Key takeaways from the 4th Envision Career Discovery Conference

I attended the 4th Envision Career Discovery conference organized by Enlight at Toronto City Hall to support my friend Gwen Wang who was one of the organizers recently.

Some of the topics we discussed at the conference are worth mentioning:

Communication skills

Many new graduates or young professionals, especially those whose first language is not English asked me how to improve communication skills at work. Communication skills, in my opinion, not only means that we have to use the appropriate grammar when we speak or write, more importantly, it is the skill to be able to express ourselves and/or explain our opinions in a clear and concise manner that other people can understand. Ultimately, communication skills are critical to extend our influence horizontally (colleagues), vertically upward (your bosses), and vertically downwards (those who work for you). To this end, I recommend a book titled Influence without Authority by Allan R. Cohen and David L. Bradford that offers practical, common-sense advice to the new world of work.

Networking

Jeremy Choi, Managing Partner, Pixelcarve Inc. provided an interesting concept regarding networking - the 5:50 rule: get to know someone like the way you would want to know them for the next 50 years instead of the next 5 minutes. Utilize tools, like Google Contacts to manage all your contacts and record not only the phone number, email address, but also their hobbies, their family and anything that relates to the person. In this way, it is easier to follow up with your contact especially during special occasions like birthday, work anniversary and the first time we met .etc.  After all, people do business with people who care about them.

Work and life balance

The question of work and life balance is often asked whenever I attended this kind of conference. The answers that Beth and Michele provided are meaningful:

Beth A. Shaw, Managing Director, Equity Capital Markets & Operations at Desjardins Securities Inc.

"Different people have different definition about work and life balance. The tolerance level also varies. For example, to work 12 hours consecutively is fine for me, but it may be considered to be too much for other people."

This leads to another question: when you first choose your career, choose something that really interests you. If you find a work that naturally motivates you, you may never have to think about work and life balance.

Michele Goddard, Senior Vice-President and Managing Director, Client Strategy and Execution, BMO

"There is no specific boundary regarding work and life. We have to prioritize. For example, if you need to work on an ad-hoc report that will be due in a week, it is necessary to spend extra hours to make sure you can deliver it on time with quality. However, if you are suffering from the flu, you'd better spend more time on the bed in order to be effective for future assignments and life experiences."

ROI still remains a hurdle for social media success

I had an opportunity to attend Technology Marketing & Sales Think Tank round table discussion organized by ITAC and SMA recently. Marketing professionals from the high technology industry had an open discussion about our challenges and experiences in social media.

Almost all attendees expressed the point that we all use social media tools to some extent in our marketing efforts.  Most of us utilize social media for the purpose of brand awareness. However, we have a different strategic focus for each social media channel. Facebook, for example, is used as a main channel to employ the human side of an organization in order to engage with internal employees, vendors, existing/prospective customers as well as attracting potential talented people to join the company. No matter whether we are in B2B, B2C market or both, in the end,  we deal with people. People like to do business with people they like, period.

Most companies spend a considerable amount of time and resources to keep the social media platform updated with event pictures, customer quotes and featured employee stories, .etc. However, very few can prove to Senior Management the impact on ROI of social media. Currently, most marketers use vanity metrics such as total views, likes, shares and comment to evaluate the performance of social media platforms. These metrics, however, mean nothing from an actual financial perspective. We are struggling to prove that social media have a direct impact and/or influence the generation of  sales and revenue. To some extent, we can use what Dan Ariely  said about big data to describe social media: big data is like teenage intimacy – everyone talks about it, nobody really knows how to do it, everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone claims they are doing it.

Besides the obstacle of social media measurement, most of us expect that social media will become even more crucial to the fundamental business model in the next few years. In the digital world, marketers are facing challenges in keeping pace with industry leaders in terms of breaking new ground and with the latest social media trends. Here are some suggestions that may help you keep abreast of the trend:

• Set a realistic expectation of social media performance to the Senior Management team. To maintain social media channel activities and to measure their performance is time consuming. It also takes time to demonstrate its impact on business.
• Develop a clear goal for each of your social media platform. It doesn't make much sense to post the exact same messages on each channel. Understand what your followers and target audience wants.
• Use social media platforms as listening tools to monitor the industry trend and competitive activities. By following key influencers for a specific industry and engaging with industry groups will help companies to build their thought leadership in the chosen field, both at the corporate level and at the personal level.
• Encourage as many stakeholders as possible to actively engage with your social media actions. There are many software solutions available in the market, Gaggleamp is one of the tools to empower your employees, vendors and customers to share your social media messages automatically.
• Integrate traditional marketing activities with social media campaigns to generate a better outcome. For example, to develop pre-event, during event and post event social media strategies and have a follow up plan. Make sure you figure out what’s the next step?

