WORDS

by Feuillu

In their September e-newsletter, Merriam-Webster had this to say about which words usually make their monthly Top Twenty Looked Up Words list:

“What we do see, for the most part, are familiar words that are looked up on a daily basis and not news-driven words that come and go.”

This theme comes up in conversations about social media. Overnight success is a fantasy. Bit.ly estimates that links don’t really get much traction after a few hours, no matter where you post them; A site called Geek Estate suggests a real estate agent should expect to invest at least 18 months’ worth of work before her blog earns money.

Good content over time gets the search engine juice. No surprises there. In the same newsletter, Merriam-Webster said that news oftentimes drives up a word’s look-up frequency, but those look-ups don’t bump the word up into the big gun Top Twenty group. It’s like the difference between liposuction and a lifestyle change. Sure, you could keep throwing surgery at your “problem areas” but you’ll just keep going through the overeat->overpacked lipid cells->liposuction circle. A lifestyle switch that included exercise and healthy eating would be less taxing on the wallet, the body, and the spirit, and would effect a long-term change. You’d be in a healthy lifestyle and a mindset, instead of self-defeating loop.

What are the words you “look up” on a daily basis? I don’t mean the words unfamiliar to you. I mean to ask what are the words that are your core favorites, your old standards? For this blog, mine are (in no particular order):

1. Technology

2. User Education

3. Media Psychology

Here’s how I define them:

“Technology” I define as behavioral design in tech, specifically web applications. My “User Education” is information meant to comfort, then cajole the end-user into safer use of the Internet. “Media Psychology” as a term is new and isn’t yet in the M-W dictionary, but my formal definition is this:

“Media Psychology: the study of group or individual behavior (especially mental and social processes like perception, learning, thinking, sharing) that influences or is influenced by mass communication structures.”

I remind myself of those words and definitions each time I post here. Those areas are my work focus. I use Twitter, Facebook, and G+ for other, on-and-off-topic meandering. I don’t bother with “black-hat” search engine optimization smarminess. I also, in turn, don’t expect a lot of comments or inbound links. Growth over time will build my search engine muscle, i.e. my “look-up” frequency. People will find me eventually. People always find real content eventually, and good content finds them.

What words are in your Top Twenty list?

Let me know in the comments.

-Christine Cavalier

Links:

Grammar Girl’s Affect vs. Effect post: http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/affect-versus-effect.aspx
Bit.ly’s half life of a link post: http://blog.bitly.com/post/9887686919/you-just-shared-a-link-how-long-will-people-pay
GeekEstate’s 18 month post: http://www.geekestateblog.com/why-it-usually-takes-18-months-to-make-money-from-your-real-estate-site/

School of fish andres_colmen

I just realized a person I “circled” on G+ is a controversial mommy blogger of questionable judgment. I promptly uncircled her. It doesn’t matter if this blogger “deserves” my uncircling. She may or may not, in your opinion. In my opinion, it behooves me to avoid drama. I’ve learned many, many hard lessons over the years as a blogger and as an Internet user. I’m now a big proponent of learning how to identify and avoid waves of hateful passion that rise up usually without the least bit of supportive facts.

This particular mommy blogger posted an apology to another amateur investigator blogger whom she harassed and bullied online for investigating the death of a 2-year-old. Turns out the amateur investigator was somewhat justified in her pursuit of the mother’s culpability in that death. There were mistakes made all around by both bloggers, so I won’t tell you that either blogger deserves your sympathy. Personal responsibility is key online and off. Those women jumped into that quagmire of “cause” and they both will have to pay for those choices. But what can we, as conscientious Internet users, take away from this situation?

Here are some take-away lessons for the professional and polite online user:

1. Leave groups that are prone to impassioned causes, especially groups that take up virtual pitchforks against private individuals. Consider disassociating yourself with individuals of questionable character.
2. Do not post, on any platform, opinions about people, places, or things without real-world (not just online opinions) evidence. Learn the difference between fact and opinion, so as to be able to better assess the validity of what you read online.
3. Tread carefully around libel; learn to recognize it. Online cases are being heard and recognized by courts; soon it will be the norm.
4. If you simply must discuss someone or some situation, take it off public online forums. Find or make a private group or email a friend. FB, Twitter, G+, etc. are not your partners in “finding truth” or “raising the flag.” These sites (and your own public blog) are not your friends.

