communicating

It’s an Algorithm, Not an Apocalypse

iPad user on Facebook Messenger

Facebook is updating its algorithm, and we’re panicking about all the wrong things.

Let’s imagine, for just a moment, that Facebook is gone. No more pages or groups. No more notifications alerting you to new comments on your clever meme, or the most recently posted photo of your cousin’s dog. No more videos (close-captioned, of course), and definitely no “insights” tab cluing you into which of your highly crafted posts and curated shares garnered the most audience engagement.

Anyone else feeling a little queasy?

What will we do if our brand messaging gets buried? How will we make our potential customers aware of how awesome we are?

As communicators, and certainly as marketers, most of us have developed a dependency on Facebook over the past several years—and as the platform has grown, shifted, and evolved, we’ve had to adapt as both personal users and brand managers. The topic of adaptation entered the spotlight again in the past couple of weeks, as Facebook announced the latest round of changes to its algorithm. And I watched as my Twitter feed, populated largely with marketers and professional brand managers, erupted into chaos. What will we do if our brand messaging gets buried? How will we make our potential customers aware of how awesome we are? What do we say when the boss asks for a monthly report and the numbers have plummeted?

Since that time, there have been a few other thought pieces that accurately reflected my view on the matter. (In short:  CALM DOWN.) Facebook has always made decisions based on what they feel is best for their business—and make no mistake, their business is in data-informed ad sales. The medium they use to facilitate that business is their massively popular social media platform. If users leave the platform, Facebook’s business model begins to fail. It is, therefore, in the company’s best business interest to keep their users happy, interacting, and returning to the platform regularly. Luckily, those are the very same behaviors that are in the best interest of the brands that so often depend on Facebook to increase their own reach and impact.

This particular algorithm update prioritizes content that is shared by the end user’s friends and family. The concern for brands, naturally, is that this reduces organic reach of content from business pages, in a time when brand content is shown to an ever-lowering audience percentage from the start. Here’s the thing: Nobody comes to Facebook to see brand content, and they certainly don’t come to hear a sales pitch. They come to see what their friends and families care about. The secret to good content development has always been to create something that people care enough about to share or interact with in some way.

Even as we begin to see the Facebook shift as an opportunity rather than an obstacle, the mass panic provoked by the initial announcement begs another question. Why are we so afraid of losing Facebook influence?

But as marketers, we are all too often tempted by the allure of vanity metrics including number of followers, empty likes, and high reach measurements—even if we didn’t reach the right audience. We’ve put out content for the sake of posting something on a Tuesday at 10:00 a.m., even if we didn’t have anything worth saying. We’ve ignored what people really wanted to see, in favor of showing them what we wanted them to know. We have made our bed, and that bed is firmly situated in our best potential customers’ blind spots. With this new algorithm, Facebook is providing us with a short-term incentive to do what we should have been doing all along: listening to our audience, creating content that they care about, and encouraging a sense of community.

Even as we begin to see the Facebook shift as an opportunity rather than an obstacle, the mass panic provoked by the initial announcement begs another question. Why are we so afraid of losing Facebook influence?

Don’t get me wrong. Facebook has been a game-changer. It was revolutionary in its early days, and continues to be an incredible tool for marketing, communication, and sales—but believing that a single channel can make or break your brand is dangerous. Facebook is powerful, but if it disappeared tomorrow, the strongest brands among us would not go out of business. If your brand depends on another company’s web algorithms, I urge you to do some serious reflection about how to diversify your outreach and storytelling techniques.

The Great Facebook Freak-Out of 2018 was enlightening as it forced us to have difficult conversations about our content—but perhaps it should instead be sparking a greater discussion about our viability. If our brands are truly lost without Facebook, maybe the “insights” tab isn’t where we ought to be looking.

From Great Expectations to Sense & Sensibility: Career Advocacy with a Humanities Degree

There is a question every English major has heard a million times, one that most of us hate, that bruises our tender literary hearts:

“What are you going to do? Teach?”

I gave a talk recently to a room of English students and faculty at my undergraduate alma mater, SUNY Plattsburgh, and asked the audience if any of them had ever been confronted with that question. Nearly everyone raised a hand.

