Dan Erwin

13 Spooky Web Marketing Statistics from Hubspot

The well-known web marketing firm, Hubspot.com, just sent along some very significant inbound marketing statistics with permission to publish. They're fascinating and especially illuminating.

1.    In 2012, there were 6X as many display ads shown as there were total web pages on the internet. That's 2,502 display ads per internet user.

2.    In 1998, the average consumer saw or heard 1 million marketing messages--almost 3,000 per day. That was 15 years ago--before smartphones, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn. . .

When Silence Always Beats Talk

Silence, when supported by intelligent questioning, is easily one of the most useful interpersonal tools in the managerial repertoire. Silence inevitably beats talk for enhancing higher order thinking, including complex analysis, evaluation, creativity, problem solving and decision making. The problem is that managers are either ignorant of its use, or—more significantly—the magnitude of change required is prohibitive. Indeed, research in educational settings reveals that the required change to an effective wait-time is of the order of 600%. The consequence? Silence nerves usually take over—and the manager rolls, losing one of the very best options for human productivity and insight.

The silence process
You read that right. Silence is a process. Call it wait time, lapse time, pausing or Golden Silence, a term coined by Miller and Heiman, the sales’ gurus. The original research defined two uses of silence: wait time I was defined as the duration of the pause after a question; and wait time II was defined as the duration of the pause after the responder first answered.

When you give your respondent extra time to think about your question, the information given back is far more likely to be solid information than if you had given half as much time.

‘The Fifth Estate’: Authoritarian Leadership and Collateral Damage

Bill Condon’s new movie thriller, The Fifth Estate, has been reviewed as a study of technology and ethics. The thriller about the rise of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange initially moves rather slowly, explaining the internet to its audience. But thirty minutes into the movie, the ethical questions surface with the NYTimes’ Bill Keller, the Guardian in London and Der Spiegel in Germany partnering to parse, redact and publish the classified documents. Government ministers, of course, are portrayed in their attempts to contain the flow of documents. Inevitably, much of the film and its reviewers focus upon whistle blowing, first amendment rights and the realities of collateral damage.

Yet, The Fifth Estate provides a shockingly graphic picture of leadership horrors and the gullibility of followers. Steve Coll of the The New Yorker, writes about the glamorization of Assange, but you can be certain that there is no glamorization in this film.

Quote of the Week: Robert Shiller, Nobel Prize Winner

 It's like having a good friend who is a devout believer in another religion. You can learn a lot from a friend like that, even if you don't pray in his church.
    --Robert Shiller

Shiller's statement is about his friend Eugene Fama of the efficient-market theory, of whom Shiller is a critic.

I'm interested in the truthfulness of the analogy. I've always questioned the Fundamentalist approach to Jesus "only." Although a piece of my background was in an evangelical seminary, I'd studied Islam in the Koran and Judaism. The bias to apologetics, a defensive of the so-called Christian gospel, was pervasive. But from today's perspective, it's clear I didn't really move beyond that stupid bias until June of 1987 when youngest graduated from Barnard College. Like the dutiful "religious" that I was at that time, my wife and I attended the Columbia University baccalaureate service.

I don't remember who spoke, probably a college chaplain. But I do remember the readings by three students. One was a Muslim from the Koran, another a Jew from the Old Testament and the third a Christian from the New Testament. They all read what was essentially the same text with the same message, but from their own scripture.

I wasn't especially surprised, but I saw the similarities of the great faiths laid out in front of me. Growing up in the Detroit area, I was rather open to ethnic diversity, but hadn't stared as closely at religious diversity and had no Muslim friends. Thankfully, the world--and my world--has changed drastically since then. It has become all the more obvious that the trajectory of the biblical tradition is in the direction of inclusion. I celebrate that fact.

So Gene Fama and Bob Shiller have a lot more in common that most might think. "He collects data and he shares it and I use it all the time, and I use many of his theories. Not all of them, of course, but he's a very good guy."

How Much Do You Know About How You Learn Best?