I realize that many of you love your dogma about freedom of expression, etc., and I get it, but there is no expression, no freedom, without prices, without consequences. Now we are faced with a world of permanent records of our expressions that *we do not own* and therefore do not control. There really is no taking back of what you post online.

To riff off West Side Story: there is a community online somewhere for all of us. There are places for you to spout off. Public sites are not those places. Free apps are not those places. For people concerned with their credibility and reputation, there is no room for error. Be careful out there, folks. Waves of hateful passion are hard to avoid, and impossible to control.

I just saw this job posting:

Director, Social Media Strategy

Hiring Company Industry: Food & Beverage

Number of Employees: 10,000+ Employees

Total Compensation: $120K – $145K

Reports to: VP, Consumer Strategies

Location: Philadelphia, PA

Job Description
 

ARAMARK is a leader in professional services, providing award-winning food services, facilities management, and uniform and career apparel to health care institutions, universities and school districts, stadiums and arenas, and businesses around the world. The company is recognized as the industry leader in FORTUNE magazine’s “World’s Most Admired Companies,” and as one of America’s Largest Private Companies by both FORTUNE and Forbesmagazines. ARAMARK seeks to responsibly address issues that matter to its clients, customers, employees and communities by focusing on employee advocacy, environmental stewardship, health and wellness, and community involvement. Headquartered in Philadelphia, ARAMARK has approximately 255,000 employees serving clients in 22 countries.

ARAMARK is seeking a Director, Social Media Strategy to develop, manage and implement ARAMARK’s social media infrastructure. This role is responsible for collaborating with ARAMARK’s businesses  to develop strategies that enable meaningful engagement with its consumers and clients to drive demand and foster strong and positive connectivity.  The Director will also collaborate and work closely with Corporate Communications to support  ARAMARK’s broader employee and external communication initiatives. This position will serve as the central hub for guiding, solving and observing the social media presences of ARAMARK as well as its lines of business. Additionally, the position is responsible for the tracking and reporting of all social media to executives and must be skilled  in assessing and presenting the business implications, meaning and value of social media activities on ARAMARK and its businesses, employees, clients and customers. Specific responsibilities include:

• Develop and implement the overarching social strategic framework, including the listening strategy, playbook, governance, policy and measurement criteria.

• Coordinate responses to appropriate conversations.
• Manage the  multiple profiles for ARAMARK in corresponding channels.
• Provide leadership and guidance in the creation of social media strategies for the corporate ARAMARK brand and individual line of business brands.
• Partner  with Corporate Communications to adapt the corporate branding strategy and mission to enliven in social media.
• Work with business units to develop original and curated content to be used across all social channels and as an integrated part of their entire marketing mix.
• Ensure the integrity of the ARAMARK brand across all ARAMARK social presences for the different lines of business.
• Analyze activity and reporting status, trends and business value and identify areas that require follow-up actions in the form of more research and/or understanding, business strategy modifications, or remediation plans.
• Partner with relevant functional areas and businesses to drive alignment in complementary activities.
• Grow the social media program based on opportunities.
• Provide or coordinate training and awareness within the organization where necessary.
• Manage vendor and service provider relationships.

QUALIFICATIONS:

• Bachelors degree in marketing, communication, PR, technology, or significant work experience.

• Minimum of 10 years business experience in marketing or communication on client or agency side; minimum of 5 years in the digital and/or social space.

• Proven experience in independently developing, implementing and measuring sustainable social media strategies for a corporation or brand.

• Superior hands on knowledge of technologies, partners and conferences.

• Well networked in the social space- ability to keep up on trends and new innovation.