Now, this is not to say that there is anything wrong with being a teacher. Quite the contrary, education is a wonderful field filled with selfless, vastly underappreciated practitioners. If any among you want to take on this necessary and rewarding work, please go for it. But that question is loaded, and its effects can be detrimental to a budding career. It is a symptom of a greater issue: Everyone thinks English majors (or history majors, or philosophy majors — most of the humanities get thrown into the same pile of flawed expectations) are prepared exclusively for a career in teaching. After all, what can you really do with a B.A. in English other than teach people how to read and write?

The reality is that my fellow English majors build careers in all kinds of areas, ranging from business to communications to law. We are trained in some of the most valued skill sets on the job market, and yet we can’t seem to break down this systemic misunderstanding of our abilities. The English major has a PR problem, and our graduates are suffering for it.

The English major has a PR problem.

So as a former English major, and one who even went on to do something as frivolous as obtaining a graduate degree in writing, let me do my part to shift the dialogue. I will say this quite clearly: Humanities majors are great employees. True, we don’t have a clear career path set before us like the pre-med majors or the folks over in the accounting department — but that’s actually a good thing. We have options, and our skills are translatable in a way that the modern economy necessitates. Hiring managers, however, do not always understand our value. That means we need to be prepared to speak about our talents in a professional context. We need to advocate for our careers, and clarify our capabilities.

Hiring managers…do not always understand our value.

Not sure how to do that? You’re not alone. Career prep is rarely integrated among literature and writing courses. Here are a few talking points to get you started:

Writing

We’ll start with the obvious one. English majors can write. It’s kind of our forte. But why is it important to be a good writer?

Remember that time is money — and confusion is a time vampire. With that in mind, employees who can communicate with clarity are essential to any organization. You can say what needs to be said, and you don’t create chaos by provoking misunderstanding. Furthermore, English majors are experts at adapting their writing style for a specific audience or format. We can switch from persuasive, fact-based essays to lyrical prose in the time it takes to grab a coffee between classes. That sort of flexibility is important in the workplace, where you will need to communicate with everyone from coworkers to CEOs.

Reading Comprehension

Did you know that law schools love English majors? It’s true! And a lot of that love is due to our reading ability. We are well acquainted with late night novels, Shakespearean tomes, and loads of boring pages we never wanted to see in the first place. We can read a LOT, often quickly, and we can understand what we read in a way that makes it applicable on a larger scale. In a lot of ways, reading is the written word’s equivalent of listening — and everyone likes to work with a good listener.

Critical Thinking

All of those papers your professors assigned weren’t meant to torture you. Rather, they were a measurable way to assess your critical thinking skills. You need to be able to take in information and establish an opinion based on the material at hand. Then, you need to be able to express that opinion intelligently. In the classroom, that kind of higher-level thinking will get you an A. In the workplace, it will get you promoted.

Research

Remember cringing when you saw that research paper assignment on the syllabus? Email that professor now and thank her. The hours you spent in the library, scouring the shelves and Google-searching obscure topics, were some of the best preparation for entry-level work in a number of fields. Your boss will, at some point, need to collect a bunch of data and present it to the VIPs. But your boss probably won’t be the one collecting all of that fascinating info. That’s where you, at the assistant or associate level, will likely be knee-deep in the company database or locating competitive data online. You’ll have to find everything your boss needs to know, and you’ll often be asked to present it in a layman-friendly format. Perhaps you’ll even need to be persuasive. Sound familiar?

Empathy

Reading builds empathy, awareness, and diversity of thought. For many English majors, our first introductions to cultures beyond our own were in the pages of a good book. We traveled the world between two covers, heard snippets of other languages, saw a variety of family dynamics and relationships at all levels of functionality. We learned about sports we don’t play and music we don’t listen to. We experienced lives that were very different from what we would normally encounter. Office types call that cross-cultural competence, and it’s a big deal.

Criticism

English majors are all too familiar with the critical workshop setting. We have sat in a circle, seen our work handed around the room and desecrated by red ink, and we have quietly accepted comments from our peers and teachers. It’s hard. Very hard. And a lot of people are really, really bad at it. In fact, you’d be surprised at just how badly some professionals take criticism.

As an English major, you know that constructive feedback is not a personal attack, but an opportunity to gain insight into your work and improve future drafts. Corporate America has a similar ritual, called a performance review. It usually happens at least once a year, and your boss may tell you things about yourself you don’t want to hear. You need to respond calmly, with respect for a professional opinion that differs from your own, and with an ability to determine quality advice from bullying nonsense. It’s a talent in its own right, and English majors have a leg up in the process.