Early in a client’s development, one important issue always comes up. If the client doesn’t bring it up, I do. It’s this: how does he or she go about learning and what are the best ways for them? A few talk about learning styles—the notion that each person has a particular way he or she learns best, whether eye-oriented, print-oriented or ear-oriented. This notion has been around and quite popular for a long time. It’s also been thoroughly debunked by research.

But there are three important, very solid “learning style” lessons about the way we learn.

What Do Managers Actually Do All Day?

By the time a smart Gen-Yer has been employed for a few years, the opportunity to manage begins to take shape. Thus, in this blog I intend to revisit a highly relevant subject: what do managers actually do? Leaders in the field have all answered the question in the same very traditional way. However, as a student of the field, I intend to take a unique perspective on the question.

Since Peter Drucker, managing has always been defined as getting things done through other people. And whether you look at the older work of Kotter or the fine new work by Hill and Lineback, I do not disagree with that definition. Where I do part company with all of them is how you achieve that objective.

All of them—indeed, all managers and nearly all theorists believe language or conversation is merely a tool used to describe and report on reality. They believe that actual managing takes place in organizations, jobs, processes, technologies that exist independently of language and conversation. The hackneyed phrase, “stop talking and start working,” imperceptibly rules the roost. I suggest—in contrast—that managers who fail to understand that their primary job and focus is conversation are

How to Get Relegated to Page 7

Certain kinds of issues, though exceptionally definitional and useful, inevitably get relegated to the back pages of the newspaper. Research data in its initial stages doesn’t get near the front pages unless it’s about popular conflicts, related to widely held concerns and fails to challenge blameworthy voters. For example, the data supporting the notion that parental support of their kids’ education may be the most significant factor in personal success took a long time to get to the front pages. Maybe that was just repression, denial or ignorance. Obviously, the red meat about poor teaching, corrupt unions and government failure is a lot more interesting, though often irrelevant.

So research that reveals that American adults are, at best, in the middle of the pack of nations when it comes to problem solving in technology-rich environments is relegated to page 11 in the New York Times and page 7 in my local Minneapolis Star Tribune. If you’re an astute HR person, senior exec in one of our better companies or young parent, the information just might be very useful. At the least it would tell you what to focus on in recruiting for better decision-makers and what to do about your kids' education.

After all, you can’t problem solve very well until a problem is well-defined. And it could make you very cautious about the quality of employee intuition and their ready inferential, opinion-based chatter. After all, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan pointed out years ago, you are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.

The data
The comparative research was based on new tests developed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a coalition of mostly developed nations. The tests focused on literacy, facility with basic math—numeracy—and problem solving in “technology-rich environments.”

Japan ranked first in all three fields with Finland second in average scores with the Netherlands, Sweden and Norway near the top. And Spain, Italy and France near the bottom. Just 9% of Americans scored in the top two of the five proficiencies. The biggest lag in Americans was among younger people. Among 55-to-65 year olds, the US fared better than its counterparts. Among 45-to-54 year-olds performance was average. Once more: the performance was most behind among younger people. 

Why is the US so rich?
If you feel defensive about these stats, you’re probably asking why, if we’re so dumb, are we so rich? Anthony Carnevale at the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workplace said that the answer is four-fold: higher skill levels at the top, being big, being more flexible than other economies, and being able to attract other countries’ most skilled laborers. “But that advantage is slipping.”

This really, really needs to be on the front page to stir up the hoi polloi, get the politicians focused clearly and get the public going on the necessary changes. That is, if we can look beyond the end of our noses.

Flickr photo: fishbel

The Dark Side of Leadership

With today’s political darkness, many have compared the government shutdown to the conflict between Clinton and Gingrich. What was missing with both Gingrich and today’s Tea Party is what Jeb Bush calls a “little dose of reality.” Before we look at Jeb Bush’s remarks, it’s wise to recognize that this dark side of leadership has a long history in fact and in literature. One of the greatest speeches in Western history, Hamlet’s soliloquy in Act 4, Scene 4, emphasizes the foibles of leadership with an utter lack of a sense of reality. Although Bush comments from a political perspective, Hamlet applies just as well to business leadership. This is a highly relevant case of what literature can do for the politician and the businessperson.