Blink and You'll Miss Your Career Development

It has been a little more than two years since I started my first day with Burson-Marsteller right out of college. I had held four internships prior to that job, been working during the summers since I was a sophomore in high school and had long been doing odd jobs throughout my life. Little did I know that during all of those summers and those internships, I was reinforcing critical work skills and ethic that would pay dividends down the road.

One of the funny things I found out about internships is that you always feel like you are learning. And you probably are. But most of the time it is getting into the routine of that work environment, tackling the tasks that your superiors delegate, and simply keeping your mistakes to a minimum. They almost always have an end date and when I would reach my last day, I always felt like I grew leaps and bounds as a worker. I never had to worry about hitting a growth wall because I would hit my last day first.

I wasn't wrong for thinking that. All of that investment of time and effort when I was younger has reflected as I continue my journey as an employee. Lately, however, it sure seems like the growing and learning has slowed to a pedestrian pace.

When you are first starting out, everything is new and it is all a potential learning experience. Even the first few months I was at Burson, I found myself gobbling up every new opportunity that came my way, sometimes even to the detriment of my other work as I was overburdened with tasks. But after a few months, those same tasks that were once tantalizingly mysterious had become so mundane that I often wondered if I was wasting my time where I was.

I started to become frustrated with the projects that my managers assigned to me. They were the same projects I was working on this time last year. Hell, some of the projects were the same ones that I was working on the year before that when I first started. How in the world was I going to keep moving up in this world if year after year looked like Groundhog's Day?

As an intern, your starting base is zero. Every lesson, mistake, success, and utter failure is filed away into a repository to draw from the next day. Soon that repository becomes so full that every moment at work becomes a smaller percentage of the total number of influential events at work. The growth seemingly stops and you're left to wonder "Is now the right time to move on?"

The past two weeks I had been working on pulling together a report for one of my clients. It was a recap of the company's biggest event of the year. The report was the culmination of several months of work for the client and for us as agency. Now, I had done reports like these before and practically in my sleep. This was just a slightly larger one and for a more important event.

As I spent an hour of my day today scanning through the report for any errors, I found myself dropping a bucket into my well of knowledge that contained all of my past mistakes. I picked out the errors that I found and sent the report to my director. Usually when this step happens, I wait for an hour and address whatever corrections she has at that time. It is the way that it always goes. No matter how hard I try, there will always be mistakes.

While I waited for her to review the document, I started to think about the whole process of pulling the report together. It required me to work closely with the client, coordinating its global teams, managing a small team, and managing up with those above me. It started to dawn on me that while this was a report that I had done before in the past, the situation wasn't the same.

If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck. But that just wasn't the case this time. Because what it looks like on the surface isn't always what you glean. Career development is funny like that. I was frustrated because I thought that I was stuck in a black hole of monotony. But what I failed to realize is that my job was changing more slowly than in the beginning because my well had finally overflowed and needed to move elsewhere. Every drop became that much smaller of a proportion.

I kept learning at the same rate that I did as an intern. The key is to recognize it, appreciate the growth or the shortcoming, and categorize it for use on a later date. Just like the first time I was assigned a report like this, there was a different set of circumstances than the last time. I drew from those experiences and adjusted accordingly. It looked like a duck, swam like a duck, and quacked like a duck, but it was most certainly something else.

My director emailed me back. No edits. Just a good job and her asking me to send it directly to the client. I sat back in my chair and dropped this lesson into my new and larger well.

Another Day, Another Social Media Screw-up - Delta Airlines Edition

I have taken a look at some pretty terrible social media screw-ups on my blog in the past and every time I write about it, I always think to myself that it has to be the last time that we will see a major brand botch it badly. Enough articles outlining various social media failures exist at this point that we could create an entire Encyclopedia Britannica of what not to do when engaging with the public on social media.

But, thankfully for us, and much to the chagrin of communications managers everywhere, companies like Delta Airlines still exist and somehow find new ways to remind us that social media is always just a little more complicated than it needs to be.

After the US beat Ghana 2-1 on Monday night, Delta decided that this was an appropriate tweet to send out:

Twitter quickly pointed out that there are, in fact, no giraffes in Ghana. This issue could have been solved if the social media team had taken a collective thirty seconds to Google whether or not giraffes were in the country. Here, let me do it for you.

Sure, everyone wants to be part of discussions on current events. We get that and accept that it must be done. But if you are going to do it, then why stray from the safest possible tweet?

The team should have stopped and asked themselves several questions:

• Will adding the image enhance the tweet in any way? 

I know that tweets with images are more engaged with on Twitter, but did Delta really think that would be the case here? Legitimate question - how is this tweet improved with an image? You can't add an image to a tweet every time and expect it to be better. Show some discretion and pick your spots.

• Okay, let's go with an image. What two images represent these countries? 