Conversely, we are usually better than most at delivering criticism. Having felt the harsh sting of someone disliking a project you’re passionate about, we tend to be tactful with our suggestions. The truth hurts, but English majors at least know when to carry a Band-Aid and some anti-septic spray. We’re also pretty good at metaphor.

So the next time someone asks, “What are you going to do? Teach?” you know what to do. Look them straight in the eye and speak with confidence: “I’m an English major. I can do anything.”

Beyond the Red Tape: Communicating Through Bureaucracy in Higher Ed

This post originally appeared on www.studentaffairscollective.org, on October 15, 2014.

Recently, the Student Affairs Collective’s Twitter #SAChat held a discussion about issues with bureaucracy in higher education — and wow, do people ever have issues with bureaucracy! Student affairs pros nationwide hashtagged their grievances about hierarchy, institutional distrust, and office politics. As a newcomer to the college-as-workplace, I have fewer years of cynicism to overcome than many of my colleagues. Still, you don’t have to work for a school to understand that educational institutions in this country are tangled up in red tape. It’s hardly surprising that so many of our professionals are frustrated.

Now, I should mention that I’m in the somewhat uncommon position of not having a background in student affairs. My prior experience and education are rooted in communications, specifically writing and marketing, so my natural inclination is to see these kinds of challenges in terms of a communication problem. And it seems clear to me that the higher ed field is the victim of its own communication breakdown. On a fundamental level, we have not only failed to keep up with the times; we have failed to keep up with our students’ expectations. Even worse, we have failed to keep up with their needs.

Over the past ten or twenty years, the world has changed in unprecedented ways. Personal technology usage has skyrocketed, transforming the way we interact and the methods we use to acquire information. Today’s students and prospective students — the notoriously techy Millennials, and their even more digitally advanced younger siblings, Gen Z — have been brought up in a culture of immediacy. For them, knowledge has always been literally at their fingertips, available with the click of a mouse or tap of a tablet. They’ve spent their whole lives updating Facebook statuses, writing blog posts, buying music from the iTunes store, and texting.

Imagine, then, how they must feel when faced with a university website that’s practically impossible to navigate. Put yourselves in the shoes of an individual who has been tweeting since middle school, and think about how they would react when someone says, “Sorry, we don’t have that information. You need to visit [insert name of cross-campus office here].” And why would anyone who downloads entire software programs onto their telephone in a matter of seconds ever find it acceptable to hear “we’ll get back to you in a couple weeks?”

I know what you’re thinking. Spoiled. Lazy. Self-centered. But here’s the thing: They’re not the ones who are trying to sell something. And make no mistake — higher education is trying to sell something. It is not a student’s job to adapt to our needs; it’s our job to anticipate theirs, and to create an environment in which they can thrive. In a time when the world’s greatest minds are writing articles for the Huffington Post, chronicling their formidable thoughts on Blogger, teaching MOOCs, and recording speeches for YouTube, it is becoming increasingly important for colleges and universities to improve the sales pitch for our services. Academia doesn’t have a monopoly on knowledge these days. Our business model has to change accordingly, and while that’s a topic for another blog post, it begins with developing effective, efficient communications strategies. Like any other business, we need to meet our customers where they are. Our message is only relevant if it is heard.

I won’t pretend that I have all the answers, and certainly every campus has a different set of needs to match their unique student populations. But I do know that it is essential for various divisions, departments, and offices to communicate with each other, as well as students. Campus websites need to be user-friendly, with easy access to information. Social media accounts must be implemented, not only eagerly, but strategically. We need to stop the constant back-and-forth, the long wait times, the sluggish response rates. We have to evaluate our structures and processes, particularly those that are most time consuming from a student services perspective, and ask ourselves: Why do we do this? Is there a better way? We should be our students’ best advocates when they come to us with complaints, not voices of dissent telling them, “This is how it is,” and making excuses for institutional inefficiencies. We need to be proactive, instead of reactive when it comes to emerging technologies — after all, there’s no use hopping on the bandwagon for the latest trend if, by the time we get on board, our audience has already moved onto the next big thing.

Students need to be able to work effectively in the fast-paced digital age, and the people preparing them for future careers are responsible for setting a good example. It’s long past time for us to start.