Social Spend Soars. Results Don't.

What's wrong with this picture?

CMOs are spending more on social media marketing without a proportionate return, according to The CMO Survey.

As a percentage of marketing budgets, social spending has tripled during the past seven years, up to 12% of budgets from 4%.

At the same time, CMOs don't see the ROI.

Nearly half (44%) say they cannot prove the impact of their social spend; and fewer than 5% say social contributes very much to their companies' performance.

Glassdoor: Better Job-Seeker Tool Than LinkedIn?

Gary Slack provided today's post. He is chief experience officer of Slack and Company, LLC, a leading global B2B marketing strategy and services provider based in Chicago.

Glassdoor really is coming into its own as a terrific tool for job-seekers of all types—college students looking for internships or full-time jobs and anyone and everyone looking to change jobs or careers.

The platform used to be mainly for checking out what current and former employees anonymously say about their employers, but the site now does double duty big time as a repository of jobs—getting as much monthly job-post traffic as LinkedIn does.

Some interesting things about Glassdoor:

• The average company rating on Glassdoor (on a 1-5 scale) is 3.2. In my experience, any company that’s at 3.6 or above is doing pretty well.
  
  
• Caveat emptor with companies 2.6 or below—and, yes, there are plenty that do that poorly. They probably should be quarantined. But don’t pay too much attention to a company’s rating if it only has a handful of reviews—say 10 or fewer.
  
  
• Companies that have thousands of even tens of thousands of reviews and are at 3.6 or above are doing a pretty good job by their employees. When they’re above 4.0, like Google is, that’s just amazing.
  
  
• Glassdoor tells us their research shows prospective employees going to the site put more stock in reviews and ratings of current vs. former employees. Makes sense.
  
  
• Look at how raters rate the company’s CEO. And whether they would recommend the company to a friend and whether their overall feeling about the company’s future is negative, neutral or positive.
  
  
• You also can learn a lot about prospective employers from their company pages on Glassdoor—usually much more robust than company pages on LinkedIn.

You still need a strong LinkedIn profile more than ever, but consider making Glassdoor your first stop on the way to a first job or a better career.

That Old Black Magic

Whoever Americans elect as president next week, I hope she has a witch as her top aide, as does South Korea's president. We're going to need that old black magic to get well.

Writers need black magic, too; and editors are its source.

In his new memoir, The Accidental Life, Terry McDonell quotes Norman Cousins, the longtime editor of Saturday Review, on the art of editing:

Nothing is more ephemeral than words. Moving them from the mind of a writer to the mind of a reader is one of the most elusive and difficult undertakings ever to challenge the human intelligence. This is what being an editor is all about.

Editors are advisers, coaches, cheerleaders, therapists, parents, midwives and—as Cousins implies—sorcerers.

They're also missionaries, as Robin Lloyd, contributing editor for Scientific American, says:

My motivation as an editor is clear, compelling communication for the reader. Delivering that is my first job. Readers are looking at every word for an excuse to bail out—to stop reading a story. My job is to prevent that and to keep them reading this story by focusing on clarity, pacing, logic, arc, and sparkling prose.

Above all, editors are match-makers, pairing willing writers with willing audiences.

That means an editor must be conversant in many fields; sense which topics are ripe for coverage; and know which ideas, words and phrases will keep readers reading.

No mean feat.

If Your Event isn't Eventful, It's Just Another Meeting

The investor of today does not profit from yesterday's growth.

— Warren Buffett

Bundled tips. Distilled solutions. Condensed books. Expert panels. Industry roundups.

Sound like your conference?

You're preparing attendees for the last war. But they need to wage tomorrow's.

"Traditional conferences focus on finding solutions to yesterday’s problems," says conference designer Jeff Hurt.

Smart attendees (that's redundant; stupid people skip conferences) don't need more packaged information; they need results (remember, the word event comes from the Latin for result.)

"People no longer come to your meetings to get information," says planner Holly Duckworth. "They come to make sense of the deluge of information they already have."

If you're not transporting attendees to a future world, helping them adapt to new realities, and equipping them to thrive, you're not offering results.

To put it another way, if your event isn't eventful, it's just another meeting.

My 5 All-Time Favorite Books on Marketing

You witness it every day: the fundamentals elude many a marketer's grasp.

But imbibing the fundamentals is fun. And easy.

Just make a pact with yourself to (re)read these five mind-blowing game-changers in the next few months.

You'll thank yourself.

Your boss will thank you, too.

Confessions of an Advertising Man. David Ogilvy's 1963 romp is a blueprint for sound marketing. In keeping with its title, the book begins, "As a child I lived in Lewis Carroll’s house in Guildford. My father, whom I adored, was a Gaelic-speaking highlander, a classical scholar, and a bigoted agnostic. One day he discovered that I had started going to church secretly."

Positioning. Revolutionaries in 1981, Al Ries and Jack Trout were the first marketers to recognize content glut was our biggest challenge. The book opens with the statement, "Today, communication itself is the problem. We have become the world's first overcommunicated society."

Influence. In Orwell's year, 1984, Robert Cialdini mashed business and psychology to create every marketer's playbook. Cialdini has just augmented his classic with a new book, Pre-Suasion. You might read this book, too.

Maximarketing. Stan Rapp and Tom Collins ushered in the age of personalization in 1986. The technology has changed, but the principles they cite haven't. When Maximarketing was published, David Ogilvy said, “Everyone in advertising must read this book.”

New Rules of Marketing and PR. David Meerman Scott blundered onto a path for marketing his employer's products and turned his journey into a 2007 book. Marketing hasn't been the same since. Scott didn't invent content marketing, but he was the first marketer to recognize its primacy. "Put out great content, and you’re great," he said. "Put out crappy, and you’re crappy."

NOTE: I have encountered a sixth ground-breaker that belongs on the list, Experiential Marketing.