There's a reason people are burning out, leading to what some are calling "The Great Detachment": Workers don't understand the purpose of their companies or why their jobs matter. Internal comms pros can connect those dots for them, guiding leadership to be accountable to employees for creating meaning in their work—and to normalize vulnerable conversations about mental health. - Caleb Gardner, 18 Coffees
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Adrienne Elrod, a Democratic strategist who worked on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, was certain the Mike Bloomberg campaign account had been hacked.
On Jan. 14, the night of a Democratic presidential debate that did not include Bloomberg, his campaign’s Twitter account sent out a number of eyebrow-raising tweets, including a picture of him photoshopped as a meatball, round and covered in sauce. Elrod reached out to the campaign to let them know of the intrusion.
"Oh my God, I don't know if you guys realize this — your account's been hacked," she recalled telling the campaign. "And they're like: 'No, no, no. It's part of our strategy.'"
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Idea of the Day: The divide between social entrepreneurship and regular business is increasingly blurred, writes 18 Coffees’ Caleb Gardner.
Read More“Being more socially conscious as an entrepreneur is not just the right thing to do; it’s good for business.”
One of the most powerful paradigm shifts taking place in our country right now is that of energized and emboldened new levels of civic participation as they directly intersect with youth culture, diverse voices and technology. Call it the next level of the disruptive "leaderful" era, an era in which everyone begins to not only recognize but also leverage one's own personal power and mindset to encourage rapid, dynamic social change. This bottom-up approach is increasingly challenging traditional forms of authority, social norms and hierarchy to try to push through to a new social model.
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Just three years after Iran’s crackdown on the Internet, in 2012, the country’s supreme leader Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei joined Instagram, a service technically banned by the state. @khamenei_ir has 4643 posts, 1.6 million followers and follows just 12 accounts on the popular photo sharing site owned by Facebook. Ayatollah Khamenei’s account is a far cry from the typical Instagram fare. Here you won’t find artistic portraits of a plate of chelo kebab or candid shots of the Ayatollah cuddling kittens. Instead, the page is filled with propaganda including videos of his speeches, some over a minute long. A feat that left many users wondering how the Supreme Leader managed to beat Instagram’s non-negotiable 15-second cut-off. It was a technical glitch, said Instagram.
Read more at the Economic Times →
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Everything we say, do, tweet, or blog about makes up who we are online and many are missing the mark. For those of you having a difficult time managing and executing your communication strategy online, you can look to the following ten digital communication strategists. These people are experts in managing company brands, client brands, and their own. There is a lot that can be learned from them.
Read more at The Huffington Post →
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“Visual content requires more time dedicated to it to get right,” says Caleb Gardner. Brands only have a few seconds on Instagram Stories and Snapchat to make an impression, so every detail and every second counts. Cicero describes the kind of talent needed by such forward-thinking marketing teams as, “Swiss Army-knife people — people who have the capacity to think and create good looking content online at a much faster pace than ever expected before.” No small feat!
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This month, President Barack Obama’s former social media adviser Caleb Gardner highlighted the danger of filter bubbles – a phrase invented by the internet activist Eli Pariser.
“More likely than not, you get your news from Facebook,” Gardner told students at Northwestern University in Illinois. “Forty-four per cent of US adults get news on the site, and 61% of millennials … if that doesn’t frighten you, you don’t know enough about Facebook’s algorithm. If you have a parent who’s a Trump supporter, they are seeing a completely different set of news items than you are.”
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