” craze, someone pointed out that if you empowered stupid people, you’d get powerful stupidity.  And unless you believe all content is created equal, this brings up the same conundrum.

The Word Formerly Know as Content

“Content” has become a word whose connotation has become content-neutral. Here’s what I mean by that.  Once upon a time, it was an epithet to say, “He’s all sizzle, but no content,” “that was zero-content consulting,” or, “the cover looked great, but the content didn’t live up to the promise.”

Nowadays, “content” too often means nothing more than the bits and bytes that take up space under a headline. (I want to take a moment to note an important exception, Valuable Content, whose very title insists on a value judgment; kudos to them. But they are all too rare).

All too common is SuperSpun Articles, from Jonathan Leger, who promises:

“Never write another article again! Generate thousands of highly unique [sic] top-quality articles at the push of a button!” …We GUARANTEE that no two generated articles will EVER have more than 25% duplicated content (usually far less than that). The odds are one in ten million that two articles will be 20% the same…”

He can do this because he’s generated “spinner” software that looks up synonyms and the like and generates nearly infinite variations on “content,” all of which are “unique” in the search engine optimization game driven by Google. And we have come to refer to this as “content.”

In this world, even the old line about a thousand monkeys typing for a thousand years and writing Shakespeare is no longer funny!  Because the “point” of “content” is no longer literature, or even meaning – content has become the pink slime of words.

The point of “content” is to push our reptilian buttons, increase our SEO ratings, and raise our Klout scores.

I can live with art for art’s sake having been lost; even education for education’s sake.  But when meaning for the sake of meaning is lost, I don’t know what to do.

What do words mean when words aren’t intended to have meaning?

Pink Slime Trusted Advisor

Here’s the other dot to connect (the first one was Always Be Publishing).

Exhibit 1. A Monster.com ad for Michigan Farm Bureau Insurance headlined Trusted Advisor / Insurance Agent. The ad says,

    • “We have over 400 trusted advisors across Michigan who markets [sic]  the products and services we offer.”

Exhibit 2. Trusted Advisor Account Service Management Sr. Advisor for Dell SecureWorks. Here is the first of seven “job responsibilities:”

    • Proactively monitor support distribution lists/customer service ticket delegations for potential escalated issues with customer accounts in order to curb potential dissatisfaction issues which may include responding to customer “how to” questions; Update customer delegate Helpdesk, Trending, and Incident tickets requesting update and closure
    • Knowledge requirements include MOAM1, LIAM1, and DCAM1

When Maister, Galford and I wrote The Trusted Advisor in 2000, we started by saying, “While none of us begin our career as a trusted advisor, that is the status to which most of us aspire.”

At the time, it seemed an unremarkable comment. Imagine our astonishment if someone had told us, “Hey, in only 12 years, there will be over 400 trusted advisors in just one insurance company – and in their Michigan operations alone!” Not to mention they’d be required to know MOAM1.

Words in a Meaningless Environment

Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean there’s nothing to be afraid of. I happen to believe that if we are subjected to a campaign of verbal carpet-bombing and told it’s marketing, and that if all of us are taught that the road to success is to always be publishing more content than our neighbors, then there are certain predictable outcomes:

  1. Words will progress asymptotically toward meaninglessness
  2. “Content” will become the verbal equivalent of beige, no longer requiring a qualifying adjective
  3. Writing will become mechanized

Oh wait, we already established that’s what happening.

4. The abuses of language outlined above will cross over. In addition to losing connotative meaning, they will cause us to lose denotative meaning. We will no longer be able to tell a trusted advisor from a transactional subject matter expert.

That means the first exhibit in our book, which portrayed a 4-step progression from subject matter expert to trusted advisor, will be rendered not just meaningless, but incomprehensible to many.

Apparently that’s already happened to the people who write employment ads.

A Simple Idea to Radically Increase Employee Engagement

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Reading Harvard Business Publishing the other day, I ran across Bill Taylor’s post on how Zappos actually incents people to quit. It’s part of how one extremely high service and collaborative culture works. Here’s an excerpt:
 

"After a week or so in this immersive experience, though, it’s time for what Zappos calls “The Offer.” The fast-growing company, which works hard to recruit people to join, says to its newest employees: “If you quit today, we will pay you for the amount of time you’ve worked, plus we will offer you a $1,000 bonus.” Zappos actually bribes its new employees to quit!

Why? Because if you’re willing to take the company up on the offer, you obviously don’t have the sense of commitment they are looking for."

Shades of an idea I had about ten years ago. Time to trot it out again.

If your company hires an executive search firm (aka headhunter) to do a search, you also get (or at least you used to—it’s been a while since I’ve checked it out) a commitment from the firm to make your own company “off-limits” from searches they run for other firms—to some extent, for some period of time.

The thinking is, if you hire us to steal away someone for you, we’ll promise not to steal your people—at least until you stop paying us the hush money.

And implicit in that thinking is: employees are hard to get, harder to keep. You have to lock employees up. Golden handcuffs for starters. But also, make it disloyal for anyone to leave. Make it a sin to be seen talking to headhunters. Get headhunters to stop seducing your employees. Lock them up. Don’t let them hear about other firms. Tell them they’re much happier working for you—but don’t let them do any direct comparisons.

So it is with the ethos of "attraction and retention" these days. (Why do those terms sound like ad copy for a roach motel?)

