At the worst possible time — on the eve of the social site’s IPO – The Wall Street Journal reports that General Motors plans to quitadvertising on Facebook because ads there don’t get the job done:
General Motors Co. plans to stop advertising with Facebook Inc. after deciding that paid ads on the site have little impact on consumers’ car purchases, according to a GM official.
The move by GM, one of the largest advertisers in the U.S., puts a spotlight on an issue that many marketers have been raising: whether ads on Facebook help them sell more products. On Friday, Facebook is expected to sell shares in an initial public offering that could put a market value on the company of as much as $104 billion…
That aside… personally, I have trouble understanding why Facebook wants to go public anyway. Of course, I’m pretty sure Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t want to — hence his childish, obnoxious gesture of showing up for business meetings on Wall Street in a sweatshirt.
But while I blame him for not dressing like a grownup, I find any reluctance he feels to go public totally understandable. I say this as someone who suffered for decades working for publicly-traded newspaper companies — and who would still be a newspaperman if his paper had not been owned by an overleveraged public company. To me, anyone who is making plenty of money from his private company would be totally insane to go public.
No one, but no one, would accuse me of being any sort of financial whiz. But I fail to see the presence of any of the usual reasons for going public. What does Facebook really need an infusion of cash for? It’s not capital-intensive like, say, a steel mill. It’s always been able to rake in the money for relative little investment.
Yes, I’ve gone out there and read explanations of why. But I’m unconvinced. So what if, for instance, going public would be a huge windfall for Facebook employees? Why would I, as an investor (if I were an investor), want to spend my money to give them that windfall? Where’s the competitive advantage in encouraging a company’s founding talent — the people responsible for making the property valuable — to cash out?
The one rational excuse seems to be that in this converging online world, the only way to compete with the other titans out there, such as Google, is to have mountains of cash on hand, so you can beat the others to the punch when it comes time to buy a YouTube or an Instagram.
In other words, it’s a necessary step in the bid to become all things to all people online. Which seems, in and of itself, a debatable goal. But hey, nobody’s asking me.
The firm has had enough trouble clawing its way back, and now this…
Don Draper, who created a sensation last season by biting the hand that fed his agency — Lucky Strike — with an anti-tobacco letter published in the NYT, seems to have been vindicated. He’s to get an award for taking a courageous stand, and captains of industry will be there to see him get it. Roger Sterling goes along to the banquet and is happy as a clam passing out his business cards in that target-rich environment. (By the way, I’m sort of the Roger Sterling at ADCO, because that’s the sort of thing I do. Fortunately, dropping acid is optional.)
But then, in a calculatingly offhand manner, the guy from Dow Corning confides to Don that sure, all those people will give him awards, but none of them will ever work with him, because his letter demonstrated that no client could ever trust him. And then asks him if he’d like another drink. Yes, as it turns out.
The episode ends with Draper sitting back at his table at the banquet looking like he just got hit by a stun gun. (Everyone else at the table looks the same way, for differing reasons.)
So was the guy from Dow just blowing smoke? Was he just saying Dow will never work with SCDP? Or was he delivering a message on behalf of the other fat cats? Or was he just speculating? And will Don share what he’s learned with his partners (I’m guessing not)? Or will Roger, his mind having been expanded, figure it out?
I don’t know, but I wish I could have found a clip of my favorite line of the episode. It’s when Roger shares yet another “brilliant” insight with Don, and Don tells him that even some people who have not experienced LSD know that…
It comes to our attention that “newspaper reporter” is now listed as one of the five worst jobs to have. Right down there with lumberjack. Here’s the CNN Headline News report:
On the heels of a report indicating good job prospects for the college class of 2012, career guidance website CareerCast released its list of the best and worst jobs of the year, and after reviewing 200 professions across a wide range of industries.
The five “best” jobs are software engineer, actuary, human resources manager, dental hygienist and financial planner. The top five “worst” jobs are lumberjack, dairy farmer, enlisted military soldier, oil rig worker and newspaper reporter.
So what makes a job among the best or the worst? CareerCast based the rankings on a methodology that rated each profession’s work environment by assessing both the physical and emotional demands, including: necessary energy, physical demands (crawling, stooping), work conditions (toxic fumes, noise), degree of competitiveness, degree of hazards personally faced and degree of contact with the public. Each category was broken into elements and then each element was given points. In the end, a higher point total made a job less desirable, while a lower total indicated a job was more desirable….
He hasn’t been a reporter since 1980, but our own Brad Warthen can tell you that being a newspaper editor is not what it once was, if you can even find such a job.
Which of course is the problem. The main thing wrong with being a newspaper anything is that if that’s what you do, it probably won’t be long before you join the ranks of those who used to do it.
Beyond that, we’re suspicious of the criteria used in compiling this list. Lumberjack? Obviously they’re not taking into account such factors as leaping from tree to tree as they float down the mighty rivers of British Columbia… the giant redwood, the larch, the fir, the mighty Scotch pine… the smell of fresh-cut timber… the crash of mighty trees… with my best girly by my side…
Since 2002, SC Fathers and Families has been a leader in fatherhood initiatives, and the program’s new website makes that abundantly clear.
