'Ben Thinking' for the week of 02.26
Remember last week when AT&T had that nationwide telecommunications outage? And then went out of their way to tell us it wasn’t a cyber attack?
Two things:
1. If you were affected – hey, you have $5 coming your way! Look at you!
2. If this didn’t make you take note of your own crisis communications program, where you now have to prepare statements for what it wasn’t … as much as what it was … well, I don’t know what will.
One more (unrelated) thing – I added a new section to the end of this … see what you think.
Let’s get into what I’ve Ben thinking about!
My boss doesn’t give me feedback.
Whether you’re trying to deliver the feedback…or wanting the feedback…this is a quick read. You won’t be surprised by what you find…but you will wonder ‘why did I stop doing this in the first place?’
Age gaps in the workplace are driving down productivity.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one – there are now five active generations in the workplace. For the past few years we’ve been talking about why this matters. Now we have stats that show, if left unmanaged, this gap can impact work quality and output.
→Generational Wellness in the Workplace … why does that topic sound familiar?
Social media benchmarks by industry, a report.
You are going to want to spend some time with this. I’d love your take on some of these stats. For example, brands averaged 10 posts, per day, across all social platforms. Thoughts? Aspirations?
→Remember when social media was a fad? That was about $900B in ad spending ago.
Are we worried about losing our ability to measure social campaigns?
In short, yes. A large percentage of marketers, actually – according to this survey.
From August – wait, what? Why?
Why am I running a post from August? Because of the topic – in the first half of 2023 manufacturers were a top target for cyber attacks. That number hasn’t gone down. These numbers – which are now six months old – are startling.
TikTok usage behaviors: U.S.
Did you know that the United States ‘only’ has 150 million TikTok users? Which is 0.0018% of the platform’s total audience?
→Speaking of which – Cybersecurity isn’t just an IT problem.
For the pod squad: A bit of optimism, by Simon Sinek
This week’s was a lot of fun. Are you a super communicator? Want to be? Listen as Simon discusses with journalist Charles Duhigg.
Take Five: Trending, wk. of 2.26.24
1. Ukraine invasion hits two years
2. Nvidia
3. OpenAI’s Sora
4. Social media under fire – who’s to blame?
5. Days to note: Employee Appreciation (March 1); International Women’s Day (March 8)
Note: this is a new section; just a quick run-down of five topics dominating headlines (beyond marketing communications)
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Thank you,
Ben