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Top of Mind Thursday Memo Archive
Top of Mind Thursday – September 26, 2024: Someone is Always Watching!
This week, news reports broke the story that Mark Robinson, the Republican candidate for
governor in North Carolina, had made a number of inflammatory comments on the chat forum of a porn web site, including calling himself “the Black Hitler.”
That would be bad enough for any politician, but Robinson’s comments were often diametrically opposed to the extremely conservative, anti-abortion, anti-transgender stance he has taken as a politician. Following this revelation, most of his campaign staff and staff in his current role as lieutenant governor have resigned, though Robinson says he intends to continue in the race.
How was this discovered? Turns out Robinson had used the same user IDs across social media, as well as using his real name and address. Yet, Robinson denies the charges, saying these were AI-generated and not real—in spite of the fact that many of the comments were made before today’s AI tools were released.
In this day and age, it’s hard to believe that anyone—let alone a politician running for office—wouldn’t know that everything we say and do online is recorded somewhere. This includes things you said or did before you entered the public sphere. As I’ve told clients for years, the web is enduring, not endearing. Once something is out there, it’s almost impossible to make it totally go away.
Robinson was significantly behind the Democratic candidate before these revelations were made public. While it was unlikely he’d win before, now his chances for victory are practically nonexistent.
Meanwhile, there’s a lesson for the rest of us. Be wary of what you say or do online. Very few online forums are really, truly private. Presume everything you do is recorded and someone out there will be watching what you say and do—if not now, in the future.
Someone is always watching. Act accordingly!
Check out our marketing leadership podcasts and the video trailer for my book, Marketing Above the Noise: Achieve Strategic Advantage with Marketing that Matters.
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Let us help your business rise to the top.
linda@popky.com
(650) 281-4854
www.leverage2market.com
Top of Mind Thursday – September 19, 2024: Misgrading Home Work
This week, Amazon announced that as of January it will be requiring all employees to work from the office five days a week—ending their hybrid work program.
This affects engineers and others whose work can be done offsite—not those on package assembly lines or delivery workers. Amazon says they are doing this to “strengthen the company culture.”
I don’t get it. Amazon thrived during the pandemic with employees working from home. What went wrong since then? And will the culture magically be strengthened by requiring everyone to spend time commuting to work and sitting in a cube all day, then spending even more time in Seattle traffic to get home?
I spent 15 years at Sun Microsystems. Never during that time did I belong to a work team that had all of its employees in the same physical time zone—let alone all in the same building. It never stopped us from dominating our market space for years. People either got the culture, or they didn’t. And if they didn’t, they didn’t last.
Too much bad behavior is blamed on cultural issues, and too many arbitrary decisions are handed down in the name of culture. Meanwhile, management makes vapid promises about work-life balance, without realizing how they are upending the lives of their people.
If Amazon has a problem with the culture, they should dig deep to figure out what is causing the issue and deal with it. I highly doubt it’s not seeing your colleagues in the break room every morning, every day of the week.
It will be interesting to see how this impacts productivity, as well as retention. Handing employees an F on home work is likely to result in valued employees deciding there are better cultures than this one.
Check out our marketing leadership podcasts and the video trailer for my book, Marketing Above the Noise: Achieve Strategic Advantage with Marketing that Matters.
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Let us help your business rise to the top.
linda@popky.com
(650) 281-4854
www.leverage2market.com
Top of Mind Thursday – September 12, 2024: The Debate Goes to the Dogs (and Cats!)
On Tuesday, the two major party candidates for President met in Philadelphia for a debate.
The first debate, in June, was the event that killed Joe Biden’s re-election hopes. This time, the Democrat facing Donald Trump was Kamala Harris, and the evening went very differently.
Harris had obviously prepared for the occasion, going on the offensive and baiting Trump with statements that she knew would push his buttons. And they did. Whether it was the size of his rally crowds or how much money he inherited from his father, Trump immediately focused on his take on those details, rather than maintaining the focus on national issues or policies or Harris’ prior record.
Probably the strangest part of the evening was Trump’s fascination with an already-debunked story that Haitian immigrants were eating local residents’ dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio. Huh?
While most observers noted that Harris easily won the debate, the question is will it move the needle on the election?
Most people entered the evening having already chosen a candidate. Those choices aren’t likely to change. This election will likely come down to a few thousand voters in just a few battleground states. Both candidates are focused on those areas and the race is too close to call.
Perhaps the one action that happened on Tuesday most likely to impact the race was Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Kamala Harris after the debate. Millions of people have already reacted to her social media post. Will they come out to vote? We’ll have to wait and see.
In the meantime, let’s hope there are no more wild stories like Springfield, OH, which brought a whole new meaning to the term “catfishing.”
Check out our marketing leadership podcasts and the video trailer for my book, Marketing Above the Noise: Achieve Strategic Advantage with Marketing that Matters.
.
Let us help your business rise to the top.
linda@popky.com
(650) 281-4854
www.leverage2market.com
Top of Mind Thursday – September 5, 2024: A Hole in the Universe
Last weekend, the IDF recovered the bodies of 6 hostages from a tunnel in Gaza, including Israeli-American Hersh Goldberg-Polin, whose parents have spent the last 11 months aggressively advocating for his safe return.
Mainstream media headlines noted that the six had died, but that’s not accurate. They were murdered—executed at close range when their captors realized the IDF was close to recovering them from a tunnel under a child’s bedroom.
These were young people who had been attending a music festival. They were advocates for peace who were brutalized and terrorized for nearly a year without the International Red Cross, the UN, or much of the world paying attention to their plight.
We got to know Hersh because of the efforts of his parents, but there are still 101 hostages being held in Gaza, not all of whom are still alive.
Bringing them home is not a simple task. Negotiating with terrorists is a losing proposition. Recovering these people and corpses may involve releasing thousands of convicted murderers and terrorists, who have sworn to repeat the massacre again as soon as they can. There is no right answer that does not include pain and sorrow.
In Judaism, we believe saving a life is like saving a whole universe, because of what will come from that single saved life. That means we lost six whole universes last week, and more than 1200 since the October 7th attack.
Right now, we feel the loss as a hole in our universe, but life goes on. Jewish babies are traditionally named for family members who have died. In just the last few days, babies have been named in memory of Hersh Goldberg-Palin and Carmel Gat. While neither of these children are directly related to Hersh or Carmel, all of Israel and Jews worldwide consider them to be family and we remember them accordingly.
From the depths of our pain, we focus on repairing the universe for those still to come. It’s all we can do.
Check out our marketing leadership podcasts and the video trailer for my book, Marketing Above the Noise: Achieve Strategic Advantage with Marketing that Matters.
.
Let us help your business rise to the top.
linda@popky.com
(650) 281-4854
www.leverage2market.com