 But what if—just imagine—a really forward thinking company, a Zappos wannabee, went to a search firm and said this:

We don’t want to hire you to do a few dozen searches to get new people for us. Instead, we want to hire you to find a bona fide job offer for every one of our existing employees: a legitimate job offer, one offer per person per year, to leave us for someone else.

Because if someone isn’t happy/engaged/fulfilled here, we are committed to helping them become happier/more-engaged/more-fulfilled somewhere else. 
And, if they weren’t in the right place in the first place, we want to know why: was it recruiting, training, leadership, motivation? What went wrong?

Why should a company pay to have its people recruited away? Taylor’s answer for Zappos, that it weeds out the uncommitted, is only a part of the truth. The bigger part is that a company which is clearly is committed to long-term personal development at the apparent expense of the company’s short-term economics is a company which will in fact prosper greatly—precisely because it is committed to personal development, and not just until the W2 form relationship is over.

Those who stay have truly re-upped. Those who leave give the company great market research data, and are a walking advertisement for devotion to people development.

It’s the familiar trust paradox. Long-term management delivers better short-term results than does short term management. Long-term commitment to people gets better ROI than "human capital" optimization strategies.

An employer that is people-focused enough to constantly offer their people alternatives is a company that is going to attract a whole lot of high-development people.

But, you might say, what’s in it for the search firm? The chance to walk in through the front door for once, rather than skulking around the back. A chance to find great candidates without having to slink around, to actually place great employees in, occasionally, even greater situations. To make a difference. Maybe to even get a better nickname than “headhunter.”

Sounds like a win-win-win to me.

Attract and Retain: People Strategy, or Roach Motel Ad?

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The phrase “attraction and retention” falls naturally off the lips of HR people. It’s also common with the customer relationships crowd.

Yet it’s also perfect ad copy for selling flypaper or roach motels; “they can check in—but they can’t check out.”

So which is it? High-minded strategy for people and customers? Or unfortunate parallel with the extermination business?

The phrase “attraction and retention” grew out of McKinsey’s 1990s “war for talent,” crystallized in the 1997 book of that name.

Excerpt:

…a company’s ability to attract, develop and retain talent will be a major competitive advantage far into the future. “The only thing that differentiates Enron from our competitors is our people, our talent,” said Enron Chairman Kenneth Lay recently.

Ouch…score a few points for the insect hypothesis.

Let’s have a look at how the phrase has evolved in ten years. Today:

It’s still about employee attraction and retention—in the HVAC contracting business.

For the 7-county Milwaukee area, Deloitte Consulting offers a 5-step process for attracting and retaining new business and industry residents.

It’s about website visitors

And it’s definitely about customers

But just how does one attract and retain?

Well, for customers, you could use one-to-one marketing:

Remember all of those advertising brochures you’ve found in your mailbox over the years from them? Those are the results of a one-to-one personalized marketing strategy. Most likely your relationship with Radio Shack began when you walked into one of their locations and purchased a stereo.

Yup, that’s probably where it started, all right. Though I haven’t been back in years…wonder why…

To attract and retain employees, you could create a retirement plan .

You could also “attract and retain more supporters, members, and donors, through a BrandXcellence consulting relationship.”

Here’s how Brunswick does it:

• Business and financial leadership development programs
• Products managed and engineered by local and regional talent
• Performance management process

You could do it through CRM.

You could read about the Five Key Elements of A&R.

But wait a minute—why is it that are we doing this? What purpose does attraction and retention serve? Ask that question, and we get some consistent answers:

the long-term sustainability of an organization’s business strategy and market differentiation hinge on effective recruitment, talent development, and retention.

Human capital continues to be the single-largest investment a company makes, and now management can quantify the return on investment of its human capital and connect it to business results…"

We use tools such as the Watson Wyatt Human Capital Index ® – which links the effectiveness of human capital practices to shareholder value creation

A primary challenge facing almost every organization today is quantifying human capital investments and their effect on shareholder value.

Ah, yes, that’s it—the reason we want to attract and retain employees and customers is so that we can raise shareholder value. People and customers are the means;  business success  is the end. Therefore the value of employees and customers can be measured by their contribution to financial value creation.

Does it not dawn on these people that they’ve gotten it backwards?  That financial performance is a result, an indicator, of success in serving employees and customers?  That companies should serve people—including shareholders—rather than the other way ‘round?  Causality flowing one way doesn’t mean it flows the other too; people who like things hang around for more, but just because people are hanging around doesn’t mean they like things (prisons, for example, have high retention rates).  

The sin of the roach motel approach is that it focuses on symptoms, not causes—and in so doing, perverts means and ends.

It all comes down to motives, and motives can be slippery. Even the same person, moments apart, can treat customers like ends—or like means.

One of the best—and most vacuous—recommendations is to engineer your entire company culture around doing things that attract people and encourage them to stay. Best, because it’s absolutely correct. Vacuous, because if you don’t start with a profits-exist-for-people mindset, you’re never going to get there by pursuing X-step processes in support of increased shareholder value.

You either live it or you don’t. People are attracted by genuine motives—not by some technician measuring their attraction levels. People stay most if they genuinely want to stay—not because of a program that locks them in in order to increase shareholder value.

The roach motel crowd is dominating the dialogue. In our pursuit of minute measurement of the effectiveness of flypaper, we’ve forgotten motives.

People come if we really, really like them and treat them well. Period. People stay if we really, really like them and treat them well. Period. Not for the sake of shareholder value. For their sake. Period.

Then—and only then—the shareholder value thing works best too.  As an outcome—not as a goal.