Alibaba’s fake product issue – Economics of counterfeit product review

Alibaba’s real product product ratio only accounted for 37.25% of all the products sold through its platform, according to a recent survey of the State Administration for Industry and Commerce of the People’s Republic of China.  Alibaba immediately announced that the survey samples were questionable. The State Administration only took 51 samples from 1 billion products. The State Administration responded to the critique by Alibaba with a white paper which listed Alibaba’s five challenge questions on January 28, 2015. They also required that Alibaba’s executive team behave properly and to reign in their arrogant attitudes. However, the State Administration claimed that the white paper released could not be considered as a legal document two days later to the public. It seemed that the saga was over, but it actually caused Alibaba’s stock price to fall significantly.

A well-known scholar Mr. Larry Hsien Ping Lang undertook a comprehensive analysis of the history of world fake/reverse engineered products. Many advanced economies have experienced a fake products being sold in a  period in their history. Let’s start with the U.S., the U.S. experienced the period of fake products during 1840 to 1910. It had much more serious implications in those days. For example, the author of A Tale of Two Cities, CharlesDickens visited the U.S. in 1842. He found out that fake copies of numerous European masterpieces were all over the place, including his own books.  He was so angry that he wrote a book titled American Notes to reprimand those who had participated in the phenomenon. However, the American book publishers had copied the book and were responsible for selling them widely throughout the  U.S.

A further surprise, Germany (later a high tech/innovative mecca also experienced fake product period from 1871 to 1900. The reason was because right after Germany was united in 1871, it did not have the  fundamental infrastructure to develop its economy. Therefore, Germany came up with a very simple idea that to copy products from the most advanced economy at the time, namely the United Kingdom. In 1887, the State of Britain passed an Act that any product imported from Germany must add a logo “made in Germany”, which identified fake products. 

Also, Japan experienced fake product a period during 1945 to 1960. In this period, made in Japan was equivalent to fake or reverse engineered products. In China, fake products have appeared in the market since 1990s. Nobody can predict how long it will take China to rectify this situation. Perhaps they can learn from how other countries prohibited fake products to everyone’s benefit. 

The methods to counteract this practice can be categorized into the following three areas:

1. To increase product quality. How did Germany achieve the goal? In 1890, the German government announced a policy to compete via product quality. Many German manufacturers, especially small and medium ones started research and development departments. This resulted in the future strong foundation of the German economy. In 1907, German products could compete with U.S. products.  The Japanese government also had a policy of saving Japan through quality. On the one hand, it imported advanced technologies from across the world. On the other hand, the Japanese government supplemented companies that did research through taxation and direct investment. For example, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd. was able to produce machine tools in 1960 that were considered the most advanced technology at the time. 
2. To increase the capability of industry workers. Germany utilized the apprentice system. When people reached 16 years old, they would become an apprentice for two years and needed to study industrial theory in school for another two years. Germany required that all workers must pass the 4-year apprentice training for 450 industries. Japan created the permanent employment. Japan relies on organizations to train employees on the job. It takes time to train workers to master the process and become really good at it. 
3. To prevent fake products with strict regulations. In Japan, the government uses societal pressure. Any company would definitely go bankrupt if they sold any counterfeit consumer goods. Germany controls the fake products through regulations. I have to say that Germans follow rules in a far superior fashion compared to the rest of the world. If a company breaks the law, they will face a substantial fine and a possibility of jail sentences. Similarly, the U.S. created a law between 1984 and 1994, any company who sold fake products would face a $2 million fine and a 10-year jail services. If they broke the law again, they would face $5 million fine and a 20-year jail services.

The U.S., Germany and Japan ended the fake product phenomena through the above mentioned three-step strategies and became top industrialized countries in the world. Hopefully, the Chinese government will learn from the lessons/experiences of those nations and create a Chinese model to end reverse engineering as soon as possible.