Recently, ADCO worked with Fathers and Families to create a website that would offer a comprehensive resource to those looking for information on fatherhood and the often challenging issues that surround it. ADCO is happy to unveil the new SC Fathers and Families website, complete with a resources tab offering answers to many of the questions fatherhood can pose.
Check it out, and see how SC Fathers and Families helps Dads address some of the most daunting issues they can possibly face.
So you feel like you’ve got the hang of Twitter and Facebook, but don’t quite have your LinkedIn strategy together?
Shelly Kramer, who loves LinkedIn, shares 12 secrets for making the most of that powerful professional networking tool on Ragan’s PR Daily. Follow the link for the full lowdown, which provides instructions on how to do the following:
1. [Know] How to remove a connection
2. Hide your status updates
3. Privacy matter to you? Opt out of ads
4. Get a custom URL
5. Make yourself anonymous
6. Customize a link to your website
7. Add your blog feed
8. Hide a recommendation
9. Add to your connection base
10. Block connections and group activities from competitors
11. Get LinkedIn updates in an RSS feed
12. Beef up your experience with projects
No, it’s not much of a song, but that’s not the point. It was meant to evoke a certain sense of what 30ish, white, button-down people thought was particularly cool, sexy and sophisticated at that point in cultural history (1965).
You might say the scene’s cultural antecedent was the below scene in “The Pink Panther” (1963). The singer is Fran Jeffries.
Below that, you’ll find an original video of Gillian Hills singing the song in 1962. Gillian later appeared in a ménage à trois with David Hemmings and another girl in “Blow-Up,” the ultimate mid-60s cool movie (much spoofed by Austin Powers).
That’s all for now. We’ll try to keep up with this stuff for you. Our time machine is standing by.
1. Generally speaking, connect only with people you know, trust, and respect. Anyone can build a massive network of people they don’t know, and those collectors are generally “takers” rather than “givers.” Steer clear of them.
2. When you send a LinkedIn invitation, personalize it. As I mentioned in the earlier article, using the standard default message is another way of saying: “Hello. I’m lazy. This invitation isn’t important enough for me to spend the 15-20 seconds it would take to write a personal message telling you who I am, how we know each other, and why I want to connect.”
3. As a general rule, many people do (and more people should) place tremendous value on their LinkedIn network. Respect that, and don’t assume that they are going to add you to their trusted network just because you sent a LinkedIn request.
4. Most people who do this aren’t Linkedin Jerks. They simply haven’t had any training on the platform and don’t know any better, because “everyone else always sends me that standard message.” Which brings me to another point: How do you differentiate yourself on a platform such as LinkedIn? It certainly isn’t by doing what everyone else is doing.
5. If someone sends you a LinkedIn request with the default message, reply with an offer to meet for coffee to get to know each other first, or you can simply start an online dialogue. An actual message I sent recently is below:
Thanks for the invitation and for taking the time to read and comment on the material you’ve read.
I typically reserve my LinkedIn network for people that I know, trust, respect, have worked with, etc. and that is also how we train people to use LinkedIn as social media coaches. This is nothing against you personally; just the way I choose to grow and protect my network. Hope you understand.
All of that said and dutifully quoted, here’s a problem I have with such advice: I know a lot of people. Even more people know me. In real life, I often (sometimes several times in a day) have apparent strangers come up to me and start conversations in a way that makes it obvious that they assume I know who they are. And in truth, they probably have every right to make such an assumption.
It is reasonable for me to assume, in return, that every unrecognized person who sends me a LinkedIn invitation could actually be someone I should know, but do not recall. There are a lot of people out there like that.
So I’m certainly not going to admit, in writing, that I don’t know such people. I’m either going to approve them (if they appear, by job description, to be someone I should know for sound business reasons) or ignore them. And usually the former.
Slate has put up a really interesting photo slide show invoking the “Mad Men” era, to help us all get psyched up for the season premiere coming Sunday.
Recently, we’ve moved into a new level of acceptance of our “Famously Hot” identity. It’s so well known that Columbians can invoke in part, and get the message across.
In 2011, Men’s Health magazine named Columbia the 13th drunkest city in the country.
We rank 14th among cities for DUI deaths; 18th for binge drinking. And with the University of South Carolina earning the No. 20 party school slot in the 2011 Princeton Review rankings, perhaps it’s not surprising that Columbia is famously drunk.
But it’s not clear whether Columbia is drunker than in 1873, when, according to a later report in the Temperance Recorder, there were “grogshops everywhere.”
And it’s hard to say whether Columbia is any drunker now than it was one night in December of 1922, during Prohibition, when The State newspaper reported a rash of drinking arrests. “Columbia Police Have Busy Night,” the paper trumpets: A man and woman were arrested for being “drunk and disorderly in a motorcar” on South Main Street, with the woman “almost unconscious from the effects of strong drink” and unable to give her name. A man drove off Assembly Street into a hole. Another man was arrested for “illuminating part of the town with gunfire.” Two men were arrested for “transporting small quantities of hooch.” Four more were hauled in for being drunk and disorderly. The cause of all these crimes, according to the paper, was “dynamite liquor.”…
Of course, if one is famously hot, one is likely to be famously thirsty. So there’s some logic to this. Think what you will of this latest wrinkle on our reputation, we’re at least glad to have helped provide a way to express it.
