Daily Archives: July 10, 2009

The best CEO coaches offer more than mere crisis counseling, functioning instead like a personal trainer in a gym. Their
principle mission is to keep CEO clients healthy, alert, positive and operating at the top of their game. But it’s not a role that just anyone can play. Though directors can help with specific situation-based advice and may even be personally capable of coaching, it is really not their role to get personally involved in the details of a CEO’ s job. If they did, they could not maintain objectivity when considering company performance issues.

When a board decides to move ahead and bring a CEO coach in, how should it proceed? Should a board hire such a coach or should it get its CEO to do the hiring? While CEO coaches are retained in various ways, the most effective way is for the board to tell its CEO they’d like him to search out a coach for himself. They should discuss with the CEO why they think coaching would be valuable and then talk through characteristics they would like the coach to have. Beyond that, the CEO should be turned loose and allowed to choose their own coach, and it’s typical practice for the CEO coach’s services to be built in to the CEO’s compensation agreement.

CEO or executive coaches are now commonplace in organizations because CEOs recognize the demands and stress of the job require it. Smart CEOs understand their longevity and success may depend on a dynamic and productive partnership with a coach.

As a friend who is a coach said to me – organizations are places where people don’t talk without prior agendas – so people are tired and sick of trying to act out roles all the time.

A really effective Coach would be a person an executive can really be himself/herself and look at possibilities of rejuvenation and development.

Sample entries include: Astroturfing: Trying to cheat the online community by creating a fake grassroots ‘buzz’ around a product, service or event. Some companies will get their people to pretend to be advocates or pay a blogger to say nice things but they should beware, most communities will see straight through you and the backlash can be destructive.

Blog storm or ‘swarm’: This is when a huge number of blog entries suddenly appear around a particular event or topic. John Sargeant’s woefully endearing per- formancon Strictly Come Dancing caused a ‘blog storm’ that dwarfed the activity around 9/11. Blog storms now regularly force stories into mainstream media.

Dooced: (v.) To slag off your employer and lose your job as a result. Named after Heather Armstrong (blog name Dooce) who was fired in 2002 for shouting her mouth off.

Easter Eggs: (1) All packaging and no chocolate, (2) Secret messages or graphics hidden in a computer program for a bit of a joke.

Flicktion: A collection of pictures on Flickr accompanied by short stories. Hat Tip: A public acknowledgement to someone (or a website) for bringing something to the blogger’s attention. Kitty Blog: A pointless blog.

A new jargon busting guide gets released.

let the madness begin.

Many of us would like to believe the Internet is a force for unity, but danah boyd, a social-media researcher at Microsoft Research New England and a fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, thinks we’re deceiving ourselves.

Speaking last week at the Personal Democracy Forum, an annual conference that explores how technology is changing politics, Ms. boyd asked a packed audience of activists, political operatives, entrepreneurs and journalists to raise their hands if they use Facebook. Almost every hand in the place went up. Then she asked who uses MySpace, and barely a hand was seen.

How could that be? Sure, Facebook is growing much faster. But MySpace is far from dead. In May, Web-traffic tracker comScore reported that Facebook and MySpace are neck and neck in terms of U.S. visitors, with 70.28 million that month for Facebook, up 97% from a year ago, and 70.26 million for MySpace, down 5% from last year.

Ms. boyd got some answers from group of people she’s been hanging out with over the last four years: U.S. teens. During the 2006-2007 school year, her conversations with high-school students began showing a trend of white, upper-class and college-bound teens migrating to Facebook–much like the crowd in the conference hall has. Meanwhile, less-educated and non-white teens were on MySpace. Ms. boyd noted that old-style class arrogance was also in view; the Facebook kids were quicker to use condescending language toward the MySpace kids.

“What we’re seeing is a modern incarnation of white flight,” Ms. boyd said. “It should scare the hell out of us.”

Others have mounted quantitative studies that confirm these divides. A December 2008 study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project showed that, overall, Facebook users are more likely to be male and have completed college, while MySpace users are somewhat more likely to be female, black or Hispanic, and to have not completed college. Since that study, however, Facebook has boomed and the social-network landscape has no doubt changed significantly.

More studies come from Eszter Hargittai, an associate professor of Communication Studies at Northwestern University, who surveyed both 2007 and 2009 first-year college students, ages 18 and 19, at the diverse campus of the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Her February-March 2007 survey of 1,060 students found that Hispanics were much less likely to use Facebook than anyone else and much more likely to use MySpace. Whites, African Americans and Asian Americans were all big users of Facebook, with 80% or more of each group using it sometimes or often. MySpace was equally popular among whites (57%) and blacks (58%), while Asians were least present (39%). There were socio-economic differences, too; Facebook users tended to have parents with significantly higher levels of education than MySpace users had.

Interesting.

In India right we see the older folks and savvier internet users moving to Facebook and using condescending language towards the ‘uncooler’ Orkut users, who are typically younger.

75 percent of hiring managers go to LinkedIn to research job candidates before making an offer, compared to 48 percent for Facebook and 26 percent for Twitter, according to Entrepreneur.com.

Interesting!

I hope that makes people sit up and take notice of social media. Wonder what those percentages would be in the case of India, though…