Econ 101 Meets Social Media 101 - February 5th, 2010

Econ 101 Meets Social Media 101

Priceless?

For those of us that care about accuracy and insight, the demise of professional reporting is a sad, sad thing.  This week a writer in the New York Times asserted that high prices were the “cause” of food shortages in North Korea. Then my local paper, the Wisconsin State Journal, reported the reason condos take so long to sell in Madison is that there aren’t enough buyers. So, for the record, I just want to note that there is an entire discipline –called “economics”– that explains how supply and demand affect prices in the market place. In the absence of professional reporting, you’ll have to do the heavy lifting and read up on it.

List Prices

The tyranny of lists was once again driven home to me this week by a social media how-to-find-a-job checklist that a colleague sent me.  Not only did it contain over 10 categories of things to do, but each category also had up to a dozen individual subcategories (”Send thank-you notes!” “Let colleagues know you’re looking for a job,” etc.).  And the final set of things to check off included “100 Best Blogs to Follow,” “50 Ways to Use Twitter,” and “30 Ways to Land a Job.” At what point does all of this become too overwhelming? My guess is that even an unemployed person has limits on the time and energy they have available to devote to blogging, commenting, e-mailing, calling, researching and (of course) submitting resumes. Which is why I liked this advice best of all: “Do something that has nothing to do with the world of social media.“

You’re Not the Boss of Me!

In a somewhat delicious revenge article on Thursday, former Microsoft researcher Dick Brass really stuck it to Microsoft for being an organization culturally resistant to change and innovation. Not afraid to name names, Brass identified specific people with specific personal agendas who thwarted the efforts of his own pet project, tablet computing. Unsurprisingly, Brass claimed that obstacles to progress were based on power struggles, personal opinions and miscommunication, rather than opposition to the technology itself.  Microsoft did fight back; however the company’s response was fairly muted. One can only imaging the scrambling that took place behind the scenes amongst those people who must have been jockeying for position in authoring the best rebuttals to Brass’ assertions. In probably one of the worst sentences to ever leave the corporate communications office of a Fortune 50 company, Microsoft noted that “what matters is innovation at scale, not just innovation at speed.” Yeah, right.

Econ 202, or “Yes, in fact, I *am* the boss of you!”

In a capitalist society, organizations are highly dependent upon the rule of law to maintain profitability, particularly when it comes to intellectual property rights like trademarks, copyrights, etc. This also extends to the work performed by its employees, whether they are assembling left-handed brass widgets or creating research that impacts the stock market. Therefore, it really shouldn’t come as a surprise to Forrester research analysts that their employer (that is, the company that pays them to research and write) wants to control how they blog about their work. You can’t take things from your employer without the company’s permission, whether it’s widgets or whether it’s words. As for those crying “free speech,” they need to revisit what the constitution protects, exactly.  Just another case where the demise of professional reporting leaves us in the lurch.