Gee, I don't know, what is arguably the biggest thing that the average person uses to identify foreign countries? A flag. The country's flag. Why are you making this harder than it needs to be? You don't stand to gain anything really by being part of this, but you sure as heck stand to lose by doing it incorrectly.

• Why are we selecting these images?

Again, a question so simple and, yet, nobody seemed to have asked it. Because if they had, the group would have Googled whether giraffes are in Ghana and decided to go a different route.

If you clearly don't have your ducks in a row, sometimes it is better to just sit a few plays out than put yourself in a potentially compromising position. And that's a lesson that Delta is learning the hard way.

Your Disinterested-In-Soccer Trolling Tweets Are Grating

Clint Dimpsey scored a goal yesterday in the first 30 seconds of the US's World Cup yesterday. I am pretty sure that the sound waves of the exaltations combined with the jumping up and down may have caused a minor earthquake throughout the entire nation. It was incredible. A picture-perfect start for the US that nobody could have predicted.

After screaming like a mad man and hugging my coworkers, I went to check Twitter to see the collective freakout that normally takes place when historic moments in sports just occur. 90% of the tweets I was looking at were some combination of "OMGGGGGGGGGGGGG", "Holy. Shit." and "FKLDAJEFOIWFIJIAJCD9A38RJMIASDF8" (presumably a pocket-tweet mid-hug). Euphoric is the only word to describe what everyone around me was feeling and clearly the sentiment was shared by millions on social media as well.

And the other 10%? Well, have you ever had one of those friends that goes out of their way to be disinterested in something that you care about deeply? The type of people that will sit there and passive-aggressively mutter snide remarks? That, unfortunately, was the remainder of my Twitter feed.

I get it - soccer isn't for everyone. Some think it is slow and boring. Others hate all the flopping. Most just don't understand it.

But the World Cup is every four years and it is pretty easy to avoid it if you aren't interested in it. So is it really necessary to sit on Twitter and be the biggest contrarian possible by subtweeting or blatantly tweeting about not caring that Clint Dempsey just made history? Because if millions of people from a melting pot of backgrounds can be brought together by one month of soccer every four years, the event has to be somewhat important. So it seems like you could probably just keep your opinions to yourself.

And, sure, rooting for the US once every four years in the World Cup is super trendy and most will stop caring the moment the US is out. But isn't that the exact same as the Summer Olympics? Or the Winter Olympics? So if you can enjoy the Olympics, you should at least be able to understand how others can do the same for the World Cup. That's a good enough reason to just keep your fingers off that send button.

Stop Screwing Up Social Media - It's Just Not That Hard

"I know what will really inspire our brand ambassadors," said generic social media "expert" at large corporation. "We need to give them something that they can tag themselves with and declare their loyalty to our company in an effort to convert others to our services. What we need to do is give them a hashtag on Twitter!"

"Dead on!" replied slightly more junior social media "expert." "This way the people can simply send out a Tweet and all of those around them will see how dedicated they are to us and our community will grow!"

You know I would have thought that this conversation stopped taking place several years ago given how obvious it is that:

• It is a lazy comms strategy
• Personal testimony over Twitter is simply a one-time act - not likely to occur again outside the one time the hashtag is created
• Any brand that could have alienated its users at some point has now given control to those users by opening up the world of social media to the conversation

McDonalds screwed this one up pretty badly when it invited everyone to share their #McDStories (gee, wonder what could have possibly gone wrong with that one?). J.P. Morgan also blew it with their chat to #AskJPM a question, leading to a hilarious series of tweets asking how one goes about blowing up the global economy as effectively as J.P. Morgan helped do. Roger Goodell is no stranger to controversy with how the NFL has handled the lawsuits that former NFL players are bringing in droves that accuse the league of knowingly withholding information on the dangers of playing football, all while trying to add an additional regular season and playoff game to the mix for some more cash for the league. So maybe it wasn't the best idea to give fans (and players) an open forum to #AskCommish anything they thought was important.

#AskEmmert with the NCAA's embattled commissioner Mark Emmert was hijacked. So was #RedskinsPride - the Washington Redskins effort to combat Harry Reid's crusade to force the team to change its name. 

Even what should have been a safe #ILoveWalgreens hashtag was taken over by an unruly social media mob. If your neighborhood drug store isn't a sure bet, don't you think that that might be a sign?

These are all very high-profile businesses here that are really screwing up a comms tactic that isn't that hard. And the reason it isn't that hard is because you just don't do it. I can't think of any time, any brand, in any part of the world that wouldn't run the risk of getting taken over like those mentioned earlier.

I'm not saying don't engage with fans on social media. But the hashtag pride strategy needs to stop. Control the forum and you can help control the message. Send it into the wild and your Twitter hashtag will mutate into an uncontrollable beast.