• Minimum 2 years of developing, implementing and measuring social media strategies for clients, a corporation or brands.

• Strong written, verbal and technical communication skills with thorough attention to detail.

• Existing knowledge of social networking and monitoring tools for utilization of metrics and benchmarks to measure effectiveness.

Other skill sets and experiences required include:

• Must demonstrate the ability to impact and influence at the most senior levels of the organization and across the enterprise.

• Must also possess strong collaboration skills coupled with experience strategically navigating a large organization, including partnering with other departments and stakeholders to understand need and generate appropriate, innovative solutions.

• Ability and desire to lead high-performing matrix project teams.

• Ability to partner with the corporate IT department to develop technology solutions that advanced the social media capability.

For more information or to apply, visit www.aramark.com/careers (Job Number 65760).

 

 

 

I could go on forever about the eleventybillion things wrong with this job posting, but I’ll contain myself to only a few words, in hopes that Aramark comes to its senses in this hiring process. Aramark is a Philly company and I want them to succeed solely for that reason. I have no affiliation with Aramark or any of its related companies.

Aramark should tread very, very carefully in this realm of social media. The company should have a clear sense of its goals. Social media can be damaging. This posting doesn’t at all pinpoint what Aramark should expect this Director to accomplish. It seems like one of the social media kumbaya kool-aid drinkers wrote this job posting, as if they were sitting around drinking coffee, saying “Hey, you know what we need? A CONVERSTATION WITH OUR CUSTOMERS! We need to ENGAGE! Yes! Let’s engage!”

Uh, no. Let’s not engage. Let’s listen, sure. Let’s not build our own channels on which to listen. Let’s not have this pie-in-the-sky idea that we are going to build a social network around Aramark. Let’s not intrude on our customer’s private conversations just because we want to “engage” them. Aramark is a food service provider. The psychological elements around food and eating are a delicate bunch. You cannot hire a social media strategist that doesn’t understand this. Aramark’s social media strategy should be extremely custom-made, and IMHO fly as low on the radar as possible. They need to build a personality profile around the strategy, like an old grandmother with comfort foods or a sleek, fine dining gourmet vegetarian chef. Perhaps they need multiple personality profiles for the many, many businesses they have.

But this job posting is only going to attract the PR hacks, the cheerleaders, the cultists who think the word “democratization” holds meaning. It’s very worrisome to me.

I’ll stop now.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments.

-Christine Cavalier

Here’s more spam for you, hot from the presses.

Please, be informed that some financial body cancelled your ACH transaction (ID: 34753232), lately started by you or another person from your check account. 

Let’s take a look at some of the glaring spam points. I’m just going to number them and you can figure them out yourself. PurpleCar.net is not a how-to-spam-and-spoof-better blog for criminals:

1. Bad Grammar.

2. Inconsistent naming conventions.

3. Non-traditional format (we all know what REAL banking emails look like).

4. Absurdity (real banks don’t send these emails, the account numbers are obviously fake, etc.).

5. Odd font happenings.

Other indicators:

Another killer was that I received 2 of these emails at the same time, each slightly different from the other. This may or may not happen to you, but it definitely should fire a warning shot.

Also, Yahoo correctly placed these emails in my spam folder. Yahoo knows more than I do which emails were sent on a massive scale, so it’s good to take your service provider’s opinion on a particular email into consideration.

Here’s the other email:

The ACH transaction (ID: 5010624), recently sent from your bank account (by
you or any other person), was rejected by the Electronic Payments
Association.
###############################################
Canceled transaction
Transaction ID:    5010624
Reason of rejection    See details in the report below
Transaction Report    report_1409.pdf.zip (ZIP archive, Adobe PDF)
###############################################
13450 Sunrise Valley Drive, Suite 100 Herndon, VA 20171 (703) 561-1100

2011 NACHA – The Electronic Payments Association

If you fell for this spoof, call your bank(s) right away and let them know. Put a watch on all of your credit cards. Go through whatever security checklist your bank or credit card suggests. Also, file a police report.